Routine – Tongue Quest

Whenever you’re doing something, you’re not doing something else. This might seem obvious, but it doesn’t occur to us at the times that perhaps it should.

I was pondering learning strategies as I often do, and I thought of flashcards. Specifically, how I would go about making sentence cards from the word lists that I’ve been keeping from my intensive reading translations. It then occurred to me that I might not need to at all. Indeed, learning with flash cards is not a requirement for language learning, and at this point, I’m thinking it isn’t worth it.

Whenever I’m reading, I’m learning by immersing myself in context. But to my detriment, whenever I’m fiddling with spreadsheets, I’m not learning anything. The same goes for finding sentences for those words; no learning. Again for loading them into another spreadsheet, again when I’m dating and saving them, and again when I’m importing them into Anki.

Is it really worth the tedium to create flashcards for “efficient learning”? I’m not so sure.

So, while I’m not setting a timed goal just yet, I’d like to make note of my thoughts: Reading intensively and extensively, along with listening, appears to be the most effective method of learning for me. That is to say, input is key.

More and more everyday I realize how much wisdom those two Steves of language learning have. I suppose my foreseeable future is just simply interesting sources of real, natural input. Reading and listening to stories is far more fun than grinding flash cards anyway.

“The ideal unit of learning: the story.”

That article has an interesting take on the subject, and I recommend reading it.

Point of this post: I’ve discovered that effective language learning can be an enjoyable daily activity without tedium. The most natural approach is also the best; exploratory and content-driven without obsessing over little details or systematic routines. I’ve never felt less stressed about the daily “study”, and yet, I might just learn as quickly as I wanted to in the first place.

Nothing more than reading (and occasionally listening), sometimes with a translator, sometimes without, but always without a second thought about what else I “should” be doing to be “more efficient”.

Better yet, this is a great method for use during breakfast. How nice.

Toll.

I can’t understate the importance of breaks. I forced myself to take one last Sunday. It was hard.

So as it turns out, Glossika is pretty boring for a person in my situation. It’s not that it’s bad, in fact I’d say it’s a simple way to make daily progress without a ton of effort; it just isn’t a one-size-fits-all product. What makes or breaks progress in language learning is up to personal interests and motivations.

Boredom is a bane to learning. Avoid it at all costs. If something bores you, stay away. Don’t even so much as think about it. Escape while you still can. If you don’t, you’ll likely suffer burnout, killing your motivation and damaging your progress. This is my experience at least, and unfortunately I learned that lesson the hard way. That break I took was a direct reaction to sensing just that little spot of boredom.

I like to take a forced break one day a week. Not only does this help prevent burnout, but it builds excitement for the following day. This kind of segmentation also lets me easily work in weekly consolidation with reviews, flashcard creation, or the decision to try a new strategy/method/activity for the following week. Keep things fresh and exciting.

One could say that there are two parts to learning a language: content and methodology. Ideally, you want the content you consume to be as interesting as possible, and the methodology you use to be as fun as possible.

For my German, I’ve dropped Glossika and instead started reading a lot. It’s quite enjoyable. My new routine goes like this (rather, I aim for this):

Intensive reading (reading and translating):
- Read while translating unrecognized words as I go, each on a new line inside the translator (DeepL seems to work the best for this). Sometimes look them up in a dictionary and find sentence examples and such (time for another plug: Linguee! Great dictionary.)
- Throw all words and translations into 2 columns of a spreadsheet
- Save as “<YYYY-MM-DD> <book/chapter title>” — I can use those words any way I’d like later. Just good data to keep along the way, and I can easily measure my progress by the day, too. I know when I started and finished reading a book, and all the words by the day and in order that I translated. Keeping data is fun :^)
Extensive reading (reading without translating), perhaps with a separate book, perhaps with a book I read intensively from awhile back
Listening/watching podcasts/TV — Yay, cartoons!
Fiddle with mini projects like crafting some beautiful German spreadsheets for grammar stuff (I will defeat you yet, case/gender system!)

I do each item for anywhere from 15-30 minutes, with a minimum daily requirement of the intensive reading resulting in 50 translated words.

It’s a fairly simple process of reading and listening. Steven Kaufmann was right, it’s the best way to go. Simple, enjoyable, and effective. Those latter two go hand-in-hand, I think. I enjoy this new process much more than even using Lingq, and unlike Lingq, it’s free! Best of both worlds.

I might get into the subject of reading more deeply later — Olly Richards covers intensive vs extensive reading well on YouTube — but this update just needs to be thrown out there for the sake of recording the change on this’ere blog.

I keep saying that I’ll get into some subject or another in more detail later, and they’re starting to pile up now. That ain’t good.

Meanwhile, the challenge timer says there’s 16 days until I should have a B1 level in German. Can I do it? I think so. My grammar should be sufficient by then, too, as I’ve got some case-gender memorization cards in the making that should work beautifully.

Auf wieder…lesen? Gut genug.

Tag: Routine

Usage of Time

A Change of Strategy: Reading, Ho!