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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5314 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 753 of 1317 24 October 2013 at 4:54pm | IP Logged | ||
I just released the first beta version of my SRS application!
As you can see, there's a new and improved search box, and support for more than one user at a time. I've already invited my first intrepid beta tester to try it out. If there are no casualties, I'll invite another round of volunteers shortly. Send me a PM if you're willing to live dangerously. Right now, it's French-only, but other languages could be made available if there were sufficient enthusiasm. If you're a programmer and you'd like access to the source code, please send me a PM, too. The code itself is in the public domain. Anki: This brings back memories It's been a long time since I was regularly doing 4,000 Anki reps/month. But thanks to my newly refreshed supply of sentences, I'm introducing 15 new cards per day, which is keeping me good and busy. My goal is to sweep up any recalcitrant vocabulary that has evaded my extensive reading efforts. And so far, so good: I'm finding lots of words that appear in repeatedly in multiple books, so this is a useful exercise. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5173 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 754 of 1317 24 October 2013 at 5:11pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't know if you've answered this before, but about how much time on average do you
spend inputting for SRS? When I go through my vocabulary collection phases I tend to get overwhelmed which makes me think it's best just to use digital sources for importing into Anki (though every once in a while I run into an issue with UTF-8 that seems impossible to get around). (I'd be interested in trying it). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5314 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 755 of 1317 24 October 2013 at 5:36pm | IP Logged | ||
I essentially never enter sentences manually. Well, several times a year, if I read an awesome paper book, I might spend a couple hours entering several dozen cards. But it's a massive waste of time. This is why I went so far out of my way to get a big stack of legal French ebooks and loaded them into the Moon+ ebook reader, which is one of the rare ebook readers that allows me to export my highlights as an email. The email gets pasted into the "bulk import" page of my program, and I add definitions to the snippets at my leisure. The goal of my program is to turn Anki card creation into pure language study time. I review the snippets one at time, with a dictionary on the same screen, and all I need to do is highlight interesting words, click "Lookup", and paste the relevant definition onto the back of the card. My program automatically boldfaces words when I look them up, and it adds the "word =" to the back of the card for me, so all I need to do it paste in the definition. If I were willing to spend $$$, I could actually integrate the Google Translate API for making bilingual cards. This would be awesome at the beginner level. But more urgent priorities would be: 1. Finding a way to capture text clippings from web pages effortlessly. 2. Writing an Anki plugin which automatically imports new cards on every sync. But again, the only way that any of this would happen is if there were a whole lot of people knocking down my door. Writing a program like this is a huge amount of work, and it only makes sense if it's going to be useful to a lot of people. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5314 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 756 of 1317 25 October 2013 at 6:42am | IP Logged | ||
I had a few spare hours this evening, so I started work on a Chrome extension:
This is still missing some major pieces, but it currently works on my machine. :-) This takes the highlighted sentence and zaps it straight into the web app so I can add definitions later. Le voilà : 
I'm going to have a lot of fun with this. Edited by emk on 25 October 2013 at 6:50am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4791 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 757 of 1317 25 October 2013 at 1:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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That looks awesome!!!
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5314 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 758 of 1317 25 October 2013 at 10:14pm | IP Logged | ||
My last month of Anki:
As you can see, I let reviews pile up for a month or two. This was no problem, because I hadn't added any new cards in a while. The dark green bars are old cards getting reviewed, and the light green are younger cards (with spacing under 20 days or so). The blue bars are new cards. I'm going to keep it at 15 new sentence cards per day—this will probably build up towards 30 minutes eventually. As usual, Anki is doing its job. Cards that I found really challenging a week ago are starting to feel a lot easier. New words are slipping into my passive vocabulary, though not with a 100% success rate. But that's OK—even if I can only say, "Huh, I should know this word," that usually means the game is half won. As for active vocabulary, it's not a priority right now. I already know far more words than I can use fluently. Not that Anki doesn't help with that, too, but I'm OK if most of these words aren't at the tip of my tongue yet. SRS Collector The Chrome extension is now in private beta! None of the intrepid beta testers have been mangled, mauled or lost any fingers. In fact, they've provided me with a nice list of a dozen issues that need fixing. It's really enjoyable the way I can just go about my business using my usual mixture of French and English, and when I run into an interesting sentence online, I can capture it in a couple of seconds and keep reading. At my level, I'm not very likely to pop articles into readlang, LWT or LingQ, because it's too much of a disruption. But highlighting a sentence and hitting a button is no problem. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5314 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 759 of 1317 26 October 2013 at 12:37am | IP Logged | ||
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Oh, wow, I just read through the sample reading comprehension section for the DALF C1. It's an interesting passage by Guy de Maupassant on the difference between realistic art, and earlier schools that aimed for dramatic effect.
And as far as I can tell, I understood every word of it. The questions, as expected, are quite serious reading comprehension questions, and I bet they demand quite precise answers, just like they supposedly do on the DELF B2. But given 50 minutes, I would have no problem with this section. At this point, I'm pretty comfortable saying that my French reading skills are around C1. After all, I'm chewing through moderately difficult French novels at close to 40 pages per hour. My listening skills need some more work to reach the near-complete comprehension demanded at C1, but that's probably a matter of a few hundred more hours of serious TV watching and maybe a bunch of subs2srs work. Writing would take some practice, but again, I know how to improve. The remaining barrier really is speech. If I limit myself to B1 topics, I can fake C1 fluency a decent fraction of the time. If I try discuss C1 topics, my fluency drops to a pretty marginal B2. (All this is subject to the usual day-to-day variation.) This has been true for a good long time, and I don't know how to fix it. The problem is that my weaknesses all involve fast, intellectual discussions with a fair bit of nuance, and I don't get a lot of opportunity to practice that. I do discuss those subjects with my wife, but married-couple "telepathy" gives me an unfair advantage. As usual, I don't really have a roadmap. For those of you reading along, how did you reach the point where you could discuss current events/business/literature/theology/whatever with a group of native speakers, and manage to "hold the floor" in a fast discussion long enough to make your point? What did it take to broaden out your comfort zone? Sigh. I bet if I were a college student again, with papers to write, stacks of books to read, and a nightly bull session in the dorms, I could sort this out within a year. I'm starting to suspect that some of the skills I want learn will require a change of environment. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5173 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 760 of 1317 26 October 2013 at 1:17am | IP Logged | ||
I think the tactics in How to Improve Your Foreign Language Immediately by Boris Shekhtman might help here. My Turkish co-worker essentially used his islands technique (without knowing what it was) to expand what she could talk about in English. She said she would go to the same place every week for happy hour and the regulars would ask her all these questions about Turkey. When there was something she didn't know how to talk about, such as the economy, minorities, etc, she would say, "Let me go study up on that and I'll tell you next week" and she would do just that. You can start with subjects near and dear to you that you would talk about anyway, write up something you would say about it in English, then try to write it again expressing those same ideas in French (this is actually quite hard to do and you may find your sentence structures being "off") and post to Lang-8 (with an instruction to edit it in a spoken style) and then learn that. Then just continue expanding your "islands". I find that I'm pretty good in English at finding connections between different subjects to my "pet" topics that I've thought a lot about. Shekhtman suggests this as a technique as well - finding ways to steer the conversation towards a subject you're well-versed in (though it could be much harder to do this in a foreign language and I'm sure examiners can tell when your tangent is tiré par les cheveux so it takes practice). Beyond that, this is something to work on myself. It helps if you can take an advanced class (or even a masters-level class) at a local college that will force you to work on the advanced topics. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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