Register  Login  Active Topics  Maps  

Sab’s TAC2015 Teams Rätsel and 東亜

 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log Post Reply
21 messages over 3 pages: 1 2 3  Next >>
sabotai
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5641 days ago

391 posts - 489 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: German, Japanese, Korean, French

 
 Message 1 of 21
27 December 2014 at 7:29pm | IP Logged 
2015 is right around the corner. Here are my plans for the coming year.

2014

Still a few days left for TAC2014, but I can overall it was...a mild success. I didn't reach my goals in just about anything, but I still ended up spending far more time studying languages in 2014 than I had in any previous year (as best as I can guess, anyway). So I'll be generous to myself and count it as a moral victory.

TAC2015 - Teams Rätsel (German) and 東亜 (Japanese, Korean)

German

Started this several years ago, but have bounced around between languages a lot since then. If I had to estimate it, I'd say until last year, of those 7 years, only 1.5-2 were spent on German. I spent most of last year on German and it's helped a lot, but I still spent far too much time in my comfort zone. For this year, I'll be using mostly subs2srs and LR to advance my German, but also using a variety of drills (FSI, Practice Makes Perfect, Assimil Active wave, etc.)

Japanese

Started this, like German, quite awhile ago, and like German, it's been more off than on. What really got me back into Japanese was starting subs2srs a few months ago. For 2015, subs2srs and JapanesePod101 will be my main resources.

Korean

Korean has been a tough nut to crack. I've spent a good deal of time, including last year, on Korean and I don't feel it's advancing much. Like German, I spend far too much time in my comfort zone and have not pushed myself. Haven't found anything to use with subs2srs yet. Sogang, Yonsei and Korean Grammar In Use will be my main resources along with TTMIK. And I'll keep my eye out for material for susbs2srs.

Other

I'll be indulging in wunderlust as well. No use fighting it, just need to take it in moderation.

I'll start off the year indulging in Russian and Khmer, with Hindi, Thai, Finnish, Greek and Bengali on my hit list.

Goals

Last year I set a goal of 1000 hours and barely made it to 700. This year, I'll again aim for 1000.

German: 275 hours
Japanese: 275 hours
Korean: 275 hours
Other: 175 hours

Edited by sabotai on 01 January 2015 at 5:15am

1 person has voted this message useful



Woodsei
Bilingual Diglot
Winner TAC 2012
Senior Member
United States
justpaste.it/Woodsei
Joined 4556 days ago

614 posts - 782 votes 
Speaks: English*, Arabic (Egyptian)*
Studies: Russian, Japanese, Hungarian

 
 Message 2 of 21
27 December 2014 at 8:12pm | IP Logged 
Nice to see your goals laid out so cleary, sabotai! This on-off thing, tell me about it.
I've had that happen to me in Japanese, and yeah, even though I kept reading, I realized
I was stuck too much in my comfort zone, like you. Hopefully we can both level up in our
languages. Good luck on your journey!
1 person has voted this message useful



sabotai
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5641 days ago

391 posts - 489 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: German, Japanese, Korean, French

 
 Message 3 of 21
29 December 2014 at 6:04am | IP Logged 
Thanks Woodsei! If I had to pick a phrase to describe the theme of my learning for 2014, I'd say...actually I can't think of one. But it'd be some saying concerning time, seeing as I was mostly focused on just putting in the hours. The theme for 2015 will have something to do with pushing me outside my comfort zone or consistently marching forward instead of backwards or sideways.

2014 Review

I don't plan to do much over the next few days. I'll probably keep up with my subs2srs decks, but I'll be spending most of my time in Audacity chopping up mp3 files, importing CDs, and just getting ready for 2015 in general so that I can start off running on January 1st.

Last (Full) Week of 2014

German: 4 hours, 30 minutes
Japanese: 5 hours
Korean: 2 hours, 30 minutes
Total: 12 hours

2014 Total: 702 hours, 45 minutes
German 2014: 228 hours, 25 minutes
Korean 2014: 190 hours: 35 minutes
Japanese 2014: 160 hours, 15 minutes
French 2014: 78 hours, 25 minutes
Bengali Script 2014: 24 hours, 30 minutes
Spanish 2014: 9 hours, 20 minutes
Russian Script 2014: 5 hours, 45 minutes
Georgian Script 2014: 4 hours, 15 minutes
Finnish 2014: 1 hour, 15 minutes

Not sure these times mean that much. French and Spanish didn't get that much work in, especially Spanish. Only made it half way through the Georgian script. And for Japanese, German and Korean...I just didn't push myself very far. A lot of that time was spent redoing a lot of stuff I already did years ago.

