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CZ’s TAC 15 CHN/JPN/KOR | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5538 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 777 of 844 11 June 2014 at 3:43am | IP Logged | |||||
Personally, I'm ecstatic that you've gone back to using that account again, partly as it makes my weekly Korean writing goal a complete non-issue. My goal, which was intentionally set low, is 2 posts per week (of any length), yet I frequently have issues finding time to come up with something to post. This week, though, it's only Tuesday and I've already made 5 posts in Korean just from replying to posts you've made. Edited by Warp3 on 11 June 2014 at 3:45am 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 778 of 844 12 June 2014 at 5:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
That's how I feel when I'm trying to practice structures in my head and writing blog posts. I honestly just try to make it a habit to think in one thought in a foreign language at a given time and continue to build from there. Even if the thought is simple like "한예슬은 너무 섹시하기 그지없어," I'm still getting used to some structures I don't use often. ----- Anyway, until June 21st, I'll barely be doing any language studying. I have an exam in my accounting due tomorrow (but I plan on taking it tonight) and a comprehensive final due on the 20th (but plan on taking it earlier.) 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 779 of 844 16 June 2014 at 11:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I have been tweeting more in my languages and I think it helping, especially for
Japanese. I am now a believer that the 100% input methods are ineffective. I used to believe that all I needed to do was to keep getting input and I understand Japanese decently but I could hardly produce anything until a couple of weeks ago. As of now, I am reading sentences out loud from my textbooks and working to use the structures more often. Instead of doing the "do one lesson until it's drilled into my memory", I have grouped several lessons together and will go through them once and then go through any lessons (or parts of lessons) giving me trouble until I am satisfied enough to move on. I won't stay on things too long because I am still using Anki for grammar. I will get some reinforcement from Anki, but it seems like actually using the stuff helps me more. I am still thinking of how to make the most out of my blog, which will also be only in foreign languages. Right now, I am thinking of making regular blog posts like I am, but I can only do that comfortably in Korean. I think making dialogues like those in textbooks will really help consolidate my knowledge, especially if I use the new grammar structures I'm working on. I haven't tweeted or written in Cantonese for two reasons: I can still only say really basic stuff like "I am American. I am not Chinese. I don't want [this]." I also most likely need to learn the Jyutping romanization to input into the computer as I type, as all the materials I have for Cantonese use the Yale romanization system. This last bit is just to tally up how many tweets I have so far this month: Korean: 21 Japanese: 10 Mandarin: 4 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 780 of 844 30 June 2014 at 8:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
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2014 Midway review
My goals for 2014 listed on Page 90. For the most part, I'm doing my best to continue with my languages every day. While I am not able to watch dramas every day like I used to, I am able to listen to podcasts while I am at work once the store hours are over. I am being more consistent, but I am definitely working on a routine that will help me continually improve. For vocabulary, I tried a few different methods. I tried traditional flashcards in February for the 6 Week Challenge and tried Anki flashcards in May. For now, I am simply just reading intensively and looking up the words as I go. I have pop-up dictionaries for Korean, Japanese and Mandarin, so that's really helpful. I am planning on trying to read some more comics/manga/webtoons and books, but those will all be extensive reading with no dictionary look ups. Later on in this post I'll go more into detail on why I am abandoning the traditional vocabulary acquisition methods that helped me so far. For grammar, I was using MCDs for grammar and while they are helpful, they do not help me produce any sentences. Lately I have been practicing a lot more output through writing and thinking in the languages. The only real speaking I do at this point is to read sentences out loud from my textbooks and grammar books. Earlier in the summer, I had an accounting summer course. For the majority of courses I have taken throughout university, I only had to passively learn the material in order to get an A. However, that's just not that smart for accounting. Sure, reading the textbook