I just saw the latest video. Lovely dog! TBH, I just assumed that you wouldn’t be able to film any of these sessons, so the fact that you can record today’s session to share it later is a lovely surprise!
If you have the same problem again, I’m sure most of us would want you to go ahead with the conversation session even if you can’t film it, because we’re all rooting for you to succeed!
You are about 10-12 minutes into your first conversation and this is so exciting! OK, this is already amazing for 75 days. 75 days is NOTHING in language learning and you are communicating. I used to do this kind of thing teaching English online and I am impressed! If I had an English student talking like this, I might guess around 12 months studying the language. Well done! You seem stressed whenever you hit vocabulary gaps (“Oh oh”), don’t be! That is inevitable and trust me, it sounds better than it must seem from the inside. Let the teacher help you find the word and don’t feel embarrassed.
Aran, have you though about crosstalk as an additional exercise?
Good. We’re almost 20 minutes in and you seem to have got your confidence back again. I wonder if she will believe that this is your first ever conversation.
40 minutes in now. It’s an unfortunate irony that conversation classes tend to reach less and less familiar topics just as your brain is getting more and more tired; but you are holding up really well!!!
You just finished and I watched the whole thing (I’m lucky that you did this on my day off!). The most striking thing is that I think you can say that the new listening practice works! Brilliant job.
Thank you Martin! 
Catrin would tell you not to worry about me beating myself up - it’s always much more drama queen than anything else, I usually find the whole process of making mistakes and getting stuck quite funny - I might need to work on my presentation skills 
Just going to get the videos up now, but I genuinely enjoyed that - and I think I probably could have prepared a little more for what it would be like with a traditional teacher, and the lack of overlap between our work and ‘teacher questions for beginners’ in general - I might give that a bit of thought before tomorrow’s session. 
What’s crosstalk?
(with some hidden apologies at the end of the day 73 video for any Welsh learner I’ve ever not been patient enough with ).
Crosstalk is something Marvin Brown came up with for ALG. Basically, you would speak English and your interlocutor would speak Croatian and you have a whole conversation like that.
Your philosophy is quite different from the ALG approach, so I’m not proposing you use it like they do but rather as a preparation for a conversation. Let me explain what I am suggesting.
Let’s say that you want to discuss how you are getting to Croatia, why you are learning Croatian and your son’s schooling (I think those were sone of the topics you covered today, right?) and you know you might lack some vocabulary. You said earlier (although I hope you will reconsider) that you don’t want to use a phrasebook or anything like that to fill in vocabulary gaps, so what you can do instead is go through the exact same topics as Crosstalk first with a different teacher and pick up some vocabulary that way and then have your conversation class. The main advantages are that you are picking up vocabulary in context because you need it, exactly as you are in the conversation class, but with the major advantage that Crosstalk is MUCH, MUCH, MUCH less mentally exhausting than conversation, so you can do it for longer and cover ground more quickly.
Edit: Crosstalk
Oh, man, I can’t wait to try this challenge for myself! It will have to wait until I leave Vietnam (likely either November this year or February next year) and it won’t be Croatian for me; but I definitely feel inspired to try this challenge for myself.
If the proofreading for the new course is finished by then, I’d ideally love it to be Chinese; but if not, I’ll most likely have another go at Japanese. 75 days: 70 with the app and 5 days of conversation classes at the end. I can’t wait to try this!
I think the Chinese course will be in excellent shape by the end of the year - I’d love to see how you go with it.
Interesting about the crosstalk stuff - I always prefer to push through the pain, it feels faster and psychologically more satisfying for me - so in a sense asking ‘how do you say x in [this language]’ is like a mini-version of Crosstalk (If I’ve understood correctly) - and I’m definitely a fan of falling back on that as often as needed
Well, I’ve got the buzz today - sometimes learning a language feels like a slog, but sometimes you get that sense of having taken a big step forwards, and today was definitely ‘big step forwards’ territory for me - it seemed to be lasting FOR EVER, and I started to wonder if I was going to be able to keep going for the hour - but Sanja was so good at keeping the flow going, and finding the right level, that in the end we powered through to the hour easily, and I was definitely starting the process of getting some chunks automated.
So I’m pretty delighted by that. I don’t think there’s any way that any experienced teacher would rate me as less than a B1 on the speaking/listening in this video, and that is not bad at all for 74 days of an hour a day. I think I would probably get to B2 if I did a week’s immersion, but since that’s not on the cards I’m going to see what happens if I do an intensive listening day once every two or three months for the next couple of years.
@martin-harte @tatjana Thank you SO much for your company in this thread - knowing that at least a couple of people were seeing some of the videos was a HUGE motivational factor to keep me going with the livecasting, and now that I’ve made it through the project, I’m incredibly grateful for that - it feels absolutely fantastic to be able to have a conversation in Croatian (however limited) 
I’m sure we all hope you have a great time in Croatia - you’ve certainly earned it! It’s a great inspiration to see the reality of someone successfully working through all the challenges.
Diolch, Robin! I think it’s particularly worth noting that I’m not even at the end of purple belt yet, but that’s definitely enough content for conversations.
It feels super strange not to have to do a livecast of learning Croatian today! I feel slightly at a loss May just come and look for conversations on the forum instead
It’s mental to think that less than 3 months ago, you didn’t speak any Croatian and now you are able to have conversations.
Just to put 75 hours into perspective, Croatian is a Category 3 (of 4) language in the old FSI categories and a Category 4 (of 5) language in the new ones. The typical time spent is apparently 23 classroom hours and a minimum of 17 self-study hours a week (so basically full-time study) and for this category, it typically takes around 44 weeks of that, so 44x40 = 1760 hours (half of those with a teacher). Divide that by 75 and you get about 23.4.
This is how small 75 hours is in the grand scheme of things and here you are having conversations.
You made it brilliantly. I’m just listening to the conversation in video 74. You can understand almost everything Sanja says and your responsed are really great! If you’d continue you’d speak Croatian really well. Now your task is to do some conversations in the wild when you visit Croatia! WELL DONE! I am proud of you, really!
Ponosna sam na tebe! Sad hrabro naprijed!