Sometimes life can be very unpredictable and lead you to strange places...

I had no plans to learn my 3rd foreign language before, however this has become a reality after meeting a person who speaks fluent german, who inspired me to undertake this huge project - german language. So, I have dicided to pull the trigger and give it a shot.

I have been learning german for 2 months now with reasonably good gains. I have finished memrise 1-7 courses which helped me to recognize around 3200 german words. The fact that german is a germanic language and I have english and norwegian under my belt from earlier, makes the vocabulary aquisition process significantly faster.

Moreover, the fact that I have consciously chosen word recognition over active recall, made me able to learn words faster and in bigger amounts than I normally could if I chose active recall instead. I think word recognition makes more sense in the start since I learn languages primilarly by reading and listening, which requires good recognition skills (no active recall is required at this stage actually).

Active recall only becomes relevant when starting to output (writing/talking), but that is at least 6-12 months away, so active recall doesn't make sense at this stage. Why? The answer is simple: why would I want to say something to someone (active recall), if I won't be able to understand the answer (recognition) or engage in the conversation in any meaningful way (superb active recall skills)?

That's why comprehension (comprehensible input) ALWAYS comes first in my book and I am a strong advocate that this approach makes language acquition process way faster, because we don't need to jump over 2 or 3 steps at once, but we rather focus on one step at the time.

To put it simply, for me the language acquisition process looks something like this:

1. Word recognition (the most common 2-3k words)

2. Reading (word, grammar recognition - sentence mining), building listening skills - comprehensible input.

3. When no.2 is solid, learning to write, hiring a tutor for corrections/input.

4. When writing skills are quite good, then talking (with natives, tutor).

Now I am at stage no.1 and the journey is quite long to stage no.4. I think I am at least 1 year away from beginning to talk somewhat okay-ish (simple blahblahblah :))) ) and another 1-2 years to become comfortable with it (like fairly confident and competent). My estimate for reaching B2 level is roughly 2 years of active study. Even though it can be reached faster, I think its a safe/conservative guess in my case.

So, my plan for the May is to finally transition from word recognition to stage no.2. I don't have the exact numbers (hours of immersion) for May just yet, but I am planning to have them soon.

See you later alligator :)

Update (29th April 2023)

May goals:

Reading: 30 hours (1hr a day)

Listening: 30 hours (1hr a day)

Anki: 600 learned cards (20 cards a day)

I think I will excede these goals, but I would rather overperform than feeling like a failure not reaching my own goals.