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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| NuclearGorilla Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6785 days ago 166 posts - 195 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Japanese, French | Message 89 of 102 22 June 2011 at 4:11am | IP Logged | ||
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I got around to changing the topic title, since it was pretty well completely wrong. May still be wrong. I wonder if anyone will get the reference.
It was another lackluster week, the previous one, this time more lackluster than most recently. I had 444 minutes, all Japanese, nothing of particular interest, other than a bit of handwriting practice, because it's fun. I suppose I shouldn't be too disappointed with that time, either; it's still better than an hour per day, which is a pretty good amount. It's just, I would like to do more, since I'm capable. I expanded the spreadsheet I was using for the six week challenge and plan to continue its use as a record of study time. This week has started off a bit better than the last, though. I suppose I should talk about that next week, but hopefully it will carry on. One thing I definitely need to do is increase exposure to spoken Japanese. That hasn't been happening lately, and it's definitely something that should receive regular, ideally daily, attention. Maybe I can find some decent short material (~10 minutes) for when the thought of a whole show or whatever is too daunting. I'm currently in the process of increasing my French. What exactly I'll do, I'm not sure. I expect to do something besides reading, though, since that's far ahead of any of my other abilities. Next month, I'm considering participating in the Tadoku challenge, since I had a time with the 6WC (even if I didn't follow its main thrust). I could read any and all languages (except English, obviously), which would be a fine thing. I'd just have to find things to read. And read them. With my eyes and brain. I'm not sure why I'm finding significantly less to say. It may be that I've re-established myself well enough where interesting changes are less. Whether or not things are ever truly interesting in this log is questionable, but I mean relatively. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| NuclearGorilla Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6785 days ago 166 posts - 195 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Japanese, French | Message 90 of 102 26 June 2011 at 6:34pm | IP Logged | ||
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As hinted at in my previous entry, the week started off well. Did it continue as such? It actually got even weller, despite that "weller" is not an acceptable comparative. How well? We'll use the power of numbers to explain!
French: 71m German: 25m Japanese: 1249m Total: 1345m Note how the numbers told you precisely how much time was spent. Magic! I spent my French time watching some things (which I actually meant to continue doing at some point...), and the German time reading a thing. I don't know if I want to keep reading that thing, though, at the moment. I would still like to do more things with the French, so maybe I'll do some more things and look into finding some speaking practice. In Japanese, I did a bunch of things. Well, a couple things. I did more video game playing, which continued to be entertaining and challenging, I did some video watching, including a fun video series on penmanship, and I resumed the Core2k learning. For Core2k, with the exception of one day (the Sunday) I studied 3-4 groups per day, totaling thus 22 groups or 176 words, a nice sum to be sure. I noticed something amusing in Anki's graphs, which was that during periods of larger amount of entries since I began my quicker paced study, the performance on young cards begins to noticeably sink. It's not by a lot, however; the difference is from around 90% to around at worst 82% (although it's possible it could dip lower than that if I proceeded at too great a pace). Since this approach greatly reduces the time spent on initial learning compared to the old one, being reduced from somewhere around 20 minutes to an average of 12 minutes--which seems like it may be overly high, especially as I have managed to speed things up considerably the past few days, after I had calculated that average--there would have to be much more significant hinderances to my success rate. My success rate on new cards is actually quite high, though, and seems, at worst, unaffected. As for speed, I believe I set a personal best at 7'19" for a group, breaking the record of 7'20" I had set the previous day. Less that a minute per word is pretty neat. In the Core2k sentences, I've found just this week two new kanji. 