Regardless, I spent far more time on language learning this year than in any previous year. That's something. And I did learn the Bengali and Russian writing systems. I did (finally) get subs2srs up and running, which I have been loving so far. I think overall, I probably advanced German, Japanese and Korean more than I'm giving myself credit for.

A few years ago when I first learned about LR, I tried it with Alice in Wonderland for German. Last month, I've LR'ed the first two chapters, and I had a much easier time following it now than I did back then, so I know I have made progress in German. But this "off and on" thing has really been killing me. And like I said in another thread, every time I switch a language back "on", I go back to the beginning to make sure I haven't forgotten anything. I need to stop doing that. By the time I get back to where I was, I'm dropping it again for another language...

Anyway, onward to 2015.
1 person has voted this message useful



sabotai
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5641 days ago

391 posts - 489 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: German, Japanese, Korean, French

 
 Message 4 of 21
29 December 2014 at 7:35am | IP Logged 
A little more detail of my resources and activities.

Anki

In addition to subs2srs, I have several other decks per language. I keep these decks small so that I don't get crazy with reviews and subsequently burned out. I aggressively delete cards that are easy or annoying, and for most decks, "new cards per day" is set to 5.

Audio Sentences: Audio of sentence on front of the card, text and translation on back
Written Sentences: Good old fashioned sentence method. I use sentences that challenge me.
Cloze Sentences: Everything from MCDs up to clozing out full sentences for translating

Dialogs: After I study a dialog a few times, I make a card that's just the title of the track title and its resource. This deck is really just to use Anki to create a review schedule for me with dialogs out of Assimil, textbooks, etc. With iPod in hand, I listen to the tracks a few times before moving to the next card. I used to just have a long playlist and put it on shuffle, but eventually I got bored because I'd end up listening to my iPod while staring a wall for 15 minutes. Using Anki to create a review schedule for me makes it a tad more interesting.

So far, it only takes about 5-10 minutes per language to through the sentence decks each day (I fill out my 15 minute block by typing up more sentences, editing audio, etc. to make more cards. I count that time being as I am going over the material while do it). The Dialogs deck is usually 5-10 minutes as well. That deck is set to just 1 new card per day.

German

Movies (subs2srs)
Audiobooks (LR)
Assimil, Linguaphone, Living Language, FSI
Mastering German Vocabulary, Big Yellow Book of German Verbs, Modern German Grammar: A Practical Guide
Practice Makes Perfect workbooks
Dual Language books, Novels in German

Movies (subs2srs): I spend about 30 minutes a day on 3 decks. Die Welle, Lola Rennt and Das Leben Der Anderen. Die Well and Das Leben Der Anderen will last me several more months, but Lola Rennt probably only has about 1.5-2 months left. I only got about 450 cards out of it. I started it about a week or so into November and am about halfway through it already, so I'm going to need to find a replacement soon.

Audiobooks (LR): Starting off with Alice im Wunderland. Shortlist for the next book: Tom Sawyer, World War Z, Stephen King's It or Ready Player One. I've only read World War Z in English, and that was years ago.

Assimil, Linguaphone, Living Language and FSI: Main resources for my Anki decks. I'm on Unit 2 of FSI. Assimil will start on Lesson 50 for audio sentences, Lesson 1 for Cloze (basically starting at the beginning of the active wave). LL: Complete - Book 1 for the cloze sentences, Book 2 (of 3) for the audio. Linguaphone - Lesson 8 for the audio sentences, Lesson 1 for the Cloze.

Mastering German Vocabulary, Big Yellow Book of German Verbs, Modern German Grammar: These are my two main books for my Written Sentences deck.

Practice Makes Perfect workbooks: Drills to help me fill gaps. Exercises that I get wrong will be made into cards for my cloze sentences deck.

Dual Language books, Novels in German - for dual-language reading and intensive reading.

I know this seems like a lot of resources, but I don't plan to work on all of these right now or every day (that would be crazy!). I add to my written sentences deck 2-3 days a week. I do Practice Makes Perfect drills sporadically (IOW, whenever I feel like it). The "whenever I feel like" rule also applies to LR. The only thing I'm doing now on a daily basis, and plan to continue to do on a daily basis, are the subs2srs decks and adding to audio and cloze decks to make sure I always have new cards every day.

