Language Goals - Clear the List, July 18

It's healthy to review your goals as you go along to see where you're making progress, but more importantly, where you're not! If you can see where you're failing, you can take action to turn it around.

Clear the list is a monthly round up of your language learning. It's a review of how you did last month, and goal setting for the upcoming month hosted by Lindsay Does Languages and Eurolinguiste.

French

I'm doing ok in French, but there's a long way to go yet. Listening is my weakest skill. My tutor is really good, and allows me to steer my own lessons (with her guidance) so generally I get to work on what's been troubling me the most. I only have two lessons with her a month because my life is pretty hectic, but those lessons are so valuable! Before my next lesson I'm going to prepare some questions for her (in French, obviously) so that she can do the talking instead of gearing me up to get plenty of speaking practice! French words seem to just blend into one another and getting some quality listening work in this coming month is going to help immensely.

Japanese

This is a pretty big language and for now all I'm planning to do is keep on top of character recognition, and writing practice. I'm not quite ready to leap into this language yet, but I've noticed that the company I work for has started making contacts in Japan, and we've had a couple of Japanese reps come over to visit us. It's been pretty disappointing for me that I was only able to say a few greetings to them in Japanese. They seemed to be impressed but I think they were just being polite!

Polish

I absolutely love the sound of Slavic languages. Two of my friends are Polish and they seem to think that learning the language is pretty pointless, but are quite impressed with my pronunciation nonetheless! The grammar seems tricky, but I haven't really looked into the grammar that much. What I have been doing is noticing the patterns as I'm learning set phrases, and it seems to be sticking! This month I'm going to look a bit deeper into how to use cases properly.

Spanish

I accidentally added Spanish to the list of languages I'm learning. There's no reason for me to learn it, as I've never felt connected to Spain or any other Spanish speaking country, but thought I'd add it on Duolingo just to see what it was like... Well, I've only just started learning and I've fallen in love with it! Maybe it's because I've been learning French for quite a while, picking up another romance language has seemed pretty easy! Having said that, I'm not far along, so all I'm planning to do this month is keep up with Duolingo and Memrise.

Swedish

This is the language I'm struggling with the most. I really don't want to shelve this language yet, but for some reason, things aren't sticking. My only goal for Swedish this month is to try out different learning methods or courses. I need to find something that will work for me. I should be beyond the beginner stage by now but I'm still just clutching on to the basics which is frustrating.

Welsh

Being rusty in my own native language is quite shameful! I really need to get more exposure to the language (I don't live in Wales anymore!). This month's goal is to find some TV shows, books and podcasts that are relative to my interests. I'm also going to continue teaching my other half words and phrases, but in a more structured fashion.