'New' here means that I have not seen them in Heisig. And this week actually means yesterday. I considered briefly whether I should add them in my RTK deck and learn their keywords, but then I figured that would be a waste of time, since I know the primitives and am learning the words, anyway. I had already taken this tack before, when I encountered another kanji and took the same approach. And I've probably done it more times, still. But really, there's no reason to think that, after seeing it probably a hundred or more times, I'm going to forget 俺. I've considered whether I should add the kanji to the RTK deck with a Japanese keyword, in order to ensure I can remember how to write it. This should take care of itself for kanji which are a part of the Core2k deck, since I write them down. So, the answer I came up with seems to be "no". As can be seen, I now view most things here as a waste of time. I also spent a bit of time continuing with the Subs2SRS deck that I made fifteen years ago and started on 5 years ago. (Numbers may be inflated.) Not for very long, but I may continue with it. I think I'd like to find a better way to work through it than I'm doing, however; as is, it's little different than a bunch of C2k cards, differing only by source and the presence of specific words. And the chronology. I'm not sure if it will be helpful enough in improving my speech deciphering abilities. And on a similar topic, I still should be listening to more Japanese. Even if I do have a perfect, native-like Japanese accent, each phone and mora floating down gracefully as do petals from a cherry blossom, thus making all my utterances a form of listening practice. (I strongly doubt the perfection of my accent. But I've never spoken Japanese with anyone, so who can tell?) I'm uncertain as to whether I should watch with English subtitles or not. I'm pretty good about not getting too distracted by the subtitles, since I see each utterance as a puzzle, whereby I try to reconcile that which was spoken with that which was subtitled and that which I know. I've spent too much time on handwriting "practice" over the past week. It's just too fun. Especially as I realized that if I slow down just a bit, sometimes the kanji will look pretty good. Instead of the usual scribbles that I do since I'm just a man trying to make his way through the review session. I even printed myself off some gridded paper, which I haven't used since the very start of Heisig. I'm not using it for reviews this time, though; I'm just using it to write kanji for fun and to check that everything's sort of lining up properly, proportionally and locationally. I'm hoping to find some printable sheets which have a grid with six degree angle parallel lines over it, so I can practice writing very pretty. I'd rather not have to make them myself, because that takes more effort. I'm going to note that today's entry is particularly long largely due to needing sleep, which makes my thoughts chattier than a snitch at a policemen's ball. When it turns out next week that I had no hours of study recorded on the Sunday, this will be the reason. (On which topic: I prefer to avoid doing my Anki reviews unless I've slept since the last time, particularly if I'm adding cards to a deck. Since sleep is when memories are consolidated, I feel like it may cause detriment to both my immediate recall and possibly long term recall. But then, I may just be being overly cautious to the point where the restriction is more harmful than that which it aims to foil. I may look into this.) Hopefully I've made up for the past few weeks' deficiency in word counts. Next time I write things in here, I will likely comment on whether or not I am doing the Tadoku, since it starts on the new month's blossoming, and this present month has already wilted and begun its spiral into death, from whose claws one may find neither respite nor release. Edited by NuclearGorilla on 27 June 2011 at 6:14pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Spanky Senior Member Canada Joined 5955 days ago 1021 posts - 1714 votes Studies: French | Message 91 of 102 26 June 2011 at 7:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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Once again NuclearGorilla, inspired title for a log. Love the reference, but hate that
years of trying to forget that abnormally funny and frightening show have now been reversed. So both a tip of the hat and a curse for you. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| NuclearGorilla Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6785 days ago 166 posts - 195 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Japanese, French | Message 92 of 102 05 July 2011 at 4:41am | IP Logged | ||
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Spanky, I'm delighted I was able to do you such a (dis)service. Minds function better when warped on occasion.
