Well right now I’m feeling pretty happy with myself. I’ve been at least doing something everyday in terms of language progress, again haven’t spent as much time as I would like [which probably can never happen unless I had the whole day free and the focus to just study] but its also not something to turn your nose up at. [wait. . .who even uses that pharse anymore? i don't think i've ever even spoken those words in real life before. . .don't you love the differences between written and spoken language? lol]

I’ve been going through my Chinese characters list pretty frequently for the past couple of days, and am up to about the 300 character mark. Its weird, even though these 300 only scratch the surface of the total that “needs” to be learned to be considered literate in Chinese, I feel like I can read a large chunk of the characters I run into (on websites and such). This may be because I’m studying down a list by frequency, so of course the one’s at the top of the list are going to be everywhere, but also I think I’m seeing characters that I may not necessarily know but am familiar with or have familiar pieces so I am comfortable with them. Regardless it feels pretty good. I’m gonna definitely keep this up. . .only 2,700 more to go! [or 10x times what I’ve done to go! haha].
I’ve also been listening to my Chinese podcasts almost everyday. These are really a god send, whenever I lay down, am bored, or have downtown time I can pop in the ipod and just go through the more difficult Elementary lessons that I’m on. And even when I may be doing something else I can go through the newbie lessons and still pick up lots of stuff as well as keep the flow of the language going mentally. Pretty awesome~

Korean I’ve been doing a pretty good job keeping up with too. I listen to the easy beginner and newbie KoreanClass101 podcasts while I’m “working” in the morning [shouldn’t even call it that since I just talk to the kids really]. And I’ve even listened to some of the fairly easy intermediate lessons on my ipod.
On top of this I finally got back to doing my SRS reps in Mnemosyne, which contains a lot of my novel Korean vocab. This is a really big deal since I had a horrendously HUGE hiatus in doing them, about the whole of my last semester in college (the last 4 and half months) I neglected my poor Korean SRS and the damage was visible when I first looked at the stats (about 1,100 scheduled words which should ideally be in the 10’s, in addition there were about 300 unmemorized words). I made a huge dent in this number over the past few days and somehow still remember or have a good hint at a vast majority of the words. Although at times I feel it is very tedious, even worse than regular flash cards, I guess my recollection of the words attest to the power of SRS. I’ll keep adding new entries to this as I continue to catch up.
And I’ve been consistently watching Korean programs to top of my nights. I’m not really doing much studying of them, but its good to practice comprehension and what I know and a good source of entries into Mnemo. Korean shows are really entertaining(*note to self* remember to include some fav shows in Korean language approach) I really should probably try to start watching more Chinese programs though.

Lastly, I’ve even found time to learn some Arabic! It just some of the alphabet and a few vowels, but it’s a big start. There are a few, about 5, lessons on Youtube that are done by a terrific teacher here. The way he set up the lessons is really just impressive and I found myself picking up what he said rather easily. I went through all his lessons, and now I can proudly say I can read about 12 Arabic consonants, a few vowels, and a handful of words. Plus he explained the formation of the script very well, I finally understand what was previously a complicated mess to me. It was cool too because all the things taught in the vids built on each other.

Reminds me that youtube is a great general learning resource and people now have any information they want literally just a few buttons away! I will search on there for more good lessons and absorb as much as I can for sure~

Anyway, next up. . . my korean language approach!

Reminder:
- Abuse Youtube!
- Watch more Chinese programs
- Write some entries in a target language?
- Keep it up!