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CZ’s TAC 15 CHN/JPN/KOR | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| The Real CZ Senior Member United States Joined 5647 days ago 1069 posts - 1495 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 633 of 844 25 November 2012 at 3:30am | IP Logged |
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I stopped studying with Anki. While it is useful for what it does, in the bigger picture, it's a highly inefficient tool made to allow people think they are learning. From what I have noticed, I need around 30,000 words to be functionally fluent in my own terms in Korean. It'll take forever using Anki. You can make the case that if I entered 100 words per day that I could reach that 30,000 word goal within a year. However, it takes me roughly 2 hours just inputting those 100 words into Anki, and these are simple cards with the English definition on the front and the Korean word on the back. I had reached the point where I had to review 1000+ cards in a day, and I had only been putting in around 70 cards a day and getting those kinds of numbers. So, I would end up spending two hours just inputting words and roughly two more hours reviewing cards.
Stopping before it became a huge problem was a great idea for me. I've been reading the blogs of Scott H Young and Cal Newton for learning and realized what I had been doing wrong. Instead of continuing to learn new material, I was reviewing old material over and over and over. I went back to my old method, which allows me to see hundreds of new words in a much shorter time. Without having the perfection paralysis of trying to be perfect in Anki reviews, I am actually learning more doing a lot less. Since Anki doesn't guarantee 100% success (and after the cards got to 2 months, I would forget them the next time they came up), I found out that it was really inefficient to continue using Anki. What I have started doing is continuing to challenge myself by using deliberate practice. I hadn't realized that I was already doing this for some things. I focus on intensive reading, looking up every word in the book or article I'm reading. I probably see around 200 words in just an hour's work. If I only remember 100, I'm fine with that. I'll eventually end up seeing the other 100 again and looking them up takes seconds, so it's not a big deal. For now, I usually read around 10 pages a day in a novel using this method and read five finance articles on Chosun Business. Each method only takes an hour and I end up recognizing a lot of new words. As long as I continue reading, those words will stick. What I have also started doing with deliberate practice is to work on the grammar structures I need work on. I write in my own words what the grammar structure means and its function in a sentence. I say out loud a few sentences using the structure and it sticks much better than just reading the English equivalent of the grammar structure. What I had mentioned earlier about deliberate practice being already used was referring to watching dramas without subtitles. I had noticed a marked improvement in my listening ability within a month, so I'm assuming that within a couple of months of doing this with reading and writing, both of those should be a lot better. After improving my writing skills exponentially, I'm hoping all of that writing practice will help me with speaking. I don't really use Skype or anything and there aren't any Koreans in my area, so my speaking naturally lags. Oh well, I only have a year of school of left and so when I move out, I'll probably end up moving to a city/suburb with some Koreans there. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6550 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 634 of 844 25 November 2012 at 9:43am | IP Logged |
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I agree, at your level it's better to spend time on native materials than on Anki. Doing hundreds or even thousands of reviews every day would just kill all my motivation to study.
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| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4866 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 635 of 844 25 November 2012 at 1:17pm | IP Logged |
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I think studying through context is always better than studying words in isolation. I also wonder sometimes whether an Anki card doesn't lose its effectiveness after 5-10 repetitions. But because I always use sentences usually there are still new things I might learn from any given card, so I keep them.
I'm awed if you can remember 100 new words per day. I'm glad if I remember 10 totally new words well and 10 totally new words somewhat. I still make noticeable progress. Of course some words I hadn't seen before don't feel totally new, because I already know all their components. For example, I just learned the word 탈북자, which is so easy to remember when you know that 탈옥 means "escape from jail", 북 stands for North Korea and 자 indicates a person. I guess if I count them I might get to 50 on a study-intensive day. I think the more words you already know the more words you can assimilate easily. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| The Real CZ Senior Member United States Joined 5647 days ago 1069 posts - 1495 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 636 of 844 25 November 2012 at 2:08pm | IP Logged |
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I think it's easier for me since I already know roughly 8-10 thousand words in Korean. I intuitively know a good number of the Chinese root words without even knowing the hanja. That's why I'm just going to focus on intensive reading and just look up the words in Naver's dictionary without actually trying to force myself to remember the words.
