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Going back to Europe TAC 2014 DE|FR|日本語 | ||
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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 17 of 142 18 January 2014 at 7:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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So I've had rather too much free time on my hands over the last few days. On the plus side, I've been reading rather a lot. And as a result, I've also been thinking rather a lot about reading.
There are a few more abstract words in French which were giving me some trouble in retaining the meaning: ainsi, désormais, au-delà, ailleurs, d'ailleurs. Somehow I've covered enough pages in the last few days that these words seem to be following me around in many different contexts, and I find myself being able to understand the meaning they bring to a sentence in most cases now. It just serves as another reminder that for both French and Japanese, I need to read more and read regularly. So this afternoon I asked myself the question: How long does it actually take myself to read stuff? Successful participants in the Super Challenge have already proven that time spent reading turns into improved proficiency, but how long would it actually take me to read 10,000 pages? So this afternoon I read a number of different things in 15 minute slots (short enough not to lose concentration, to allow myself enough time to try with a range of materials, but long enough to read a meaningful amount), to see how many pages I could cover. I then extrapolated this into pages per hour. As I mentioned, I've had far too much free time this week. French: L'élégance du hérisson (novel) 39 pages per hour Japanese: モモちゃんとプー (children's book) 43 pages per hour Japanese: ドラえもん (manga) 80 pages per hour Japanese: カンガルー日和 (short stories for adults) 22 pages per hour Then I realised I needed some kind of control, spent a short period of time trying to find something in English that was neither too dense (Dickens) or too easy (Jilly Cooper) and settled on: English: Flashman 48 pages per hour So it seems that my reading speed in French is not too far behind my English. It's a shame my comprehension isn't quite so good (to be honest, having picked up an English book for the first time in a long time, it was a novelty being able to understand every word). My results for Japanese surprised me. First of all it confirmed what I had already suspected, that the penalty for manga in both Super Challenge and Tadoku is too great. But the gap between my reading of a children's book with full furigana and high comprehension and reading an adult's book with no furigana and medium comprehension really surprised me. The font is a bit smaller in the adult's book, but the difference in volume is probably no more than 25%, if that. Anyway, with a little bit of rounding, I worked out that I'd probably need around 250 hours to complete a French Super Challenge and somewhere between 250-500 hours to complete one in Japanese. Although I'm not going to hang around waiting until the next challenge starts in May. 3 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 18 of 142 23 January 2014 at 8:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think I've figured out the biggest problem I have with fitting German into my life at the moment. Apart from my previous complaints about time, energy, and the general burden of responsibility which comes with every typical adult life, I've taken note of the fact that I was trying to do too much of the same kind of activities in both languages.
My passive skills in French are not too bad, at least in the sense that I'm at a stage where I can continue to improve my listening and reading skills just by doing more of them.. But my knowledge of the grammar system is thoroughly broken and my active vocabulary relies too much on me hoping that a relevant cognate/loan word exists. I decided to tackle this through working with textbooks, Anki and occasional tuition via Skype. At the same time, my German is not yet good enough to profit from spending a lot of time on native materials so apart from the occasional foray into more intensive-style reading or tuning into a German radio station just as a gauge to see what I can pick up, I am fairly limited in what I can do. Being a beginner, naturally my biggest issues are with developing a grammatical framework and building up a basic vocabulary. I decided to tackle this through working with textbooks and Anki, at least until I reach a point where native materials and one to one tuition become more appropriate options. For the first few days it was pretty cool to do my Anki reviews in one language, then spend 45 minutes on a textbook, have a break, then do the same for the other language. But as my decks grew from a handful of words to a couple of hundred, it made it very plain that this wasn't going to work. In the space of two or three days, just through working through totally unrelated textbooks which are even pitched at different levels, I'd collected a whole set of house and kitchen related vocabulary in both languages. Seriously, when my brain is coming up with combinations like "die Fourchette" and I can't get "l'assiette" out of my head when I'm searching for "der Teller", I know I'm just making things hard for myself. And for all those with existing Anki allergies and recovering Ankiholics, it's not just an Anki/vocab problem either. As noted earlier, my French grammar is pretty broken right now. One of the many things that needs fixing is an improved gender awareness. The thing is, as well as trying to get my brain to just notice, for example, how adjectives behave in French, I'm also simultaneously trying to learn, for the first time, how adjectives behave in German. In German, an adjective is not modified for gender if it is used in an XはYです style sentence (hopefully someone who knows some Japanese and a lot more German can come up with the proper grammar description for this). In French, however, it is. I make dumb mistakes because when I don't have several minutes to think about it, I forget which language behaves in which way. In the great scheme of things, it's not a huge problem. But by trying to fix some rather fundamental grammar/vocab issues in one language, while also trying to learn them for the first time in another language, I think I'm making things harder for myself. So, I have a few options: 1. Continue making things harder for myself 2. Stop worrying about my active French skills and just use the language for reading (and in all seriousness, I've read enough over the last few weeks to convince myself that French is worth knowing just for the reading). Work on my German instead. 3. Put German back on hold until my French active skills are more solid 4. Do nothing (only kidding!) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6553 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 19 of 142 23 January 2014 at 9:27pm | IP Logged | ||
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I vote for option 2.