As was no surprise to me, I decided to go ahead with the Tadoku business. No doubt I will fall handily behind many, but it is always nice to be able to quantify how many people you're objectively better or worse than. It's already shaped my study somewhat, in that I read a bunch of stuff in French, I think because that's much quicker for me to read than Japanese. The week started off as previously alluded to with a full '0', the only of which I've had since I renewed logging efforts at the start of May. It did not set a great pace for the rest of the week, where while I did not slack off incredibly, did fall short of last week's heroism. I remedied this somewhat by a six-and-a-half hour effort on Saturday, which is a good number. Speaking of numbers: Japanese: 803m (13h23m) French: 289m (4h49m) Total: 1092m (18h12m) French One may be surprised to find that I did things with French, since I had said that I had wanted to and I have a habit of not doing things of which I say that.However, it did happen, including some TV watching and I don't remember what, and then on Friday and Saturday, reading. Between the two days, I read the entirety of Le petit prince, which I suppose breaks my not-having-finished-a-personally-chosen-book-in-a-foreign-la nguage-ness. We will ignore that it is a very short book, and as well that it is an easy book, and focus instead on the finished nature of it. Need to find more books. Books that will be entertaining. Japanese After Sunday, every day I continue on my pace of four C2k groups per day, meaning 192 words for the week. I intend to continue taking one day off per week, which is one way to try to limit the influx of reviews somewhat. Last week I mentioned the appearance of a number of new kanji, and this week there were even more. The reason? Since I sorted the cards by the iPlusN stat from the Japanese Morphology plugin, it changed up the order of the cards from the original, which likely had these cards somewhere further toward the end. So, at the end of my i+1 cards, these new kanji ones were concentrated. This meant something like seven new kanji in one day, with six of those in the same group of eight cards. I ended up doing just fine on those, however, in particular compared to the i+2 cards, which did not feature new kanji, which followed. As a result, I went and recalculated the iPlusN for all the cards taking into account the cards I had since studied and resorted the cards. While that gave me about 80 or so new i+1 cards, I've now exhausted those, and will simply have to face some i+2 cards. It shouldn't be so much of a problem--I was likely doing this beforehand, without having any i+n being calculated. Still seems a bit suboptimal. I might resort once I get through the i+2 cards, though. Even though I don't have all that many left to study in the 2000, around 300 I believe (which should only take two weeks? Really?). And when I finish, I can... do... something or other. Eh. I also continued with game playing. It's only very mildly irritating to have to count the number of screens that I read to count them for the tadoku. I'm not sure if I'm over- or underreporting; I'm not counting every screen, since some don't seem like they have enough text to count. I'm not going to worry about it though. I'm probably going to try to do some other reading than this in Japanese though. Tadoku may not be quite the best thing for me, given that I already have a strong tendency toward reading over other skills. I suppose this allows me to steer into the skid, or something. (That analogy doesn't really lead anywhere.) However, it did result in me doing a bunch of French reading, that I may not have otherwise done, or if so, not as voraciously. It's probably a good force, ultimately. While I've repeatedly said that I need to increase my exposure to audio in all languages, it seems likely that, despite that this is what I should do, I will instead do a bunch of reading, because meaningless internet contests matter! I would now like the reader to imagine a bird. Take a good look at your bird, see its colors, its demeanor. Now consider that, for no one else does that bird exist, and that once you stop contemplating it, that bird is gone forever, its life transient and meaningless, the only evidence of its existence a faint memory, a memory which can but once be true. Your bird is gone. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| NuclearGorilla Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6785 days ago 166 posts - 195 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Japanese, French | Message 93 of 102 11 July 2011 at 3:39am | IP Logged | ||
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I read through some of this log's early entries. It reminded me I had written in French on a couple of occasions (and I noticed errors in them). It also made me want to do RTK3 just to see how many kanji I can learn in a day, to relive the glory days. Of course, this isn't a worthy task, as I've concluded repeatedly in the past, but it still tempts from time to time. I suppose at some point it could prove worthwhile, but I heartily doubt it.
