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| sabotai Senior Member United States Joined 5874 days ago 391 posts - 489 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Japanese, Korean, French | Message 73 of 151 02 February 2014 at 5:18pm | IP Logged | ||
Right now, I'm just reading the sample sentences from lessons over several days. I've tried intensive reading in the past, but it still tames me too long. Right now, I'm on chapter 6 of Yonsei 1 and am reviewing TTMIK level 3 and well as section 5 of Korean Grammar In Use: Beginner. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| sabotai Senior Member United States Joined 5874 days ago 391 posts - 489 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Japanese, Korean, French | Message 74 of 151 10 February 2014 at 7:38am | IP Logged | ||
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Week 6 (Feb 3 - Feb 10)
Slacked off during the week (only a few hours studied) but knocked it out of the park this weekend. I must have set a personal record for studying languages in a day on Saturday. 6 1/2 hours. Did just a little over 4 hours on Sunday, so 10+ hours for the weekend. Not bad. Times for the week Korean: 5 hours, 40 minutes German: 4 hours, 40 minutes French: 1 hour, 40 minutes Japanese: 1 hour, 10 minutes Spanish: 2 hours, 15 minutes Week 6 Total: 15 hours, 25 minutes Year To Date: 63 hours And yeah, I started Spanish again. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sabotai Senior Member United States Joined 5874 days ago 391 posts - 489 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Japanese, Korean, French | Message 75 of 151 16 February 2014 at 10:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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So I started this week experimenting with SRS again. I quickly squashed that by rereading my previous posts on it and remembering how much I hated it. Every once in awhile I get the bright idea to try it again. At least this time I didn't waste too much time on it.
Whatever psychological barrier is being thrown up when I do SRS, it doesn't seem to be that way with doing exercises in general. I hate matching and the nonsense that fills a lot of self-teaching materials (Teach Yourself is particularly bad with that), but I do like doing other types. Well, I shouldn't say "like", but I do think I get a lot out of doing certain types of drills. Cloze deletions, verb conjugations, variation drills, etc. I appreciate and notice the progress I make when I do them. I started doing the FSI drills for German and I like (appreciate) those kinds of drills. Part of why I hate SRS is because it requires me to sit at a computer, and I do more than enough of that as it is. So I started making my own exercises using the sentences from the lessons from Assimil, Living Language, Korean Grammar In Use, etc. Here's an example from Assimil Spanish lesson 1 ¡Buenos días! Pablo. ¡Ana! ¿Qué tal [estar]? Bien. Tú, en cambio, [tener] mala cara. Sí. [Yo estar] [un] poco preocupado. ¿Sabes? [Yo <tener] ganas de verte. Yo también. ¿[Tú querer] comer conmigo? De acuerdo. [Ser] [un] buena idea. Tú [estar] bien. Tú [tener] una idea. To también. Yo [<tener] ganas. Tú [querer] comer. [Ser] [un] buena idea. Yo [estar] de acuerdo. Yo [estar] bien. Tú, en cambio, [estar] preocupado. Yo también. Yo [<tener] ganas de comer. Yo [<tener] ganas de verte. Tú [estar] conmigo. Tú [estar] de acuerdo. For this, I decided to test my self on the conjugations and the use of un/una. That seemed to be the general focus of this lesson, as well as the nest several. The '<' sign tells me I'm looking for one of the past tenses - figuring that the rest of the sentence will clue me in to if I need the simple past or imperfect. As for the other types of conjugations...I'll cross that bridge when I get there. Here's part of the one for Korean Grammar In Use 책상 [on] 컴퓨터가 있어요. 책상 [under] 구두가 있어요. 책상 [front] 의자가 있어요. 책상 [behind] 책장이 있어요. 책상 [next to] 화분하고 옷걸이가 있어요. 책상 [left] 화분이 있어요. 책상 [right] 옷걸이가 있어요. 화분과 옷걸이 [between] 책상이 있어요. 책상 [in middle] 인형이 있어요. 집 [inside] 강아지가 있어요. 집 [outside] 고양이가 있어요. Form Negative 나는 언니가 있어요. 동생이 ___. 자전거가 있어요. 차가 ___. I'm trying to use as little English as possible, but for drilling myself on locations like this, I had to bite the bullet. I didn't see a way around it. So I print them up, do them when I want to (using a separate piece of paper so I can do them again later), don't do them when I don't want to. I've only been doing this a few days. We'll see how it goes. Edited by sabotai on 16 February 2014 at 10:20pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| sabotai Senior Member United States Joined 5874 days ago 391 posts - 489 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Japanese, Korean, French | Message 76 of 151 17 February 2014 at 6:53am | IP Logged | ||
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Week 7 Review (Feb 10 - Feb 16)
