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Ezy Ryder’s endeavor (TAC’14-15 旅立ち、鵲、東亞) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Ezy Ryder Diglot Senior Member Poland youtube.com/user/Kat Joined 4341 days ago 284 posts - 387 votes  Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 105 of 144 19 January 2015 at 4:05am | IP Logged | ||
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I've made a brief video in Japanese when I started studying seriously, then a year later, and
yesterday I've made the 2 years progress video. If anybody's interested: the video. Chinese: writing 1000 characters. I laid down a bit while listening to Led Zeppelin III, and dozed off... Got up at midnight, but managed to finish yesterday's quota anyway. And as a result, I've studied my 1000th card in my character deck (at 1002 as of now). I'm handwriting each review, and I thought I could upload a photo, to give you an idea how much I'm writing. Over 7 A4 sheets, filled on both sides, probably over a 1000 characters per sheet. (and yes, I noticed the sheets are upside-down, but the goal is to present the quantity, not the quality of my practice, so 文句すんな :) ) Photo Also, expect another post in the next 24 hours, as I should surpass 2k terms in LWT today. Edited by Ezy Ryder on 19 January 2015 at 4:09am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Ezy Ryder Diglot Senior Member Poland youtube.com/user/Kat Joined 4341 days ago 284 posts - 387 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 106 of 144 20 January 2015 at 3:06am | IP Logged | ||
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Chinese: 2000 LWT Terms. If I keep up this pace, I should get to 20k around July. So,
before the deadline. Also, I found a new Japanese band I like: ハナ肇とクレージーキャッツ (I presume that's the band ザ・スパイダース referred to in one of their recordings). Here's a sample of their music: 悲しきわがこころ and something a bit more 元気 遺憾に存じます (0:00-2:24). 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Ezy Ryder Diglot Senior Member Poland youtube.com/user/Kat Joined 4341 days ago 284 posts - 387 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 107 of 144 21 January 2015 at 3:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've had a really fun "Polish" (more like literature, generally) class today. We talked about grammar. Although it doesn't always make sense (e.g., they claim only three tenses exist in Polish, and made up an
order for cases... what?). I've had to note some terms, but most of the time, I didn't need to write whole definitions for unknown terms - looking up the English translation was enough! Also, I should start the "praktyki" next month. That means four weeks without school, but going to a workplace related with a specialization (I.T. in my case) for six hours a day, five days a week instead. Now, generally such apprentices don't really have much to do there, as usually they aren't trusted with anything important. Which could mean, more time for studying Chinese. I'll look up how to run LWT on a tablet (this will be the second time it'll come useful for me (the first time being, reading Tae Kim's guide outside)). Here's the note:
Edited by Ezy Ryder on 21 January 2015 at 3:08pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ezy Ryder Diglot Senior Member Poland youtube.com/user/Kat Joined 4341 days ago 284 posts - 387 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 108 of 144 30 January 2015 at 10:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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Déjà Vu
I’ve been getting tired of SRS’ing recently. 140-200 character reviews, plus learning 30 new ones can take over two hours, and I didn’t even count how much time LWT takes. I’m not sure I can say SRS isn’t the best for me, vocabulary-wise, but it certainly can be tiring if you’re going faster than a few words a day. Over the last 806 days, I used Anki on 641 days, spending over 711 hours on it, and doing 286,731 reviews. I’ve studied some 13k words in Mandarin, 9k in Japanese, 1800 in Na’vi, 1234 Hanzi and ~600 Kanji’s writing, and 161 signs in JSL. So at the very least, I should be able to say I gave it a try. I still consider it one of the most efficient ways of studying, but I simply got tired. I might’ve bitten more than I could chew, or just gotten bored with it. So I decided to drop studying words with Anki (I’m afraid I lost the count, as to which time it is). On two occasions the alternative was extensive reading, which didn’t end up pretty. So this time, maybe intensive reading? By which I mean reading stuff on-line with the help of a pop-up dictionary. I haven’t yet decided whether I’ll come up with a daily (characters-read) quota. On the one hand, it could ascertain I’ll make at least the minimal required progress; on the other hand, setting it too high has proven to lead me to burning out, on more than one occasion by now; not to mention one shouldn’t let the inability to do something completely, hold them from doing it at all (within reason). Perhaps I’ll end up coming back to SRS’ing anyway, once I’ll panic because of the feeling of not making enough progress otherwise. I’m starting to notice a pattern, or cycle: 1.:Fear of failure. 2.:Doing Anki religiously. 3.:Not completing the daily quota. 4.:Missing days. 5.:Being overwhelmed by the backlog and/or wanting to make up for the missed days. 6.:Burning out. 7.:Not noticing fast enough progress. In other words: Fear->Overambition->Fatigue->Guilt->Fear. To break the cycle, I’d have to take at least one of these elements out of the equation. Fear: I could try to ignore the thoughts suggesting the current methods are not sufficient. Overambition and Guilt: I could set overly low goals at first, and then ease into a more demanding habit. Fatigue: I could look for a new method which would be both effective, and less tiring. I recently thought about writing an SRS simulation, to approximate the interval modifier which would be more suiting for me personally. I could try an Iversen-like wordlist approach or give another try to the Goldlist method. Motivation might also play a part in the process (duh). Apparently wanting to study in the country is not enough for me. My Chinese penpal hasn’t been particularly talkative the last few… months, but I reckon my Taiwanese penpal should have more time soon, so maybe another human being will do the trick? As odd as it might sound, considering me being a 引き篭もり Aspie. Oh, and I don’t know if it’s even worth mentioning (as it might turn out to be just a temporary fluctuation), recently I felt like a wreck (didn’t even have the energy to rest), but the last two days my hypersomnia seemed to have calmed down a bit. Yesterday I slept for 7 hours, and today 5. Now, only if I managed to keep this amount (maybe even an hour more), and shift it, so that I don’t go to bed in the morning, and get up in the afternoon (did I mention there were periods, during which I didn’t see the sun for a few days in a row?). Edited by Ezy Ryder on 30 January 2015 at 10:09pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Ezy Ryder Diglot Senior Member Poland youtube.com/user/Kat Joined 4341 days ago 284 posts - 387 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 109 of 144 02 February 2015 at 5:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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Mandarin text coverage after Week 0: 95.61%
