#foreign langages

My friend’s birthday is tomorrow, so I took them to a movie and supper tonight! First time getting out in a while, and I’ve gotta say.. I forgot how nice it is to just hang out with friends. Before going out I made sure to finish my day’s worth of lessons for German, and I added a page of notes for birthday vocab, too.

Stayed up way too late after binging some movies that I stumbled upon and happened to have liked. First run through I had English subs and second time was with German subs. I think I might revisit them to memorize the dialogue a bit; I’ve found that parroting movies makes the language feel more natural to me and helps me with conversing in person.

My two Colloquial books were finally delivered! 😁 I’ll start in on them tomorrow. I was a bit passive with my studying today; while doing chores and driving for errands I listened to some children’s audiobooks in both German and French. Since I’m more focused on progressing with German, I try to occasionally toss in my other goal languages. Becoming accustomed to hearing and listening to new sounds is especially difficult for me—I prefer reading and writing—it’s helpful to add exercises that focus on audio whenever possible.

Since the holiday involved both family time and work, I took a couple days off of studying as intensely as usual. Music and casual conversations in German was about it. Back to my lessons today though!

So, I know I haven’t been posting regularly because of my schedule today and yesterday. However, I have had consistent language practice the whole time. How? My new favorite language learning app, Tandem. I went onto the app to ask a couple questions about German, but I ended up having three great conversations in Spanish. I felt like a fish out of water because of how rusty my Spanish is, but I felt like having no other choice but to use it with those specific people was helpful. Today was geared more towards German. I loved switching between them and getting good use out of both languages!

Today I took time off from my German lessons because of working late both yesterday and today. Back to work in the morning, too, so I only listened to some audiobooks when I had the chance. On the up side, it was nice to change things up a bit and do less reading/writing exercises.

Day 2/?

This morning I’ve been working on and off to get through today’s goals: first phrases, people, and family. There have been a couple times when I started to lose interest; to get past this I took time off to listen to some music in German. (I’m really into CRO this week. Not sure what others think of his music, but I like most songs that I’ve heard so far.)

Yesterday I organized the layout of my notes and planned my approach for my independent studying. I wrote out some short term goals with the hopes that meeting smaller stepping stones will make things manageable and keep me motivated with more frequent achievements.