I do believe Anki is helpful for someone at Evita's stage, as Anki really helped me in early 2010 when I finally started to put some effort into studying Korean. I'm just at the point where I need to plug the holes in my comprehension, in which Anki would be too slow to allow me to get where I needed to. Oh, I did do 200 words a day here and there. That was killer lol. I spent so much time the next day doing reviews, since I already had a lot of reviews waiting for me plus 200 more. The other big flaw in my study plan was doing English --> Korean. While recall is much more useful than recognition, I had learned so many synonyms that I had to start using Korean definitions, which forced me to learn even more words. It was great for learning seeing as how I had to start doing mono dictionary work, but it made it a bigger pain in the ass to review. Alas, Sundays are my day off from studying. Deliberate practice mentally drains you (but I only do it for 4-5 hours a day anyway). I'll go watch the last two episodes of Nice Guy and catch up on this week's episodes of I Miss You and maybe read a webtoon (I read those extensively.) Edited by The Real CZ on 25 November 2012 at 2:08pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5533 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 637 of 844 25 November 2012 at 3:39pm | IP Logged |
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The fact that you keep trying to "sprint" in Anki rather than taking your time with it doesn't help either. ㅋㅋㅋ I'm content to continue slowly adding items to Anki and letting it build. The 한국어 deck I have now has grown quite sizeable (4282 cards) but it was built over about 3 years, so the review counts are still easily manageable (for example, today I reviewed 73 cards from that deck in 10.7 min) since many of the cards already have large intervals. (For reference, my review stats for *all* decks today was only 145 cards in 23.26 min.) If you added the same number of total cards over the course of a couple months, the review counts would be enormous for quite a while until some of them started to stretch out a bit.
I do however agree that you also have to make plenty of use of other resources (such as books) to expose yourself not only to new vocabulary, but to your existing Anki vocabulary in new contexts. The way I see it, Anki just keeps the concept floating in your head; reading and actually using those words is what solidifies them in your mind and adds the various shades of meaning to each word or phrase over time. That said, I'd be hard pressed to find what I considered to be a more efficient use of that 10-15 min window each day. Sure I could read a page or two during that time, but I already read fairly regularly, so it isn't really an either-or scenario. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| The Real CZ Senior Member United States Joined 5647 days ago 1069 posts - 1495 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 638 of 844 25 November 2012 at 7:32pm | IP Logged |
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Well, the slow, methodical pace is terrible. You leave yourself forever in the intermediate level. I just want to move on from "studying" Korean to being able to use it, which is why I sprint. I'm entering my last two semesters of college, so I won't have the time to just spend an hour hoping doing simple and repetitive tasks makes me improve. As I stated earlier, I made the biggest gains in listening when I stopped using subtitles. It was hard and I hated it. But after a month, everything became clearer and clearer. I know this will work with the other skills. I can read through a novel in roughly two hours and know basically what happened. I just don't know the 20% of the words yet that add the detail to the stories. I could do what I have been doing and just "hope" reading more will help or I can stop making excuses and look those words up so that I can actually know them and quickly move onto the next set of words I need to pick up.
As I've stated before in this log, I hate studying languages, I just want the end result. If the shortest process to attaining my goals is the most painful one, so be it. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5533 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 639 of 844 25 November 2012 at 10:22pm | IP Logged |
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I can't really argue with that logic. :)
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| The Real CZ Senior Member United States Joined 5647 days ago 1069 posts - 1495 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 640 of 844 02 December 2012 at 3:04pm | IP Logged |
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I've mainly been intensively reading 두번째 열병, a book I had read extensively two years ago (and barely understood.) I'm up to around page 200 now, and intensively read 40 pages on Friday (took about three hours.) While I have praised extensive reading a lot in the past, I really think intensive reading is a better technique, depending on what your goals are. If you're just trying to get into reading your target language more, I would say go with extensive reading. if you're trying to identify and fix your weaknesses, go with intensive reading.
What I do with intensive reading is to simply look up every unknown word. I do make note of which grammar constructs I need to brush up on/learn, but vocabulary is the focus here. By just looking up words and trying to make a connection between the Korean word and the definition (I'm to the point where quite a few new words have to be looked up in the Korean-Korean dictionary) instead of memorizing them. Looking at example sentences or back at the source sentence allows me to see how the word interacts with other words. It's much easier to draw connections to its definition and usage than to try and memorize the definition. I have also been trying out a new method to learn grammar. Once I get some more time using the method and see how well it works for me, I'll post it here. As for dramas, I've been watching Miss Ripley lately because I'm a big fan of Lee Da Hae. I read some reports that she's going to be in IRIS 2 and I realized how I still haven't seen most of her dramas. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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