I am still learning new things and coming to new conclusions. In my last update I talked about re-introducing French into my schedule. Unfortunately, this did not last very long, which I’ll come to later.

A while back I watched a video by Steve Kauffman which mentioned that the Mini Stories in LingQ are the same stories for each language. I hadn’t considered before that if I could read and understand them in my best language (currently French), that would make them much easier to understand in Russian, and any other language in the future that I struggle with in the beginning.

However, after starting to read the French versions … I understood the first one okay, but the second one was a bit of a struggle. I realised I needed a slightly higher comprehension of French to really understand them (without using the translation feature).

As amazing as Alice Ayel is, I’m now struggling to follow the next video in the course, and decided I needed to go back and ‘revise’ the audio/transcripts of the previous lessons. However this takes a great deal more mental energy for me, and that’s mental energy I don’t currently possess.

Dreaming Spanish, however, has now become my favourite resource. The videos are much shorter with more variety, and I’m enjoying them immensely. Spanish is proving really easy for me to comprehend, not just because of the quality of the content, but because of the similarities with English and French. I’ve decided that, for now, I’m going to focus on bringing my level of Spanish up to my level of French, then hopefully beyond.

When my cognitive issues improve, I will definitely re-take up French again. However I’ve found it more difficult recently to juggle multiple languages, so for now I’m focused (almost) entirely on Spanish.

Why the almost? Well, the next in-person Polyglot Conference is in Budapest in October. I can’t commit to booking it right now, but I’m hopeful that my health by then will permit me to attend.

Hungarian is currently on the ‘Ideally’ section of my language bucket list. In the last few days I’ve wondered about picking the language up now, in very small manageable doses, so that if/when I make it to the conference, I could at least understand some of the local tongue.

That said, it’s a language I’m much more interested in understanding than being able to communicate fluently in—which makes it an ideal guinea pig. Today I trialled a language program which was mentioned in a forum thread about Automatic Language Growth. My conclusion was a resounding “Not for me” (it was nothing like ALG), but I tried it in Hungarian.

I’ve not used uTalk much lately; I find it very repetitive and the only reason I prefer it over Duolingo is because it uses pictures rather than translation. However I’m considering making a single Easy Game in Hungarian a daily habit, to pick up some vocabulary. There’s very little I can find out there for beginner-level Hungarian comprehensible input, so until I get to grips with LingQ’s Mini Stories in Spanish or French, I’ll stick with that for now.

So my new language routine? A daily few minutes on Hungarian, and lots of Spanish. Japanese, French and Russian are taking a break. I don’t want to put them aside for too long, so I’m trying to watch as much Dreaming Spanish as I can. I’m up to 26 hours and finished all the Superbeginner videos yesterday. Onto the beginner videos!