January 8th 2023
- Read 60 pages of Empire of Sand by Tasha Suri
- Do my Anki reviews for Arabic
- Add 15 cards to my Arabic Anki deck
- Listen to/read 30 minutes of Korean content intensively
I completed all of my goals yesterday!
January 9th 2023
- Read 50 pages of Empire of Sand by Tasha Suri
- Do reviews for and add 10 cards to my Arabic Anki deck
- Read or listen to Korean content for at least 30 minutes
Seeing as I'm mostly using this thread to keep up with my language learning and reading goals, I might as well give some background on my goals!
For reading, I used to a read a lot as a child, but I started reading less and less once I reached high school. I never stopped reading completely, but I decided around August of last year that I wanted to try to read more. The books I've read since then are The Stardust Thief by Chelsea Abdullah, The Rules and Regulations for Mediating Myths & Magic by F.T. Lukens, Monsters of the Week by F.T. Lukens, We Hunt the Flame by Hafsah Faizal, Girl, Serpent, Thorn by Melissa Bashardoust, This Woven Kingdom by Tahereh Mafi, A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark, The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri, A Marvellous Light by Freya Marske, The City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty, A Strange and Stubborn Endurance by Foz Meadows, We Free the Stars by Hafsah Faizal, Captive Prince by C.S. Pacat, Prince's Gambit by C.S. Pacat, and The Wrath and the Dawn by Renée Ahdieh. Some of the books were from
this list, and some were just ones I came across at the library.
For Korean, I started learning like four years ago, but I haven't been consistent. I went really hard the first year, burned myself out and barely studied the second year, and now I'll have periods where I study and periods where I don't. My original reason for learning Korean was because I used to be a big Kpop fan, and I also loved watching Korean variety shows. Nowadays I don't consume as much Korean media, but I still listen to Korean music regularly, and I still enjoy learning Korean and would like to be more consistent! My most-listened to Korean artists/groups these days are probably Stray Kids, NCT, and IU. I listen to a lot of songs from a variety of artists/groups as well though.
For Arabic, it was a bit of a random choice. I was learning Russian, but I was having a lot of difficulty with the grammar, especially with declension, verb aspect, cases, unidirectional and multidirectional verbs, and so on, so I decided to take a break from it around January of last year. A few months after that I dabbled a bit in learning German, but ultimately I decided to give Arabic a try around October. Given the difficulty I had with Russian, you'd think I would have gone for a language closer to English, but no. The Arabic I'm learning at the moment is just Modern Standard Arabic, but I think I'd like to learn some Egyptian or Levantine Arabic at some point. Also, I'm not really sure why I had more trouble with Russian than Korean, given that Russian is at least an Indo-European language like English, but that's just how it goes I guess. Korean grammar never really confused me at all once I got used to the SOV sentence structure.
Jan 11
