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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| NuclearGorilla Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6788 days ago 166 posts - 195 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Japanese, French | Message 57 of 102 10 August 2010 at 12:13am | IP Logged | ||
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I spent Friday evening watching some of Japan's Saturday morning cartoons. I think it was a useful sort of thing, overall, although some of it was pretty useless and bizarre. Unfortunately, my stream cut out and now I'll never know what happened with the room Curious George had flooded. I did note one very useful fact, which is that, since the stream never stops (well, except that once), there is no need to shore up the energy to start another program. It may be of note that I did not find these particular programs very taxing, which is good, since it means that I likewise did not feel like bothering to turn it off. This is an illustration to me of a powerful effect of TV which I had not noticed could be put to my own benefit: it actually takes more energy to stop than to continue. (This is of course why English language TV is a demonic force.)
I've realized that a large part of what keeps me going is self-delusion. I suggest to myself that this is a worthy experiment, that it will lead to results. However, both of these can be practically contested. Will it lead to results? Not for a long time, this is a near-certainty, and the quality of the results is largely unknown. As to if it's a worthy experiment, rationally I would argue no, it is not. I have heard anecdotal evidence that this works, and so my outcome would be another anecdote to the pile, along with experiential evidence that it works. While the latter would be valuable to some degree, and is certainly the main motivator for the experimental angle, it is not exceptionally worthwhile. Having experiential evidence of success is of limited use due to the inviability of the method itself with respect to my preferences. My lack of desire to watch any manner of video programming for extended periods of time makes "study" of this sort difficult. It could be better than I think and I'm just using this as some manner of scapegoat. But still, doing this and this alone makes it a lot less interesting. I've constrained myself in such a way that I can't just bounce between courses when I feel like it. Perhaps I just ache for a bit more freedom. However, I am doing as my method tells me, which happens to be heavily constrained and of questionable interest. So having reasoned it out, it would likely be best that I try something else. However, this is not going to happen, I don't think. I am perfectly capable, like most people, of being well aware of a rational reason, or in fact, a battery of such reasons, and then acting in the direction contrary to that of the known reason(s). I like to think I do it more consciously that others, but who knows. I am likely to change this log's title (again), because I don't really care for this one. I'd have done it a while ago, but I thought it best that I give notice first, and I have forgetting to do that. My video streak extends to 54 days. That's a pretty good streak, actually. Hopefully I can extend the streak to X, where X is the point of fluency in Japanese or infinity, whichever comes first. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| NuclearGorilla Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6788 days ago 166 posts - 195 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Japanese, French | Message 58 of 102 01 September 2010 at 4:18am | IP Logged | ||
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I have not posted in a bit, although not for the usual reason (shame), but rather because I haven't felt I had anything worth writing. That's right, I have quality standards here, that's why everything I post is pure gold.
I've surpassed 170 hours now. I had written out something for a couple weeks ago which had it at 150, a number more pleasing for a milestone, but no matter. This also passes a 10000 minute mark, which might sound more impressive, although I haven't decided yet. I had a story about a baseball game I watched in Japanese; it wasn't very interesting. It wasn't even really a story. Maybe that's why I didn't post it. I watched some more children's programming, closer to the time of the last post. (The stream I was using stopped working.) Some of it I find entertaining, some of it I don't care for at all. I don't know that there is a specific relation to age level on that, either. I think I tend to be fond of the ones with singing, actually. I've been watching a few Japanese dubs of films. If only it seemed palatable to watch a movie a dozen times in Japanese like it was with the Lion King in French. But I've some Disney movies to watch, regardless of how many times. Singing. Why is this the ticket? Also, I don't care that I'm able to wholly enjoy children's media in a manner that resembles a child. People who would have a problem with it need to lighten up. Oh, yeah, it's the end of the month. I don't really feel like going too deep into statistics (no, I'm not ill, although that makes me worry), but I got a bit over 31 hours video this month (I might do a bit more before the day is through, but I'm not counting on it). Not as good as last month, but an average of over an hour per day on video is certainly satisfactory. I only did 144 minutes of my reading with audio, which suggests that I've mostly forgotten about it (and until drawing my attention to it today, this was correct). Despite some rough patches (seven 20-minute days), I've managed to maintain my streak of video watching. Yes, I have maintained my streak for 77 days. This happens to be eleven weeks. I'm quite pleased by this. There are really very few positive habits, particularly those which require doing something as opposed to not doing something, which I'm aware of keeping for such a time. And, as the length of such a streak increases, I am likely to grow more irrational about not breaking it, which is good, to a certain extent. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| NuclearGorilla Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6788 days ago 166 posts - 195 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Japanese, French | Message 59 of 102 15 September 2010 at 7:05am | IP Logged | ||
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I used to update this log once a week. Now it seems every two weeks at best. I suppose things have not been interesting enough to comment more frequently. If I did not have a pressing matter to attend to, I likely would not be posting at present, either.
