Something I realized is that, while I’m in grad school for a totally unrelated field, getting super passionate about one specific language is borderline impossible to maintain. I do it as a way to relieve stress essentially. So I’m “doing” 3 languages, but just moderating my goals to 1. Familiarity with the script, 2. Some sort of base of comprehension 3. Some base of pronunciation.

So, since I absolutely love Chinese characters, I’m going to over the last year of grad school try to get comfortable with Zhuyin, Hangul, and Kana, and to get at least 1500 characters into Remembering the Hanzi.

Beyond that, I’m gonna just jump between working through a beginner course in Korean and Mandarin (I’m about halfway done with the mandarin course already) and try to get my 15 minutes of shadowing or comprehension work in. By restricting myself to these dialogues I can substantially lower the time investment needed for comprehension to build a foundation long term. I’ve made compressed audios of all the dialogues in my mandarin and korean texts to facilitate this, I have a 2 hour long round trip commute where I can basically shadow the shit out of this linguistic core. For these languages, my Anki will just be directly mined from these textbooks to minimize the time I’m learning from flashcards, since I’m not likely to get the necessary input for 3 languages at once (so frequency flashcards have minimal payoff and maximum effort). For Japanese, ill just keep watching subbed anime and gradually working through a core Anki deck.

So to reiterate, the goal is basically A1 spoken in all 3, A2 comprehension, and some foundation in Hanzi. After grad school I will have the ability scheduling wise to do stuff like get a tutor and more specifically focus on one of these 3 languages seriously while just inpooting the others a bit on the side.