I stopped using it because it simply wasn’t much fun to review. I’m coming around to Khatzmuto’s idea of only entering sentences into your SRS program. I’ve said before that I don’t think you need context for many words, usually nouns, and I still believe this. But I also know that, efficient or not, going through two or three hundred repetitions of mostly single word cards (das Haus – house, die Blume – flower) can become dreadfully boring. So, I’ve started a new German deck in which I’m going to only enter sentences. Any sentences that were in the old deck are (slowly) being moved over.

I’m also going to follow Steve Kaufman’s advice to just let the words overflow. I mentioned before that I’m pretty bad about feeling compelled to “catch” every single unknown word I come across, and I’ve finally come to terms with the fact that it’s just not feasible. The words I really need to know, I’ll run into over and over. With that in mind, I’m giving myself “permission” to run across an unknown word, look it up to understand what I’m reading, and forget it.

I think I pulled this word from the Using German Vocabulary textbook that I’ve mentioned before, because I’m sure I didn’t come across it in reading. It’s not an expression I ever use in English, and actually, I’m not even sure I’ve ever heard “hot water tap” used in any meaningful sentence. So why do I need it in Anki? I probably don’t, so I deleted it.

How do you decide what to put into your SRS? I know Khatzumoto basically advocates adding stuff that you find interesting, but in following that rule, I feel like I’m going to end up missing a lot of words I “need” to know. Then again, doing what I’ve been doing, I’m learning words like “hot water tap”, so perhaps only adding things that I find of interest might work.

As he says, while it’s meant for lyrics, it’s really just a text field, so you can put anything in it – Assimil dialogues, troublesome vocabulary, or transcripts of whatever you’re listening to. I’ve had an iPod of some sort for years now, and I never thought of doing this, even after seeing some podcasts come packaged this way, like Slow German. All this time, I’ve been printing out copies of the transcripts for Deutsche Welle’s Top Thema podcasts, when I could have just been copying and pasting the text into the Lyrics field.

While that’s certainly not a good thing, some good has come from it, and that is this: I’ve been reminded once again that one is allowed to set aside language learning for a while, and the world won’t come crashing down. That may sound silly, but for many months now, language learning had become a major part of my daily routine, and at times, I let it slide from “extremely enjoyable hobby” to “work.” On some days, instead of thinking “I want to work on Russian now,” I’d instead think “I need to / must work on Russian sometime today.” Particularly when tackling a number of languages all at once, such thinking quickly leads to feeling down about not meeting all of your obligations – real or imagined. Russian didn’t really care if I met with it on Tuesday or Wednesday, but in my mind, Russian did care, in a bizarre way. Russian felt neglected.

Thankfully, languages are much more forgiving than people are. Shelve them for a week or four, and they’ll wait around for you. Furthermore, while I do regret having been away from my languages for so many weeks, the break is proving to have been helpful, as I’ve been able to see that what I’ve learned so far won’t disappear if I miss a few weeks. For a long while, I was quite in the mindset that if I missed a day or two, what I’d learned would drain out of my head like water out of a sink. That hasn’t been the case at all. This past weekend I was out of town for a few days, with none of my Russian materials; I hadn’t studied any Russian for weeks. Yet I was still able to think a bit in the language, bringing to mind words, sentences, and bits of grammar that I honestly expected to have completely forgotten.

I’ve written a few posts like this now, I think, but I do think it’s a point worth stressing: don’t turn your hobbies into work, or you’ll learn to hate your hobbies. Perhaps this doesn’t apply to many people, but I know it applies to me. I tend to be serious about most things I do, which has its ups and downs. It’s good to work diligently at things; it’s another thing altogether to let those “things” dominate your life. When you’re regularly feeling guilty for not paying enough attention to “your languages”, it might be time to reconsider how you’re doing things.

Has anyone else had similar positive experiences with taking a decent sized break from language learning? Before answering that in the comments, though, let me make it clear: you’re not going to learn any language by ignoring it all the time. But breaks can be beneficial, I think.

• German
• French
• Russian
• Spanish
• Dutch

German is still more or less a task of vocabulary learning. The others, however, still involve a lot more, and trying to balance them all out is proving to be more difficult than I expected it to be.

When I first threw Dutch onto the pile, I figured I could just do a bit with each language each day. But even if I only put in 30 minutes a day with each one� – which I wouldn’t be overly happy with – it would still be 2.5 hours a day, which sometimes, I just don’t have. The end result has been that while I hit a few languages each day, the others are often ignored almost entirely.

