In my last post I set several goals as I was getting ready to get through my weekend of Thai. Now I thought I would let people know how I did. It was a very interesting journey, but one that I think helped me a lot to know where I am and how much further till I get to where I want to be.
Input Goals
First of all I had an input goal to read the first book of the Mannii reader. This I did in a about 10 minutes. That is about what I expected. I had hoped to come back and read the 2nd Mannii reader book, but I didn’t get the chance. Either way I did complete the minimum of my goal.
The second part was I wanted to complete several Audio lessons of the Intermediate Thai and Colloquial Thai audio companions to the books of the same names. Just to clarify how I judge my ability to complete an Input activity. If I can understand at least 80 to 90 percent of what is being said, then I feel I have mastered that activity. I don’t judge myself on my ability to speak Thai during input activities. These are two different skills and they must be judged separately. I wrote a whole post about it on another blog
I had a problem with the colloquial Thai audio in how I put it on my Ipod(it had no albums and so all the ‘tracks’ got jumbled together). I decided I would just focus on the Intermediate Thai Audio. I completed about half of the lessons. This wasn’t too hard, Reviving my Thai is like riding a bike. It takes a minute, but all the skills start coming back again. No I’m not riding with my hands off the handle bars yet, but I am riding the bike just fine.
So in summary my Input day was a success!!!!!!
Output Goals
So what about out put? First of all I wanted to complete several lessons of Pimsleur Thai and start Thai Typing lessons. I completed my first lesson which was to learn the home keys of my left hand, which are ฟ, ห, ก and ด from pinky to index finger. That was pretty good. I am focusing on Typing Thai for two reasons. The first is because I already know how to ‘write’ the characters. That is something I never forgot how to do. The second is that, being in New Zealand, my most likely situation that I am going to have to write Thai is on Facebook with my Thai friends. It’s embarrassing that I have to go to a Virtual keyboard online and look around for the characters and it ends up taking several minutes just to say a simple comment. So yes I want to be able to Type in Thai so I can communicate with my friends again.
The second part of my output goal was to complete Several Pimsleur Thai lessons. I finished 9 of them. First of all I ‘cheated’ per se. Since each lesson is about 30 mins each, I wasn’t going to spend that much time on Thai I probably remember. So this was how I decided to go through the lesson. Pimsleur is made up of Two parts, each lesson has a dialogue at the beginning and then a section where they dissect and show common variations on that same dialogue. If I could understand 100 percent of the dialogue, then I skipped that lesson. There was an exception to this. I decided to stop every 4 lessons and complete the whole lesson, even if I understood it our not. Why 4? Why not? I had to pick a number and 5 seemed to much and 3 too little.
So, Yes I completed my Output goals for the weekend!
Anything else.
Besides those things, I finished the lesson audio for 2 and a half lesson of my course and I am almost done with the 3rd PDF lesson. I feel this was a very productive weekend. I hope to be back up to my old level of Thai with in two or three more weeks.
- Get ready, Get set, Go! (want2speakthaijarvis1000.wordpress.com)
- Plan of attack (want2speakthaijarvis1000.wordpress.com)
- Lets start from the very beginning (want2speakspanish.wordpress.com)
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