I just stuck with Bulgarian for the entirety of this challenge and for reference for anyone
who is new here, because it does end up being a little bit important later on,
I am still very much so a beginner in Bulgarian.
Also, as those of you who are familiar with Elysse might know,
Elysse doesn't study Bulgarian but I opted to just continue with the language that I've
been focused on this year instead of trying to pick one of the ones
that Elysse also studies because we are at different levels with those anyway.
In terms of how much I was going to be studying, I was looking at about
an hour-ish each day but not every single day. Overall, Elysse is very go-with-the-flow,
very flexible when it comes to her schedule, so I wasn't looking at anything rigid like
set study times or studying every single day or anything like that.
When it comes to that hour-ish of study time each day, Elysse avoids learning based
on language level or topic and instead opts to dedicate time to one specific skill like
listening or reading or speaking. I decided that I would follow this through the challenge but
I also went through some of her videos and social media posts and picked out
exact activities that she's talked about doing before that I wanted to try out.
In terms of materials, I was not going to be using textbooks. Elysse did say that she uses
a grammar workbook for German, but because I tend to rely pretty heavily on language
textbooks when I'm at a beginner level (so I have been for Bulgarian), I opted to just
completely ignore them during this challenge and focus on trying out some other things instead.
When it came to input material, both content that was more language
level-appropriate and more immersive, adult native-level content were important.
And I probably wasn't going to be reading much.
Elysse doesn't read a lot and when she does she said that it's usually more so
articles based on a specific topic she's interested in as opposed to reading novels.
The ultimate goal for all of this
should be to speak well with an emphasis also put on developing a good, native-like accent.
Speaking practice shouldn't come from structured formal language courses in
a classroom so much as lessons with private tutors and things like that.
In terms of developing that accent, it doesn't come from
sessions dedicated to working on that so much as incorporating it into other activities.
For example, pausing and repeating phrases in podcasts or videos etc.
Although speaking is the ultimate goal and the main focus of this approach and routine,
all of the elements of language learning needed to
be considered important and needed to be involved somehow. I needed to make sure
that I was varying what I was doing and not just focusing on one skill.
Little successes needed to be appreciated.
And then the last rule was a very easy one for me because it's something that I do
every single day already and that was that I needed to log my time with polylogger.
Elysse and I do share a lot of more fundamental beliefs about language learning. I also ignore
language levels for the most part. I also think it's important to use a mix
of level appropriate and more adult, native-level immersive material. I also
feel like all aspects of language learning are important to my routine. I don't try to
just learn through reading or through listening or anything like that,
I think it's important to have all of the skills represented. I also think it's really important to
keep track of your small successes and the progress you're making. I also log my time
each day… but how we then approach language learning ends up being a little bit different.
I'm overall also very flexible and forgiving when it comes to my language learning routine,
but I think I'm slightly more strict and more structured when it comes to my language learning
schedule than Elysse is. I really try to block out my hour before work every single day to
study Bulgarian. So, there is a set time each day where I usually end up doing that and I also have
a very consistent schedule when it comes to language lessons and just conversation calls
for working on maintaining and improving my other target languages. Which also brings me to the fact
that I do not stick with just one language at a time. Though my main priority is Bulgarian,
it's definitely been my focus this whole year and I really make sure I dedicate an hour-ish of time
to Bulgarian each day the same way Elysse dedicates an hour-ish of time most days to
whatever her target language is, Bulgarian is never the only language in my life. And then
I think the most obvious difference between the two of us comes down to focus. Speaking is the
ultimate goal and ultimate focus for Elysse and it's one of my ultimate goals and focuses as well,
but I don't put anywhere near as much of an emphasis on my accent and I also kind of split my
ultimate goal with speaking and reading, which is definitely not as much of a priority for Elysse.
So, overall, very much the same
on a fundamental level and even very much the same in some ways in the way we go about it,
but at the same time completely different and even after saying all of that I'm still
not sure if I would consider us to have very similar routines or very different routines.
