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Ezy Ryder’s endeavor (TAC’14-15 旅立ち、鵲、東亞) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Ezy Ryder Diglot Senior Member Poland youtube.com/user/Kat Joined 4129 days ago 284 posts - 387 votes  Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 81 of 144 29 September 2014 at 1:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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Just a quick post about a different kind of milestone. I’ve checked how many characters are used in my Chinese deck, and today at around 3AM, I’ve passed 3k. Current words/character ratio – 3.57.
When preparing the cards from 半月1-4, I’ve checked at which word the text coverage should reach 98%. There are only ~600 words left until reaching this word, and level. Which means, that by October, I should get to a level of comprehension (of these four books) around 97-98%. So, I’m considering participating in Tadoku. I think the reason my Japanese is more fluent than my Chinese, despite lower vocabulary, is that I’ve done way more extensive reading than in Chinese. I’m not sure whether I’ll actually register (that would require making a Twitter account…), but I might still compare my page-count and (hypothetical) position in the ranking with other (actual) participants, daily. I also thought about recording a brief (2-3 minutes) unrehearsed video in Chinese, before starting the project, and then after finishing each book; to see progress. I could even calculate the speed of my speech in WPM… I’m a statistics freak, ain’t I? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ezy Ryder Diglot Senior Member Poland youtube.com/user/Kat Joined 4129 days ago 284 posts - 387 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 82 of 144 04 October 2014 at 5:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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Chinese: 11 000 words. This update is a bit late... Mature: 3300, Young+Learning: 4329, Guessed+Known: 3515, Words/character ratio: 3.66.
I’ve had two worse days. The first one, I didn’t even finish the reviews. The second one I finished them despite a backlog of some fourteen hundred cards, but haven’t added any new cards. I’ve tried reading a bit of the Witcher, Wikipedia and a visual novel I’ve found a let’s play (read?) of on YouTube. I understand quite a lot, which led me to consider dropping adding vocabulary in Anki; but I don’t want the situation with Japanese all over again. So instead, I’m just gonna consume some native content, on top of my regular vocabulary binging. Maybe even during the breaks? As for Na’vi, the Na’vi frequency dictionary project still isn’t finished, and the end of the year is getting closer and closer; so I might start studying the vocab in a less useful order. Also, content in Na’vi being as scarce as it is, I’m gonna study it only productively (English->Na’vi). Though, maybe I could translate the English to Chinese, as I like the concept of laddering… Oh, and something you probably didn’t know, recently Na’vi finally got a word for “duty, obligation.” Now we don’t have to say things like “Fwa fko zene sivi” (literally, "what one has to do"). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ezy Ryder Diglot Senior Member Poland youtube.com/user/Kat Joined 4129 days ago 284 posts - 387 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 83 of 144 12 October 2014 at 12:25am | IP Logged | ||
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Chinese: 12 000 words. Mature: 3695, Young: 4568, Guessed+Known: 3788, Words/Character ratio: 3.83.
I tried reading a paragraph from a Chinese Wikipedia article about language acquisition. 97.6% text coverage. Are we perhaps getting somewhere? Also, found a Taiwanese drama (深情密碼) on YouTube, available in three versions: with English subtitles covering the Chinese ones; with Spanish subtitles only; and with Chinese subtitles only, but lower sound quality… Reading the (Chinese) subtitles first, and then trying to listen to the audio while reading them again, I can vaguely understand. But not any other way. Also, there’s approximately one new word per minute. I’m kinda not sure how much point is there in slogging through this painfully slow process now. Perhaps I should just focus on reading for now… Speaking of reading, I'm still not reading much (no surprise there)… Also got some writing (typing?) practice in Japanese, at a forum for learners of the Na'vi language, of all places. A Pole, writing in Japanese, in the Russian sub-forum, of an English-based forum, for learners of the Na'vi language. Call me easily-amused, but it seems quite funny to me. Edited by Ezy Ryder on 12 October 2014 at 12:26am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ezy Ryder Diglot Senior Member Poland youtube.com/user/Kat Joined 4129 days ago 284 posts - 387 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 84 of 144 20 October 2014 at 8:14pm | IP Logged | ||
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Chinese: 13 000 words. Mature: 4141, Young: 4803, Guessed+Known: 4056, Words/Character ratio: 3.99 (oh, bugger…)
