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Expug’s All at On(c)e Log - TAC14 | ||
Tags: Papiamento | Estonian | Georgian | Native Materials | Norwegian | Total Annihilation Challenge (TAC) | Mandarin | Russian | German | French | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5164 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 297 of 415 27 August 2014 at 11:02pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm happy with watching the Georgian series, and I am understanding more and more. Sometimes I even laugh! Today two characters were watching TV, a soap opera, and the man 'commented'" about the doctor on the soap opera: "He knows nothing, he's a Brazilian doctor".
Easy German is over for the moment, at least until new episodes are released. It was very important as a cultural/conversational intro. I learned important linking expressions, as the interviews were very authentic and natural. Needless to say I'm more and more convinced of the efficacy of double subtitles. I resumed watching Das Leben der Anderen and will do it this way. I found German and Portuguese matching subtitles (even an Estonian one but it didn't match, unfortunately) and I'm learning a lot from that. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| fabriciocarraro Hexaglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Brazil russoparabrasileirosRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4713 days ago 989 posts - 1454 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, EnglishB2, Italian, Spanish, Russian, French Studies: Dutch, German, Japanese | Message 298 of 415 28 August 2014 at 5:56am | IP Logged | |||||
That's an interesting idea. Doesn't it confuse you? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4845 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 299 of 415 28 August 2014 at 7:04am | IP Logged | |||||
Well, to be fair, those are situations that I know the right words to say and listen for. Other situations are different... I don't feel ready to put Japanese into the "speaks" column yet. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5164 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 300 of 415 28 August 2014 at 9:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
How so? For example, I'm currently watching "Das Leben der Anderen", a German movie. I merged German subtitles and the Brazilian ones. I tend to listen to and read the German subtitles. When I don't understand a word, I read the Portuguese subtitle. That happens quickly and it becomes automated with tieme, till you don't really need non_L2 subtitles anymore. I mean, I have time for all: listening, reading the L2 subtitles and reading the L1 subtitle when possible. This is more effective than reading because I'm forced to analize line-by-line. --------- Today was a productive day. I'm really happy about Norwegian, tempted to change its status. I only need that people talk slowly to me, but that's what *basic* is about. I can translate lyrics into Norwegian in my head. The tests by Goethe-Verlag have been of great help at activating my Norwegian. I hope I can finish the next 100 and start doing them for another language - these are called 'advanced' but the format is the same, only the vocabulary is slightly more 'technical, philosophic, jargon etc.). I read my novel fast, almost skimming, and it turned out that I could understand sentences in a broader context, that is, it was more effective towards global comprehension than reading slowly. German is also being improved steadily. I need to work on speaking up, especially if I want to go to Germany. My reading speed is not so bad when you account for German's unique word-order. Estonian still isn't at the native materials stage, but it doesn't mean it's neglected at all. After all, I'm using a very comprehensive resource. I believe if I mastered the content of Basic Course in Estonian I'd be in a B2 passive/B1 active. That's not how I work, though, but I'm not any less happy about the book. I've got a good feel for the Estonian phrase/word order, something that took years to grasp in Georgian and in German. I believe the best thing to do, for the SRS fans, is to turn each of the sentences at Basic Course in Estonian into an Anki card. I have no 'active' thoughts for Estonian now, I want to work on an audio-intensive course first. (BCE wasn't that audio-intensive because it consisted only of the words and sentences being read slowly by a single voice). For me to work on these audio-intense courses, I have to overcome the audioblock by downloading the lessons or study them in the morning. Now, my mornings are still a mess. I'm doing Memrise, Happy Journey Across China, Chinesepod, Russianpod, Tutu. I want to leave only the CHinese series as a permanent resource, because there are other interesting series to watch. In about two months I will finish one season of Advanced Audioblog for Russian, and I won't work on the other series. I expect my Russian to be good enough by then so that it becomes indifferent whether I read form the podcasts or from native material sources. Then in another two months I finish Chinesepod, and I also don't expect to add any other resources for Chinese at this 'slot'. I want to do less stuff in the morning, and maybe I will keep 1 Estonian course, the Chinese series and an optional one, when the time comes. The mornings are being too stressful and I'm not managing to focus on each resource with the attention it deserves. It can't be just about listening pasively; I need to actively study these resources that are aimed directly at learners. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5164 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 301 of 415 29 August 2014 at 9:42pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I've noticed some courses place too much emphasys on word formation. This is totally against the principle of learning naturally. I mentioned it once about Assimil Russian courses, and I noticed it's more frequent for Russian but it also happens for Estonian and Georgian. The point is, why do I need to know "how" an adjective is formed from a verb? Just tell me the translation for a verb is xxxxyy and the adjective is xxxxxzz and I'll be able to see a patern there and draw my conclusions instinctively. Just like we don't "have" to be told that the English -tion corresponds to the Spanish -ción. The problem with such chapters is that they go on with lots of "examples" that merely consist of the same rules.
