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2010 a Language Odyssey (Team H) - CLOSED | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6474 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes  Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 25 of 85 05 February 2010 at 12:57am | IP Logged |
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Week 5
I caught up with my Chinese sentences and even studied 361 new ones - that's above target! I also did 1090 Anki reviews of my characters in the last week, still slightly up because I missed last week, but hopefully decreasing from now on. And I spent several hours studying the Chinese subtitles for "Mamma Mia", which are of a refreshing ease. Unfortunately I couldn't get VLC Player to show the subtitles from my file while playing the DVD. Bad news is that I only spent 1 hour on French, finishing Montesquieu's "Lettres Persanes", which was my chosen book for the month of January. I will try to read either "Le rouge et le noir" or "Candide" in February, and it will probably take longer because these works are longer and the month is shorter and I haven't started yet. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| annette Senior Member United States Joined 5510 days ago 164 posts - 192 votes Speaks: English* | Message 26 of 85 05 February 2010 at 1:18am | IP Logged |
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Inspired by you, I am going to start using Anki for Chinese!!! We'll see if I can be as
dedicated as you are to doing those reps. ;) Is there a special language pack or something like that that I need for Chinese characters? I feel like I heard something like that, but I'm not sure. I've only ever used Anki for Arabic before (which I'm planning to start Anki for again as well, as my vocab is dwindling). By the way, I'm sorry to hear about your loss. I hope you and your parents are well. Keeping you in my thoughts, Annette 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6474 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 27 of 85 12 February 2010 at 12:00am | IP Logged |
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Thank you, Annette. Yes, I do use the Basic Chinese support pack, and also the Hanzi
stats plugin. I love the Hanzi stats, it really motivated me to study characters last year because it showed me how many characters I know and which essential characters from HSK lists or frequency lists I was still missing. Week 6 Chinese * 833 Anki character reviews - they're definitely decreasing now, though there are still a few characters that I keep forgetting. * 395 new Chinese sentences, a new record of an average of 56 new sentences per day, even as they're getting less and less obvious. If my review count goes too high, I may actually decrease the target of new sentences per day. Anyway, this means I now understand 1807 Chinese sentences and it's only February. I feel confident that I can hit my 5000 sentences target and have enough time left to study authentic Chinese texts, even though my focus will shift away from Chinese in April. * Since some of the sentences had 70% unknown two-character words whose meaning was not easily inferrable, I decided to study a Chinese HSK deck at the same time. For this purpose, I eliminated all single-character HSK items and I am studying the rest at an accelerated pace of 100 items per day at the moment just to get through the HSK 1 ones as quickly as possible. I'm almost done with them now. It's surprising how many words I only know from my second-level textbook, and there are even a few I haven't seen (or paid attention to) before. * I also did some random Chinese study on LiveMocha, and with Wenlin. French, Swahili, Modern Greek * I spent only 1.5 hours on French this week. I'm really not motivated about this language anymore, but I have to study it more. Good news is that I got "Candide" by Voltaire, as recommended by another forum member in the French forum section, and it is indeed an excellent read, quite funny. This shall be my French book of the month. * I spent more-than-required amounts of time on Swahili and Greek. In Greek, I am now at Assimil lesson 33, so I have advanced 5 lessons this week. In Swahili, I'm only at lesson 27, one more than before, and that is because the way description vocabulary in lesson 26 just refuses to stick, even after two weeks! It's essential stuff like "left" and "right", but I only understand it from context, because I've done this lesson so often. This is a big drawback with the Assimil method as the publisher recommends it - I automatically memorize the translation at some point, and even most of the Swahili dialog, but I only understand it from the intonation of people's voice, I'm still no further ahead in understanding the vocabulary in any other context, or even in the same context if other people say the same sentence! So for this reason I have decided to give up and enter the Assimil Swahili vocabulary into Anki. This is taking up a bit of time now, I'm entering three lessons every day and study yesterday's vocabulary as well (15 new words per lesson on average, never would have thought...) but when I'm caught up, I should be able to advance through the course faster. Edited by Sprachprofi on 12 February 2010 at 12:02am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| lorsque Groupie Canada Joined 5443 days ago 64 posts - 67 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 28 of 85 18 February 2010 at 4:04am | IP Logged |
