Clear the List: My Monthly Language Learning Update
We’re heading into March and I’m still settling into my systems and routines for 2024. Consistency is my main goal for the new year, and in some areas I’m succeeding (daily vocab) while in others, I’m struggling (speaking). Overall, I’m happy with my progress but there are certainly areas that can use improvement.
If you’re new around these parts…
Welcome to Clear the List, where I share what I’m doing to learn languages as well as my latest analysis of my language goals.
If you’d like to join and share your own language learning goals and updates, I’d love for you to join me. You can do so by sharing your updates, or a link to your own post, in the comments below.
So let’s get started, sharing our goals and motivating one another to #clearthelist!
Please feel free to tag your posts or photos with either #clearthelist on your favorite social media channels!
Last Month’s Goals
Start digging into Scottish Gaelic. // I’ve been consistently working on my latest language. Primarily I’m using Duolingo and Memrise (my own course) for the language on a daily basis. When I can fit it in, I’ve been enjoying Jason’s Youtube videos as well as Lauren Rhiannon.
So far, I’ve learned several hundred words and am able to string short, very basic sentences together. I only have a vague awareness of how the grammar works at this point, but I’ll hopefully get to dig into this more soon.
Maintain my vocabulary learning streak. // I currently have streaks on Drops, Memrise, and Duolingo. I was able to maintain these. As of writing, my Drops streak is 1290 days, my Duolingo streak is 878 days, my longest Memrise streak is 1,397 days (Croatian) and my shortest is 1 day (one of the two Scottish Gaelic courses I have going is completed and so there isn’t enough for me to learn in it to keep up my streak and get enough points, I need to add my new material to it).
Keep working through my YouTube Queue. // At the start of last month I had over 3,100 videos in my Watch Later queue. I realized that going about this in this way doesn’t make any sense, so I’ve started revamping everything, more on this below.
Keep reading Game of Thrones in Russian. // I’m going to be honest. I didn’t get to this one in January. But I did start getting back into LingQ, so that’s a start.
Keep reading Eye of the World in Hungarian. // Same as above.
Read in French. // Same as above.
This Month’s Goals
Keep digging into Scottish Gaelic. // This is my newest and 17th language. I’m very excited to keep working on it and getting deeper into the language.
Maintain my vocabulary learning streak. // I use Memrise to study vocabulary on a daily basis. I use some community decks, some Memrise decks, but mostly focus on decks I’ve created myself. I currently have streaks on Drops, Memrise, and Duolingo. I plan to maintain all of my active streaks through February and on.
Unfortunately, it seems Memrise is going to be doing away with their user-created courses, so I will be moving away from the platform in the near future. I’m holding out until they make that change.
Keep working through my YouTube Queue. // What I’ve been doing hasn’t been working, so I created language-specific playlists for all my languages and started to sort all of the videos. That way, I can focus on one language at a time rather than dig through EVERYTHING all mixed together. I’m still not done sorting, so I don’t know the final numbers, but here’s where it all is at today:
- Korean: 259 videos
- French: 133 videos
- Russian: 43 videos
- Chinese: 173 videos
- Hungarian: 164 videos
- Portuguese: 90 videos
- Croatian: 57 videos
- Japanese: 83 videos
- Italian: 20 videos
- Hindi: 5 videos
- Hebrew: 3 videos
- Persian: 16 videos
- Scottish Gaelic: haven’t built yet
- German: haven’t built yet
I’m obviously not actively studying many of these languages, so the numbers won’t change for every single one of those lists month over month. For now, my goal for this month is to finish setting them up and clean up all my playlists. Next
Keep reading Game of Thrones in Russian. // I love reading and one of the ways I can re-read books I love guilt-free (rather than reading something new) is by reading in one of my target languages. I want to aim to read 15 out of the 31 days of the month. I’ll share my LingQ stats in my next update to verify if I’ve done this.
Keep reading Eye of the World in Hungarian. // Same as above.
Read in French. // Same as above.
Update my Scottish Gaelic vocab list. // So that I have things to study in Memrise.
Resources I Used This Month
A quick recap of the materials I am using.
What I Am Using to Learn Scottish Gaelic:
I’m debating between which Scottish Gaelic content I move onto in the near future. I’m between the Teach Yourself book, Scottish with Jason (online course), or Coffee Break Gaelic. If you have experience with any of these, I’d love to know what your experience was. Let me know in the comments below!
What I Am Using to Maintain Chinese:
- LingQ – my favorite tool
- iTalki Lessons – I have weekly Chinese lessons
- Memrise
What I’m Using to Brush Up/Improve French:
What I am Using to Maintain Russian:
What I’m Using to Learn Japanese:
What I’m Using to Learn Croatian:
What I’m Using to Learn Hungarian:
What I’m Using to Learn Sign Language:
Not Currently doing any study for: German, Hindi, Norwegian, Hebrew, Italian, Korean, Persian, Portuguese, Spanish
What I’m Using for Little Linguist
- Lots of books
- Day-to-day interaction
- italki Lessons
- Duolingo ABC
- Movies in Chinese
- Gus on the Go Chinese
Resources That Aren’t Language-Specific
- Fluent in 3 Months Bootcamp Challenge
- Todoist (to keep all my language lessons and to-do’s organized)
- Notion – my new favorite app for taking notes (I just set up a template for the way I use Notion to take notes if you’re interested in duplicating it for yourself)
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