If I do all of this, uh, my hope is that at the end of the three months, uh, I
will have made a significant improvement.
Steve Kaufmann here.
How do we maintain our commitment in learning a language?
That's what I'm going to talk about today.
And I'm going to talk about it in the context of my next 90-Day Challenge.
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Now, you know, I often make the point that language learning is not a sprint.
It's a long distance race.
It's not even a race, it's a journey.
And there was once, uh, I think a movie called The Loneliness
of the Long Distance Runner.
And so as we're engaged in this long distance process of learning a language,
it's easy to see our enthusiasm flag.
And that's why from time to time, I join a challenge at LingQ.
And so I'm going to do a 90-Day Challenge, but I'm going to
do three different challenges.
Now there's a place on LingQ where it invites you to join a challenge.
So I joined the, um, Streak with Steve challenge, which is where I'm
committed to maintaining my streak, that I have to save so many LingQs,
create so many LingQs every day.
Um, so that's one.
But I'm also going to do a 90-Day Challenge in Arabic and Persian.
So it's three challenges, but it's really the same challenge.
What I'm committing to do is to save, to create a minimum - and I'll go into how I
set these, my goals - but 13 LingQs a day in Arabic and 13 LngQs a day in Persian.
Now the streaks that we track at LingQ have to do with creating LingQs.
But that's not my only activity.
I'm going to be speaking with my tutors two or three at least times a week.
One tutor in Arabic, one tutor in Persian.
I'm going to be doing my usual reading and listening.
However, in order to meet my LingQs target or goal I did a number of things.
First of all, I adjusted my daily goal down because I, you know, if
you go to the settings gear symbol on LingQ, you can set your daily goal.
And there's this sort of, you know, intensive level, which I have done in the
past, which is a hundred LingQs a day.
And then there's what we call casual, which is only 13 LingQs a day.
And so I adjusted my goals down to 13 because I want to maintain my streak.
I want to be able to do at least every day, I want to do 13 saved LingQs in
at least one of the two languages.
So that means that I have to bring in new material.
I have been in both Arabic and Persian, I have been spending a lot of time
with my existing content because I have so many saved LingQs, especially
in Arabic, words that, you know, I've, I've looked up, they're now
yellow, but I still don't know them.
So I go back into content that I've listened to before hoping
to move some of these to known.
The problem with that is the brain doesn't remember much it seems.
It doesn't remember the words, but it knows that the
content is not new any longer.
It's heard it before.
It's read it before.
So it's less stimulating for the brain.
So I'm going to force myself to bring in new content.
Now this could be in the case of Persian, some of the content that Sahra
is creating for me in Iran about...
she travels in her country and this kind of thing.
Or
how about, uh, you know, she's done some on, on a movie director in Iran, and
then she sends me a link to the movie.
So I'm going to try to see if I can find these Iranian movies somewhere.
It's not that easy to do.
And of course the dialogue is very fast and I don't understand it.
And we're trying to figure out how I can maybe extract the
audio and we're working on that.
And of course, and with Arabic, uh, what I want to do is I want to focus more on
to Arabic so that I can enjoy movies.
Cause right now I don't understand the movies and most
of the movies come from Egypt.
And for that reason, I've started talking to Mohammed, who is from Cairo.
And we started a few lessons now in Egyptian Arabic.
I have listened to the mini stories quite a few times in Egyptian Arabic.
And so then I get on with Mohammed and I read a story and then he, and
because the stories consist of, you know, part A, which is third person
and part b, which is first person or past tense or future tense.
And then there are questions where the answers are sort of provided.
And so he reads the statement, he asks me a question and I'm reading
along and I answer reading along and he corrects my pronunciation and this
gets me closer to Egyptian Arabic.
And I'm hoping that through this process, I'll be able to
understand Egyptian movies.
So if I can continue my sort of input activities, reading and listening if
I can get on with my tutors, do some reading and some speaking, if I can access
now movies, which is the live language, people living the language, over a period
of three months and, but every day I have to find at least 13 new words that
I save as LingQs and put them into my vast collection of, of saved LingQs that
I'm still trying to learn yellow words.
If I do all of this, uh, my hope is, uh, that at the end of the three months, uh, I
will have made a significant improvement.
Uh, yeah, the idea of the, of the challenge is, is, is not
that you're going to necessarily measure how much better you became.
It is a little nudge to get you going every day, because
I want to maintain my streak.
I want to save those 13 LingQs.
Uh, it's a bit of a commitment and I'm hoping that other people on LingQ will
do the same and so we can compare.
It doesn't mean that everyone is studying Arabic and Persian.
People might be studying Chinese or Russian or Spanish or
Portuguese or whatever it is...
english.
Uh, but at least we're kind...
of that loneliness of the long distance runner.
The loneliness of the language learner is lessened.
To the extent that we can share our experience, share our activities
and make sure that we maintain our streaks or, you know, uh,
whatever level we set for ourselves, goals that we set for ourselves.
So we're kind of collectively pushing each other to work a little harder and
hopefully enjoy it more because the goal ultimately is to enjoy learning
the language, not necessarily to,
I dunno, achieve some numerical number, it's to feel more comfortable, more
engaged with learning the language.
At any rate, that is what I'm going to do for the next three months.
It's a 90-Day Challenge.
I'm going to try to maintain my streak and I'm going to try to see how far I
can push my, my numbers on my profile at LingQ, known words and so forth.
But the only goal I'm going to really track is to save LingQs.
That makes it easier for me, eh, fewer, uh, you know, less pressure.
Um, I'm going to have these increased, have this increased
interaction with my tutors.
I'm hoping that that will move me into a situation where I can enjoy movies.
Then I have to persuade my wife that we're going to watch
arabic or person movies rather than whatever latest thing she's
found on Netflix or Amazon.
Right now we're enjoying a Danish movie "By the Seaside" or something
of that nature from Amazon.
It's spectacular.
I love listening to Danish.
I don't understand it as well as I would like.
Uh, I even ran through our mini stories in Danish.
I see we only have 25.
I would love to have the full set of 60.
If there's any Danish people out there that want to help us with getting more
content into LingQ, please let me know.
And I encourage all of you to make a commitment to the next 90-Day Challenge.
Sign up at LingQ.
Thank you for listening.