Korean: 1 hour, 40 minutes German: 5 hours Japanese: 2 hours, 50 minutes French: 2 hours Spanish: 1 hour, 30 minutes Total: 13 hours Total To Date: 76 hours Would have gotten more done but I spent time messing around with SRS and making worksheets. 1000 hours is looking like a reach, but now that I've got sizable playlists for most of my languages for extensive listening practice as well as worksheets filled with exercises (well, just 1 worksheet's worth so far for all by German), I'll have 2 more activities to devote time towards. I can fill some more of my "empty spaces" now. I can't exactly do some of the things I do while cooking or working out, but 10 minutes on a worksheet while something cooks in the oven and extensive dialogs for when I'm exercising can push me to 20+ hours per week. I'll have to do 20.5 hours per week the rest of the way to get to 1000. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sabotai Senior Member United States Joined 5874 days ago 391 posts - 489 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Japanese, Korean, French | Message 77 of 151 24 February 2014 at 5:39am | IP Logged | ||
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Week 8 Review (Feb 17-23)
Korean: 5 hours, 50 minutes German: 3 hours, 20 minutes French: 1 hour Spanish: 1 hour, 20 minutes Japanese: 1 hour Total: 12 hours, 30 minutes Year Total: 88 hours, 30 minutes Was going along great until I lost most of the second half of the week when I bought a game on Steam called Banished! and before I knew it I had sunk 20 hours into it. I was in a really crappy mood though and really needed the escape into a simple yet addicting game for a few days. The addiction ran its course quickly and I got back to learning some languages today. A few weeks ago I took out Practice Makes Perfect German: Pronouns and Prepositions. I did chapters 1 and 2 with no problem at all. Then I hit chapter 3, pronouns in the accusative case, and did poorly. Apparently I need a lot of work on actively using pronouns outside of the nominative case. Passively, it's not effort at all. I read them and listen to pronouns in all cases without effort. But I can't bring out the correct one when I need to. That's what pushed me into action on creating worksheets. 8 Weeks in, here's a rundown of where I am with resources. French Assimil: Lesson 22 FrenchPod: Newbie #13 Extensive Listening Playlist: 16 minutes long (finished Assimil dialogs) Slowly working my way through Assimil. I do plan on doing the Active wave when I get halfway through. In fact, I'm thinking of doing "active waves" for most of my languages and resources. I also just started to quickly go through the FrenchPod Newbie dialogs again. One last quick review of them before I send them into my extensive listening playlist. Spanish Assimil: Lesson 15 Extensive Listening Playlist: 8 minutes long (finished Assimil dialogs) Japanese JapanesePod101: Beginner Season 1, Lesson 24 Assimil: Lesson 10 Japanese Sentence Patterns: #8 Extensive Listening Playlist: 13 minutes I just started doing an "active wave" with the JPod101 Newbie lessons, translating from English to Japanese (just speaking, not writing). I've also been editing the dialog files to take the sound effects out and to cut out the silence. So far I just have one Newbie season done out of 5. I'm way behind on adding these. Korean Sogang 1A: finished Yonsei 1: Chapter 7 Yonsei Reading 1: #16 Korean Grammar in Use Beginner: 3.17 TTMIK: Level 3, Lesson 17 Extensive Listening Playlist: 37 minutes long When I start Sogang 1B, I'm going to do an "active wave" with 1A. Took a step back and restarted Korean Grammar In Use at chapter 3 to review that material again (mainly for the vocab and listening practice, the particles I feel I have a good grasp on) and I'm still on level 3 of reviewing old TTMIK lessons. German I've read through several A1 readers as well as a few B1s. Man these readers are boring. I'm done with them. I'm going to go back to using novels and doing some LR, dual language reading, intensive reading, etc. And as I said above, I've been doing German drills and have found some pretty significant holes in my German. I've been doing FSI drills as well as some from workbooks like Practice Makes Perfect. I actually enjoy doing them. Edited by sabotai on 24 February 2014 at 5:40am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sabotai Senior Member United States Joined 5874 days ago 391 posts - 489 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Japanese, Korean, French | Message 78 of 151 02 March 2014 at 10:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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So I've been reading some threads on the forum. Ari's tips for listening, which was basically what got me to create my playlists of "finished" dialogs in the first place. leosmith's listening thread as well as iguanamon's "multi-track" thread.
