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| NuclearGorilla Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6789 days ago 166 posts - 195 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Japanese, French | Message 81 of 102 02 March 2011 at 1:19pm | IP Logged |
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The Februarathon is over. To those who participated, good job! Even if you don't think so. I think everyone did well enough to merit at least some praise, if not more praise.
I did pretty well most of the month. Of course, I bombed hard on the final week, to the extent that I could not even cover my total minutes goal in average. Oh well. Things happened, needed attending to. And also some laziness in there. Once the habit's gone, there's a compelling reason to act gone, and one skilled in convincing oneself against one's better interest can convince oneself against one's better interest in this case. I may have felt it especially more important not to let my goals slip, but having already lost at both total time and Japanese time once earlier, they seemed of lesser importance than they might have. I did, however, manage to successfully read three or more pages of German every day. A good thing. While I have my statistics, I'm not much keen for posting them elaborately at the moment, but I will share some fine numbers (totals, mostly, since they seem easier). -Total pages read, 156. By record, no noticeable difference in speed over the month's course (it actually seems as if it's slowed down somewhat). -Total Japanese minutes, 2490. Which is 41.5 hours, or quite near 90 minutes per day. A good number here, and certainly more than I would have accomplished without a goal for the month. -Average minutes per day, 114.36. Bah. I guess it's reasonably close to the desired average, but my goal wasn't an average, it was each day a minimum, which makes this more disappointing. I ultimately finished 840 words of the Core2k (I guess with the ordering I'm using, I should be calling it 'Kore', but why break an established pattern). If I had done the 40 words each day starting with the day I started on it, I'd've had 1000, which would have been a fine number. 800 has some significance as a milestone too, I guess. But it's a smaller number. In any case, I'm still going to take a break from it for a bit, since I'm kind of sick of it (not incredibly, but somewhat). It is my hope that the amount of vocabulary I have "learned" (I have no real idea of how much this manner of studying words is effective) will provide me some meager ability in understanding Japanese, either spoken or written or something. How will I test this? I will figure that out. Hopefully soon, since otherwise it's likely I'll continue to put that off and do little to nothing in the meanwhile. Whatever I do, I will need to determine my failures at understanding (because there will be many failures) are on account of simply not having enough vocabulary, or whether it is a matter of not having learned the vocabulary in an effective manner. The former is an easy remedy, requiring only walking further down a travelled path, but that latter will require I figure how to clear out some rocks on the path that I had not seen before. I don't like this analogy because to me it has very obvious inconsistencies lurking just out of reach, but maybe someone won't see those and they'll think it's a good analogy, and then maybe they'll think more highly of me which will increase my status in a way that I will never be aware of and will benefit no one. Maybe for a future post I will list various things I've found that seem useful. Chances are in doing so I'll find some things I have that I've entirely forgotten about that will seem useful. Is anything I've found or used legitimately useful? From where I stand, I don't think I could really say. Earlier in the month, before I felt like Japanese was smothering me, or something like that (probably just aching to smother me, really, seems the type) I enjoyed watching the Japanese television on the KeyholeTV a bit. Good times were had. There was a commercial with penguins wearing backpacks. It made me want to buy a penguin wearing a backpack. The Japanese must know how to speak to my desires as a consumer. Maybe I will take up watching that again, so that I might see penguins or perhaps other animals wearing or carrying bags of sorts. Unless in Japan they only sell penguins with bags, which would be disappointing. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| NuclearGorilla Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6789 days ago 166 posts - 195 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Japanese, French | Message 82 of 102 27 April 2011 at 1:03am | IP Logged |
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I sure have wasted a bunch of time over the past couple months, doing quite little. Let this be a lesson that I need to always have firm goals in place or else I will fail. You are encouraged at any moment to come into this log and ask if it is not apparent, What are your goals? and then yell if I don't provide a satisfactory answer. And possibly punch me in the face.