I acknowledge the importance of intermediate textbooks. Living Language Ultimate Russian, and the overall corpus of Russian resources, demonstrates how helpful it is to have a 'path' to follow, even if it's quite important that you also create your own path through native resources (and SRS, if you like). I reviewed Norwegian and Georgian and I don't see any issues with RUssian, it's like you could find resources for Russian at A1.1, A1.2, A1.9 and B1.999 etc, that is, you don't even have to take any "auantum leaps" on your own. Whenever you finish one textbook in Russian, there's one 5% more advanced for you to follow with. Speaking of SRS, Gabriel Wyner and YnEoS confirm it, but for me it still feels like learning to 'read' by reading the dictionary, not enjoying the process, it's like cracking" the language. Much of the fun is in doing tasks of different types and seeing knowledge consolidate from the combination of them all. Ok, I could SRS Basic COurse in Estonian and maybe advance 1 year in my studies, being able to soon read Estonian in my own, but what is the point if I don't like doing SRS? I still prefer to leave SRS as acessory. It helped enormously with Norwegian, Papiamento, Chinese but, for example, I prefer to use sentences when I can already read them more or less 'extensively', maybe at some 60% comprehension. And words are even more boring. I've been using a sentence deck for Mandarin for over 1.6 year and only now I see some 'fun' in it as I finally know about 60-70% of the characters most of the time. While it's quite motivating to realize that, it's also motivating to be able to use the SRS more intuitively instead of cramming through each single character then the word then the global sentence, then pinyin then translation Forgot to say that I've started using ChineseSkill, the equivalent of duolingo for Chinese. So much fun, I don't mind starting over. I'm treating it like one more of the games for iPad I have, not as a language tool. It's still pretty much easy, obviously, and I like how we get to train writing characters in an interactive way, by joining radicals. Btw, I'm finally worrying about radicals at this stage, as I'm studying level 4 of HSK as a Memrise course. I learned the main characters without worrying about radicals and as new ones are being introduced it makes more sense to care about radicals. It didn't make much sense to scrutinize each character by radicals when I didn't even have a foundation for communicating yet. Speaking of my mornings...I realized I have enough time to work at least in the Chinesepod in the afternoon, so I'm worrying less about it in the morning. I listen to the Russianpod in the morning as a background listening, but next week I'm resuming the Advanced Audioblog, and in this case the lessons are shorter, TL-only, so no use listening to them in the background. Today I played the Russianpod first, then watched Tutu and Happy Journey Across China. There was no time for finishing reading the Russian lesson and I didn't do anything of the Chinesepod lesson, but I did both later. After all, I don't really *have* to do these podcast lessons at my desktop because I can play and read them elsewhere, there's no 'audioblock issue' for them as there is for Happy Journey Across China. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4252 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 302 of 415 30 August 2014 at 12:56am | IP Logged | |||||
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I think a lot of the bad feelings people associate with SRS, are more due to the poor quality of most SRS decks available, and aren't necessarily inherent in the SRS system itself. For me SRS is more about scheduling my learning for me, and having control over what information is shown and what information is hidden. The main downside I see with SRS is that because it randomizes the order of the content you study, it removes the context of the lesson. So for example, in the past when I've tried Assimil courses converted to SRS, they've been really awful to use. But a lot of poorly formatted courses with uninteresting content can work a lot better as SRS decks. Its just always a cost/benefit analysis of how happy you are using textbooks formatted as they are versus how long it would take you to make a fun SRS deck.
The fact I'm using so much SRS now, is due to a lot of specific circumstances related to the languages I'm studying and my own preferences. All the languages that I moved over to SRS either had good SRS material available for them already, or had a course that was already well formatted in such a way that I could very easily create a fun SRS deck out of it. For French and Russian the bulk of my learning has been outside of SRS so far, and I probably wouldn't change that if I had to re-do them. So I don't know if it would make sense to convert your Estonian course to an SRS deck or not. It would depend on how usable it is on its own, and it might not necessarily be easy or time efficient to make a fun SRS deck out of it. I would just suggest not biasing yourself against SRS as a whole based on previous bad experiences. Maybe you'll never need to use it, but if you ever find yourself in a position where the only available resources are really frustrating to use, you may want to consider some SRS solutions. I could write a lot more about ways to make more fun SRS decks and how to make SRS decks more efficiently, but I don't want to clog up your log with too much of this discussion, so perhaps later on I'll write up a longer post in the Techniques, Methods & Strategies section and open the discussion up to more people. Edited by YnEoS on 30 August 2014 at 12:56am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4845 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 303 of 415 01 September 2014 at 3:01am | IP Logged | |||||
That would be nice, YnEoS! Personally, I have periods where it's fun to do SRS, and periods when it is not. I try to do my reviews if I feel like it, and if I really don't feel like doing them on a certain day, I don't. I used to get really frustrated when I didn't feel like doing reviews... or rather, I felt guilty. But now I just let it go. I don't want to force myself to do anything. Also personally, it's a lot more work, for sure, but I find that SRS is more effective and interesting when I make my own cards. I tried pre-made decks before, but I always gave up quickly. They felt impersonal to me. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4252 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 304 of 415 01 September 2014 at 4:58am | IP Logged | |||||
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I created a topic about it over here, though it's more me just throwing lots of ideas out more than any thought out detailed guide. I might try and organize my thoughts a bit better at some point in the future when I've experimented more with SRS.
Finding a good sustainable deck can be tricky, and as a general rule I think its better to keep anki reps lower than you think you need, and only after a good period of sustained practice very slightly increase your reps if you think you want to do more. Generally you'll see a lot more benefit doing even 5-10 minutes of anki a day for a year than trying to do longer sessions and ending up deleting your deck because its frustrating. Though with some of the recent decks I've built I've been motivated to do much longer anki sessions, and usually wish I could do extra reps when I finish, because I like the presentation and content better than most of my textbooks. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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