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Film History Studies TAC15

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51 messages over 7 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6
YnEoS
Senior Member
United States
Joined 4049 days ago

472 posts - 893 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish

 
 Message 49 of 51
14 March 2015 at 2:26pm | IP Logged 
Still trying to figure out these forum issues, can't log into here from my computer, so I'm posting this now from
my phone.

Anyways still in the process of rebuilding my previous extensive Anki routine intensively. I dropped a few
decks I added in the last month but overall progress has been good. Pretty much finished rebuilding
Japanese, so this month I'll be focusing more on German and Hungarian. Anyways here's the current deck
status.

French
subs2SRS - Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960)
subs2SRS - Vivre sa Vie (Jean-Luc Godard, 1962)
subs2SRS - 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (Jean-Luc Godard, 1966)
subs2SRS - Coursera - Structures I: Cables & Arcs videos 1.1-1.2

Japanese
2000 Common Words & Phrases
Book 2
SRS - Ghost in the Shell SAC Episode 1

German
FSI Dialogs Lessons 1-15

Hungarian
FSI Dialogs Lessons 1-6
Book 2 Lessons 1-32

Swedish
Book 2 Lessons 1-32

Czech
Book 2 Lessons 1-16

Lots of cards to get through so rebuilding is slow, but enoyable and I think filling in some of the gaps my mind
was skipping over when doing these extensible has been really good for all my languages.

I'm excited to get Cantonese, Mandarin and Hindi back into my routine, but I may choose to stay in more
comefortable Romance/Germanic/Slavic territory after those for a while. Not so sure how much
time/motivation I have for Thai, Korean, Malay, and Telugu anymore, but I have some good Anki decks built
for them
so I may still pick up the basics at some point to give future me more options.

Edited by YnEoS on 14 March 2015 at 2:32pm

1 person has voted this message useful



YnEoS
Senior Member
United States
Joined 4049 days ago

472 posts - 893 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish

 
 Message 50 of 51
23 April 2015 at 5:09pm | IP Logged 
Sorry again for the long radio silence.   Just a quick update, studies progressing nicely, I'm experimenting using Book2 for some L2->L3 study, and so far it looks promising, but I want to wait at least a month or so before I post about it. Hope everyone else is doing well, I'll try to find some time to catch up on everyone else's logs at some point.
2 persons have voted this message useful



YnEoS
Senior Member
United States
Joined 4049 days ago

472 posts - 893 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish

 
 Message 51 of 51
21 July 2015 at 3:28pm | IP Logged 
The Forum going offline made me decide to post in the backup forum, so I guess now is as good a time as any to post an update. I've been studying regularly but my methods have been inconsistent as I've been doing a lot of experimenting with different and I don't always feel like discussing them all in detail.

I'll probably do a big progress update in the near future, but until then I thought I'd share some thoughts on a change I've made to my study methods that seems to have made the biggest difference so far. In retrospect it seems like a fairly obvious thing to think of, yet it never occurred to me to try it before, so I thought it might be worth discussing in detail in case anyone else wants to try it.


Basically I've found it very very useful to use slowed audio when doing L-R, preferably along with some sort of truncate silence filter so I don't end up with long pauses. Basically for the longest time I didn't ever consider slowing audio because I thought it would be "unnatural" and might mess up my speaking, and also a lot of stuff gets posted on this forum about how terrible slow audio is, and how you should listen to native-like speech as soon as possible to get used to it. Now I've never really minded audio of native speakers talking slowly, because I've always thought this was sort of "natural" in that it's how a native speaker would say the word if asked to repeat it clearly.

Where I kind flipped my philosophy on this issue was when I was listening to the brain science podcast. There was an episode where they interviewed someone who developed a program for helping children with learning disabilities to read better. They found some children had a problem with listening, distinguishing between certain similar sounds, and that training them to distinguish between these sounds also helped them read much faster. And they put lots and lots of research and trials into refining their training program.

What they found was that slow speech that gradually transitioned to regular speech worked much better than just listening to regular speech from the beginning. Not only that, but computer slowed speech worked better than humans just talking slowly, because when speech is slowed down by a computer it can better elongate consonant sounds.

Now I don't want to extrapolate too much from this and claim that computer slowed down audio in L-R will develop listening skills in the same way their highly specialized training program does. But it did convince me that computer slowed audio can't hurt, and may have some listening benefits.

I think in a lot of my early L-R attempts I had 2 deficiencies. 1) I wasn't used to native audio and 2) I needed a larger vocabulary. I'm pretty firmly convinced that it pretty inefficient to try to remedy both of these at the same time. I noticed when I started L-R with a difficult language that had little transparency, most of it was just reinforcing the words I already knew. I did pick up new vocabulary when it was used frequently but it seemed like most new words just whizzed by me without registering. Part of this is probably because when I L-R I almost always use L2 audio and L1 text, whereas the original method description recommends parallel texts, which I don't use because of the long prep time required to get them. I definitely agree that parallel texts would help more with picking up new vocabulary and adapting your ear to native speed. But I have tried L-R with parallel texts and still found it fairly difficult to go back and forth between both columns, and would probably still use slowed audio even if I had parallel texts available to me.

I haven't used this method long enough to discuss any long term results, but even a light slowing of audio seems to make a huge difference. My brain can process a lot more new words, and I'm better able to assess my comprehension level. Whereas starting with native speed, I often wasn't sure if I was missing things because I didn't know the words or because I couldn't parse the sounds. It also seems that after L-R with slowed audio, if I then L-R the same text with regular speed audio my comprehension is much better than in the past where I would repeatedly listen to the same text at normal speed. Its also especially helpful with languages like Japanese where the sentence structure can be very different from the English translation, and the slower audio makes it easier to scan the text ahead to figure out the whole meaning of a sentence and figure out how the audio corresponds to it. So overall I'm pretty optimistic about the method and I'm excited to report back on how far it takes me.

More and more its becoming apparent to me that, the "drop yourself in the deep end so you get used to it faster" philosophy of learning doesn't ring true. Obviously you need to keep working through more difficult material to improve, but my experience so far has been showing more and more that the smaller steps I can beak things down to the faster I can learn.


Just to the discuss the practical side of implementing this, obviously the main way I slow the audio is in audacity, which means I have to have an MP3 of the audio I'm using to L-R. Unfortunately the vast majority of my audiobooks are from Audible, which has a slow function, but it's pretty terrible sounding and they don't have any function to reduce silences. But luckily I don't think you need to L-R with slow audio for every book, so its just a matter of finding an MP3 for 1 good book, and then getting used to the normal speed for that book so I can then start L-Ring with my audible books. I can also used this method with podcasts using the Overcast podcast app, which has a 75% speed option, as well as a Smart Speed feature that reduces silences. I don't usually have English translations of podcasts, but I've been using this for French podcasts where I often know most of the vocabulary but can't always follow rapid native speech.


Edited by YnEoS on 21 July 2015 at 6:29pm



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