At Home with French (2016): End of Year Summary

source: superdad.gr

A LOT has happened over the last 8-9 months since my last update. As I’m currently beyond exhausted, I’ll try to keep this post brief, and will fill you in more when I hopefully score a few hours of sleep and a hot shower sometime in the new year.

First of all, my little baby girl was born last week. She’s gorgeous and now snuggling in nicely at home with new mommy and daddy. We’ll be spending our first Christmas together as a family in just a few days!

Earlier in the year, my wife and I left the islands of Hawaiʻi for the first time in 4 years, taking the time off to visit family and friends back in England and Russia during May. My wife also attended her PhD graduation ceremony, which made me very proud. It’s tough for both of us living approximately 7,000 miles away from loved ones, so it was great to see everyone over those few weeks (as well as practice my Russian with the in-laws of course 😉 ).

Russian (182h)

Prior to visiting Russia, I spent an additional fortnight chatting with around a dozen professional Russian tutors on italki. As my in-laws don’t speak any English, I quickly picked up speed in Russian during my 2 week stay in St Petersburg, and the initial preparation with italki helped me hit the ground running. I also won the 6 Week Challenge on the Language Learners forum during this period with Russian as my target language, which was a nice encouraging bonus.

Latin (86h)

Every new semester, I enroll in a language course at university to keep in touch with how other professors teach, and more importantly, what it feels like to be a student in the classroom. I find this helps me with my own teaching in terms of developing a genuine empathy and partial understanding of what many of my students are going through. In Fall, I chose Latin, with a view to building a grounding in Latin grammar and reading, and I hope to follow this later with the Lingua Latina series at home.

Hawaiian (55h)

In the previous spring semester, I rounded off my Hawaiian with an advanced conversational class for fourth year students. As many of my classmates were fluent speakers or worked with Hawaiian on a daily basis, it was really quite a challenge, but I managed to hold my own and did a fair bit of immersion in the language. I also had my first real vivid dream in Hawaiian, which is the source of one of the middle names we gave my daughter, but more on that another time.

German (40h)

My German is at a point now where I can enjoy computer games, tv series, movies, and literature much more than before. On that note, I completed a few games and a couple of tv series during the year, and look forward to more of the same in the new year (ideally some more extensive reading).

French (35h)

When I started my little odyssey in French, I envisaged all kinds of progress by the end of the year. However providence had different plans for me, and so my aventure française is still very much in its (*ahem*..pun ahead) infancy. I did however collect some great resources earlier in the year which will keep me busy for a good while, and having recently bought a Kindle Paperwhite on a Black Friday week deal, I’m now looking forward to adding more digital content to my collection.

(Total time spent on learning languages during 2016 altogether: 410 hours)

With Christmas just round the corner and a new year on the horizon, I wish everyone the very best in achieving their hopes and goals in 2017, and Mele Kalikimaka from all 3 of us here!!

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15 Minutes a Day (remastered): Week 5, “ʻohana”

Hours of study this week: 5.0
Total hours of study: 35.3

I got up bright and early to indulge in a stroll around Magic Island this morning, where I let my mind ponder over the Furey Brother’s Irish classic “It’s a long, long way from Clare to here”. And as I relaxed to the sound of the waves crashing around the peninsula, I took a moment to reflect with my wife on how my learning strategies had evolved over the last half a decade.

If you’d asked me how to put my best foot forward in learning a language back then, I’d have probably pulled out a big fat frequency dictionary and feverishly referred to some efficient flashcard system like Anki, solely focused on reaching “Grand Central Fluency Station” as soon as possible. I certainly wouldn’t have dared suggest tackling a new language before reaching a pretty decent level in any former study languages, and the idea of doing just 15 minutes a day would have felt like an abject sacrilege to the gods of efficiency.

Thousands of posts and countless experiments later, and both my approach and attitude have radically changed. I find myself getting to know one big ʻohana (Ha: family) of languages better each day (or at least trying to, as and when time and tide permit), still keen to reach that same Grand Station above, but now with a much more relaxed demeanour, focused more on slowing down just enough to enjoy the vista and deepening friendships along the way, and savour some of those little epiphany moments on what I hope will be a lifelong journey.

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15 Minutes a Day (remastered): Week 4, “ma la ma lama”

Hours of study this week: 5.8
Total hours of study: 30.3

I’m still not hitting all my targets, but I’m gradually getting there… I threw around a few phrases of Pidgin and discussed Anglo-Japanese bilingualism with a Hawaiian-born taxi driver, and also happened to scare some Russian speakers half to death in an elevator when I asked them (in Russian) to press the floor for my office. I also learnt several new words in Spanish whilst listening to my wife’s Zumba DVD in the background this weekend, and set aside some time to make some Hawaiian parallel texts.

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15 Minutes a Day (remastered): Week 3, “ad astra per alia porci”

Hours of study this week: 5.5
Total hours of study: 24.5

I watched Stargate with my wife this weekend, as she’d never seen the film before and was interested in watching the series. Not long into the movie, I jumped up and was compelled to hit the pause button. Hieroglyphics on the screen…and with incorrect translations just begging to be mended beneath them (which is actually part of the plot)…it was all too tempting! I found myself able to translate whole phrases of hieroglyphics and couldn’t help but round off my eccentric performance with a “little Pharaoh” victory dance of delight (much to the bemusement of my Nefertiti). But hey, how often do I get to use my knowledge of Ancient Egyptian in this modern age! 😀

Come on Danny boy, you overlooked the 3 lines on that first one…it’s plural!

