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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| nancydowns Senior Member United States Joined 3923 days ago 184 posts - 288 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written) | Message 65 of 69 03 May 2014 at 11:31pm | IP Logged |
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Hello Bakunin! :-) I enjoyed reading about your error journal. I have begun writing more on Lang-8 and have been wondering myself the best strategy for learning
the correct form. I thought about using pencil and paper to write out what the journal should say. But I wonder if you are correct that there could be a more active way of saving past mistakes to look at. What program do you have your journal in? I think Microsoft Word (which is what I have) would work because you could make an index of the grammatical term and then link it to the extrapolation of the corrections. I might try that and see if I think it's worth the time. Thanks again for your logs because you are helping me a lot in refining my own learning process. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Bakunin Diglot Senior Member Switzerland outerkhmer.blogspot. Joined 5131 days ago 531 posts - 1126 votes Speaks: German*, Thai Studies: Khmer | Message 66 of 69 04 May 2014 at 8:30pm | IP Logged |
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@Mooby: Lemony Snicket, A Series of Unfortunate Events, is dark stuff. I’m not sure if I can recommend these books. But if you do like them, there are ten or eleven in the series. I know that you don’t really do extensive reading, but why don’t you try it with a short (about 100 pages) book for young readers (like Snicket). Just read it without looking words up, without worrying about ‘lost learning opportunities’, ignoring passages you don’t understand. You should be able to read 100 pages in about three hours, so if that is a total failure, you’ve only lost three hours. What are three hours in the grand scheme of things? Nothing! But if it turns out to be a positive experience, you’ll have one more tool at your disposal.
@nancydowns: Thanks :) Yeah, I found just writing entries and looking at the corrections wasn’t efficient. It felt like I was wasting a large part of the feedback I got. But this has changed a bit with the error journal. I’m now more attentive to certain structures and seem to have wed out a few pesky errors already. Usually, I’m looking for additional examples of the same phrase or pattern on Google; sometimes, if a new word is suggested which I don’t know very well, I look it up and note down a monolingual definition; if I get advice or explanations from the corrector, I copy them over. In the usual case, where I just look up additional examples on Google, I add like five or so to my error journal, and sometimes I use some of them to make cloze deletion cards in Anki. This process (1 - copying error and correction, 2 - looking for examples, selecting good ones, copying them over, 3 - making cloze deletion cards) reinforces the correct structures much more than a cursory reading of the correction on lang-8 ever did. To your question: yes, I use Word. I don’t index my corrections, and so far I haven’t been going back very often (but it’s a new thing, so this may change over time). I see the main value in the process itself and the fact that I keep notes at all. But I like the idea of indexing and will look into it! Edited by Bakunin on 04 May 2014 at 9:23pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Mooby Senior Member Scotland Joined 6106 days ago 707 posts - 1220 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Polish | Message 67 of 69 04 May 2014 at 9:08pm | IP Logged |
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Ha, you're right! I try to do more extensive reading but my tendency to 1)want to study and 2) buy interesting but advanced books - slows me down.
Once I've finished my current book, I'll start Le Petit Nicholas stories. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Bakunin Diglot Senior Member Switzerland outerkhmer.blogspot. Joined 5131 days ago 531 posts - 1126 votes Speaks: German*, Thai Studies: Khmer | Message 68 of 69 01 June 2014 at 6:08pm | IP Logged |
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I’ve just come back from two weeks in Thailand. Apart from the putsch and the curfew related inconveniences during the second week I had a great time. I was with a Swiss friend of mine who is thinking about shooting a movie in Thailand, so we did some work related to that project. I did a lot of talking and translating for my friend - really interesting stuff. I also met quite a few new people and visited various places in Bangkok I hadn’t been to before. I really did talk a lot, and I can say I’m now quite comfortable speaking Thai: albeit my Thai leaves a lot to be desired, there’s little I can’t get across; furthermore, Thais never switch languages with me.
This trip has shown me again that my passion in language learning is still Thai. It is the language I’m most curious about, the language I really want to explore and master. But it is also very clear that I need to spend a lot more time on Thai if I want to advance further, e.g., write well, understand stand-up comedy, understand important cultural references, speak with ease about complex issues, master code-switching between various registers, understand dialects, slang, poetry and word-play, to give a few examples. Learning a language to an advanced level requires a lot of time. But I also want to have a life besides language learning: friends, traveling, sports etc. Given these other activities, I’m clearly at my limit with the languages I’ve taken on. I would love to improve my French or Polish, and I really would love to learn Turkish, but it is obvious that I won’t have the time to do all of this and lead a balanced, healthy, social life. I need to make cuts somewhere. At this point in time, summer approaching and all, the most reasonable solution to me seems to give up Turkish and scale down Polish. French has already taken a back seat - all I do is listening to podcasts -, so there’s little to adjust. The other cut I’m going to make is HTLAL. We have a great community here, and there are lots of interesting people and views, but somehow I feel that by now I know what techniques I enjoy and how I learn effectively. I really regret having to give up Turkish. The language has grown on me, and I know that there is an incredibly interesting world out there to explore. I have been to Central Asia and Turkey several times and would love to see, hear and taste more, and with some language skills under my belt this would be an immensely more enriching experience. This morning I started reading the Little Prince in Turkish and realized it wouldn’t be too long before I really could pull that off. But, alas, I just can’t see how to make time for Turkish. So here’s my sign-off plan: continue listening to select French podcasts - this should keep the my French on life support; continue to read Polish at a 1 mio words per year rate and listen to podcasts - this should help me to make further progress, albeit at a slower pace, and get me to the books I really want to read later this year, probably in autumn; step up my efforts with Thai - see above for where I would like to be in a few years; reduce Turkish to the time I used to spend on HTLAL, or less, or zero; spend more time outdoors and with friends. Now, as Buddha kept emphasizing, all phenomena are impermanent, and this extends in particular to any single plan I’ve ever come up with in my life. I wish everybody in the Southern hemisphere a pleasant winter and the rest of us a great summer! :) Edited by Bakunin on 01 June 2014 at 6:08pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| yuhakko Tetraglot Senior Member FranceRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4633 days ago 414 posts - 582 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishB2, EnglishC2, Spanish, Japanese Studies: Korean, Norwegian, Mandarin | Message 69 of 69 02 June 2014 at 1:39pm | IP Logged |
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Until the end, you will have written inspiring posts! I have to admit, I'll be missing
those long impressive posts which have shown over and over again that "standard studying" as is mostly been done here is not the only way. I wish you the best with your studies and "real" life as well. I hope you can stop by from time to time to tell us what you've done and where you're going next. Your turkish experiment was also something and I hope you won't end up totally stopping it as it seemed progress was clearly coming along! In any case, good luck and hope to read more of you when you find the time! 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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