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TAC ’15 French Spanish Celtic Adv Study | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5384 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes  Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 81 of 336 13 October 2012 at 1:15am | IP Logged | ||
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Just finished Harry Potter y el prisionero de Azkaban. At times my reading feels
definitely more fluid though it slows down if I hit a bunch of unknown vocabulary. I find myself thinking in Spnaish quite a bit now and sometimes it leaks in while trying to think in French (will have to work on switiching between the two later). I added 100 more words to my Memrise garden thanks to a slow night at work. I'm favoring adding more words more quickly over getting in more reps. I figure if I keep getting 100% on my reps then that just shows I'm not pushing myself enough. If I'm in the 90s and even high 80s that should mean I'm adding words at about the right rate without sacrificing learning. I've typed up a bunch more of Madrigal's for Anki and I now have all the essential lessons and chapters that I marked as I was going through it, including everything on the subjunctive and imperfect. I still want to add the chapters on irregulars to get practice and convert a bunch of the "usted" forms to "tú" so I can get some practice. I've been tired so haven't been keeping up with Pimsleur but I'll sign off from here and get on that. I should be done with Pimsleur II by the end of the month. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5384 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 82 of 336 20 October 2012 at 8:10am | IP Logged | ||
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So I've spent the day figuring out some technological "hacks" to enhance my learning. I
got an electronic version of Using French Vocabulary which I already have in regular book form. I've been trying to convert it to text to be able to import it into Anki as in Rob Tickner's Svenska 10000 log but I've been running into problems. I can't get the source encoding right so all the characters turn to gibberish. I've started making a deck for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (loved the movie, could watch it every day) following emk's instructions. Seems to be working pretty well so I'm very excited. Though it seems that my DVD ripper split the movie up into several .vob files (I'm assuming by chapter) so I assume I'll just need to simply split up the sub files and follow the sbus2srs instructions for batch processing multiple episodes. I'm thinking of other mobile devices that I could use to optimize my learning. I currently have a netbook which is basically everything but it gets bogged down easily. I currently use it during my commutes to read Harry Potter as a parallel text (open two files and set them up side-by-side). I wouldn't be able to do that with an e-reader but I would be able to look up words on the fly. I have my smart phone from France which I could maybe use with wifi to get Anki mobile going as well as having access to all kinds of audio. There's so much free wifi around that I may be able to manage without 3G/4G. I was sad to discover that there are apparently no hacks for converting my DVD player to be region free. I'm getting a kit to hook my laptop up to the TV which will help and will allow me to watch all the videos I have on my hard drive though will be less than ideal. I may consider around Christmastime a new player that I could make region free with a USB hookup and access to Netflix and the like. I have Monk playing right now with the Spanish language track. The subtitles don't match, of course, but I find that they diverge much less than French ones do. Apparently there are many more ways to say one thing in French than in Spanish. While looking up how to set all this stuff up I started reading into incremental reading, primarily used with Supermemo. It sounds potentially amazing - especially for queuing up a bunch of Wikipedia articles in French and turning them directly into cards on the fly. I'm too tired of reading up on all this stuff for the moment but will look into it again. If someone who has set up their own system has any opinions to share, they'd be welcome. I'm up to over 600 words in my Memrise Spanish garden which puts me at 15% of the deck finished. It's exciting to make progress and I've started to take more notice when I encounter words I've covered while reading Harry Potter. I found a book I got to help with French before going abroad that I completely forgot about: The Ultimate French Verb Review and Practice. Thumbing through it I find that it's excellent. I also have The Ultimate French Review and Practice which is a general grammar book but I like how the verb one goes into detail. And many of the things it covers goes beyond just verbs such as word order with adverbs, conjunctions, and direct/indirect object pronouns. I may use it to review some things and smooth out my French and I may consider the Spanish version. If someone knows of an easy, automated way to extract all the info from this book into Anki that would be awesome. Edited by sctroyenne on 20 October 2012 at 9:52pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5384 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 83 of 336 20 October 2012 at 9:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well, in my battle against technology yesterday technology won. Still haven't found a way
to get the document to convert properly. I could just make do with the accents not right but I'd prefer not to. The subs2srs cards looked like they were going to work without a hitch but turns out the audio just won't work. I tried the audio extractor tool when the main one didn't work and discovered the problem - it only detects one language track and that one's Spanish (I wouldn't mind Spanish for later but I want French right now). Maybe I'll try some other audio extractor tools to see if they work and can give me an audio track to import into subs2srs. But I was too tired to battle on. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5384 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 84 of 336 21 October 2012 at 9:51am | IP Logged | ||
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Well, continuing to have frustrations. To top off everything, once I resigned myself to
