Having a handle

I realize that I need not write the English meaning alongside the sentences/phrases/words or even letters that I copy down. It's an i+1 question, you see. If I choose text which I have a handle on, text that is guessable, then I'm only wasting time (on English) if I also write the meaning.

So from today on, I shall never do so. The corollary, of course, is that I should never copy completely unknown - nor completely known - language samples.

Two into one

After 1 month, I find/found that I had settled upon two main types of language activity.

The first, was to read through a text, sentence by sentence, comparing languages i.e. English  with Whatever. In other words, a form of the Schliemann parallel text approach. (A little different, in that I never do it word for word. That is, I skip the hard bits.)

My second activity is to sentence mine, or collect, i+1 sentences/phrases and write them on paper. The aim being to build up to 10,000. The intent being to become familiar or used to Whatever's spelling, syntax, grammar, pragmatics and so forth.

These two activities I've combined. I do them together. And they work very well, once I'm beyond the language's basics. But in a couple of weeks I'll have a number of lesser known languages coming up - Maori, Arabic and Russian. I may need to come up with additional/alternate ways to get them rolling.

Loose sheets into folders

I'm keen on the idea of writing 10,000 sentences per language. I want to start now, but how? I don't fancy buying and carrying around an exercise book for every language, as there's a luggage limit that I need to stay under when I fly.

So I'll do it this way. I use the one exercise book and have a page for each language. I'll number the sentence, and write down the date. Then I'll take the book apart (when it's full) and place the sheets into folders.

It's sentences that I'll copy. Maybe some phrases, or even single words if necessary. It'll all be i+1. I will need to know them roughly, not completely. Partially on the way to knowing. I'll be on the lookout for short sentences, that I'll highlight as I read.

10,000 sentences

What I did, when I set out with this project, was to highlight on my Kindle the first word of every sentence that I knew roughly. I had been doing that for Polish and Spanish.To date, I had accumulated several hundred.

But what to do next (apart from simply continuing)? Should I just look over them from time to time? SHould I review then in Anki? Or should I copy them out?

And then I remembered something I'd read years ago. Something about sentence mining - about collecting ten thousand sentences. It struck me that I could do something along those lines.

I would set up a 10,000 sentence goal for each of my languages. Especially for  those of my languages at a post-beginner up to an intermediate level - say from 10% through to 60% - I would collect those (usually short) sentences by writing them down. They would, in effect, consist of i+1 material.

I could fill notebooks.