tell us more about these projects! i’ve struggled to pick up languages again after an extended break and no time and a project-based approach seems very refreshing!
Apologies in advance for the long post. I do plan on making a more detailed post on this at a later point hopefully a video but I make no promises these days.
Important note!! Before you start any short- or long-term learning projects, begin a polyglot journal outlining your objectives and check in every two weeks with an extra detailed summary of what you’ve done, haven’t done, dislike, feel needs changing, etc. either once per quarter or 2x year. Your micro-goals, methods and timeline should shift over time, showing that you can reassess the project and try out new things to suit your needs. If you don't update on time it's nbd, but at least try to write a note in your planner or calendar about what you did when because it can be extremely helpful one year later when you try to revisit where you are now and how you got there. 🧿🤍
The main projects from 2019 to today include the following
Greek - Conversational Speaking, 2019
Goal: meet for casual 30-minute lessons with a teacher, 2 or 3x per week to build up conversational skills and high frequency grammar in use as a passive bilingual (it being the native language which I actively lost growing up for various reasons).
Reflection: The real studies were repetition in speech and looking up key vocabulary I would need to use to tell my teacher about what happened in the last week, and my teacher supplied me with additional vocabulary to help me be more specific. Now I have a record of that vocabulary which I can review whenever by topic/story. Plus my family did notice my drastic improvement and asked if I had been studying.
Irish - The Merlin Project (Quarantine Project), 2020-2022 (+ ongoing, needs new methodology because I met my aims a while back at this point)
Aim: Go from A2 to B1 by learning to write so that you can have the skills to be able to read longer texts
Challenge: Rewatch an episode from the last show that you watched and write down what you see in as much detail as possible, making sure to use a grammar point you’re currently studying in your writing. Look up new words to make the text more specific and add them to the description. Correct your text. Watch the same scene again and add more detail, as in the following:
(Basically: first: do a grammar practice, then: watch 30 seconds, write using that grammar, translate dialogue if you want, consult dictionary, write again incorporating the new words and/or make the sentences more complex, at the end: correct your text yourself or with a teacher, start again and repeat until the scene or full episode is complete or you've exhausted the usefulness of the exercise.)
Alternatively just write or translate fanfiction, but I don't say that here.
By self-correcting you should become very confident on the basic skills at your level, whereas the rewriting itself allows for varied attempts at forming sentences and vocabulary acquisition in a specific context.
FYI I posted the project itself along with the notes to my website (here) and intend to share the presentation on the experience I gave in the Gaeltacht this past August soon enough.
Multilingual, select Romance and Germanic languages - The Diana Project, 2022-present
Challenge: dive deep into the rhythm, melody and sound of certain languages (which relate to a poet I’m analysing) via a slow read of poetry and familiarisation with the poet, poet-translator and poet-actor
Components: read, write, translate and recite poetry on the subject of Greco-Roman tragedy (now its shifting to satire after 1+ year or so of tragic influences) from select eras and in select styles, ex. ottava rima, rhyming verse & simultaneously learn about the rhetoric of poetics that influenced these authors and their poems or translations
These writings I’m still adding to my website as part of a translation, recitation and poetry portfolio.
Most recently, I’ve started what I call the Secret Senecan Project which requires reading certain ancient and mediaevil texts on stories I’m familiar with in the original, identifying key words based on context then extrapolating the grammar from their features (declinations, location in reference to other word forms, etc.). The next step will be to compare these predictions with the bilingual translation and consult my grammar books in those languages to confirm or improve my predictions.
If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading! I hope to polish this up and make the details more learner-friendly sometime before 2024. (:
