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Rapp’s Neutrino Log

  Tags: Spanish
 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log Post Reply
21 messages over 3 pages: 1 2
rapp
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5512 days ago

129 posts - 204 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Esperanto, Spanish

 
 Message 17 of 21
09 December 2014 at 6:41pm | IP Logged 
Thanks for the kind words.

I don't have time for a full update at the moment, hopefully I can do that this weekend. A couple of months ago, the structure of the program was revamped in terms of the number of levels in the program (went from 32 to 101, I believe) and the XP system was rescaled so that now you're supposed to do 19,000,00 points worth of atoms per day instead of 1,900,000 (points awarded for each atom went up too). So my current stats will look bizarre when I post them.

So far I'm just about half way through the program (day 456 of 995). I've stuck with it every day, although I haven't always managed the full allotment of atoms for the day. I would say that the program really does work, is easy to stick to, and has produced good results so far.

Reading is my strong suit - I can read news articles, wikipedia articles, young adult level novels and the like with a good level of understanding. The novels are the hardest just because of the range of vocabulary used, but it really is true that if you don't sweat it and just keep reading, that missing vocab gradually gets filled in.

Listening comprehension is lagging behind somewhat. I can follow along with many podcasts quite well, but movies and tv are much harder. I would say that this is the weakest part of the neutrino approach. Inundating yourself with media does work, but is seems relatively inefficient. I think there must be some audio equivalent of the "keep reading and only occasionally bother to look words up in the dictionary" rule of thumb. I've been following emk's log about using subs2srs to learn Spanish with some interest. Maybe that sort of focused listening along with a transcript is the kind of thing I'm looking for.


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Cavesa
Triglot
Senior Member
Czech Republic
Joined 4790 days ago

3277 posts - 6779 votes 
Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1
Studies: Spanish, German, Italian

 
 Message 18 of 21
09 December 2014 at 10:29pm | IP Logged 
Thanks for the detailed info, rapp. It is great to see actually the first real review of
neutrino, everything else just doesn't go directly into it.

It's great to see you progress so nicely. Reading your log, I wish I had the money to get
to Neutrino for Japanese.
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Snowflake
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5740 days ago

1032 posts - 1233 votes 
Studies: Mandarin

 
 Message 19 of 21
10 December 2014 at 2:31am | IP Logged 
rapp wrote:

I think there must be some audio equivalent of the "keep reading and only occasionally bother to look words up in the dictionary" rule of thumb.


This is a little puzzling to me as there's nothing about not to do things that are "unassigned". Also by now you are using
http://free-translator.imtranslator.net/speech.asp
and are occasionally working with movie/TV series subtitles.

Edited by Snowflake on 10 December 2014 at 3:03am

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rapp
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5512 days ago

129 posts - 204 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Esperanto, Spanish

 
 Message 20 of 21
10 December 2014 at 9:42pm | IP Logged 
I probably didn't express that very well, Snowflake, so let me try and expand upon my thought.

When it comes to reading, there seems to be lots of advice available. To be very general, I would summarize that advice as:

1. read lots
   a. if you encounter an unknown word, skip it and keep reading
   b. BUT, if you encounter the same unknown word several times, look it up

Many discussions here on HTLAL focus on details of what constitutes "lots" and "several" in that summary, but this is the general algorithm for learning to read in your L2. And in my experience so far, it works well.

But when it comes to listening comprehension, the advice is much more sparse, and in neutrino in particular it seems to boil down to just:

2. listen lots

Khatz is well-known for advocating always having L2 audio present in your environment, even going so far as saying you should place a speaker under your pillow at night so that you continue hearing it during sleep. But I haven't really heard any advice anywhere that I can equate with 1a and 1b above.

Listening to lots of audio is definitely important, and I have made good progress doing just that. But it seems like there must some guidelines out there for how to identify portions of audio that are worth spending more time on, and those you can more safely let pass by.

My guess is that something like subs2srs could be that thing I'm looking for. According to emk in his Spanish subs2srs experiment log, you'll end up deleting most of the cards that tool generates. Maybe the card contains an audio snippet you already understand well, or maybe there is some technical difficulty with the card, but for whatever reason most get deleted. The one's that remain, however, are one's that you've identified as worthy of more thorough study - a new word or phrase, another example of usage of a word you're sort-of familiar with, etc.

I can see that algorithm being something like this:

3. watch lots of L2 movies/tv shows
4. for a subset of them, use subs2srs to generate anki cards
   a. delete the majority of cards upon first encounter in anki
   b. retain for further study only cards you find "interesting"

I think the ideas rattling around in my head are related to the idea of i+1 input, and the "growth zone" that Khatz mentions in this article: http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/comfort-zone-growt h-zone-panic-zone

It seems like the "look up repeatedly encountered unknown words" advice and the "only keep subs2srs cards you find interesting" advice are both just ways to identify items that are in that growth zone - items with the biggest payoff per unit of study time. But there are wildly different amounts of overhead involved in applying those two rules of thumb.

To jump back to the reading example for a moment, when you do repeatedly encounter an unknown word and decide to look it up, there are tools such as pop-up dictionaries that can bring the effort required to do so down to almost zero. Tools like "learning with texts" make it easy to generate srs cards from selected bits of text. So as you are reading, you can very easily "capture" that growth zone item. That's not the case with the audio-related tools I'm familiar with. With subs2srs, for example, you have to gather up subtitle files, make sure they are properly time-aligned with the movie, run the subs2srs tool on them, and import the cards into anki before you can even begin the process of identifying the cards worth keeping.

So I'm looking for ways to reduce that overhead. I'm curious about tools and techniques for more easily identifying and capturing bits of audio that are worthy of further study.
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Snowflake
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5740 days ago

1032 posts - 1233 votes 
Studies: Mandarin

 
 Message 21 of 21
11 December 2014 at 3:43am | IP Logged 
Hope this all makes sense as I'm a bit tired......

I tend to think that listening comprehension generally lags behind other skills. If I were say 90% through and having disturbing comprehension gaps, that would be different. My day to day approach is also a bit different ...for instance I prefer reading hard copy books, in part due to having overuse issues with my wrists and elbows. I also avoid pop-up dictionaries as I tend to pay more attention to the pop-up than the text. And since my TL is Mandarin, finger tracing the Chinese characters into say a dictionary is good for reinforcing stroke order.

Capturing bits of audio that are worthy of further study; I take a relatively casual approach.... is the passage interesting enough that I'm willing to spend more time? And if yes, how much more time? If the audio is part of say a TV series or movie and the subtitles pretty much match the dialog then it's usually a matter of transcribing the subtitle and repeatedly listening to the audio. If it's music, then a Google search for the lyrics is in order. If it's say a movie and the subtitles don't match, then I'll probably extract the sentence and send that audio clip to a native speaker friend. I personally find extracting audio for habitual inclusion in SRS cards, or the effort needed to set up something like subs2srs to be draining.

Edited by Snowflake on 11 December 2014 at 3:46am



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