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Тупиниким - now with more subs2srs! | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Tupiniquim Senior Member Brazil Joined 5871 days ago 184 posts - 217 votes  Speaks: Portuguese* Studies: English, Russian | Message 17 of 28 22 December 2014 at 8:39pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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The past couple of days have been nothing but stress and concern, but still I managed to do my Russian Anki reviews (although I did not internalize the new content very well, it's all a blur in my mind).
I also watched some French TV. I could understand a lot of things when I was paying close attention. But since I was very distracted by recent events, I couldn't stay focused for long, so it quickly turned into noise. This morning I received good news, and there's not a lot of reason for worrying now, so I was eager to get back on track. I was not eager, however, to go back to my Kafka deck. By reading the book at the same rate as I do the SRS, I'm moving at snail's pace, which is making me antsy. I'm also pretty sick of the narrator's voice, even though he has a pleasant voice. It's all the same all the time, it's becoming tedious. So I decided to bite the bullet and follow emk's subs2srs instructions. He made them so detailed that it wasn't that hard at all. Especially considering I knew where to look for content in the suitable formats in order to avoid messing with OCR and having to synchronize subtitles. I acquired the American movie “The Equalizer”, with two audio tracks and both English and Russian subtitles in the .srt format. The Russian subs match the audio pretty much 99.9% as far as I can tell. It took me only a couple of hours to find the material, download and figure the programs out and have a 1000+ card deck ready. And that while being interrupted several times by other unrelated duties. I'm guessing the next time I have to do it, it will take no more than 15 minutes. I copied emk's note and card layout (which he shared on his log), but I changed it to put the Russian text on the front side of the card. That's because my main objective is to acquire reading comprehension, while listening comprehension is just secondary to me. Also because my previous experience with audio only questions has been brutally unpleasant. A few impressions: Listening and understanding on this subs2srs deck is much much harder than on my Kafka deck. I guess that's because the pronunciation is lot more casual in the movie, while narration in the audiobook was very crisp and clear. I would not have been able to understand anything at all on the subs2srs cards without the Russian text there. It's not a matter of “sink or swim”, but rather “sink or sink”. On the other hand, the individual sentences are much simpler in the movie than in the book. In my Kafka deck I had a sentence as complicated as: “And if they thought they could keep him in a constant state of terror by recognizing his qualifications as a land surveyor in this intellectually supercilious way, as it certainly was, then they were wrong. He felt a slight frisson, yes, but that was all.” Meanwhile, in the movie deck I have sentences like “How old are you?”, “Did he catch the fish yet?”. Much more adequate to my level. The story moves a lot faster, since the entire movie is just 2 hours and 12 minutes long. So I get a new scene pretty much every dozen cards. That feels refreshing by comparison to the crawling pace of the 14 hour and 44 minutes long book that I was using. Since it takes little to no effort to make the cards, I'm using the suspend button a lot more liberally. I have 31 suspended cards to 97 “young+learn”. There's a lot of slang in the movie. I have to look things up on Google translate quite often. And some times not even Google translate does the job, so I have to look up links for more detailed definitions of some words. I installed an Anki plugin that adds a Google search option to Anki's context menu, to make it quicker. Here are my stats for the new deck: Today Studied 261 cards in 103 minutes today. Again count: 63 (75.9% correct) Learn: 261, Review: 0, Relearn: 0, Filtered: 0 No mature cards were studied today. Total: 97 reviews Average: 48.5 reviews/day Due tomorrow: 96 cards Days studied: 3% (1 of 30) Total: 261 reviews Average for days studied: 261.0 reviews/day If you studied every day: 8.7 reviews/day Mature: 0 Young+Learn: 97 Unseen: 909 Suspended+Buried: 31 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5320 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 18 of 28 22 December 2014 at 9:19pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Good, it sounds like the "leech" functionality is working as intended, then. :-) For whatever reason, some cards are just massively hard, and they waste a disproportional amount of time. After tens of thousands of Anki reviews (and a Super Challenge), I'm happy to trash those cards with extreme prejudice. In fact, the leech threshold on my Spanish deck is 2! Basically, for the time I could spend dealing with one leech, I could learn 5 interesting and challenging cards. This ties into Krashen's theory of "i+1 input"—I don't need to kill myself on the hardest imaginable input, I just need to stretch myself a bit.
