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Long term timescales for your wish list? | ||
Tags: Study Plan | Time to learn | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| yantai_scot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4793 days ago 157 posts - 214 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 1 of 20 22 February 2014 at 1:17am | IP Logged |
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I'm just curious with the interesting thread on peoples' hit/ dream
lists. Have people got tentitive plans that cover the next few years or longer? Being a newbie to actually following through I have vague plans and wondered if anyone else had a long term view? Do you like to have targets or prefer a more organic approach to picking up and dropping languages My (inexperienced) plan for now- Currently: German to B1 From September: start working towards B2 less intensively (over 1- 2 years) then maintain. Anytime after September: participate in a 6 week challenge for Scots Gaelic Sometime in 2015: participate in Dead Language Challenge (Ancient Greek) and the TAC in Russian (zero to A2) Hazy on the detail: restart Mandarin in next 2 years How about everyone else? Edited by yantai_scot on 22 February 2014 at 1:18am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Stelle Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Canada tobefluent.com Joined 4135 days ago 949 posts - 1686 votes Speaks: French*, English*, Spanish Studies: Tagalog | Message 2 of 20 22 February 2014 at 3:30am | IP Logged |
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I'd like to bring my Spanish to a very solid B2 by the end of the 2014. I'm almost there - I just need to do a bit
more of everything: listening, speaking, grammar study, reading. Then, I'll work on maintenance and slow improvement. I'd like to be at C1 eventually, but I'm not in a huge rush. Spanish was a big push this year, with lots of hours of study. Long-term, I see myself spending about an hour on Spanish every day, with a mix of Skype conversations a few times a week, watching TV series, and reading books. I'm going to start learning Tagalog in the spring with the 6w challenge, and I'd like to go from zero to conversational (one-on-one, not in rapid-fire group conversations) by mid-2015. Eventually I'd like to be at a level equivalent to B1 or maybe B2 in both speaking and listening, although I expect that that will take me a long time. I plan on spending a good chunk of time on Tagalog for the first six months or so, until I get some of the basics down, and then I'll probably just focus on informal conversation with my husband and his family, which will be easy to fit into my day. After that? I'm not sure yet. I do know that five languages (including my native tongues, which I've been neglecting this year) is probably my limit, except for brief travel-related study. So Tagalog will bring me to four, and I'm going to wait and choose my fifth very carefully. I'm thinking either Arabic or Russian. I'm in no rush, though. I don't expect to start until 2016 at the earliest. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| tastyonions Triglot Senior Member United States goo.gl/UIdChYRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4656 days ago 1044 posts - 1823 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 3 of 20 22 February 2014 at 12:08pm | IP Logged |
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My Spanish has progressed faster than my French did, no doubt partly due to my French helping me out. I started studying it (Sp.) this past October and think that I will have a pretty satisfactory level (near my current level of French) by the end of the year if I keep up the pace.
I have Italian in my sights for 2015, and I imagine that it will go faster still with the help of both French and Spanish. And after that Portuguese should be a breeze...I have noticed that my comprehension of Portuguese is improving a bit already as my Spanish advances. But I think that in terms of planning all bets will be off once I start to take up languages from other families. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Fuenf_Katzen Diglot Senior Member United States notjustajd.wordpress Joined 4360 days ago 337 posts - 476 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Polish, Ukrainian, Afrikaans | Message 4 of 20 22 February 2014 at 6:14pm | IP Logged |
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There are a few languages I've been curious about, and in looking into them, I actually found that some of them have very interesting cultures, and I know native speakers of the languages as well. Realistically, I won't seriously add another language until 2016, and I'm going to try really hard to stick to that rule (as tempting as it may be!). The whole beginner stage takes a lot of time and energy, and I think it's best to take a break from that for awhile for my own sanity--I hate having to resort to the same basic conversational topics!
