March well and truly whizzed past! It was a busy one for sure, but what about my languages? And what are my language learning goals for April?

What happened in March?

Language Stories finished! – Woohoo! Seasons one AND two of Language Stories are now complete. Missed any? There’s plenty of time to catch up on everything here.

Women In Language happened! – It feels like a long time ago now but Women in Language happened early in March and was a great success! We had over 500 people join us across the 4 day event to hear from an awesome line up of 25+ speakers. Looking forward to next year already!

Language Stories won a film festival! – Ashley entered Keeping K’iche’ to Northampton Film Festival, we went along to the screening, just beyond excited to see it on the big cinema screen and then…we won! One thing we were keen on from the start with the series was to make this pretty niche topic accessible and interesting to a wider audience. It’s so exciting to know that with this win, we must be going in the right direction. Yay!

Language Learning Review for March

There were a couple of days when my language learning routine didn’t happen – the first couple of days after Women in Language and the morning after we won the film festival. So clearly, both things I don’t mind missing a language study session or two for.

Women in Language inspired me to experiment with many new things for my language study. So far, I’ve tried mind mapping for Korean. I really enjoyed this!

As Shannon and I are planning to travel to Korea, I started by focusing on the topic of transport and in particular thinking of the transport methods I’m most likely to use and then expanding out from there.

Here’s a little snapshot of my first draft:

 

 

 

 

 

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One of the things I took away from #womeninlanguage was mindmaps! 🤗 This is my first draft of one I’m working on for Korean about transport. 🚗 🚌 ✈️ How did I do so far? Corrections welcome! 😀(Swipe to see close up!)

A post shared by Lindsay Williams Languages (@lindsaydoeslanguages) on Mar 25, 2019 at 11:49am PDT

As you can tell, I wrote everything in English first and then went back around and squeezed in my Korean translations (using Naver dictionary online). I’ll talk about what needs to happen next below.

Language Learning Goals for April

Guarani

For April, I’m going to keep things going as they are with Guarani. The coursebook I have isn’t structured how you’d typically expect a coursebook to be. It’s quite a random order of vocab lists, grammar points, short dialogues and now also longer texts.

That means that I have to take small parts of it at a time and then really expand on them on my own by writing my own sentence examples, checking with the dictionary and grammar book, and then looking through my story book for examples. Learning a language with limited resoruces is possible but it requires more patience and openness for sure!

Here’s my list of what I’m using in rotation right now. (For more resources, especially for beginners, click here)

Five books that I bought in Paraguay (and can’t seem to find online to recommend for you, sorry!)

My notebook. I write my own sentences and practice using examples from my books I find as well.

ABC News in Guarani. I sometimes read their short articles on this page in Guarani.

Korean

With Korean, I’m going to start by re-writing my transport mindmap. I’ve got three big topics that I circled on my first draft as things that deserve their own mindmap or further study – Food, Weight, Time. These three will be next on my list this month.

Once I’ve got everything confirmed and finalised on my mindmap, I’ve got a few options and I’ll see what fits best depending on what I feel I need most.

I might record the words, I might make a Decks (Memrise) course, I might write more sentences and scenarios using the words, I might search them online to give me more context. We shall see!

Others

My ‘Others’ 20 minutes each day is still a lot of fun. I’ve also started 2 language exchanges after Women in Language (told you it was inspiring!) so I’m also getting extra speaking for Spanish, Italian, and German now too, which is great!

Here’s some of the things I’m using for each language:

French – 750 French Verbs and Their Uses, 712 More Things to Write About

Spanish – 750 Spanish Verbs and Their Uses, 712 More Things to Write About

Italian – Italian Grammar You Really Need To Know (I have an older version), Online Italian Club, language exchange

German – Online German Club, language exchange, LyricsTraining

Portuguese – Novo Avenida Brasil 2 (I have an older version)

Japanese – Read and Write Japanese Scripts, Terrace House on Netflix, LyricsTraining

Indonesian – Teach Yourself Complete Indonesian

Esperanto – lernu.net

Dutch – Learn Belgian Dutch at learndutch.org, LyricsTraining

Chinese – YoYo Chinese, Chineasy, an old Ikea table chess instructions manual!

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How did your language learning go this month? What are your language goals for next month? Share in the comments below!