This makes perfect sense. Like Khatzumoto, I love having lots of easy cards. If the "regular" format is too hard, it definitely makes sense to jiggle it around a bit.
Yup. TV is great for that: You get lots of relatively simple conversational input, about a fairly restricted topic, with plenty of emotion to help make it stick. But TV audio also tends to be pretty fast and challenging. So you wind up working really aggressively on listening comprehension very early on. And I like having good listening comprehension—it makes it easier to use native speech as comprehensible input. Edited by emk on 22 December 2014 at 9:19pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Tupiniquim Senior Member Brazil Joined 5871 days ago 184 posts - 217 votes Speaks: Portuguese* Studies: English, Russian | Message 19 of 28 23 December 2014 at 8:30pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Thanks for dropping by emk :)
* * * Today I didn't even touch my Kafka deck. I went straight for the Equalizer one. I had 95 cards due for review and I also introduced 20 new cards (suspended 1). Tomorrow I will have only 19 cards due! That's way too easy. I think I'm going to introduce several new ones tomorrow, and they will pile up like mad in 3 - 4 days. My success rate for these cards is about 75% when new, as opposed to my Kafka deck, where the success rate was a little over 80%. That makes sense, because I have not watched the movie, and the cards were generated without my participation. On the other hand, my success rate for cards seen for the 2nd time was 100% for today's review on the new deck, while on the Kafka's it was about 92%. I don't even remember hesitating at all in order to answer these subs2srs review cards. The sentences are so simple and there is so so so much context that the answers just flow! But I didn't want to give up Kafka's story, so I decided that I will just use it for L-R. Today I did L-R stages 1, 2 and 3 for a 20 minute portion of the 2nd chapter, which resulted in about 1 hour of work. Something very cool happened. I was interrupted halfway through stage 3, closing both my sound file and PDF reader. However, five minutes later I was able to resume it, but now I had to figure out where in the sound file I supposedly quit (since I had closed the program, not just paused it). So I just fast forwarded to somewhere in the middle, and started looking for the corresponding portion in the English text. With just a couple of sentences I was able to correctly find the matching spot, which is very cool because I'm now able to recognize a pretty decent amount of words! Edited by Tupiniquim on 23 December 2014 at 8:31pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Tupiniquim Senior Member Brazil Joined 5871 days ago 184 posts - 217 votes Speaks: Portuguese* Studies: English, Russian | Message 20 of 28 25 December 2014 at 5:08pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Yesterday I worked on my Russian as usual, but forgot to update this thread. Nothing out of the ordinary: about 90 new subs2srs cards and a little over 40 minutes of L-R with Kafka - The Castle. Today I reviewed about 90+ subs2srs cards in the morning, introduced about 20 new ones and decided to review a portion of my backed up Kafka deck (32). I was feeling pretty much done with Russian for today, but then I stumble upon a couple of video game related Youtube videos in Russian (about the Elder Scrolls series more specifically) and man, it feels like I'm on the verge of understanding something. The words are just there, and I'm even identifying many of them, just not entire sentences yet. Being this close is giving me a lot of motivation, so I'll probably work a lot more on my Russian today. After all, the holidays will soon be over and this much free time is hard to come by on a regular schedule. So, I'm planning on doing some more L-R and introducing additional new subs2srs cards today.
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| Tupiniquim Senior Member Brazil Joined 5871 days ago 184 posts - 217 votes Speaks: Portuguese* Studies: English, Russian | Message 21 of 28 26 December 2014 at 8:07pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Today I finished chapter 3 of The Castle, doing L-R stages 2 and 3 only. I'm seriously considering doing just stage 3, and then later listening without text. It will take more mental effort, but it will be more interesting, I think. Stage 1 is horribly boring, and not that much necessary, as far as I can tell, so I'm not doing it either way.
