Learning Italian
Learning Catalan went incredible well. I reached 150 days of doing it on DuoLingo just before going on holiday. I was pleased to be able to speak to some shop owners and waitresses in Catalan. They seemed very pleased too, in fact, one thought I was living there and couldn't believe I was just there on holiday or that I had only been learning for a few months. Either that or, more likely, he was just being polite. But I feel it is less than polite to show up in Catalonia and speak Spanish, the language of what they view as technically a different country, a country that repressed and claimed to own them, particularly in a time when there is growing support for Catalonian independence.
After getting back from Barcelona and Sitges, I switched to studying Italian, which my Dad and Sister are learning on Duolingo. At present, my Italian vocabulary is around 3000 words. My aim is about 10,000 which is my approximation of relative foreign-language fluency in a European language. I am lucky to have a few Italian study books and tools floating around for me to use. For example, I have a huge box of vocab cards. A cursory glance over the vocab cards and I already knew around 2 fifths of them, nearly half. Perhaps having a few cards on the go to read through each day would have me build toward that goal and a Practice Makes Perfect Italian vocabulary book to help cement that knowledge. I will let you know soon how I'm getting on.
Graeme