Right, so I was doing this tadoku business? Well, it turns out that in order to make those numbers go up, you actually have to read things. Which I have hardly done at all this week. I hope to do more. One day I spent about two hours reformatting an ebook I had instead of reading it as intended. It looks much nicer now, for what it's worth, and it turned out that it was so poorly formatted that there was a certain point in the book after which everything turned italics and stayed that way, so the reformatting would have proved a necessity. Of course, I proceeded to read that book for about an hour and only yesterday have I returned to it (I intend to again, really I do). In order to count writing this log as study time, I'm going to write the rest of it in French. The squeamish should turn away. Je n'ai écrit pas beaucoup en français depuis longtemps, ou vraiment de tout. Donc il prend beaucoup de temp pour écrire, et ça que j'écrit n'est pas correct souvent. J'essai d'écrire sans utiliser une dictionnaire quand c'est possible, mais je ne veux pas me tromper. Alors, avec le log, on y va. Comme ça que j'ai dit au-dessus, je n'ai fait pas beaucoup de lire, mais aussi je n'ai pas fait beaucoup d'étudier. Ben, en tout cas j'ai étudié plus qu'une heure tous les jours, mais je ne pense pas que ça suffit. (C'est bon que je le crois.) Il faut lire plus, parce que c'est utile et amusant et j'aime le français beaucoup et je ne veux pas qu'il me laisse. Quels sont cettes mals figures? Français: 118m (1h58) Japonais: 666m (11h6m) Total: 784m (13h4m) Plus que 13 heures n'est pas si mal, pas du tout. Mais parce que j'étais si bon en étudiant avant, il ne suffit pas maintenant, et je me dit qu'il faut faire plus. Et il le faut. Pour le japonais, j'ai continué avec Core2k. Lundi je n'ai etudié que 16 mots, mais c'est pas grand-chose, parce que maintenant je peux finir sans avoir plus un jour oú je n'étudie pas 4 groupes de mots. Je suis presque fini; il reste 4 jours! Finir Core2k doit être une occasion spéciale, comme le jour j'ai fini RTK. Il faut le célébrer, mais je ne le fait pas probablement. Je doit planner ça que je ferai ensuite. Si je ne trouve pas quelque chose, c'est possible que j'arreterai en étudiant beaucoup et ça va être mal. J'ai écouté qu'il y a quelque chose, nommé tadoku; peut-être je peux lire de plus? Ou apprendre comment on parle en japonais. Il faut lire de plus en français aussi. Ça ne doit pas être un grand problème, mais on va voir si je le fait. Je veux trouver quelqu'un avec qui je peux parler, mais je ne sais pas comment je le ferai. Ça va être très amusant, je pense, à parler en français. Il y a depuis longtemps que je ne parle en français, et comme je me rapelle, c'etait toujours divertissant. J'espére que je me ne trompé pas beacoup, mais ça c'est l'optimisme. Je suis desolé, j'ai essayé. Edited by NuclearGorilla on 11 July 2011 at 3:40am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Silenz Newbie AustraliaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4913 days ago 23 posts - 33 votes Studies: French, German, Russian | Message 94 of 102 11 July 2011 at 7:45am | IP Logged | ||
I smiled like a moron when I saw the title. Awesome log, should be interesting to see the final results. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| NuclearGorilla Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6785 days ago 166 posts - 195 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Japanese, French | Message 95 of 102 17 July 2011 at 7:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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The past week was a reasonably good week. The most unusual thing, is that French outdid Japanese on time spent. Numbers:
French: 620m (10h20m) Japanese: 547m (9h7m) Total: 1167m (19h27m) In addition to these numbers, I've now surpassed 10000 minutes of total study time since May 1 when I began effective logging; the more exact number is over 170 hours and averages over two hours per day. That's pretty fantastic. More typically I've seen off and on periods, but these past 2+ months have been marked with consistent study of a fairly high volume. I would attribute this both to having a log--seeing how I'm doing daily reminds me whether I'm doing as much as I feel I should--and to having Core2k to give me a regular, ongoing study plan. Although the original plan had been to finish C2k on Thursday, the week turned busy and I was on that day not even able to complete my C2k reviews--although that was partly due to tiredness, as well. I did, however, manage to finish it the next day. There were many new kanji the last two or three days, 17 by my count. Based on how easily I managed to remember these, often only barely increasing the time spent over words without new kanji, is one of those things that makes me want to rip through RTK3. Not worth it, though, as I keep telling myself again and again. It's my plan to take the roughly 40 minutes per day I was spending on C2k and use it to either watch things or do something else. Forty minutes is conveniently very close to a typical TV show episode length. At some point in the future, once the number of reviews has gone down a bit for one, I'll likely continue with the Core6k. I think I will probably try to keep the same schedule I was doing, with 32 words per day six days per week, and break it into blocks of either 400 or 800, after which I break for more emphasis on other study. Having the 800 word blocks helps change the complexion a bit from an unending marathon to a series of long jogs, where there's no reason to get worried since there's a time to rest not too far ahead. Doing the math on this, I could start every month with two weeks on, which would get me through 400 words if I add in two more groups, and then do two weeks off for other study, or just carry on and get the 800 done in a month, depending on how I feel about it. It's surprising still how quickly they go, but there are so many of them that it makes up for it. French saw quite a bit of action this week. It was mostly reading, although I've started going through some of the French in Action again, starting at a random episode that I'm sure I've seen quite a bit further than. I was reminded about it by my reading through my log last week, since I had written long ago that I had wanted to continue with it but never had. It's probably easier to understand things than it was before, but that was too long ago for me to really remember. I'm