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Spanish: A little subs2srs experiment | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5229 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 121 of 147 21 December 2014 at 6:06pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Hi Emk,
Had a look through my statistics for the French & Italian subs2srs which I've done. I've done the Hero Corp television series for French, and the film The Hobbit for Italian. I'm not as consistent as you with your studies. For Hero Corp: Days studied: 86% (38 of 44) Total: 1403 reviews Average for days studied: 36.9 reviews/day Total: 5 hours Mature: 34 Young+Learn: 171 Unseen: 986 Suspended+Buried: 100 For The Hobbit: Days studied: 70% (12 of 17) Total: 897 reviews Average for days studied: 74.8 reviews/day Days studied: 70% (12 of 17) Total: 2 hours Mature: 13 Young+Learn: 208 Unseen: 1544 Suspended+Buried: 81 I don't know if I'm just naturally more pessimistic (or stupid) but I'm not seeing a huge boost in comprehension. Although our situation is different since I already understood 50-70% of the dialogue and I can read ~B2 in both languages already. Although I'm not having a huge increase in listening comprehension, I would say to anyone thinking about doing this I find subs2srs cards a lot more interesting than the normal word2word cards and I tend to do these cards first before moving on to the torture machine cards. The reason I'm posting in your log is because this log has me thinking. I'm not getting the results you are, I believe because we are at different stages with the languages we are using subs2srs with. So I was thinking about how I could use subs2srs in such a way it would be more helpful to me. Then I remembered an exercise which Tarvos mentioned on the forums here where his tutor made them listen and translate a small chunk of dialogue. This is what I have come up with. I'm going to do another set of French cards for a TV series I have Mafiosa, Le Clan. I don't have any subtitles for it at all in any language. So I will sit down with sub-edit and put in a placeholder whenever someone speaks, SOME_FRENCH_WORDS_HERE for example. Then I will allow the subs2srs to chop up the audio & video and insert my placeholder text. Because Anki will allow me to edit the card, I will listen to 1-2 cards per day, and translate them as best I can, thereby doing Tarvo's exercise once or twice each day. At the end of one month I will export my "translated" cards into a single anki deck and I hope to have one of my French speaking friends review the cards and give me corrections. I could use something with sub-titles, but I don't want to tempt myself. What I am hoping to find from this exercise is after a period of intensive listening daily I will significantly improve my listening comprehension. I am not really sure how I could test this, other than doing 30 new cards the following month, and see if my score for 30 cards improves. Suggestions? 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 122 of 147 21 December 2014 at 9:43pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Well, there are three things worth keeping in mind: 1. I started with basically no Spanish, and I'm using subs2srs as an Assimil replacement until I can watch TV unaided. 2. I have accurate Spanish subtitles, which allows me thoroughly learn very hard material. 3. I'm doing a lot of subs2srs. The best way to measure quantity is to look at mature cards. At least in my experience, the real comprehension gains occur after 20–30 days, which is about the same time Anki marks the cards as "mature." Here are your card numbers:
That gives you a total of 47 mature cards across two languages, whereas I have 10 times that number just for Spanish alone: 
