Planning is the best!

So, as I mentioned in my previous post, last week I made a plan for the whole week on Sunday, to try to help me stay on task better. This technique worked marvelously, and I think I got a lot more done during the week as a result. I certainly didn't manage to finish everything on my list because it was quite ambitious. But by the end of the week my list looked like this

Monday

• Review vocab from class
• Pretend I'm in a restaurant and order food

Tuesday

• Practice asking questions
• Learn unknown question words
• Learn a few new verbs to ask questions with
• Complete Unit 4 in Sanibona

Wednesday

• Practice using "to be" with occupations
• Complete Unit 5 in Sanibona 

Thursday/Friday

• Roleplay going to the market
• Review rest of week's material

Not too bad for one week! I also decided to make a plan for my language partner and I should talk about. This also really helped to guide our sessions, so I was able to learn a lot more than I had in previous weeks. All in all, it was an excellent Zulu week, and I hope to keep this momentum going forward!

Man with a plan

This week, I decided to make a daily lesson plan for myself for each day of the week, which tells me what I should do each day for Zulu. This structure has considerably helped me stay on task and feel like I'm heading in the right direction with my language learning. Because this was my first weekly lesson plan, I may have been a bit too ambitious for what I can actually get done in a week, but I guess it's better to aim high than low. In future weeks, I think I will be able to make more accurate lesson plans. Below is my plan for this week:

Sunday
-learn 5 stative verbs (I'm tired, hungry, etc.) and practice using them
              -write these new words in my language dictionary
-Review commands (do this, do that)
-Review vocab with quizlet

Monday
-Do a role play where I pretend I'm in a restaurant and order food similar to what we did in class 2 weeks ago

Tuesday
-practice asking questions (where someone lives, what they do, etc)
         -use Sanibona Lesson 4 for guidance
         -prepare for meeting with Bongani to get guidance on how to ask questions
-Learn 5 new verbs to ask questions with (live, see, visit...)

Wednesday
-Write out to-be verb and practice using with occupations, etc
-Unit 5 in Sanibona

Thursday/Friday
-Review material from the week
-Do a roleplay of going to the market
-Meet with Bongani and ask him to help me review and practice everything I learned this week

The plan seems to be working quite well so far! I'm really enjoying having this structure and using a mix of different methods to improve my learning. Next week, I think I will include more specific instructions for what sort of activities I do to learn various vocab, grammar, and role plays.

Missed Week

I just realized that I forgot to post last week, so I'll post two this week to make up for it. The Zulu study has been going relatively slowly lately because I've been so busy with all of my classes. I have managed to attend one of the first semester Zulu classes, where we learned how to talk about what's wrong with us (i.e. my stomach hurts). I haven't been able to retain all of that new vocabulary yet, but I've been working on it. I also met with my language partner at the Union. We talked for a bit in Zulu and then played pool and talked in Zulu the whole time. It was a lot of fun.

I think my main issue has been that I have not been making detailed schedules for myself at the beginning of the week. This week, I'm going to make a detailed schedule (today, in fact) that maps out what I'll be doing each day for the rest of the week. This way, I'll stay on task better and also have a list of what I did that week, which will be nice to look at later.

Guessing Words

This week has been slightly less productive than previous weeks, partly because of Halloween and partly because I have had a million other things to do. I wasn't able to meet with my language partner this week either, which made it harder for me to stay motivated. However, I did attend the first semester Zulu class this past week, and I feel like I really learned a lot. We did a role play where we went to a restaurant and ordered food. I learned a lot of new vocab and was able to activate it in a conversational setting, which was nice.

This week, I decided to try and employ the "guessing words" strategy mentioned in the Peace Corps chapters. This involved listening to my dialogues a few times before I looked at the written version and trying to guess words from the context. I also looked at the pictures in my textbook and tried to guess the words that were under them without looking at the vocabulary. I think this helped me retain the words better and will keep them in my memory for longer.

This upcoming week I'm going to focus on learning more verbs and a lot more grammar. I want to learn a lot about the different noun classes, so I can more easily understand why words change when they do. I want to learn verbs so I can come up with more interesting sentences to say.