|
 |
Log - It’s better than bad, it’s good | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| NuclearGorilla Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6789 days ago 166 posts - 195 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Japanese, French | Message 17 of 102 12 July 2009 at 6:21am | IP Logged | ||
|
I'm proud of myself for having stuck with French as long as I did. I may well not have been fully focused on this at all times, but did make a consistent effort over the course of a year. When I fell off the wagon, I got back on the same language.
Since I've begun Japanese, it's incredibly easy to entirely neglect French altogether, and indeed this has been the case for the past week in any case. If I am to study Japanese, which I haven't entirely decided, then I will have to do my best to keep some French around, I think. A slow, steady pace that will accumulate. Because otherwise, the neglect will be total, as my focus elsewise linguistically will be entirely on the new language. As a report of my progress then in Japanese, I've been watching things, listening to things, and doing Heisig. This is largely all I've been doing, aside from reading things in English. For Heisig, I have gotten through 810 so far, on day 15. I hope to do another 75 before the day's end. My average rate is currently 54 per day (if I achieve my goal, 'twill be 59 per day). I intend to finish by the end of the month. I can see how it's common that people burn out near the end; it seems like there's quite a lot to do... Also, I have contemplated the notion that I am studying Japanese, and the question to come to mind was, "What the hell is wrong with me?" Ah, sweet self-incomprehensibility. (Note, I couldn't come up with a satisfactory answer, although it was a bit of a leading question.) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| LtM Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5863 days ago 130 posts - 223 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: German | Message 18 of 102 12 July 2009 at 7:43am | IP Logged | ||
|
A great language log, NuclearGorilla. I look forward to reading more. :)
You’ve done a nice job with your language studies, putting in time consistently. I too struggle with keeping up more than one language. Although in theory I study three, I find that I tend to focus on only one at a time, and just do minimal work with the others. Hopefully it all evens out in the long run. And I’ve got to tell you that this quote of yours was absolutely priceless:
Years ago, after I had been studying French intensively for months, I went to a Spanish conversation seminar. For whatever reason, the instructor decided to ask me a couple of simple yes/no questions. But instead of replying “Sí”, I had so much French on the brain that I accidently answered “Oui”, twice, right there in front of everyone. I felt like a total moron. So, yeah, I share your pain. Edited by LtM on 12 July 2009 at 7:43am 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 19 of 102 07 August 2009 at 10:56pm | IP Logged | ||
I may be able to one-up this now. Last night, I was speaking in English with a German at a French table, and despite nothing ever having been said in German, responded "Ja" to a question in English. How this happened exactly, I don't know, but it's pretty ridiculous. He didn't seem to notice, so I suppose I didn't get the embarrassment factor, but it sure felt awkward. I failed at my goal of finishing Remembering the Kanji by the end of July. I was on pace, having finished the first half of the book in 17 days (and I had a total of 35 in the schedule), but right about that point I just stopped--added no kanji--for around 10 or so days. I don't really understand why. I kept up with my reviews at least. The lesson in this, I think, is: If you're doing RTK, never stop adding ever for a day. Add 5, add 1 even, just add something. Momentum is a powerful thing. (Also, usually if I tell myself just to add five, I end up adding double that at least.) So, as it stands, I am now on day 42 with 1293 kanji done (haven't done any today yet). If I want to meet my new arbitrarily set goal of finishing by the 15th, I'll need to have an average of 83.22 per day--perhaps a high goal, but doable (this is actually below my average for the first six days). Although I will have to move towards the end of this run. I'm thinking, largely for my own personal enjoyment, to take one day and try to do as many as I can. I may try this Monday. Regarding balance in the force/language learning, I may ultimately decide to spend X minutes a day reading or similar in French. I should probably do that in German, too, since I neglect it a lot, but... For the computationally inclined, the Windows 7 release candidate (which you can probably still download?) has the neatest feature ever (well, people I told about it didn't seem that excited, but...), I believe they call it multi-user interface or somesuch. But, you can change the language the interface uses by downloading a language pack from the Windows update. Changing languages just requires logging out and back in. I'm so amused by this. Also, the OS itself works pretty well. I've been using it instead of Linux while my brain atrophies. I'm a little disgusted with myself actually. And now, we must move forward not backward, upward not forward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling. 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 20 of 102 16 August 2009 at 5:56am | IP Logged | ||
|
I haven't been keeping up with my desired kanji pace so much lately. One night, because the better idea seemed to be to drink and discuss the War of 1812 (I think it was), and then I lost about 1.5-2 days to adjusting my sleep schedule and moving. Due to these events, I even lost a day of reps (I tried for 10 minutes, but it was obvious that I was performing well below my usual levels, presumably due to tiredness.
