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Mandarin: 2days,2weeks,2months,2years | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5238 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 9 of 118 17 August 2014 at 4:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
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A quick update for something VERY useful I found this week. I have been building my anki deck with the transcript from the Pimsleur course and adding in audio from the CD's. The problem with this is I can't really review the anki deck in the supermarket for example. So I decided I needed to create a character only deck with no audio.
I have been given a couple of books in MOBI format which have chinese characters and at some point in the future I want to read them. I've been using the Online Character to Pinyin Converter for a little while. So using ebook-convert from the Calibre I converted the mobi book to a text file. Then I opened it and pasted the characters into the converter. This not only gives you the pinyin and the English translation, but it will actually build you a CSV/Excel file for you to study. You can do up to 100 characters at a time. So I did this for the first 10 paragraphs of my books (ticking the ignore duplicates box) and then downloading the csv files. I bundled all this together and imported it into anki. It sounds complicated but it took less than 20 minutes and I got 330 unique cards with simplified, traditional characters, with translation and pinyin from an actual book. I figure I have to learn them all eventually so might as well use the times when I can't study the preferred deck. I've updated the first post with the links to the resources. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5238 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 10 of 118 20 August 2014 at 6:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Update
OK, I've continued to beef up the "silent" anki deck and I've now got ~1,100 characters to learn from just 3/4 of a book. I've managed to rank at 20 in the 6 week challenge bot with 22.3 hours of study so far and 29 on total hours spent language-learning. Gotta say, after 22 hours of Pimsleur (on repeat) I'm getting pretty sick of it, especially the part where he keeps asking her to dinner. Do you want to go at 4 o'clock? No 4 o'clock is bad, 5 o'clock ok? No 5 o'clock is bad, 6 o'clock ok? Bloody hell! Just forget it, go home and go to bed! :-) Anyway, I'll persevere until the end of the 3rd set of lessons! (I'm not even off the first set of lessons.) Having the dialogues loaded into anki with the pinyin and characters is helping a lot, but creating them is time consuming. I've managed to get up to lesson 1.12 loaded into the anki with audio, pinyin, etc. I'm not getting as much time as I'd anticipated to do the pronunciation drills which LeoSmith recommended, so I will try to carve out some time for that next week. My friend in Taiwan is having some simple conversations with me via skype chat so I can practice the characters I've learned so far, I need to start talking soon. I've tried to commit to writing down things in Chinese when I take notes. This is mostly numbers since I don't know much else and can't string a sentence together. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5238 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 11 of 118 25 August 2014 at 11:09am | IP Logged | |||||
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I haven't participated in the Going Native thread because this isn't something I would normally do. I don't know why, I just never have. So to get into the swing of Mandarin a bit more, and to have something non language related about China I downloaded an anki deck with all the provinces and their capitals to memorise.
Of course it does have the hanzi names, pinyin, etc so I will learn something language related. I also ran across the periodic table of elements in Chinese which was shared. I think I'd have to be really bored to download that. I've also been watching Say It, which is a program from Singapore which teaches Mandarin to English speakers and English to Mandarin speakers. I couldn't work out why they only showed the segment for people to learn English with this actress who was trying to learn English. Turns out I was watching a channel some "stalker" guy setup who edited out anything but this woman!!! I've found the entire show now and it turns out to be an hour long, and have other people in it. I've put the link in the first post of this thread. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5238 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 12 of 118 29 August 2014 at 12:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I've updated the first post with some more resources. I spent 3 hours yesterday making flashcard sentences from the book 1984 by Orwell. I'm getting sick of anki already, but I have noticed it helps. When I was doing the sentences I recognised a lot of them from the deck I have been doing on single characters and the Pimsleur transcript.
