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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5524 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 1161 of 1317 23 October 2014 at 4:56pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Thank you! Matando Cabos looks like fun, and I was able to find a used copy. I hope you enjoy El Gato del Rabino; the French version is brilliant. Also, you might get a kick out of Blacksad, which although it's published first in France, is actually created by a Spanish-speaking team. The first book is just a flawless homage to film noir, and the latter books are fun.
Yeah, the creators of Destinos definitely understood how language learning works; that much is apparent just from episode 2. For personal reasons, however, I have no particular desire to get the full course. I'm sure it's excellent, but I'm just goofing off here, trying to adapt my intermediate French and beginning Egyptian techniques to Spanish video sources.
In my experience, the most important rules of SRS flash cards are: 1. Find ways to automatically create large numbers of cards from fun native materials. 2. Delete ruthlessly, for the slightest reason. 3. Don't learn more than 10 per day, or 20 if you're in a moderate rush. The idea is that card creation should be so effortless that aggressive card deletion becomes painless. For those who are interested in subs2srs or Anki + audio, you might also be interested in this article by Sprachprofi, which I recently reread (and posted in another thread). 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5524 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 1162 of 1317 26 October 2014 at 4:00pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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If you're interested in Spanish or subs2srs, you're invited to check out my new log: Spanish: A little subs2srs experiment. A few highlights to whet your appetite:
Subs2srs setup 
Reviewing on my laptop 
Reviewing on my phone with AnkiDroid  
 
My first "ah-ha!" moment 
Hey, I just learned ¡Aquí está! For more details on how I set this up, and how the process works in practice, check out my new Spanish log. This is just a tiny little experiment, to see how easily I can pick up bits of Spanish by goofing around with native materials from the very beginning. There's lots of advice on using Anki, too, for people who are into that sort of thing. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5524 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 1163 of 1317 27 October 2014 at 3:10pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Egyptian: Falling behind and catching up
During the first half of this year, I was spending between an hour to an hour and a half on Egyptian, using Assimil, Anki and Beeminder. You can find the whole story in this article. But I began falling slowly behind—not beyond my ability to recover, but enough to make things a bit annoying. And then I got overwhelmed with work, and I had to cut my hobbies back to the bare essentials. So I put Egyptian on "pause". This is not the first time I've done this. Below, you can see my various Egyptian experiments: 
The original burst of activity was when I tried doing an Assimil lesson every day, making Anki cards manually using HieroTeX to manually typeset everything in the Assimil lessons. This was fun, but also completely insane. Once the thirty days were up, I kept up my Assimil reviews for a while, then eventually started neglecting them. Then I caught up on my Egyptian backlog in a rush. And a couple of months after that, I started learning new cards as part of my Beeminder experiment. Then I trailed off again, and I just caught up in another rush. Catching up Over the past few days, I've cleared a backlog of about 500 Egyptian cards: 
This took me between 15 minutes and 1.5 hours per day: 
All in all, not too bad—there are people who spend more time than this on their languages every day. What does it feel like to catch up? At first, it feels like I've forgotten a lot. My failure rate is high, and I strain to understand the cards. But within a couple of days, I'm flying: My review speed is way up, and I can read cards at a glance. And it's not just stuff I've already seen on another card: My Egyptian "activates", and everything becomes easier and faster. Some random observations and advice: 1. This kind of catchup is much easier with easy MCD cards, because they provide lots of hints, and I see each text multiple times. 2. I try not to fail too many cards. A lot of the time, I'll just go ahead and choose "Hard" unless I've totally forgotten the material. This prevents me from building a big backlog of failed cards. 3. I delete whenever I feel the urge. Yes, I'm a broken record on this issue. There's a reason. :-) Looking forward Now that my backlog is cleared, my daily review load looks pretty reasonable: 
Here's what I need to do next: 1. Reset my Beeminder road from lesson 65 to lesson 61. 2. Make more Anki cards for lessons 62 through 65. 3. Start reviewing normally again. Fortunately, thanks to design of my Egyptian experiments, I have tons of material in Anki, which means that don't loose much ground. And because my progress is so slow (1 Assimil lesson/week), backlogs build up very slowly. Still, I'm actually learning Egyptian, even if the process is slow. It's just a little minor background task in my life. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5524 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 1164 of 1317 31 October 2014 at 2:37am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Un peu de rattrapage
I've now caught up on my French decks, too, bringing the total reviews to more than 1,100 cards in 9 days: 
I actually had a higher proportion of failures than you see here, but since I'm working with sentence cards and MCDs, I often just select "Hard" instead of failing a card outright. This catch up included three days with over an hour of Anki reviews: 
Overall, a bit draining, but otherwise reasonably pleasant. My deck is full of quotes from good books and movies (plus Assimil L'Égyptien), so reviewing it is a pleasure. Quelques statistiques I have done Anki reviews on 759 of the last 951 days, averaging 43.4 reviews per active day, for a grand total of 32,917 reviews. My most intensive period was at the beginning, when I spent 4 months studying French full time, making it from A2 to a solid B2 before my exam. During that time, I learned up to 40 cards per day (which I do not recommend, since it chokes out extensive activities, unless you actually study full time). 