There was even a stretch where I was behind on my Core2k reps, whose completion I then continued to shun for about a week. It's all better now. I've just recently rekindled my efforts on adding new Core2k cards, beginning three days ago at a blistering pace of eight words per day! Yesterday I did sixteen though and I may continue at that pace or faster. I tried a bit of a video game in Japanese, but I don't know how I should go about it. I could figure out just a few things, and I can look up the rest and figure things out. But, I don't know how I would like to go about using this in order to improve. Do I pick out interesting words and sentences? And then what would I do with them? Or do I just hope some stuff will stick on its own? As can be seen, my eagerness is tempered with uncertainty. (Also not sure how deep the eagerness well runs on this.) I have begun prepping myself for some Swedish study, somewhat at random. Currently I am listening to an audiobook while reading the corresponding text (L2-L2). I don't know if I'll continue this study or for how long. I have seen a beginning of a six week challenge for May. I was disappointed to learn of January's Dutch challenge far too late to join, as I have a desire to study Dutch, so it would be nice to at least make use of the coming event, lest I be filled with further regret. Its stated (though obviously, quite flexible) language is Spanish, however, and I wonder if I should abandon this nascent Swedish bid in order to make a move against Spanish. I studied it in the high school for two years under the tutelage of a poor teacher, and can remember some things, but I should more than qualify as a beginner in the language in terms of this challenge (I think my Japanese qualifies too, despite the many hours endeavored). I've long wanted to try FSI's Programmatic Spanish and this would certainly be an opportune moment to try. I don't think that I will like the FSI course, but it simply seems like something interesting to try. I've never progressed long in an FSI course and there might be some value to it. A set course seems somewhat welcome at this point. The alternative would be doing I don't know what with Swedish. Listen-reading, I expect, would be the best bet, given that I have a familiarity with Germanic languages (but not North Germanic yet!). I attempted LRing Swedish to some extent years ago, although how much and to what effect I cannot recall exactly. I believe I went through L2-L2 at least twice on one book with at least one L1-L2 of the same, as well as listening without text to another once and a single pass of L1-L2. My resulting level of knowledge seems to be that I can recognize some more words than I'd think I should be able to and that I still have some of the audio fragments lodged in my brain ("på huvudet med sin käpp" comes to mind). Either Spanish or Swedish sounds like good fun. I don't really have too much desire to learn Spanish, but I could entertain the notion well enough. My desire to learn Swedish stems almost exclusively from how lovely it sounds, and it will be difficult (relative to Spanish, at the very least) to find materials for it. I'll have to decide by the end of the month which. I, for whatever reason, thought to check, and it turns out that the 27th will be my fifth anniversary as a member of these forums. I wish I could reminisce about the good old days, but my memories don't seem to go back that far and the present state doesn't seem so bad, anyway. I do remember clearly though that at one point the forums were owned and moderated by several kodiak bears. I think we're better off without them, although I wish I could better remember the coup that ousted them. You could tell who the brown nosers were by seeing who had recently added Bear to their "studies" list. Terrible language. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| NuclearGorilla Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6789 days ago 166 posts - 195 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Japanese, French | Message 83 of 102 02 May 2011 at 4:57am | IP Logged |
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I decided on Spanish. I'm not sure why yet. I'm still certain that Swedish is a much nicer language and I prefer it greatly. Perhaps it is its limited use that swayed me against it, which must be the sole reason I can think of. That and the thing that I've joked about before, that I will never study Swedish, always putting it off in favor of another. That seems likely enough, although there's no real motive to it. I'll have to register on the twitter thing sometime, too, so that I can see just how short I fall of others' efforts.
