This report provides an overview of my language acquisition activities from August 3rd to August 9th. All languages suffered this week due to a busy schedule. I felt a few moments of comprehension issues in French, an unprompted comprehension in Portuguese and even a dream in Spanish. German and Telugu progressed in their own ways.
This Week’s Data
Spanish and French input via TV series remained strong despite a difficult week. German, Portuguese and Telugu maintained passive background exposure. Audio reading hours and mass sentence hours were also down this week in French. Telugu also saw a slight fall in input.
The Good, The Bad and the Ugly
French
Comprehensible Input: I progressed through Plus Belle La Vie (PBLV) Ep 695–713. No dramatic comprehension gains found, but steady familiarity maintained.
Mass Sentence w/ Anki: With little time, and even lesser motivation, I restarted my anki towards the end of the week. I have effectively only seen 32% of the entire deck despite over 9000+ revisions. I noticed a growing awareness of passé composé vs imparfait distinctions in utilization. I have also seen more sentence structures that I have yet to master which slowed down my pace by repetition tough sentences.
AudioReading: No noticeable change seen in my reading ability. My favourite newsletter articles this week came from
, , , , and . Their newsletters were just challenging enough to keep me on my toes while following with the audio.Speaking: I did a 2-hour conversation with my Haitian friend in French. The conversation was good however there were several moments that I couldn’t fluently or coherently express myself on a specific point and where I just couldn’t understand the questions asked.
Extensive (Easy) Reading: I started with
’s book Viens On s’aime. While I am not a fan of Romance novels, I found it very easy to read and extremely funny with comprehension levels as much as 80-90%. I read the prologue and parts of Chapter one.
Spanish
Comprehensible Input, I watched Al Fondo Hay Sitio Episodes 103-113. I picked up new expressions like guachafita and que mal me cayó, both embedded in emotionally charged dialogue which sometimes caused my Comprehension to falter. In searching for more series and films from Peru, I encounter clips from Peru, Colombia, Spain and Argentina. I could clearly hear the difference in accents and instantly knew which series or films were not from Peru.
Notable moment: I had a lucid dream where i felt that my brain was trapped in Spanish despite my efforts to use other languages to communicate.
Portuguese
Language Priming (LP):I listened passively to YouTube content for 20-30 mins per day and Rebelde Brasil Episodes.
Notable moment: I unintentionally understand a clip in Portuguese just before falling asleep without realizing that it was in Portuguese until afterwords. Portuguese felt so normal to hear that my brain didn’t even detect language change.
German
Language Priming (LP): I continued with passively listening to book-related YouTube content for 20-30 mins per day.
Structural acquisition: I continued Language Transfer German (Ep 6–12), which focused on linking German syntax to English structures in hopes of learning German language structure.
Telugu
Language Priming: my daily listening in Telugu through short web-series on YouTube. Recognition remains limited to high-frequency nouns (ladu, amma, nana) and English loanwords.
Mass Sentence w/ Anki: I completed 117 reps and I have now seen ~9% of all the cards. Slowly I am seeing where the simpler sentences are allowing me to parse the language like this week I learned example “oka = a”, which I while complex sentences are still for clear parsing, but longer more complex sentences remain opaque for the moment.
Psycholinguistic Review: What the Data Revealed
The data suggest two main things:
Bilingual Dream Activation: The Spanish dreaming episode suggests language activation thresholds were lowered through consistent CI, allowing previously dormant lexical/grammatical pathways to reemerge spontaneously.
Implicit Comprehension Leap in Portuguese: Understanding without conscious recognition of language identity is a hallmark of high automaticity in L2 processing, indicating strong form–meaning mappings from passive exposure.
Overall Language Activity to Date
Next Week’s Goals
French: More Mass Sentence Repetition, AudioReading, Speaking Practice and Easy Reading.
Spanish: Watching 1-2 episodes of Al Fondo Hay Sitio per day, totalling 7-14 episodes.
Portuguese + German: Continue ongoing Language Priming for both languages while working to complete German Language Transfer series to gain more understanding of German structure.
Telugu: Continue current methods of language priming and Mass sentence with Anki.
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You can see some of my older Polyglot In Progress updates here.
It's great to see how you keep track of everything you do in the languages you're learning.