Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Happy New Year!

... and an update...

While I will not be doing daily updates on the New Year's resolutions, I would like to point out that it's important to act on them now, with the feeling you've a new year before you, that this is the year you'll get them done, etc. Most New Year's Resolutions, of course, are forgotten after a month and only remembered in late December when you decide, once again, that this will be the year. To make it the year things come together, you must act while the excitement is with you. To that end, an update to keep me accountable for at least starting:

I have learned all the lyrics to Laura Pausini's Come se non fosse.... I realize that learning four songs in Spanish and Italian is not the toughest goal, but being able to check off one goal is encouragement to try to check off the others. And so I'm 1/4 of the way through one goal for Italian.

On the Spanish front, I have switched from Borges' Ficciones to Borges' El Aleph. Skimming the two at the bookstore, I realized that I had read more of Ficciones than I had taken account of, especially since I made extensive use of "La muerta y la brújula" for a seminar paper in grad school. So it's Aleph, and I have read the first section (4 pages!) of "El inmortal". Were you to ask me if I wanted ice in my drink, I'd still be lost, but I'm now prepared to discuss bloodied horsemen, deserting mercenaries and the habits of troglodytes. More importantly, the preterite is starting to sink in, which it never has.

Elsewhere, I see that Edwin at Tower of Confusion has been thinking about resolutions too. He's going to try to learn three new French words a day for a month, and see if it looks like a good plan for a year. I think this is smart. It should be doable for a month. If it's a chore, he's got a foundation of 90 new words and ready practice to add 2 words a day - 60 words a month - thereafter. If it's not so rough, he can keep adding 90 all year. If it's a bust, he's only lost a month and isn't committed to a plan that doesn't work for him. The main thing, whatever you're doing, is to keep working at it, understanding that it's not about methods or programs, but about your learning, and that if something works for you then you should stick with it and if it stops working for you, you need to find something else. As they say, nothing succeeds like success!

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