I've been contemplating setting a kill point on this experiment, at some multiple of 50 hours. After which, I can choose to study the language however I please. Perhaps I could abandon it for a while and satisfy other urges with my newfound sense of discipline. I haven't fully decided on this yet though, despite having fully decided on it a week or so ago. Mainly, I wanted to go out with a bang, yet even acting under the assumption that I could earn my freedom, my pace has not improved, and may well have languished some. My formal goal for the end of this month is a total of 200 hours, which would be about 30 hours for the month, which is quite reasonable. Currently I'm only on pace for a bit over 22 hours, so I clearly need some stand out days (or simply to up the pace). I haven't been enjoying it so much lately, but I'm not sure at all as to why. Instead I spend my time drawing animals wearing various hats. I have decided to begin using the Pomegranate Method, which is a little known language learning method. I will detail the method eventually, but at its core, it is merely one of the many so-called "fruit methods" to sprout up in the wake of the Durian Method fad. I like this iteration because it appeals to my sense of minimalism. I will be changing the thread title to reflect this allegiance. My current streak on video should be at about 91 days. It'll probably get longer if I don't break it. Perhaps next time will be a dedicate post to my dissolution of the video endeavor. Or maybe I will once again decide that no change is the best change. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Spanky Senior Member Canada Joined 5958 days ago 1021 posts - 1714 votes Studies: French | Message 60 of 102 15 September 2010 at 7:25am | IP Logged | ||
Honestly, NuclearGorilla, this log absolutely kills me, thanks so much for many of these posts. By the way, you cannot change the title of this log, it is sublime. Edit: crap, too late, I see you have recklessly changed the title already. I will be checking the forum rules to see whether I can undo your mischief and restore the original. Edited by Spanky on 15 September 2010 at 7:28am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| NuclearGorilla Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6788 days ago 166 posts - 195 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Japanese, French | Message 61 of 102 22 September 2010 at 4:30am | IP Logged | ||
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Thank you for the kind words, Spanky. I changed the title because I felt it unoriginal, but I will consider your input next time I'm bored enough to change it. And I wasn't joking about the hats.
I still haven't managed to regain any joy from video watching. It seems I'm just watching to make the number go up. I guess the number is going up though. I have begun watching at 1.3x speed, simply to go through it faster. If I'm not going to understand things, I may as well do it quickly. It only affects my ability to hear when people are talking very quickly, anyway. I think I've decided that this will be my last month following this method. I hope to reach 200 hours before its end, but the date is the deadline. I've been on this track for over a year now (or will have then, I forget), it's been interesting seeing what happens, but I've had enough of it. I feel content stopping at this time, since I have shown myself that I could indeed keep going--my streak is very near 100 days--and thus I have not been defeated, but am merely choosing to travel down a different path. There is a certain sadness that comes with this, but I've listed the various reasons why continuing with this isn't a good idea multiple times already, so it's really just best that I listen to those reasons now. I may take some time off from Japanese starting October to spend on some other language or endeavor, but I have not decided as yet. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| NuclearGorilla Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6788 days ago 166 posts - 195 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Japanese, French | Message 62 of 102 01 October 2010 at 11:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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The month having turned and my deadline having passed, it would make sense to divulge my plans for the following month. The problem there, is that I have not decided on any yet. And further, I've decided not to quit quite yet. After discussing with a friend who shares views on numbers and streaks, I realized that 107 days is not a reasonable place to end a streak; I must finish on a number ending in zero. Likewise, I had not reached 200 hours yet, and I may as well. So here you can see the power of streaks to keep me doing something I don't really want to and had set myself against solely for the point of preserving a meaningless number. So, now the end day is October 3, at which point I must have my 200 hours. I was going to justify my current hours total by including the time I spent reading with text and audiobook, but that seemed a little cheap. Of course, since I'll still be doing video watching on occasion in the future, maybe the hours number isn't so important, as it will continue to rise, albeit more slowly. Eh.
Also, being the end of the month, I may reflect on the past month. Anki was 300 minutes (10m/d). Video totaled 23.5h, which isn't great, but pretty good since I haven't really enjoyed it all all the past couple weeks. So, that averaged 47m/d. So, unless I really decided to keep going for some reason I cannot at the moment imagine, My best month was one of 38.52 hours (July 2010). Since this method appears to require more than that even to be reasonably effective, I do believe that this is not an effective method for me. Although I am certainly interested on seeing how, if at all, this appears to affect future study. I'm quite uncertain what I want to spend my newly found time on. A very reasonable idea would be to move into more traditional study of Japanese--since I've been on a long streak of Japanese input, it should be fresh in the brain and ready for action. I could spend the month tackling a different language, such as Dutch or Spanish, which are the two I'm considering. Mostly these since I feel like there would be some degree of rapid progress, due to my knowledge of related languages (Dutch) or to previous study (Spanish). I could work on a language I've already studied (and am keeping), since I have a problem neglecting these things, as I've mentioned numerous times. And a final option would be to spend the time on some unrelated endeavor. This falls outside the scope of this log (ha). If you're feeling particularly vocal, feel free to submit for consideration your opinion on what I should do in October, to: this log. That's right, doing the same thing for so very long has apparently weakened my ability to come up with a proper stratagem. (Also people hardly ever write here so sometimes I feel lonely.) So if you're bored enough, go nuts. I suppose next time I'll have to have actually quit the video watching, otherwise I'll be outted as a fraud and be placed among the ranks of such notable language learning frauds as... as... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| NuclearGorilla Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6788 days ago 166 posts - 195 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Japanese, French | Message 63 of 102 06 October 2010 at 11:59pm | IP Logged | ||
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I stopped with the video watching as planned, ending my streak at 110 days with 200 hours and two minutes, this requiring a four hour effort on the final day. If I could manage that everyday, then maybe it would have worked out.
