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Тупиниким - now with more subs2srs!

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28 messages over 4 pages: 13 4  Next >>
Tupiniquim
Senior Member
Brazil
Joined 5865 days ago

184 posts - 217 votes 
Speaks: Portuguese*
Studies: English, Russian

 
 Message 9 of 28
12 December 2014 at 8:50pm | IP Logged 
In today's Anki session, I managed to lower even further the red card count, yay!

Studied 96 cards in 42 minutes today.
Again count: 13 (86.5% correct)
Learn: 48, Review: 46, Relearn: 2, Filtered: 0

I added 75 new cards, finally getting the full contents of the first chapter, Прибытие, into SRS format. That's about 37 minutes of audio, split into 574 cards. I wish I knew how to generate them automatically, like emk does, but all in all it's not so bad to make them by hand. After all, I'm picking up words and the gist of the plot while I do it. 63% of my deck still remains to be seen, so I can take a couple of days off from adding cards until I start working on chapter 2.

During today's session I had to suspend 2 more cards. I think I get now what emk means when he refers to cards that “make you die a little”. At first it's just a difficult card that you don't completely “get”, but, as it repeats again and again the next days while you make little to no progress retaining their meaning, it's just not worth putting yourself trough that grief. I'll consider un-suspending them way into the future.

So far I'm enjoying this method very much, mainly because it doesn't feel “language course-y”. The audio is just a regular native grade book, not that slow unnatural language course speech that grates on my nerves. Of course, the system has its drawbacks, and I'm probably gonna have to look up things in a formal grammar book at some point, but so far it suits me well.

Meanwhile, for the past couple of days, French has been almost entirely on hold. All I did was read a couple of French forum threads and a short MMA article. I can't help it, the progress I'm doing with Russian is really astonishing and it's monopolizing my attention!
2 persons have voted this message useful



Tupiniquim
Senior Member
Brazil
Joined 5865 days ago

184 posts - 217 votes 
Speaks: Portuguese*
Studies: English, Russian

 
 Message 10 of 28
13 December 2014 at 12:43pm | IP Logged 
Today's session was awesome! I started early in the morning (about 6:30 AM), put on my earphones and went on until 8AM, taking several short breaks every half dozen cards or so. The reason why it was so great is that I decided to focus on the audio only at first, by closing my eyes and hitting “R” to repeat the clip over and over again. Some sentences were completely opaque at first, but then I kept repeating the audio until I could pick up at least one word. Then it enabled me to remember the context, and with that information I kept listening for the words that I knew should be there. By the time I looked at the Russian text in front of the card, I already had about half a sentence figured out (e.g. OK I recognize голова – head, низко – low, глаз – eye, лоб – forehead, крючковатый нос – crooked nose. So he must be describing that portrait of the castle steward with the lowered head, where his eyes couldn't be seen, and the drooping was caused by his big forehead and crooked nose), or in some cases its entire meaning! For some of the shorter, easier cards I could even visualize the exact spelling in my mind before looking at it, e.g. “молодой человек с лицом актера”. Only after the session was over I realized that I could have tried to write those sentences down on a notepad to check whether I was really accurate. Maybe I'll try it tomorrow.

This last sentence reminded me of something that was bugging me from the beginning: I was hearing the “ё” sound pretty often, but that letter never showed up, it was always “е”. In fact, I did a Ctrl+F on my book and there was only one occurrence for “ё”, in the word “всё”. So I decided to look it up on the internet, and apparently it's an “optional” letter, to the point that very few people seem to make a point of using it, unless its replacement by “е” causes ambiguity.

Today's breakdown was:

Studied 107 cards in 60 minutes today.
Again count: 12 (88.8% correct)
Learn: 46, Review: 57, Relearn: 4, Filtered: 0

I had to suspend 1 card, because the text wasn't entirely matching the audio. 5 easy cards became mature (long intervals). I'll only see cards such as “разумеется” about one month from now.

* * *

Little update:

I did a little L-R this afternoon for the 1st section of the 1st chapter, since I'm almost finishing seeing the respective cards on Anki. I jumped straight to stages 2 & 3. I have no longer need for stage 1, as I know this part of the story almost by heart at this point. I'm glad I chose Kafka, because I really like his style, and repeating the same section of the story over and over again doesn't annoy me. I tried L-R for French a couple of years ago and I had to give up because I didn't like the text at all.

Well, anyway, I was able to understand most of the text during stage 2, where you're only supposed to match the L2 sound to L2 orthography! That's probably the result of intensively drilling each and every sentence for two weeks!

