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Assimil x4 for Film Studies - TAC’14 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4257 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 89 of 99 21 April 2014 at 11:19pm | IP Logged | ||
Thanks, though I probably end up skimming most of the courses I go through when I don't purposefully give myself extra tasks and obstacles to slow myself down. I might actually put Méthode 90 aside for the moment, as I'll get to in the second portion of my post that's happening right now...... ------------------------------------------------------------ --- Wanderlust and more putting off German: So I kind of quickly tired of using Méthode 90, it's a good course and there's new vocabulary, but in some ways it's not too different from just being another Assimil. It does have better grammar notes than , but German is probably my strongest language when it comes to grammar awareness. So basically I'm just looking to increase my German vocabulary, which seems to me to usually be a long and slow process. I don't really feel like doing another basic course, but I also don't really want to dedicate a significant amount of time to native materials or intermediate courses because I'd rather dedicate as much of that time as possible to Russian and French. So basically I'm not going to worry too much about how fast my German grows. I've increases my Anki reps for all my Subs2SRS decks so my German will keep advancing forward with or without more courses. Now I'm going to feel a tiny bit ridiculous for what I'm going to start up next because my wanderlust section has been so erratic lately. But I think I want to start up using Assimil Italienisch Ohne Mühe again. I know I dropped Italian a while back and insisted I was going to keep up Romanian only to eventually drop that as well. With Romanian there's the temptation to sink lots of time into it and that takes a bit of a toll on my other languages. However Italian seems to make more sense to me now, even though I don't find it as fun as Romanian. Basically learning Italian is a more interesting way I can pick up some extra German vocab, and I won't be as tempted to pour tons and tons of time into it. Italian is also much more useful for my film studies, and I like the idea of studying all the major languages in the field. I also think now that my routine is stabilized again and I know a bit more about my learning process it will be more fun to resume my L2->L3 experiments. Basically before I didn't take my Italian studies very seriously, and was relying mainly on the synergies between the 3 Italian Assimil courses. This time I'm just going to focus on the 1 course and use scriptorium and shadowing to make sure I really learn it. Then at a later date I'll try working through the Russian and Hungarian based Assimil courses as well. So I have no idea how long I'm going to commit to all these things, but at the moment it feels like the route I can stay most motivated about. Hopefully there won't be too many more routine changes for a few months. Edited by YnEoS on 22 April 2014 at 12:29am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4257 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 90 of 99 24 April 2014 at 4:37am | IP Logged | ||
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A bit more thinking recently. So language learning has been a bit of a detour for myself from my usual focus on film studies, and my initial plan was to dedicate several months exclusively to language study and then to incorporate it back as an aspect of my normal film study routine.
I've been working on phasing out my coursebooks for a while now, but I think the completionist side of me might have gotten a bit carried away. I realize I've been neglecting certain film projects of mine for far too long, so I think it's time to cut the rope on some of aspects of my language study. Of course thanks to some of the wonderful techniques I've learned from this forum, it's not completely a matter of choosing one over the other. Now I have methods for studying film and language at the same time. But to do all my film projects properly I will have to spend a good amount of time reading English materials as well, so I won't be spending as much time on my languages I have been these past months. I'm not going to cut out all my courses just yet. I think it will be very useful to finish up Assimil Ungarisch ohne Mühe [German->Hungarian] and Italienisch Ohne Mühe (German->Italian) and they don't take up too much time in my day. Outside of that I'll just be maintaining my Anki Subs2SRS decks, and keep doing some L-R and other native material work with French and Russian. I think I'm still going to try and do as much as I can for the Russian Super Challanege, but I'm not going to worry too much if I can't allocated a lot of time to it everyday. I probably won't update my log as often, just because I think there will be less stuff to talk about. But I'll write up a bit on my progress from time to time, and I'll continue following the logs I follow. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5169 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 91 of 99 24 April 2014 at 8:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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What about reading film theory books in other languages?
