Purpose/Background:
See old thread (First Two Weeks With Both Lingq And Norwegian, A Report. ...)
Goal:
B2 level Norwegian through reading Harry Potter. Initially I will be reading only then I will start listening to the audio after a sufficient base of vocab has been established. I plan on starting my speaking around 5k+ words. I dont have a timeframe I want to accomplish this in, I just want to enjoy the journey.
The second two weeks (one month):
I finished Harry Potter og de vises stein (Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone) this morning. My current stats are:
Words Memorized: 2770 (+1546, +126%)
Lingqs: 7678 (+4654, +153%)
Words Read: 87615 (+57,169, +187%)
Ratios (rounded)-
Known/Lingqs- 1:3
Known/Read- 1:31
Linqs/Read: 1:11
A summary of the last two weeks:
On my last post I stated that I am still “Toddling” or that I am between crawling and walking. I don’t know if I can truly say that I am walking full time right now, but there are times that I’ll flip the page on my phone app and I’ll only see a few yellow and a few blue words on the page. At those times, I feel like I’m walking for sure. Other times, I’ll turn the page and see lots of yellow and/or blue. The blue words are getting more specific, though. When I see lots of blue words it’s because there’s a lot of specific description, a banquet scene talking about the way the food looks and smells could be an example, or walking through a dark forest and hearing all the sounds around you.
I don’t know how I will continue to progress in my ratios (which are no standard, just something that I think is neat to track) as I go throughout the books but I’ve read some people saying that your rate of vocabulary aquisition increases with the amount of vocab you know and some say it decreases, I’ll find out over the next month what that looks like for me.
I did start listening while driving in the car over the last two weeks to the audiobook. It’s helpful that I am familiar with the story, and I’ve already read the passages from the audiobook to learn the vocabulary. I have found that some of those pesky words that seem to be important and appear a lot but you can’t get them to stick just work their way into your head and most of the time they click when listening and I don’t have the ability to check the dictionary meaning in lingq. This surprised me. I am also at the point where I can hear about 75% of the words even if I don’t know what they all mean, only about 25% of the time does it just sound like noise. I’ve also learned that the times that I don’t understand are partially because I don’t have the vocabulary yet, which emphasizes the importance of both listening and reading. For my 2700 words that I have down, there’s a chance my brain will make the connection, but for the words I don’t know, my brain doesn’t have the ability to access the internet and pull meaning out of thin air.
Here are some observations I’ve made:
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Just keep going, your brain will get it through enough exposure. You almost don’t even have to try, just keep reading and listening.
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The times that you do have to try are the words that won’t stick, just review them after the page that you are on and only try to notice, I wouldn’t even reccomend rote memorization of the words, let the definitions come.
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Track your progress like you’re supposed to track your weight, weekly not daily. Look at your improvement week to week or in larger chunks and don’t get bogged down on the little ups and downs of day to day language learning.
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Learn to be okay with some ambiguity. There are passages that I didn’t understand entirely, but I got the gist of them. When I encounter some of the same sentances and structures days or weeks later, they make sense and I haven’t even picked up a grammar book.
Conclusion:
I will report back in a month. I am starting the second Harry Potter book today. I plan on finishing the entire series before moving on to content that I haven’t been exposed to yet. There’s a YA book called Odinsbarn that’s part of a series that I want to read pretty badly, but I want to see where the Harry Potter books alone take me. I can’t wait to see where I am in July. If you have any questions please ask and I’ll answer them. If you have any suggestions I’m open to those as well.
Tusen takk, LingQ!