Thus, with my lukewarm feelings toward Spanish, I have commenced, sort of. I intended on doing a bit more than I have today, maybe I'll get it done eventually anyway. Although I had wanted to try the FSI course, I took a look through it a bit. It's not even worth trying. It will bore me to tears and turn my apathy towards Spanish into hate. This is my prediction. So I will not do it. Instead, I'm trying listen-reading on Spanish. Maybe it'll take. I still apparently remember things, despite not using or studying it (and then hardly) in over five years. Not enough to claim any sort of proficiency, however, and so I don't think my advantage is especially much. It does somewhat queer the analysis of LR that I might like, but it's simply one of those things that one must live with; there can hardly be objectivity in comparing between one person's experiences, as the languages are different, a person gains more experience with each language, etc. So, no comparison can be perfect and it's not worth too much effort to bother. My Core2k revival may have finished (or perhaps not). I've gotten 56 sentences in the past week, although I've added none the past few days. Surely I can spare 15 minutes to get just eight per day, yes? Maybe. I'm not sure how else I'll ever figure out any native media if I don't come up with some more words; the words I've got now are quite insufficient for most efforts. I might just need to find easier material, but I haven't thought to search it out. Part of the difficulty seems to be that the really easy stuff likes to be in kana, which makes it harder. Maybe I could try the LRing with Japanese again, now that I've got some vocabulary and grammar and things to work with. So, I should continue with studies a bit today. And with luck, at some point I will actually enjoy Spanish, but I'm not counting on it. (Actually, I kind of am counting on it, since it seems pretty likely considering my track record with roughly every other language I've studied.) I believe I had something I intended to mention last time, but I forgot it. And now I've not remembered it. This is why one should write things down, so that rather than forget what you wanted to remember, you can forget or misplace where you wrote the things down. I suppose it will suffice for now to say, that it likely was not worth reading anyway. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| NuclearGorilla Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6789 days ago 166 posts - 195 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Japanese, French | Message 84 of 102 08 May 2011 at 6:29pm | IP Logged |
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I suppose, with a week having passed, I could make an assessment of that week.
I made a comment in the six week challenge thread, that if I would, if nothing else, spend my time procrastinating on studying Spanish with other study. I had intended it as a joke, but it turned out fairly true. Overall, I've done very well though as far as time spent goes. The numbers as follows: Spanish: 453m Japanese: 791m French: 22m German: 140m Total: 1406m A very strong showing, I say. I didn't realize that my Japanese totals had eclipsed the Spanish by quite so much. Although the main thrust of the six week challenge is focus on the one language, I'm not going to go to much effort to deliberately change my activities. It should be apparent why--what it is that I'm doing has resulted in immense amounts of time spent, which despite not be centered on the challenge's focus are nothing to tamper with. I was largely aided by my newfound amusement with the Japanese video game I've been working through--I cannot really say playing, as what amounts to intensive reading can hardly be labeled play, but entertaining nonetheless. The level of the text is probably way beyond what I should be looking at, including slang and constructions that I've never even heard of. Regardless, my interest has been captivated and I struggle along. And when I get through a whole sentence successfully, readings and meaning, it's extremely satisfying. In order to facilliate my activity, I have several tools. I have both the Japanese script and the English translation. I use Rikaichan to help with the Japanese when necessary. If I can't come up with a good idea of the meaning of a sentence, I check the English translation to see if I can get a better idea. (This is risky, however, as the translation is not going to be accurate all the time.) And just yesterday I came across an Anki plugin, Yomichan, which is a tool similar to Rikaichan, only it has a very easy mechanism for capturing vocabulary and making it into flashcards. I haven't done so much with it yet, but it seems like it could be quite helpful for keeping my precious vocabulary. I've been considering returning to Tae Kim to investigate in earnest some of the new grammar I've encountered, since I've only actually gone through the basic grammar section. I've consulted it, but not yet studied it. In addition, I've added a few more sets of Core2k and I even added 11 kanji from the RtK1 supplement for no apparent reason. I've been abiding by a strategy of adding in new kanji as I encounter them, and that's only resulted in 8 previously (although one or two of those even I had no precipitating reason to study). I think it's a good way to go--why study characters that I don't need?--and I'll probably resume it until the next time I feel fanciful. Regarding Spanish. I've done some time on the listen-reading as I intended. I have also spent a great deal of time watching the Spanish TV, largely that from the Spanish public television subchannel I found. It's more useful than the 'normal' Spanish channels since it seems to have more children's programming on it. Although children watch some creepy stuff. I almost spent some time listening to Spanish during a long walk, but instead spent the three hours with my own thoughts as I prefer, since I couldn't work the volume on the contraption and it was too quiet to compete with the sounds of man and nature. And I don't like headphonery in the public sphere. It's my intent to do some more LRing this week, although it doesn't seem to hold my interest as well as I'd like. It would probably be a bit better, but the Japanese seems a tough competition. I have now sentenced a sufficient amount of words to their eternal imprisonment in a slurry of mediocre, overly verbose prose. Some words have had much better fates, but then, some much worse. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| NuclearGorilla Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6789 days ago 166 posts - 195 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Japanese, French | Message 85 of 102 15 May 2011 at 4:24pm | IP Logged |
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Weekly updates? What nonsense is this!