Studied 203 cards in 68 minutes today, all in the subs2srs deck. Some of the sentences introduced today made me go "Whoa! I gotta see this scene!". Suffice to say, Denzel Washington's character in this movie is more badass than Batman. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Tupiniquim Senior Member Brazil Joined 5871 days ago 184 posts - 217 votes Speaks: Portuguese* Studies: English, Russian | Message 22 of 28 27 December 2014 at 9:58pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Today I worked on my Russian pretty much the same amount as the past few days, but it felt more tiring. Not in a bad way, though. I'm exhausted, but it feels good, and I'm looking forward to more study after a replenishing night's sleep.
I attempted to do L-R stage 3 from the start for chapter 4 of the Castle, but within a couple of sentences I realized I was missing a lot of nuance. So I decided to stop half-assing it and did stage 1. Then about one hour later I did stage 2. When I was about to do stage 3 half an hour ago, I was already feeling depleted and called it quits. Tomorrow I will try to pick up from where I left off. In case I fail, I'll go back stage 2. I feel like my reading of the L1 text was pretty solid and thorough, albeit relatively quick, so I don't think I need to repeat it. As for SRS, I [s]tudied 158 cards in 43 minutes today. 20 new cards introduced. I became very curious and decided to watch the entire movie. Well, I have mixed impressions. What a coincidence that the movie I picked for my subs2srs deck has Russian people as antagonists. I looked it up on a Russian forum, and some users were not very pleased with its plot. I can certainly understand how they feel. While Denzel is pretty much commando-ninja-Jesus, every Russian character is a stereotypical villain, one of which even sports tattoos on his back with the words Смерть - Террор - Темнота in large letters. That forum's users seemed frustrated with the continued portrayal of their nationals as evil in American movies. On the other hand, the action scenes are pretty damn awesome, if a bit gruesome, and the characters (all of them) are very cool, despite the obvious clichés. Edited by Tupiniquim on 27 December 2014 at 10:00pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Tupiniquim Senior Member Brazil Joined 5871 days ago 184 posts - 217 votes Speaks: Portuguese* Studies: English, Russian | Message 23 of 28 28 December 2014 at 8:37pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Today was somewhat atypical. I did my Anki reviews (there weren't many anyway) and L-R stage 3 for chapter 4 of The Castle. Everything went smooth as normal, but I wasn't feeling like doing anything else proactive.
So I decided to get a couple more movies to feed to subs2srs and have new decks ready for the near future. I became curious about one of them, namely Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, so I decided to watch it. I can certainly see why it received so much criticism. But eh, whatever, it was fun. I turned my brain off and enjoyed it. So much so that I will watch Rise of the Planet of the Apes within 10 minutes. With Russian audio and English subs. Also, I deleted the DotPotA subs2srs deck. I was probably gonna need to suspend/delete a lot of cards with broken monkey Russian anyway, so it's too much work to salvage. So, today was a somewhat "lazy" day, but still, I can feel the hamsters spinning the wheels up there while I'm trying to understand the Russian audio. It's something. And it's a little break from the routine too. Anyway, I starting to feel the need for some variation. I will reflect upon the possibilities, but I wonder if some kind of output or intensive activities will help. * * * Update: Rise isn't as cool as Dawn. Meh. Back to languages, they're better than movies. Edited by Tupiniquim on 28 December 2014 at 11:03pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Tupiniquim Senior Member Brazil Joined 5871 days ago 184 posts - 217 votes Speaks: Portuguese* Studies: English, Russian | Message 24 of 28 29 December 2014 at 6:58pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Anki says today was my 30th day of study. So, after reviewing all the due cards on both decks, I decided to take the time to look at the statistics and assess my results:
Is the method any good? Should I keep using it? Yes, and definitely. While it's not magic, not a miraculous way to learn a language quickly and without any effort (frankly I doubt such a thing exists), it's mostly enjoyable and I can feel the progress, noticeable and consistent. Although I believe I could (in theory) achieve similar results utilizing a more formal and structured approach, such as textbooks and educational recordings, it's an undeniable fact that I wouldn't have had the energy to persevere for 30 days following a traditional language learning program. Meanwhile, I can see myself showing up to do this same Anki routine for a long time. Even if I don't add new cards for a while, I still have 1741 unseen ones, and 520 that I've already seen but still need to mature. Judging by the couple of days when I was extremely concerned about family issues and nevertheless still being able to keep