To put this in perspective, Sprachprofi learned 1500 Japanese cards in 30 days. She might have had something like 500 mature cards and another 1000 young cards at the 30 day mark. And remember, we're both beginners tackling carefully selected TV series—the same sort of stuff that a strong B1 student might marathon-watch with decent comprehension. So what about subs2srs as an intermediate? I actually tried this in French, and results were mixed. On the plus side, I could use subs2srs to gain near-total comprehension of my favorite French songs and movie scenes. But it was always far more effective when I had accurate subtitles. The biggest problem with subs2srs at the intermediate and advanced level is that once you understand 90+% of the dialog in a series or movie, it's too much work to make subs2srs cards for the remaining 10%. I've love to see a tool like Fleex.tv with an integrated subs2srs mode. (In fact, I'd love to see a version of Fleex.tv for students of languages other than English.) If I had some way to capture 20 or 30 subs2srs cards from each episode of Le Trône de fer with minimal fuss, I'd be a very happy student. All that said, I've tried side-by-side experiments comparing subs2srs and manual dictation exercises. Subs2srs (with accurate L2 transcripts) worked better than endlessly looping audio and trying to copy down what I heard. But your mileage may vary. Episodes 11 & 12. Ah, that's better! My comprehension was much better than it was with episodes 9 and 10. To review: Episode 5 (studied with subs2srs): 80+% comprehension. Episode 6 (reviewed without subs2srs): Variable, but good overall. Episodes 7 & 8: Less than 50% comprehension, but I could follow the plot pretty well! Definitely fun. Episodes 9 & 10: Definitely harder than 7 and 8. Rough going overall. Episode 11: Not as good as 7&8, but definitely better than 9 and 10. Episode 12: Wow, this was great! I followed almost all the story, and I understood some sections solidly. Overall, I feel like my comprehension is a little too low for extensive TV watching. Out of 6 episodes I hadn't seen in Spanish before, maybe 3 or 4 of them felt like they were helping me make progress efficiently. The hardest 2 felt like a waste of time—well, except for the fact that my Anki reviews afterwards were ridiculously easy. EDIT: Summary: Out of 6 episodes, 3 or 4 of them were at the very low end of the "useful extensive listening zone". Another 2 were still outside of it. Excellent progress, especially for such a modest investment, but I still have more work to do. Edited by emk on 21 December 2014 at 9:59pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5858 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 123 of 147 22 December 2014 at 10:29am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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One thing i've found helpful at a more advanced stage is trying to repeat and mimic the sentence. It makes reviews take a bit longer but it seems to help the phrase stick in my head more and i find myself thinking of them throughout the day and tossing in the phrases or interesting parts of the sentence in my daily conversations. I've been doing this with Mandarin, and to compare i'm at:
Mature: 577 Young: 286 Suspended: 1266 EDIT: I'm also not noticing a huge boost in my comprehension, but at this stage that's to be expected. What i am noticing, however, is that i am noticing some of the words and phrases in conversations here, especially more colloquial stuff, and that it also helps reinforce things that i've studied but never really internalized. Though lately i've been suspending a lot more cards than adding them, which makes adding new cards take a lot longer. Edited by Crush on 22 December 2014 at 10:33am 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 124 of 147 22 December 2014 at 12:40pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Yes. For those reading this log, I'd like to clarify something: I think that subs2srs is most useful in the "pre-TV" stage. Once you can actually watch TV for fun, I think that a few hundred hours of interesting DVD box sets are probably going to do a lot more for your listening. (Also, a good 5,000 pages of interesting reading will probably help tremendously.) If you can already watch TV for fun, don't expect a few hundred subs2srs cards to make a huge difference. I mean, they still make really great and really fun Anki cards. But at the upper levels, it takes a lot to move the needle quickly. The last time I saw a big, short-term jump in French was halfway through the Super Challenge, when I watched 60 hours of TV in a month and read 1,500 pages. If you're at that level, don't expect miraculous, broad-based results from 10 hours of anything. (I mean, it can happen, if you target exactly the right weak spot, but it's rare, and then you'll spend the next 6 months trying to repeat it.) The goal of my particular subs2srs experiment is to make it from <A1 to easy native TV as quickly as possible.
