Time-sink.

Studying that one notoriously hard language for dual citizenship purposes is such an incredible time-sink for me, right now.

I do DuoLingo for like fifteen to twenty-five minutes a day to practice paradigms, but the big thing is just memorizing a shit-ton of vocabulary, since it’s not related to anything you would ever know and there’s not really all that much borrowed vocabulary from common languages with international impact.

And, that’s like forty-five or fifty minutes of time a day, though it’s growing increasingly less as the vocabulary settles in, per the algorithms on the flashcard app that a programmer friend who’s into languages helped me set up on my laptop and on my smartphone.

I can see progress – like, I read a sample sentence from a newspaper article that I tried to get through months ago, and now I know a lot of the vocab there – but, still, it’s just so time-consuming.

By the time I have breakfast and get ready and then turn to language study, it turns out being like a two-hour chunk of my time every day, since I have to have breaks in between different sections of study, like between DuoLingo and flashcards and then between memorizing new vocab and practicing old vocab.

I’ve heard that it’s more effective to study languages in small doses, like it’s better to study twice for fifteen minutes than once for forty minutes, but, it’s hard to schedule my day and get that regular study in without doing it all upfront.

Like, the few times that I got interrupted and I had to do some at night after work, my recall rates were truly horrible.

Just such a time-suck, though, when I have so many other projects that I could be focusing on.

Sigh.

But, there should be only a few more months of memorizing base vocab, fortunately.