At about the same time as I got my results for the Goethe-Zertifikat-B2 exam, I also got some horrible news when my mother was diagnosed with cancer which I mentioned in an earlier post. My wife and I also had our second baby in November of last year, and sadly in mid-January of this year my mother lost her long battle with cancer.
As a result, my time and focus for language study has been diminished. After passing my exam, I wanted to just enjoy using the language. I have continued to do so mainly by reading German novels (I'm currently reading Das Todeskreuz, up to page 154 out of 500+, and which I picked up for free while on holidays at a free book exchange), listening to the amazing array of high quality and informative German-language podcasts, and speaking once per week with my Austrian friend at work. Of course, this isn't enough to advance in the language. Actually, because my Anki reviews have suffered greatly, I probably haven't been maintaining my level. I'm not sure. Perhaps I'm being harsh.
Anyway, what's important in my view is the future, and what it holds. My family issues haven't stopped me from thinking about the future, and coming up with some plans. They've just mainly delayed me from writing them up here.
So, what's the plan for 2013?
I wanted to do an experiment to see if I could learn two languages at the same time to any useful extent. I'm not silly enough to pick two closely related languages which have the same endpoint, so that eliminates a few options :-) I have to be interested in them, of course. I have to want to speak/read them, and for those I need to desire to connect more with the culture, and have the opportunity to do so. In order to avoid overlap in goals and language types I decided to pick one ancient language purely for my amusement, and one modern language.
There were several choices I considered. My wife's family speaks Maltese, and I think that I might like to learn it to a lower B2 conversational sort of level someday, but the idea just didn't grip me this year. I have also long had a passion for Serbo-croat, even though I only ever learnt a little really. One of my best friends has a serbian dad and a croatian mum, and one of my work colleagues speaks Serbian, so there was some good opportunity for practice there. However, that work colleague is on maternity leave for most of this year so I figured it wouldn't be the best time to start. And besides, and let's face it, learning a language is a LOT OF WORK. Don't believe the hype you read - it's not a short road in terms of hours of effort. Even getting to a high B2 in German was quite a demanding task for me given my work and family time constraints, along with my other goals. I figured that I would therefore push it down my goal list. As much as I would love to learn it, I figured that some other languages I could choose might possibly lead to some sort of career advancement or opportunities, or just generally be somehow more useful, so I should push them up the list at this stage of my life when I still need to pay off my house and support my family :-)
I thought about the romance languages like Italian and Spanish, or even being sensible and improving my somewhat B2-ish (but as yet not formally tested) French to a proper qualified C1 or even C2. Now that I think about it, this latter was probably the better idea, but I just wasn't drawn to it this year. Probably because I know that starting on a new language and getting to that B1-ish sort of level of a lot less work than pushing a B2 to C1. At the beginning you can do different kinds of practice where you don't expect a really high level of precision from yourself. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong about this, but the idea didn't appeal to me. Ditto for my German, which I would like to bring up to an official C1 or C2 level someday, and especially become much more comfortable in terms of understanding a broad range of everyday spoken material very accurately. Italian and Spanish just didn't do it for me. I like their movies, the cultures, the food, the countries. All of that. But for some reason, the spark just isn't there for me right now. Don't ask me why!
I even thought of pursuing my passion for Australian native languages by trying to learn one. The problem is that the speakers are few, remotely located and therefore difficult to access. I'm not sure what the quality of learning materials is like, but I know they don't have any Assimil courses for them :-) Also, apart from the few books I could find and the paucity of speakers, I also can't really find a lot of input material. No real podcasts or movies. There is one movie in a language I'm particularly interested in learning (called Ten Canoes - if you haven't seen it, you should check it out!), and possibly some radio programs, but other than that it's pretty bare. There are some University courses which I could do by distance learning, but these are prohibitively expensive ($440 for each course) when my goal is to spend little to no money on my language learning projects. I still have this thought bubbling away in the back of my mind, however, and plan to figure out how I can push this along in the future. But for now it needs to stay on ice I think...