Yup. This is the big problem with subs2srs at the upper levels. You don't get enough useful cards per episode, because you already understand >80%. That said, there are a couple of experiments I'd like to try with French: - I'd love to try subs2srs with Intouchables, which makes heavy use of very rapid, very colloquial speech (with several different accents). It's possible that 10 or 20 hours of work with material like this might improve my comprehension of certain styles of fast, colloquial speech. - If I had an infinite amount of free time (hah), I'd modify the VLC player software to allow me to easily capture short sections to Anki, complete with subtitles. If I had this, I'd rewatch season 1 of Le Trône de fer and capture just the dialog that was giving me problems. The basic idea would be to have a "rewind 30 seconds" button and a "make a subs2rs card" button. Would either of these experiments help overcome my remaining weaknesses with French listening? I have no idea. But it would be fun to try. Edited by emk on 22 December 2014 at 1:48pm 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 125 of 147 22 December 2014 at 2:46pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Took a short break without learning any new cards
A week ago, my subs2srs reviews were getting up near 70 cards per day, and I was busy with other stuff. So when I finished episode 5, I didn't add any cards for episode 6. This led to a rapid reduction in daily reps and time spent on subs2srs: 
I spent the last three days watching two episodes of Avatar per day, with the results described above. This was fun, but I'm not quite ready for extensive listening. So it's time to try something new with subs2srs. Why larger chunks of dialog are interesting Honestly, after three episodes of Avatar and almost two months, subs2srs is getting pretty easy. Why? Mostly because the average card contains 2 to 4 seconds of audio, and maybe 40 or 50 characters of text. This has really helped me understand short sections of Spanish audio. But of course, audio doesn't always come in short sections. When watching Avatar on TV, I'll get big chunks of fast dialog all at once. And quite a few language learners and teachers have noticed that the ability to understand and repeat large chunks of dialog is a fairly reliable way to identify advanced students. For example:
In fact, rapid memorization of large chunks is a reliable sign of expertise in many domains:
So, my question: If I increase the "chunk" size on my subs2srs cards, can I train my brain to hold more Spanish in short-term memory? To pull this off, my brain would need to improve how it stores and represents Spanish. Basically, human short-term memory stores "7, plus or minus 2" pieces of information, but each of those pieces can be an entire "chunk":
So let's increase my "chunk" size, and see whether or not my brain can adapt, and find more sophisticated ways to represent Spanish. Combining subtitle lines with Subtitle Edit Here, you can see see three closely-related "lines" of dialog: 
These would actually make more sense if I lumped them together into a single, longer line: 
But doing this manually is a nuisance. Let's use the Merge short lines feature in Subtitle Edit, and adjust the parameters for what qualifies as short: 
This gives us lots of cards in the 9 to 10 second range, and a couple that are closer to 12 seconds. Here's a 10-second card: 
I'm also going to reduce my "new cards per day" from the recent high of 20 to only 5. This will give me a chance to try out this new card format and see whether I'm ready. Also, I've chosen a relatively easy episode for this experiment. 3 persons have 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 126 of 147 22 December 2014 at 7:30pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Two more longer-format cards:
 
The card on the right is a nice challenge: I really have to pay close attention to pick up all the details. I wouldn't necessary recommend this longer format for first-time subs2srs users, because it's easier to gloss over details. But I was getting bored with the shorter cards, and for me, these longer cards feel like a nice change of pace. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4247 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 127 of 147 22 December 2014 at 7:47pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Wow, I never thought of merging short subtitles together, but it sounds like a really great idea that would improve certain nitpicks I've had with my subs2SRS routine lately, and I plan on implementing this immediately.
Subtitles need to be short in order to fit on screens and to be quick and easy to read, but there's absolutely no reason why this feature should carry over to Anki flashcard study, especially partial sentence subtitles. 2 persons have 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 128 of 147 23 December 2014 at 1:17pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Adding some Listening/Reading
Over in a another thread, I mentioned a couple of limitations of my subs2srs experiment:
Listening/Reading is a close relative of subs2srs and Assimil: It combines L2 audio, L2 text and L1 audio. Unlike subs2srs, which works best if you do a little bit every day, L/R supposedly works best in larger chunks. Anyway, several people gave me very good advice about L/R tools, but Via Diva mentioned a tool called Aglona Reader:
Aligning Harry Potter Just to try it out, I grabbed the Harry Potter ebooks that I'd bought from Pottermore, and started aligning them: 
It took me approximately an hour to align the first chapter of Harry Potter (about 4,746 words in Spanish). It definitely would have taken me longer before doing 20 hours of subs2srs! This might have gone a lot faster with another book, because the Spanish translation moves sentence boundaries around constantly. The process is fairly straightforward: Aglona Reader tries to guess "chunk" boundaries using punctuation, and I can either press Space to confirm, or I can use the mouse to mark better boundaries. Reading on Android Aglona Reader comes with a rather nice Android app. There are three reading modes. The default is parallel text, marked by color: 
You can also choose to mix sentence fragments together: 
More advanced readers can use pop-up mode: 
Is this worth it? Maybe. The output looks pretty useful, and I like the Android app. I can certainly read Harry Potter comfortably and with pleasure in this format. But as always, the preparation time is a drag. One option would be to align public domain texts, or to find pre-existing aligned texts and convert them to PBO format for use with the Android app. But wouldn't it be nice if language teachers, language schools or publishers would provide pre-made subs2srs decks and PBO books? Edited by emk on 23 December 2014 at 1:25pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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