Polyglot in Progress
Issue #7: August 10th - August 16th 2025
This report provides an overview of my language acquisition activities from August 10th to August 16th. The week was steady overall, with Spanish and French continuing to lead in active input, while Telugu, Portuguese, and German moved forward in smaller but noticeable ways. New interventions — subtitles in French and grammar drills in Telugu — created valuable disruptions that shifted my perspective.
This Week’s Data
Spanish and French input hours via TV series were reduced to make time for AudioReading and Mass Sentence w. Anki practice which saw increases in comparison to last week. Telugu saw an increase in Mass Sentence hours and naturally reps. German, Portuguese and Telugu maintained passive background exposure.
The Good, The Bad and the Ugly
French
Comprehensible Input: I continued with Plus Belle La Vie (PBLV) S3 Ep 714 - 727. and Les Années Fac Ep 19-20. The first few episodes had dense dialogues required focused listening. Tuesday, I found myself hyper-monitoring, parsing sentences carefully for full comprehension. I had noticed expressions such as“mettre un terme à”, “C’est de la balle”. By Thursday, my comprehension had improved. Towards the end of the week, I decided to watching with Subtitles to further refine my comprehension.
Mass Sentence w/ Anki: The first few days saw me slowing down to pronounce the words properly. It showed improvement in ease of articulation however the sentence construction were different from I would imagine them.
AudioReading: Earlier in the week, I sometimes felt that the pacing of the audio was a little difficult to keep up with while trying to internalize the articles along with the unknown vocabulary. I felt some improvement towards the end of the week. I found the expressive style of
and the sassiness of intriguing this week, creating an urge to improve my writing. I have also tackled articles from: , , , , , , .
Spanish
Comprehensible Input, I watched Al Fondo Hay Sitio Episodes (114–122)/190. Much of it felt nearly effortless, even reaching points of native-like rhythm and flow. I felt some of the scenes at the tip of my tongue, as if I could almost spoke them. At the same time, there was presence of unknown expressions used during emotional exchanges reminded me of the gaps that remain in my listening comprehension
Portuguese
Language Priming (LP): I continued with Rebelde Brasil. No noticeable changes. I still remain able to sometime understand spontaneous clips of the episodes.
German
Language Priming (LP): I used a compiled dubbed anime episode and vlogs continue my exposure, thus also revealing from time to time, familiar words.
Telugu
Language Priming: I sticked with short web-series on YouTube from South India Logic completing several videos. Passive recognition of learnt sentences from Anki were not noticed during listening.
Mass Sentence w/ Anki: I completed 208 reps and found that articulation of the complex sentences were a little easier as well as many familiar sentences were seen in the reviews.
Quick-Grammar: I built some grammar awareness by looking up the present tense (progressive and simple) and negation thus laying the foundation for faster absorption of Anki sentences.
Psycholinguistic Review: What the Data Revealed
The data suggest two main things:
Spanish – Automatic comprehension with pragmatic bottlenecks: Extended stretches of effortless, near-native comprehension showing that the system has already consolidated core grammar and lexicon.
Telugu – Delayed semantic integration: Semantic carryover into passive listening is still minimal, with little overlap between Mass Sentence exposure and Language Priming recognition. This points to an early convergence stage where the sound system is established, but lexical/semantic anchoring is still waiting for critical mass of repeated patterns across contexts.
Overall Language Activity to Date
Next 2-Week’s Goals
French: I will be doing a 2-weeks intensive sprint in order to improve all my skills in French including my Passive Listening hours.
Spanish: I will watch only 1 episode of Al Fondo Hay Sitio per day as entertainment during my break.
Telugu: I will continue my Mass sentence with Anki since its just 10-15 mins per day.
Portuguese + German: I intend to continue the ongoing Language Priming for both languages however the listen time reduced to 10-15 mins per day.
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You can see some of my older Polyglot In Progress updates here.
Also, check out my introduction to a few of my languages.
Telugu! South India films are something else! Very popular with my family (with English subtitles, of course).
As for Brasilian,Portuguese... it's one of my favourite languages, it's just so musical. I don't know much, only a mere sprinkle. If you can get your hands on the film Os Narradores De Javé, you must watch. It's brilliant.
Honorée de la citation Shamar ☺️