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Kuji’s Krazy Log II | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5158 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 513 of 706 13 June 2014 at 10:58pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I've been through the same feelings lately. I'm kinda concerned about the effectiveness
of everything I'm doing. I believe extensive activities alone won't bring me to fluency, or that that will take me too long. Therefore I will try as often as possible to read at least 1 page intensively, for instance. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| sabotai Senior Member United States Joined 5874 days ago 391 posts - 489 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Japanese, Korean, French | Message 514 of 706 14 June 2014 at 6:17am | IP Logged | ||||||||
This was where I was for the longest time, so much so that this post could be used as a summery for my previous learning logs (and much of my current one). One grand scheme after the other. At one point, I think I enjoyed making up my elaborate systems more than I liked learning languages. I'd make this system, think of how I'm going to demolish all of this material in every possible way, and then I'd miss a day or two and my system would collapse on itself. Then I'd either waste a week trying to get it back up and running, or I'd scrap it and start over. I did go a bit too far to the other end late last year with my experiment with not having any plan at all and just doing "whatever I felt like doing". That just made me feel lost. So, now I have a rather loose, flexible system. I have a list of activities (most I can usually do in 15 minute chunks), and I try to do 1 reading (SRS handles this now) and 1 listening activity every day. Some days I do worry about if I'm making good progress, especially if I've spent several days just doing SRS and listening to old dialogs, but I then I just remind myself that being too obsessed with progress in the past has caused far more harm to my language learning (going way too fast through materials) than good. And another thank you to Expugnator for that link on habits. Very good article. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4839 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 515 of 706 16 June 2014 at 4:52am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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@Expugnator - I know what you mean. I myself have found that a lot of my activities are based on the written word, and I'm trying to see how I can add more listening, watching and speaking activities into my routine.
@sabotai - Thank you for the comment. I'm glad I'm not the only one that felt that way! My system is very similar to yours in that I have a list of activities that I rotate through, but also some activities I try to do on a regular basis regardless of the rotation, for example, writing something every Tuesday, etc. To be honest, this system is pretty good for me, but I'm probably expecting it to do miracles. The system is there just to keep myself organized. The system itself is not going to make me fluent in Japanese or Portuguese. That depends on the quality of my language time. I'm currently spending an hour a day with Japanese (a conservative measure) and perhaps an hour with Portuguese (definitely a more liberal measure). That is not enough time to become "fluent in a year" or whatever my brain seems to think I can do. But that is enough time to improve every day and get better and better. But more to the point: my problem is making sure I put in the quality time every day. I spend time with my languages every day, but the amount of time is wildly inconsistent. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6612 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish | Message 516 of 706 16 June 2014 at 8:05am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Thanks for the link. I have the same problem with grand schemes. I need to find small things I can easily do every day and make them habits.
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| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4839 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 517 of 706 17 June 2014 at 7:16am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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@Brun Ugle - as I said earlier, it's great to have you back! That link is awesome, isn't it? Together let's kick the habit of grand schemes and establish some new and better habits! :)
OK, I whine and complain a lot on this log. I'm sometimes embarrassed about it, but I tell myself that other people may have the same problems, so I post what I feel. I don't plan to quit that. But something I want to do is to start doing daily updates, like other loggers do. Nothing fancy; just a log of what I do every day. To be honest, I don't believe that I can update every single day, but I won't kick myself if I miss a day or two of logging. I fear, though, that it will turn into a weekly update - which, of course, is not bad. Japanese - Back when I first started keeping a log on HTLAL, I ordered a book called Breaking into Japanese Literature. The book has seven classic Japanese short stories, with the Japanese on the left, English translation on the right, and definitions of nearly all the Japanese words on that page at the bottom. There are audio mp3s as well, so one could really do some serious L-R using just one book and no dictionaries! The only problem was that at the time, I was not ready for it. The stories are from 100 years ago or so, and there are a lot of archaic words and Chinese characters. So the book sat on my bookshelf for two years. Until yesterday. On the way out of my house to go to work, I grabbed Breaking into Japanese Literature and put it in my bag, then I worked on the first page for 20 minutes on the train ride to work. The first thing I can say is that it seems a lot easier to read than it did two years ago. Of course, I have the English translation right there, but I found that I didn't have to refer to it as much as I thought I would. That doesn't mean that I hardly referred to the English, because I referred to it a lot. But it was better than I thought. I could have read for the entire 40-minute ride, but I'm trying to use timeboxing techniques. The rest of the train time was spent reviewing a JapanesePod101.com podcast. At home, I spent 15 minutes on a reading assignment in Chapter 14 of An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese. Actually, less than 15 minutes; my wife wanted me to make her some tea. I'm such a gentleman. EDIT: Oh, I forgot: I watched about an hour of recorded World Cup games in Japanese! I have not yet watched a World Cup game in English. The broadcasts here (the NHK ones) might have an English audio track, but I haven't even bothered to check. I'm proud of myself! Portuguese - Yesterday was not a good Portuguese day. I planned to do a little journal writing on the train ride home, but I was just so tired, so I spent the entire time listening to my playlist of DLI and PortuguesePod101.com dialogs (with some Natiruts mixed in). At home, I tried doing some Memrise. I chose a basic Portuguese course and went through some of the cards. But I knew a lot of it already. I wanted to just delete, delete, delete, and study what I don't know. But I don't know how to do that. I guess that is one advantage Anki has; you can create your own cards on stuff that you need to study. I'm too busy right now, but I want to start setting some monthly goals. I'm thinking of a half-month's worth of goals for the second half of June to start with. I'll post those at a later time. Edited by kujichagulia on 17 June 2014 at 7:20am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6589 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 518 of 706 17 June 2014 at 12:37pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I'm proud of you too :)))) Maybe especially of how this is so natural that you forgot to mention it. To be nitpicky, this material isn't very suitable for true LR, because it's not a continuous long text by the same author. The book sounds good for sure, but this format originates from teaching literature, I think. And you can get a much better idea of the various styles by reading short excerpts in your native language. A language learner can't skip actually reading, and it generally gets easier after, say, 10 pages, and much easier after 50-100. Also, a commute is like a timebox in itself. You have to see for yourself whether you lose momentum when you shift focus. It can be like recharging too, though. For me a big advantage of my e-reader is being able to read more than one book during the commute. But these are minor things really. You seem very motivated and enthusiastic, which is much more important :-) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4839 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 519 of 706 18 June 2014 at 3:02am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I forgot to mention it because it didn't feel like study. I have to watch the World Cup, right? :)
Yeah, that's true. I shouldn't have said that it was good for LR; I don't want to give people the wrong idea. I'm using the book as a "warm-up" until summer vacation starts at my school. With the students gone and no classes to teach, I can take my time and peruse around the school library, and maybe do some reading there during work hours (shhhh... don't tell anyone!). I tried reading one novel last summer, a book called Kitchen. It was kind of interesting, but there were a lot of words I had to look up. Even with a mix of intensive and extensive reading, it took me two weeks to read 60 pages... then I had to take it back to the city library. But the librarian at the school library will let me borrow books for the entire one-month summer vacation, so I'm hoping to take advantage of that. Yeah, there's no getting around the fact that I need to read, and I need to go through the struggle of the first 10, 50, 100, 200 pages, etc., and keep struggling until it gets easier.
Interesting that you brought that up. I was just thinking this morning if I really need to have timeboxing during my commute. The point of my doing timeboxing was to encourage me to set a habit of doing something every day, but I'm already doing something every day on the train. It's at home that I need to work on consistency. I think doing timeboxing during the commute has indeed caused me to lose momentum on some activities like reading. I'm going to rethink this. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4839 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 520 of 706 19 June 2014 at 2:32am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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OK, I've thrown timeboxing out the window. Yesterday morning, I read another page from the first story in Breaking Into Japanese Literature. By the way, that story is called "The First Night", from Natsume Soseki's Ten Nights of Dreams. Very interesting story. Anyway, instead of stopping halfway through my commute as I was doing the past few days, I just kept reading until I got off the train - the entire 40 minutes. I had this satisfying feeling that I was able to read more that I usually do, and I felt like I got more out of it.
On the way home, I did the same with the Portuguese article I'm reading. It's a bilingual text iguanamon sent me sometime ago about a sketch artist in Mauritania. I just kept reading for the entire 40 minutes. I don't even know why I was timeboxing my commutes. That is a problem I have. I get an idea to solve a small problem (study habits at home), and I apply it to everything. So, no more timeboxing. I'm just doing a straight rotation through my list of activities. As for home study, I'm setting my timer to 15 minutes, and I'm making sure that I get at least 15 minutes of study done every night, and more if I feel like it. I did that last night with An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese. The second reading assignment in Chapter 14 is really boring, but last night I got into the flow and worked through it for 30 minutes, did the questions in the workbook, and presto!, it was done. Now all I have to do is the listening assignments and the review - both of which are relatively quick - and Chapter 14 is done! That leaves the 15th and final chapter to tackle. In addition to all that, I watched about 20 minutes of the Brazil-Mexico World Cup game, in Japanese. I have not yet watched a single match while listening to it in Portuguese, as I had hoped to do, because lately I'm not up so early as to listen to it live online. If I have energy, I may try doing that this weekend. Edited by kujichagulia on 19 June 2014 at 2:33am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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