up with the reviews, I think this method will work fine even during the busiest of occasions. As long as I have access to my computer, my phone, or any other computer with an internet connection, it's just a matter of reading and clicking. Books or subs2srs? Honestly, I still don't know. Although creating cards by hand from books is a worthwhile study activity, having a 1000+ card deck automatically generated without any user interaction works like a siren's call for a lazy bastard like me. Also, it might be the only way to keep adding to my Anki collection once I'm back from the holidays. As for the content, I'm also torn. When I review my Kafka deck, I feel like I'm really getting challenged, like I have to concentrate and make an effort to find the answer. My success rate, ranging from the mid 80's to low 90's % for that particular deck, seems to indicate that I'm in the sweet spot, where the content is not too easy nor too difficult to be a waste of time. However, on some days it feels like pulling teeth. My subs2srs deck, on the other hand, is far too easy. Some days it feels awesome to hit only the “Good” button, but there are times when I think I should be doing something a little harder. My success rate for that particular deck is over 99% for reviews. With sound clip, screenshot, L2 text including both previous and following lines, it's nearly impossible to fail those cards. I'm starting to wonder whether I should have kept emk's standard card layout after all. I'm still mulling over it, only hesitating because my priority is reading, not listening comprehension. How about L-R? When things “click” with L-R, they click a lot more often and more intensely than with Anki. But problem is, they do not always click. L-R is a lot more involved, a lot more time consuming, and I'm not always in the mood for it. Today, for instance, I don't feel like doing it at all. Maybe tomorrow I will. But the point is, while a good L-R session is very satisfying, if I were doing nothing else, my progress would suffer a lot. Some days I need the easy bite-sized study sessions from Anki. I'll keep doing L-R on and off, but Anki is still the main star. Does watching movies help? Yesterday was the first time that I tried to watch movies with Russian audio and English subs. They're a nice way to squeeze a little extra language exposure into my entertainment time, but there's no way I can consider it “study time”. At least not at my current level. It was pretty cool to recognize certain words and expressions in a different context and during an entertaining movie, but far too often the sentences sounded like complete gibberish to me, with not one salvageable word. Other times I just tuned out the Russian audio completely because I was paying too much attention to the plot and the subs. So, while it can be fun and useful in that “every little bit helps” kinda way, I have to study a lot more before I can get something really substantial out of it. Complementary activities: Both Sprachprofi and emk do complementary grammar study, not drills, but something more informative outside of the Anki guesswork. I have not regularly done so up to this point, but I'm starting to feel the need. A little over a week ago, when I freaked out that a seemingly simple and good card had triggered the leech category, I started considering my options to prevent that from happening again. At first I decided to export my failed cards for the day to txt format, opening the resulting file in Firefox in order to quickly look up the words in Google (images, translate and web) and Wiktionary, and then create an auxiliary Anki deck with one card per difficult word, each containing 3 images, a sound clip with its pronunciation, the etymology (whenever available and helpful) and its English translation for answer. Needless to say this did not last more than 1 day. Those cards took way too much time and effort to create, while their reviewing was easy as pie. Nevertheless, I kept doing the first part of the process (exporting the failed cards as txt and looking up images and etymologies), without going as far as creating the cards, for 3 or 4 more days, until I started my subs2srs deck and just stopped failing cards. Today, while reviewing my backed up Kafka deck, I was able to decipher two of such difficult cards just by recalling the etymologies of the words (“однако таким тоном, словно он не одобрял поведения К.” and “Словно по команде, дети сразу замолчали, и эта внезапная тишина в ожидании его слов как-то расположила учителя.”). I think this worked out well because I enjoy knowing the etymologies of words and their cognates in other languages, so I'm seriously considering doing some other kind of complementary activity that involves etymologies. It just can't be for failed cards only (because I hardly ever fail them with subs2srs), nor can it be for all cards (because that's not practical at all). Writing this post has been a great way to look at my experience so far and to put me on the right path to decide how to go on for the next 30 days. Edited by Tupiniquim on 29 December 2014 at 8:00pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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