Japanese

Anime (subs2srs)
JapanesePod101, Japanese For All Occasions, Assimil
Japanese Sentence Patterns, Dictionaries of Japanese Grammar, All About Particles...plus several more books
Practice Makes Perfect workbooks

Anime (subs2srs): About 30 minutes a day, like German. 22 episodes of Psycho Pass and 94 episodes of Rurouni Kenshin. I have subs for 18 episodes of Cowboy Bebop, but all but episode one are in idx/sub format and I'm not sure how good they are. I'll be finding out soon enough. But with the link Esy Rider gave me in my old log, I'll never want for Japanese anime subs.

JapanesePod101, Japanese For All Occasions, Assimil: Right now, I am working through and chopping up JPod101 and Assimil lessons for audio sentences, cloze sentences and dialogs (after actually doing the lessons a few times of course). I'll get to Japanese For All Occasions later.

Japanese Sentence Patterns (and others): These are my main sources for written sentences.

Practice Makes Perfect: Same as with German, "whenever I feel like it" and I make cloze sentences for material I want to work on, mostly kanji and readings.

Korean

Sogang, Yonsei, Ewha, Hippocrene, Korean Grammar In Use
TalkToMeInKorean
Novels

List of textbooks: I use these for all purposes. Audio, cloze, written, dialogs. I am currently (and way too slowly) working through Sogang, Yonsei, Yonsei Reading and Korean Grammar In Use. I want to make it clear, though, that I don't just mine these for SRS material. Most of my time is spent listening to the dialogs and going over the chapter's material. After doing that a few times, then I start editing audio and typing up sentences.

TTMIK: Listening to the lessons and creating some cards from them.

Other TTMIK: My Weekly Vocab, Verb Guide, etc. TTMIK provides audio of all of the words and sentences in these guides, so I'll be using them for my audio sentences as well. I am also going to watch the videos on their YouTube channel and take notes on the patterns and vocab they cover. I've been watching some of them, but have been skipping others, like the "Catch The Wave" videos, and anything else that seemed too advanced for me.

Novels - Not sure if I'll get to this in 2015, but I have a lot of novels in Korean. It depends on how much progress I make. I'd like to start reading, but I don't want intensively reading these books to be a grind (which they have been to date).

Russian

Living Language, Teach Yourself
New Penguin Russian, Modern Russian Grammar

Living Language, Teach Yourself - The main courses I'll be using. Will be using them for dialogs, audio, cloze and written sentences as well.

New Penguin Russian, Modern Russian Grammar - Supplements and will be used for written and cloze sentences.

Khmer

Cambodian for Beginners

Cambodian For Beginners - the only resource I have. Will be using in every way possible.
2 persons have voted this message useful



sabotai
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5641 days ago

391 posts - 489 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: German, Japanese, Korean, French

 
 Message 5 of 21
01 January 2015 at 5:12am | IP Logged 
Now that I've gone over my resources and activities (and to create a list so that I can look back on it and remind myself), here are my language specific goals.

German

Subs2SRS - Currently I'm halfway through Lola Rennt, about 25% of the way through Das Leben Der Anderen and maybe 15% through Die Welle. I want to complete these and 3 more movies in subs2srs by the end of the year.

LR - I'm 2 chapters into Alice Im Wunderland, which amounts to ~30 minutes of LR material. When I do LR, I will listen to the same chapter a few times in a row. So for every 15 minutes of LR material I do, I'm doing it for at least 30 minutes, sometimes 45 or 60. My goal will be to LR ~30 hours worth of material (which equals at least 60 hours of doing LR)

30 hours would be Alice Im Wunderland, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and most of World War Z.   Although, I might hop between several different books.

Audio+Cloze Sentences: I want to have added all of the useful sentences from Assimil, LL:Complete, Linguaphone and FSI to my audio and cloze sentences anki decks. That might be a bit too much as FSI is jam-packed with sentences. Still, that's only 1 Unit every 2 weeks (with 4 weeks to spare), so might be doable.

Written Sentences: I want to add all useful sentences from Mastering German Vocabulary and The Big Yellow Book of German Verbs. Because I'm only adding sentences that truly challenge me to this deck, I'll probably end up only adding about half of the sentences in these two books.

