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Film History Studies TAC15 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4252 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 1 of 51 30 August 2014 at 9:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
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TAC15 Entries Start on Page 6 ------------------------------- So I know most people just keep 1 log going as a long uninterrupted story of their whole language journey, but personally I like to make clean breaks when it feels appropriate or there's a big shift in my studies. I was planning to do this at the end of the year, but now appears to be a more appropriate moment, because my old log title no longer suits my studies, and I was also keeping 2 logs for 2 methods, that now make better sense all combined together in one place. The quick summary of my past follies of studiy goes as follow: Log 1 - How do I learn languages? Experimenting with different courses and methods and learning how much of a difference appropriate resources can make. Log 2 - Yay Courses! Assimil! and other Courses! and Assimil! If you'd like to read all the sordid details, you can find them in my profile, but I won't give you any further assistance via links. Anyways, now I'll make some attempt at introducing myself and presenting what I think the use, value and purpose of this log will be. Introduction So for those who haven't followed my past logs, I study film, I'm learning languages to help with my film studies, because there's a whole horde of interesting films and film criticism that have not been translated for English speakers, and I got impatient. I also have an interest in literature, but primarily because they didn't make movies before 1889ish or something. I like to study multiple languages at once because I like lots of options with materials, and I'm not in any big hurry to reach proficiency in all of them. In the experiments of my previous logs, I think I learned pretty well what it takes for me to push a language into intermediate phase, but focus on several languages has delayed my progress towards basic proficiency. Now I want to change that, and so I'm going to be pushing ahead to try and make it to basic proficiency in French. I've also recently had bit of an SRS renaissance in my studies, and so I'll be using a lot of that to manage my multiple language study and make sure my other projects don't get left behind with my new focus on French. What Sort of Stuff am I Gonna Post? In past logs I've stuck to a fairly regular posting schedule and I liked to post lots of stats about my course progress. This log will not be like that. Partly due to Native materials becoming difficult to quantify, and partly due to me getting lazier about posting regularly. At the moment of typing this introduction I'm imagining on this log I'll stick to posting about my favorite things, which is films and native resources, and efficiency tips I discover to improving study. Hopefully this makes this log more fun than my past logs, but we'll see how long I stick to this plan. Anyway that's all for now, I'll probably post some other stuff later about the current state of each of my languages, but I just did this recently in my past log, so I'm not up to typing it up again. Anyways this is my new log, enjoy! Edited by YnEoS on 24 December 2014 at 6:45pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4252 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 2 of 51 03 September 2014 at 12:54am | IP Logged | |||||
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So as mentioned previously I'm going to try to use this log to write about more learning theory and my various experiments.
(Some of this discussion is a continuation off my Creating Better Anki/SRS Decks discussion.) Most of my languages right now have a fairly solid Anki deck that's fun to use and doesn't feel like a burden to repeat every day. Where I'm on a bit shakier ground and doing more experimenting is with French and Russian my intermediate languages. With these languages I'm doing more extensive study, so my goal with Anki and these languages really isn't to learn content so much as it is to acquire skills that improve my ability to learn things extensively. For instance in French right now, I recently worked through Gabriel Wyner's pronunciation trainer, which used minimal pairs to help train me to distinguish between french sounds that native English speakers don't usually distinguish between. The idea being that better pronunciation comprehension improve the ability to learn vocab, and eventually improves your own speaking, because you're better able to hear what's wrong with your own speaking. So now I'm attempting to do something similar with French verb forms based off of FSI French drills. Now I learned most of the verb forms in my basic courses, but I somewhat worry that recently certain tenses/moods have blurred together in my head with passive study and need separating again. When a certain tense only appears in certain kinds of sentence constructions, it seems to easily becomes automatic from extensive reading/listening. However I worry about tenses that can appear in the same sentence constructions, where the tense and context are the only ways to extract the information. Perhaps this would work itself out with time, but I'm somewhat afraid of just always assuming text through context and starting to ignore verb endings. So I'm starting to create some tense comprehension drill cards based off similar principles of the pronunciation comprehension cards, they look something like this.  
The front cards have audio of the actual sentence, but the spelling of the verb is hidden, so I have to hear the difference to discern which case it is. Now unfortunately I didn't preview the audio before generating this deck, and in FSI they always use the Male speaker to say one tense and the Female speaker to say the other tense. So right now it's less of a trainer deck and more of a reminder deck. In the future I may just remove the audio and cloze the verb endings, but I don't really like those kind of production decks, so I'll try to go without. Since I don't want to put too much effort into tweaking these decks, I'm going to leave this one as is for now and see how it affects my comprehension in my extensive studying. I'll update with progress in the future. With Russian I recently played around with a 1000 most common Russian words decks for fun, and while I knew most of the vocab in the deck I realize there were some common words that weren't sticking because I wasn't properly distinguishing between prefixes and roots in my extensive studies. I recently learned the Russian prefixes, which helped a lot, but decided to make a vocab deck based around learning some common roots. I figured this would help add a few chunks of vocab, and would improve my ability to find roots in new words. Initially I made comprehension cards that looked like this. 
On the front I simply had the word + audio (with root separated out from everything else) and on the back an image for the word (in this instance lace) and the definition of the root. Unfortunately I found these recognition cards fairly difficult (as recognitions cards usually are without sentences) and just highlighting the roots wasn't enough to make them stick. Now I think one efficient solution would be to simply find sentences for these vocab, but I always try to find easier solutions first, because I don't want to sink too much study time creating the perfect anki deck. So I decided to create some production cards. Now I'm still figuring out good ways to make production cards. Done wrong I absolutely hate production cards for multi-lingual study. The worst example being translate L1-->L2 cards, because I'll be constantly thinking of the translation in different languages than what I'm studying. But I also acknowledge that production cards can be incredibly powerful because once you can produce something its very quickly consolidated, and I think it greatly improves speed of progress. So I decided to make a second production card that looks like this. 