Method of calculation: You’d generally expect dealing with word counts, but that’s tiresome with longer texts in languages which abstain from using spaces, so I simply divided the sum of (non-unique) characters making up words I understood (not necessarily known), by the sum of (non-unique) characters in the whole text (not counting punctuation, etc. Just the Hanzi). Text type: Some random Manga-drawing tutorial I found after a minute of googling. 502 Hanzi-long. Impressions: The text wasn’t meant to be a piece of literature (kinda reminds me of one 3d graphics tutorial written in verse), which probably was the reason it was so easy. Some new words were fairly easy to guess even without the accompanying pictures, like 克服 or 大功告 成. For some I needed them though (like 圓). And some I just hat to look up in a dictionary (like 清單). But at 95% text coverage, reading (with the help of a dictionary) doesn’t seem overly unpleasant (yet?). So I'm gonna try interspersing every 10 minutes of reviews, with 10 minutes of (intensive) reading. And now, back to the character writing backlog. PS.: Temporarily blanked out on the word “impression,” and had to look up 感想 with my pop-up dictionary in order to be able to use it in this entry. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ezy Ryder Diglot Senior Member Poland youtube.com/user/Kat Joined 4341 days ago 284 posts - 387 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 110 of 144 05 February 2015 at 7:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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Just a short update, to say I'm gonna try doing the new characters before reviews. Usually, I'd
have the mindset that reviews are more important than new cards (stagnation being better than "one step forward, two steps backward"). However, doing the new cards is more difficult, time- taking, and thus tiresome than reviewing. That is, during the reviews, I just need to write the character, and that's it. Well, at most rewrite it again if I'm not satisfied with the way it looks. However, when learning new characters, it's a whole 'nother story. New cards have only the Hanzi on the back, and one reading on the front. Which means I need to look up optional additional readings, and write the pinyin and definition for some useful words which use the character. And my speed drops from 2-4 cards per minute, to ~0.4 cards per minute. Both phases have their pleasant aspects - reviews show me how much I'm able to write already, and adding new cards, I further broaden my capabilities. TL;DR Gonna give doing the new cards before reviews a try. PS.:Listening to Fleetwood Mac's 1968 "Fleetwood Mac" album while writing this. I didn't know they were this good! PPS: I wrote a little app today, for improving reading speed in English. I have one book about wxWidgets and Qt libraries, so maybe I'll try making it work in an actual window, on more platforms, and with more languages. So far, it just "uncovers" a text, one word at a time, at the desired speed, and even includes a word wrap function :) It has the advantage over some similar software, that it also improves your eye movements, as opposed to just comprehending more words over time; so it should be easier to translate these improvements to actual reading. I think I once saw some open-source CJK tokenizers, so maybe it could help also with reading speed in these languages. Would anyone here be interested in something like that? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ezy Ryder Diglot Senior Member Poland youtube.com/user/Kat Joined 4341 days ago 284 posts - 387 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 111 of 144 08 February 2015 at 6:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well, doing the new cards before reviews was a flop. It's quite likely I wouldn't be finishing even
the other way around, but the consequences of not finishing are worse this way. So, today I'll try the last alternative I could think of - mixing the new cards in between reviews. Which I think was what I used to do in 2013... ah, the memories. Maybe that'll both be quicker than just adding 30 new cards in a row, and provide more variety. I know our team's February TAC challenge hasn't been chosen yet, but inspired by the lyrics memorization idea, I've already chosen which song I'd do, got the lyrics, I think more or less figured out the chord changes, and I'm getting closer with the amp settings. Getting back to handwriting; during my intensive reading practice, I read that the cursive script might actually be a bit more regular than I used to think it was (even found a reference to 草書 代用符號表). Managed to find a website which lists a number of cursive radicals (although sometimes they're more similar to the Heisigian primitives), with an animation showing the stroke order and direction of movements, regular script radicals/primitives which can be written using it (in specified parts of a character), and even example characters for every substitution (in the cursive script). I started making a deck where each note contains a picture of a cursive script radical/primitive, all the regular script radicals/primitives it can signify and the part of a character it is used in. It automatically creates a card for every regular script radical/primitive in a note, so far only productive cards (a regular script radical/primitive on the front, and cursive on the back), but making an additional card type for passive reviews (cursive on the front, and all the regular script radicals/primitives on the back) shouldn't take more than a minute. I'll most likely stick to using the running script during my character reviews, but I hope once I finish preparing the deck, it'll making taking handwritten notes quicker (and prettier :) ). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Woodsei Bilingual Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Woodsei Joined 4789 days ago 614 posts - 782 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Egyptian)* Studies: Russian, Japanese, Hungarian | Message 112 of 144 09 February 2015 at 2:40am | IP Logged | ||
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Ezy Ryder, your progress is amazing. I keep meaning to up my game, too, but...
I didn't know LWT had a test function. I set it up, but I still haven't gotten around to using it, and I really should, since I do a lot of reading online and on the pc/phone anyway. It's great, because that would solve my Anki problem, as well as give me a few active exercises. The band you've posted, I didn't expect it, but I really enjoyed listening to the two songs very much! Are you still translating songs into your TL? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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