I had another week that was in a way good. I outdid my Japanese time from last week. However, my Spanish time was much, much lower. As in, 0. Not quite the idea of the challenge, but I'm going to refrain from caring. I'll probably do some Spanish today, still, but Spanish is simply not that important to me that I want to put it ahead of Japanese in any way. I believe my enthusiasm for Japanese has stemmed from the realization that I can actually sort of understand some things occasionally. I hadn't considered that possible previously, which is a bit bizarre. In any case, with the realization comes the further idea that, if I continue to attack it, I will be able to understand more. (Why I want to understand anything in Japanese is another question entirely, one that I'm not sure the answer of.) The numbers: Japanese: 821m Spanish: 0m French: 10m (The French was from trying to watch something then falling asleep.) This brings this month's total to 1612m so far. February's 2410m, which was a very good month, will be the one to beat. I will beat it good, I say! I hope having a goal like that won't thwart me. Don' want no pressure, jus' wants t' learn. I continued playing the video game for some of the time, but towards the end of the week, I stopped, instead working again in greater earnest on the Core2k. I decided to reevaluate my study procedure, which has shaved a lot of time off. Previously, I would repeat the sentence, write the entire sentence, then write just the word once or twice (of course repeating it aloud). I decided that writing the entire sentence probably wasn't all that necessary, and so I chopped that step out. So now, instead of a group of eight words taking around 18-20 minutes usually, they're taking 11 minutes on average. That's a big time savings. I haven't noticed any significant detriment, either (although I only just began as such two days ago). In addition, while I would previously prefer to spread these blocks of time out, doing one then taking a break, I've instead been doing them all at once. In particular, I've been going in with the mindset of doing as much as I can within an hour. Both times this resulted in five groups being completed. So, 40 words in the span of an hour, which I find quite agreeable. I don't know how I could make this go any faster. I presumably could, yes, but I think it would require a greater change in my process and could result in lesser retention. I think I can be pretty satisfied with this approach, however, so while it would be nice to improve efficiency, I'll stick with what I've got. I have been using timers for these things, which helps create a sense of urgency and allows greater precision in my measurement, hence reinforcing the sense of self-competitiveness. I've passed 1000 words of it now, which means I'm over have way through. I could complete 1200 words within the next week if I keep up the pace. Early in the month I had decided on reaching 1200 before the end of the month as my goal, which would have required just a little over one group per day. I have now made up for my days of inactivity. My reviewing has of course required more time the past couple days from the reviews and will continue to increase should I keep adding cards at such a pace. The reason behind going through Core is to gain a limited but functional familiarity with frequent words, so that I can read texts with slightly less difficulty. Over time, the increased exposure will itself result in better understanding of these words. So in that way, it acts as a catalyst for a continuing cycle of improvement. This step is not wholly necessary, I don't think, but I think it's a very useful way to make material more accessible so that exposure is more tolerable and, perhaps even more useful. This entire Core thing, as well as the idea of blasting through a whole bunch of material quickly, has left me wondering if it would be possible to apply it to Spanish. I'm familiar with a number of common words already, but rounding out the set could be useful. Although, given that Spanish uses a more transparent orthography than Japanese, that it has many words that are cognate to words in English and French, and that I already do have some knowledge of the language as is, I would have to ask if this is even at all necessary. My thought is, No. I could begin slogging through Spanish text with probably at least as good an understanding as I do of Japanese immediately. Probably better understanding. Japanese is so very hard, and Spanish is so very easy. (Incidentally one of the reasons I chose Japanese as opposed to something like Spanish, but I'll complain anyway.) I've been