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読みたい！ TAC 2015 (Rätsel|東亜) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5983 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes  Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 49 of 91 30 January 2015 at 8:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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So I was expecting a lot of crazy stuff to happen with work at the start of the year. It was a couple of weeks later than expected, but the expected craziness is well and truly happening. I don't need to go into the details, suffice to say that a lot of stuff is happening that is taking up a lot of my mental energy, both at work and at home, which does not leave a lot of space for languages!
Anyway, the beauty of the TAC is that it doesn't matter if your language learning gets interrupted by life stuff for a few weeks, because you still have the rest of the year to make up for it. And the beauty of the way memory works is that whatever I don't totally forget while I'm taking a break from study, will be retained even better when I do return to the books! Anyway, the little remaining space I do have in my head for languages is currently being taken up mainly by turning up to German class and doing my homework, and keeping an eye on Twitter for interesting things. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5983 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 50 of 91 03 February 2015 at 7:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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The last few days have been relatively "normal" so I took the plunge and signed up for the 6WC with German again. Might as well make the most of it while my German still sucks enough for me to be allowed to participate!
Being forced to take a break, with no guarantees regarding how much free time I'll have over the coming weeks either, has actually helped me get a new perspective on what I want to do right now. I hate to admit it, but not only have I not missed Japanese, it's actually felt like something of a relief not to do (or feel like I ought to do) anything with it. No conversations, no lessons, no books, no articles, not even any TV. I'm doing just enough Anki to keep my deck alive, so I still have the option to go back to it, but I'm only doing this because it only takes a few minutes a week and the deck is so mature now that anything that comes up I can either answer really easily or I'll never remember in the current format so it's on its way to leechdom anyway. French is an interesting one. I'm still kind of dabbling round the edges, with no pressure to perform, but it's quite good fun. I've got a range of French stuff on my Twitter feed, I look at the occasional article on Le Monde or Libération, and I've been reliving my childhood with a few more episodes of the French dub of the epic 80s cartoon series Les Mystérieuses Citées d'Or. So my output skills are not great and I have no motivation to work on them, but it seems the passive skills, at least, are taking care of themselves. Moving on to German then, I feel much more motivated to prioritise language study time on this language now. Just to get myself past that annoying stage I'm in where everything feels like hard work! My class winds up in four weeks so I'm starting to think about what I might want to spend my time doing after that too. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5536 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 51 of 91 04 February 2015 at 9:17pm | IP Logged | ||
That sounds a bit like the reason I'm still reviewing my Spanish deck even though I'm not actively studying Spanish right now. It only gives me a handful of cards per day all of which are mature enough to be fairly simple to answer, so it's more a matter of "meh...why not". 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5983 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 52 of 91 05 February 2015 at 7:04pm | IP Logged | ||
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@Warp3 you are exactly right. It's easier to keep the deck going, given the minimal effort involved, than having to make a decision to drop it for good or not. I've dropped other decks before when they got too bothersome to maintain, but this one throws up maybe 50-70 reviews a week, which is nothing.
Speaking of dropping things, I decided to throw in the towel on the Twitter challenges. The Japanese SC has been hanging over me for so long, but still riding the relief I'm feeling from taking almost a complete break from Japanese, I decided to extend the relief by cutting free from the challenge. I guess I'd like things to trundle on with Japanese like they currently are with French, where I'm dabbling with native materials with no pressure to perform and, at least with French, it's showing some results. My reasoning for dropping out of the 6WC is a little different. I started off thinking I'd really aim to get the hours in this time, since I am still pretty motivated for German. So for the first couple of days I put in enough time, over a range of activities, to keep me hovering most of the time in the top 10. Then last night I unexpectedly had to work later than normal, so I got back late, pretty tired and with not much time or energy to spare for languages. However, I made the use of the time and energy that I did have and actually got in a pretty effective study session. In fact, for the 45 minutes or so I was studying last night, I subjectively reckon that my German got as much, if not more, benefit than it got from the 2-3 hours a day I was putting in the rest of the time. However, that 45 minutes didn't really count for much on the leaderboard. Time on task is important, but it's not the only factor. If anything, I think I'd like to challenge myself to get more quality study in, as subjective as that is, rather than counting the hours and minutes. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5983 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 53 of 91 15 February 2015 at 1:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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So I've had a stinking cold all week and work has thrown me some unexpected surprises on top of the stuff I was already expecting to have to deal with. I can still find just enough time to keep up some momentum with German, although I'm not sure I will have time to go to the class next week.
I've started making regular use of the Top Thema articles on Deutsche Welle. They are aimed at B1 level, so they are a bit of a stretch for me, but it seems like it's just the right amount of stretch - it's out of my comfort zone but still giving me the tools to make another, bigger comfort zone! Each article leaves me with half a page of useful vocabulary to learn, plus I get some exposure to verb forms that I'm not really ready to use myself yet, but just being able to recognise and understand them better opens up the way into native materials. I also like the fact that the articles are published twice a week. Any more than that and it would be too much material to work with, or at least too much of the same method all the time. But I quite look forward to the latest article being released on Tuesdays and Fridays. I've also bought myself a copy of the Hueber German/English Learner's Dictionary, which one of my classmates brought to class a few weeks ago. I'd generally been relying on a combination of Beolingus and Word Reference, which still do a pretty good job for looking things up e.g. when I'm reading. The Learner's Dictionary, however, is more for browsing or for looking up common but troublesome words, since it comes with reasonable bilingual definitions and plenty of example sentences and related expressions. I do quite like it, and I'm not normally a dictionary person! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5983 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 54 of 91 24 February 2015 at 9:04pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hopefully the crazy time I have been having at work is now behind me and I am back to my regular levels of sleep, brain power and enthusiasm.