Edited by Tupiniquim on 13 December 2014 at 9:19pm

1 person has voted this message useful



Tupiniquim
Senior Member
Brazil
Joined 5865 days ago

184 posts - 217 votes 
Speaks: Portuguese*
Studies: English, Russian

 
 Message 11 of 28
15 December 2014 at 1:15am | IP Logged 
Tonight I have a splitting alcohol induced headache. To be honest, my entire body aches from physical exertion and this merciless Brazilian sun. Having anticipated that I would be in no shape for studying this evening, I decided to be diligent and do all my Anki work early in the morning.

Today's session was the longest one yet, with 60 reviews and 20 new cards. My procedure was pretty much the same as yesterday's. Success rate was a little lower (about 85%) but still pretty good.

Something exciting happened that I think it's worth a remark: I was failing a particular card every other time it showed up, because I didn't know any words in that sentence. Whenever I got it right, it was because of the voice actor's intonation. Today that card appeared once more, but also, Anki introduced me to another sentence which seemed to have a similar portion. I noticed what both had in common – the expression “at least”, which I figured should correspond to “по крайней мере”. After the session was over, I looked it up and I was right. That's a pretty nice way to learn and consolidate the meaning of a word or expression. I don't think I'm going to forget it anytime soon.
2 persons have voted this message useful



Tupiniquim
Senior Member
Brazil
Joined 5865 days ago

184 posts - 217 votes 
Speaks: Portuguese*
Studies: English, Russian

 
 Message 12 of 28
15 December 2014 at 10:56am | IP Logged 
Today's review started out very good, I was on such a hot streak that I thought I would score 100%. Then I had a sharp decline and started making several mistakes, ending up with a 81% score. I think I know why that is. Most of yesterday's new cards and all of today's were about a lengthy visual description of the castle and its surroundings. This is the kind of section that I tend to just skim when I'm reading a book. I just go: "big round tower, small houses, everything covered in snow. Got it". Well, turns out Kafka really wanted to emphasize every little detail about the environment. These next few days are going to be rough.

1 card had to be suspended for being outrageously long.

I'm getting dangerously close to seeing 50% of all my deck, so I should probably add some new content today or tomorrow. I already have the first 20 minutes of chapter 2 split and ready.

* * *

I had no internet connection for the entire afternoon and most of the evening, which is not only annoying, but also makes my life harder when creating new cards, since I need to be online to look up translations with Firefox' GTranslate. Still, I managed to add about 60 new ones, by carefully making comparisons between the L1 and L2 texts. I'm pretty sure it went OK.

This new content corresponds to the book's second chapter, and it starts out very interesting and with plenty of dialogue. It's also a little bit surprising, since the protagonists on other Kafka books I've previously read (Amerika, The Metamorphosis and The Process) seem to be mostly reasonable men, albeit somewhat insecure or even depressive. But this protagonist so far seems a lot more assertive, and even kind of a dick.

Edited by Tupiniquim on 16 December 2014 at 2:51am

1 person has voted this message useful



Tupiniquim
Senior Member
Brazil
Joined 5865 days ago

184 posts - 217 votes 
Speaks: Portuguese*
Studies: English, Russian

 
 Message 13 of 28
16 December 2014 at 9:36pm | IP Logged 
Experimented with a new card layout with three fields. The first one just for audio, the second one is a hint field containing the L2 text and the third one is the L1 text answer. At first I was very excited about it, since it would force me to start with audio only, then only look at the text if necessary. But now I'm starting to wonder if that was a mistake. As far as I can tell, this is going to vastly increase review time and make hard cards even harder. That goes against that Khatzumoto idea, with which I tend to agree, of doing a massive number of very easy reviews. Unless I go on a mass suspension spree against any sentence longer than just a few words, the reviews are going to be very long. On the other hand, I'm starting this difficult language from nearly scratch, and my choice of source material is a fairly complicated novel, so it makes sense that I can't handle every single sentence I add.

Now I have to decide whether to proceed with this audio-first layout while radically trimming my deck down to the bare basics, or to go back to the old format (text+audio first) which will allow me to retain a greater number of cards in activity. Fortunately I exported my deck before altering it, so I can roll back any changes if necessary.

Today's review was pure frustration, nothing was "clicking". For the first time since I started (18 days ago) I am not looking forward to the next day of reviews. There are several reasons for that: I forced myself to push through several difficult cards just in order to convert to and test the new layout; the cards are still dealing with the unpleasant long visual depiction; I'm not at my best today, physically nor mentally. All these factors contributed to a very bad session (statistically it wasn't so poor, but it still felt like a chore, whereas every other day felt like fun). It can't be burnout, because I was still pretty enthusiastic up until last night.