wanting to use subs2srs to help me with listening, in particular. I even made a deck for it, probably months ago by now. I cannot use it yet, however, as I constantly put off watching the show that it's for. Maybe I should try to see if I can find the proper materials for something I've already seen. Another thing I'm intending to look into is a recently developed Anki plugin, Morphin Morphology, which does some textual analysis comparing words you know(/have studied) and those you'd like to and selects sentences that are i+1 or something like this. I don't know, I said I need to look into it more, which is due to this lack of understanding what it does. I'd've done it already, but the plugin threw out an error and I didn't feel like figuring things out right then. I've been wanting to get some more French going. It hasn't happened. Oh well. Same for German. One day. My plans for the next week are, then: to try to continue Core2k at, if not the same pace as I'm on, then a good one nonetheless (I plan on 40 words today, at least). To continue consumption of Japanese media, and in particular to do some good attentive listening each day, in addition to slogging through some written stuff. To do something with Spanish, either LRing some more or watching something or whatever. I think that about covers my aims. Are those nebulous enough? Revised goal: I will do a thing in a language. Sometime. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| NuclearGorilla Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6789 days ago 166 posts - 195 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Japanese, French | Message 86 of 102 23 May 2011 at 3:21am | IP Logged |
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I met my revised goal! Isn't that fantastic? I did a thing in a language.
Let's start with numbers. Everyone likes numbers, except for squares. The unhip kind, not the four-angled type. Those squares are cool cats. The hip kind, not the furred type. Cats are to be hep, rather than hip. Weekly totals: Total: 1160m (19h20m) Japanese: 1051m (17h31m) Spanish: 30m German: 79m (1h9m) Total totals: Total: 3445m (57h25m) Japanese: 2711m (46h11m) Spanish: 483m (8h3m) German: 219m (3h39m) French: 32m My ranking within the challenge is pretty poor, as one might imagine. I'm in 41st or so based on target score. However, on total score, I'm in 15th. If I had chosen Japanese instead of Spanish as the target language, I'd be in 9th for target language. However, if I had done that, then I wouldn't be going against the challenge in any way. I must continue to stick it to the man by not doing the language I said I would. I also did beat my previous best record for a month of Japanese study (I don't know how this compares to hours of video in a month record, I'd have to check). I was afraid that by mentioning it last time, or indeed just realizing that I was close, that I would jinx it. But I didn't! And now I've a whole ten more days to pile on to it. If I continue at my average daily rate, I should surpass 66 hours on Japanese alone. I get the feeling that that shouldn't be as big an achievement as it would be, but it would be. So I shan't belittle it. German. I started reading a book! This book is not like the last book I decided to read in German, in that I haven't made it half way through, and thus I haven't stopped reading it yet. I think it may be longer than the last one. But this one's targetted at young teenagers, so perhaps it'll require enough less thinking that I won't grow bored with it. Although with books in general if I haven't finished one within a couple weeks, there's a good chance I'm not going to, and the only thing that helps foreign language books against that trend is the sort of obligation to read them. Hopefully I'll finally finish a book in not-English chosen of my own volition! (This is actually something I haven't done. I've read halfway through about five different books in French, and the several German ones I've actually finished were for coursework.) I should probably find the sort of books I read in English to read in German, or whatever language, but for whatever reason I've never even tried to look for them. Funny, a little. French. Haha, like I did anything in French. (I like French and would like to do things with it, it's just sitting out for now. Later, I'll probably get around to it again. It'd be nice to do some conversing in it, which is a faculty in which I'm not especially capable.) Spanish. Haha. At least I did better than last week! They broadcast a baseball game in Spanish, so I had it on in the way I watch baseball, which is mostly background