June German Studying Update
Back with another German studying update. I'm making this update from Switzerland, for the first time since January. So this will be the first month since I started making these updates that I am actually in a German-speaking country.
I've mostly kept up with my goals for the last month, which were: 1) Immerse for one hour per day 2) Study 105 new words per week in Migaku Memory 3) Keep up with my reviews
Immerse for one hour per day
I've kept up with this goal fairly well, though not necessarily made it every day. I'd estimate I'm making it at least 6 days per week, and on the day I fail I usually get quite close. Not rigorously tracking the time, but rather taking a quick look at Youtube video lengths, podcast lengths, and time after reading gives me a pretty good estimate without the overhead of using a tracking app or recording stats.
I've continued posting updates in a thread with other language learners. This has been a great way to keep myself on track. I post an update saying how I achieved my one hour that day, and then a short plan of roughly how I plan to hit an hour the next day.
I've been mostly filling my hour with podcasts. I had a good amount of commuting time last month, so I used that time to get my hour of immersion in with podcasts. A huge amount of my listening time the past 3 weeks has been the Easy German podcast. The EasyGerman podcast, without a subscription, doesn't have transcripts. I've therefore not had a ton of ability to mine this content. Instead I've found that on days when I read or watch Youtube, I mine so many cards that I had one day where I was too low on cards to get new ones, so I just spoke with ChatGPT to get example sentences for 30 new vocab words on topics I'm interested in and mined those. This is not ideal but a great way to get out of a bind when having a busy workday and not getting enough mine-able material from whatever immersion I'm able to get in. I'm currently in a cost-cutting mindset, so have been focusing on getting subscriptions down instead of up. However, I do find myself listening to this podcast most days, and the transcripts could be super useful to mine, so I'm considering subscribing. I think I'll balance it out by cancelling my audible subscription, where I've accumulated quite a few credits at this point. Actually, as I write this, I'm going to cancel my Audible subscription. Edit: incredibly, if you cancel your Audible subscription, you lose all your credits (that you already paid for) immediately. I'm pausing my subscription for 30 days, going to get my remaining credits either refunded, or just spend them if I have to, and then cancel. I've downloaded the one sample transcript available for easygerman, will listen to the episode, and then see how mining the transcript goes.
The fantastic thing about easygerman is that it is actually fun to listen to, which is a high bar for a language learning resource. The hosts are native speakers, speaking a bit more clearly, slowly, and with not-too-difficult vocabulary. However, as far as I can tell, it is pretty natural conversation between two very likeable hosts. They speak about fun topics that adults would typically discuss, like their work routine, their holidays, and their hobbies (they recently had a great few episodes on cycling). Both hosts frequently bring along material to discuss, which keeps the flow of topics moving. They also seem to do genuinely interesting things, like recently podcasting while travelling in Namibia, which brings a lot of variety to the show.
The amount I've focused on this resource might be overdoing it slightly, since I had so many commuting days where 90% of my immersion was Easygerman. It is of course easier than a Youtube or Netflix video, or reading, so I do need to make sure I'm getting exposed to a wide range of content. However, this podcast is great and I don't see a problem with binging through it as long as my other immersion remains varied. I plan to use it on days when I don't have time to actually sit at the laptop to read or watch Netflix, but still need to get my immersion in. The show has a huge back-catalogue (over 500 episodes) and each is roughly 30 minutes, so a huge amount of immersion content for me there. Now that I write this out, I'm obviously going to subscribe to the 'membership' version of the podcast. The value-add from this resource, which besides the transcripts is available completely free, is amazingly high.
Reading
Last month I said I was going to stick it out with Harry Potter book one. And... I'm still going! I haven't read a *tonne* in the last month, mostly doing podcast content and some Youtube, but I've been sticking with it and making some progress. I'm about midway through chapter 3. I've picked up enough vocab so far to read through the book a bit more fluidly. I haven't yet gotten to Hogwarts yet, where I anticipate the unusual vocabulary ramping up. We'll see how it goes, but I'm pretty set on reading this thing at this point.
At first, I would just dump a whole chapter into Migaku Clipboard and read it there. This doesn't work out because Migaku Clipboard is a potato and doesn't work well with large chunks of text. It also made me perhaps a bit lazy with the lookups anyway. So now I'm reading one page on my laptop ereader, then moving to Migaku Clipboard to mine the page and do any lookups. I just got my Kindle that I lent out returned, so I'm going to next try just reading on there, and coming back later on to mine on the laptop. It will be interesting to see if I can still follow the thread when not doing any lookups for much longer periods of time. (Though I might load a German monolingual dictionary on the Kindle to help with this). Reading without the laptop is a huge boost, since I like to read before sleeping without screens around me.
You may recall I tried reading Neuromancer in German, and struggled greatly. Well, I've since been reading it in English, and I can say I don't think I really understand it even in my native language. After some googling, apparently it is actually just a very difficult book to parse.
Keep up with my reviews and new cards
My Anki reviews aren't being done every day, but I also don't add new cards there. So I'm able to just go in once per week, blitz out some reviews, and stay mostly on top of it.
For Migaku reviews, there is nothing to discuss. It is automatic at this point. 105 new cards per week and all my reviews every day (average around 80-90 reviews). I've now completed all my Migaku reviews for 143 days consecutively.
Living in Switzerland
I'm back in Switzerland again as of the time of writing. I would like to try and integrate more, and make some German-speaking friends, especially with the effort I've been puttin into the language. Swiss German will still be a complete demon for me, and I've not put any serious effort into starting to crack that, but there should still be plenty of opportunities to speak Hochdeutsch around.
I've stopped doing my online lessons, after nearly a whole year. This is partly a cost-cutting exercise, but also partly a decision to try and practice using my German more here in person. My German lessons became largely speaking practice (though with a very good teacher and speaking partner) and I feel confident enough that I'd like to just have that speaking practice in person and make in person friends. I'm looking at language exchanges in my city, where I can meet in-person and speak half in German and half in English with someone who wants to improve their English. I'm also going to try and generally go to more in person events while I'm around, from meetups to just more regularly showing up when my partner's family are organising something. I'll have more to update on that next time, where I hope to share some concrete implementations I've made.
Motivation
I feel less motivated than I have in quite a while. I'm making good progress and mostly getting my 1 hour per day in. However, I think I'm just not super absorbed by the input I'm consuming. As in, if I wasn't learning German I wouldn't spend one hour per day consuming it. This is going to be natural I guess. I'm not always going to have input that I'm mega excited ebout. I've had peaks of enthusiasm for sure. Watching How to Sell Drugs Online was so fun that I was immersing way more than an hour per day, in contrast to now where I really get my hour in and move on to other things. My plan is just to stick it out, and keep getting my hour per day in. I'll also keep my eyes open for immersion material that is hyper interesting to me. I will check in on this point next month to make sure I don't risk burning out.
Excited to reach 5k next month (at 4.7k known words in Migaku right now). Besides that, the same goals as last month: 1 hour per day immersion, 105 new words per week, and keep up with my reviews. Until next time!