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#russian:goals
guillemelgat · 3 months
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Language Goals 2024
Another year, another set of goals! This year, in the actual spirit of my very reasonable 2022 language goals, here are my plans for language study.
Catalan
First and foremost, my goal is to find Catalan friends in my new hometown, because I really need to speak Catalan with people at minimum once a week or I get very sad, and currently I’m not speaking it with anyone at all. This goal is pretty chill though—I just have to actually sit down and put in the time to find people.
My main goal is to read 30 books in Catalan. I’ll make a proper post about it with a list of books that I’m thinking of and how the challenge itself is going to work, but overall I’m trying to pick a mix of styles and genres, so expect anything from medieval literature to YA novels to academic texts. I have a lot of books that I’ve been meaning to read for a while, so hopefully this will give me a chance to chip into some of them. 30 books is less than other versions of this challenge that I’ve seen, but it’s also many more books than I’ve read in Catalan possibly ever and I think it’s more reasonable in conjunction with a full class load. Hopefully it ends up being just the right amount!
Welsh & Basque
This year I really want to work hard to actually get these two to an upper intermediate level, because I’m so close if I put in the work. For both of them, I have two main goals: (1) go through the textbooks/workbooks that I started going through casually last semester (Basic Welsh: A Grammar and Workbook by Gareth King and Standard Basque: A Progressive Grammar by Rudolf P.G. de Rijk) so that I can continue to review and learn new grammatical structures, and (2) watch one episode of a TV series each week in each language. For the TV series, I’m going to be watching Rownd a Rownd on S4C (which is available outside Wales/the UK! Huge win!) and Eskamak kentzen on EITB. If I have time, I’ll try to go through episodes more thoroughly and note down new vocabulary and such, but the main goal is to make a routine of it and watch consistently so I’m trying to keep it simple. I’d also like to use both languages with other people more often if I can, but I think finding a consistent language partner will perhaps be a goal for another year.
Malayalam
I’m planning to focus the first half of the year on Welsh and Basque, and then next fall, I’m hoping to be able to take the Malayalam classes offered by my university and to get into studying my home dialect (or rather, my extended family’s home dialect, since I didn’t speak it at home) as well. Since this will be later and also classroom learning rather than self-study, I’m not going to go into details, but overall, after my trip to Kerala (which I have stuff about, it’s on the docket!), I’m generally feeling much less alienated and much more motivated to study the language. I’m also looking forward to being able to take real classes, which I think will help keep me focused and on track.
Russian
This is a minor goal, but at my friend’s house over the summer, her mom was joking that if they just spoke to me in Russian while I stayed at their house, I’d probably be able to understand it by the end. That led us to concoct a plan where I study a bit of Russian vocab, then go there and do intensive Russian immersion for a weekend or so. This is more of a silly goal, but I’d like to try it because I think it could be fun.
Anki
This isn’t a language goal per se, but rather a general resolution to spend this year learning to use (and tweaking and configuring) Anki. Anki has a notoriously high barrier to entry, and from everything I’ve seen it should be treated as a long-term, intensive project—I’ll hopefully reap the rewards later if I take my time and set up everything right in the early stages. With that in mind, I’m hoping that by the end of the year I’ve figure out a set up for my decks and cards that really works for getting me to remember and be able to use vocab and grammar. I’ll focus on the languages here for the start, but I’m hoping that with habit and time, if I get a good system going I can use it with other languages too.
And that’s it! It’s been a bit since I was systematic about studying languages, but I’ve found that I really miss it and want to go back. I feel like I’m at a really good place with all of these, and I’d like to continue to make progress, so I’m really trying to focus on consistency and hitting the sweet spot of just challenging enough to get myself out of my comfort zone while not burning out. Hopefully I’ve set this up in a way to build habits and make me excited to keep immersing myself with these languages in the coming years, which is really the key to learning any language in the long term—I've realized that I speak Catalan so well because it's fully integrated into my life, and I'd like all these others to be as well. Here’s to a good 2024, and I wish all of you luck with your own goals as well!
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guillemelgat · 1 year
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Language Goals 2023
In the spirit of last year’s very reasonable and achievable goals, here are more reasonable and achievable goals for 2023!
Catalan - I’d like to get the C2 this coming year. I’d also like to read more; specifically Ausiàs March and Vicent Andrés Estellés, and possibly El Canigó and/or El comte Arnau. And if I can, I’d like to write one creative piece in Catalan that I can feel proud of!
