I’ve now been studying for 27 days (25 of which I’ve studied on) and a total of just over 8 hours of active study. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.’-William James, 1897 ‘Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. It might shed some light on how I do it, how much progress has been made, and how it’s ok to feel like you haven’t made that much progress sometimes! Errors are all part of the learning process. Today I invite you to sit in on one of my study sessions. So here I am saying it, I aim to JUST use Burmese By Ear (which is excellent so far by the way) and hopefully that’ll be a fantastic foundation in a little under two months of 20 minutes active study per day.ĭay 13. So much time is lost around playing around with different and resources and chopping and changing. That’s find ONE good resource, including audio, and work through it from start to finish. But there is one thing that I’m determined to do, that I wish I had done with Mandarin. After that I can re-visit and go into more detail, learning the script etc.īut if I learned anything from learning Mandarin it’s that I’ll change my mind on what the best approach is in a pretty short time… so we’ll see how I’m feeling next week. So I started a big pass through of the resource, which I estimate will take me about a month and a half at 15 minutes of new content, and 5 minutes of revision per morning. Construct a bit of a schema in my head of the language and see what kind of links I can make to previous knowledge, such as Mandarin. I realised what I was best off to do first was to survey the language and get a better feel for what it’s all about. I did this for 4 days but realised I was actually progressing really slowly and getting bogged down in the detail, so it was time to reflect on my learning process again.
Initially when I started out I was trying to learn how type Burmese and really get my head around the burmese script. It’s been going well and I’ve only missed one day so far. May 5, 2015: Don’t forget to apply the learning model Ollie! Wish me luck, I’ll report back in a week. I did all of this to try to find a language exchange partner, which I still want to do, so this weekend I’ll go to that curry restaurant, have dinner there, practice my burmese that I’ve learned, and see if they know anyone who wants to do a language exchange. I then looked on my language exchange for language partners, but didn’t find any who speak Burmese in Melbourne, so I just googled ‘Burmese Carlton’ (I live in carlton) and the only results that came up were a curry restaurant. That then linked me to this resource which I’ve now acquired. I thought it would be interesting to practice this new language, AND to log how much time I actually spend on it.įollowing my S.A.(U).L.T (Survey, Acquire, Understand, Link, Train) framework I’ve just surveyed the internet (by googleing ‘best learn burmese resources’) and found this article which looked good (it had the word ‘hacking’ in it, an indicator that the author was serious about efficient learning). Below you can see the journal in full.Īpril 27, 2015: S.A.(U).L.T., my learning approach, to a new project…Burmese! To start off with, here is a study log with my record of active study time, passive listening time, and rough notes of what I did in each time period. The idea of this journal is to track the development of my study method and hopefully demonstrate that no single method is ever perfect and the important thing is constant hard work and reflection on progress. The more recent the journal entry, the more developed the study approach (assuming I’m getting better at this caper!). Be aware that if a study technique is suggested, or a tip is given in one of the journal entries that doesn’t necessarily mean that that is a tip or method that I am using today. They’re a great record of an evolving study study method.
One of my current learning projects is learning Burmese.īelow is a series of ‘journal’ entries that track how my study is going. Ollie’s Burmese Language Learning JourneyĪs part of my own commitment to learning I’m trying to share some of my own learning projects through this blog.