In terms of ancient languages, there are only really a few standouts - Latin, Ancient Greek, Egyptian Hieroglyphics and Old English. I actually started on Old English at one stage, but just went off the rails and when I thought about it again late last year, I decided that what I would love to be able to do is read Caesar's "Conquest of Gaul" in its original language, along with many of the other latin classics. The Greek classics are possibly even more appealing, but for accessing the history of european culture, I think there's nothing like Latin. I would love to be able to read the Latin inscriptions of old monuments around Europe the next time I'm there, for example!
There's also an Assimil course for it (just like Ancient Greek and Egyptian, in case you're interested) so, the choice was made! My goal is to be able to read Caesar's "The Conquest of Goal" in its original, with minimal notes (mainly for cultural items) by the end of the year. Actually, I'm setting my goal for this to be mid-year, but definitely by the end :-) I ordered the Assimil course with audio as a Christmas present from someone who was struggling to find something for me. As a side note, I also got the Assimil album which purports to help young kids speak French (but I would say to just avoid it - it's not really in the Assimil style at all), and this book on swearing in German (which has already helped me understand my current German book mentioned above, Das Todeskreuz).
As for modern language, if you worked in my team, you would see that there's really only one choice. My small team has two fluent Mandarin speakers (also two fluent cantonese speakers) and my company in general has many chinese people. On top of that, my current home town of Sydney is heavily populated with chinese people, many of the older ones being Cantonese speakers, but more and more the mix is dominated by Mandarin speakers. I had also already bought the Assimil course for Mandarin three years ago (although I had never used them), so there were no new costs involved. Also, I love martial arts films, and am interested to get news about China from a chinese perspective rather than the dumbed version of international news we often get from the world's English-speaking press, so finding interesting content won't be a problem.
The good thing about this combination is that they're very different which has meant that, so far, I'm really not suffering any confusion of one on the other. Latin is a highly-inflected Indo-european language, and Chinese is completely the opposite. My goal in Latin is just to read the classics - I'm not really concerned with my own ability to compose into Latin and definitely not with speaking or listening - whereas my goal in Chinese is mainly to become a conversational speaker who can read a little bit of day-to-day stuff, although I have been adding chinese characters to my Anki list and can already identify a small number of these reasonably reliably.
So, there you have it - a seemingly unlikely combination of languages to learn at the same time, but this unlikeliness is what makes them such a good match, especially since they have different goals. As to what the exact goals are, I haven't fully fleshed these out yet, so I'll post more on each of these in the future, along with some of the tools I've already found to help me out along the way. And since we're so far into the year, I need to let you know how far I've got. So, I started at the start of the year with my Assimil lessons for each course and I'm currently up to lesson 28 in Chinese with Ease and lesson 26 in Le Latin (although I want to listen to the audio for lesson 25 again). I'm clearly not keeping up with the 1 lesson per day plan, but it's going OK. I generally don't do any on the weekends, though I should find the time to do a lesson of each somehow. I'll try to fix this going forward. I'll discuss how I tackle them specifically more in a future post. One thing I'm sure about - I'm glad I studied German before Latin, although you'll have to wait for my Latin resources post to find out why!
And what about German itself? Well, I don't have too many specific plans, but I do know that finding a high quality piece of audio, and then translating it and remembering the whole translation while I'm listening to the audio helped me massively, so I think I should find chunks of audio (perhaps from movies as well as podcasts), especially of everyday German and just really focus on one chunk at a time until I feel as though I understand everything that's being said "in real time", and then move on to another chunk. I haven't really started this yet, but I will do it soon and see how it goes. I can't focus massively on studying German this year (although I will happily be enjoying using it), but I feel that if I can manage to do something like this audio study once a month I can make some comprehension progress which has been lacking for a while. Of course, I would need to find time for my Anki reviews, which hasn't happened yet, partially due to some unfortunate changes in the new version of Anki which are steps backwards, if you ask me. Oh well, it is free after all!
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