Against my better judgement, after a couple of requests, I’m going to livestream my preparations in the new app for our trip to Croatia in July - I reckon I can fit 75 days in before we fly! (if there’s any fuel left).
I don’t know much about how YouTube works, to be honest, but as far as I can understand it, you can ‘follow’ my channel at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdpFM4a-JkcCL72q7xIZo8A - I don’t know if that will give any alerts when I livestream, but they end up as videos afterwards, so I’ll post them in here when they’re published.
Here’s day 1:
I’m afraid I’ve got no chance, absolutely zero chance, of figuring out in advance when my daily hour is likely to be! I’ll try to settle down into a routine - maybe I’ll get time in the mornings - probably more likely to be an early evening thing - time will tell!
I haven’t been able to watch all of one of these yet (you’d be surprised: I definitely will at some point- most likely a Monday), but I’ve made sure to watch at least 10 minutes every day (not always the first 10 minutes). Today (Monday) is my day off, so I was able to watch rather more and to watch it live. I was switching back and forth between watching you and doing Italian on the app, which was really very motivating!
It’s interesting to hear about the missing introductions. I quit the Bulgarian course because of that. I’m sure it will get fixed as soon as you guys can, though, so that’s not a complaint. On the whole, I’m amazed you got out so many courses so quickly: I feel like a child in a sweet shop ha ha.
One of the things that always makes me struggle, but doesn’t seem to faze you very much is when words are introduced with 2 different pronunciations. It always takes me quite a bit longer to learn those. I wonder how you seem to cope with that so well.
You’re doing a great job and I can’t wait to hear how it goes for you using it in Croatia.
You’ve definitely got more patience than I have, I don’t think I could watch someone else doing this unless I was being paid to coach them
Oh, interesting that was an issue in Bulgarian, I’ll flag that up (but it may have been fixed by the latest stuff anyway ).
It’s always a bit of a ‘what?!’ when you hear two different models - I just choose one and stick with it as a starting point, usually the male voice, on the grounds that it’s the sort of stuff that will become clear later on without any great effort - lazy route always works best for me!
It’s going to be fascinating to see how it unfolds. At the end of our ten days in Ireland, I felt as though I was tantalisingly close to being able to have some conversations, and we definitely had some ‘sort of’ conversations amongst ourselves, but I was conscious of some key gaps that were frustrating - we hope we’ve fixed those in the work we’ve done on the core since then, and I’m feeling some of that starting to come through with the Croatian - but I’m definitely still feeling ‘mmmmm is this really going to work?!’
Catrin won’t appreciate me being in ‘work’ mode too much in Croatia, but I will definitely try to have some activation conversations before going, and see if I can film one or two interactions while we’re there
“Oh, interesting that was an issue in Bulgarian, I’ll flag that up (but it may have been fixed by the latest stuff anyway.”
It was an issue with every language I tried (Bulgarian, Norwegian and Swahili), so I think it’s general. With Norwegian, I was able to get through it for obvious reasons.
“It’s always a bit of a ‘what?!’ when you hear two different models - I just choose one and stick with it as a starting point, usually the male voice, on the grounds that it’s the sort of stuff that will become clear later on without any great effort - lazy route always works best for me!”
I always worry that one of them is wrong and spend the next few minutes panicking about which one is right.
“It’s going to be fascinating to see how it unfolds. At the end of our ten days in Ireland, I felt as though I was tantalisingly close to being able to have some conversations, and we definitely had some ‘sort of’ conversations amongst ourselves, but I was conscious of some key gaps that were frustrating - we hope we’ve fixed those in the work we’ve done on the core since then, and I’m feeling some of that starting to come through with the Croatian - but I’m definitely still feeling ‘mmmmm is this really going to work?!”
Yeah, it really is going to be interesting. But Croatian has some major advantages over Irish. I’ll bet it has much more media and (more importantly) much more variety of media. I imagine you’ll probably be watching videos in Croatian in your free moments a bit further down the line. You’ll also be able to use a cheap phrase book to fill in quite a few holes on your flight. I’m really excited to see how you do.
To put 75 hours into context, I remember Daniel Tammet learning Icelandic in a week for a TV show, which involved a similar amount of hours and was claimed to be proof of his amazing abilities. So if you’re successful in this, you’ll essentially be achieving something that previously only the insanely gifted could pull off just by dint of your method.
We’ve just rolled out a significant fix for introductory items, so any more headaches of any kind will be of particular interest…
I don’t think I’m going to be getting into watching videos - I really want to see what happens if I do as clean a run as possible in-app, with just some conversational activation before going, maybe a couple of hours. Also going to be phrasebook free! We’ve got a new approach to listening exercises which I think is really going to help cover basic greetings and ordering stuff and so on, it feels as though it’s starting to work for me in Croatian - I’m definitely confident with good morning, good afternoon, good evening, please, thank you, how are you, and all of those have come from the listening…
It’s a lump of work to roll it out, though, so it won’t be overnight - I think it’s only in Croatian and Italian at the moment…
).