The stats:
I have studied Yiddish for 446 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 282 hours
I have reviewed 4,919 individual flashcards
I made some progress breaking out of my slump this week. I have received a copy of "Colloquial Yiddish" by LilyKahn and have started plugging lessons from that book. I have also started creating word lists of the sorts of things I talk about for new vocab words, rather than simply finding words at random in the dictionary, which was amusing for a while and maybe will be again in the future.
My word lists began with words about cowboys, because of course it did. I also added in a lot of words related to music, and I have a long time this weekend and think I shall spending it just making lists of words I use and then plugging them into my flashcards.
I think I need to revisit my schedule. I was waking up at 6 a.m. to take out my dog and then study Yiddish, and it has just left me exhausted. I had to stay out later last night and so slept in until 7 a.m., and it was wonderful.
So when to study Yiddish? I have been trying an experiment this week where I study on the bus, in waiting rooms, whenever I have downtime. Instead of studying in one fell swoop, I study in five or 10 minute chunks throughout the day.
This has turned out to work fine, so I think I will continue to experiment with it. It makes plowing through 100-plus words a lot less daunting, and kills time nicely where otherwise I would often be bored.
In the meanwhile, I also bought a new iPod. The last one kept running into memory problems, and so I use the old one pretty much exclusively for my Yiddish flashcards now and the new one for music, video games, everything that would no longer fit on the old iPod.
So I'd better keep this going. My goal is to literally fill up my old iPhone with flashcards. Currently the flashcards use 854 MBs of memory; my iPod has 32 GB total storage. I'm almost at 5,000 flashcards. So my iPod should hold at least 160,000 flashcards.
I reckon by the time I get there I will speak pretty good Yiddish.
