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Film History Studies TAC15 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| chokofingrz Pentaglot Senior Member England Joined 5190 days ago 241 posts - 430 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Japanese, Catalan, Luxembourgish | Message 33 of 51 16 November 2014 at 5:50pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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I need to figure out how to run subs2srs on a Mac. I'm assuming that opening a Windows virtual machine will facilitate this... but I'm too lazy and/or mistrusting to make that happen today.
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| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4255 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 34 of 51 21 November 2014 at 11:25pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Seeing pretty consistent progress in most my languages so far (Hindi is still a bit troublesome, Korean stuff feels like it's being slower to stick but stuff is sticking)
I've decided I want to push the gaps between my reviews even further, because instinctively I was hanging onto a lot of cards like I needed to review them right away before I forgot them. But the cards will always keep re-appearing the deck and I'm always going to know more of the language the second time I see a card, so even I forget stuff there's no reason I can't figure it out again. So these are the new review intervals I've given myself the first time the card appears. 
I still have the option of doing more intensive reviews of the cards, when I mark them "wrong" they move onto the 3 day review cycle, but the point of starting out with such large intervals is to force myself to not try and memorize everything that appears in my deck right away, but to see what sticks and what gets forgotten and then start more selectively picking cards for more intensive study. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4255 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 35 of 51 26 November 2014 at 5:34pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Time for a bit of a profile update, I decided today to move Cantonese, Japanese, and Hungarian up to intermediate. Of course it's unlikely that all of these languages are at the same level and have moved up at the same time, so the decision to re-classify them has more to do with my recent increase in native material to better assess their level. Now that I see how much I can get out of native material I feel pretty confident that my passive understanding in these 3 languages has either been at intermediate for a while, or is verging on being in intermediate territory very soon. I haven't really tested my active skills with these languages much (except talking in Japanese with my sister when she visits), and likely active skills are lagging behind and are more of an upper beginner level. But I understand several thousand words in each of these languages, I have a pretty solid idea of how the grammar functions, and can work comfortably with native materials, though it's still more efficient to use translations to help speed up my learning process.
Since this is a new-ish log, I think it might be useful to go through each language and summarize how I studied it and where I am now. Cantonese - I began studying Cantonese 2 years ago because I am obsessed with the Hong Kong film industry, and this is the first foreign language I began studying independently outside of school (5 years of German in middle/high school previously). Cantonese was initially a bit of a frustrating experience, because none of the materials available were particularly well formatted. But I ended up modifying most of them to make the more usable, editing audio and pdf files. The most important thing I learned when studying Cantonese was not to accept the available materials as is, but to build my own study resources to learn more efficiently. Eventually I decided to put Cantonese on the backburner to focus on French and spent a long time learning ~1000 characters in Anki. Now that I've gotten better at creating audio flashcards in Anki and building subs2SRS decks, I realize I could've used my time much more efficiently, but I guess that's the case with everyone's first new language. Hungarian - I've been studying Hungarian for a year now, and these studies also involved a lot of repeated banging my head into a wall, but I did eventually get the language in my head. For Hungarian I had Assimil and FSI so I didn't need to modify resources as well, and I brute force shadowed these courses to death til I had absorbed a good chunk of the content. Now I've got my FSI and Subs2SRS anki decks, and realize I could've made my Hungarian studies much more relaxed had I known what I know now. Japanese - I began very slowly playing around with Japanese 7 months ago, and my Japanese studies may thus far been quite comfortable and possibly the fastest to intermediate of any of my languages (even faster than French), which is a nice signal that my constant re-thinking of my study methods seems to have produced some tangible results. With Japanese I played around with more intensive L-R which helped me absorb tons of vocabulary pretty rapidly, as well as some really solid pre-made anki decks. I also think the difficulty of Japanese is sometimes grossly exaggerated because it uses Chinese