97.0% text coverage in a paragraph from a Chinese Wikipedia article. Didn’t understand 5-6 words on a page from the Witcher. I might be making a huge mistake yet again (重蹈覆轍?), but it seems adding vocabulary to my Anki deck ceased being as effective as it used to be a couple thousand words ago. So, maybe, just maybe, I could (should?) focus on input now? I’d probably still look up at least a few of the words I can’t guess, just wouldn’t study them via SRS. And, I have mixed feelings about the daily reviews. I’m not sure whether I should keep doing them (eventually there should be fewer of them every day), or just leave it all to input. The problem is, last time I tried to do so, I didn’t consume all that much input, even when didn’t bother with keeping doing Anki, which certainly freed some time and energy. On the other hand, this time around I’ve accumulated some more of them words, so perhaps that could make the difference. I tried searching for a more challenging text in English, to see what’s my tolerance for ambiguity, and so here is an excerpt from an uncopyrighted novel from the XIX century, from which I’ve edited out the stems of all words I didn’t know the meaning of, in this context – “My man Jeeves:”
That’s about 96.4% text coverage, or ~7-10 unknown words on a typical page. Reading it seemed quite fine to me. It was a tad more difficult than, say, most posts on this forum; but I could definitely see myself reading this book anyway. Does that mean, my current text coverage in Chinese is good enough to switch to mostly extensive reading? Could someone offer a bit of advice? Edited by Ezy Ryder on 20 October 2014 at 8:15pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4445 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 85 of 144 20 October 2014 at 10:55pm | IP Logged | ||
I read the excerpt first as you posted it and the sense of it seemed quite clear (but then I've probably read a lot of Wodehouse, so I knew what to expect). I went and found the passage, and a fair few of those words are no longer common currency, at least not in conversation in the UK, except perhaps in a humorous context. If your Chinese coverage is that good, I expected you can most certainly be reading extensively. My Japanese coverage for the same passage would probably #### out 50% of the words and I still get some benefit from extensive reading. You surely must be at the stage where you can read a novel and be confident of understanding the main plot and the sub-plots even if you miss out the occasional word. Edited by dampingwire on 07 November 2014 at 12:28am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ezy Ryder Diglot Senior Member Poland youtube.com/user/Kat Joined 4129 days ago 284 posts - 387 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 86 of 144 06 November 2014 at 5:23pm | IP Logged | ||
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@Dampingwire Thanks for the quick reply.
I’ve been trying to work out how to improve my problem with listening comprehension in Chinese. I’d presume most people would suggest me to listen more, perhaps to things with transcripts or subtitles. But if you’ve been following this log long enough, you can probably guess what I’m gonna try to use. Anki! “Here we go again,” I hear you say. But let me explain my (false?) reasoning first. It seems, our brains are best at doing exactly what we require them to do. And not much more. Most people here are probably aware of the fallacy behind “I’ll study only L1->L2, so that I’ll remember it better.” Studying L1->L2, you’ll end up being better at… going L1->L2, and you’ll have gaps in going the other way. And vice versa. Studying L2->L1, you’ll develop better recognition abilities, but your production will be lacking. And, it seems it doesn’t hold up true only for the language direction. All the 118k reviews I’ve painstakingly done in my most recent Mandarin deck, have been Hanzi->Pinyin+Meaning. So, I’m much, much better at reading, than at listening (or perhaps I should say "I'm much, much worse at listening, than at reading)." It has happened to me multiple times, that even having heard a word correctly, I only understood it after writing it down using an IME. NOT looking it up, but simply seeing it written in Hanzi. Thus I’ve changed the card layout, so that now it’s Pinyin->Hanzi+Meaning, and rescheduled all cards as new. However, I realize there’s more to listening than just being able to understand the meanings of words. I’ll also have to be able to understand them quickly (160WPM being the average audiobook pace, leaves only 375ms per word). And of course, that’s still not everything. Familiarity with the sounding of the language might also affect comprehension. For example, while listening to some Taiwanese podcasts, I’ve found most speakers merge “sh,” “zh” and “ch;” with “s,” “z” and “c” respectively. So I started to subvocalise them this way while reading, to get used to it. 日本語は、最近ちょっとアマガミ実況に夢中 になっちゃったらしい。全ての新単語を調べ る、でもアンキに入力するつもりがない。繁 体字中国語である夢中になれそう練習方法が 見つけたら方がいいなぁ… 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ezy Ryder Diglot Senior Member Poland youtube.com/user/Kat Joined 4129 days ago 284 posts - 387 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 87 of 144 11 November 2014 at 12:03am | IP Logged | ||
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Enter Subs2SRS.
