20 April 2022
This is the sixth and seventh (I missed six months!) update on my German language learning journey!
Stats
Words that I had hoped to have learnt by now: 2120 (10 each day for 212 days)
Words that I have actually learnt up till now: 1505
Full Anki stats for month 7 here.
A slower pace
The pace has really slowed over the past two months. So much so that I missed my 6 month reflection!
Why is this? Two main reasons: 1. A shift of focus, 2. Already feeling close to the goal.
Working through the practice exam activities last month made me feel like I wasn’t too far away from my B2 goal, so I’ve been a bit more chilled out. Finishing book number 2 also took a bunch of time the past month, in addition to starting to do the bulk of the recording for my Cognitive Load Theory online course. But really it’s just lower motivation.
A few more reflections
Learning speed: Average answer time remained low over month 7. It was 10.98s per cards compared to 10.7 and 11.3 for the past two months respectively.
Learning timing: One thing that changed this month is that I stopped doing Anki in structured sessions, and started to spread my reviews out over the day more. This just means that I don’t have a big stack of reviews to do when I get home at the end of the day, and it’s been going well.
New word sources: Another thing that’s changed is where I’ve been getting words from. I’ve been reading a bunch of online newspaper articles, mainly from Online Focus, and that’s been providing me with lots of great vocab.
Word addition: Another change is that, unlike previous months when I’ve been doing some reading, and adding some words, day by day, I’ve been doing it in bulk for the past few weeks. This means just doing a bigger reading session on a single day and adding about 20 to 25 new Anki cards, then having Anki release 5 or so per day. It’s been working well : )
Word choice: Another change which has helped me to stay motivated is being a bit more selective with my word choice (i.e., which words I’m choosing to try to learn and remember). Initially I was learning pretty much every new word I came across. But after my podcast discussion with Margaret McKeown about Vocabulary Learning, I realised that Tier 2 words* would be a great focus for me, and I could include a few Tier 3 words too for topics that I find interesting (economics, education, etc)
Next steps
This month I hope to just keep on keeping on. From March 20th till April 20th I only learnt 2.6 words per day, so I really want to pick that up and keep it at 5 more consistently! Let’s see how I go : )
I hope you enjoyed this update on my journey – From Beginner to Fluent German in One Year: the Challenge