I am interested to hear if there are any successful GTDers who have found a way to incorporate learning a foreign language into their lives.
I have recently started learning Swedish and Norwegian. I have outlined my goals as follows:
1. I want to be able to speak conversational Swedish using approximately 2000 words and solidify my knowledge of Swedish grammar (I already have a basic understanding of how most Swedish sentence structures work) by Christmas of 2006.
2. I want to complete an equivalent of a college semester of Norwegian by finishing an email course of 160 short lessons by Christmas of 2006.
These two languages are closely related, and much of their grammar is identical. A great number of words also either look or sound very similar. I have studied both languages in the past, but because of lack of proper discipline I was never able to successfully gain thorough knowledge of either one.
Using the GTD model, I have outlined my goals, and now I need to simply compose next actions for both of these projects.
For Norwegian it is going to be quite easy -- the email course I have subscribed to already has 160 easy-to-consume short lessons that each take about 10-15 minutes to study. I am currently reading them every Sunday and Wednesday -- 2 lessons a week.
The rest of the week I study Swedish, i.e. on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday devoting about 10-15 min to the task. I have many more materials for my Swedish learning needs than for Norwegian, so the challenge here is to process all of them and stick to what I think is going to work best. I am starting out with an audio-only 10-lesson audio course that teaches basic phrases and expressions (each of the 10 lessons is about 30 min. long -- it's one of those Pimsleur courses). I am then moving on to another elementary course of 12 audio lessons from Sveriges Radio (each of those is about 20 min long). After completing these two rather elementary courses I am planning to move on to a mostly text-based 18 lessons course that I bought at Border's the other day, which promises to support my goal 1.
I also have a Palm-based flash cards program which already comes with a set of 1000 words -- I plan on using this whenever I get a free minute and while waiting on something/someone (in a grocery store, at a doctor's office, at an airport, etc.) -- just reviewing 10-20 words at a time can make a difference if I keep my long-term goal in mind. I should say that I already have a knowledge of about 500 Swedish words, so my plan is to add another 1500 to complete my goal of 2000 by Christmas of 2006.
I should mention at this point that English is not my first language -- Russian is. I have spoken English for so long though that it almost feels like a first language, however I have not forgotten Russian either. I think you can never un-learn your native language no matter how much time you spend using your second/third language.
I am anxious to hear if there are success stories of acquiring another language, particularly from English speakers who have learned a foreign language and are able to define their ability level and limitations you might still have. Has GTD helped you at all in reaching this goal? If yes, then how?
I have recently started learning Swedish and Norwegian. I have outlined my goals as follows:
1. I want to be able to speak conversational Swedish using approximately 2000 words and solidify my knowledge of Swedish grammar (I already have a basic understanding of how most Swedish sentence structures work) by Christmas of 2006.
2. I want to complete an equivalent of a college semester of Norwegian by finishing an email course of 160 short lessons by Christmas of 2006.
These two languages are closely related, and much of their grammar is identical. A great number of words also either look or sound very similar. I have studied both languages in the past, but because of lack of proper discipline I was never able to successfully gain thorough knowledge of either one.
Using the GTD model, I have outlined my goals, and now I need to simply compose next actions for both of these projects.
For Norwegian it is going to be quite easy -- the email course I have subscribed to already has 160 easy-to-consume short lessons that each take about 10-15 minutes to study. I am currently reading them every Sunday and Wednesday -- 2 lessons a week.
The rest of the week I study Swedish, i.e. on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday devoting about 10-15 min to the task. I have many more materials for my Swedish learning needs than for Norwegian, so the challenge here is to process all of them and stick to what I think is going to work best. I am starting out with an audio-only 10-lesson audio course that teaches basic phrases and expressions (each of the 10 lessons is about 30 min. long -- it's one of those Pimsleur courses). I am then moving on to another elementary course of 12 audio lessons from Sveriges Radio (each of those is about 20 min long). After completing these two rather elementary courses I am planning to move on to a mostly text-based 18 lessons course that I bought at Border's the other day, which promises to support my goal 1.
I also have a Palm-based flash cards program which already comes with a set of 1000 words -- I plan on using this whenever I get a free minute and while waiting on something/someone (in a grocery store, at a doctor's office, at an airport, etc.) -- just reviewing 10-20 words at a time can make a difference if I keep my long-term goal in mind. I should say that I already have a knowledge of about 500 Swedish words, so my plan is to add another 1500 to complete my goal of 2000 by Christmas of 2006.
I should mention at this point that English is not my first language -- Russian is. I have spoken English for so long though that it almost feels like a first language, however I have not forgotten Russian either. I think you can never un-learn your native language no matter how much time you spend using your second/third language.
I am anxious to hear if there are success stories of acquiring another language, particularly from English speakers who have learned a foreign language and are able to define their ability level and limitations you might still have. Has GTD helped you at all in reaching this goal? If yes, then how?