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Тупиниким - now with more subs2srs! | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Tupiniquim Senior Member Brazil Joined 6084 days ago 184 posts - 217 votes  Speaks: Portuguese* Studies: English, Russian | Message 1 of 28 06 December 2014 at 11:39am | IP Logged | ||
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Target language:
Russian Background: I'm definitely a beginner, but I'm not starting from absolute scratch. I'm already familiar with the Cyrillic alphabet, although I still can't read it as fast as the Latin. I also know a few basic words for concepts like person, house, sun, cat, dog, love, friend, life, apple, land, tree, man, woman, child, light etc. Goals: To develop passive skills, especially reading. Stumbling upon any Russian websites or internet forums and then being able to read their contents will be a huge success. As for listening skills, they are of secondary priority but still important. I hope to be able to watch sports broadcasts and comprehend the narration. I will only pursue output in case it comes at a significant discount from all the input drilling. Otherwise I won't bother. Overview: I plan to combine siomotteikiru's L-R technique with emk's & Sprachprofi's idea of drilling each sentence of the source material with flashcards. As such, I'll be using novels (text in L1 and L2, audio in L2) to make Anki cards. Software: Just Anki and Audacity. Prep work: While it takes a little over a minute to produce each individual card, only 13 seconds account for pure prep work, which I don't think is that bad. It consists of splitting the sound file into short clips fit for flashcards. Thanks to Crush's post on emk's log thread, I can do it pretty efficiently just by highlighting the sections with the mouse, labeling them with sequential numbers, and then exporting them into multiple mp3 files all at once. It took me about 1 hour to go through a 20 minute file. Although it may seem like a long time, it's an activity that can be done while listening to music, or half-watching TV, so it doesn't feel too much like a chore. There's no need to listen to the sound file while splitting it, just by looking at the wave form it's possible to tell the speech apart from the silences, breathing and lip smacking. The 20 minute long audio (half of the novel's first chapter) worked out to 280 flashcards. Making the cards: This part counts as studying and not mere prep work, because I have to pay close attention to each sound clip in order to delimit to which sections of the L2 text they correspond, and then check whether the L1 translations are good matches. If I'm dealing with PDF files, I open them in Firefox' embedded reader, so I can use my gTranslate add-on to look up words. If they're EPUB files, I extract them with 7zip (seeing how that format is just a container) and open the resulting HTML files in Firefox too. I just drag & drop everything inside the card: the audio clip from its folder into the front field, along with the L2 text. The L1 translation goes into the back field. In case the audio clip is way too short or ends on a mid-sentence pause that hinders its meaning, I can simply add the next one (that's why it's good to use numbered filenames) and Anki will play them sequentially. Combining the flashcards with the L-R: I'm still unsure as to whether I should do the L-R procedure before or after creating the cards, or maybe even after reviewing all of them. What happened this very first time: I added 150 cards from scratch (a little over 50% of the content), then did the L-R for the entire section, then added the rest of the cards. I definitely picked up some words from context (just looking at the general sentence translations and not the individual words) while making the cards, which helped a lot keeping track of the flow during L-R's 3rd stage. I did the L-R a couple more times in the following days, but I jumped straight to the 3rd stage, which according to siomotteikiru is the most important part. I still don't know what order is optimal, so, for the time being, I'll do each procedure when I feel like it. Reviewing the cards: I decided to take a page from emk's book and introduce the cards slowly (10 new ones a day) and set a low leech threshold (4). Since my cards take more time and effort to come into existence than his, I will not be so cavalier about deleting them. I plan to send the very easy ones into long intervals ASAP, and to suspend the very hard ones. Eventually, after I have all the normal cards on comfortable intervals, I intent to un-suspend the very hard ones and see whether I can tackle them with my new knowledge. Deletion will be reserved for the ones that can't be salvaged, or perhaps the very easy ones, in case they start taking too much review time from the regular ones. After one week, so far I have only one suspended card, and I did it manually, I did not wait for it to trigger the leech category. Some impressions: I'm very excited about this method because I'm noticing real progress! At first I could only hear the words I already knew, but now I'm starting to pick up new words from context. More importantly, I'm starting to hear some words I still don't know, which means, being able to tell where their boundaries are, coming up with a spelling for them in my mind and confirming my guess by looking them up. During this short trial period, I dreamed twice of random Russian words from the text! This method still feels like “playing with a new toy”, even its “boring” parts (i.e. preparing the cards). I often catch myself thinking about it throughout the day. This adds a lot to the excitement. My initial choice of source material was probably suboptimal, considering it's a novel not originally written in L1 nor in L2 - The Castle, by Franz Kafka. But now I'm far too invested to replace it. My next choice will probably be a Russian or English/American novel. Another problem with my choice of material is that the vocabulary is a little too advanced for a novice like me. So now I know how to say “land