characters. But of all the languages I've studied so far it's been the easiest to develop listening skills in, because of how every word's function in the sentence is so clearly marked and how the verb is always at the end. Plus English speakers get a pretty significant vocabulary discount, and I got a little extra help from my Cantonese studies. Now I think is also a good time to briefly address my French level, because I've been studying languages for about 2 years now, and I keep adding more exotic languages to my profile, but still only have English listed in my speaks section. I've seen some enormous gains in my French lately, particularly listening to native French audio has gotten much easier very recently, and my comprehension is above my other languages by a very noticeable margin. But I don't practice speaking French at all, and have more pressing goals for my languages studies at the moment. But I feel pretty happy with my level of French right now, I feel like if I planned a trip to France for some reason, I could spend a month straightening out my grammar/production, function fairly well in the country and come back as basically proficient. Which is kind of all I really want for speaking abilities, I don't really need to be able to speak all my languages in my day to day life, just to conduct my studies in them, and know that if I decided to travel to a country where the language is spoken that I have a strong enough base that I could adjust and get around in the language. Sometime in the next few months I am going to try to work through some French film books that don't have English translations available for them, so perhaps if I find that I can comfortably do research in the language without translation, that might be a suitable enough reason to move French from Intermediate to Basic Proficiency. Edited by YnEoS on 26 November 2014 at 5:40pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5167 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 36 of 51 26 November 2014 at 8:43pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Congratulations on your achievements! I really don't bother updating my profile unless it is for switching to Basic Fluency, but I believe none of my 'Study' languages are at a level as high as yours for Hungarian, Cantonese or Japanese. And that's really impressive, given that each of them belongs to a different language family. Most important, you experimented and learned your strengths.
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| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4255 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 37 of 51 02 December 2014 at 9:34pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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So Book2 is turning out to be an incredible resource for starting new languages. I'm already seeing some great gains to my Hindi, Korean, and Thai studies.
Like a kid in a candy story I also couldn't help building a Czech and Telegu deck as well and feeding them into my Anki cycle. With my current SRS system it's much easier to juggle multiple languages, and doesn't distract much from my primary studies. There are a few other languages on there that I have on my long term hit list, so I may add in a few more just to let the basic grammar patterns start soaking in. I feel like decent amount of time has passed that I can reasonably comment on initial results of my new study habits, so I'm planning to type up a big long post either this weekend or early next week. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4255 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 38 of 51 18 December 2014 at 3:31am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Been meaning to post an update for the past few weeks, but haven't gotten around to it, so I'm going to run through a quick summary of my recent study activity, and then in my next post I'll review my progress so far this year.
Anyways, so I've gone on a slight tangent on my study routine recently and I've been mostly building new beginner decks from sources like Book2 for my new languages, and my Subs2SRS study has been most maintenance. Results from this new method have been really exciting, and it seems so far to be a much faster way for starting opaque languages than Assimil ever was. I've been making the greatest strides so far in Hindi, Korean, and Thai. But I forgot how much I hate the beginner phase, so I've temporarily deleted my Malay and Telugu decks to make my studies more bearable. But I did see some solid gains in those languages, just the decks aren't as big as the other languages so they take a bit more concentration for me to absorb things. I think I'll add them back very soon, I just want to get my review reps down first. Feeling a little bit of Anki fatigue, but I'm also really enthusiastic about the initial results I'm seeing so far, so right now my plan is just to put less new cards into Anki for the time being to make more room for casual movie watching and L-R. Not sure if my goal is going to be to slowly phase it out, or to simply take a break for a bit, we'll see how it goes. Anyways onto my overall self evaluation for the year... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4255 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 39 of 51 18 December 2014 at 4:30am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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2014 Summer & Self Evaluation
