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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| sabotai Senior Member United States Joined 5663 days ago 391 posts - 489 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Japanese, Korean, French | Message 81 of 151 10 March 2014 at 4:48am | IP Logged | |||||
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Week 10 Review (Mar 3 - 9)
Korean: 7 hours, 10 minutes German: 5 hours French: 1 hour, 15 minutes Japanese: 3 hours, 35 minutes Total: 17 hours Year to Date: 118 hours, 50 minutes Got close to hitting my 20 hour per week goal this week. I'm trying to up the amount I listen even more, I just don't have enough material edited for German or Korean yet. For German and Korean, I want to have a daily 45 minutes of extensive listening and 15 minutes of native material listening to make it an even hour. But I don't want to burn through the material (basically get sick of it) by listening to the whole playlist in one day. My playlist for German was only 30 minutes long but I edited a bunch of Teach Yourself material today and pushed it to just over an hour. Ideally, I'd like to have over 2 hours so that on average I'll hear dialogs about once every 3 days, or more. I've gotten my Korean playlist to over an hour now too, but it's short of where I'd like it. For native material, I watch a 15 minute chunk of a variety show in Korean. For German, I started watching episodes on Der Kriminalist. For German, sometimes I'm frustrated by how much I don't understand, other times I'm surprised at how much I do. In general, I feel that I do get a slight idea of what they are talking about. For Korean, it's still a puzzle to my brain most of the time. For French and Japanese, the 10m/10m split is what I'm still going for. I slacked off on French, but I hit my goals for Japanese. Listened most days (5 days out of 7) and did a few days of actual study. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| sabotai Senior Member United States Joined 5663 days ago 391 posts - 489 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Japanese, Korean, French | Message 82 of 151 16 March 2014 at 8:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I like to write my thoughts up in this log to help me remember things. But, sometimes I still forget. I was reading my posts from the beginning of the year and I completely forgot about wanting to read 10k pages of German this year. Oops.
I didn't go into detail about why I stopped doing scriptorium, but looking back I do remember why. With everything I do basically, I went way overboard. I was doing 10+ pages a day for a few weeks and completely burned myself out on it. I was also doing scriptorium on a ton of sentences that I already knew. So here's my little update on how I'm going to go about doing scriptorium again 1) I will only do 1 page of scriptorium in a language per day. (Except Korean) 2) The sentences that I scriptorium must be either: a) An i+1 sentence in terms of vocabulary b) A cluster of several sentences meant to illustrate a grammatical rule or pattern that I either just learned or need help on (such as when I fail a drill) For the Korean TAC challenge, it will be to do 120 of something by the end of April. So, for that, I'll do 120 pages of scriptorium in Korean, so that means I'll probably have to do 3 pages every day to meet that goal. I think 3 in Korean, plus 1 in each of the other three languages (keeping in mind that I only study French or Japanese ~3-4 days a week, if that, so it'll be 4-5 pages a day total) sounds doable. Edited by sabotai on 17 March 2014 at 6:35am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| sabotai Senior Member United States Joined 5663 days ago 391 posts - 489 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Japanese, Korean, French | Message 83 of 151 17 March 2014 at 7:17am | IP Logged | |||||
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Week 11 Review (Mar 10 - 16)
Today started off as an off day. I did my 3 sheets of scriptorium for Korean and then did some extensive listening (for Korean) but then I didn't really feel like doing anything else. I was going to just take the rest of my Sunday off and get back to it on Monday. That was at about 3pm. Then, at around 9pm when I felt like I really wasn't going to do anything the rest of the night, I added up my time to come report it and saw that I was a mere 2 hours away from hitting 20 hours for the week. That actually got me motivated and I got to work. German: 11 hours, 40 minutes Korean: 3 hours, 45 minutes Japanese: 4 hours French: 45 minutes Week 11 Total: 20 hours, 10 minutes Year To Date: 139 hours Totally destroyed German this week. A good helping of intensive reading along with a large helping of extensive listening, along with my usual activities. Overall, I do feel more enthusiastic going forward. I had fallen back into doing reviews the past few months. I was rereading sentences from chapters several times and it was starting to be a big drain on me. Once again, I am ditching the whole idea of "review" (except, of course, for the extensive listening playlist) and am going back to just doing a once over with scriptorium and moving on. Today for Korean, I wrote out sentences from chapter 5 of Sogang 1A, mainly because of the (으)러 grammar point (I mostly have it while reading but it still eludes my ear when listening most of the time). About 50% of the sentences I wrote out had that in it. While going through the Yonsei textbooks, I'll come across it again. It will be in Yonsei Reading, too. And then while going through Korean Grammar In Use, I'll come across there. And when going through the TTMIK lessons, I'll probably see it there too. I'll also see it used in future Sogang chapters. I don't need to spend weeks rereading the chapter over and over again, killing my desire to read Korean in general. That's a lesson that's taking awhile to sink in for me. In fact, I wrote about that a few months ago. I have this feeling, this urge that I need to learn the grammar and vocab 100% the very first time I see it. It causes me to constantly take a step back in my learning. To waste time starting and restarting SRS. To start languages over from square one. If there's one thing that I can point to that's been a massive hindrance to my language learning, it's that. I need to bookmark this post so that every time I get the urge to start SRSing again, or the urge to start a language over, or the urge to go back and reread all of the sentences from the first chapter of Sogang 1A or Assimil or Living Language...I can read what I wrote here, hopefully come to my senses and just keep pushing forward. Edited by sabotai on 17 March 2014 at 7:18am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4649 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 84 of 151 18 March 2014 at 2:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
Your posts about learning strategies have been very interesting!