I think I need to come up with a method of using Anki which is less of a strain for me. It is useful so I don't want to burn myself out on it. I think I'll come up with some kind of limit for myself like 1/2 hour or an hour per day max, then one cram session per week and one full day off. Need to put some thought in this, because I have previously got Anki burnout. I wonder if any Anki experts know how to use the "Custom Steps" options in an Anki deck? I've created a "Most lapsed" deck which I've set to "1.5 2 10" based on the recommendation on someone blog, but I have no idea what this means in reality. I couldn't work it out from the manual. Anyone know? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ezy Ryder Diglot Senior Member Poland youtube.com/user/Kat Joined 4351 days ago 284 posts - 387 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 13 of 118 29 August 2014 at 2:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Personally, instead of limiting the number of cards seen, or amount of time spent daily, I'd
suggest limiting time spent on each card. You can do this on Ankidroid just by going into the settings; and by downloading a plug-in on the PC version (I'd presume Mac, Linux, etc., too). It's called "Automatically_show_answer_after_X_seconds." It can speed the reviews up quite a bit. I've went from 19.8s/card, to 3.5s/card (currently it's set to show the answer after 2 seconds, but I'm not sure whether it wouldn't take some time getting used to first, so if you'd consider giving it a try, maybe set it a bit higher; at first I've set it to 7s, then 4s, before the current state). At first your retention rate may suffer, since you probably have a bunch of cards you need a while to recall, but after some time with this approach, it'll get back to normal (or maybe even higher). The custom steps, are the intervals for cards in the "learning" process (before becoming young). The first one is the interval after failing them, the rest are after each "good" answer. Personally, I'd suggest adding a longer interval, too. Mine are "1 10 30." 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5238 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 14 of 118 29 August 2014 at 3:59pm | IP Logged | |||||
That seems like a very sensible suggestion, and I use the android version so I'll mess around with that to find something comfortable. If it doesn't work out for Hanzi, I can still set that on the French decks which I whizz through anyway.
I've had a good old read of the manual and a lot of blog posts so I hope that I've understood this properly. Let me know if I haven't. It seems that the default starting intervals for “hard,” “medium” and “easy” cards (by default these are .3-.5 days, 3-5 days, and 7-9 days, respectively). I decided to experiment on my custom deck of "Most Lapsed French Words" which basically takes all the French words I have screwed up on and drills me on them. A setting in the custom steps of: 0.25 0.5 2 gives me: Again="repeat in 15 seconds", Good="Repeat in 30 seconds", and Easy="Repeat in 1 day" Setting to 1 10 90 Again="repeat in 1 minute", Good="Repeat in 10 minutes", and Easy="Repeat in 1 day" Setting to 100 1000 10000 Again="repeat in 2 hours", Good="Repeat in 17 hours", and Easy="Repeat in 1 day" Setting to 10 10 .25 Again="repeat in 2 hours", Good="Repeat in 17 hours", and Easy="Repeat in 1 day" So this is telling me that the first two are minutes, and the 3rd is 1 interval (AKA 1 day). Setting to 0.25 0.5 90 Again="repeat in 15 seconds", Good="Repeat in 30 seconds", and Easy="(end)" So with this setting I'm telling anki I don't want to repeat this if I think it is easy. For my normal Hanzi deck I have steps 1 10 and easy interval of 6 days, which would mean: Again="repeat in 10 minutes", Good="Repeat in 1 day", and Easy="Repeat in 6 days" So your setting of 1 10 30 would mean you are asked the card again in 30 days time. =========== I posted this over-detailed post in case I every have to figure this out again! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ezy Ryder Diglot Senior Member Poland youtube.com/user/Kat Joined 4351 days ago 284 posts - 387 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 15 of 118 29 August 2014 at 4:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Not exactly. When presented with a new card, or card I need to relearn, I'll get:
1 minute for Hard 10 minutes for Good The "Easy interval" for Easy (1 day in my case, 3-4 days by default) If I choose Hard, in about 1 minute I'll get the same options. If I choose Easy, I'll see the card tomorrow. If I choose Good, I'll get these options after about 10 minutes: 1 minute for Hard 30 minutes (that's the 30 from "1 10 30") for Good The "Easy interval" for Easy (1 day in my case) If I choose Hard, it goes back to square one. If I choose Easy, I'll see the card tomorrow. If I choose Good, I'll get these options, after about 30 minutes: 1 minute for Hard 1 day for Good (the card becomes "Young") The "Easy interval" for Easy (1 day, too, in my case) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5238 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 16 of 118 01 September 2014 at 9:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
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So far I'm 26 days into my time and I've managed to do 42+ hours according to the 6weekchallenge bot. So I'm averaging over 1.6 hours a day of Mandarin learning! Yay!
I've used audacity to strip out the sound from a half a dozen YouTube videos and created myself a "Numbers MP3" so I can drill myself with the numbers 1-10 until I know them like the back of my hand. I've already got a good feel for the characters 1-10 since I now use those exclusively when taking notes, etc. I can obviously do all the numbers now that I know those characters, but pronunciation is another thing. My friend in Taiwan sent me a lot of links to those "Visit Taiwan" type advertisements, but the beauty of them is that it they have both English & Mandarin subtitles. So these are short and give me something "Native" to work with for awhile. I can watch those when I am sick of Say It or Pimsleur. ANKI Update: I tried the automatic showing of the card, and found this annoying. So I put it back to the defaults. I figure I can push the show answer button myself. Of course this doesn't help me get through the cards, but then again I'm not in a race, and I can always cut back the number of new cards. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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