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CZ’s TAC 15 CHN/JPN/KOR | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| The Real CZ Senior Member United States Joined 5652 days ago 1069 posts - 1495 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 769 of 844 10 May 2014 at 8:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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Progress Report:
Mandarin Vocab Deck: 365 cards (635 to go) (Need to keep going at a rate of 30.3 a day) Japanese Vocab Deck: 355 cards (645 to go) (Need to keep going at a rate of 30.7 a day) Korean Vocab Deck: 317 cards (683 to go) (Need to keep going at a rate of 32.5 a day) For the past week, I have been adding 30 new words a day in each language. Doing the reviews, finding and learning the new cards takes about 90-120 minutes. I usually mine for more cards than I need so that the next day I can start learning words right after the reviews. Typically I break it up into two segments during the day: reviewing vocab and learning new words in the first segment and intensive reading/word mining in the second segment. I usually do the second segment at night after work since it doesn't require as much focus. I believe I can keep the pace up and I will use my two off days during the week to do more than the average. However, I won't be going crazy because I will be using the bulk of my days to study for my summer course and GMAT exam. If anything, being this busy is really helping me work faster and manage my time better. The only thing I miss is the lack of time to watch dramas, but I do listen to podcasts in the three languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4871 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 770 of 844 10 May 2014 at 8:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm really curious as to how you would rate your long-term retention of vocabulary when you study them at this a speed. Looking at your past experimentations, do you tend to forget a big part of the words at some point (but it might be easier to make them stick the next time you learn them) or do you feel that a lot of them are already memorised quite definitely after you delete the vocab deck?
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| The Real CZ Senior Member United States Joined 5652 days ago 1069 posts - 1495 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 771 of 844 10 May 2014 at 9:18pm | IP Logged | ||
It depends on how much contact I keep with the language after deleting the deck. At the very least, I have a passive retention/the ability to recognize the word but not recall it. All three decks have words that I have learned in the past but have a hard time recalling words, or words that I forgot but are easily learned. In addition, there are plenty of words I haven't seen before. For me, it's more effective than just simply reading and trying to learn words that way. Reading for me is most effective to cement what I have already learned from intense vocabulary and grammar studies in addition to learning stylistic points. However, in learning from the past, vocabulary will only be learned at this rate for May. I'll scale it down to 10/words a day next month while I focus on grammar sentences for the next few months, hopefully finishing at least a sentence per grammar construction in my grammar books. Then I should be done learning grammar until I get to an advanced stage (and learning the more nuanced meanings in the target language). This is just like sprinting. You can only keep the high pace up for so long before you need a break ("walking it off"). That's why I hope switching the focus between vocab and grammar will help me in maintaining this pace. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| The Real CZ Senior Member United States Joined 5652 days ago 1069 posts - 1495 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 772 of 844 15 May 2014 at 9:14pm | IP Logged | ||
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Some notes anyone reading may be interested in.
So far, from May 2 to May 14, I have added on average 30 words a day to each deck. On day 1, I added 100 Japanese cards and on day 2 I added 100 Chinese cards, but starting from day 3, I added 30 cards (on average) a day in all three of my decks. Some days I would add more to certain decks, and one day I added 60 cards to my Chinese deck and only added 10 cards the next day. Here are my totals: Chinese: 500 (added 435. 33.5/day) Japanese: 515 (added 450. 34.6/day) Korean: 440 (added 313. 