New Year ramblings

Happy (belated) New Year! 

I've been meaning to write a blog post for a while, but Christmas and New Year holidays have taken up a lot of my time. I have been enjoying reading other blogs and all the New Year posts though, especially with all the language challenges and resolutions being made.

I thought I'd list the challenges here that I'm aware of. Please let me know if I've missed any!

The Add1Challenge is running again, but I couldn't find a sign up link...Here it is!

Italki are running a language challenge, which you can read about here.

LindseydoesLanguages has an instagram challenge, which I think is running for the whole year.

Memrise are offering $1,000 (plus runner up prizes) to the person who learns the most words in the January mem-athon.

I've never made New Year resolutions before, but after being inspired by some interesting blog posts I do have a list! Several of the items are health/diet related as I do have issues I need to keep on top of, and I haven't been very good lately. I'm not going to post them all on here, but avoiding gluten as much as possible is one of my goals for this year. I have only succumbed once so far! :)

Language Learning in 2015

I've really struggled the past month to get anything much done with my Russian. After the Toki Pona event I spent a week doing lots and feeling excited about Russian again, but that momentum faded away in the run up to Christmas.  I've studied a bit of grammar here and there, reviewed my memrise courses and a few other random things which haven't added up to much. Christmas is part of the reason, but I'm also struggling with maintaining motivation. I'm not sure where to go with this at the moment, and feel like I'm treading water. I know if I don't push on now I will quickly lose what I've learnt over the past months, but it's a bit hard and a bit boring and I'm not sure what I'm doing right now!

One of my thoughts was to switch to Dutch for this month. I have played around with Dutch a little bit, but in the end realised that it was too hard for me to try and learn both Russian and Dutch. I simply don't have enough time, and decided to just concentrate on Russian. However, I'm still really interested in learning Dutch, and wondering if taking on a Dutch challenge for a month will be helpful in keeping my language learning going while giving me a break from Russian (and maybe coming back with a renewed enthusiasm for it in February?!). It will also be the first time I have ever attempted to learn a language (not including Toki Pona!) without attending a class first, and I am just a bit curious to see how that goes.

Of course it could also be beneficial for me to stick to Russian, and work through my struggles by pushing on with it rather than running off with an attractive and shiny looking new language! Maybe that would be worth doing to prove to myself that I can get over these humps and bumps in the (language learning) road?

I'm at the point where in the past where I would stop and tell you it's too hard, I can't do it, I haven't got the language learning 'gene', and so on. If you've read my post about being a scanner, then you'll know that staying focused on one thing for a prolonged period of time is really difficult for me. (If you're interested Jana Fadness writes much more eloquently than me about scanners here.)

I know I'm not the only one who finds this hard. For me the problem is never getting very far with one thing. I may know about lots of things, but nothing that goes beyond the surface. This used to feel ok, but not so much anymore.

I really want to keep digging with languages, and Russian. I want to keep going, stay focused and get back some of that motivation. I just need to figure how to achieve this, and what would work best for me right now.

Free courses in 2015!

FutureLearn are offering some more great looking courses next year. I'm especially excited about the following two, and have already signed up!

Introduction to Dutch
Learn to speak, write and understand basic Dutch, with this free, three-week, introductory foreign language course.

Cultural Studies and Modern Languages: an Introduction 

Explore the culture, language and national identity of eight countries through their books, images, slogans and monuments.

Can't wait to start! You can see all the language and culture courses here.  

Learning multiple Languages (at the same time...)

Should you (attempt) to learn more than one language at at time? This is something I've pondered for a while. I've read many discussions on why it's not a good idea, and a handful on why you can and how to go about it. What I've discovered is that there's really no one answer. I have a list of languages I'd like to study, some in more depth than others, and as an older language learner I'm feeling that I want to explore them sooner rather than later!

After reading Ellen Jovin's wonderful blog I felt like I'd been given permission to take a peek at some of the another languages on my list. Ellen chooses to spend about 3 months studying one language before moving onto the next, and while I have no intention of giving up Russian I'm also very curious about several other languages especially Dutch, Japanese, Arabic, Romanian, Esperanto and Toki Pona.

my slightly biased language shelf!

I was thinking of studying Esperanto, and read a number of articles on how Esperanto helps learners to improve quicker with other languages as well. I was also drawn to how fast people seem to be able to use it, and how you can become quite good at it in a relatively short time. However, I was getting strong urges to take a look at Dutch, and after finding a Teach yourself Dutch book for 75p in a charity shop (plus some great Russian books!), I decided to go with this instead.  I also really wanted to try out duolingo (after reading lots of great reviews), and not one of the other languages on my list is available there (yet).  Plus because Dutch is suppose to be quite close to English I was curious to see how true this was, and I thought it would be a complete change from Russian (I also read about how it's best to learn two languages that are not related if learning more than one at a time).

my great charity shop finds, cost me £3 in all!

So, I started very enthusiastically a couple of weeks ago, spending about 10/15 minutes on duolingo (which I do enjoy, finally feel part of that club! :D), doing a basic memrise course and (if time) working through a lesson in the Teach yourself book or at learndutch.org - all in a very laid back way. My only rule was that I had to get my Russian all done first. I have found Dutch easier then Russian, helped by similar words (sometimes the same words as in English), and the familiarity of the Latin alphabet. I have not struggled with confusing the languages which is a concern in some of the articles I read. Probably because I'm at different levels with them, and they are very different.

However, after a good start I began to get frustrated with a few things. My time is very limited, and some days I don't even get to my Russian. On bad days like that I will try and get on memrise to at least review my words, but that's all that happens. Over the past week I've had ill kids and been poorly myself, so my learning time has been very sporadic. This means that no Dutch gets done, and when I do get back to it I have to go over the same stuff as it's leaked out of my brain! So, the slow progress is annoying particularly when I feel I could get further in Dutch much faster than I have in Russian. I'm also unable to dig as far into Dutch as I would like, I'm reaching the point where unless I just want to carry on studying Dutch casually and for fun, I need to look at rules and grammar. But to find myself at 1am reading about when to use de or het is making my head spin! First world problems eh?!

So what to do? I love Russian, however hard it is, and no matter how terrible I am at it I can't stop! I'm also really enjoying Dutch though, and would love to progress further. I'm not sure if it comes down to realising what my limitations are and just carry on as I am, or tweaking things to maybe doing a couple of days of just Dutch a week, or dropping Dutch for now until my Russian level improves. I think it may just take some trial and error to figure out what's going to work.

Any tips? Leave a comment below! :)