I also managed to not miss a single German class. Having said that, my German study since my last post has mainly consisted of doing just enough homework to not embarass myself in class, listening to Radio Deutschlandfunk when I couldn't get to sleep at night (strangely soothing), barely keeping on top of my Anki deck (i.e. not reviewing every day) and having another go at watching the first couple of episodes of the German dub of Sex and the City (something of a result here - my comprehension has definitely improved since I last attempted it). Still, my German is looking a lot better than my French and Japanese right now! Anyway, now things are back to normal I am actually itching to crack open a German grammar book and get some quality study time in. The Präteritum is just begging me to review it. So that's what I'm going to do right now (and I shall follow up with more SATC later!) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5983 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 55 of 91 07 March 2015 at 1:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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Reposting from 28th February, which disappeared during the Great Forum Crisis of 2015:
I stayed up far too late last night reading the beginning of Amélie Nothomb's Péplum, so I guess that means I'm back on track again with French. I wish I'd had access to books like this when I was still studying French at school, I think I might have taken an altogether different trajectory with the language. Well, if I have time to complain about things like that, I have time to get on with my languages right now! I'm also in the middle of reading Michael Ende's Momo in German. I can tell it's not overall a difficult read, however, given my low starting point and the fact that I don't know the story (unlike Der Kleine Prinz), I'm crawling through it at a snail's pace. It really feels like I can read something like Péplum 10 times or more faster than something like Momo right now. Still, it's worth the effort. I'm feeling somewhat wanderlusty at present. I was in London a few days ago and spent a good hour on the fourth floor at Foyle's before convincing myself that no, now is not the time to start with a Slavic language (despite the awesomeness of radioclare's log, Ezy Ryder's examples of word building in Polish on my own log, and all the cool stuff I learned about Czech thanks to this thread). Anyway, my house is already far too full of language clutter. No new languages until I can read German as well as I can read French! I'm also a little concerned about the state of HTLAL, with the maintenance warnings that have been popping up recently and the intermittent down time of the site. I don't need to log myself to learn languages. In fact I'd probably at times learn better if I had less HTLAL time and more language time. However, I have learned so much from this site over the years and the google search feature is always my first go to if I am carrying out research to solve a particular language problem. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5983 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 56 of 91 08 March 2015 at 7:23pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm starting to address the language clutter that I referred to in my previous post.
In order to learn a language well, resources are of utmost importance. I am in the fortunate position of having some disposable income to throw at my language hobby, but the result of this is that over the years my psychological response to solving problems in language learning is by buying more resources. Now sometimes, a new resource really is the optimum solution. But it should not be the first thing you do to try and solve every problem. My Japanese library grew to ridiculous proportions quite some time ago, but it reached the point where rather than throwing up solutions to my problems, it just created problems of its own. I'd collected books that I didn't want to read and textbooks that I either didn't need or simply disliked. But I felt so guilty about spending that money, collecting the library, and then not using it well, that I felt rather weighed down by the whole thing. And when you have too many textbooks to choose from, or, for that matter, general reading books, it becomes very easy to procrastinate, either unconsciously or consciously. I'd been trying not to make the same mistakes in German, and yet I found myself fretting about whether to study from one of two general textbooks, three grammar books, a vocabulary book, or any of the great free resources on DW. Not to mention another grammar book and vocab book sat on the bookshelf which didn't really suit me, alongside the Assimil that I'd given up on 75% the way through. I've tied myself up in similar knots with French in the past as well. There is something rather beguiling about a shiny new language book. So full of possibilities. It may have been shipped to you from half way round the world and arrived in an invisible cloud of exoticism, or maybe its something that you picked up from a bookshop on holiday and is tied up with happy memories of short term escapism. But that doesn't actually help learning a language and, as I have discovered, can do quite the opposite, as it discourages you from letting go of things you don't need. So I've started tackling my own language clutter head on and in the last couple of weeks have donated bags of stuff to a charity shop specialising in books. The Japanese children's books that bored me to tears are gone. Genki I & II are gone, no regrets about using them but if I had to relearn Japanese from scratch I would start somewhere else. The Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese, which I hated so much and yet couldn't let go of because it cost me so much, is finally gone. I hope the charity shop recognise what it's worth and get a good price for it. The 新完全マスターN2聴解 book I bought to complete the set, even though I had no need to work on listening for N2, is gone (but I'm keeping the rest, they're still useful). Same goes for some of the basic French books I picked up a few years ago, thinking I'd have to relearn the language from scratch (blame that on bad advice from the internet). The books aren't bad, I just don't need them. I got rid of more stuff I won't list here, and I still have enough stuff left to fill 6 shelves of a bookcase. But that covers both textbooks and native language materials for 3 languages I feel serious about, a handful of introductory courses for 3 languages I've dabbled in and may return to, and a couple more general books about language. I think that's ok. I may change my mind if I have to move house... The most important lesson though is about reigning in my urge to solve my problems just by throwing money at them. Just as I've come to realise that it's not so much about how much time you spend studying, but how much quality time you spend, I think a similar thing applies to the resources. At least for the languages I am studying, where there are more good quality resources available than any one student actually needs. Maybe I need to pick a less popular language next, to really teach myself a lesson. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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