I'm also reducing my textbook study as a natural process, and I think this happens to you too. You worked agressively on Assimil and I bet you reached B1 for most of your languages. That allows one to learn through native material. I just wonder if it isn't right to pick up a textbook on thematic vocabulary or a grammar book from time to time. I might do this for German, for which I do plan to drop textbooks in a couple of months. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4257 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 92 of 99 24 April 2014 at 10:05pm | IP Logged | ||
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Certainly, I hope to start reading theory in other languages soon, though I think at the moment French is the only language where that would be practical to do so. Part of the difficulty is fewer film books are available as E-books or audiobooks, so I can't use a pop-up dictionary or do L-R to make more difficult material more manageable. There's also just a ton of stuff I want to read that's only available in English, and so I have to make some time for it eventually.
Hopefully in a few years I'll have switched over a lot of my studies into other languages, but for now to be practical I can only set aside a portion of my time for film studies into other languages. I think I'll probably return to my textbooks still occasionally. Just for the moment I need to put aside any non-essential ones and focus on other things. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4257 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 93 of 99 10 June 2014 at 10:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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No more coursework, but been doing a ton of L-R
Recently for Russian I went through The Master and Margarita (~16 hours) and Anna Karenina (~41 hours). Probably gonna keep focusing mostly on Russian for the time being, but I've got a few Hungarian books I plan on throwing in just to make sure I keep a bit of momentum behind that language. I also figured out some good ways I can mix my film studies and language learning better, at the moment the stuff I'm studying isn't much related to the languages I'm studying, but I'm hoping in the next month or so to start studying French and German in depth and so hopefully I'll be able to keep the slow push towards basic proficiency going. Finally diving into Russian literature has been so immensely delightful that I think I want to stay warm and comfortable in the languages I've picked up so far for a good long while. I'm somewhat tempted to say that I don't plan on picking up any new languages in the future that are outside of language families I've already studied. Though it's hard to say exactly what my priorities and the interests will be in the future, and I definitely at least want to learn Indonesian someday because it would open up some tantalizing areas of study, but definitely not anytime in the near future. For now I'm just going to continue my healthy diet of books, movies, and music. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4257 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 94 of 99 20 July 2014 at 11:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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Going to be doing a big update some other time, particularly for my Russian studies, but right now I'm going to post about some tactic changes in my Hungarian studies that I'm really excited about. So this is going to be another long post where I talk my current thoughts and strategies surrounding language learning.
So first let me start by discussing Anki a bit. I think Anki is a wonderful tool for more intensive learning, I think it may actually be the most time efficient learning tool I've used so far, particularly for distant languages where it's harder to pick things up through extensive study. What I think makes Anki crap for a lot of people is that there are very few good decks out there and most of the available public decks are about as well designed as a learning tool as a dictionary. Making a good Anki deck takes a long time, so for myself and others the best convenient option is to build the deck into being some portion of their wider studies, IE: by adding words from courses that won't stick to help make sure they're reviewed regularly. However I think Anki study can be really really efficient with the right deck, and can even function as standalone study. The ideal deck in my mind gives a few words, then some sentences based on the words you've already learned, repeats, and has audio for everything. Recently I've been trying to approximate this with my Cantonese studies, by using the character/word/sentence lists grouped by level on canto-dict, and some other decks I've put together from online sources. Usually it doesn't result in smooth alternation between words and sentences that match each other. The sentences and words are related, but come in giant groups, and only some decks have audio. I've noticed however that with my random messy decks, whenever things randomly align well, my learning speed rapidly accelerates. And I've begun to slightly tweak my decks to try and regenerate this effect sometimes. So for example in Cantonese I once got a really long sentence with 4 or 5 new characters and no matter how many times I learned the sentence I seemed to forget it the next day. So I looked the new words up online and added them in as individual cards at the front of my deck, and instantly the sentence became so much simpler. I'd