surveyor” in Russian, even before knowing the words for “bed” or “food”, or even how to count to ten! Still, since I'm learning the language for fun, and not for practical purposes, this is just an amusing side-effect and it doesn't bother me. Choosing a novel instead of a series' episode or a film poses a challenge: some sentences are way too large and too cumbersome to split into meaningful pieces. As a result, one of my cards has 14 seconds worth of audio, spoken at nearly machine gun rate! I'll probably suspend it as soon as I see it for the first time. The holiday season is starting and I'm going to have a little more free time, so I will increase my new card limit to 20. Once I'm back to my usual routine, I'm going to dial it down to something more manageable. Something funny: out of my initial 409 sound clips (which were utilized to create the first 280 cards) only one of them was discarded, and that because the voice actor interrupted a sentence to yawn, and then ended it with its final word, not having pronounced any of the words in the middle! I found it bizarre, but no biggie, it's just a 0,2% loss. Edited by Tupiniquim on 22 December 2014 at 8:46pm 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 2 of 28 06 December 2014 at 11:58am | IP Logged | ||
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Oi :)
Always great to see someone who wants to watch sports in L2, and even more special that you want to do it in Russian :) Let me know if you need help finding streams etc ;) You can also get authentic texts with audio and translation at GLOSS (choose a lesson and click "source" on top - works for reading lessons, too). 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Tupiniquim Senior Member Brazil Joined 6084 days ago 184 posts - 217 votes Speaks: Portuguese* Studies: English, Russian | Message 3 of 28 06 December 2014 at 3:02pm | IP Logged | ||
Привет Serpent :) I will take up on your offer, please let me know if you require any assistance with PT-BR as well! * * * Anki says that I studied 76 cards today, but that's not true. I don't know if there's a bug in the card count, because it doesn't feel like that many. Maybe I just wish the review was longer :-) I think I actually studied 48 cards (20 new, 28 reviews), at least that was yesterday's forecast. I also added 46 new ones from the second half of the chapter. I decided that I'm going to do the L-R only after adding all cards for a specific audio, that way I can avoid Step 1 (simply reading the text in L1, which is boring) and skip right to Steps 2 & 3, or maybe only Step 3 (reading L1 while listening to L2, which is the most fun). Edited by Tupiniquim on 06 December 2014 at 4:39pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Tupiniquim Senior Member Brazil Joined 6084 days ago 184 posts - 217 votes Speaks: Portuguese* Studies: English, Russian | Message 4 of 28 07 December 2014 at 2:42pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think I figured out why Anki showed me a different card count after the review. I think it's counting the first time failures as independent cards. In that case, yesterday I happened to fail 28 cards out of the 48 total, which means I must have failed most of the new ones and some of the old ones.
If that's true, today's session was even worse: 83 studied cards, out of 47 scheduled, which means 36 failures, or 76%! This is corroborated by the growing number of reviews: I have 37 cards due tomorrow, not counting the 20 new ones. Some speculation: 1) Maybe increasing the new card limit to 20 was too much, I think I was performing better at the beginning, with 10 new cards a day, although I did not keep track of my progress. 2) The cards' content is getting increasingly difficult. The first ones described the protagonist's arrival, and some details about the environment and the people. Right now I'm seeing cards that deal with a heated argument, and the characters' intentions, using a more difficult vocabulary. 3) I did L-R three times on my first days, along with Anki, which may have helped consolidate those 40 ~ 50 first cards. But for the past couple of days I've been studying new cards without L-R, trying to draw their meaning from the memory of creating them a week ago. I'm mostly guessing the words I already picked up from the previous cards and the obvious cognates (e.g. кастелян, палка). After today's review, I decided to listen to the unedited audio, without reading anything, just to check whether I could keep up with it. I was very successful up to and including the content of today's cards, being able to imagine the corresponding scenes and even gesturing as if I were the one saying the dialogue lines. Then, once I entered un-reviewed territory, there was a sharp decline and I could only pick up sparse words. I think it proves that even with a high SRS failure rate, it's possible to make very noticeable progress. Edited by Tupiniquim on 07 December 2014 at 2:44pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Tupiniquim Senior Member Brazil Joined 6084 days ago 184 posts - 217 votes Speaks: Portuguese* Studies: English, Russian | Message 5 of 28 08 December 2014 at 8:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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My Anki session for the day:
Studied 92 cards in 47 minutes today. Again count: 17 (81.5% correct) Learn: 49, Review: 37, Relearn: 6, Filtered: 0 44 cards are scheduled as due for tomorrow. I decided to do my SRS in the afternoon, as opposed to my previous very early sessions. I was more attentive and made fewer mistakes. I marked some cards in order to have a closer look later and assess the quality of the translation. I have added 40 new cards, most of which are pretty short and seem easy. They mostly describe the protagonist's way along a snowy road, his fall and subsequent rescue into a peasant's home. The sentences are simple and they will probably add quickly and painlessly to my vocabulary. At work, I spontaneously remembered some words from the text and looked them up on the internet: глубоко, крикнуть, печки. I'm finding these sudden flashbacks very exciting! Already looking forward to tomorrow's reviews! UPDATE: Right after writing this log post, I had another sudden epiphany and managed to remember the word разрешение, spelling it right on my first attempt! :-D Edited by Tupiniquim on 08 December 2014 at 8:54pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Tupiniquim Senior Member Brazil Joined 6084 days ago 184 posts - 217 votes Speaks: Portuguese* Studies: English, Russian | Message 6 of 28 09 December 2014 at 6:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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Here's my breakdown for the day:
Studied 93 cards in 40 minutes today. Again count: 12 (87.1% correct) Learn: 45, Review: 43, Relearn: 5, Filtered: 0 52 due for tomorrow. A few impressions: 1) Reviewing these cards feels like a fun activity. Once I'm done with my session I keep looking at my deck's statistics and thinking about the next day's reviews. I'm refraining from reviewing ahead because I want this method to be scalable in the long term, when I'll have less free time. So I decided to take a few breaks every half a dozen or so cards, so I can stretch the session to make it last longer and really take my time to think about the sentences. 2) Today for the first time I was annoyed by one particular card, one that yesterday I had marked for reconsideration on the basis of a possible weird translation. So I just decided to suspend it, it's my first suspension out of frustration. 3) For the first time I came across a section where the audio doesn't match 100% the text. The voice clearly says центральный, where the text reads главный. Given the context, they're pretty much equivalent, but I just find it weird that the audio and the text are otherwise word for word equivalent, within all 149 cards that I studied so far, except for this one adjective. 4) I have acquired a second reading of the very same text, so I think I'm going to listen to it and see whether I'm relying too much on my memorization of the voice actor's intonation. I have noticed that some cards seem completely opaque, until I listen to the audio a few more times, then something "clicks" in my head and I suddenly remember the sentence's full meaning just because of the voice's particularities. * * * I have listened to the second version of the audiobook. The difficulties that I encountered were mostly due to speed, as this second voice actor speaks a lot faster. Whenever the rate was reasonable, I was capable of understanding what was being said. Furthermore, his voice isn't as pleasant as the first guy's. He did, however, read the word главный, as featured in my text. For that reason, I'm considering using this second version whenever my favorite one goes astray. I have added 20 new cards just in order to break the 400 mark. I'm set for 12 days worth of new cards in case I'm unable to add new content. Edited by Tupiniquim on 09 December 2014 at 7:36pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Tupiniquim Senior Member Brazil Joined 6084 days ago 184 posts - 217 votes Speaks: Portuguese* Studies: English, Russian | Message 7 of 28 10 December 2014 at 8:49pm | IP Logged | ||
Funny. My Anki stats for today show that my performance wasn't as good as yesterday's, and yet, I felt that things were "clicking" a lot more often, and some cards that were hanging by a thread in my mind are now much more solidified. I even stumbled upon a couple of cards that were completely opaque at first, but then I managed to recall their answers with some effort, and it was very satisfying.
I'm hoping to keep the red ones to a minimum. 
Also, I'm thinking maybe I should be more lenient with how I score my results. The review was pretty long today, but I feel like adding a few more cards later. All this time I've been doing pretty much only Russian activities, but every other day I read a French article on Project Syndicate. I have to look up an average of 2 words per text, which is nice. On the other hand, I tried watching some French TV and my listening comprehension was pretty poor, so I tuned out all very often. I have to give it another try, or maybe just do some L-R. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Tupiniquim Senior Member Brazil Joined 6084 days ago 184 posts - 217 votes Speaks: Portuguese* Studies: English, Russian | Message 8 of 28 11 December 2014 at 6:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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Today I woke up at 4am! I considered doing my reps right then, but my previous experiences with early morning Anki sessions wasn't very favorable (I keep getting distracted thinking about all that I have to do during the day). I decided to add content instead and do my reps in the afternoon. Best decision ever! Not only did I manage to add 96 new cards, reaching the 500 mark, but I also had a really good review session to boot, as shown by today's stats:
Today Studied 101 cards in 49 minutes today. Again count: 11 (89.1% correct) Learn: 47, Review: 50, Relearn: 4, Filtered: 0 Unfortunately, my card inventory had to be diminished by 1. I deleted a ridiculously easy one, that was simply "сказал он". What was I thinking when I added it? That verb shows up in that conjugation 43 times out of 499 cards with other sentences. There's absolutely no need for a dedicated card. I had to suspend my 3rd card today. It was way too long and full of unknown words. I think it's a good card and it's probably worth getting it back into the rotation once I'm more knowledgeable. I'm very pleased with today's studies, especially because I managed to reduce the amount of "red cards" (the ones that I have to relearn). I still feel like doing more activities in Russian today, but I don't want to mess up my Anki schedule. Maybe I will read a few Bible passages in bilingual columns, or even a Project Syndicate article. Edited by Tupiniquim on 11 December 2014 at 6:53pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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