Practice Makes Perfect workbooks: To complete PMP: Pronouns and Prepositions, PMP: Sentence Builder and PMP: Verb Tenses. Pronouns has 22 units, Verb Tenses has 24 and Sentence Builder has 20. A total of 66 chapters, a little over 1 per week. Easily doable. In fact, I could have it done by the middle of the year.

Reading - Intensive Reading and Dual-Language books. No goal here, I'll just do it when I feel like it.

German Time Goal: 275 hours

Japanese

Subs2SRS - Because I'm using anime instead of movies, and I have more material than I could ever hope to get through, I'll just make a time goal here. 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week for 52 weeks = 130 hours for the year. So, My goal is to do subs2srs for at least 130 hours in 2015 for Japanese.

JPod101, Assimil, Japanese For All Occasions - To complete Assimil, complete Japanese For All Occasions, to complete all of the Beginner level and Lower Intermediate level dialogs in JPod101. I'll need to work through about a dozen new dialogs per week to hit that goal.

Written Sentences - To finish Japanese Sentence Patterns, A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar and one other book I'll decide on later.

Practice Makes Perfect: Basic Japanese and Complete Japanese Grammar.

Japanese Time Goal: 275 hours

Korean

Textbooks: By the end of the year, I hope to have finished Yonsei 2, Yonsei Reading 2, Sogang 2A, Korean Grammar In Use: Beginner and Hippocrene's Korean. "Finished" means that I've worked through the dialogs and have them on my extensive listening list, have used all of the sentences that I can for my Audio, Cloze and Written sentences decks, and have completed any other uses for them that I can think of. IOW, I want them on my bookshelf, retired as learning aids. If I change up my routine partially or even fully, that does not change this goal. If I drop SRS again and start doing completely different things, that doesn't matter. By the time it's 2016, my goal is to have these books retired for good and working on the next book for the ones in a series.

TTMIK: To have listened to all of the grammar lessons and be working on some of the Iyagi dialogs.

Korean Time Goal: 275 hours

Russian and Khmer

These are just "on the side" languages so I won't set any real goals for them as I can and probably will change them several times over the year based on my wunderlust.

Wunderlust Time Goal: 175 hours

2015 Time Goal: 1000 hours
1 person has voted this message useful



sabotai
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5641 days ago

391 posts - 489 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: German, Japanese, Korean, French

 
 Message 6 of 21
03 January 2015 at 1:21am | IP Logged 
And on the 2nd day of 2015, I learned that trying to learn a language when you don't know the script is massively annoying.

The Cambodian for Beginners book teaches the script as you go, so I figured I'd give it a try. I'm listening to the first lesson, and after about 5 minutes of looking at a script I didn't know at all along with the romanization, I gave up. I just do not like using the romanization "crutch" at all.

I'll add the Khmer script to my list of things to get to some time this year and hopefully give Khmer another shot later in the year. I'll sub out Khmer for Bengali. I only have Teach Yourself Bengali, so that's what I'll be working my way through.
1 person has voted this message useful



Nieng Zhonghan
Bilingual Tetraglot
Senior Member
Antarctica
Joined 3430 days ago

108 posts - 315 votes 
Speaks: Portuguese*, Japanese*, Spanish, Galician
Studies: Finnish, Icelandic, Armenian, Mongolian
Studies: Old English, Russian, English, German, Korean, Mandarin

 
 Message 7 of 21
03 January 2015 at 12:48pm | IP Logged 
It is nice that we are both in the same team. I am also interested in Korean, German and
Russian (wunderlust).

I will definitely take a look at the list of German and Korean resources you listed in
your log.

By the way, Khmer is still in my list of languages I'd like to take a look in the future.
1 person has voted this message useful



sabotai
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5641 days ago

391 posts - 489 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: German, Japanese, Korean, French

 
 Message 8 of 21
06 January 2015 at 1:56am | IP Logged 
Thanks for reading Nieng.

(Short) Week 1 (Jan 1st - 4th, 2015)

Short first week (so that I always have my weeks ending on a Sunday).