As many of you have probably noticed, recently you can read quite a lot about Subs2SRS. So, I’ve decided to give it a try. You might remember (if not, you can just scroll up…) how in my last post I’ve said I’m trying to “reverse” the deck, so to speak (though, “rotate” might be a better word); to practice recall of meaning while being cued by the pronunciation. Well, I’ve changed my mind. And perhaps it’s good I did, because my recent experiences suggest, even that couldn’t guarantee good listening comprehension. So, I started yesterday. I’ve been recommended two Taiwanese 偶像劇 recently, and I started manually making cards from one of them. This show (喜歡一個人) actually is available in both good audio and video quality, and with very clear Traditional Chinese subtitles, on YouTube. My current routine is, to do a five minute session in Anki, after which I add 10 new cards (often one or two more). I listen, trying to understand, so that I don’t make cards with really easy sentences (like spoken unnaturally clearly, or when someone repeats after someone else). Then, I add a recording of the sentence to Anki, on the front of the card; and the subtitles (I type them in manually, which is problematic mainly with names, as they tend to be the majority of words with unknown Hanzi) and optionally, unknown vocab, on the back. I timed one session today, and a ~dozen sentences took me slightly less than 20 minutes. In the last two days I went through 12 minutes of the first episode, making 112 cards. At this pace, I would make around 600 cards per episode, and currently I’m aiming at 50 new cards per day, so I should get through the first episode (just adding cards though) in less than a fortnight. As for the actual experiences with this approach. The first day was a drag. 90% of the time, I just couldn’t get what they were saying, even after multiple replays of the audio, and some breaks with interleaving. All I was getting, was “#####啦,” “#####喔,” „###啊.” Which, in case you don’t know much Chinese, are sentence ending particles, there is only a few of them, and they occupy the ends of most sentences in casual speech. Perhaps it being late could’ve had something to do with it, but I just decided to finish early, hoping tomorrow will be a bit better. And, perhaps it was. Was I more focused? More patient? Either way, today it seemed a bit easier. It still seems they’re mumbling, skipping some consonants here and there, and basically speaking mercilessly quickly. But after a couple reviews, many cards become somewhat understandable. I actually got three new cards right today, with no prior reviews, too. However, there’s a thing that makes me a bit concerned. That is, sometimes I end up memorizing the sentences, and then just guessing which one it is because of a particular word at the beginning, or end. I hope this problem will solve itself, once the number of sentences raises enough. Though, I’m not quite sure it will. It kinda reminds me of a story from my childhood. It happened before I learnt to read. So, I had a comic book, which I kept asking my mother to read to me, again and again. And one day, I played a joke on her, I told here that this time, I’ll read it to her, and I recited the whole thing from memory. For a moment, she thought I learnt to read by myself, while in fact, having heard it so many times, I simply knew it by heart, by that time. And I’m sort of afraid a similar thing might happen with these sentences. On a final note - hearing the language, even with my comprehension as shaky, as it is, I get to appreciate how beautiful it is. I hope it’ll seem even more so, once I really get the hang of it! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ezy Ryder Diglot Senior Member Poland youtube.com/user/Kat Joined 4129 days ago 284 posts - 387 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 88 of 144 16 November 2014 at 5:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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First week of Subs2SRS-like study
I think it’s getting better. The first day was a drag, but now, at least some of the older sentences are gradually becoming more comprehensible, at times even without replaying the audio. Also, when mining the show for incomprehensible ones (still the majority), I start to pick up some words, and occasionally, even a whole sentence (though that’s still quite rare). 231 notes studied, 1282 reviews in ~7 hours. 75.73% correct answers for unlearnt and 79.01% for young. After the first week, I’ve only studied a half of the first episode, so if I won’t start picking up more sentences, I’ll be able to go only through two episodes in the first month. But there seems to be at least some progress, so perhaps things will keep getting better. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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