Whatever decision I make, one thing is for sure: I'm going to set my leech count to 2. I've been very stingy with the suspend button, and I keep trying to salvage every single card. Now I'm starting to notice the adverse effects. When I answer a difficult card correctly, it feels very satisfying, but when I fail it, it feels miserable. And since SRS is a numbers game, these things add up pretty quickly. I'm hoping that with such low leech count the app itself will force me to let it go.
1 person has voted this message useful



Tupiniquim
Senior Member
Brazil
Joined 5865 days ago

184 posts - 217 votes 
Speaks: Portuguese*
Studies: English, Russian

 
 Message 14 of 28
17 December 2014 at 12:24pm | IP Logged 
After such a miserable time I had yesterday, I was seriously considering taking my first day off. But this morning I woke up pretty motivated to get back on the horse and leave my mistakes behind. I had a pretty decent night's sleep and my mind was fairly clear. I decided to roll back my deck to its previous state and continue with the old card format. I'm barely able to “ride a bike with training wheels”, so why am I attempting to “fly a rocket ship” anyway?

Since I had to restore the original deck, yesterday's work didn't count for anything other than messing up stats, therefore I had 100 cards accumulated for review, plus 20 new ones. I went back to reading and listening at the same time, and the reviews went very fast and smooth. I had a success rate of over 98% for the old cards! The new ones brought the average down a little bit, but that's expected:

Studied 144 cards in 50 minutes today.
Again count: 8 (94.4% correct)
Learn: 45, Review: 98, Relearn: 1, Filtered: 0
No mature cards were studied today.

I also decided to set Anki to show me the new cards only after the reviews, so that I can have a consistent flow of motivating successes before delving into new information. My red card count (relearn) was 1! That's awesome, especially in a 100 card long review, which is the maximum default.

I suspended a few more cards (about 9, I think) to get rid of that awful scenery description that was annoying me so much.

I'm feeling pretty enthusiastic again, and I'll probably add new content later today!

* * *

Added 69 new cards.

Edited by Tupiniquim on 17 December 2014 at 8:22pm

1 person has voted this message useful



Tupiniquim
Senior Member
Brazil
Joined 5865 days ago

184 posts - 217 votes 
Speaks: Portuguese*
Studies: English, Russian

 
 Message 15 of 28
18 December 2014 at 1:53pm | IP Logged 
Today's session was weird. I had relatively few cards due for review (48), two of which I failed. One of them went into relearn status as usual. The other one triggered the leech category. This makes me a little worried. That card contains a very short sentence, 4 words long, 3 of which I already know. And yet I kept failing it the same way: I would translate the known words in my mind and then remember the context to try and guess the unknown one. Whenever I guessed incorrectly, I would take a look a the right answer, mark the card as failed, and then answer it correctly upon seeing it once more at the end of the session or within 10 minutes. This pattern kept repeating at least three times (this was one of the first cards, from before I set the leech threshold to 2), which means that something is missing. I was clearly failing to internalize that new knowledge, I was throwing it away after passing the card.

I have to come up with something to prevent this from happening again. This type of card does not deserve to be suspended. It's short, concise, has good audio, it's 75% comprehensible, it's even interesting (a sassy dialogue line). In theory, it's perfect for teaching me that other 25%. But somehow it's not happening in practice. In the meantime, I decided to compromise and raise the leech threshold to 3.

The new content part of the session was strange too. The 20 new cards I had scheduled for today appeared in completely random order, even though my deck is configured to show me new cards in the order they were added. I'm guessing perhaps this is a side effect of exporting/importing the deck?

* * *

Just tried something new that might be balls-to-the-wall retarded. I won't get into details until I give it some days of testing. I just think it might be overkill and I don't know if I'll have the motivation to follow through.

In (un)related news, I'm starting to feel the Wanderlust in face of recent obstacles. Trying hard to resist it.

Edited by Tupiniquim on 18 December 2014 at 9:23pm

1 person has voted this message useful



Tupiniquim
Senior Member
Brazil
Joined 5865 days ago

184 posts - 217 votes 
Speaks: Portuguese*
Studies: English, Russian

 
 Message 16 of 28
19 December 2014 at 6:53pm | IP Logged 
I did my reps in the morning as usual with pretty good results.
Then in the afternoon a health problem in the family sprung up and I'm worried out of my mind.
I'm trying to do something language oriented just to distract myself, since there's nothing I can do at the moment, but I'm too concerned.

Sucks :(


1 person has voted this message useful



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