2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5900 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 5 of 20 22 February 2014 at 6:54pm | IP Logged |
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I just started a 1-year challenge to get reasonably conversational in Japanese, so hopefully I'll be at a decent level by January next year. I'll keep going after that and just see how I feel in 2-3 years time... And I'll probably try to go there for a few weeks next summer, so it would be nice to be able to speak it well by then :-)
I'd like to revive my Italian at some point - I haven't been maintaining it at all besides listening to music and occasionally reading some blogs, but it would be nice to get that back within the next 5 years or so. But only if I feel like it. I also have Hebrew and Hungarian on my hitlist, but I won't be doing any intensive study. I might start studying them slowly in a few years and just keep going until I can have not-terribly-awkward conversations. If I can't speak at least one of these reasonably well 10 years from now I'll be disappointed in myself... But for now it's all about Japanese :-) Liz 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5157 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 6 of 20 24 February 2014 at 9:53pm | IP Logged |
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I spent my first twelve years of language learning with much wanderlust and a break of
at least six years. So, when I decided to resume studying, two years ago, I decided things would be different. I listed all languages I was somehow interested at - that was tenths of languages. Among those, I grouped the related ones and tried to filter to the most important ones in each group. For example, I decided Russian would be my first Slavic language and I'd actively study only German and Norwegian from the Germanic ones, the others coming passively as a bonus and subject to an occasional basic activation if I had travel intentions. I ended with a list of about 16 languages. Again, I decided to diferentiate languages that were close to the ones I already knew and thus could be learned with a higher passive transparency and languages I'd just start from scratch. Currently, I'm studying one in the former group (Geman), 3 in the latter (Russian), but, for example, my next Slavic language will surely a higher transparent language after I've become able to understand Russian. All this to say that I'm eager about starting something new. Next ones in line are Estonian, Indonesian and Turkish. All of them seem quite interesting. What makes me eager about learning them is that I feel they'll be easier and perhaps more pleasant to learn at the initial A1-A2 stage than Chinese, Georgian and Russian that I've been struggling at for the past two years. Yet I will try to resist wanderlust by following the chriterion of only starting a new language after having been through all the necessary textbooks up to the intermediate level and starting to find them too easy for my level. When you drop textbooks and manage to learn only from bilingual readings and videos with subtitles, it's much more relaxing and it feels much less like studying. That's when I know I can start a new one without getting too tired. Now I regret having started three 'alien' languages from scratch like I did, so I'll keep it at a maximum of two. Surprisingly, my wish list isn't exacly growing. I feel a higher wanderlust for the closest languages. Hindi, for example, is on my list but I don't even think about it as I know it's something still far away. Edited by Expugnator on 24 February 2014 at 9:54pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |
| yantai_scot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4793 days ago 157 posts - 214 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 7 of 20 25 February 2014 at 12:30am | IP Logged |
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I have a vague notion of learning more beyond my big 3- decent
conversational and written German, Russian and Chinese although these are a lifetime's work on their own. Somewhere in the ether, I'd really like to learn Serbo-Croat, Romanian, maybe Dutch, Gujarati? But I feel fraudulent as I've not managed one yet! So I'm on a self-imposed embargo of non- German books until I reach that B1 goal or I'd just go back to daydreaming about learning a language than doing the work to make it happen. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4435 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 8 of 20 25 February 2014 at 1:07am | IP Logged |
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The past 6 months I've spent a lot of time brushing up my Mandarin. Now I'm getting back into French...
something I haven't done for a while since high school. The long-term goal is to become conversational in 6 months (at least learn enough words & phrases to be able to ask for directions). What I'm finding while studying Chinese is that I had to rearrange my time schedule to allow more exposure to the language on a daily basis. Besides learning words & phrases, I had to cut most of my TV programs in English out to accommodate news & info in Mandarin. Right now I'm basically learning French by phrase books & video lessons. At the same time I'm making notes along the way in Chinese to keep the language fluency. In the short-term will be looking to get the hours of exposure up. It is like learning to play piano. You can practice for just 1 hour /week or 3 hours /day. The difference is not only that practicing for 1 hour /week would take you longer to become proficient, you may not make it at all. It is like if you move to a country where a language is spoken and function mostly in that language throughout the day, you are guarantee within 6 months you would be able to communicate at a higher level than just repeating the same words from phrase books day after day... 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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