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Hi Sprachprofi,
That is awesome. You have inspired me. I am going to use Anki. Do you know where I can get a deck with 10,000 French Sentences? I too am going to follow your recommendation in regards to Assimil and use Anki with it. I need to accelerate my pace. Thank-you for your efforts. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6474 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 29 of 85 18 February 2010 at 10:25am | IP Logged |
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Lorsque,
As far as I can see, there is no 10,000 sentences deck for French yet, just one for intermediate students with 1000 sentences. However, you should easily be able to create one yourself (the author of the 10,000 sentences method recommends that anyway) based on the French you hear and read. Also, the Tatoeba Project has lots and lots of French sentences, so you could just find one or two example sentences there for each of the words you want to learn and fill your deck that way. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6474 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 30 of 85 18 February 2010 at 10:04pm | IP Logged |
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Week 7
* 758 Anki Chinese characters reviews * 150 new Chinese sentences - far below the target, but I had too many reviews pile up and I had to skip one day because of the Berlinale * 896 Anki Chinese words reviews / 301 new words. The words are almost all new now, as I've reached the upper HSK levels. Even if they consist only of characters I know, it sometimes takes several tries to commit the words to memory * about two hours studying Chinese outside of Anki, reading Mamma Mia subtitles, Harry Potter or writing on lang-8. I am still trying to settle on some interesting material to use for this. I thought I'd read those traditional stories that I have as a bilingual text, but the Chinese seems to be Wenyanwen spelled in simplified characters. Very weird. * 5 1/2 hours spent on French this week, still reading Candide but also entering some advanced vocabulary into Anki because I've encountered unknown words that I've encountered many times before and they just won't stick because I don't see them often enough * 2 1/2 hours on Swahili. I've caught up with the vocabulary-entering now. It was very beneficial because I noticed a lot of things that I had overlooked or misunderstood in the previous lessons. For example, I totally missed the explanation of -ji- (oneself). I'm a bit confused about funga/fungua though - is it really that there is only a one vowel difference between 'to open' and 'to close'? Or was the Assimil translation messed up? This week I got a lot of work-work done, namely on GermanPod101, the machine translation project and my university essays. Because of that, I am satisfied with the language study I was able to squeeze in. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6474 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 31 of 85 25 February 2010 at 10:15pm | IP Logged |
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Week 8
I am unable to progress as quickly as hoped on the Chinese sentences file (only 122 new sentences this week) because many new sentences contain two or more new words now. This is why I'm making an increased effort to commit more HSK words to memory (676 reviews / 150 new) before tackling the sentences with full-force again. At this point, I would even pause the sentence-studying if I wasn't afraid of the reviews piling up. I'm also less happy working on Anki these days because I have a cold and I find it harder to concentrate as much as I need to for Anki. There are two items of good news though: 1. I found a good teacher, who assessed my level well, found a really interesting lesson to study (from Boya Chinese Lower-Intermediate) and spoke Mandarin almost exclusively during the lesson. I shall study with her one hour a week; already did last Friday and I have another appointment for this Friday. 2. I found a really interesting set of easy books to study, a collection of stories from Chinese history/legends designed as cartoons with the occasional vocabulary hint and grouped around each of Confucius' values. Today I spent three hours studying Chinese because of this! Total study time for Chinese this week: a little over 8 hours In contrast I've only spent 3 1/2 hours on French. There is just no interesting material for me at the moment. I would really like to integrate some Quebecois TV programs, e. g. the Radio Canada news, into my routine, except it won't display correctly. I tried re-installing Silverlight and installing the file of codecs that Radio Canada recommends - nothing. Here's a screenshot, maybe there's an angel on the forum who can help. In terms of Assimil, I studied 3 Greek lessons this week and am now on lesson 36. I really get the impression that my Greek is improving. For Swahili I'm on lesson 29, so two new lessons this week. Edited by Sprachprofi on 26 February 2010 at 1:46pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6474 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 32 of 85 26 February 2010 at 2:25pm | IP Logged |
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Gotta love Boya Chinese... The example sentence for 宝贝 (bao3bei4, baby):
妈妈：宝贝，现在太晚了，苹果也睡觉了，明 天再吃吧。 孩子：我知道小苹果睡觉了，大苹果还没睡。 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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