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srs, fsi, podcasts, l-r, shadowing | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4758 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes  Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 41 of 44 19 July 2014 at 6:06am | IP Logged |
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4103 cards in anki mature or learning categories.
I've decided to give fsi another try. This is completely different than what I was thinking a couple of days ago, but the people over on James29's thread were pretty convincing. I believe that the massive reading and listening of the super challenge might have pushed my passive skills up to a C1 without improving my active skills much. I still want to do something like the superchallenge at some point, but I won't do it as a part of anybody's "challenge". I'm not out to compete with anyone, and I don't want to consider anything except what I think will be effective when I decide to do something. Challenges are not for me. OK FSI. I bombed out at about Unit 15 the first time and at about Unit 11 the second. If I approach it the same way, I will bomb out again, and miss all of the wonderful effects that people who have completed the course say that it gives. One approach that I tried was to go through and entire unit each day, repeating the same Unit for about a week. This meant going through a unit several days, and having to wait days before I could start to notice improvement. The second approach I used was to go through each unit one time, rewinding a minute each time I make a mistake, and only moving forward when I have each response perfect. My idea here was that I would spend more time on what I was bad at and less time on what I already knew. It sounds good, but in practice, it sucks. Here is why, I move quickly over what I already sort of know, and barely review it one time. When I get to materials that trip me up I spend a long time on them, maybe failing ten times before I get it right. Once again I would move forward when I get it right once, barely learning it and not reviewing. This method means that most of the time is spent failing to respond correctly. Here is what I am going to do this time. I've split up the longer files that make up the first 45 units into approximately 10 minute files. I'm going to do each file 6 times and then move on. During 6 repetitions I should see improvement each day. If I am still making a lot of mistakes after 6 tries, it's time to move on anyway. I will adjust the schedule if I can think of a better way to do it. So far, I quite like the feeling of "mastering" a little piece of the course each day. The conversations and drills really "ring in your head" after 6 repetitions. At this point I'm not going to worry about reviews. :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4758 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 42 of 44 19 August 2014 at 3:05am | IP Logged |
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As anybody can see, I've had a bad case of wanderlust on learning methods.
I threw out all of my L1 to L2 cards from my anki deck. They take too long. There are many ways to translate an English student into Spanish, and it seems silly to only count one of them as right. All of my cards now are from books for the super challenge. I listen to the radio news in Spanish every day for at least a half hour. I've only missed one day with anki. With the massive thrashing I gave my anki deck, I only have about 2000 cards in the mature and learning categories. I did a bunch of shadowing of super challenge books, and I have restarted fsi. I hate to make any claims about how I'm doing on fsi, since I have quit it twice. For me it is very important to have an approach that makes sense to me. I have learned that I bomb out if I try too much for perfection. I need to have way to do it, and then just work through it without getting impatient for results. I fooled around a little with Latin and ancient Greek, but I can't really claim I studied. Even though I have floundered on learning methods, I have only missed studying one day. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4758 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 43 of 44 31 August 2014 at 5:20pm | IP Logged |
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I finally seemed to have settled down on a way to study for the next few months.
FSI: I'm working through about 1 unit of FSI each week. I read through the lesson first each day, reading the left column. Then I work through the lesson itself one time. By then end of the week I can do virtually all of it pretty easily. I may be able to get through the lessons faster, but this pace is easy. I'm overlearning a bit. While overlearning has fallen out of favor; the research on massed versus distributed practice is pretty conclusive about the superiority of distributed practice in terms of long term learning, overlearning has the advantage of making the last few days of each week easy. I start a new lesson each Saturday, and by Wednesday I'm rattling through it with few mistakes. I'm only on Unit 5 at this point. I ground my way up to Unit 15 before, stopping and repeating each exercise until I got it perfect. This was too painful to continue. I find FSI drills fun and invigorating if I'm not too tired. Nothing in FSI, even in the later lessons, is completely new to me, but I lack the speed to do it quickly enough without a little practice. SRS: I do my anki reps every day. I've worked through a lot of cards in anki. I've added about 5000 total cards to my deck at this point. I've had some cards from assimil in my deck, in both the passive and active directions. If I have learned anything, it is that cards in the active direction are a pain. Assimil in an active wave is not that bad because the context of the passage helps remove ambiguity in the translation. In an srs card, there is little context and there are many alternate Spanish translations I can think of for a given English translation. I've wiped them from my deck. Now I have a only cards from screenplays and novels that I gathered while I was doing my false start in the superchallenge. I can do five or six times more cards if the cards are in the L2->L1 direction. LISTENING: I've been listening to podcasts recently about a half hour a day. I enjoy this, but I'm thinking about restarting L-R and shadowing. I really enjoyed my L-R of Cien años de soledad. After 2 or 3 L-R's through the book, I could follow most of even that wonderful piece of literature. I don't have a lot of time to do it, but 20 minutes at lunch 5 days a week adds up over the months. I may just continue to listen to podcasts. I've been listening to VoA Buenos Días América, mostly, but the last couple of days I've been listening to Caracol radios Hoy por Hoy midday news podcast. I find it more challenging than VOA, but more interesting also. I am often unfamiliar with the topics that show up on the noonday news in Colombia, and it gives me a chance to learn something about the country once the topic slips into focus. Edited by sfuqua on 31 August 2014 at 6:39pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4758 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 44 of 44 31 August 2014 at 6:38pm | IP Logged |
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automatic control of grammar: 55%
unique passive vocabulary:4553 words. One thing that people like to hear in these logs is about results. I'm in the middle of the big intermediate plateau where it is hard to see improvement every day. I hope that FSI will make up for my lack of immersion and add. I hope that my SRS work will add the vocabulary I need to start to comprehend at the C1 level, someday. One thing that has clearly changed in the last few months is my level of comprehension. I can now often understand the radio pretty completely. I can read many novels now with fair comprehension. I couldn't do these things a few months ago. Comprehension is a strange. I listen to or read something, I understand some of it, and I say, wow, I understood that. A few months later, I read or listen to it again, and whole new aspects pop into focus. What I am saying is that I have a tendency to overestimate my comprehension. I'm trying to think of a way to get a more objective way to measure progress. Maybe I'll count how many words I don't know on a random page of a novel I haven't read. That would only measure vocabulary, and rather crudely at that. There is another way to measure progress. FSI includes most of Spanish grammar. I'm can get over 50% of FSI right, at full speed the first time through. After a week of practice on a unit, I get at least 95% right. So let's say that I have automatic control of about 50% of the grammar. When I finish FSI, I will have automatic control of nearly 100% of the grammar. So lets say, at Unit 5 in FSI, I have a grammar score of 55%. There are about 19,000 unique words in my subtitle/novels deck right now. These words include proper names and different inflections of the same root word. Let's say there are about 10000 root words among these 19000 words (there are at least 9000). Let's say I'm learning a new root word about every card. So at this point my passive vocabulary is at about 4550. This is crude, but at least it is an objective number. Please don't be offended by the crudity of my calculations, but these calculation will give an objective measure of what I have studied and more or less mastered. It's just another way of saying 5 of 55 units of FSI completed, and 4500 of 15000 anki cards completed. Edited by sfuqua on 31 August 2014 at 6:50pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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