Language Goals - Clear the List, August 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.

Let's see how I did this month...

French

Last month's goal - improve my listening skills.

I had a pretty good couple of lessons with my tutor this month. I wouldn't say my conversation skills are fluid - far from it, but they're getting a little less disjointed every time. I really need to attend more French speaking meet-ups for the practice. It's been about four months since I've been to one! One sad thing for me this month - my tutor is moving to Canada! It's a real shame for me, but really pleased for her. I have one more lesson before she moves, so I need to make the most of it - one solid hour French only listening and speaking!

This month's goal - find a new tutor!

Japanese

Last month's goal - character recognition and writing practice.

I'd stared off the month just reviewing Memrise, as you do, when LingoDeer was recommended as a great little app for learning the language. I'm very impressed with the app, and even though all I wanted to do was keep up with character and kanji recognition this month, I've actually started learning the language with gusto! I haven't actually made any time for writing this month, so I really need to focus on that next.

This month's goal - continue with Memrise and LingoDeer, and practice writing.

Polish

Last month's goal - explore cases.

I didn't do any delving into cases - I just carried on, business as usual! I'm continually adding to my vocab and taking notice of the patterns in the grammar. I think I'm doing ok. I might have to ask my Polish friend if she wouldn't mind sitting with me for half an hour here and there to figure out what I'm doing.

This month's goal - continue learning, record myself speaking.

Spanish

Last month's goal - continue with Duolingo and Memrise.

I've been keeping up with Duolingo and Memrise and the more I do, the more I want to learn! I've started watching the Easy Spanish videos and I'm surprised by how much I've picked up. This wasn't a language I was really interested in, but it's just suddenly grabbed me with both arms!

This month's goal - buy a coursebook and start studying in a more structured way

Swedish

Last month's goal - switch up my learning methods.

I didn't go looking for different ways to approach Swedish, instead I decided to take a break this month. I'd been having some difficulty with it and it was getting me down. I do honestly believe that you need to step away from something occasionally to get your bearings before trying again. Hopefully August will be kinder! One of the resources that was suggested to me was learningswedish.se so I signed up. I haven't really looked at it properly yet though, so we'll see how it goes.

This month's goal - start the course!

Welsh

Last month's goal - get more exposure to the language .

Ebargofiant by Jerry Hunter is a Welsh language novel I bought quite a while ago, but I haven't got round to reading it properly. It's been written in a dialect, a bit like the way Trainspotting by Irvine Welch was written.

I'd been putting it off because of this reason, but I bought the book so I had to read it... The reason I bought it in the first place was because it's reasonably short and it was highly rated - I had to abandon it as the writting style was too distracting.

Other exposure was downloading an app called Clic which is an on demand service for the Welsh channel 4, S4C (like iPlayer for BBC). I only watched one episode, but it was a documentary about the river Rhine, all in Welsh.

This month's goal - continue to get exposure to the language.