Documenting my Language Learning Habits#
This blog is an open to the world notebook of my language learning. I had a similar project at my micro-blog for learning Russian, but I decided it was time to give it more room to develop and extend to my other languages of interest: Chinese, Spanish, Swedish and perhaps French and Estonian in the future. There will be a daily blog post with three words I learned that day with notes and occassional blog posts with more information
Goals#
I have following goals w/re these languages (as of August 2021):
- Chinese - eventually read the hardest texts in this language and converse naturally with someone who can only speak Chinese
- English - read whatever I please, write even the hardest texts and converse about anything with anyone with a natural, fluent accent
- Swedish - maintain the current "can follow the TV news and read a newspaper" and expand to more fluent speaking
- Russian - be able to survive tourist life without switching to English
- Spanish - be able to survive tourist life without switching to English
How Do I Study These Languages Today#
I practice Chinese vocabulary daily using Skritter and I get lessons from iTalki every week. English and Swedish I maintain by following media. Russian I learn with my partner, we exchange daily audio recordings of the same sentence in Finnish and Russian and most Russian posts here are based on those lessons.
About Technology#
This blog was built with Eleventy and runs on Netlify. I used Stephanie Eckles' excellent 5t3ph/11ty-netlify-jumpstart as a starting point. This blog is very much work in progress (and best viewed on Netflix Navigator 😅).