I am always encouraged when people post their story and progress learning a language, so I thought I would do the same with my language project.
Last December, I decided to travel and learn two different languages. I wanted to do a challenge similar to Scott Young’s Year Without English Project (The Year Without English - Scott H Young). Instead of 4 languages in a year, I decided to do 2 languages in 6 months, traveling to Colombia and China.
I spent January through June preparing for my trip. For the first 3 months, I practiced Spanish whenever I had the opportunity. I mostly followed the Speak From Day One principle. My roommate is from Colombia, so we made it a rule to only speak Spanish whenever we went to the gym, and I had online classes on iTalki several times a week. The language lessons and partial no-English rule helped me overcome my fear of speaking and making mistakes. I used Duolingo extensively, and I created my own Anki deck to study from words I encountered or got from a frequency list. Most importantly, I always tried to keep it fun by listening to music and watching telenovelas.
I did something similar with Chinese, but I mainly focused on learning the characters with Skritter. I think Chinese characters are beautiful, and, as that was one of my motivations for learning, I wanted to focus on learning to read. By the time I left for my trip, I had about 150 hours of Spanish practice and 50 hours of Chinese practice.
When I arrived in Colombia, I mostly abandon formal study and got most of my practice through immersion. For the first two months of my Colombia trip, I spoke almost no English. During the last month, I found that I wasn’t making much progress by just speaking so I started to use LingQ to read Harry Potter. Right now, I have studied Spanish for about 320 hours, (not including immersion) and I am about to surpass 20,000 words on LingQ.
When I arrived in China, I focused on learning to read. I spent about 6 hours a day practicing for 3 weeks until I got sick. Since then, my Chinese studying has tapered off, but I managed to learn around 400 characters, and I even was able to read two graded readers.
Continuing forward, I think I am going to keep working to improve my Spanish and put Chinese on the back burner. I really enjoy reading in Spanish, and I feel like I still have so much to learn and improve.
Here are some plots that show how I spent my time studying: Language Learning Plots - Album on Imgur
I kept track of the time I spent with an Android app called Tasker, which is used for general phone automation. Whenever I open up a particular app, Tasker writes a timestamp to a csv file, and it does the same when the app is closed. This way, almost every second I spent studying could be recorded without any additional effort. I only kept track of my formal study time. I spent a lot of extra time in conversation in Colombia that I didn’t record. The csv file automatically syncs to my Dropbox with an app called Dropsync, and I plot the data on my computer with a python script I wrote. The code is very rough around the edges, so any feedback is appreciated. Below is the github of the python script: