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Mandarin: Year 3.7 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| proudft Senior Member United States Joined 5142 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 105 of 111 23 October 2014 at 11:17pm | IP Logged |
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Yeah, Glossika takes a lot of time. At the 50 new sentences/day pace it is 2 hours. Well, I guess that's 2 hours of practice that I wasn't really getting before, so there's that.
Broken down by step: - Listen to previous day's recordings of myself: 13 min - Listen to previous 4-day block of the GMS C files: 15 min - Re-record the previous 4-day block: 15 min - Listen/translate previous 4-day block, using GMS B files: 35 min - Listen/transcribe new 50 sentences, using GMS A files: 30 min - Re-listen/check transcription of new sentences with the text: 15 min - Record new sentences: 3 min Technically I can do the some of these away from the computer (and I did that yesterday on a walk, trying to multitask), but it's always nice to have the text available and the ability to easily rewind/loop if one of the translations is hard. Gonna do a little schedule shuffling now that I know just how long this takes. I suppose slowing down the # of new sentences would proportionally cut the time too, after a few days at the new pace, but naaaaah. 50 a day is a mere 60 days total; 120 hours. I can find 120 hours! Right? :P 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| proudft Senior Member United States Joined 5142 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 106 of 111 30 October 2014 at 3:04am | IP Logged |
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Haha, ok, that pace is not sustainable. Some of these sentences get pretty complicated pretty quickly.
Dropped it back to 25 new a day a few days ago and now that all the past 4 days of review have been at that level, the time has dropped to an hour-and-a-quarter, much easier. Did 426-450 today, so almost halfway through F1. Only 2 intermediate Chinesepods remain. We've dutifully watched a Lala every day. Only about a half dozen episodes left, so nearly time to pick a successor. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| proudft Senior Member United States Joined 5142 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 107 of 111 22 November 2014 at 7:15am | IP Logged |
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Went on vacation for a week and spent a week catching back up on everything.
The Glossikas took a sudden leap in complexity at #550. The last two days I've only had time to add 10 each day and I'm not really confident I will actually remember these, they're so long. We'll see in four days I guess. Sample recent sentence w/my cut-rate pinyin: "We weren't happy with the hotel. Our room was very small and it wasn't clean." -> women bu tai manyi zhe lvguan; women fangjian feichang xiao, erquie bu ganjing. Geez. Time to get that brain in gear, I guess. The successor to Lala is a military show called Chinese Expeditionary Army, which I am watching by myself and up to episode 4. Frankly, it seems kinda useless/lame, but who knows, maybe the military vocabulary might be useful somehow... maybe? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| proudft Senior Member United States Joined 5142 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 108 of 111 01 February 2015 at 12:17am | IP Logged |
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Still plugging along. My lack of posted updates is more to do with nothing really exciting changing in my schedule, plus this site more often then not when I think about posting an update is running at a godawful slow speed and I just decide to go do something else.
But anyway, Christmas with the family was moderately successful. I can understand about 75% of their typical talking, which is enough to follow a conversation... finally. I really like the Glossika, but I sort of derailed myself when they sent out a free update with a mainland speaker instead of a Taiwan speaker. I switched over to that, and since I was at around 600 or so I took a week and a half or so to start the mainland over from 1 and did a TON each day until I caught back up to where I was. Everything else in my life really suffered starting on about day 3 or so... there was one day where I remember doing the Glossika stuff for four hours, no joke. But I did get all re-caught up and have been proceeding along at 10 new sentences a day, I'm at 760 now. When I go on walks I listen to the matching GSR files, it seems to be working out. Chinese Expeditionary Army was replaced with Jia You Er Nv. The amount of talking in the army show was really small. Too much action and standing around, it was not a really good listening::time ratio. I started JYEN over and am on episode 16 now. Similarly to the holiday time with my wife's family, I can understand enough of the talking to follow along - not 75% for this show but maybe half or so. If I reach episode 120 and still can't really follow everything I guess I'll start over and do it line by line, writing it all down... that sounds exceptionally tedious, though. A couple days ago I added 'reading' to my official daily to-do list and started Island of the Blue Dolphins, a translation of a book I read when I was a kid. I was sort of inspired to order this book when we were on vacation and I had some alone time in a library in Santa Barbara and browsed through their Chinese section and read a couple of pages of Harry Potter. Though I was not really a fan of Harry Potter, I could see how reading a translation of something where you sort of already know the plot could be useful, so I ordered the Blue Dolphins and also the Long Winter, which was my favorite Little House on the Prairie book when I was young. And the Stand is en route, but that one is coming from China and I expect it to be probably too difficult for now. Anyway, the reading is really slow. I 'only' have to look up a word every sentence or so but that does take a while. I'm aiming for a page a day for now, which sounds awfully slow but oh well. But again, of all the latest stuff, Glossika is by far the most immediately useful. I really think it is good for anyone who has built up enough vocabulary to concentrate on their grammar instead of the words. Not sure how much that is, there are a bunch of oddball non-typical-daily words in there like broken bone, birds, instruments, and paint, but I knew those already so woot. But for whatever reason grammar has been my sticking point and this is really hammering away at that. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| proudft Senior Member United States Joined 5142 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 109 of 111 02 April 2015 at 4:19am | IP Logged |
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Finally finished Glossika set 1 (to sentence 1000) yesterday. Printed out set 2 in tinytype on doublesided pages and I've been mulling over how to begin with it.
