[T-980] How would your day be different if you knew your L2?
Dear Rine,
If you knew Japanese as well as English today, how would your day look?
Would your content consumption be split between English and Japanese? Or would one push out the other?
My native language is Serbian but I spend most of my day reading and writing in English.
My Serbian actually suffers noticeably. I frequently speak like an idiot, starting sentences in Serbian and finishing them in English. I drown my native speech in English phrases like Americans drown their fries in ketchup.
On the other hand, despite reading and writing in English, these days I don’t speak it much. And from prior experience I know that it doesn’t take a long abstinence to dull the edge of my speech ability… the next time I show up in the voice chat I will probably talk myself into a corner, struggling to find the word I need to wrap up a convoluted sentence.
So if maintaining two languages has such a cost, how would it be with a third?
How will I make sure none of them gets neglected?
Well it occurred to me that this is the real point of what I am practicing during these 1000 days.
The idea is not to learn another language, but to learn to live with another language.
The actual ability will emerge as a natural consequence, an inevitable side effect.
I guess that’s what Khatz means when he tweets about how it’s all about getting used to your L2.
What I did today
- Reps
- Passive immersion
- Active immersion (no qualms here, I said earlier that my weekends are disorganized)
- I now thread the cable of my immersion earphones through a safety pin pinned to the top of my undershirt. This helps maintain the cable at optimal slack, to avoid the nagging ear-yanking that sometimes happens with wired earphones.
Obstacles
- Today I discovered another issue with the transfer from Anki to SM. The answer field is sometimes missing some bits, like the definition of a word. Maybe it’s because I tried to generate the XML without using the enforce styling option in Anki2SM. Will check tomorrow. Hopefully I won’t have to abandon this entire setup.