I would very much like to finish this in the following week at least. I have 559 to go. Should I space them evenly, that'll work out to just under 80 per day. I believe I can do that. Although something interesting I've noticed is that my failures and lack of desire tend to spring up actually when I set ambitious goals. This is rather unfortunate, and suggests to me that I would be one to run from audacious goals. Whether I am this person or not, it would be better not to be, so I must therefore act in a manner congruent (or at least more congruent) with my perceived ideal. And I think that person is most certainly going to finish this week. And I am that person. (Lots of referencing potential and actual persons there...) I've been reading the blog http://natural-language-acquisition.blogspot.com/, and I find his ideas to be quite agreeable for the most part. And, quite appreciably, he often provides reputable sources. Those are always nice to see on the internet. Stemming from this reading and my previous ideas, I believe I'd like to try my Japanese learning in the following way: --Finish Heisig. This is largely because I've already started, and am roughly 3/4 through (72.6249% exactly). It should hopefully (hopefully) also provide extra motivation for continued study, as I'll have finished something big and time-consuming, and I shouldn't like to throw away time. --Learn kana. This is kind of an obvious move; I just feel kind of crippled and incomplete not knowing these. Although I've managed to pick up a few of them in a manner that I'm not actually sure of. This will probably take place along with the following step. --Watch unsubtitled Japanese programming. Full bore. I do not intend to be fettered by any "sentence mining", nor any aids for language learners. I do not intend to beleaguer this point, as it would suggest I'm viewing this as something novel or unique, which I am fully aware it is not. --Books and written media for Japanese children. This is an interesting point, I believe. By this, I mean largely kana-ized children's media. The point to this is actually an interesting one, which is to solidify knowledge of the spoken language. I imagine I will casually begin to pick up kanji readings along the way. For these, I likely will use an SRS and whatever else. I'm not entirely sure though. The downside of this is that written language does offer a lot of content, useful content, much of which I would be deprived of. But I don't think this is such a bad idea. Chances are I'll modify this plan to a point of non-recognition, but it's good to at least formulate something. I think. Although I haven't given myself any timeline or anything. It can wait. I picked up Candide one sleepless morn. I read it once in English. Since I now know what the book is meant to be doing, I'm actually finding it more enjoyable this round. Although I've only read 3 or 4 chapters, and they're pretty short chapters. I could probably try to read a chapter of that a day. That'd be fun; might try it. And now to the entirely unrelated to language project of setting up Windows XP to run software RAID on as many hard drives as I can (I'm doing at least 4, hoping for/have equipment for 8 or more). Offering more words per page than any other learning log! (May be true, I sure don't know.) 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 21 of 102 31 August 2009 at 7:57am | IP Logged | ||
|
J'ai seulement plus 200 kanji à apprendre. Je suis tellement heureux que je suis si près de le fin. Il y avait longtemps, mais certainement plus long qu'il fallait.
J'espére finir avec ça le demain ou le lendemain. Le derniers trois jours j'ai fait 315 kanji, et je dors pas encore. J'ai aucune idee pourquoi j'ecrit en français. C'est un log pour le français, meme si j'apprends le japonais. De sujêt de les disques et RAID... je pouvait convertir la carte du disque à une de RAID, mais il n'a marché trop bien. Mais je peux dire maintenant que j'ai établir un RAID avec 4 disques durs. Il faut reviendre à mes etudes maintenant... et je reviendra ici quand j'ai fini. Le cycle éternel va prendre fin! 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 22 of 102 03 September 2009 at 3:49pm | IP Logged | ||
|
I have finally finished RTK. I had intended to finish 2 days ago, but I was tired so I left 49 cards for yesterday. Of course, I had a ton of reviews to get through, so between those and the reviews, it took quite a bit of time to finally reach the end. Yesterday was my largest repetitions count--nearly 500--easily overtaking my previous high of around 400, which is notable in that that was after a day of no reps. I'm guessing it was high yesterday because there were a lot of recent cards and I haven't been sleeping very regularly lately so I was forgetting them a lot.