I don't study all 5 languages every day. Usually it's 2-3 of them, with one getting the majority of my time. Sometimes, I skip a day and don't study languages at all. There are times when I don't touch on a language for several days. For German, and Japanese to an extent, that's not an issue. But for Korean, French and Spanish, they erode quickly. Korean's getting to the point my Japanese and German are, but not quite there yet. So, a few things I'm adding to my schedule. 1) Listening to my extensive listening playlist in all 5 languages for at least 10 minutes every day. Regardless of if I actively study them or not that day. 2) In addition to that, I am going to spend at least 10 minutes everyday listening to some form of native material in all 5 languages. leosmith said in his thread that his threshold for "somewhat comprehensible" is pretty low, so while I will look for "somewhat comprehensible" materials, preferably with a transcript, I'm not going to make it a big priority. That's 100 minutes a day. Currently, I have an abundance of time. What usually keeps me from spending the 20+ hours a week on studying languages are health related (I get migraines a lot) or because of general lack of motivation (and occasionally other things/hobbies get in the way when I get super-motivated in something else). Even when I just plain don't feel like doing any learning, I can still get myself to listen to audio for short bursts of 10 minutes each. What I can't do is get myself up to do 30 minutes of a new lesson, drills, reading, etc. This week in particular has been pretty bad on both the motivation front and getting migraines. Quite a bit of my time spent on languages this week has been listening to my extensive listening playlist. I bought a small speaker system for my iPod a week ago. Listening to audio while laying down in bed with a migraine (with the volume low but still understandable) = doable. Listening with headphones on with a migraine = torture. I noticed that forcing myself to listen to a language for a short period of time helped with my motivation. Yesterday I put on the Japanese playlist to just listen for 10 minutes and I ended up spending 20 minutes intensively listening to JPod101 dialogs afterwards. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sabotai Senior Member United States Joined 5874 days ago 391 posts - 489 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Japanese, Korean, French | Message 79 of 151 03 March 2014 at 4:06am | IP Logged | ||
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Week 9 Review (Feb 24 - March 2)
Korean: 6 hours, 40 minutes German: 1 hour, 20 minutes French: 1 hour, 50 minutes Spanish: 1 hour, 5 minutes Japanese: 2 hours, 25 minutes Total: 13 hours, 20 minutes Year to Date: 101 hours, 50 minutes 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sabotai Senior Member United States Joined 5874 days ago 391 posts - 489 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Japanese, Korean, French | Message 80 of 151 04 March 2014 at 10:02pm | IP Logged | ||
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A few updates
I've decided to drop Spanish for now. I'm hitting the issue that most people talk about when they warn against learning 2 similar languages at once. When trying to use the language, I'm mixing up definite articles, pronouns, etc. "Elle" comes out when trying to use the feminine pronoun in Spanish instead of "ella" for example. I guess I could just force my way through this, but I've also lost some interest in Spanish. Not sure what I'll replace it with, or if I will replace it. I might go back to rotating in and out several "wunderlust" languages. As for the worksheets I was creating, I going to stop those as well. With the added focus on listening, I don't have time to type up all the material and make drills out it. In fact, it took too much time as it was anyway. And for French and German, that's not a problem. I'll just do the active waves in Assimil, both have tons of workbooks I can use (I have several in each already), not to mention free resources like FSI. So I'm good to go with drills for those 2 languages already. I just have this mental drive to annihilate all of the material I come across, use it every way I possibly can, before moving on and it is one of the things that prevents me from letting go and just moving to other material. Korean and Japanese are another issue though, although not too bad. They still have options. The Korean textbooks are filled with drills and exercises, even though no answers are given (The Yonsei Workbook does give answers though). For Japanese, I can do an "active wave" with the hundreds of dialogs I have from JPod101. I also have a few workbooks for that too. If I feel I need to, I can go back to making more of my own drills. I kinda liked making the drills, but it was becoming a massive time sink. Just took too much time to do it. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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