I feel that this is one of the biggest traps for language learners, together with the trap of never learning things well enough to know them. I think I'm erring on the side of wanting 100% at the moment. 100% is really something that has to happen organically with practice, not only with repetition. But knowing how much is the right amount is generally quite difficult. I think the key is to move forward, but to monitor if and when you really, really need to refresh something. Your comment that you'll come across the pattern again in different books makes sense. I think it's a lot more efficient to learn something three times in three different context than to repeat the same lesson six times. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| sabotai Senior Member United States Joined 5663 days ago 391 posts - 489 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Japanese, Korean, French | Message 85 of 151 19 March 2014 at 3:36am | IP Logged | |||||
Thanks!
This is why I've gone with the "scorched earth/ strip mining" mentality in the past. I figured it was better to overlearn everything early rather take my chances on not fully knowing something down the road when I might need it. Now I see that just leads me to become bored and frustrated with my lack of progress. Agreed on moving forward and making a check every now and then to see if anything needs more work. Seems the most efficient way of doing if know how to monitor your progress. It's one of the reason I've taken a liking to doing drills. They do a decent job of pinpointing problem areas, if you can stomach doing them. Edited by sabotai on 19 March 2014 at 3:36am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| sabotai Senior Member United States Joined 5663 days ago 391 posts - 489 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Japanese, Korean, French | Message 86 of 151 24 March 2014 at 4:22am | IP Logged | |||||
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Week 12 Review (Mar 17 - 23)
German: 3 hours, 45 minutes Korean: 10 hours, 45 minutes Japanese: 2 hours, 30 minutes French: 3 hours, 5 minutes Week 12 Total: 20 hours, 5 minutes Year To Date: 159 hours, 5 minutes Followed my great German week with a weak one, but followed a weak Korean week with a good one. Got lazy with the German listening this week. As for the TAC Korean challenge, I've done 18 pages of scriptorium in Korean so far. 38 days left, 102 pages to go (2.68 per day) Edited by sabotai on 24 March 2014 at 4:22am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| sabotai Senior Member United States Joined 5663 days ago 391 posts - 489 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Japanese, Korean, French | Message 87 of 151 31 March 2014 at 5:12am | IP Logged | |||||
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Week 13 Review (Mar 24 - 30)
German: 1 hour Korean: 5 hours, 30 minutes French: 2 hours Japanese: 1 hour, 15 minutes Week 13 Totals: 9 hours, 45 minutes Year To Date: 168 hours, 50 minutes It wasn't a bad week, it was a flat out strange week. Just a whole bunch of real life getting in the way. I should get back to form next week. Another 18 pages of scriptorium for Korean. 36 pages done, 84 to go. (2.7 pages a day needed to hit goal) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| sabotai Senior Member United States Joined 5663 days ago 391 posts - 489 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Japanese, Korean, French | Message 88 of 151 06 April 2014 at 4:27am | IP Logged | |||||
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I've been breaking up my goals into manageable chunks. I started it several weeks ago but didn't do a good job of keeping to it until this week. I have my goals for the year and a general weekly goal for time, but sometimes it's hard to stick to large, general goals.
I've broken my goals up into 15 minute blocks of time. I haven't timed myself with intensive/dual-language/extensive reading yet, but doing a page of scriptorium takes about 10-20 minutes, depending on how many sentences I do and how long they are. I aim for ~20 sentences per page, which is how many I get out of an Assimil lesson. Anyway, here's how I have broken it down (with this week being the first I've actually stuck to it) (Block = 15 minutes) Weekly goals French 3 Blocks of Intensive Listening or Audio Drills 3 Blocks of Extensive Listening 3 Blocks of Native Listening 3 Blocks of Scriptorium or Written Drills Japanese 6 Blocks of Extensive Listening 3 Blocks of Native Listening 3 Blocks of Scriptorium or Written Drills (6 block of E.Listening and no I.Listening due to my extensive listening playlist being nearly 2 hours. Need to whittle it down some.) German 6 Blocks of Intensive Listening or Audio Drills 18 Blocks of Extensive Listening 6 Blocks of Native Listening 6 Blocks of Scriptorium or Written Drills (Due to doing so many pages of Scriptorium for Korean for the monthly TAC challenge, I'll be mostly doing written drills for those blocks, and 18 blocks of extensive listening due to having a plenty long playlist - nearly 2 hours.) Korean 5 Blocks of Intensive Listening or Audio Drills 5 Blocks of Extensive Listening 6 Blocks of Native Listening 20 Blocks of Scriptorium or Written Drills (Will be 10 blocks of each listening when the TAC challenge is over and Scriptorium goes down to 6 blocks a week. I.L. and E.L. is even because E.L. playlist is only ~45 minutes long) Audio Drills = Pimsleur, Michel Thomas, FSI, etc. Written Drills = Practice Makes Perfect workbooks, etc. These goals aren't set in stone, and I'll change them week to week as I need to and my level changes (For example, once I get through the German extensive listening that I want to do, I'll be shifting more time towards reading). But 12 blocks for French and Japanese, 36 for German and Korean will be how many I'll want for now. That's a total of 24 hours, so I don't expect to achieve every goal every week, but at least for this week, I'm on pace to be close. As long as I get over 20 hours a week (80 blocks total), I'll count it as a success. I have found that breaking things up into 15 minute chunks, and using those as my goals, has helped me to manage my time better. Nice, small numbers that are easy to count and plan for day to day. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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