Since I love statistics and mostly meaningless numbers, here are some observations. -I finished 67 days after starting. -I learned new kanji on 44 days. -I learned more than 10 kanji on 39 days. -I averaged 30.48 kanji per day. -Including only days where I learned kanji, I averaged 46.41 kanji/day. -Including only days where I learned more than 10 kanji, I averaged 51.59 kanji/day. -I completed the first roughly 25% of kanji in the first 6 days. I completed the last 25% of the kanji in the final six days. -The most kanji learned in one day was day 62, with 126 kanji being learned. -On 8 days I met or exceeded 100 kanji. Five of these days, I did 100 exactly. -The longest streak of inactivity was a 13 day stretch from day 22 to day 34. The next longest was a 6 day stretch from day 55 to day 60. There were only four days besides these two stretches where I learned zero kanji. -Strange sleeping habits complicated some of the calculations, as far as which kanji belong to which day, which is in part responsible for some of those four remaining days. -Number of kanji outside of RTK1 learned: 2. ("Grab" 采 because it was easy and helpful, and "dragon [old]" 龍 because it was complicated but neat (and I think the right hand side is a neat pictograph of a dragon, but I didn't notice that until afterward).) -Sheets of paper used (for writing practice): 55. At 330 per side (it was more for the 15 ungridded sheets, since I wrote smaller, but this'll do), I wrote around 36300 kanji. That is a big number. And a thick stack of paper. -Writing utensils used: 1 black pen, 1 red pen, 1.5 pencils. (By used, I mean used up, really.) -Number of times I exclaimed "What the hell?" with respect to an odd choice of keyword: a few? More than I would have liked, really. That's all the statistics I can come up with, although there are some trapped away in Anki that I don't know how to access (if it's possible). The stat I'd like most is the time spent per day, which I know they keep (there's a graph of it), but I don't know how to get in numerical form. I don't know how to get a good total estimate of time spent. Towards the end, I was going much quicker in the initial learning phase, but possibly longer in the early repetition phase. (I think it was worth it however in terms of time efficiency.) I cannot say well about early on, but once I adopted a 15 minute learning block (where I would learn however many I could in those 15 minutes) I have some sort of metric. Towards the beginning of this (I started with this maybe around halfway through) I would get between 7 and 10, typically I'd say 9. Later, in the past couple weeks, I would get between 9 and 13 generally, typically around 11. Although sometimes I'd do better on average. If I say I did on average 9 kanji per 15 minute period (which I feel is overestimating my efficiency), then I would have spent 56.78 hours total outside of Anki. As for the time in Anki, I don't have a good guess. It probably at least matches it though, or if not, will soon enough. Early on, I would actually do a funnily symmetrical thing of doing 15 kanji at a time. But I found going off of a constant time was a much better way to go. I would usually try to squeeze in an extra kanji at the end; the other way, there wasn't as psychologically good a way for me to "cheat", since doing more would ruin the nice even numbers I had. (Between that sort of thing and the great big list of statistics, I feel like I need to assert that I am not mentally irregular.) This is actually evident in the numbers I added; for the first 20 days, only 1 day I added an amount that wasn't a multiple of 5 (I believe I did one extra to finish a lesson). After that (and perhaps not so coincidentally after the long pause) there were 3 more days like that, and afterward it was essentially random--I assume this is the point I started time-boxing rather than kanji-boxing. I'm glad I've finished, no question about that. It's pretty neat, actually, to finish something so big and concrete. Having the exact boundary is very helpful in feeling done and in the accompanying sense of accomplishment; it's not like most other projects I have which are somewhat vaguely defined and as a result never really seem finished. So I may try to set more concrete goals in the future, now that I've actually done that with something and seen the result. That said, I don't know if it was really the "right" time in terms of my study of the language to tackle them. Of course it remains to be seen, but there's something really off in being able to write all these kanji but not being able to write any Japanese (I'd say I know less than 50 words of Japanese, and the number 50 there is really high). In essence while I've accomplished something worthwhile, there is the realization that at the moment at least this accomplishment is worthless. There is no use to knowing how to write a bunch of kanji and not knowing to write a lick of Japanese. And now, what next? That is the question. I pondered a bit a couple of posts ago, but I don't know if that's the best way to go even. Certainly my next move is learning the kana (I'll start with that maybe tomorrow or so). After that I have an absurd amount of possibilities. One possibility is simply to cut my losses--after all, what am I learning Japanese for anyway? Realistically, I'd've answered this question before I started; practically, I'd answer this question before continuing; actually, I'm going to keep going on without aim. It's a language, why shouldn't I learn it? (Regardless I should set a concrete goal so I know when it's okay to pick up another one. It'll wait, I bet.) In any case, I now get to move on to the real part of learning Japanese: managing overwhelming amounts of repetitions in Anki. 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 23 of 102 22 September 2009 at 3:34am | IP Logged | ||
|
I can't say I've done anything in particular since the last update, nearly three weeks ago. (It really didn't seem like it was quite so long...) Haven't bothered with any kana and I've only watched a bit of Japanese programming.