Which leads me to how it went.
I kicked off day one of this challenge by doing absolutely nothing. I really didn't intend for
this to happen, what I was trying to do was disrupt my typical routine of studying every
single morning so that way I could have more of a go with the flow approach during this two weeks,
but when I didn't study in the morning I ended up finding myself just being like, “Okay, I'll study
later in the evening, I want to do something else after work.” and then just never getting to it.
On day two I decided to try out a language learning method that Elysse talked about that
I was really interested in trying. So on day two I started off using this approach to learn with
song lyrics. I copied down the lyrics from the website in the original Bulgarian in my notebook
and then I worked on translating them as much as I could without any assistance. I did have
to look up quite a bit of vocabulary and a little bit of grammar but honestly not too much and I was
really pleasantly surprised at how much I was capable of doing. It was a really great way for me
to celebrate one of those little successes because I didn't really expect myself to be able to
translate too much on my own. I was thinking I would have to look up a lot of words– which I did–
but it was really great to see how much I was capable of without looking up any words,
how many new words I was recognizing even from italki lessons I've had in the past few weeks.
I also just really enjoyed this activity, it's definitely going to be something that I do again
in the future. It really just makes the lyrics and the language feel like a puzzle that you're
trying to solve and figure out all of the pieces of and I found it really really fun. Not only
was I able to sit and learn new vocabulary and grammar in context, but it also provides
something I can use as listening practice, I can sing along and work on pronunciation,
it just keeps giving something to your language learning in a way that articles can't.
On day three I continued learning with the song. Elysse said in her video that she'll
often use one song and lyrics for the whole week and kind of focus on different elements
of it each day. I didn't want this whole challenge to turn into me using this song
so this was the last day that I did it, but I do think it was really nice to work on it
on a second day because as I translated sort of the second half of the song I found that I
was remembering things from the day before and I also spent a little bit more time focusing on
just listening to the song and trying to pick out individual words in it and singing along,
trying to work on pronunciation than I did on the first day. I'm definitely going to return
to this song and now that the challenge is over and definitely try to listen to it some more,
try to really just comprehend those lyrics and learn all of the vocabulary that I looked up.
Days four through seven I ended up once again skipping language study.
I wanted to do some sort of speaking practice tonight,
I haven't studied in like two days but I'm just so tired. I've been so busy.
I was really really grateful for the lack of strict schedule and flexibility with this
routine on those days because I was so busy and I got a stomach bug at the same time… just didn't
have the physical or mental energy to really be dedicating to learning languages. I really feel
like flexibility and a lack of pressure is so important, honestly probably crucial, when it
comes to your language learning routine. I think it's healthy to not study when you don't want to
and I also think it's just so important that on days like these days where I was feeling sick
or just not really feeling up for it I didn't have to feel guilty about not studying or not
having a language lesson with a tutor or anything like that. It's not always possible to do as much
as you wanted to do, or even do anything at all, and dwelling on that just doesn't help.
Because I felt like I was really focused on learning new vocabulary and things like
that with the song lyrics, on day eight I decided to focus on listening. I also
decided to use this as a time to focus on my pronunciation by pausing the videos that I was
watching and repeating phrases. I started with the video Easy Languages posted a little while
ago in Bulgarian and I found that that very quickly used up a lot of my listening stamina.
I finished the 11 minute long easy Bulgarian video and my brain feels like pudding. I ended
up stopping repeating every single line about five minutes into the video because that had taken me
about 10+ minutes. So I ended up just watching the rest of the video and really focusing on listening
and understanding as much as I can and really picking out those individual words. I definitely
felt like a lot of the words were beyond my level, people spoke really quickly, a lot of
sounds are just really kind of lost or mixed together in a way that I didn't even realize.