I still haven't really figured out what I want to work on. Until I decide, I'm continuing with Japanese in order to keep the streak of Japanese study alive, although I'm not really sure what I should do for that. I'm probably going to end up studying either French, Japanese or Spanish, but I don't really know which. Spanish won over Dutch in consideration, probably because I like it less. A generalized version of this principle is the Swedish Rule, which states that at any given point, the most desirable language to study must not be studied. It seems reasonably likely that whichever language I choose, the method I will use is listen reading. I've never given that enough of a fair shake, despite the limited amount I've done it seeming promising. That is in fact what I'm doing with Japanese at the moment, finishing the L2/L2 run I had started earlier. Now that my video trial is over, I am free to do the L1/L2 part, which will hopefully have value. I'm also interested to see if it will result in a greater ability to pay attention. Alternatively, I may end up trying Assimil for Japanese or FSI for Spanish. French I would probably LR, including shadowing, which would hopefully improve my stagnant speaking ability. There is a lesson to be learned in this process, which I hope is fairly obvious. The idea is, that one should always plan these things ahead. I knew this, but for reasons I'm not really sure of, failed to do so. And thus I am left in this state of uncertainty, which isn't all that great. A related idea is that it's also important to set boundaries on activities, so that there's a well-established minimum length of commitment. Upper bounds can be good too, though. Even though I had started to stop enjoying the video watching, to the point where my streak was the only thing keeping me going, there's something to be said for the convenience of it. It requires rather little effort; one must only start, and the rest largely takes care of itself. While this sounds very lazy, and perhaps it is, there's still also some degree of challenge that must be associated with it, that I could understand so little yet keep watching. I'm still eager to see how it manages to affect my future study. I think the ability to easily hear what's being spoken (making out words and syllables; this in opposition to understanding) will be useful--although I noted this ability at 100 hours, it was probably there sooner, and I haven't noticed any real improvement. I think that RTK, which I've probably spent a similar amount of time on at this point, was likely a much smarter investment. Honestly, for someone without real knowledge of the language, I'm probably in about as good of a spot as I could be. And it only took 300+ hours to get there. So, I think to summarize this post, don't do what I've done. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| NuclearGorilla Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6788 days ago 166 posts - 195 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Japanese, French | Message 64 of 102 12 October 2010 at 7:47am | IP Logged | ||
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I finished my pass of my book, which took about two more hours. When I started to try reading English with the Japanese audio, a few minutes in I realized that I was really sick of Japanese. So, I decided I would not continue with Japanese. Maybe I was being a sort of lazy, maybe not, but it feels nice to give it a rest for a while at least. So, currently Japanese is resting in my brain, and I don't mind. I don't think I've gotten tired of a language before then, so this is a new milestone. Not exactly a positive one, but in a way it is, since it took quite a lot of consistent work to get to that point.
This leaves the question of what I'm doing instead. In a way, it's roughly nothing at the moment. I decided I'd go with Spanish (although I'm wondering if I should have gone Dutch at this point). To prepare my ears, I'm listening to an audiobook continuously (well, a lot of the time I guess), although passively. Occasionally I will give it some conscious attention. It is a joyful thing to be able to listen to something still foreign yet largely understandable. I was missing this with Japanese, where I didn't understand hardly anything. I don't have any estimated percentage numbers, because although I like numbers that figure doesn't mean much to me, so I will say that I can actually understand full utterances occasionally with the Spanish, as opposed to just words and a few set phrases. I think that if I start reading the Spanish text with the audio, it'll work out pretty well. I'll have to start that soon, so that I don't keep listening to the audio alone in perpetuity. So, unless I change my mind at random and switch to Dutch, this is at present a Spanish log. I really never anticipated that it would ever come to this. I'm hesitant to add Spanish to my "Studies" list, since I don't know how long I'll keep up with this or even that I'll want to maintain the language to any degree (keep it, as I say), but for the sake of inflating my list to make me look smarter, or rather inflating my list to more adequately represent my lack of focus. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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