(Obviously I'm just kidding, you should decide for yourself which option is the best one.) I remember trying to learn the French possessive pronouns at school and being very surprised that they have more variations than I was used to in German and Latvian. I don't think I ever learned how to properly use them. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6598 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 20 of 142 24 January 2014 at 12:25am | IP Logged | ||
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Yeah, if there's no pressing need for you to speak, focusing on the passive skills is a good idea. If you make sure to do both reading and listening, much of your knowledge will be activated through synergy. After all, active skills mean nothing when they're not accompanied by passive ones.
2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5227 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 21 of 142 24 January 2014 at 3:27am | IP Logged | ||
But that's the only way you have to know if numbers people throw at you make any sense at all, which is one of my pet peeves regarding language studies. That is essential to properly assess what you can or cannot do, or even what is sensible to attempt. So you get different ppm (pages per minute) speeds for different languages. But you also get 80ppm for manga and 20ppm for novels in the same language. Why? Because 'pages' are not very precise measuring units either. Then you can take any given text and print it in pages of all sizes, or render it in different gadgets with different screens... I scan and proofread texts by the tons, and at some point I had to establish the number of typos and / or scannos that are [un]acceptable in a given text. Off I went to code programs to count words, pages and whatnot, process entire novels, etc. In the end I came up with an average value of 327 words per page (using my main 10 inch eBook reader as a reference), so any texts would be labelled 'unacceptable' if more than one error was to be found per every 650 words -- that would mean finding roughly one error in every other page of a physical book, which would drive me up the wall. But how many Japanese words fit in a page that holds an average of 325 Spanish words? Can they be counted the same way? Even so, assuming the count would surely be much higher, two- or three-fold maybe, what about errors in the text? Are more 'errors per page' acceptable in Japanese because equal pages contain way more words? I just don't know, but I'd say the better one gets at a language, probably errors become the less acceptable. Would you even try to measure that dependency? As you can see, there's a lot of arbitrary stuff in the seemingly most innocent considerations, and most of the time, you can't make them much more meaningful after a lot of work. Conclusion? In no way it's a time waste to do your own research / experiments. At the very least you'll learn what not to waste your time on :) 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 22 of 142 24 January 2014 at 9:42pm | IP Logged | ||
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@Evita it didn't even occur to me that I could put this to a vote! But actually, after a great French session on Skype (I mean, the enjoyment was great, not my performance) I'm actually leaning more towards option 3.
@Serpent you are totally right about the importance of passive skills. I didn't really stress that whatever happens, I'm going to keep reading and listening to French (and Japanese, for that matter) because it seems such an obvious thing to do. German is tougher as I still need a few more hours real work before I can just read. I still listen to German music, and I appreciate it's a valuable exercise to do so, I just don't mentally count it as study. As for a pressing need to speak, well, if I really want to, I can create that as soon as I decide where to go on holiday this year... @mrwarper I totally agree with you. I have found it incredibly useful to capture a little bit of data about how long it takes to do things, from reading a book extensively to working through exercises in a textbook. Of course, it's also rather important not to spend so much time thinking about collecting data you start to forget the main purpose of the activity in the first place, i.e. learning the language! I've also had another look at my scores from the 4 6 week challenges I've taken part in via Twitter, which has helped inject a little more realism into any assessment of how much time I am likely to spend on languages in a year (short answer: somewhere between 500 and 700 hours). Having looked at my own timings for reading and some of the comments on the 2014 Super Challenge thread, I've decided that regardless of what happens with the next Super Challenge, I'm going to try and read 3000 pages each of French and Japanese this year. Since that should take me around 75 hours per language (obviously this is a loose estimate) I will try and match that with 75 hours of TV or film per language. That's a decent amount of exposure for my two "best" languages and leaves me with 200-400 languages left. Throw in 50 hours per language for speaking and/or tuition and 25 hours for writing and I have 50-250 hours left. Thanks to the unique problems of reading in Japanese, ideally I should continue doing some study of kanji. I've done some calculations on how long that will take as well, and in short, it depends on how many more years I want to spend studying kanji. My do a little bit a week approach outlined at the start of this log would probably cost me 50 hours (ouch, that could be all my annual time budget used up already). If I wanted to study kanji so hard I could guarantee myself a kanji-study-free 2015, however, I reckon it would take around 150 hours. For the sake of this initial plan, I'll take the 50 hour option. I reserve the right to change my mind. So I'm left