My sister and I started a self-study journey a couple of years ago. Though life has constantly gotten into the way, in the last couple of months we’ve greatly improved the foundations of this long term commitment. We had interrupted schooling throughout primary and high school and so we do lack some foundational learning skills but that’s part of the point as to why we’re doing this.
We are currently studying the Tongan language, Auslan and mathematics (geometry). The reason we’re studying Tongan is because our father is from Vava’u, Tonga and we’ve long held a disconnection from the culture since being disconnected from him and had always wanted to learn when we were young. We’re learning Auslan because we believe everyone should have learnt it in primary school and that it will be helpful for a variety of reasons. We’re learning mathematics from a year 9/10 level because we both missed much of the foundational topics and need them to study sciences we’re interested in. Improving my understanding of sciences will help me with my curiosity and writing and my sister is enamoured with astronomy and cosmology and so wants to build a foundation for studying that.
What have we learned so far:
One of the first things we learned is: start small. We tend to bite off more than we can chew and it can be quickly overwhelming and demotivating. The best way to keep something flowing to is ensure that it is gratifying and motivating, and so we spent a long time figuring out how much was too much to fit in with our other obligations.
Resources we use:
Faufaua
We’ve luckily found an online textbook that’s designed for teaching and learning Tongan.
Twinkl
Twinkl is for primary school teachers, providing learning materials aimed at primary school children. Which makes it perfect for us to gain incremental and gentle learning. I have a bunch of resources from when I had a subscription with them, both on the Tongan language and Auslan. They’ve been incredibly clear and helpful to use as we learn.
We use Obsidian and OneDrive to manage our documents together. We’ve tried using ClickUp to help as a scheduler and to set goals and deadlines but have had some difficulty with it, especially as more and more features get put behind a paywall.
YouTube
Great for all sorts of learning, particularly for pronunciation and proper hand-work when it comes to learning language.
Khan Academy
For mathematics, working our way into sciences.
Reddit is great for finding real people collaborating with real experiences and resources. Finding resources on the Tongan language and culture in Australia is difficult. A lot of the resources are old or written by people who aren’t Tongan or are westernised/Christianised versions of the culture and history.
We had very interrupted schooling growing up, throughout both primary school and high school. Not only did we miss out on some foundational learning, but we never really learned how to learn properly. The school systems (we went to about thirteen of them together) weren’t really designed for diverse learners or individual learning focuses meaning that when we dropped behind we were just left behind. And so this is why it’s taking us so long to work through different study habits and techniques, hoping they’ll stick.
Hopfield is Writing 
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