I’ve gone 21 days without listening to English voluntarily extensively, instead listening to mostly Greek, but also some other languages. Alright so let me explain what I mean by ‘voluntarily’ and ‘extensively’. If I have to read English for my job or for performing essential life duties such as paying bills or shopping then of course that is not voluntary. Speaking to friends and strangers also doesn’t count. By “extensively” I mean reading any article, essay or book that I don’t have to read such as news or other pleasure books, so, yes, in the last 21 days I haven’t read any news articles or read or listened anything else in English for pleasure or for the joy of learning. Youtube videos or podcasts are a bit more gray. I do watch some videos that are mostly visual so as to relax which have a little bit of English in the background but where words are not the main point of the video, these are mostly dance videos or animal videos. I’m always trying to listen to as much Greek as possible and not listening to English is one way to increase the amount of Greek I listen to. But it’s hard to keep up a very long streak for more than 3 or 4 days. You just sort of have to get into the zone. It’s much easier in the early days of learning a language when enthusiasm is highest. I was able to do that when I started learning Greek last August where I went on a 20 day streak roughly (I didn’t keep very rigorous count) but ever since then I’ve been trying to break that record and I have finally broke it. I also once went roughly 2 months with only listening to Arabic but I don’t remember the exact number of days. I have been immensely aided by a new app I built which divides audios into 4 or 5 second segments followed by a 5 second pause, which gives me time to reflect on what has been said if it is not clear. This has allowed me to listen to some very hard audios such as Christopher Rico’s reading of the Bible. I can now almost understand every modern impromptu speaker of Ancient Greek. I still have some trouble with Paolo Pezzulo and Gerardo Guzman among others, not because they don’t speak clearly but because they speak with a vocabulary which is more advanced than usual. I have 160 hours of Greek audio downloaded into my iPhone so I can access this immense library easily at any time. I’ve also gone through and edited out all of the parts which I find annoying, for example, I really hate it when a podcaster or a youtuber introduces the audio by saying the same thing over and over again, music also seriously annoys me. Sadly, I have to confess that for a while during that 21 day streak, I declined in the amount of Greek I was listening to, to the point where I just wasn’t listening to anything and while this might have helped my ears (I have an extremely bad case of tinnitus) it didn’t help my Greek. So I might try a new goal where I try to listen to at least 90 minutes of Greek a day. I still haven’t started a systematic effort to speak Greek every day since I’m working on a Greek computer program that never ends and I want to finish that first, but when I do finish that program I want to try to both listen to at least 90 minutes of Greek per day and speak the language for 2 hours per day whether with myself or with someone else.
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