Rather than giving any up completely, however, I’m considering making a schedule of some sort, like having set days for certain languages. If I put in the time with those for the day and still have more time, I’ll “allow” myself to study something else. Or perhaps I’ll just keep better track of which languages I’ve been studying on what days, and just make sure that I make contact with all of them on a regular basis. I think this may be a better idea than a strict schedule, as I fear I wouldn’t stick to a set schedule very well.

For those of you who have tackled numerous languages at once, how have you handled this dilemma?

The thing I’m having the most trouble with at this point is pronunciation. Some of the dipthongs are still puzzling me, and while I understand the pronunciation of g / ch, I’m having some trouble producing it myself. I’m not too worried about it though, as I’m fairly sure more listening and practice will take care of it. I’m also going to have to be careful about nailing down spellings, as many of them are similar to German words, but not exactly the same. I plan on transcribing the lessons by hand, which should help a lot.

All in all, I’m quite happy I started learning Dutch; I think it’s going to be fairly easy to get a good foundation in it (in comparison to say, Russian, which I’m still battling with). I’d like to find some good Dutch-only podcasts, so if you know of some, drop ‘em in the comments.

The not-so-great success – okay, I’ll be honest, the failure – is a Prisma Nederlands-Engels dictionary. It’s for speakers of Dutch, but I figured as long as it gave the Dutch words with English translations, I’d be okay; I primarily wanted it to do word lists.

Unfortunately, I didn’t take one thing into consideration: I never imagined that just because it’s for native speakers of Dutch, that none of the Dutch noun genders would be listed. So while I can look up words while reading with it, I still won’t know whether they’re de or het nouns.

I requested the New Routledge Dutch Dictionary via OhioLINK at my university, and it came in today. It lists the genders of nouns, and seems like a really nice dictionary. Unless I can find something of similar quality with a similar price, I’ll probably be picking up a copy soon.

While I didn’t shadow Assimil’s French with Ease very much, I find the idea of global understanding, as opposed to understanding each individual word, intriguing. Why? Because after hearing him talk about it, I realized that that’s where I was at when I finished working with Assimil’s French with Ease, and it’s where I’m now with Russisch ohne M�he. In the more advanced lessons, I could get the gist of what was meant, but if I were to try and say something similar, I wouldn’t be able to, because I wouldn’t know what each part of the sentence was doing. This could go so far as I would know what a noun meant in the sentence, but if you gave me the English equivalent, I wouldn’t be able to give the French or Russian word – even though I’d be famiilar with it in the context of a sentence.

Dr. Arguelles says that once you’re at that point, it’s time to analyze the L2 and L1 side by side, and I’ve started to more or less follow that advice. As a test, I took a lesson from Russisch ohne M�he which I could get the gist of, but there were many words in it which, if I saw alone, I wouldn’t understand. I learned all of the words using the word list method, and then I broke the lesson down grammatically, checking declensions and conjugations. As to be expected (at least, it’s what I expected), when I listened to the lesson again, my understanding of it was drastically increased. And, I could say what every single word was doing, and felt that I could say something similar if I wanted to.

Through this, I learned that for me at least, Assimil’s passive way is simply too passive. I can reread the lessons over and over; I can listen to the recordings over and over. I have no idea how many times I listened to French with Ease, in full, but it was a lot. But I simply don’t learn enough of the words and phrases as stand-alone entities that way. To get the most from the courses, I have to understand globally, and I have to understand at the word level. I suppose you could say it’s an issue of macro vs. micro. Interestingly, I think this implies that I’m one of those strange creatures who actually benefits from taking words out of context to learn them, and then putting them back in.

Has anyone else experienced this, or are you all able to pick up all of the words in a course like Assimil simply by reading and listening to the lessons again and again?

A few things in the works:

• Some free lessons at edufire.com for Language Geek readers. I have 3 coupon codes worth $30 to give out. I’m not sure how I’m going to do it; I’ve considered a contest, but I’m not sure what kind of contest. Ideas certainly welcome; if you have any, throw them in the comments, please.
• A post about global understanding vs. understanding of individual words. Dr. Arguelles’ video on shadowing brought this idea to my attention, and I’ve been ruminating on it.

I’ve also been suffering from wanderlust, and am considering throwing Dutch onto the heap of languages I’m learning. Quick, someone convince me to not do this.