Theoretically I suppose I could have included reflection on language learning in the post on studies, but since this is what I do for fun, I figured it deserved to be in a post about things I do for fun.
My Estonian and German studies both suffered a little last year. After having a cracker of a year in 2012 - which had a great virtuous circle relationship with a trip to Europe in which I spent two weeks in Estonia and two-and-a-bit weeks in German speaking countries (plus a week and a bit in Italian speaking countries, but I'm not learning Italian, so that doesn't count), 2013 was a but of a bust.
I kept my hand in with Estonian by having a lesson once a month (which is not as useful as having one once a week), but for various reasons I couldn't take any German language subjects in my studies, so it was up to me to keep studying things like grammar and such... without an external reminder... while being busy with other subjects...
And, well, good intentions do not always translate to actually doing useful things. I spent the whole year totally going to do some German studies this week. Occasionally I actually started a module, which I was totally going to finish by the end of the week...
And then it was 2014.
It's been one of those years. One minute it's April, and there's something I want to do tomorrow, the next minute it's October, and I can't quite tell you what I did with the days in the middle.
What I did do, and found that helped me keep me slightly in the loop with my German, was start learning Esperanto.
In German.
Just in case you've missed it the last few times I mentioned it: I've been learning Esperanto in German.
I have German books on Esperanto, and I've been using a couple of programmes like Kurso and Lernu, which I've set to German. I haven't been doing as much with these resources as I'd need to in order to actually have a useful knowledge of the language (considering I've been doing this for a few months, and I should totally be able to go to a congress or something by now), but it's been getting me to use German to achieve some goal or purpose, which is supposed to be good for your language learning.
Plus, as an added bonus, I'm learning Esperanto. Why? Well, that's a topic for a later post.
My goals for 2014 are to brush up on my German enough to pass my course (going back to the studies bit), but to also try to find a way to have more useful German based stuff. I haven't worked out the details of this plan, so I suspect it will fail.
I'm going to endeavour to gain more "contact time" with Estonian. I actually have a plan for this one: I'm going to read something involving Estonian words every night (if possible) and watch at least one eesti keeles TV programme or Movie a month.
Actually, I suspect the same plan could probably work for German.
And I'm going to learn Esperanto well enough to feel I wouldn't be wasting my time if I went to a congress or tagged along to a meet up group.
Once again, the overall goal is to be a bit better.
And - on a completely different note - I'm going to try to get away more this year. To put some of my annual leave towards things like camping and such. I was too much here last year. This year I'm going to spend some time elsewhere.
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