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petrklic - Русский Язык (TAC 2011) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| petrklic Triglot Pro Member Czech Republic Joined 5086 days ago 95 posts - 109 votes  Speaks: Czech*, English, Russian Studies: Vietnamese Personal Language Map | Message 65 of 68 12 November 2011 at 8:55pm | IP Logged |
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To make things more interesting towards the end of the year, I decided to set a challenge for myself. I'm slowly but surely approaching 4000 words. That's a nice, round number (minus the initial four, which spoils things a bit), a great way of wrapping up a year of study! My current count is 3807, so I'm missing 193 words. 49 days are left, which means I need to add about 4 new words every day. (Of course, I have a script that does these counts for me.) This is certainly doable, my rate over the month of October was a bit less than 5 a day, but it's a close call. I don't want to run over arbitrary lists either, I want to come up with those words "naturally": by reading texts and finding words that I don't understand.
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| petrklic Triglot Pro Member Czech Republic Joined 5086 days ago 95 posts - 109 votes Speaks: Czech*, English, Russian Studies: Vietnamese Personal Language Map | Message 66 of 68 11 December 2011 at 5:35pm | IP Logged |
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Ok, today I've crossed the mark of 4000 words. It's just fresh cards right now, and it's too late for me to turn them all into mature by the end of the year, but I should be able at least to go through them and remember them well enough.
But language-wise, this whole year has been so stereotypical! I mostly understand spoken Russian and I can read Russian without effort. My writing is not too bad, according to my current teacher. I think most of the problems that my previous teacher had with my Russian was not that it was incomprehensible, but that it was informal. Well, my current teacher praises this very quality. I conclude that my writing is just fine for my purposes. My speaking is... not that great, but I can get the point across, and usually it's not a problem for me to express myself. My Russian is not as good as my English, but I feel it's "good enough". Anyway, I think it's time to move Russian to backburner. I'll keep reading stuff in Russian, Google helpfully learned that I speak Russian and often gives me Russian hits. So Russian somehow became part of my life. It's another language that I speak, albeit not as well as the others. This all added up and I was struggling with wanderlust throughout the whole year, and was just barely keeping all the interesting languages at bay: German, Norwegian, Old Church Slavonic, French... As I announced in T.A.C 2012 thread, I've decided to take a more serious look at Vietnamese. I'll keep this thread open as a place to post random Russian-related notes, but after the New Year, my main focus will most probably be Vietnamese. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| petrklic Triglot Pro Member Czech Republic Joined 5086 days ago 95 posts - 109 votes Speaks: Czech*, English, Russian Studies: Vietnamese Personal Language Map | Message 67 of 68 24 December 2011 at 2:19am | IP Logged |
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And as a sort of "итоги 2011 года", I should run some statistics on my Anki deck. In 2011, I added 876 words (which is 2.46 words a day) and 3193 cards in 1313 facts.
Which means that for every measurable word, I need to add about 1.5 facts. That's surprisingly big number. Originally I thought those were clozes, but there are only 231 of those, and that still leaves 1.25 of other facts per countable word. So I did some more tag magic and grepping, and found out that there were another 120 facts for word combinations, like "архитекту́рный стиль", "перьева́я ру́чка" or "чёрное де́рево". That's almost 15%, and it's hard to count this automatically. Another 30 cards are for Church Slavonic numerals. The rest are mostly words that are not in my frequency list: admittedly obscure words like "гипсокартон", "надысь" or "головастик", but also words that I would expect to be counted, like "кремний" and "ночнушка". These apparently legitimate, but uncounted words comprise another about 15% of my vocabulary from 2011. I am not sure if this scales back to past years, as I was more careful not to add unimportant words back then. Figuring out the exact count is certainly possible, I could pass the words through a lemmatizer instead of cross-referencing with frequency list, but I don't feel I care enough to write this right now. But really, this all shows that my facts are either clozes, or pronunciation cards that comprise about 1% of facts, or legitimate vocabulary. Perhaps I could just ignore that 1%, count my non-cloze facts, and call it a day, and it would be more accurate than all the black magic with lemmatizers and frequency lists. By this metric, I know about 4350 words or word combinations, and suddenly I feel like герой труда (never mind that that's a vocabulary of an 8-year old). There's one final bit of stats that I can extract from my deck. I can take the frequency list, and see where the newly-added words lie. I sliced the frequency list into exponentially growing belts: top 25 words, next 25, next 50, next 100, next 200, etc. My biggest relative improvement, it turned out, was in three belts between words #1600 and #12800. (The three belts are #1600-#3200-#6400-#12800.) I covered about 5% of each of these belts in 2011 alone. My biggest absolute improvement was in two belts between words #6400 and #25600, I learned about 250 words from each. These four belts (#1600-#25600) are covered at, respectively, 58%, 40%, 26% and 15%. I wonder if this tells anything about me. Apparently, I don't feel much compelled to add words from belts below #1600. I added only about 30 words in all those belts combined, which is about 2%. That probably means that I'm so sure in that area that I don't even feel like I need to add those words. Note that there's still plenty of words that I don't even have in Anki—the coverage of words below #1600 is below 80%. I suspect that I simply know these words from context or otherwise, never added them, and see them so often (because they are comparatively high-frequency) that they are deep in my long-term memory. I add words like this retroactively all the time. For example, I might, after some thinking, recall that the word for "shade" is тень, but I would be all unsure how the inflection pattern goes, and generally I'd be all vague and hand-wavy about that word. I'd then look into the deck to brush up on it, only to find out that it's not there. But if I had seen the word in text, I would have just known what it means. Either I had seen or heard it earlier, but neglected to add it, or it's because of the similarity with Czech (stín). Similarly I knew the word бутылка all along, because it's a cognate with English "bottle" and thus easy to remember, but only added it recently. Wow, this is getting long, and I feel I'd need someone armed with good theory anyway, like a language acquisition researcher, to spot the interesting patters or make any sort of use of this. In fact, if anyone is interested, I'm game. I have logs and Anki decks with almost-daily snapshots about 2.5 years back, and I'm a programmer by trade, so I could fetch all sorts of data. Then again, I'm not statistically significant sample, so this all might be just useless. In conclusion: I learned a lot, and it was a good year for my Russian studies. Yay! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| petrklic Triglot Pro Member Czech Republic Joined 5086 days ago 95 posts - 109 votes Speaks: Czech*, English, Russian Studies: Vietnamese Personal Language Map | Message 68 of 68 09 January 2012 at 5:22pm | IP Logged |
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What's the etymology of Russian word каникулы? Surprisingly the reason is the same as why "dog days" mean what they mean in English! I love it when stuff clicks together like that. More here.
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