Year of Slovak

5-minute read

After putting 6 months of consistent (daily) effort into learning Dutch, I’ve decided to focus my attention on Slovak. Through learning Dutch, I have learned an incredible amount about how I can teach myself a language (as well as the Dutch itself, of course). My objective is to study 60 minutes every day for a year, and to assess myself along the way. I intend this post to serve as documentation for my progression. I would like to preserve this language in my family by speaking it to my children, but this requires a degree of fluency that I certainly do not have at the moment. Though, given I learnt this language during my critical period, I believe my intuition for the language is good enough to get me to the level where this is becomes possible.

Week 1: 20241118 (getting started)

Tracking: I am tracking all of my progress here: https://www.beeminder.com/oschwartz/year_of_sk. In this beeminder, I include all of the time I spend actually concentrated on material. I label the activity with a capital letter to indicate the skill being exercised (listening, reading, speaking, writing).

Resources: Slovak is not the biggest language. Nevertheless, there is still plenty of material available. My current input list consists of:

Software: Anki, ASB player for mining subtitles (https://killergerbah.github.io/asbplayer/)

Week 2: 20241125 (building a routine)

  • Added ‘Hry o život’ (the Hunger Games) to my input. I am using this for extensive reading. That is, I attempt to read this without doing word lookups unless I really do not understand the meaning of a paragraph.
  • Reading SME articles intensively (though not looking up absolutely every word, just more intensively than the Hunger Games).
  • Attempting to add 5 flashcards each day, either with a new word, or some grammatical construc that I am unfamiliar with.
  • Using https://slovniky.lingea.sk/anglicko-slovensky/ as a dictionary. (Frustratingly, there is no Slovak/English kindle dictionary available on the internet which makes work lookups slightly less efficient as it requires having a laptop nearby with Lingea)

I am temporarily putting my Dutch learning on hold, as I feel that this makes my time allocation to either language a little too thin. I may revisit Dutch next year, but we’ll see.

Week 3: 20241202

  • I’ve made an important discovery about the Slovak language this week: imperfective vs perfective form. This is something that intuitively I know, having grown up with the language. For instance, the difference between robit' and urobit'. However, I have now formally learnt and understood the difference between the two. Lingea (dictionary mentioned above) is invaluable because it tells you, for any given verb, whether it is imperfective or perfective.
  • Ordered ‘Lev, šatník a čarodejnica’ in both ebook and audiobook format. I’m now listening and reading this at the same time. This is a good level for me as I am able to understand nearly every sentence, and therefore following the story is not a problem. Perhaps I need something more challenging, however.

My current target is 60 minutes each day of consuming content, excluding time for revising and adding ankis. This seems to be sufficient to make good progress in the language, though we shall see.

When I speak to my dad in Slovak, I’m now making a more conscious effort to stay in the language, and ask him to fill in missing words, and to correct my grammar. This is not something he has been doing for the last few years (since we were much younger, in fact), so it’s an adjustment, but it’s helping me practice what I learn.

Week 4: 20241209

  • I find writing very difficult. Knowing when to use the correct endings for adjectives is very tricky, as well as knowing the correct ending of the noun. The cases of nouns are becoming more intuitive, but actually reproducing the endings myself is quite hard.
  • Starting writing with my Slovak tutor over Whatsapp, just to practice this skill as I notice that it’s the one I struggle with the most.

Week 5: 20241216

  • Additions: reading Greek myths before going to bed. Also started learning some Spanish today.
  • Tuesday: considerable time writing today.
  • Finding it very frustrating that I cannot import a Slovak-English dictionary into my kindle to assist my reading, but oh well. Lingea is good enough.
  • Keeping post-it notes with vocab that I read in Narnia that I then slowly add to anki…

Week 6: 20241223

  • Found a list of most common Slovak words (obtained from a user on Reddit). Making flashcards out of this.
  • Continuing with Narnia. Reading some SME articles.
  • Found a fantastic podcast https://ekonomialudskourecou.sk/. These podcasts are 15-20 minute episodes with transcripts included. The episodes explain some aspect of a particular country’s economy. They are quite factual and fairly interesting.

Week 7: 20241230

Away on holiday. Chipping away at Hry o Zivot. I’ve found that I can understand considerably more of Dejepis Inak than when I initially looked at the channel. Interestingly, I’m finding that I can communicate significantly more fluently with my dad. I can also communication substantially more complex ideas.

(For future reference, books by Jan Markos: https://www.martinus.sk/authors/jan-markos might be appropriate reading in the future).

With the resumption of work, I’ve decreased by daily attentional target to 45 minutes.

Week 8: 20250106