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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6821 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 113 of 124 10 December 2013 at 8:34am | IP Logged |
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REVIEW OF PROGRESS
2013 overall has been a productive year in terms of language study. Here’s a brief summary of my progress in the following languages: CANTONESE: Thanks to immersion in Hong Kong and intensive studying, I’ve made a respectable amount of progress in Cantonese. This year, I started and finished: (1) four volumes of Sidney Lau’s Elementary and Intermediate Cantonese, (2) Susanna Ng’s Interesting Cantonese Volumes 1 & 2, (3) Routledge’s Beginning Cantonese Grammar, and (4) Greenwood Press’s Living Cantonese for Intermediate Learners. I am also about 85% of the way through Routledge’s Intermediate Cantonese Grammar. I now have a number of friends and relatives with whom I speak exclusively in Cantonese, and I have logged about 30 hours of Cantonese language exchanges. I have gone from high beginner (roughly high A1 or low A2) to high intermediate. I am probably hovering just below basic fluency, according to HTLAL’s guidelines, with the main limitation being a lack of reading ability. SPANISH: I read three novels this year, and I also resumed Spanish tutoring lessons via Skype (approximately 15 hours worth). My Spanish isn’t quite back to its highest previous level, but my speaking ability and comprehension have recovered fairly well. GERMAN: After allowing my skills to atrophy for more than a decade, I finally dusted off my German and reactivated it for a trip to Germany and Austria earlier this year. Using Anki, I have learned all the words in Langenscheidt’s Basic German Vocabulary (4,000 words total). I have recovered probably 90% of my previous knowledge of the language and filled in some holes in my vocabulary. FRENCH: I also reactivated my French for a two week trip to Paris earlier this year. I did a complete review of Assimil’s New French with Ease, and I also started and finished: (1) Assimil’s French Without Toil, (2) Living Language’s Ultimate French: Basic-Intermediate, and (3) an entire newspaper issue of Les Échos. Additionally, I used Anki to learn 1,500 new words in French, mostly taken from Assimil, newspaper readings, and my time in France. I have recovered all of my previous knowledge of French, and also expanded my vocabulary and grammar knowledge. JAPANESE: Starting from a base of about 50 words and phrases from Pimsleur, I learned a low-beginner level of Japanese for a two-week trip to Tokyo. I used a combination of Assimil Japanese, JapanesePod101, Japanese for Busy People, and Anki to teach myself kana, basic Japanese grammar, and a base vocabulary of roughly 950 words. GOALS FOR NEXT YEAR Next year, I plan to simplify my language learning. I won’t be doing so much traveling, so it doesn’t make sense to spread myself thin trying to focus intensively on a different language every few months. CANTONESE: This remains the focal point of my studies. Next year, I plan to get through Greenwood Press’s Intermediate Themes for Listening and Speaking, Wedding Bells intermediate reader, and at least half of Interesting Cantonese Volume 3. I would like to learn at least 2,000 more vocabulary words to fill in additional holes in my vocabulary, and memorize at least 1,500 characters from the Anki deck I've been working on. Hopefully, next year will be the year that I reach basic fluency! MANDARIN: I will need to make a several business trips to the mainland this upcoming year, so it’s time to learn some Mandarin. I stopped learning Mandarin back in fall 2007, so it’s been a while. Back then, I made it through Pimsleur Levels I-III, FSI Modules 1-3, Chinese in a Flash Volumes 1 and 2, and about 20 lessons of ChinesePod Intermediate. With some effort, I can probably still recall and use about 1,000 words and some basic sentence patterns, with the primary difficulty at this point being interference from Cantonese. I have decided that I’ll start with a modified, low-intensity version of Ari’s ChinesePod method (maybe going through one lesson every 2-3 days, instead of every day). This will keep things fun and interesting while I figure out how much grammar I want to learn. I hope to get through at least 100 ChinesePod lessons next year. I will use Anki to learn vocabulary, but I’ll hold off on learning any Mandarin readings of characters for now. GERMAN: I plan to spend a week in Austria next year, so there will still be some need to keep my German fresh. I’ll probably start reactivating my German in May, using a combination of Assimil German with Ease and Using German (French base). This time, it’ll be easier since I’m still reviewing the Langenscheidt basic vocabulary words every day. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4696 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 114 of 124 11 December 2013 at 7:02am | IP Logged |
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Ari's ChinesePod method is fabulous. I don't follow it verbatim, but I do incorporate elements of the method into my own learning.
For example, any audio that I've used in my study - audio that comes with my textbooks, or from JapanesePod101 or PortuguesePod101 - is edited down just to the dialogues, then put them onto a Japanese/Portuguese listening review playlist. When I am walking to/from work/home, or if I need an "easy" language activity, I'll hit play on my Walkman and randomly listen to a few tracks. It's amazing how much that helps. I've had Japanese lessons where I just couldn't understand everything in a dialogue as I listen through it, or catch every word or syllable, no matter how many times I listened to it. Then, after a few weeks/months on the listening playlist, all of a sudden words, syllables and meanings become "revealed" to me, and it gets easier to listen to and understand a dialogue. I guess some things just take time to "stick" in my head. And it's not those dialogues that become easier to listen to and understand. I've noticed gradual, minute improvements in my Japanese listening when I am speaking Japanese to people around Osaka. Unless I turn on Internet radio, the only time I ever hear Portuguese is through my listening review playlist. And I think that has helped my listening tremendously. I notice the difference when I do listen to Internet radio. EDIT: Oh, and job well done for 2013. Keep it up for 2014! Edited by kujichagulia on 11 December 2013 at 7:04am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6821 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 115 of 124 13 December 2013 at 4:17am | IP Logged |
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@kujichagulia: Thanks! And congratulations on your progress this year too! After my brief stint studying Japanese, I definitely have a newfound appreciation for the complexities of that language and just how hard it is for language learners. As for the Chinesepod method, I’m looking forward to trying it out. Repeated listenings over time does seem to work: most recently, I’ve noticed that when watching and rewatching commercials on television, my comprehension is improving. There are commercials I used to see on TV back when I first moved to Hong Kong that completely went over my head; now, after seeing those same ads hundreds of times, I am finally beginning to understand them!
CANTONESE I started flipping through a few pages of Intermediate Themes for Listening and Speaking yesterday, and the book seems to be at the perfect level for me. The book is split into 12 chapters, each which includes several dialogues that cover a range of topics, such as pop culture, music, sports, outdoor activities, housing and dieting. There are approximately 800 vocabulary words, probably about 500 which are new to me, such as “balance,” “outskirts,” “accommodation,” “carbohydrate,” “TV addict,” “less crowded,” etc. This is helpful since my dedicated vocabulary books, the Interesting Cantonese series, focus mainly on concrete nouns, but skimp on abstract words like “accommodation,” “phenomenon,” “attitude,” “potential” or nouns like “blanch,” “chew,” “screw,” and “flip.” Cantonese is rich with all these words, so I have been learning them from other sources, but Intermediate Themes will help fill in the gaps. I also think this is a good book to follow Living Cantonese, since the grammar and sentence patterns in Living Cantonese seem more common and basic than the ones in Intermediate Themes. One interesting thing about the book (that some learners may find unnecessary) is that there is considerable attention given to explaining the differences between spoken Cantonese and standard written Chinese, including Mandarin pronunciations. Last year, I would’ve just ignored these explanations and exercises, but now that I am adding Mandarin to my list, this feature seems like it’ll be quite useful. I am now 90% of the way through Routledge Intermediate Cantonese. I just have two more short chapters to review and add to Anki. I am not too concerned at the moment about retaining all of the grammar explanations, since I will do another pass through the much thicker Routledge Comprehensive Grammar book at some later point in time, but I do want to memorize all of the sentence patterns and sample sentences in the current volume. I know I spend a lot of time harping about building vocabulary, but I really feel that for me, it’s the biggest stumbling block in trying to survive speaking Chinese while living here in Asia. Even after studying literally thousands of words this year, I still come across so many new situations every day where I need to know and use words that aren’t part of my vocabulary – such as trying to explain the history of MLK day in the US, talking about the design and stitching of a wedding dress, discussing spare parts for a broken water heater, paying a tax bill, or teaching someone how to braise short ribs. I think if I only interacted with Cantonese speakers in a limited vacation/tourist setting, I’d feel pretty fluent chatting about things like traveling, sightseeing or restaurants. But when I’m dealing with situations where I really do need to have conversations about “any topic” all the time, fluency still feels so far away. CURRENT ANKI COUNTS Cantonese (vocabulary and sentence patterns): 5243 cards (147 cards not yet reviewed) Cantonese (characters): 9883 cards, including flipped cards (9263 cards not yet reviewed) French: 1456 cards German: 1415 cards Japanese: 950 cards Spanish: 1435 cards 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6821 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 116 of 124 17 December 2013 at 2:50am | IP Logged |
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CANTONESE
Yesterday, we had a family dinner with relatives, and I was very happy to be able to speak fairly fluent Cantonese during most of the evening. Some of the conversation topics were still over my head, and there were a few things people said that just flew right past me, but overall, I was able to understand most of what was discussed and participate without too much strain. One thing I am still working on, though, is correcting “automatic” mistakes that just come out when I’m speaking. For instance, about six months ago, one of my big problems was that I would respond incorrect to a question – for instance, if a supermarket cashier asked me if I wanted a plastic bag, I would say, “haih” (the incorrect response) rather than “yiu” (the correct response). Even though I knew it was the wrong answer, I still couldn’t stop myself from saying it in the moment, since the wrong answer just came out automatically. It took several months before I stopped making this kind of mistake, although every so often, I’ll still lapse. There are a few other things that I know I say incorrectly that I still need to fix, so it’s something that I am paying close attention to. For instance, I tend to overuse the final particles “ama” and “wo,” which make everything I say sound like a teaching moment or a surprise to me. It’s good that I am aware that I am making these mistakes so that I can focus on improving, but nevertheless, it still makes me wince a little inside when I say the wrong thing. I’ve finally finished adding all of the Routledge Intermediate Cantonese words to my Anki deck: in total, it came out to be 980 example sentences. I am currently learning 3 new cards per day and I still need to get through 230 new cards, so it’ll take a few months before I make it through all of them. But this is not a rush project. Most of the sentences are things that I already understand and use; the primary purpose of this Anki deck is to reinforce the correct sentence patterns and idiomatic usages. MANDARIN I’ve gotten a headstart on next year’s resolution to go through at least 100 ChinesePod lessons. #1 was the intermediate level lesson on negotiating a contract for teaching English in China. After listening to three seasons of JapanesePod101, it is so nice to come back to ChinesePod. Jenny and John are such incredible hosts—knowledgeable, engaging and great at explaining things, and Jenny’s Mandarin is so clear. I do like JapanesePod101, and I think it delivers a lot of value for the money, but I still like ChinesePod more. I think part of this is because of the engaging hosts, part of it is that the episode-based (non-serial) structure of ChinesePod is more flexible, and part of it is that Chinese is simply more straightforward than Japanese. Regardless, I think using this ChinesePod method will be fun. I think my ChinesePod level is just right at the cusp of intermediate. The elementary lessons are too easy, but the intermediate lessons still have a LOT of new words to learn. According to Ari’s method, if I continue with the Intermediate lessons and diligently learn the new vocabulary, these lessons should eventually get pretty easy and then I can move on to the upper-intermediate level. After I get through a few more lessons, I’ll put together an Anki deck and start SRS-ing all of this new vocabulary. Most of these words are very similar to Cantonese words I already know, so this will either make the Mandarin vocabulary very easy or very confusing to learn. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6821 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 117 of 124 20 December 2013 at 2:37am | IP Logged |
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CANTONESE
I’ve been speaking a lot of Cantonese in the past few days, and I can definitely feel my abilities improving. Namely, I’ve been able to use a lot of new sentence patterns and structures, as well as infrequent vocabulary, without mental strain or effort. Even a lot of fairly complex sentence structures come almost automatically now. It doesn’t feel exhausting to sustain several hours of conversation in the language. That said, there are still a few things that I still need a lot of work with. My processing time with numbers is still embarassingly slow, even if it’s just telling someone how much I paid for something, the date that I’m doing something, or what time it is. I still get pretty frustrated when there are vocabulary words that I don’t know. Yesterday, for instance, I didn’t know the words for mortar and pestle, and it sort of halted the conversation while I tried to talk around the missing words. And, when I deviate too far from my comfort zone, my language still breaks down. Just yesterday, I needed to tell someone that I want to have the same cell phone carrier as my friends, since intranetwork SMS messaging is free, whereas per-SMS charges can quickly add up, and I was pretty much at a loss of words. There were simply too many words I didn’t know and too many confusing structures that I wasn’t comfortable with, that I just sort of ended up babbling. MANDARIN ChinesePod Lessons #2 was Teaching English in China, and Lesson #3 was Lili & Zhang Liang: A Fated Meeting. I’ve been making good use of all three tracks for each lesson: the audio track is great for listening to the banter between the hosts; the dialog-only track is good to get repeated listens; and the review track is an awesome learning tool. Like the JapanesePod review tracks, these “audio fix” tracks test recall of vocabulary words and also drills translation of new sentences. These tracks are longer than JapanesePod’s reviews, and the inclusion of the sentence translations is great, since I can really hear and use the vocabulary in context. I’ve been spending about an hour a day listening to ChinesePod, mostly focusing on the dialogue and review tracks. Each new lesson has approximately 15-20 new vocabulary words in it, which I’ve started inputting into a new Anki deck. I've initially set the Anki deck to test me on 10 new words per day; I think this is a reasonable pace, especially since I am not learning any new German/French/Japanese words at the moment. Once the daily reviews starts to get too unwieldy (for me, more than 50 reviews/day), I might dial back the number of new cards per day. I’ve been ignoring the characters for now, since it’s too much of a hassle to input them into Anki and I think introducing simplified characters to the mix will just be confusing. My sentiments might change when I start making trips to China and find that I can’t read anything in simplified. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6821 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 118 of 124 31 December 2013 at 8:44am | IP Logged |
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I finally created flipped cards (L1 -> L2) on Anki, which have doubled up most of my deck card counts. I have held off until now because I wanted to make sure that my passive knowledge was pretty strong, and also because I usually don’t have a problem actively recalling words that I’ve studied passively with Anki. But now that my decks are getting pretty large, especially for Cantonese, I need to be sure I can recall the words rather than just understand them. And I think the timing is right for French, German, Spanish and Japanese, since I haven’t added new cards to those decks in a while, so the daily reviews have dwindled down to very small numbers.
CANTONESE I start my new job in a week, so I anticipate having a lot less time to devote to studying Cantonese. With that in mind, I’ve gone through the entire Intermediate Themes for Speaking and Listening book, and culled out all of the new vocabulary (660 words total). That’s usually the most time consuming, labor-intensive part of my studies; all that is left is to review the new words every day and then do the listening and speaking exercises whenever I can. I spent most of yesterday speaking Cantonese with friends, which was great practice. Speaking has gotten a lot easier, especially when I’m warmed up. There were still a lot of words that I didn’t know and which I’ve added to Anki – things like, “healthcare,” “motivation,” “middle class,” “potassium,” PH level,” and so forth. But I feel like I’m starting to reach the point where I can usually guess what a word means based on context. MANDARIN I’ve made it up to 8 ChinesePod lessons: #4 (Standing in Line), #5 (Studying Chinese in China), #6 (Going to the Dentist), #7 (A Trip to the Dry Cleaners), and #8 (Adoption). I’ve been spending a lot of time with the review tracks, which have been a great study tool. For a lot of the words, I can understand them easily when I see the pin yin and characters, because they are similar to Cantonese. And I can usually understand them when spoken at a fairly slow pace, but it’s hard for me to recall and use the Mandarin pronunciations myself. I think after so many years of listening to Cantonese, my brain has adjusted to the rhythm and prosody of Cantonese, so switching to Mandarin tones and prosody is a challenge. Luckily, I don’t think that studying Mandarin has adversely affected my Cantonese, at least not in the past two weeks. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6821 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 119 of 124 09 January 2014 at 2:43am | IP Logged |
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Since adding flipped L1 L2 cards to my Anki deck, my daily reviews has gone up substantially. The new reviews aren’t so bad since these are mostly words that I have already learned pretty well the first time around. But this should keep me busy for most of the year, as I get through all of the “new” cards.