German: 3 hours, 45 minutes
Japanese: 5 hours, 15 minutes
Korean: 2 hours, 30 minutes
Russian: 30 minutes
Bengali: 15 minutes

Week 1 Total: 12 hours, 15 minutes
2015 Total: 12 hours, 12 minutes

Progress

German

For German, most time was spent on subs2srs, other SRS decks and I LR'ed one more chapter in Alice im Wunderland.

subs2srs
Das Leben Der Anderen subs2srs: 820 new cards to go, 923 total
Lola Rennt subs2srs: 191 new cards to go, 333 total
Die Welle subs2srs: 1019 new cards to go, 1192 total

Reports in Anki are created by adding up values saved by the cards. I was going to add some other stats when I realized that the reports Anki generates are not accurate due to having deleted cards from the deck. Oh well.

LR
Alice Im Wunderland LR: 3/12 chapters (0:39:31/2:57:30)

Workbooks
PMP: Pronouns and Prepositions (0/22)
PMP: Verb Tenses (0/24)
PMP: Sentence Builder (0/20)

Japanese

Continued to spend time on subs2srs, JPod101 and studying grammar

subs2srs
Cowboy Bebop Ep1 deck: 14 new to go, 113 total (just about done with this one)
Kenshin Ep1-4 deck: 775 new to go, 895 total (just finished episode 1)
Psycho Pass ep1-7 deck: 1720 new to go, 1789 total

Dialogs/Lessons
Assimil (15 / 99)
Japanese For All Occasions (0 / 72)
JapanesePod101 Beginner Season 1 (67 / 170)
JapanesePod101 Beginner Season 2 (0 / 56)
JapanesePod101 Beginner Season 3 (0 / 25)
JapanesePod101 Beginner Season 4 (0 / 50)
JapanesePod101 Beginner Season 5 (0 / 25)
JapanesePod101 Lower Intermediate 1 (0 / 55)
JapanesePod101 Lower Intermediate 2 (0 / 26)
JapanesePod101 Lower Intermediate 3 (0 / 24)
JapanesePod101 Lower Intermediate 4 (0 / 25)
JapanesePod101 Lower Intermediate 5 (0 / 25)

Grammar
Japanese Sentence Patterns (54 / 142)

Workbooks
PMP Basic Japanese Chapter (4 / 8)
PMP Complete Japanese Grammar (0/ 15)

Korean

I've been giving some of the old dialogs a quick once through before chopping up the sentences I want for the Audio Sentences deck.

Dialogs/Lessons
Sogang 1A Chapters (8 / 10)
Sogang 1B Chapters (0 / 8)
Sogang 2A Chapters (0 / 9)
Yonsei 1 Chapters (6 / 10)
Yonsei 2 Chapters (0 / 10)
Yonsei 1 Reading Entry (16 / 40)
Yonsei 2 Reading Entry (0 / 40)
Hippocrene Beginner's Korean (0 / 12)

Grammar/Lessons
Korean Grammar In Use: Beginner Entries (48 / 112)
TTMIK Lessons Levels 1-3 (85 / 85) (finished)
TTMIK Lessons Level 4 (25 / 30)
TTMIK Lessons Level 5 (0 / 30)
TTMIK Lessons Level 6 (0 / 30)
TTMIK Lessons Level 7 (0 / 30)
TTMIK Lessons Level 8 (0 / 30)
TTMIK Lessons Level 9 (0 / 30)

Russian

Just working my way through chapter one of Living Language Russian (Complete - the newer edition). Just some words and phrases to learn the pronunciation and brush up on the script.

Bengali

The Teach Yourself Bengali book is divided into 3 sections. Section 1 is the script, section 2 starts on chapter 14 and is the standard TY system (a few dialogs, some grammar explanation, some exercises), and section 3 is more reading focused.

The dialogs that start off in chapter 14 are bit tougher than is typical for most TY books, because it seems they expect you to retain some of the words and phrases used to teach the script.

So far I've just dabbled with the dialogs in chapter 14 and will be making a audio sentences/phrases/words deck for the content in the first 13 chapters. Normally I wouldn't do cards for just vocab words, but seeing this is my sole Bengali resource, I have to attack it in every possible way.


1 person has voted this message useful



This discussion contains 21 messages over 3 pages: 2 3  Next >>


Post ReplyPost New Topic Printable version Printable version

You cannot post new topics in this forum - You cannot reply to topics in this forum - You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum - You cannot create polls in this forum - You cannot vote in polls in this forum


This page was generated in 0.4688 seconds.


DHTML Menu By Milonic JavaScript
Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved
No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization.