Now on to Croatian

I'm done with Russian for the time being. I'm now reading Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. In English that is. The first step in doing L-R with a language is to know the book you're reading well. I've never read the first HP. It's a quick read, and there are differences from the movie, so I'm looking forward to step 2 in L-R.

Which is, reading the book in Croatian while listening to it in Croatian. I'll do that once I'm done with HP in English. After that, the difficult part: reading in English while listening in Croatian. Sounds simple, but it isn't. You really have to stop yourself from reading ahead in the English. I've learned that you really have to rein yourself in. 

Also, the language might not have the same syntax as English. You might find yourself following along from the beginning of the sentence to the end them back to the middle. You really can't do this with a brand new language, at least not a language that you're not familiar with or that you've got a related language to. 

Someone in the language forums followed the L-R plan with Italian, despite not knowing the language. She knows Spanish pretty well, so thought she could do well with Italian. And well she did. She did L-R in Italian with HP1 and HP2, ending up with a B1 in Italian listening and reading. And she had an A1 in listening and A2 in reading at the beginning. She did L-R for 38 hours and got to B1 in both listening and reading. That's an awesome result!

Thus my plan. As I've written elsewhere, I've had as high as 3/2+ in the DLPT IV in this language. But that was 20 years ago. My proficiency is crap now. I believe, however, that L-R'ing HP1 might bring my language back. I can still understand quite a bit of Croatian when I read it, despite my pathetic 0+ in the reading DLPT two years ago. We'll see.