CANTONESE I have made it through most of Chapter 1 of Intermediate Themes. The book feels less polished than Living Cantonese: whereas the Living Cantonese dialogues were produced professionally as part of a popular radio show, I believe the Intermediate Themes dialogues were written and produced in-house by Greenwood. So the dialogs seem a little bit stilted, and the voice actors don’t seem as experienced. There are spots, for instance, where the actors seem to hesitate or stumble when reading their lines. But overall, the dialogs do a great job of including lots of new words and sentence patterns. And they speak at a realistic conversational pace that is good for my listening comprehension practice. Since I just started a new job, I haven’t really figured out a schedule for formally studying Cantonese and getting through the Intermediate Themes book. I have a lot of commute time on the MTR, which is great for Anki reviews, but it’s too noisy to listen to dialogues, and I don’t like lugging around the Intermediate Themes book, which is pretty large, on the train. My office is an English-speaking environment, so there are very few opportunities to speak Cantonese at work. Hopefully, once I get settled in at work, I’ll be able to carve out some time to resume language exchanges and study Cantonese. In the meanwhile, I’ll just try to seize whatever opportunities come up naturally while living here in Hong Kong. MANDARIN I have only added one new ChinesePod lesson to my study list: #9 (This is Outrageous!). I’ve memorized the dialogues for the easier lessons, including Teaching English in China, A Fated Meeting, and Adoption, but some of the longer lessons are still tough (e.g., Standing in Line, A Trip to the Dry Cleaners, etc.). I try to strike a balance between adding enough new lessons to keep my studies interesting, and spending more time on past lessons to make sure that I really learn the vocabulary and the sentence patterns. I don’t know how Ari was able to manage learning a new lesson every day, but I generally find that an Assimil-like approach of allowing lessons to sink in over time works best for me. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6821 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 120 of 124 23 May 2014 at 8:50am | IP Logged |
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The new job has been pretty busy, so I haven’t had any time or energy to post on this log. Recently, it’s been really hard to motivate myself to study languages, so my lofty goal of tackling Mandarin this year has gone out the window. I haven’t even looked at a ChinesePod lesson in months.
The one thing I’ve still managed to do, however, is keep up with Anki. I’ve been doing all of my daily reviews, which includes new flipped cards for all of my languages as well as 5 new characters per day from the shared deck of 5,000 Cantonese characters. The former is very useful, since using these flipped cards to force myself to practice active recall is really helping me solidify all of the vocabulary I crammed last year. The latter is also helpful, although it is extremely slow and painful to plod through these new characters every day. My character recognition is still very weak, but I am now able to read a lot more characters than I could before. I haven’t done any systematic study with the Greenwood Press books over the past several months, but I took a look at the first seven chapters of the “Wedding Bells” intermediate/advanced level reader, and I was happy to note that I could read about 80% of the sentences. I still have approximately two more years before I finish this deck, and I imagine even longer before I’ll feel comfortable reading in Chinese, but I’m looking forward to one day overcoming that hurdle. Already, I’m noticing that studying characters has been strengthening my overall knowledge and comfort with the language, especially with how words are put together. I’ve also noticed that at some point in the past several months, the tones have really “clicked” in my head. Before, I was usually able to replicate tones in speaking, but I couldn’t really identify the tones of particular words in isolation, and when I encountered new words, it was hard for me to use the correct tone until I’d heard the word a zillion times. Also, I would sometimes mess up and use the wrong tone, even for common words where I knew and could normally use the correct tone. But finally, after much studying, I’ve reached the point where I can pretty easily identify which tones are which, even for new words. My accuracy is much higher than before; I rarely make tone mistakes now, except for sporadic mistakes with very low frequency words that I don’t have much occasion to use. My use of final sentence particles has also been improving. I’ve noticed that I usually use the appropriate particle, and I don’t have to think about it most of the time. There are still a few that I’m not very comfortable with, such as “jēk” and “le mē,” but I think it’ll come with time. I’m noticing that a few that I used to struggle with, such as “gwa,” “lo,” and “bo” now feel much more natural to me. I think learning these words requires subconsciously associating the particle with the emotion it is intended to convey, which takes a lot of exposure and practice. In terms of other word use, I have a tendency to overuse “dōu” especially when I mean to use “jauh” or “yauh,” so that’s something I will continue to pay attention to and try to work on. Edited by mike245 on 23 May 2014 at 8:50am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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