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15 Minutes a Day (remastered): Week 2, “hana hana hana”

Hours of study this week: 7.8
Total hours of study: 19.0

My first week back at university this semester was, in a word, gruelling! I managed to fit whatever spare moments I could into studying languages (lunch breaks, 4 o’clock morning rises, bedtime snacks, etc), but I had so much prep to do for teaching my own class, in addition to tackling 4 new graduate courses on top of this, that it was really quite a challenge. Hopefully next week will afford me more opportunities to study and less overall admin.

I found this Hawaiian dictionary in my local bookstore over the weekend, which ended up being a bit of a silly impulse buy:

Silly, why? It was only when I peeled off the plastic cover that I discovered it was based on a dictionary that dates back to 1865! No ʻokina & kahakōs, and no English to Hawaiian section either, noooo….this baby’s going back to the shop on Monday! I think I’m going to order one of the dictionaries by Mary Kawena Pukuʻi instead, and will make do with the ulukau online dictionary until its arrival.

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15 Minutes a Day (remastered): Week 1, “la bonne position”

Hours of study this week: 11.3
Total hours of study: 11.3

I officially reopened this project and cut the ribbon on 19th August, after I spent a little time getting used to a new study regime, fiddling around and fine-tuning methodologies, and tidying up or simply getting hold of suitable resources in the preceding week.

Hooray, look what arrived just in time!

Now a week down, I find that everything’s starting to become much easier and fit into place. Studying several languages at once is already proving helpful in terms of learning new vocabulary and grammatical concepts. I have a broader frame of reference to draw on, with which to compare and contrast elements of different languages, and I anticipate that this positive synergy will only grow exponentially over time.

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15 Minutes a Day (language learning experiment)

Project: Learn 10 languages simultaneously by trying to study each one at least 15 minutes a day (Mon-Fri).

Languages: German, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Latin, Irish, Japanese, Ancient Egyptian, and Hawaiian.

Questions:

• Can I study several languages at the same time without falling prey to language interference?
• Is it possible to study so many languages consistently over a longer period of time with heavy work/academic commitments?
• If I study a mere 15 minutes a day (i.e. little but often), how much progress can I make by the end of a year?
• How can I stay motivated and not burn out over the long run?
• Is there a positive synergistic effect that comes from studying multiple languages at once?

Start: 19th August, 2013

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15 Minutes a Day (remastered)

Big Project Update (see first post for more details)

After a couple of failed attempts that didn’t really get started (largely due to heavy work commitments and illness), I’ve chosen to rethink this noble project again. However instead of falling back to fewer languages or a kinder schedule, I’ve decided to up the stakes and say “Impossible? Hell no, let’s go for it!” instead, and return to my original idea of learning 10 languages at the same time.

I’ve also decided to extend each session to 15 minutes, as this is a more honest appraisal of the time it really takes to set up my resources for each language, review vocabulary from previous sessions, and engage in new study. Hence the change from “10 Minutes” to “15 Minutes” in the title for this thread.

Finally, I’ve put Hawaiian Pidgin and Jamaican Patois on the back burner for now. I really enjoy listening to creole languages and find most of them relatively easy to understand, and that’s good enough for me right now. I’ll still watch Jamaican films and listen to Hawaii’s “Liddo Bitta Tita” and “Bradajo” from time to time, and maybe look up a few words in my “Pidgin to Da Max” book too, but that’s as far as it goes. Well, with 10 second languages now, I’ve got to draw a line somewhere (lol).

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15 Minutes a Day, Week 3 (first attempt): “Getting organised.”

Total hours of study: 15

I’ve clambered on the hay wain and am slowly getting back on the study track. Next week I aim for full speed ahead. I’ve thought carefully about what materials and methods I’ll continue my journey with, and have settled on the following:

• Easy Texts (Inductive Reading): Latin, Pidgin (Hawaiian Creole English)
• Assimil (Study-and-Click Method): Japanese, Ancient Egyptian
• Coursebooks, TV (Study-and-Click Method, Primetime Method): Hawaiian, Irish
• Yabla Video (Study-and-Click Method, Primetime Method): French, German, Spanish
• Movies and TV (Active Listening and Repetition, Primetime Method): Russian

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15 Minutes a Day, Week 2 (first attempt): “It only hurts when I laugh…”

Total hours of study: 10

Oh, what a false stroke of beginner’s luck… With students and colleagues dropping around me like flies on campus, and the winter vog creeping over the verdant mountains to descend on her unsuspecting valley-dwellers, I finally succumbed to illness last fortnight. I was hoping it would just go away last week, but despite my obstinancy to work through it all, things just got worse. The good news is that I’ve been to a clinic for a series of tests, and am feeling a bit better now on some meds; hopefully I’ll be able to “get back on the capall” (Ir: horse) next week and report something more cheery.

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