My Anki use goes in waves: Sometimes I learn new cards (generally not many), sometimes I just review existing cards, and sometimes I ignore it completely for a month or two, followed by a burst of catch-up. But as you can see above, even during my catchup period, I may spend an hour a day for a few consecutive days. Mostly, I learn 5 or 10 new cards per day for a reasonable fraction of the year. What's next For the moment, I'm learning 5 new Spanish subs2srs cards a day, though I may bump that to 10. And within the next week or so, I plan to resume learning 5 Egyptian cards per day. I have no plans to learn any new French cards—the best thing I can do for my French right now is spend more time on extensive activities. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5548 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 1165 of 1317 31 October 2014 at 5:50am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Great job on catching up with those elusive "hierocards", emk; you put me to shame! With cap in hand, my copy of "L’Égyptien hiéroglyphique" must have gathered enough dust by now to be worthy of a place in a museum itself (or at least a Sherlock Holmes anecdote), but I'm confident I'll work a way of fitting it into my crazy schedule by the end of this year. What lesson are you up to now (you must be very close to finishing already)? As always, your posts are a real pleasure to follow, and you can still count me in for May 2015! ;)
1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5524 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 1166 of 1317 01 November 2014 at 12:50pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I'm on lesson 65, but I'm going to rewind back to lesson 62 and start over from there. The good news is that what I've learned, I know quite well, and I'm in no danger of losing it. May 2015 is sadly out of reach (especially given my Spanish experiment), but really, everything after lesson 60 or so is mostly an introduction to Egyptian literature. I'll resume study in a week or so. A bunny polyglot My younger son informs me that his stuffed bunny speaks Italian and Spanish and French and English. His bunny also apparently enjoys Virent Ova! Viret Perna! (the Latin edition of Green Eggs and Ham), because his bunny also speaks Latin. Yes, I do occasionally read my children bedtime stories in Latin, with silly voices. I assume this is relatively normal behavior for HTLAL, right? :-) Edited by emk on 01 November 2014 at 12:52pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5524 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 1167 of 1317 01 November 2014 at 10:39pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
While the kids were napping this afternoon, I went through lessons 62–65 and added the Anki cards I had skipped the first time. This leaves me 37 days of safety margin on Beeminder, and 110 cards to learn. This means I'll be learning 5 cards/day for Egyptian, and 10 cards/day for Spanish. It feels a little crowded in my head I devoted a substantial chunk of time today to each of four(!) languages. A couple of long conversations in English with neighbor, 20 minutes of Anki in Spanish, conversations with my wife and her family in French, and at least 90 minutes getting caught up on Egyptian. English can take of itself (obviously), and Egyptian is a purely-written non-Indo-European language, so it doesn't really bother anything else. But I'm seeing a small amount of very light interference from Spanish when starting conversations in French—my brain is like, "Wait, um, there's another language in here? What am I doing now?" I don't expect this to be an actual problem. But now that I've realized, "Hey, I can learn a language!", it's a bit alarming how they're starting to pile up. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| csidler Diglot Pro Member Australia chadsidler.com Joined 4815 days ago 51 posts - 59 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Italian, French Personal Language Map | Message 1168 of 1317 06 November 2014 at 1:50am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Did you ever put much time into trying an alternative to Anki, such as memrise?
1 person has voted this message useful |
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