Wah, no language log since November...

But as Oliver Burkeman so rightly says, you can't do everything... We've been visiting family, and we've been travelling (admittedly in a very modest little way), and I certainly wouldn't have NOT wanted to do those things for the sake of having more language-learning time.

The fact that I've been busy with other projects means, however, that I've taken quite a while to formulate language goals this year. And I've also been influenced not only by the fact that some of my language heroes are taking very different approaches (Lindie Botes was feeling burnt out by the end of last year, and has decided not to make too many commitments at all, whereas the indefatigable Steve Kaufman was up for carrying on with Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, plus looking to take up Punjabi and Tagalog...) but also by what I learned from that Burkeman book...

So, fairly randomly, here are my language thoughts as we near the end of the second month of 2022...

1. I'm now thoroughly committed to the idea that at times when other projects are in the forefront, apps rock... They can't compete with comprehensible input, of course. But when you can just grab a few minutes each day, they're great. I mentioned the "language-stacking" potential of Duolingo back in November. I've since added two more pairings (Spanish from Russian and French from Russian) to my previous combos (Portuguese from Spanish, Italian from Portuguese, Spanish from Italian, German from Russian, and German and Russian from Turkish). I completely understand that many people would just find this insane. I find it fun...


At the end of last year, Duolingo told me I was among the select 1% of people who had studied the most all year. "This isn't for everyone," it assures me. Turns out, though, that an astonishing number of my friends also received the same message, so I think the cute green owl says this to all the girls and boys...

2. Benefiting from one of their periodic great deals, I now pay for the premium version of Memrise. (Conversely, because you can't do everything, I decided to cancel my subscription to Domino Chinese. This is not at all because I don't think it's good; it's just that I wasn't making consistent enough use of it.) I use Memrise for Portuguese (the European variant -- you remember that switch of focus last year?), Chinese, Turkish, Russian, Manx, and Korean... What??! Korean...? When I've already resuscitated Manx...? What about that whole limited focus thing? Weren't both those languages "parked"? And how can you read Burkeman, and take on MORE things?? Well, I haven't. Not really. But I need a new paragraph...

3. A language can be a project, in which case you devote a sensible amount of time to it, and it displaces other projects (Burkeman recommends a maximum of three projects at any given time). But languages can also be a hobby, an "atelic" activity that doesn't have a specific purpose, but is part of your life PURELY because you enjoy it.

4. At the moment, Turkish has become a project (because we might -- just might, because you really never know these days -- be going home via Turkey), and my early birthday present has been Olly Richards's Turkish Uncovered, which is expensive but thorough, and will hopefully sew together some of the odds and ends of the incredibly piecemeal experience I've had of Turkish so far.


This is Northern Cyprus, actually, not Turkey, but anyway...



5. But in terms of hobby mode -- doing something purely because you enjoy it, and not because you need to do it, or expect to actually benefit from doing it, or even have to be good at it -- there's no real limit to the number of languages you take on... Playing with more means having less time for each, obviously, so I still have no plans to exceed the fourteen I identified last year, and two of those (Hindi and Maori) are still "parked". But Korean is now back on board, in a tiny way. And so is...

6. Thai. Yep. That language I always found impossible to read, despite knowing the alphabet pretty well... For the moment, I'm quite enjoying Lingopolo, and I'm really encouraged by how much I remember...



7. So, in light of all this, I have now added Thai (from English) and Korean (from French) to my Clozemaster lists (which were previously Turkish from German, Brazilian Portuguese from Italian, Russian from Spanish, and Indonesian and Chinese from English...).

8. So what else...? Well, Manx is at the moment not getting the attention I had anticipated because it has been displaced by Turkish. But it's nice to hear the language being used a tiny bit on Manx Radio (moghrey mie, fastyr mie, gura mie eu...) and the bus indicators seem to be bilingual, which I don't remember being the case when I lived here, though I could be wrong...


The mythical water bull (normally spelled "tarroo ushtey", I think)


Confusion can abound in any language...

9. And how about objectives for the year? Well, I definitely want to read more... Reading is neither a project nor a hobby, but more a background to life (like eating and walking and washing), and it is a really great way to get more language into your life. So I want to regularly be reading Spanish. And -- because I didn't tick this little goal off last year -- I still really want to read another novel in Portuguese. Plus, there are a number of Italian books queuing up for my attention in various categories, so I wonder about having a little Italian reading project once I get home...

10. I'm a little reluctant to listen to books in other languages (on Audible, for example), partly because I often listen to stories when I'm doing something else (cooking, washing dishes, etc), and whereas that just about works for English, I'm not sure it would work even for languages I'm good at. But I am wondering about two types of experimentation. The first is with listening to translations of books I'm already familiar with (I'm not sure whether I would get bored if I knew the story in advance, or whether the different language would help me see different things in it). The second is to optimize "pairings" to a greater extent, in pursuit of which goal I've lined up an Elena Ferrante novel to read in Indonesian, along with its Audible equivalent to listen to in the original Italian... Watch this space...

11. One of my big conundrums -- and here I'm thinking forward to the time when we'll be at home, and life will (may?) be back into something more of a routine -- is whether or not to have a language schedule. Until November, for a little more than a year, I had had a language schedule (which I kept modifying as I figured out what did and didn't work), and I kept a log of what I actually did. With no timetable at all, I wonder if things would get neglected. But a timetable is also a bit of a fearsome thing, a rod for your back, and a great way to fall into all the traps that Burkeman identifies...

12. So, what might be the alternative? Should I try complete serendipity for a while, purely following up what lands in my email inbox or in my Youtube heads-ups? Or should I try an apps-plus-one-piece-of-comprehensible-input-every-day approach (rotating the languages for the latter)? Or is it best to always have a language PROJECT on the go (perhaps for a month at a time), and otherwise just read, and use apps to support my "hobby" languages? The project idea is somewhat akin to Olly Richards's concept of "sprints", although the time-outlay he's talking about sounds a bit too minimal to see real progress, I think.

13. My other as-yet-unanswered question concerns notes. I realized a while ago that I should make fewer notes... Making notes that I rarely review takes time away from real listening and reading, and the "finish this" lists that build up in my Evernote language folder are daunting and demoralizing. But making no notes at all (as has pretty much been my practice over the last few months) is also a good way to forget things...

14. I wonder whether -- once I get home -- to buy an actual notebook, and experiment with that... If you're making notes by hand there's more incentive to keep them short... It can be used on the balcony in the mornings when you have your phone but not your computer... And it would also serve as a record of learning. Definitely worth trying, plus it would be an excuse to visit those awesome stationers' shops on Jalan Carpenter...



15. At some point, I want to do some face-to-face online lessons. But which language? I feel there needs to be some very concrete incentive to justify such an outlay, and as it's still very hard to make any long-term plans for travel, this pretty much remains in the realm of the unpredictable... Next year, maybe...