and notes while analyzing example problems help, but they do not rival actual practice and actual testing. I would do a lot of example problems to help make the problems become second nature, and in doing so, that helped me understand what I was doing much more than trying to re-read the chapter/section to get any clarification. It's the same with practice tests. Instead of just re-reading the material, I took the practice tests to see what I actually knew and what I needed to brush up on. How this relates to language learning? I had relied on Anki too much, thinking pushing buttons would help me. It does to an extent, but not to the extent of actual practicing. I could know vocabulary in isolation in the cards, but draw blanks when reading them in context. For grammar, I could answer every question right in Anki, but I still couldn't use most of the structures I was learning. Therefore, I am going back to intensive and extensive reading. That's like testing myself all the time while reading without having to push buttons all the time. Reading a lot of Korean did help improve my vocabulary and grammar, so it's not as if learning a bunch of flashcards did 100% of the work. Besides, there are still words that I have learned via Anki that I would forget while trying to read. I am switching my grammar activities to simply reading out loud a lot of model sentences from my grammar books and then throughout the day trying to use those structures. I have some unused notebooks where I will specifically construct sentences using those structures. For Twitter, my blog, and thinking, I will simply just try to do that as much as possible for volume of practice and to become more efficient at formulating thoughts over time. I am still trying to devise a way to attack Chinese characters. I think I will go the old fashioned way by writing out the characters every day. My book on Chinese characters groups the characters by radicals and such, so it will be easier to learn mnemonics, but the actual writing of them will help solidify them in muscle memory. Since I will be reading a lot, I'll also be learning the characters through actual words, which should help a lot -- as it already has, since I have forgotten a lot of mnemonics for characters that I learned through RTK but solidified the meanings through vocabulary acquisition. The most important part is the routine and doing this every day. I can't put it 6 hours a day anymore with work, school and life, but if I remove a lot of useless activities I do and fill them in with activities that I can do in my languages, I should still put in plenty of time every day. Especially with thinking in the languages, though hard to do, is the easiest thing to do every day. I always tend to start off with simple sentences to get myself in the groove before trying to work on structures that I recently learned. For example, when I get to work, I'll think something like "I already want to go home." For output, my 6 month challenge is to write every single day. On Twitter, that will just entail of simple one liners or so until I can get into the groove of writing more complex sentences. Blog posts will usually just be 1-2 paragraphs unless I have more free time to write longer posts. Below are my HTLAL twitter and my blog where I only write in foreign languages and forbid the use of English. HTLAL Twitter Blog I have already started writing every day, dating back to June 29 for the blog. I tweet almost every day on Twitter, but will try to make that a daily thing now. I have had success in establishing routines in the past such as when I had to exercise every day in order to join the military. The trick is to simply accept it as something that I need/want to do every day instead of doing something based on emotion. Therefore I won't try to get too motivated nor let the "I don't want to do it" excuse pop up. Lastly, just some stats on how many tweets I had for June in each language. Korean: 33 Japanese: 15 Mandarin: 10 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4871 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 781 of 844 01 July 2014 at 12:43am | IP Logged | |||||
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I share a lot of your observations about Anki and reading. I have seen benefits from Anki cards that I could convert into solid knowledge even a year after studying them (suddenly it clicked). But the benefits are a lot less immediate than those from reading and it's also just not as interesting. What I need to get the learning process going are just awareness of and curiosity about new words. If I have that, I don't need Anki or goldlists, as long as I get a lot of repetition through native input.
It sounds like your studies are going really well! Congrats on a great first half of the year. 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 782 of 844 04 July 2014 at 9:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Thanks druckfehler!
