Foreign Languages on the Eights: 5/13

For the past eight weeks, studying foreign languages has taken a back seat to other things in my life. But I still had plenty of opportunities to take a few minutes aside daily to study some. Oh well, that's the past and it's behind me: the question is what am I going to do now. As I mentioned a while back on this blog, I decided to narrow my concentrated study of foreign languages to those that I had the best chance of approaching effective mastery of: Spanish, German, Russian, French, and Chinese. It is very easy nowadays, by means of the Internet, to both read material in each of these languages as well as hear daily webcasts in them. I also have study material at home to study with. So I just have to lay a little time aside, as well as set up a study plan. The main push should be for me to rapidly build up my passive (reading and listening) vocabulary in each of these languages to the point where I can follow the gist of anything I read or hear in them. But that aside, I also need to practice being in "the flow" of each tongue as well. So in the next few days I will work out more details. And hopefully, this time around I'll actually begin to accomplish something more substantial in this area of self-improvement!