Welsh - I’d like to listen to more of Pigion, watch more Hansh videos, and also to find more spaces to use the language in. I really want Welsh to start feeling like a language that I can do things in, because I’m at a level where I can.
Basque - I want to watch at least one or two things in Basque, and, the same as Welsh, for it to be a language that I can use for things, not just a language I’m learning.
Malayalam - I would like to get to a really basic home heritage speaker level of Malayalam by the end of the year—understanding conversations when I visit family, and being able to answer when spoken to. My goal is to watch one Elikutty video per week, and to try to integrate the language into my thoughts and routine more.
Spanish, Galician, Aragonese, Asturian - I’d like to brush up on Spanish for academic purposes, and also to learn a bit about the grammar of the other three. I’d like to start remembering to actually watch A escampar la boira, and to start listening to more music in Aragonese and Asturian. As for Galician, I’d like to go into breaking down lyrics for the many songs I already listen to in it, and maybe watch more videos in it as well. In general, I’m aiming to go into the sphere of Iberian studies, especially Iberian minoritized languages, and so I want to be more familiar with the larger panorama.
Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Cornish, Manx, Breton - Same as for the others above, I want to have somewhat of a functional understanding of more Celtic languages so that I can interact with speakers and media production without needing a translation. I also just listen to a lot of music in at least Irish, and it drives me crazy not to be able to at least superficially understand it. I think the Celtic cultural sphere is really interesting, and so I’d like to be able to learn more about it and talk to more people within it without needing to make them translate to English.
Russian - I really want to be able to understand what people are saying at my friend’s house, and I think that if I put in enough Russian listening practice and vocabulary study I’d be able to piece it together, at least partially; I can already figure it out sometimes with just a few words and context. So I’d like to actually put in some time on that, in the hopes that maybe afterwards, if I spend a few days at her house, I’ll come out understanding Russian sdfhksdhf
Amharic - I’d like to be able to speak some basic Amharic, so my goal is to learn a few basic sentence patterns and some vocabulary, and maybe be able to say one or two things by the end of the year. Nothing big, but just a bit.
I have no idea if I’ll even get close with any of these languages to the goals that I’ve set out here, but I think that if I do, it’ll pay off! And if I don’t, then at minimum, my goal is to learn one thing for each that I can feel good about in a year’s time, and I hope that at least I can do that.
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guillemelgat · 3 years
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Hi everyone! I know I haven’t been doing a lot of Actual Language Learning Posts on here in a while, that’s because I haven’t been doing a lot of Actual Language Learning. But that’s another can of worms that I’ll talk about later; for now, I’ve decided that I have at least one language goal this summer, and yes it is coming completely out of left field and has nothing to do with any of the languages I’m currently learning.
Basically, one of my really close friends from college is from the same area as me so I’ve been going over to her house a lot recently, and her family is Russian, by which I mean very Russian. Everyone there speaks fluent Russian, including the kids in our generation, and while my friend says she’s used to translating for people, I feel really weird not being able to just like...follow the conversation?? I am generally a chameleon when it comes to being in a place, and right now I feel very much like I am getting in the way.
All that goes to say that my goal this summer is to learn basic survival Russian. Not to understand it fluently, not to speak it, not to read or write it, and not to be able to get my C2 certificate in it (although given the people I’m around, understanding the conversation might require a C2 ceritification as well as like 5 PhDs 😅). I just want to be able to sort of know what’s going on and not feel like I’m interrupting everything with my inability to speak in Russian. So in order to do that, I’m going to be doing something virtually unprecendented for me: only learning vocabulary.
My goal is to do this Memrise course with some of the top 5000 words in Russian and get as far as I can in the next few months. Then I’ll also try to listen to music in Russian and follow the lyrics, which tends to help words stick in my brain. Besides that, I’ll hopefully be visiting my friend enough to get in a lot of listening practice, and my goal is for this murky cocktail of practice to be enough. I know it sounds kind of crazy, but I wouldn’t try it if I already wasn’t picking up one or two words from my one quarter of BCS. I think that if I really put in the time and effort, I might actually be able to start understanding stuff by the end of the summer, which would be super cool.
This isn’t my only summer goal, but it’s the one I’m focusing on for now. I might add a couple of things in the future, I’ll keep you posted on it! Anyways, thanks for listening to the ramblings, and hmu if you have any more recommendations <3
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