24.1/day) I'm stopping here short of the 1,000 mark for each because my accounting course is taking more time than I expected, so I'm trying hard to work ahead of schedule since this 6 week course is backloaded and has a lot of work in the last 3 weeks while not having much in the first 3 weeks. I will still add cards to my decks every day though. Now for some more in depth stats on how well I answer the cards in each language. For my languages, I would say that I'm A2 in Mandarin, B1 in Japanese, and B2 in Korean, all passive knowledge. Each language would probably be a level lower with active knowledge. (And each language would be better if I would study consistently, but that's another post for another day.) Mandarin: Learning: 95.18% (1166 out of 1225) Young: 85.74% (1112 out of 1297) Mature: 0% (0 out of 0) Japanese: Learning: 98.55% (1084 out of 1110) Young: 93.91% (1111 out of 1183) Mature: 0% (0 out of 0) Korean: Learning: 98.47% (837 out of 850) Young: 96.63% (945 out of 978) Mature: 85.71% (12 out of 14) I started this Korean deck about a month before the Japanese and Chinese decks and was adding a few words every day while mainly focusing on MCDs (which was the main reason I resumed Anki, because I feel MCDs are great for grammar.) I get all of the vocab words in context, so I pull them from articles I'm reading online and song lyrics (which is how I'm getting the majority of my Mandarin words at the moment.) All of the cards follow a simple format: [front side] English definition. Chinese characters (sample sentence with the word replaced by [...] if characters aren't available for native Korean and Japanese words.) [back side] Word in target language. In Korean, it's in hangeul. In Japanese, it's in kana. In Mandarin, it's in pinyin. I chose a simple format because the goal is to always streamline everything to make it more time efficient. It may be more efficient to have actual sentences, as I found the sentence method to be really helpful while I was a beginner in Korean and Japanese, but it takes much longer to add sentences (and MCDs, which take even longer) than simple vocab cards. What shouldn't be surprising that the higher the level I have in the language, the easier it is to retain all of these words. From my (short) analysis, B1 passive knowledge should be the bare minimum someone should be at before doing massive vocabulary memorization. I still don't know Mandarin grammar well enough and I can't read many characters with the correct pronunciation, so it is harder to recall words. I feel like my foundation is too weak in Mandarin to keep this up at the moment. Instead of adding a lot of MCD grammar cards to Anki, I am going to do several different activities and most of them are "old school" techniques. I plan on doing this with Japanese too, as my grammar needs to be improved before I can actually keep this pace up. I will go back to using the scriptorium method. I find it to be effective in the short- term, but I have never used it long term. I find that writing sentences out while also speaking them out loud really helps. I will go back to speaking the sentences out loud, as oral repetition seems to help a lot. My plan is for me to absorb more of the language by memorizing due to repetition. I will go back to adding MCDS (probably a few a day) because the repetition from the MCDs is really helpful, too, but it's more time consuming to type the sentences out and then review them all the time. My goal with doing this is to really strengthen my grasp on grammar (without remembering specific rules, but remembering sentences) and incidentally learn words while learning grammar. There seems to be a correlation (but not an actual causation) between my familiarity with grammar (and ease of using the language) and how easily I learn new words (which is probably true for every learner out there.) Concurrently, I will be testing myself on Chinese characters. I will make old fashioned note cards and use a notebook because I have found that Anki doesn't help me as much with characters as other methods do. My format for characters: [front side] Definition(s). Chinese pronunciation(s). Any mnemonic device to help me remember the character. [back side] the character itself I will test myself to reproduce the character from memory. To draw the character, I will simple just use my index finger and draw the character out on the palm of my hand instead of wasting all of that paper by writing the character out for my reviews. Speaking of paper and notebooks, I also plan on writing out the characters because mechanical memory/repetition seems to really help with learning characters. However, writing characters out just by itself isn't too helpful. It's just there to reinforce it and make it more automatic. With all of this practice on grammar, I also plan to use the language more, as one of my goals for the year is to use the languages more and get used to using them. I will probably end up using Arekkesu's self talk method. I have tried it before, but I gave up since it's really hard. That means that I need to do it more often to make it easier. I think in conjunction with practicing grammar so much for the rest of the year, self-talk will become easier. Of course, the easy part is "immersion". I have plenty of podcast series I can listen to thanks to iTunes, so I will most likely start listening to them more at work (it's manual labor, so it's really perfect to help pass the time.) Naturally I still watch dramas when I can, but work and classes are really cutting into my drama watching schedule. To tie everything up, a stronger foundation (even with active knowledge) should make absorbing new vocabulary that much easier for the future. I am also working on consistency, trying to gradually change my habits, and the first one is vocabulary learning. In the picture below (or link if the picture won't show up), I'll have two contrasting charts of the rates over time of how I learned vocabulary. 
I want to be more consistent because as the regular readers of my log have noticed, I can learn a lot of vocabulary in a short amount of time, but I have trouble sustaining that momentum, largely because reviews can take up to an hour after a few weeks of learning vocabulary at that rate. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| The Real CZ Senior Member United States Joined 5652 days ago 1069 posts - 1495 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 773 of 844 24 May 2014 at 8:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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I deleted my vocab decks. What I have discovered from analyzing my past endeavors with
Anki is that is studying vocab like this is great for short term memory, and after a few weeks, it's effectiveness drops a lot. So I will go back to reading more and more using a pop-up dictionary. I think these random spurts of vocabulary studying help from time to time, as it becomes easier to remember words while reading, but I think studying vocabulary in isolation isn't for me. I would say I have attained a fairly decent level in Korean comprehension mainly through reading and random vocabulary studying here and there. on-pop-up-dictionary/">This pop-up dictionary for Korean works well. I personally find it easier and faster to manually highlight the word than to double click it and have the computer highlight more than I want. I plan to do more extensive reading with the books I have (without looking up any words). I plan to work on production again, using my alternate twitter and blog. I think I'll use my blog for blog articles and twitter to practice structures. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| The Real CZ Senior Member United States Joined 5652 days ago 1069 posts - 1495 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 774 of 844 26 May 2014 at 8:55am | IP Logged | ||
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I have uploaded a recording of Korean. I have a very cheap webcam, so the sound quality
isn't the greatest, but it gets the job done. Sorry for the little "static" noises whenever I say something with a ㅂ,ㅃ,or ㅍ in it. I plan on doing this for Chinese and Japanese down the road. Since soundcloud is really expensive, I'll probably delete these when I get close to my upload limit (I record them on my computer first before uploading them anyway.) I want to make 2014 a year in which I actually use the language instead of passively use it, because there is simply too big of a gap between what I can understand and what I can use. Korean Recording #1 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| The Real CZ Senior Member United States Joined 5652 days ago 1069 posts - 1495 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 775 of 844 06 June 2014 at 2:23am | IP Logged | ||
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I received my Complete Cantonese (Teach Yourself series) and Basic Cantonese grammar.
I'm still waiting on the Intermediate Cantonese grammar book to arrive here. I've read reviews that the Comprehensive Grammar is better than both of those two (same authors for all three books), but I want to build my knowledge up instead of consulting a comprehensive grammar book after finishing Teach Yourself. I made that mistake with Mandarin, so I purchased Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar. This grammar book is divided into two parts, a traditional grammar reference and a situations and functions section. I'll end up going through the second part first with this book. Luckily I didn't delete my grammar MCD decks, because I'm adding to them again. I'm also going to put all of the dialogues and example sentences from TY Cantonese into a deck of its own. The dialogues don't have English translations after chapter 1, so I'll have to treat those like vocab MCDs where I cloze out every unknown word. I have not yet decided what to do with vocabulary yet. I have tried a lot of methods and all of them work, but I need to find one method to stick with. For now I'll focus on getting a better grammar foundation in all of my languages and work on being able to use the language more. I am thinking of using MCDs for vocabulary because it will teach me how to read the characters better in three of the four languages I'll be learning. I'm going back through some lower level books and reading sentences out loud to get mechanical practice (or muscle memory for the mouth) in saying these sentences out loud. I'm going back through an intermediate book for Korean (Continuing Korean) and beginning books for Japanese and Mandarin. What's really odd is that while I can understand much more in Japanese than Mandarin, I can use Mandarin much easier and faster. So I really need to go back to the basics with Japanese instead of putting intermediate grammar points in Anki. Aside from twitter and the blog, I'm trying to form sentences in my head using the structures I have been learning lately while driving and doing mundane tasks at work. I'm thinking of writing down on a flash card on what structures to try to use while I'm driving and mindlessly working. I'm getting more input these days from podcasts than dramas, but I can't really help it with my schedule. I'm lucky to get an hour a day to dedicate to dramas while I can listen to the podcasts at almost any time. I go back and forth between active and passive listening, but I don't listen to podcasts at all when studying for school subjects. I have found the sound recorder on my computer (could never find it on my older ones), so I'll use that to record myself repeating the dialogues from the books and I'll probably upload those sound files to YouTube likes Moses McCormick does. This post is long again, so I'll stop here. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| The Real CZ Senior Member United States Joined 5652 days ago 1069 posts - 1495 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 776 of 844 09 June 2014 at 8:28pm | IP Logged | ||
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It's been a little easier to come up with sentences now, but I still can't connect many
thoughts together in Japanese and Mandarin. I guess that will just take time to do. With Cantonese I am able to make really simple sentences, but I have only gone through unit one so far since making MCDs is time consuming. I have been thinking of incorporating the scriptorium into my routine. I plan to go through my lower level Japanese, Mandarin and Cantonese books and do two waves: one normal wave and the second wave where I'm three lessons behind. This will help me continue to progress but also gives me a chance to review. I won't stop doing MCDs since they are the most effective for me for learning grammar, but it's also the slowest method. I will also continue to practice saying sentences out loud, and while effective, I think it's the least effective of the three methods (but provides the most practice.) Here's my HTLAL Twitter account. I have been using it more lately and tweeting with Warp a lot, so if any other reader with a Twitter account wishes to tweet with me, feel free to. I enjoy tweeting with Warp not just because we tend to have a lot in common, but I don't feel any pressure to have grammatically perfect tweets, which leads me to tweet more. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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