Hello everyone! Guten tag!  

In this post, I'll touch upon my progress studying German.

Last month, I've finished my post by setting up the following goals:

1.Reading - 30 hours.

2. Listening - 30 hours.

3.Anki - 600 new flashcards.

Firstly, although I was quite positive I'd exceed my goals for May, I haven't managed to do that. Moreover, I've spent 27 hours reading and listening respectively, which corresponds to 90% completion. It's not bad, if you ask me, especially having in mind I was extremely busy with my job last month, as well as the fact that I've managed to spent 30 hours of Anki in addition to that. This translates to 84 hours in total, which I'm really happy with.

Secondly, I've almost finished reading all freely available texts within https://german.net/ (A1-B2) and https://lingua.com/. Also, I feel I've improved a lot when it comes to vocabulary and recognizing cases.

When it comes to listening, I've listened quite a lot and discovered a few podcasts I like, as The Easy German Podcast (https://www.easygerman.org/podcast), for example. I like also watching and listening to German Youtube videos. I use MediaHuman Youtube to MP3 converter (https://www.mediahuman.com/en23/) to convert videos into MP3 format.

I've noticed that on the days I'm incredibly busy, I tend to listen more to compensate for that, which is a great idea. Even if I'm tired after work, I can always go for a walk into the forest and listen to podcasts, or listen when doing chores or running errands. Hell, you can even do it when driving to your job, so it should be no excuses here.

The language phonetics starts to get more familiar and recognizable, but of course, it's a long way forward before I'll be able to comprehend the language well. However, after learning Norwegian on my own, I have a lot of confidence in the process. I truly enjoy listening to the content that is relevant to me, even though it's far above my current level. This includes topics like International News on DW (https://www.dw.com/de/themen/s-9077), or Technology:

APPLE VISION PRO - Was kann Apples erste Datenbrille?

I like also listening to podcasts discussing language learning, as it's always refreshing to hear new perspectives on learning and become inspired.

Concerning Anki flashcards, I've made some significant progress. As per today, I have in total of 1091 flashcards in my German deck. I don't think that's a huge amount, even though it's a milestone. I've stopped studying Norwegian when I've reached 10 000 cards in roughly 2 years of consistent studying, therefore I know that it'll take a lot of time before I'll get comfortable with the language.

However, I'm not rushing anywhere, because It's my hobby. I don't have any short-term plans to move to Germany or use it for my job. In contrast, I was really rushing with Norwegian, because I had been already living in Norway at that time and I needed to get very good very fast to get employed, so in this regard, I'm very lucky now.

Also, for simplicity's sake, I've decided to stop setting up goals for Anki cards and focus on Reading and Listening activities instead for the time being. Anki use will naturally follow, or in other words, the more I'll read or listen, the more flashcards I'll create as a rule of thumb.

Moreover, I've realized the importance of tracking my progress on weekly basis, rather than monthly. I believe, this gives greater flexibility and is less discouraging. For instance, if the first week went poorly, then I'll be able to reset and start new week freshly without feeling a need to catch-up. I know, it isn't a massive change, but more like a shift in mindset more than anything.

So, I had to adjust my excel spreadsheet, which now looks as follows: https://ibb.co/Kw2SMpd

This gives me a better overview in terms of where I stand with my activities each week and allows me to focus on one week at the time, instead of whole month .I find it to be less overwhelming.

Furthermore, the sheet clearly states how many hours per week and day I need to study to achieve my bare minimum, medium and maximum goals. This goal separation in different tiers, if you will, makes it easier to consider goals to be more flexible, than just being a hit or miss target, which is crucial in preventing disappointment over possible poor monthly performance in the future.

Moreover, It removes the need for monthly goal setting, which saves mental energy. My goal from now on will be to spend more time immersing in my target language, hopefully getting at least minimum exposure, which is 30 hours in total, however, I won't be limiting myself, in case I'll find more spare time for studying.

All in all, I've made some good gains so far and I'm looking forward to the future posts.