27 Feb 2022
This is the fifth update on my German language learning journey!
Stats
Words that I had hoped to have learnt by now: 1600 (10 each day for 160 days)
Words that I have actually learnt up till now: 1014
Full Anki stats for this month here.
Quick update
This month was super interesting.
Firstly, my goal for the month was to get back to 10 new words per day and see how sustainable that was. I was super happy with how I went, and felt like the learning strategy gains from Jan remained throughout Feb. However, I fell behind again in the last few weeks due to not adding any new words for about two weeks.
Retained vocab learning speed gains!
Last month I did some analysis and worked out that I had managed to reduce my review time per Anki card from about 33.6 seconds per card, to 10.7.
This month I studied a total of 2562 cards in 28860 seconds, meaning I was spending about 11.3 seconds per card. In short, I managed to retain my learning speed gains, as well as not become overwhelmed by reps!
Here is how my daily reps changed over time, during the time period that I was adding 10 new cards per day.
Importantly, my total time spent on reps never exceeded 30 mins meaning that my study time remained sustainable for me. Awesome!
That being said, my accuracy scores have reduced a bit, down to the low rather than mid eighties. I was being a bit lazy with my mnemonics at the start of the month, but have focussed on picking that up agin and that’s definitely helped.
Why the break?
Pretty simple, I was super busy with a bunch of other commitments, including finalising my second book, Tools for Teachers, and launching my first online course, Cognitive Load Theory Mastery.
I expect that this month will be particularly busy too, especially as I need to actually build out the CLT Mastery course (I just launched it for pre-sale at this point). So I may fall behind a little with the German again.
Breakthru Insight: Realising that you’re close to your goal can sometimes cause your motivation to dip!
Another major reason that my study dipped a bit is that I started studying some practice B2 exam texts (this one has been great) and felt like with a bit of targeted study, I wouldn’t actually be that far away from my goal of passing the B2 exam! Once I felt like this, my motivation took a little dip, I must admit.
I actually saw a similar thing happen with one of my students yesterday at Badminton (I’m the supervising teacher for one of the badminton teams at my school). Bill (not his real name) was playing one of the toughest players in the league, and he went into the match expecting to be totally smashed. However, after losing the first game (of three), he mustered all his power and put up an awesome fight in game 2 and actually won it! He was super shocked, and had a feeling of premature elation at his intermediate success! This feeling of elation from game 2 caused him to lose his focus for game three as he reflected with shock at what he’d already achieved despite his initial doubts. When I realised I could do pretty well on B2 level practice tests, I felt a bit like Bill!
Next steps
At present my plan is to focus on creating my Cognitive Load Theory my online course, wrapping up the final little bits of Tools for Teachers, and making some marked progress on my PhD project for the next few months. German will be a secondary focus. Then I’ll really kick my German into gear in the 2 or so months or so just prior to the exam. (note how an external yardstick of success changes the focus of the learning challenge from intrinsic progress and pleasure, to jumping a bar! Very intriguing! I spoke with Naomi Fisher about this topic here).
I’ll try to just keep up the reading and finish my current book, Lockdown in Liechtenstein, then probably move onto some onto something a little more academic, perhaps even just reading the German news each day (plenty to read about with the current Ukraine and Russia situation, that’s for sure!)
I hope you enjoyed this update on my journey – From Beginner to Fluent German in One Year: the Challenge