I recently posted a video of myself speaking Vietnamese. These few sentences came after quite a fair amount of time. And now I feel like I am going nowhere slowly. There are a few reasons for this.
Firstly, Vietnamese is a language that is vastly different from other languages I have studied. So I’m finding it quite difficult to retain vocabulary. Secondly, I don’t have a lot of time for learning in the evening, and at the moment an additional burden on my time is that I am nursing my very old pet rat who cannot do too much for himself anymore. Sadly, in a month or so he may not be around any longer, but for now it’s an added pressure on my schedule as well as being a bit emotionally draining at times. The third problem is that I am currently only learning from Duolingo. I’m trying to maximise what I get out of it by writing down the sentences. But here’s where the time issue comes in: I am only getting through one or two lessons per evening and I am finding it a slog with not much to show for it.
The good news: I made the decision to buy a Vietnamese book to learn from, along with some other Asian language resources, with some a virtual currency I get through my bank’s rewards program. It will probably be a few weeks though before I have these in hand though. I think having a book will allow me to see things at a glance and hopefully speed up my progress a little. Whereas Duolingo is pretty linear. I think the two resources would probably complement each other.
But until then, I want to enjoy my language learning. So I am going to pursue a language I think is fairly easy (I am already part-way through the Duolingo tree), and which I am also really keen to learn: Swedish. I am going to use Duolingo, the FSI course text, and a website I just discovered which looks great: learningswedish.se.
I will still continue reading the Italian novel I mentioned. But my Kanji learning was pretty much already starting to take a back seat to the Vietnamese, and I am ordering a Japanese book as well in the same batch, so I will put that aside for this month too.
So, a brief Swedish interlude… I am looking forward to it. I hope I don’t forget too much Vietnamese. But I think once I am a bit better equipped with resources, I will be able to make better use of my time and progress faster.