noise. But I paid attention a bit more than I'd usually. It was amusing; one announcer was an obviously non-native speaker, who asked the other announcer on a couple of occasions how to say a word in Spanish (rib and fractured rib, as I recall). The other announcer's saying for when a homerun was hit was, "Sayonara, baby!", which was amusing enough for me. And I'm pretty sure today's game was also broadcast in Spanish, but I forgot entirely about it. Oh well, I guess. Even though I entirely wasted those hours in terms of language study. I'll have to try to remember next week. Japanese. Hey, I study that! I decided to put something of a limit on my Core2k work, which was that my combined Anki and Core2k was not to exceed two hours per day. That's to balance my card adding against the extra reviews it generates. It's probably a good tactic, even if it only came up once. I finished through 1200 words on Thursday and have been having a holiday from adding new Core things for the weekend. Back to it tomorrow. (Hm, power outage lost me a bunch of stuff, so I'm not going to spend as much time outlining the rest. Probably one of the reasons why I shouldn't have stopped writing log entries in vim.) I'm using the Japanese Morphology plugin for Anki to sort the remaining 800 cards in Core2k by 'iPlusN', which should minimize the number of new morphemes I'm exposed to per sentence. I'm curious to see how that will work out, and if it will be noticeably different. I watched the show I was going to for the subs2srs, and I've begun going through the cards to study them. It's very time consuming, in part because there's about 500 cards (although there's still plenty which are likely to be deleted). I'm not going through very detailedly, and I don't know how I'll grade them when the time comes. The goal is to improve my ability to understand natural spoken Japanese through a bit of intensive study. If I could come out of this being able to understand a whole program without subtitles, I think that would be hugely motivating as well. I started reading a manga thing, よつばと, which I saw recommended for beginners. They may have been right, in that I could understand some words in it. I will probably understand more words as I continue. I've never read a manga before. It's not an especially interesting experience, as far as new experiences go, in that it does not seem particularly novel. I'm not sure if I want to do this reading intensively or not; I'll probably refrain from looking up too much. It's got nice furigana for when those times come. Although for most words, I'm more likely to understand the kanji than the kana, which is likely the opposite predicament as would be encountered by a Japanese child. My goal that I set to do Japanese listening daily sort of failed. Not badly; I did manage it most days. But some days, I did not. For next week. I hope to do carry on with Core2k. I'm going to aim again at 40 new words per day, although I will impose my two hour limit rule, to keep things in order. Unless I decide not to at my discretion. I should finish at least an initial going through of the subs2srs cards by week's end as well, and do some sort of reading of some sort (either with the manga or the video game). I should like to continue my German reading. I'd like to do French too. Lots of French. Maybe I could do a little French, as a compromise between lots and nothing, which seem to be the conflicting ideal and real scenarios. I should probably claim that I want to do some Spanish too, just so that I'm putting on the proper airs for the challenge. And so that I have a goal that I can work against in trying to do the Japanese and other stuff. Notice how I laid this all out in sections? And how I kept each paragraph to basically one topic? I wonder if it's more readable this way. There's still plenty of text, somewhat rambling, as is my way. Too bad I lost a bunch of text, this was a good deal longer, without adding anything of value. Which means that it was truer to my style. Still, I avoided being amusing or entertaining, which is also important to my style. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| NuclearGorilla Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6789 days ago 166 posts - 195 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Japanese, French | Message 87 of 102 06 June 2011 at 7:17am | IP Logged |
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I did not update this last week, and that is at least in part because it was a (relatively) mediocre week. This past week was also somewhat mediocre, so it's my hope that I can use this week to finish in a non-mediocre manner.
