The stats:
I have studied Yiddish for 431 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 272 hours
I have reviewed 4,876 individual flashcards
I was congratulating myself on managing to study Yiddish last week in New York, and then it all fell apart. Thanks to a combination of exhaustion and an extremely busy schedule, this past week was something of a bust, with me managing maybe 15 minutes of study per day and adding almost no new words.
Some of it was exhaustion, due in part to the onset of a small cold, my third this year, god damn it. (Woe be to you if you hear a child cough in an airport.) Some of it was a busy schedule. Some of it, stupidly, was a little video game I have gotten obsessed with where you solve puzzles to bring new life to a dead garden on an ancient mansion, like a video game version of "The Secret Garden."
But I know some of it is due to the fact that I am a flibbertigibbet, and must constantly find new ways to amuse myself or my attention wanes. Frankly, the fact that I have been able to maintain this project as long as I have astonishes me, because it usually only takes me a few weeks to become distracted by something new.
This means that I need to shake the program up a little. I'm not quite sure how to do this. I've ordered a new grammar book, "Colloquial Yiddish" by Lily Kahn, and if it helps me construct better sentences, I might enjoy that. But I feel like I need to drill down more, to find something that sort-of obsesses me. Something that will make me want to do the busy work of studying, the stuff that's hard and not especially fun.
I'm not sure what that might be just yet. But the thing that has kept this project going has been my ability to refocus when my attention wanes, to make the project fun again. I'll chew on this this week and see what I come up with.