The main problem is on the daily routine, step 4, you hear Mr. Glossika say the English sentence and you're supposed to translate it and say the Chinese sentence out of, I dunno, thin air. Then the Chinese sentence is on the recording to confirm you were right. So as I mentioned before, starting around 550 this got kinda hard. But I checked off which ones I got right each time and usually by day 4 on the repeats I had most of em. But starting around 800 or so, my ability to do this went straight in the toilet. The sentences are getting longer - well, technically a lot of em are multiple sentences - and I am just awful at doing this. However, at the end of the Glossika instructions there's a note: "If you get stuck, keep going." And I'm starting to be more and more convinced that the goal of this thing is to not be some kind of sentence parrot but to internalize the grammar... and that is slowly happening. There are sentences that I'm supposed to say and I'll burble something out that is in the wrong tense or missing a de or something but it's in the ballpark, and I think for now, for the purposes of this, that's good enough. So I'm gonna ramp UP the speed instead of slowing down to get everything 'right'. Because of the way I printed them out (and it took like 250 pages but I really need the printouts to scribble on because once in a while a sentence is written wrong... but I also see in the future using these as substitute drills) it'll be 16 or 20 or some multiple of 4 per day, so I'll start with 20. If I'm not obsessing over the translation step it should still be under an hour. We'll see. I have slogged my way to page 40 of Island of the Blue Dolphins and have accumulated a staggering 350+ words so far from this book. Crazy. I did, while away on a trip, try to read some of The Long Winter without being so particular about looking up every word I didn't know like I have been with the Blue Dolphins, but, amusingly, now it seems to irk me when I do that, like I'm not fully understanding the sentences. The Pleco OCR dictionary has been a godsend for looking things up, though. There are a lot of characters I know by sight and vague meaning but not pronunciation and looking those up takes forever by hand but OCR ... boop done. Another odd thing about Island of the Blue Dolphins, though, is that despite all this looking-up of stuff it is much more interesting to read then any of my native materials, and I'm beginning to be afraid this might be something inherent to Chinese literature. It's hard to describe exactly, but in my official-Chinese Chinese readers, the stories seem to be more about setting up a scene and... ok, there's your scene. Now the story's done and nothing really happened. It's all very descriptive and passive and, I hate to say it but dull to me. I HOPE this is more an artifact of what stories end up in those readers or something but in the Blue Dolphin book, things actually happen, and I actually want to keep reading to see what happens (even though I vaguely remember what happens from grade school). It's a worry that I hope is groundless. Anyway, in the live-listening category I am on episode 43 of Jia You Er Nv. Still pretty spotty on the comprehension but it's getting there. I think their awful Beijing accents are the main thing I'm getting better at. Every once in a while I'll hear a sentence and not even need to look at the subtitles to try and figure out what those sounds were. :P 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| proudft Senior Member United States Joined 5142 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 110 of 111 22 August 2015 at 9:01am | IP Logged |
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Oh hey, the forum is working again.
Watching Divorce Lawyers, on episode 19, and this show is actually funny and has shockingly non-bad production values. There are lots of episodes left for it to take a nosedive but thus far I have been pleasantly surprised, and it's nice to watch a show for the fun of it instead of mostly for the learning. Watching it on DramaFever, which looks promising for future show choices as well (and it looks like a TON of Korean stuff if you're after that). I have battled my way to Island of the Blue Dolphins page 68. My reading has been severely slacking off, mainly because of the current main Chinese project which is Glossika. So, Glossika. I had gotten to like GMS 1700 or so and then Glossika came out with a new website, and on the site the 'steps' were basically completely different than what I had been doing. This caused quite a hrmm from me. Then I thought about what Glossika had been teaching me so far, and really, the previous method had made me really really good at reading pinyin. A laudable skill I am sure but it doesn't help much in conversatin' (that's a word, look it up). The new steps (can see 'em here, the 'intensive' part at the bottom) are full of 'copy the listener' and 'don't read the book', which was quite a bit different than what I had been doing. I decided, after a day or two of grumbling about this clear betrayal, to restart over with the new method, but I also resolved to be much more consistent about it and do 50 new sentences every day no matter what (this was helped by their little .pdf chart which I copied into a 63-day monstrosity of ALL the lessons). Fortunately I have made it to day 34, with a grand total of 2 days ever skipped so far (both Sundays), and am looking forward to being done on (if I am counting days right) September 19. Unfortunately the 1-2 hour estimate is WOEFULLY off. I think it has gone DOWN now to about 2.5 hours as my short-term memory or memory for grammar chunks has improved. Fortunately, this 4-step method is a lot easier to do in four different chunks during one day than the older one, which kinda had to be done all at once with the microphone and everything. The time commitment has been absolutely brutal but it does seem to be working. I'm not sure why there is such a drastic difference in effect between ehhh ~40 minutes a day and 3 hours but there is. My sleep has been the main victim of all this, but I keep looking at the tick marks going down my 63-day chart and they keep me going. Also I will be seeing the in-laws in October after this whole thing is done and that should be interesting.. Anyway, to sum up, restarted Glossika, am constantly doing Glossika, I think I have Glossika coming out my ears and if I ever hear the Glossika English-language guy talking near me I may snap but so far it seems to be working well. Edited by proudft on 22 August 2015 at 6:25pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| proudft Senior Member United States Joined 5142 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 111 of 111 06 September 2015 at 1:53am | IP Logged |
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Poof! http://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?f=15&p=9262 #p9262
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