In addition to not spending as much time as I'd've liked, I also did not do the things that I had hoped, even over the two week span. Perhaps I can do something about that. Week 4 Japanese: 528m German: 55m French: 10m (I don't know what this was) Total: 593m (84.71m/d) Week 5 Japanese: 458m German: 60m French: 45m Total: 563m (80.43m/d) Somehow I had the impression that this past week had gone better than the week before... obviously false. I'm still in 14th for total score though, so I guess I'm not terrible. Among those who have fewer than 10 hours of target language study recorded, I have the highest total score by over 60 hours. I really enjoy thinking about these number things, don't I? Also, I should come up with the monthly statistics for May, but I don't feel like it right now, so I'll have to do that later (ha). Spanish Right. That was the point of the 6WC, wasn't it? If it wasn't obvious before, I really don't care about this part anymore. I lasted about a week's worth of caring, though, that's pretty... okay? I stopped caring about any but the "Total Score" goal a while ago. Since I keep detailed logs, it's actually pretty easy to see where I stopped caring. Which, it turns out that I stopped caring after only five days. (The sixth I did ten minutes worth, after that only thirty minutes around 10 days later.) That's not very good, then, really. I wonder if I had chosen a different language, such as Swedish, which was the prime alternative, if it would have gone better. It may have gone worse, even. I feel as though that initial burst of Spanish--which even that week could not beat out this past week's Japanese--did help to invigorate my studies overall, however, so it has nonetheless been a very useful tool. Enough that I'd start another 6WC regardless of how well I thought I could do French I spent some time watching some things. Very little time, really. And on a couple of occasions, I watched TED talks with French subtitles, the time for which I heavily discounted (around 20%, and that was me being very attentive on the subtitles). I think once the six weeks is over I might put some more time in on French. Why am I delaying this? I don't know. Maybe I'll spend the time trying to figure out the best way to improve my conversational ability outside of conversation. (I'm not wholly against conversation with my current ability, but I really can't speak very well at all.) I haven't actually come up with any ideas for this, despite it being a concern that I've had for probably over a year now (possibly longer; the time travels too swiftly). This suggests that I will most likely never think up a course of action and will thus languish eternally in this endeavor. Domage. Japanese I did nowhere close to what I had intended to with C2K, instead only adding in 64 words over two sessions. The problem, which haunted my studies in general, was that I had begun already to resent the C2K reviews, even though they were settling down a bit. But I really didn't want to do them, which often delayed me starting or finishing my review of the cards, which thus delayed my other study. In addition, since I hated doing the reviews I of course would rather spend the remainder of my study elsewise. I think I might continue at a slower pace now, since the quicker pace seems to breed animosity which is ultimately damaging. Unless it's possible that my sprint/stop routine actually results in overall superior quantity, but I'm doubting that. My thought is to try for three groups (24 words) per day. I would like to continue at at least a reasonably fast clip since having familiarity with words is pretty useful. (The whole not doing any Core2k stuff is humorous after how last time I made sure to impose a two hour daily limit...) I didn't look at the subs2srs deck. At all. I should still do that. Before I forget entirely what that show was about. But neglecting the spoken aspects of language is my way. I did continue reading the manga a bit. It can be tricky at times (most of the time). I use this as an extensive reading exercise, in that I don't look anything up and I generally don't dwell too much on things I don't understand. Combined with all the pictures, I think I get the gist of the story. Which is good, I suppose. Also continued just a bit on the video game, which is of course my intensive reading. Of course, I still can't figure out everything, even with my tools, but it's no big problem. I can eventually figure out most sentences. And I know this is useful! How? Well, I went back to the script for a previous section, to answer a question about the translation, and I could read different parts quite easily, definitely more easily than before. Some stuff still doesn't make any sense, and I do know what some of my problems are, but again, not a big thing, I understood more than before and more easily as well. It's a bit of encouragement, which is always nice. I find it quite fascinating, how I'm now capable of reading some things. As I do more work in Core, I'm accumulating