End of January Update

My whole '300 new acquired vocabulary' in each language per month' is epically failing. It's currently 30th January and so far I've learned a whooping 20 new words in Portuguese whilst completely ignoring the other languages. However, after finding a good online Chinese course - http://www.daydayupchinese.com/ - I've decided to pick up Chinese again and currently I have a anki-based vocabulary of 263 words and 49 sentences. Considering I haven't looked at a Spanish text in a good 4/5 months, I've decided to postpone my Spanish and focus on Chinese in it's place.

Progress chart

After spending the last two days doing nothing related to languages, I feel as though I might fall into my old habit of ignoring language learning for prolonged periods of time. To combat this, I've came up with goals to achieve. Each month, I have to learn 300 words - roughly 10 per day - of my lingQ flashcards in each language I'm studying.
Graphs signifying progress of my goals can be found at the top of the page.

School Subject vocabulary

I've just finished watching a channel in French called Inraci TV using http://www.101languages.net/watch/. Whilst I couldn't gauge exactly what the program was about, the word 'école' was used repetitively. So I've decided to compose a vocabulary list on school subjects.

Subjects - Matières

• Art - Le dessin

• Biology - La biologie

• Business Studies - Les études de commerce

• Chemistry - La chimie

• Computing Studies - L'informatique
  

• English - L'anglais

• Geography - L'histoire-geo*

• History - L'histoire-geo*

• Maths - Les maths

• Music - La musique

• Physical education - L'éducation physique et sportive **
  

• Physics - La physique

• Politics - Les sciences politiques
  

• Psychology - La psychologie
  

*In French schools, geography and history are combined into one subject - l'histoire-geo.
**L'éducation physique et sportive is commonly abbreviated into l'EPS.

Progress starter

This is simply a list of my current progress as of 1st January 2010.

LingQ words known
Portuguese - 1754
Spanish - 222
French - 1243
Japanese -332

Anki sentences
Portuguese - 0
Spanish - 0
French - 0
Japanese - 0

Anki vocabulary list
Portuguese - 0
Spanish - 0
French - 0
Japanese - 0

For those who don't know, Anki is a SRS [spaced repetition system] program, designed to help people remember content on flashcards.

Anytime I come across a new word I add it to my anki deck in the appropriate language -eg. I'd add 'agora' to the Portuguese deck. Then, after I've finished adding it, I review all the cards on the deck. How well you know a word determines how much time will pass until the card is shown again.




It's a good program and if you're looking for a flashcard program I would recommend it.
You can find out more at: http://ichi2.net/anki/

New Year.

Tomorrow's New Years Day [a new decade too] and since I'm the type of person who likes to start from afresh every once and a while I've decided that I want to change the way I learn languages [the difference between all the other times I've 'started afresh' and now being that I'll actually keep it up this time - I hope].

Due to being a student I often don't have a lot of time to invest into language learning. Advancing in a language revolves around you immersing yourself in the language as much as possible but I've gotten into the habit of intensively learning a language over a short period of time -a week long holiday perhaps - and then completely ignoring it for a month. I've realised that this isn't an ideal way to acquire a language. By studying so much over a short period of time, I soon [temporarily] lose interest in learning the language and it isn't getting me anywhere. Ideally I hope that by studying everyday but only for a short period of time -15 minutes or so - I will see improved results in my skills.

This blog is a way for me to track my progress and hopefully keep me from losing interest. I also hope to contribute to the language community a little by maybe posting interesting grammar tibbits I've come across or posting vocabulary lists.

Anyways, that's all for now.
I hope everyone has a great New Year!

First post.

After many [failed] attempts to start and maintain a blog, I've concluded that if I blog about something that is actually interesting to me, the chances of it continuing are pretty high. I suppose it's a no brainer really [which isn't helping my ego now that I've just realised it.]

So I've decided to start a blog of my journey with languages. I first became interested in languages when I was fourteen and wouldn't have fully discovered this interest had I not been so depressed with my lack of progress in English and Maths at school. The three main subjects compulsory to study in my year were Maths, English and a language - either French or Spanish. I choose French. Since I was failing in two of the main subjects, I put more time into the third and I loved it. Using a site called LingQ, my French kept on progressing and I soon became one of the top of my French class.

Soon, I wanted to branch on to discover more languages. Whilst browsing through youtube I found a video of the opening to a popular Japanese anime that I had often heard about, and out of curiosity I clicked to watch it. The video itself didn't captivate me but the song on the background did. I loved the sound of it. I hadn't expected Japanese to be filled with so many vowels. I typed the artist into the youtube searchbar and that evoked my still on-going love for Japanese music. But soon I found that I didn't only want to listen to the song, I wanted to understand it. So in September 2007, I started learning Hiragana [one of the Japanese alphabets] and I've been learning it on and off ever since.

Over the past two years, I've studied the following languages -
Mandarin
Japanese
French
Spanish
Portuguese

The main purpose of this blog is to track my progress in these languages and hopefully to give tips to others who are in the same position as myself.