partly hoping that it'll help me to grasp some of the bits of grammar that I've never really bothered to study. I could study these deliberately, but I guess I don't feel like it or whatever. Eh. Regarding the reading, although I'm not keeping a good log of my pages read, I've gotten through most of a book, and could possibly finish it today if I spend a good bit of time on it. It takes quite a while to read, around 2.5 minutes per page, but hopefully I'll continue to read faster. One part of this problem is that I'm still trying to read somewhat deliberately, something which I don't want to stop. I think I'll be able to increase pace as more things progress from being understandable to mundane. Not that increasing reading speed is exactly the goal here, but it would be a good thing. At present moment, my fondness for French is rather high, which I hope to continue to take advantage of. I reflected back, and I don't think I've ever done any study of French that I didn't think was fun. Part of this may relate to my natural enjoyment of language learning, some may relate to my enjoyment of the language itself, but I think a good bit stems from the methods I've used, which have placed such a high emphasis on using native materials from the start, materials that I've enjoyed. I'm still at an impasse as to how to progress with speaking, both in Japanese and French. French, I'd be fine if I just found some people to talk to and went ahead with it; it may not be too pretty at first, but I could manage. Japanese, however, I have little idea how to go about. I haven't studied any of the sort of basic conversation phrases and such, and I have not had any sort of conversation with anyone at all. Yes, I have been studying Japanese for over two years and have not had a single conversation. Isn't that fun? This is incidentally the first time I'm considering not having conversed in conjunction with the time frame, which makes it quite ridiculous. I should probably get a move on with this. Maybe I can find someone who would kindly guide me through conversational basics. I think I've wasted enough time here now. I should waste time elsewhere instead! Edited by NuclearGorilla on 17 July 2011 at 7:46pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| NuclearGorilla Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6785 days ago 166 posts - 195 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Japanese, French | Message 96 of 102 16 August 2011 at 3:28am | IP Logged | ||
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There was a gap in posting. There was also a gap in me recording my time spent. Unlike usual, it's not because I did nothing that whole time. I did largely abandon any Japanese during that time period, however, spending large amounts of time doing French things. The extent of my Japanese shunning actually resulted in missed Anki reviews, which still exist because I guess there's so many of them that it feels like a hassle to actually do them. Over the next week, they must be reduced to zero.
I don't really know how I ended up doing in Tadoku. I had been dragging on updating my page counts, and then it was 1 August and it was too late to update anything. I'm not too worried about it. There was a 6WC starting this month. I decided not to partake, since I didn't really want to start a new language at this point, or even pretend to, and I feel like my French is too good for it and that my Japanese should be too good for it (it's not, but it really can't qualify as anywhere near "from scratch" given the huge amounts of time I've dumped into it). With a new week starting next week, I'll hopefully be resuming my proper recording of activity. I'm not sure how to record some of it, but it's better that I'd just mark questioned time as zero than not to record anything at all. Part of the problem I've having is that I'd rather just use French than worry about keeping track of how much I'm using it. I suppose I should just do my best and recognize the number as somewhat meaningless. I think I will continue my focus on French until around the end of the month or I bore myself, when I will start on some C6k (I guess). I should probably not do that, but instead do something else, since more vocabulary is not the faculty I need most to work on. However, I can't seem to be trusted to do anything else. I haven't done any Japanese besides Anki in over a month. I've done plenty of French in the meanwhile, at least. But French is not Japanese, not as far as I'm aware (but I guess my Japanese isn't that good, so they could be hiding it). Given that I'd probably be better off in some ways quitting Japanese a couple of years ago, I suppose it doesn't matter so much what I do. I could probably benefit both from reading more Japanese and from watching more Japanese TV--as in, this would be a more appropriate slot for extensive video watching than where it actually landed in my studies. But it wasn't even that extensive at the time in a time per day measure, except in exceptional stretches. Since I want to post some numbers, I will post some numbers. These are the values from 1 May to today, as recorded. Japanese: 8900m (148h20m) Spanish: 483m (8h3m) French: 3799m (63h19m) German: 499m (8h39m) Total: 13681m (228h1m), avg/d 129.066m That's a pretty good run, I think. Looking at a graph for the cummulative total, it doesn't seem as though there have particularly large variations in amount done over different periods. Other graphs concur more or less. The numbers always exceed a certain baseline over seven and fourteen day periods, a baseline which I would deem satisfactory. Thus, I have continually over this period been extrasatisfactory in my studies. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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