Tuesday, November 21, 2017

Started: Practical English Usage by Michael Swan (Third Edition)

Follow-up to the post on  Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics.  I've also been doing Practical English Usage by Michael Swan.

Practical English Usage is also on the DELTA Reading List, although it's a reference book, and most sane people don't try to read through the whole thing.
However, when I read The English Verb by Michael Lewis, I was impressed by how familiar he seemed with this book.  (Michael Lewis mainly brought this book up to refute it... but still).  I wanted to gain that familiarity.
Also, when I started doing my "Grammar Questions I Couldn't Answer" series, I found myself coming back to Swan more and more.  
I decided I wanted to internalize the information in Swan, instead of always having to use it as a reference.  So I decided to add it to my quizlet study.  
I should perhaps have started a separate series of quizlet quizzes, but instead I just added this into my my quizlets on Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics.  I figured I'm the only one who's using these quizzes anyway, so I'd go ahead and  mix it all up.

So I'd alternate between the two books. I'd add in 5 words from Practical English Usage, and then when I finished that quiz, I'd add in 5 words from Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics, and then 5 from Practical English Usage again, etc.
I continued doing this until about a year ago, when I started to get sore hand from what I attributed to too much quizlet and duolingo, and decided to back off a bit. 
Part of the problem was that I had also started using quizlet to study Vietnamese, so I was really spending way too much time quizletting.   

...Not able to study applied linguistics, because I was spending too much time learning Vietnamese.  Therein lies the rub...

As someone who was originally a history major in college, and has since been trying to move sideways into language teaching and applied linguistics, I'm finding it hard to balance my time.  In order to earn the right to study applied linguistics, you really should be studying languages.  But once you start studying languages, that consumes really all your free time.  Then how do you find time to study applied linguistics?
Anyway, I'll detail I'll my struggles learning Vietnamese in an upcoming post.
For now, I'll just list the below the quizlets I've done which combine Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics and Practical English Usage.
Although my progress on these quizlets has dramatically slowed down the past year, I'm still trying  to keep it going somewhat.  I've been trying to do work 5 words a day now instead of 100 words words a day.  So this study project is still ongoing somewhat... even if it has slowed to a crawl at the moment.
Quizlet folder HERE

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