more readings that I can use to guess other words. For example, I came up against 自動販売機 (vending machine) for which I was able to properly guess the pronunciation. That was pretty neat. And my ability to read kana is so much better than it was just a few months ago, before I started with Core and this video game exercise. I can read it much more quickly. Even kanji I can read at speed sometimes, although I have to be reasonably familiar with the word. To summarize this paragraph, some things are going good. I will not bring in discussion of the spoken language here, as I'm sure that would put a damper on the good times. No good time dampering in this log, no sir! I might note here, that whether reading the manga or the game, I feel compelled to always read the text aloud. Always. It's fun, you know. With Core2k, I also always read things aloud, the whole sentence at least once when I'm learning and when reviewing just the same, as well as the word in isolation at least once (usually at least a couple times while I'm writing it down). I wonder how I sound? Probably funny. I don't really know how I sound in any languages, really. I guess for German, I was told that I don't have an American accent. I did not find out exactly what my accent sounds like, though. Should press the issue. German I read for a bit. That's about it. Should read more, reading's fun. I'm not sure what my hangup is here, actually. I enjoy what I'm reading, would like to read more, it's not difficult. I suppose I'll just have to keep doing it until my brain stops questioning things, like how if you slam your head against something a bunch of times, it stops questioning things and, indeed, has a diminished capacity for attempting to question things. Next week A strong finish is desirable. Can I finish strongly? With many hours? That's the goal. I don't think I have any particular other goals, other than to do many hours of things. I suppose I did say I'd like to carry on with C2K, and I would, and I would also like to carry on with the game playing, because it's fun (even if it doesn't really resemble game playing so much). And some more reading. These goals are still not very specific, but I suppose that's okay. Maybe now I'll do some studying instead of some excessively long log entry writing. That'd be neat! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| NuclearGorilla Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6789 days ago 166 posts - 195 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Japanese, French | Message 88 of 102 15 June 2011 at 7:44am | IP Logged |
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I had hoped to finish strong, and although I started the week finishing strong, I couldn't finish finishing it as such and ended up not doing so well. Officially, I'm blaming it on a rather tricky issue which befell my computer amidst a power outage so short that the computer was the only thing affected. Still did better than the previous week, though, so I guess that's good? Even if that just means the previous week was abysmal.
In any case, this was the final week of the six week challenge, and so now I feel I can officially stop pretending to study Spanish. On to numbers. Week 6 Japanese: 681m (11h21m) German: 135m (2h15m) Total: 821m (13h36m) This is probably better than I would do most weeks where I didn't log my study time. Still, could have done better. The German was conversation, the Japanese was some C2K and then video game playing. The pace of the C2K was fine. I don't think I need to discuss at length any of this at present, so I'll move on to a full wrapup of 6WC. 6WC Total Japanese: 4378m (72h58m) Spanish: 483m (8h3m) French: 87m (1h27m) German: 474m (7h54m) Total: 5422m (90h22m) I finished in 12th in total time in the challenge. Not that place has too much importance to me, but it sure is a number, and numbers are cool. I would have finished in 8th if I had used Japanese as my language. I averaged 129.095 minutes per day total and 104.238 minutes per day in Japanese. The main value I believe I extracted from this was the habit of good logging. Granted, I don't remember how I was logging before this challenge, but I believe I'm doing a better job of it now. It's a good habit that I've stumbled in and out of, but I believe I shall continue it regardless of whether I'm doing any sort of challenge. And hopefully, I will continue regular study, since that's a useful thing. My immediate goals are mostly the same as the ones outlined last week as far as content (although there is no longer the thought of finishing strong, since that wouldn't really make sense). More C2K, more doing other things. And throw in some other languages as handy. Maybe I'll spend some good time with French soon. This update is uncharacteristically short, but I can't come up with anything much to add. Oh well? I guess last update soaked up all my words for a while. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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