Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5316 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona
| Message 1 of 3 04 December 2010 at 2:44am | IP Logged |
Juggling languages is far from easy, especially for a relative beginner. I can see how it can take years of dedication and experience to finally settle on a suitable language learning and maintenance schedule, which is why in part I have nothing but respect for people like Professor Arguelles, who can keep on acquiring and maintaining so many languages, and also hold down a job and raise a family at the same time.
There are also a lot of excellent strategies and examples on the forum on how to do this, and I'm only just now beginning to get a clearer view of the general picture. As language learning is very time demanding, one of the strategies I use to make things simpler is to group languages I'm maintaining according to how easy they will be to continue practicing later on. In this respect, I find the following general categories useful in helping me organise how I structure my maintenance programme:
1. Languages at home - e.g. languages you can practice daily at home with your family or partner.
2. Languages in the community - e.g. languages you can practice at work, whilst living in the country, or with friends and neighbours in the local community.
3. Hobby/School languages - e.g. other languages you've signed up to study or you'd just like to learn to some degree of fluency, but that will require an ongoing immersion routine to maintain over the following years once you've reached basic fluency. I initially aim for at least a couple of hours each week for languages I'm more comfortable with, which is about all I can fit in whilst working during the week and learning a new language in my spare time.
4. Fun weekend excursions - e.g. wanderlust, dabbling, procrastination, call it what you will - the main thing here is that you just let your passion for languages determine when and how you return to review. I tend to picture this as a fun and colourful patchwork quilt, with strips of various languages loosely stitched together - an indulgent comfort blanket to look forward to from time to time on stolen weekends. ;)
Edited by Teango on 04 December 2010 at 2:51am
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hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 4890 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe
| Message 2 of 3 04 December 2010 at 4:02am | IP Logged |
I would combine categories 1 and 2, especially if you live in a country where your target language is spoken.
Also, this is probably nitpicking, but I wouldn't use the work "practice" for that category. If you're living with the language day-in, day-out, I personally wouldn't consider it practice.
Category 3 is simply actively studying a language, at least to me.
Truthfully, I've never really considered category 4. If I travel somewhere and end up using a phrasebook or such, I'll surely forget anything I looked up after returning home. I suppose that category 4 could become a category 3 for me, meaning it inspires me to actually study the language, but just casually looking up a word à la word-of-the-day calendar, I'll just forget it minutes after looking at it.
R.
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Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5316 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona
| Message 3 of 3 04 December 2010 at 4:22am | IP Logged |
Oh of course, I'm not ruling out crossovers between categories. For example, my girlfriend's Russian, but she speaks English both at home and at work (categories 1 and 2); whereas when I was living in Germany, I probably fell into categories 2 and 3 and didn't really speak German in the home at all.
The whole thing is really just a way of reminding me that I can still maintain languages without having to pencil it in each week, just by nature of being in or building a target-language environment around me. The main calculation for me is to work out how many languages are more or less just in category 3, and then schedule these in for a bit of ongoing maintenance during the week.
I also get to indulge my wanderlust at weekends and not feel too guilty, which is always a bonus. ;)
Edited by Teango on 04 December 2010 at 4:24am
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