I'm still working out this new routine, but I think I have to make some slight changes along the way. The first is regarding writing every day, especially when it comes to my blog. Right now, this point in my life is terribly droll (I honestly just study and work all the time, so it's not like I have much to write about when it comes to a diary-like blog). I started doing it already, but I'll probably have to link to news articles and write about the contents in my blog posts. I'll probably try to create some dialogues while trying to use new vocabulary and grammar structures. The second thing I need to work on is reading. I enjoy reading, but looking up every single unknown word gets real old, real fast, so I only end up reading one paragraph of one article a day...which won't help me in learning new words or retaining very many. My idea has two components: continue reading, but only hover over the unknown words that either impede my understanding of the sentence or over the unknown words that frequently show up. I just want more volume in the amount I read. For the second part, I'll probably use MCDs in Anki, BUT I won't be testing myself to reproduce the vocabulary. I'll just use it to help me read. I'll always answer as if I got it correct while reading the chunk/sentences around the cloze deletion. Last night I opened up a Word file and started copying/pasting articles into the file. My plan is to add a card or two from one article and move onto the next one. Of course I will come back to these old articles and continue adding cards to Anki, but I won't look up every word and make Anki cards for the whole news article and add them at the same time. I tried that last year and got extremely bored reading the same article over and over for weeks. Now I'll probably just be reading certain paragraphs for weeks on end, but with a lot more variety. I feel like I need to something like this because of the Chinese characters, because the MCDs will help me that much more in recognizing them while reading. This should allow me to read a lot more articles in the future too, since I will mainly be skimming through the unknown material and moving on. 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 783 of 844 09 July 2014 at 5:09am | IP Logged | |||||
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I will be focusing on input for Japanese and Mandarin. I'm having a real hard time of
trying to write anything in both languages, so I simply need much more input, both vocabulary and grammar wise. I can say really simple things in both languages, but I have trouble expressing myself compared to Korean. Therefore, the majority of my time will be spent of improving my Korean, as it is the language most important to me. Plus, it's the one I'm at the best at and spend the most time on anyway. This is leading me to trying something interesting. I'm thinking of starting several languages in a passive-only fashion through MCDs. This includes what I will be doing with Japanese and Mandarin. I figure if I add a couple of cards every day (they'll mainly be sentences from a textbook) for years at a time before moving onto grammar books and native news articles for vocabulary expansion, I can have a solid base before I start actively learning some of these languages. I find it hard to juggle three active languages (because one is a handful by itself with a tight schedule that most people on this site have), so I think just going to one active language at a time from now on will help immensely. I am trying to think of a variety of languages from different language families to dabble in. Here's what I'm thinking of adding: Cantonese (I like some Cantopop songs and love movies from Hong Kong. Plus I had already dabbled in this language before) German (I mainly want to learn this for heritage reasons.) Hebrew (I want to attempt a Middle Eastern language, and I may as well learn the one from the people who don't want me dead.) Russian (Just seems interesting and they have a lot of good literature.) French (Everyone has to learn a romance language, right?) Again, I would only be adding a 2-3 MCDs cards a day, making it a small daily commitment, but this should allow me to have a good base in each language when I go to learning them actively. 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 784 of 844 30 July 2014 at 7:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I signed up for the 6WC with Cantonese and the other three languages will still
probably get more time in the end. Anyhow, my game plan with Cantonese: 1) Go through Teach Yourself Cantonese, Basic Cantonese and Intermediate Cantonese doing scriptorium. 2) Repeat the chapters by reading the sentences out loud several times. 3) Work on creating sentences with what I have learned. 4) Put all of the sentences in teach Yourself Cantonese in an MCD deck. I won't finish this during the 6WC challenge, but I'm hoping to have a few chapters of this done. 5) Learn all of the Chinese characters in Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary. Obviously this will count towards Mandarin time as I will be learning the Traditional Chinese characters with the Mandarin pronunciation. However, this will help with all four languages. This is a goal I have for the rest of the year, but I'd like to get as many as I can done within the 6 Week Challenge. For this, I'm using traditional paper flashcards and will use massive practice over spaced repetition because my single-word vocab and MCD decks will reinforce everything I learn. I am going from character meaning and reading to reproducing the character from memory, making this active studying instead of passive studying. I won't be making a vocab and MCD deck for Cantonese yet as I want to focus on getting the basics down, but I will be doing the same things for the other languages plus what I'm doing with Anki (Cloze deletion grammar deck, basic vocab deck going from English to target language and traditional MCD decks.) I won't really be focusing on vocab for the rest of this year, as I just want to add some words to keep the momentum going. I'm on my way of completing my main two language learning goals of the year: learning roughly 4,000 characters and putting all of the key example sentences from my grammar books into Anki. I figure the foundation in my languages needs to be much stronger before I go and try to learn a bunch of vocabulary again. I became really busy and din't have much time to continue writing on my blog, but I'll continue doing so in Korean. For Mandarin and Japanese, I really need to focus on drilling the grammar points and learn how to make sentences. I have a hard time writing about anything in either language while I can write quite a bit in Korean, so I may as well continue that. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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