I would like to watch more programs, but I find it hard to justify. I don't like to just sit and not be doing anything, which seems to be roughly what one would do while watching Japanese TV programs or movies. It just seems inefficient. It's extraordinarily rare for me to watch any TV without doing something else--usually some manner of light reading or programming or really just about anything--although it's fairly rare for me to watch any TV at all. But to watch while giving my full attention? I just can't seem to coax myself into that very well. And this predicament is interesting: because I cannot seem to secure for myself the ideal condition of putting Japanese on while I give it my full attention, I neglect even to establish the less desirable environment of Japanese programming on while doing something else. I listen to Japanese music during this time, but it seems "wasteful" to put on Japanese TV and only sort of listen to it, since I don't expect it to do much good. I have now logicked myself into deciding that I should run Japanese programming when reasonable, regardless of whether I intend to devote my full attention to it. I'm not going to understand enough of it for continual attention to provide too much of a benefit to overall understanding, so I may as well just get snippets rather than nothing. I have to see if I can come up with something that doesn't take up active attention that I can do while watching. That would probably be an optimal solution for me. I know I could listen to things while walking or something, but at this stage I think watching is more appropriate for me. I don't know how much I'll actually get done with regards to this in the near future, as I've some real life things to do I've been putting off. Important things. I have been keeping up with my kanji reviews, at least most of the time. I haven't let them get out of hand. It seems like the number of daily reviews is starting to dwindle a bit and that I'll likely be down to fewer than a hundred per day very soon. (Maybe already if I did my reviews more regularly.) I figured out where I can see how much time I've spent in Anki. 4.07 days. I kind of just want to ignore that. I tried doing some kanji drawing with a brush and ink. I was not effective. The activity turned out pretty badly and I don't think I'll be trying that again without at least doing some reading on the subject (don't know if it'd help, but I can't go into that again without additional preparation). French has been ignored. Not too concerned at the moment. At some point I'll get upset at noticing how much I've apparently forgotten, at which point it will already be too late and I'll resign to a fate of non-francophony. If only I could turn back the clock at this point in the future... 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 24 of 102 28 September 2009 at 10:07am | IP Logged | ||
|
I've noticed how this log's title no longer reflects its content. Actually, I'd noticed for a while. I suppose I could've made a separate log for Japanese, or titled this less specifically, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. It's too late now; I must live with my decisions.
I had the idea of watching videos sped up. I was quite aware of the notion of doing this with audio only, but the utility of using this regularly on video had not yet become apparent. Also mplayer, my video player of choice, did not preserve the audio's pitch, which is absolutely necessary for this approach. I investigated, and discovered the solution was as simple as adding the argument -af scaletempo, which I quickly added to my config file (af=scaletempo). I've noted that vlc and Windows Media Player can both adjust the speed while preserving pitch as well. So I've tried this once now, and will probably continue. I sped it up only 10% (1.10), which after a short period is hardly even noticeable. Something like 1.05 might be undetectable even unless you're astute or suspicious. Other notes on speeds (gathered previously): If you put the audio much above 1.5 (I think 1.4 is probably the safest to say) it will be too distorted. That is not to say it's not understandable; but I wouldn't advise attempting it with a language one is learning. I've used higher speeds on audio in English that I wanted to get through quickly and it's certainly useful there. (Don't assume that just because it's going faster means you can't understand it, as that's not the case and indeed and can be helpful as you're forced to pay more active attention to the audio so you're less likely to drift.) I don't think I'm likely to try this with a speed of greater than around 1.2, but 1.3 might not be so bad. I'm not sure how useful this would be if I had the ability to understand anything I was watching. It'll be interesting to try to see what sort of effect this can have on my ability. I might assume it would improve my listening ability for audio at normal speeds. If you've tried this, I'd be interested in hearing how it's worked out for you. (Also, I stopped using Windows sometime in the past month. It was like on Windows I couldn't breathe, but had grown accustomed to the shortness of breath that I no longer realized what it was like to have my lungs filled. And now I breathe yet again! How I love Linux; that I was away from it so long is shameful.) 1 person has voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
