Welcome back to another edition of my linguistic study progress!
As I showed in my previous post, I'm using a Notion template to keep track of my studies. Feel free to check it out here!
This month, I updated the template to now include all labels written in Japanese. This is a minor change but I think it's made the template look nicer.
From what I can see, I often studied for about 1.5 hours in the month of February when in January I would do around 2 to 3 hours.
I went back to school on January 18th, so my progress slowed down a bit as I have a lot of assignments and literature to keep track of this semester. I tried my best to keep a consistent schedule, trying to finish one chapter every week of my Integrated Approach textbook. Currently, I'm wrapping up Chapter 11!
The only deliberate time off I had was when I was on vacation in Poland (link to my post) and didn't have access to my laptop.
You may have noticed that this month was kind of all over the place. In late January, I thought I would challenge myself to learn Arabic, particularly Modern Standard Arabic. However, I quickly realized I was in way over my head, and dropped off around the 1st week of February. I want to thank my friend Noor giving me lessons and trying to teach me, it seems the rumors about the difficulties of Arabic are true!
So after Arabic officially became my 'final boss battle' language, I refocused on Japanese and French. However, on February 16th, I watched a Youtube video sharing the sounds of Swahili, and it piqued my interest in the language. I did some research into the language, it's usage and it's difficulty and I thought it might be a fun side project to attempt self studying Swahili.
I began to compile some resources on how to learn Swahili. At first, I was trying to use the FSI (Foreign Service Institute) textbook as I did with French back in the day, but the book was not working for me.
My Duolingo has been gathering cobwebs since April 2020, so I decided to hop back on and use the interface again for both Swahili and French! I can definitely see some improvements in their French course, I find myself using their 'Stories' function whenever I have some free time on the bus or tram.
Additionally, I was able to meet a Swahili native through a Discord server I moderate called Language Learning Community, and he provided me the best textbook resource I've been able to find on Swahili thus far (thank you Hakeem!).
So far, Swahili is something I dedicate around 1 to 3 hours a week to, so it's very casual. I hope to work out a better study schedule, as balancing 3 languages on top of being a full time working student is just as hectic as it sounds.
Drama wise, I haven't had time to watch any J-Dramas this month, but I read the manga 'Absolute Boyfriend' (絶対彼氏) back in high school, and I found the subtitled drama on Viki (the website I usually use to watch Japanese media).
No guarantee I'll be able to finish this one, but I know the premise and I remember it being quite a cute story. I did finish the previous drama In House Marriage Honey (社内マリッジハニー) and it wasn't too bad, but towards the end it was a bit like pulling teeth with the over-acting.
Regardless, I was able to learn lots of new words!
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