with 200 hours which I may or may not find this year. Anything beyond this point might not happen. That includes finishing my intermediate French grammar book (50 hours) or working through the whole of Le Nouvel Edito (150 hours if I don't do the writing exercises, 180 hours if I do) and suddenly I don't even have time left to work on my French phonetics book (an activity I've yet to time, but I'm certain it won't take more than 50 hours, probably a few hours less) or touch a single thing in German. And yet my ideas for German were really so modest. Finish Assimil (46 hours), finish listening to Warum Nicht (14 hours) and finish working through my A1 textbook (another 40 hours). And then read something like Der Kleine Prinz. Oh and I haven't even though about how long Anki reviews would take in French and/or German. Add 60 hours for French and 20 hours for German. So basically, in order to meet my goals, I somehow need the earth day to be extended by around 38 minutes... By the way, I find for Japanese it's probably a better gauge to count characters rather than words. And I certainly wouldn't trust an OCR system to decide where Japanese word boundaries are. I struggle to make that kind of judgement myself. 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 23 of 142 25 January 2014 at 1:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think I've finally managed to get French and Japanese to coexist happily both in my head and in my habits. Given the French/Japanese meltdown I had back in autumn 2012, this is really an important breakthrough. Admittedly in 2012 I made the mistake of trying to pick up French while preparing for the JLPT at the same time, so I was once again making things hard for myself. Now I can enjoy the pleasure of working hard at both languages for no good reason at all, which is great.
I do get some occasional interference, such as thinking "les hitos" might be a real word (complete with French pronunciation) or inventing the phrase とんべてしまいました when the verb I really wanted was 倒れる, but that kind of interference is of the type and scale that it's rather amusing, rather than annoying and stressful. After a couple of unsatisfactory language exchanges, in terms of my own performance, I decided to sign up for some more Japonin lessons to give my grammar and fluency a little boost. It seems to be working. But I had this wonderful realisation a few days ago. I'd just worked through a chapter of Kanji in Context and was waiting for my Japonin class to start. I realised that doing those two activities once or twice a week was actually just enough study to keep my Japanese rolling along steadily, assuming I keep reading and watching TV. In short, I realised I can now keep studying Japanese without it needing to take up most of my life. This is great news for French. I've kept listening, reading, doing a couple of lessons on Skype and working with textbooks a few days a week and that seems to be coming together quite nicely too. On BAnna's log there was some discussion about whether you incur a penalty when switching activities/languages. I think that penalty does exist, but the extent of the penalty depends on the type of activity, the level you have in the language, how used you are to switching, and various other things which I think I can summarise as your state of mind. So, for example, I find that it's fairly easy for me to switch from doing anything in French to doing some listening in Japanese, especially if the listening involves a drama series I'm already halfway through and therefore very used to. It's harder to switch from Japanese to listening in French, but that's just because my French listening is still relatively weak. In terms of activity, the hardest switch is from doing stuff in one language to trying to speak in the other one. But since most of my spoken interactions in either language are timetabled, it's just common sense to spend the hour or so before a class or a language exchange doing stuff either in the relevant language or, if practicalities dictate otherwise, in English. The state of mind thing is trickier. Basically, if I'm trying to read the newspaper in French when I really want to watch another episode of 相棒, it's not an easy switch. It's not always possible to be where your mind wants you to be, of course, but it's important to acknowledge the impact. But on the whole, the more relaxed I feel about fitting both languages in my life, and the more I actually do some switching between the languages, the easier it gets. The fact that I've realised I don't need to do a load of stuff every day in both languages really helps here too, so if time is tight or I'm more tired than usual and I have, say, a lesson booked in French, I know that missing just one day of Japanese is not going to be a big deal. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sunja Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6086 days ago 2020 posts - 2295 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, German Studies: French, Mandarin | Message 24 of 142 25 January 2014 at 2:21pm | IP Logged | ||
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What an inspiring post!
About the switching: I find it helps to simply be aware of the fact that slipping into one language or another will make me sound different. When I speak German after a long trip to the US, my friends and colleagues say, "I can tell you've been in the States for two weeks". That's a clue that my accent is really heavy. It gets corrected if I talk to people in German and make conscious efforts to mimic, esp. the slurring. I find French is extremely hard for me to sound natural in. It feels so clumsy when I try to speak it. I'm not quite sure how or when to fix it. It sounds like you've found a way to maximize working on your languages! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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