Where I think this helps over the L1-->L2 translation cards, is that I have a piece of the word there, which helps me think in Russian. I don't really need to test myself much on endings, because those will consolidate with time and extensive study. I think it's also very important with image cards to have the image on the front of a card, because you want to pull meaning out of that image and then the card will get better anchored in your head because it has its own identity so to speak. So far these new production cards seem to be working well, I'll update if I need to make future changes in the future like adding sentences for context. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Xenops Senior Member United States thexenops.deviantart Joined 3823 days ago 112 posts - 158 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese | Message 3 of 51 03 September 2014 at 5:26pm | IP Logged | |||||
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How interesting! I confess I haven't done as much with Anki as I could, because I do find it dull (having foreign word on front card, and answer on back). I am looking forward to your discoveries, and will check out the SRS discussion thread.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4252 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 4 of 51 03 September 2014 at 11:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Glad to hear you find it interesting. I'm curious to see what portions end up working well for you, I always find myself needing to modify methods I see other people using to suit my own learning methods.
------------------------------------------ Recently I've been making a few small tweaks to my Cantonese studies, to improve my individual character cards. In general I prefer learning characters through compound words and sentences, but that seems to get more difficult at higher levels. I've mostly worked through Cantodict's list of level 2 compound words which roughly corresponds to their level 1500 characters word list. But their level 3 compound word list contains ~45,000 words which would be way too impractical to put in an Anki deck. So I've gone back to individual character cards and downloaded a deck of 5000 characters to add as a sub-deck to my Caontese deck. I could try to just pick these all up from exposure to native materials, but I prefer to give myself a little background assistance in learning this stuff. These are currently the 3 types of cards I have generated for each character.   
The example compound words was a feature of the character deck when I downloaded it but it wasn't on every single card. So I've begun filling in examples in the missing cards, which are easy to find thanks to CantoDict. Originally I only had them in the answer portion of each of the cards just to sort of passively assimilate them. But recently I decided to cloze out the tone of the character being studied and add them to the front of what I call voicing cards (character and meaning are supplied and I have to recall the sound of the word). Although I find these a useful way to building up knowledge before the final character recognition card without any additional context, I've always find myself slightly messing them up, and some characters I know by heart I'll always say slightly incorrectly. Its much easier for me to remember the pronunciation of compound words, so I think adding them to the front of the voicing cards, will provide useful context to help generate correct sound. The other advantage, is that it helps make learning individual characters feel less like laying bricks one by one, but instead each character learning one helps me learn more. I usually have 1 easy compound word example that I'll recognize more easily, but with the others I try to pick unfamiliar characters or unusual usages to help slowly plant seeds for things I'll end up learning down the road. Of course there will also be synergies between my character sub-deck and my sentence sub-decks, but building some into the character cards themselves means I don't have to worry so much about micromanaging my anki studies and keeping my sub-decks in sync with each other. The other bit of news, is that I realize I haven't posted too much about native materials yet. One of my favorite recent discoveries were the French podcast channels on France Culture. I devour tons of podcasts, so doubling up my podcast listening time with extra language practice is win win. I've begun listening to a film related podcast called Projection Privée, which also ends up being a good introduction podcast, because I'm already familiar with a lot of the topics and filmmakers they discuss so it's fairly easy to orient myself in the conversation even if I don't understand a few words here and there. 
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4252 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 5 of 51 07 September 2014 at 11:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
Just to follow up a bit on some of my Anki deck experiments, the changes in my Russian root deck so far have made a very noticable improvement in the absorption of the content. My French verb deck on the other hand was a bit awkward to use, so I decided to re-do it a bit and now it seems to be much more useful. Basically I mined all the sentences from FSI that re-worked the same verb in 2 different tenses, and then made Cloze deletions cards from them. I like these type of production cards a lot more, because I don't need prompts on the root of the verb, and the tense makes sense from context, so it feels a lot less like doing conjugation tables and more like learning to use the language.
 
So that's basically what all the cards look like, and I have the audio of the sentences on the back of the card. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4842 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 6 of 51 07 September 2014 at 11:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Hi YnEoS, I just wanted to say it was good talking to you today. You have a very interesting approach to languages and a broad linguistical spectrum, so keep up the good work!
I would love to learn more about Hungarian or Cantonese through your log and I really think it's the first time I've seen someone studying Malay on this forum. Thumbs up for that! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5332 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 7 of 51 08 September 2014 at 7:02am | IP Logged | |||||
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And I must say that I am in awe of how much consistent, well thought out work you guys put in. You make me
feel like a dilettante who is just dancing my way through my studies. You seem to be doing an amazing job with Anki - when I get the chance I suppose I should sit down and do the same. I'll be sure to come to you for some great advice :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4252 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 8 of 51 08 September 2014 at 8:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
Thanks! It was good chatting with you guys. I think most people here end up studying Indonesian, because it has more resources available than Malay. That was my original plan as well, but I found a Malay anki deck I really like, and I am more specifically interested in Malay language films, so now I don't need the Indonesian intermediary. Though I may still end up supplementing my Malay studies with some Indonesian materials.
Hah thanks, I may need to get some advice from you on finding native speakers and starting up conversations when I work up the courage to try and start talking more. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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