A Second Quarter Low on Motivation

A start of stats and a new beginning.

I can’t believe half the year is already gone.

After a first quarter divided in three countries, I began April filled with motivation to work on many things, one of which was improving my languages.

Well, that’s quickly disintegrated into some sort of laziness from which I’ve yet to recover. I even started to forget (again) to record my study time but luckily most of my “study time” was on Netflix and I was able to check my Watch history to fill in the time spent there.

The result?

For some reason, German shows up as “other”…

This seems like a lot to me, considering I don’t feel I improved much—if at all.

Korean ended up taking most of my time because of 37 hours of a Korean-French Translation-Interpretation class that felt quite below my level. I did learn a bit during it but the most pleasant part of it was that I met some people in France who enjoy learning Korean (at more than a Hello/Thank You level).

Apart from this about 90% of my time was spent watching TV shows and movies. I recorded which had native subtitles and which had English ones but I couldn’t get this to show up so I’m switching to Timesheet.io so this doesn’t happen again. It’s a much less beautiful app overall but at least I can export everything I fill in without getting a paid plan.

Basically, all the Korean and Japanese I watched had native subs while the Chinese was mostly (but not entirely) with English subs. That’s something I’m trying to change now for this new quarter but more on that later.

I also had 2 hours of German through watching the really nice movie Paradise. It made me want to start again but not enough to actually do it.

As for reading, I read quite a bit in April (8.5 hours of Korean) but completely fell off afterward. I’ve just started a new book (쇼코의 미소, Shoko’s Smile) so hopefully that’ll change.

New quarter, new start?

To be honest, I’m still pretty low on motivation at the moment. Most of the things I wanted to do ended up not happening and that’s gotten to my mind. You’ve likely seen my newsletter’s also fallen off the side, which has only added to my burnout of everything.

A good break would do wonders though so I may take a real one in August and come back in September stronger but there are a few pieces I really want to publish:

• A list of prompts I’ve used for language learning.

• A short Lesser-Known Languages piece about Tsugaru-ben, a Japanese dialect

• A first edition of Dazzled by Japanese 😁

So I’ll take a real break in August and come back in September after that—although I will likely also publish at least one Thursday’s Thousandth Thought (TTT) piece for paid subscribers.

Still. I like new starts.

And this is not only the start of a new quarter, it’s the start of the second half of 2024!

So here are a few goals for the quarter:

• Watch 20 episodes in Mandarin with Mandarin subtitles

  • While I didn’t do it in Q2, I did watch a lot of TV shows so my ear is more attuned compared to when I tried in early April. I’m already 2 in and it doesn’t feel too straining.

• Read 2 Korean books — Three if the second is done by the end of August

• Write 1 diary entry per week in Mandarin — potentially putting it in Journaly or ChatGPT/Claude for corrections.

• Read at least 1 graded reader in Mandarin — or, better, a novel.

• Have 3 conversations in Mandarin — the more, the better of course.

This feels very attainable but isn’t nothing either. I even hope I could finish it early and ride the wave to more but that’d be a very good start to being consistent again.

Somewhere in there, I might work on HSK 4 again too because I haven’t done it in years and think I might need to test to force me to do some structured Mandarin study. But we’ll see.

After all, I also have quite a lot planned outside of languages (health-related and work-related) but more on this some other day (maybe).

New half-year, new me?

I could say all the above are my new half-year resolutions but that’d make them highly likely to be dropped within a month so that’s not what they are.

They’re a step. A step forward.

Just a way to push myself to be more proud of who I am, what I do, and not feel like my days of improving my languages are long gone.

After all, I spent years thinking I didn’t improve at all at Korean and even believed that while living in Korea in 2023, even though I’m now well aware I’m at a high enough level to do pretty much anything I want in the language—just not always with the most nuanced phrasing.

I can still improve. And I chose this year to be for my Chinese. So I gotta move forward with this.

To a great second half-year!

Cheers for reading,
Mathias