A mini plateau and goal setting

I realised the other day that I had almost forgotten about my blog completely.. oops! I think that was just because I really had nothing on my mind that would be of any interest or that I had to get off my chest. I think I just need to rant a little, and maybe someone out there will have some good advice for me!

Ok let's start with German. I got really excited at the beginning of the week when I pulled out some Deutsch perfekt magazines that I had bought ages ago. I flipped through and found some of the really easy texts and was surprised that with the help of a dictionary I was able to read them through quite easily. So I put a couple of LingQ and they came up as like 40% unknown words... cool! Anyway, after doing this for a few articles I began to get quite pissy when I came to words which I know that I have learned in the past and really should know what the mean... I'm finding that I learn say 2o words and 5 of the old ones I learned a while ago just drop out of my head. It's so irritating! But to be fair, reading is probably what I'm best at. I can take the time to go through slowly and make sure I understand thing. Trying to have a conversation with someone... drives me insane. Even when they speak slowly for me, half the time I still don't get it.. let alone thinking fast enough to reply. I end up looking like a total retard.. UGH. I guess I just need to practice more. I think sometimes I do just work myself up though.

I also have been thinking about goal setting and how useful (or not useful) it is. For German it's easy to set goals. If I have a test coming up I know I have to learn this many words on this topic etc. But for French and Russian it's a little trickier since I don't have a teacher or anyway of really assessing myself. Well that's a lie, there are ways I can do it, it's just easier than it would be for German. But for French and Russian I am going to set myself goals for the next since months.

(I switched to the Princeton course for Russian since it was completely free and I had heard great things about it from other people so I'm slowly working through that now. You can find it here http://tinyurl.com/pcourse1001 )

Goals for Russian:
- complete 2-3 lessons per week of the Princeton course using LingQ as an aid
- after 6 months have completed at least 60-70 of the lessons in SLA101

Goals for French:
- reach at least a B1 level by January 2010 using LingQ as the primary tool for learning.
- have my first conversations with a French tutor by November and after that continue to have regular conversations with them.

Of course I will add to these goals once I have pondered them a little more. And also depending on time constraints... but I think that if I stick to it I will see a noticeable improvement in my ability in all my languages by the beginning of 2010!