On Friday, I worked for the last time in my previous office, where I spent nearly 19 years of my professional career. Due to the heavy workload I was handling, I had to work frantically until the last minute and rush out of the building for another appointment, leaving me with little chance to reminisce about what I had gone through in that building. Never mind - I think I’ll have time for that later if I really want to go down memory lane; it’s not like our previous office building is being decommissioned or torn down.
My previous office was located around 15 minutes away from my apartment by foot. I took full advantage of its proximity by coming home during lunch break almost daily. I would normally do things like tidying up around the apartment, prepping dinner, and taking a short nap. It certainly helped that I practiced intermittent fasting and didn’t need to have lunch, freeing up a bulk of my lunch break for my other priorities.
Starting Monday, I will work in a new office building. To figure out how much time I need to get there, last night, I walked from my apartment to the new office at my normal pace. It took me 30 minutes, exactly double the time I needed for my previous commute. Besides walking, I can also reach there by public transportation, such as the bus or subway. From a health perspective, I think it’s best if I stick to walking, but I’m keeping my options open for now.
Afterward, I swung by the Starbucks in the nearby shopping mall to study some French words. I am about one sixth of the way through my dictionary. Considering that it took me two months to come this far, and assuming I can keep up my current learning speed, I should be able to finish studying my dictionary in 10 months, adding up to a year for the entire process.
On the topic of acquiring vocabulary, I’ve watched a few YouTube videos posted by those who excel in language learning and come to the conclusion that, what truly matters is not so much the number of pages you study in the dictionary, but rather, how much repetition you have in learning the same words.
That’s why I’ve decided to limit myself to studying two and a half pages’ worth of words per day. If I ended up with some extra time after hitting my daily quota, I would use it to review the segments I have previously memorized, rather than moving on to the following pages.
My goal is to be able to understand French series and movies on Netflix with French subtitles without feeling the need to reach for the dictionary. The reason why I set my goal based on my level of comprehension of audio-visual material as opposed to books is that, once I acquire a near-native ability to understand movies, it should also help me enhance my pronunciation, as well as my speaking and reading skills.
Exactly how many words will I need to learn to attain that level? I don’t have an answer to that, and quite frankly, I don’t really care. All I know is that I need to keep cramming my head with dozens of new words on a daily basis, until my vocabulary finally reaches critical mass where I no longer feel the need to bombard my head with dictionary entries. Probably thousands of hours are needed for that, but so long as I can enjoy the process, I would consider all this time and energy well spent.
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