This post is part of my ongoing Journal on learning Burmese. You can read the whole Journal here.
It's October 7th and November 7th is departure date. For the last 2 months or so I've been passively listening to the Burmese By Ear recordings for about 15 mins per night whilst I make my lunch for the following day. Now it's time to ramp things up. I've made a schedule for turning the entire Burmese By Ear course into Anki cards, it can be seen below (numbers on the right correspond to chapter numbers, there are 12 chapters in total in the course).
This schedule should have me done with the entire Burmes By Ear course on Oct 28th, with plenty of time to revise the whole course leading up to the 7th. My goal is to be able to say every phrase in the course without significant delay by the time I get to Myanmar. This should provide a strong foundation for communication as soon as I land. Here's the contents of the course as an overview of what I hope to have mastered by November 7th.
I've allocated 30 minutes every morning to this task. I'm hoping that that's sufficient for me to be able to turn the phrases into the cards (I've allocated approx 15 minutes of ‘tape' to each of the 30 minute sessions). I'm sure I'll have a pretty good feel for how I'm tracking after the first day or two.
I've been refining my language study method over this year, and it's now to the point where I feel it worth sharing. In the following video I show you how I conduct a typical 30 minute study session, inclusive of adding new phrases to a spreadsheet, importing that spreadsheet into Anki, revising the phrases before putting them into the standard Anki spaced repetition sequence (what I call ‘in circulation'), and then using the Anki spaced repetition function in order to revise content. It's a pretty comprehensive video, I hope you get something out of it.
I'll post again in about 2 weeks to say how I'm tracking and whether I think I'm going to hit my target. Wish me luck!