I thought I was going to get more time to work on Czech tonight, but instead I finished listening to an excellent book. And now it sucks because I need a new audiobook! :-)
Also, I'm pretty tired, so this will be brief.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
...yeah right.
How do I feel about my learning?
Well, I really love the system I've designed. It's got exactly the right amount of flexibility for me because every week I can decide what my exposure level will be. Like, what will I read, watch, listen to, talk about, consume, etc. I can be flexible here because it's about gathering unknown words. I can gather a lot or a little - it doesn't matter, it's only the top 10 words that will make it through the rest of the steps. I can manage to get 10 words really quickly - ridiculously quickly. This leaves me a large amount of wiggle room for how much Czech exposure I need.
It's so nice to not have to recreate the whole system when I want to stop and try reading/doing etc. something different. The fact that my "units" are not tied to some kind of book is really liberating. I love it so much.
What sucked was figuring out how to do this *before* Christmas break, and then having Christmas break, and then having more family come after Christmas break, so it was not really a break...so much stuff to do for other people, so little time by myself at my computer (or in a book, or skyping with someone, or texting, or whatever other Czechy things I do). And the other crappy part was that my collaborators were also on break. It was really frustrating, because all I wanted to do was work on Czech, and that wasn't able to happen (at least enough) for like, two and a half weeks. Which feels like forever. But isn't.
My skype account was hacked (!) and totally unrecoverable (!!) and sent my friend malicious links (!!! how embarrassing!) so I created a new one which I will need to start using. Since that time I have only skyped twice with one friend - Petr, and once with Tom. It didn't really "count" with Tom because we were just talking in English. Sometimes it is really frustratingly easy to get sucked into English with him - I need to try harder to find my Czech voice. That's not always easy to do.
I have been playing around with Sketch Engine. I really, really, really love this tool. It gets ten stars from me. It is super fun. I am still trying to figure out how I can use it for language learning. I think that's an upcoming chapter in the textbook I am reading for fun called "Statistics in Corpus Linguistics."
There is totally a place for me in this field. But I can't talk about that right now - I'd never get to bed.
All in all, I'm satisfied right now with my progress and really excited to continue pursuing this system I've built.
And I still really love Czech. <3 <3 <3
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