just relaxing and sitting back to a DVD with the Spanish track on, the video suddenly cut out. Checked the connections, they were still properly connected, changed the cords out, nothing worked. The TV still works and the sound works on the DVD player - weird. It makes me want to go on some kind of luddite retreat. I fear that I haven't found the answer to importing an entire book's contents into Anki ready for study, at least for now. I'm wondering if, for printed grammar books I have, if a pen scanner would be a good investment. I did manage to get one thing working - I started working with Learning With Texts. It's a bit clunky but it seems to be the best solution for reading a text, learning the meaning, saving words and expressions to import directly into Anki. It'll even automatically set up cloze delete cards. It'll help me a lot in my quest to expand my vocabulary in many different specialized subjects in French which is essential for C1/C2 levels, giving me a streamlined process for dealing with all the vocabulary (I get overwhelmed by my lists). I can also easily set it up to use with Irish once I get to a point to read in that language. And, of course it will be useful to build my proficiency in Spanish. I think I'll work on getting a bunch of Babasonicos lyrics in there as well as articles from Veinte Mundos. If anyone has some good tips on how to best use it, feel free. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5525 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 85 of 336 21 October 2012 at 4:23pm | IP Logged | ||
Yup, your instincts are right—you need to extract the audio track you want and pass it to subs2srs manually. Perhaps one of these programs would help? There's a number of things that can go wrong with subs2srs. Here are the ones I've seen: 1. Copy-protected DVDs that are hard to rip. Get a better ripper. 2. Scratched DVDs. Get a special ripper which handles this. 3. Subtitle files that are offset by some number of seconds. Adjust using offsets in subs2srs. 4. Subtitle files that gain or lose about 10 seconds over the course of a movie. Hard to fix. 5. Audio on a different track than subs2srs expects. Extract the track to MP3, pass to subs2srs directly. 6. Subtitles with a screwy character set encoding. Use the popup in subs2srs to choose the right one. You won't encounter all these at same time, unless you're really unlucky! But the first time through, it's perfectly normal to feel like a total idiot and waste a day swearing at technology. That's why I made the Amélie deck available, so people could get a taste and find out if they liked the card format before figuring everything out for the first time. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5384 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 86 of 336 21 October 2012 at 8:11pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yes, it all looked so simple to begin with but didn't appreciate the myriad of problems I could run into. I do get subtitle pair cards just fine so if I didn't care about having audio that would work. But I'll try again to sort it out. And may try with another disc as well. The language settings were just overall strange on that disc (when changing subtitles through the VLC menus I had to select Spanish to get French and some things wouldn't work properly unless I changed the language selections through the DVD menu options itself).
I suppose if you really wanted Buffy cards you could get a subtitle track that already has all the timestamps there for you and then paste in the real lines from a transcript. It would be time intensive but you'd have it. I got a different digitized book to convert correctly. The problem is that the converted document has no structure (it was a pdf) and it's not simple vocabulary lists it's definitions with varying length so I can't set up a simple macro to put tabs in. If I really want it I can put tabs in manually but that will be a project... I'm digging LWT so far. I haven't exported anything to Anki yet but I'll have a bunch of cards all set up for me once I do. I spent some time just copying and pasting texts in the system to have them queued up for later. A bunch of Babasonicos lyrics, the scripts of the first ten episodes of Kaamelott, plus some articles from Wikipedia and Veinte Mundos. Later on I can work on adding audio for those as well. I love the flexibility - I can literally anything and end up with cloze delete cards of all the vocabulary that I mark. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5384 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 87 of 336 24 October 2012 at 8:16am | IP Logged | ||
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I spoke to a coworker who has been living in the US for six years about what she has done to become fluent in English (still makes some minor mistakes but I'd rate her at C2). Her journey is a lot of what you would expect: came over by herself and was isolated from other immigrants from her country, started out working for a family as a nanny, watched a lot of video, read a lot, went stir crazy feeling so isolated, dated, found a friend to go out with who taught her all kinds of slang, swear words, etc. The she said something that was really interesting - she would go out with groups of Americans who would be very interested in her country of origin and ask her all kinds of questions about the politics, religion, history, economics, etc. She wouldn't know how to talk about these subjects in English so she would ask if they would be coming back to the bar in a week, they'd say yes, and she would spend the week brushing up on those subjects to get ready for conversation. I thought that this was a really great approach - there's nothing like knowing you'll have to talk about a subject in a week's time to give you motivation to study. I think I'll take a page out of her book to schedule some Spanish conversation practice to get speaking.
LWT is still pretty awesome. In fact, I may be in danger of focusing too much on reading as my primary exposure to languages. Though it helps that I'm studying from a variety of sources, including Kaamelott scripts which will help my listening comprehension. I found a huge Camus collection and plan on working through some of his other texts (love me some existentialism). This site actually has quite a large collection of important works in social sciences so I plan on working through quite a bit of it: Classics I'm up to over 800 in my Memrise garden and hoping to hit over 1000, about 25% by the end of the week. I'm starting to have some tough review sessions but I figure it's a good thing if it's challenging. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Rob Tickner Senior Member New Zealand Joined 4481 days ago 126 posts - 158 votes Speaks: English* Studies: GermanB1, French, Swedish | Message 88 of 336 24 October 2012 at 9:28am | IP Logged | ||
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Enjoying reading your log. If you want some help decoding that file, let me know, you can
send it to me by email and I can have a crack at it for you. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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