But still I really wanted to get closer to an hour-ish of study because I hadn't studied the
past few days, so I went on netflix and discovered that one of the few things that the US Netflix
has in Bulgarian is Total Drama Island. So I sat down and I watched the first episode, once again
starting with pausing and repeating phrases but I did give that up after about maybe five minutes of
the episode. And while I was able to follow a lot of the episode and was really pleasantly surprised
at how much I could follow, I really do feel like by the end of it I felt exhausted. I really felt
that just energy depletion that you get after listening to things in your target language
after a while. I think that this night would have felt a lot different if I was at a higher
level in Bulgarian. I frequently spend more than an hour listening to things in German or Spanish
or French or even Italian, and even if it's pretty difficult material I really don't find that to be
strenuous at all anymore. But with Bulgarian, I found myself very worn out very quickly.
I'm 11 seconds in and—
It makes sense. I don't know a whole lot of words in Bulgarian and I'm still getting used to
listening to the language and picking out different words as people are talking quickly,
but for me since I am at that lower level it means that usually I wouldn't spend a whole hour doing
just listening in Bulgarian. I might watch that Easy Languages Bulgarian video and then
probably move on to a different skill or task. I do think it's really important to
push your boundaries when it comes to your listening stamina or your reading stamina
or stamina really doing anything in a target language, but I really do
think that this activity feels very different depending on the level you're at.
Days 9 through 11 my exposure to Bulgarian was really limited to just me kind of talking to
myself throughout the day. It very quickly became apparent to me that when I have no structure
at all with my language routine and it is just completely go with the flow it's very easy for me
to fall into not doing anything. I tend to resist structure, I don't like being told what to do. But
this definitely showed me that I hadn't realized how important having that structure and discipline
has been to my own language learning so my set aside language time my pre-booked italki lessons
and the little bit of structure that I have in my language routine is definitely not going anywhere.
Day 12 was my last day of the challenge and I spent it having an italki lesson.
I feel like this was fitting because it is so representative of one of the pillars of
Elysse's language learning since it is a speaking call with a private tutor. But as much as it
is this kind of big thing for Elysse's routine, I have the least to say about it because this is
something that I do very frequently as well. In fact, this italki lesson was one that I scheduled
months ago. I have an italki lesson in Bulgarian every Friday morning and I just left this there
because I knew that I wanted to be speaking with tutors. I do think it was a great note to end on
though, even beyond it being speaking focused, because it was another small victory for me to
look at and latch onto after this challenge. I found myself using and hearing a lot of words
that I learned from the song lyrics or from the videos that I'd watched and I also feel like time
felt like it moved a lot faster because I had done that really endurance based listening activity
a few days before. I was also able to speak just in Bulgarian for a lot longer than usual,
and I think a lot of this came from me talking to myself, as well as the fact that the listening
activities that I did, the song lyrics, all of the things that I'd worked on this week
really helped to improve my very small very limited Bulgarian vocabulary.
Overall, I really liked learning like Elysse. I'm definitely going to continue to incorporate
the song lyrics, the listening activities, many of the things that she talks about and really enjoys
in my own language learning routine. I also think that I'm going to start dedicating more days just
to a specific skill in order to build endurance and just to really work on improving that skill.
And I think the overall approach and flexibility when it came to days off made this routine
really easy to fit into my life, even when I was super busy. I really do think I need
a little bit more discipline and structure and I also think that I personally really thrive
when there's multiple languages in my life, but this challenge really pushed me in a lot
of new ways and stood as a good reminder that I really need to focus a lot more on
listening as a way to improve my speaking and pronunciation as well as my listening.
I want to give a huge thank you to Elysse for letting me sit down and
talk with her and then pretend to be her for two weeks. Her channel
and social media will be linked down below if you want to go check it out.
And thank you so much for watching! I had a lot of fun making this,
I'm really excited to make more of them and I hope you enjoyed it as well.
Who would you like to see me learn like next? It does not have to be
another language learning YouTuber. It does not have to be anyone with similar approaches.
Feel free to recommend fictional characters, people who have routines that you think
that I would hate, it's all fair game. I'm really excited to try out some new things.
I will see you next Wednesday with the last of my normal videos before new
year's time which is exciting and remember practice makes progress.