Chci mluvit česky | My language mission and my log | Forum

Hello Everyone, 

I am an American, living in Czech Republic, but staying in Britain for the winter. My language goal is to speak conversational and functional Czech by August 2012. To me, this means being able to have everyday conversations with my non-English speaking roommate and friends, and to do basic everyday errands (shopping, etc.) I also intend to be able to read children's books (fairy tales and other picture books) and understand the gist of contemporary television and movies.

This is my first time learning a living language (Latin in high school) so I'm a little overwhelmed, but very excited.

Cheers! :-)

Tam

Been feeling poorly, so slow going. Caught up with Anki, reviewed previous lessons, and added in Food/Jidlo #1 lesson and House/Dům. Have been re-watching Na Vlásku (Tangled) dubbed in Czech here and there, enough to get the main song stuck in my head. Slightly annoying, but good immersion. ;-)

Today, I found some good learning materials: short stories with parallel texts in English and Czech, audiobooks that correspond with Czech books I already have, and even some Kindle Czech language books which I could never find before!

I'm still watching/listening to Na Vlasku quite a lot, which I am finding helpful, but I will go back to learning basic vocabulary using InternetPolyglot and Memrise. But I'll keep it to a manageable level of learning one section per day rather than the mad cramming pace I was trying before. 

I also reread Benny's post on learning Czech, and have decided to focus on learning the prefixes he recommended. Will do that tomorrow. 

Also, chatted with my boyfriend on Skype in Czech a little bit today, which was a great step! I'll have to continue to type/speak Czech to him so that he gets used to answering me in Czech rather than English.

Thanks for the tip, Adriano! I actually just discovered Anthony Lauder and bunch of material about Czech on How-To-Learn-Any-Language.com, so I suddenly have a wealth of material available to me. :-)

So, update. Haven't been posting, but I've been keeping up with my Anki reps, watching movies and music videos, and adding sentences to Anki from what I watch.

I also signed up for the Ten Week Journey with the http://www.everydaylanguagelearner.com/, as I could use some extra encouragement right now. I do miss being surrounded by Czech speakers in my everday life, and will be happy when I get back home in April. Following a suggestion from Aaron, I did try out LiveMocha for a few days. I found the community aspect wonderful, particularly the way that submitting writing and speaking is worked into the lessons, and that feedback from native speakers very quickly. However, the content of the actual lessons, at least for Czech, was unclear at times, and actually seemed to be completely incorrect for some lessons. So, although I am tempted to go back for the community, I'm not keen on learning incorrect material. 

I did also try LingQ, but haven't really liked it so far. I appreciate the reading and listening aspect, but find that the lessons are too few and unstructured, at least for beginning Czech. 

So, all that said, I have decided that, I could really benefit from the structure of some good old fashioned book learning right now, at least till I'm a little more advanced or until I get too bored with the material. I've been working out of an older Teach Yourself book, with the audio, but have ordered a CD to use with my Colloquial Czech book, which I prefer. Hopefully that will come later this week.

Also, found a link for a "retro" Czech soap set in the 1980's (I think): 

http://www.ceskatelevize.cz/porady/10195164142/

Looks interesting, so I'll give it a whirl.