really love to engineer a deck that always functioned so smoothly, but it always seemed to me that in the time it would take to build such a deck I could get further using messier Anki decks as in relation with other study methods. Now here's the situation with Hungarian. I've poured many more hours into Hungarian than any other language as a beginner, and while I've made some good progress as a result, it's been by far my slowest language. Despite tackling FSI and Assimil head on simultaneously and repeatedly I'd say I'm still roughly reaching A2ish territory if I'm being optimistic, and I've really kind of burned myself out on studying these courses, but there are no better alternatives. As I mentioned before, I've allotted less time for language study, so I don't study each of my languages every day. My main focus has been Russian, and originally I assumed I would alternate between Russian and Hungarian every several weeks or few months, but as my Russian is reaching an intermediate-ish study level I'm realizing how much further I have to go with it, and I really have no desire to suspend my Russian studies to focus on other languages. But I also don't like letting my Hungarian just sit and waste away, and even reviewing Assimil every few weeks is kind of depressing. So when I was feeling similar to Cantonese I switched over to Anki only study with the decks I was able to quickly build and it worked out really really well, I learned a lot without feeling like Cantonese was leeching too much away from my other languages. But with Cantonese I was lucky to have lots of useful resources to use to help build some powerful Anki decks, but with Hungarian there seems to be a lot less materials. So a while ago I realized that FSI courses were basically the perfect format for my ideal Anki deck, because they usually give you the new vocab right before you learn a new sentence that uses them. But it always seemed to me that cutting the audio into an Anki deck would take so long that it would be simpler to just study the FSI instead of reformatting it. But recently I came up with a new Anki deck creation method that allowed me to do this way faster and I recently did so with FSI Hungarian. (I won't go into too much technical detail but basically Audacity ---> Video Editing Software ---> Subtitle Workshop ---> Subs2SRS). So that's basically what I'm so excited about, I turned FSI Hungarian into an Anki deck with Vocab and Sentences. This may sound trivial or purely cosmetic to some, but I think the advantages will be huge. For one thing I can kind of put Hungarian study at the back of my mind, just do my Anki reps every day while focusing on Russian French and German, which are more suited to extensive methods like listening-reading. Anki means that I don't have to make a 1 hour window in my day to study Hungarian, but can cut the lessons up into digestible pieces without adding any worry of remembering where I am. It means I'll be able to learn all the obscure vocab in FSI and not have to re-do whole entire earlier easy lessons just to pick up a few words that won't stick. And it means I'll be able to move everything to my long term memory without worrying about when to go back and review earlier lessons. Of course this is going to take a long time to finish, and won't actually get me that far. But right now the idea of getting a few thousands words of basic vocabulary down and memorizing tons of sentences demonstrating all the basic grammar points with very minimal stress and daily time spent, sounds wonderful. Hoping that once I've completed the deck I'll be at a good position with some of my other languages and I'll be better prepared to do fun activities like L-R with Hungarian. Anyways sorry for the long post, hope to report back with good results about this method at some point way in the future. Edited by YnEoS on 21 July 2014 at 12:13am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4257 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 95 of 99 06 August 2014 at 1:52am | IP Logged | ||
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Another small update. Basically, since I haven't been focusing too much on German, and it looks like I'll be focusing on Russian and French for a good while, I decided to convert the German FSI course to an Anki deck as well now that I've got the process streamlined. Probably not the most appropriate use of my study time, but since my high school education was shaky, I think it will be nice to go through a simple structured course and catch any gaps I'm missing. So I'll be able to keep German to the side and not worry about it too much, and hopefully help get ready for more serious native material work whenever I'm ready to focus on it.
Gotta do a big Russian update sometime soon, I've changed up my routine a bit, and I'd like to see how things go for a while before posting too much about it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Kerrie Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Kerrie2 Joined 5398 days ago 1232 posts - 1740 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 96 of 99 06 August 2014 at 2:40am | IP Logged | ||
If you have a smartphone or tablet, you can take a picture of the page from the Google Translate app, and then get translations very easily just by touching the word you want. I just realized that a few days ago, when someone mentioned it in another thread. It makes it MUCH easier to read paper books (as opposed to digital). 1 person has voted this message useful |
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