Oh jeez, looking back at my old log I can't believe I started this year as Assimil x4, so many things have changed between now and then. The goals my past self set for seem kind of odd to me now, and I think at some point I edited my goals in my previous log, and I don't remember when, so I'll post my original goals from the sign up thread, followed by my updated goals I posted sometime later. Anyways here we go... French
Oh wow, I can't believe I was still studying Assimil French Without Toil at the beginning of this year, that feels like forever ago! I hit Intermediate in French as originally planned, but that wasn't a big deal since I was almost there at the beginning of the year. I also tasked myself with reading a French Film History book, I got the book, but thus far haven't attempted reading it. I guess I have ~2 more weeks to try. Overall pretty happy with my French progress, I didn't ever really focus on it this year, but I used it a lot and I definitely saw some big improvements. Next year I'll consider how to make that jump into basic proficiency. Cantonese
Ugh... so I gave myself the goal of learning a certain number of characters, but I wasn't counting the characters I studied. At one point I had a few thousand compound words in Anki, so I think I'm in that ballpark, but I don't have count. Anyways I learned I learned a lot of Cantonese this year and can read Cantonese subtitles pretty well, so I'll just call this one a win. German
Yeah, I have no idea what I meant by this, considering I never did any 'active' studying this year. I know more German now than I did when I left high school probably, so I guess that's a win? Probably my most neglected language this year, but not completely neglected. Russian
Original goal and updated goal achieved woo! I had a blast trying out all the basic learning courses with Russian, madgrigal's Invitation to Russian was a wonderfully slow foothold, and Le Russe Sans Peine was one of the most excellent Assimil courses I ever used. But now I'm happy to never ever use them ever again (unless I feel like it). Also glad I got in a lot of L-R this year, Anna Karenina, The Duel, Fathers and Sons, The Master and Margarita were all great, and I look forward to diving into more Russian Literature. Hungarian
Oy, as often complained about I made such a headache for myself this year with the way I went about learning Hungarian. But I eventually hit the level I was aiming that, so I guess I that's a win, even though I think I could have made it much easier on myself knowing was I know now. Looking forward to diving into more Hungarian films and literature next year. Japanese I wasn't studying Japanese when I signed up for TAC14, so I never set myself a goal to reach. But now I consider myself a passive intermediate, so that's another win. studying Japanese was sooo much fun this year, I'm really happy I started playing around with new methods and got away from my usual coursebook methods, not looking back either. More intensive L-R with Harry Potter, SRS with sentence decks and audio, and Berlitz Think in Talk ended up being a really enjoyable way to soak up the language. Next year I plan on doing more L-R and hopefully breaking into some Japanese literature. ----- I've also picked up some other languages, but they're so new, evaluating them as this time doesn't make much sense, but I look forward to posting a lot about them in TAC15. Overall Evaluation So overall I think this year was a pretty successful, I hit most of the goals (when they made sense), learned how I like to learn, and have got a good chunk of the main languages I'm interested floating around in my head. The main disappointment is that my speak column is still empty after 2 years of language study. Of course my first year I had no idea what I was doing, and this year I didn't set myself the goal of hitting basic proficiency, but I think I secretly hoped I'd be able to get my French there. But I never really forced myself to try to reach the next level. I think in one of my early posts in the forum I mentioned that I'd rather have a bunch of languages at intermediate than a few at proficiency, and that remains partially true, and next year I plan on continuing trying to get all my main linguistic interests up to intermediate. But it is going on year 3, and my studies section is getting awfully crowded so I'm definitely going to make a concerted effort to see if I can kick 1 or 2 languages up to speaks next year. But I'll save specific goal setting for 2015. Anyways this will probably be my last log update this year. I had a blast doing my first ever TAC with you guys, and I'm excited to go through it all again next year. Edited by YnEoS on 18 December 2014 at 4:59am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5167 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 40 of 51 18 December 2014 at 9:19pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Impressive, congratulations! Looking forward to next year, as you will be adding a nice selection of languages, like Malay.
Could you elaborate a bit on what you mean by passive intermediate? How much do you think you can understand from a Russian text? I know that you get a discount for Japanese characters. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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