阿波's Endeavour (中文,台語)

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Ezy Ryder
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Re: Ezy Ryder's Endeavour (中文,台語)

Postby Ezy Ryder » Thu Feb 11, 2016 12:38 pm

Still busy with the university, but I thought I could at least make another video update on my current level (especially, having skipped January):

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Ezy Ryder
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Re: Ezy Ryder's Endeavour (中文,台語)

Postby Ezy Ryder » Sun Mar 13, 2016 3:23 pm



Gonna have to repeat the first term. I was told all the bureaucracy can be dealt with by the end of the month, which means ~200 days to prepare a bit better for the second attempt; and perhaps more importantly, to get back to working on my Mandarin. Begun slogging through the almost 2,000 cards-big backlog in the Spoonfed Chinese deck, today there were only about 400 cards left, so restarted adding new cards as well.

臺語: Had an interesting idea, as to how to choose which words to study in Hokkien. I took the ~15k words-long conversation in Mandrin with one of my friends, used one piece of online software to change it to Simplified (as the next one only works with Simplified), and another to make a frequency dictionary out of it. Apparently we used only about 2k unique words, and only about a half of them occurred more than once (up to that point). Whenever she has time, I send her 10 words a day (with example sentences, to make clear which meaning/s I'm after), and she sends me a recording of the example sentences translated to Hokkien. I then look them up in an online dictionary (to make sure I transcribed them right, and to get the characters (only for mnemonics)), and add them to an Anki deck.
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阿波
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Ezy Ryder
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Re: Ezy Ryder's Endeavour (中文,台語)

Postby Ezy Ryder » Fri Apr 01, 2016 3:12 pm

I was recently informed, my application to repeat the term has been accepted. So, I should have about half a year to myself... Hopefully I'll be able to spend more time in Taiwan this year. Also, the weather here begins to get a little warmer, so I'm trying to do more jogging.

中文:After overcoming the Spoonfed Chinese deck's backlog, I got less than 200 sentences shy of 4k; but I'm not quite as keen on this deck any more. It is kinda boring/samey, the speakers' accents are very Mainland, plus they don't sound entirely natural. Asking someone to pronounce something clearly, is a sure way to make them (unknowingly) mispronounce things...

So, what should I do instead? Inspired by a thread in another sub-forum, I picked some native content, and tried listening to each utterance, until I would hear something similar enough to what the subtitles said. Getting through three minutes of audio, took me about 3.5 hours, so it's certainly a very slow process, and I'm not sure how long will I be able to persist, after the feeling of novelty wears off.
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: 3750 / 48084,808 漢字 (handwriting) :

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Ezy Ryder
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Re: Ezy Ryder's Endeavour (中文,台語)

Postby Ezy Ryder » Sat Apr 30, 2016 10:07 pm

In the spirit of trying to solve each and every language-learning-related problem with SRS, I decided to join the 10k challenge. Here are the numbers of already learnt cards in the decks I'm most likely to be using:
-Mandarin Audio Sentences (only receptive): 120
-Mandarin Vocabulary Handwriting (only productive): 484
-草書 Handwriting (only productive): 41
-Taiwanese Hokkien Audio Sentences (going both ways): 226
Total: 871
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阿波
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: 3750 / 48084,808 漢字 (handwriting) :

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Ezy Ryder
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Re: Ezy Ryder's Endeavour (中文,台語)

Postby Ezy Ryder » Wed Aug 03, 2016 5:55 pm

苦盡甘來

Long time no see. I haven't posted much the last couple months. Since May, I've been having some vision-related problems, yet to be diagnosed. At first I was afraid those may be similar to the ones my mother suffered from prior to being diagnosed with a terminal form of cancer. Understandably, fear of death isn't exactly the best motivation for studying a language... Some of the doctors have told me that particular type of cancer doesn't tend to be hereditary; but it was only about two hours ago that, having brought the MRI results to a neurologist, I was assured nothing dangerous was visible. That may not explain what's causing the problems (I'll be doing more tests later this month), but at least it'd seem I don't need to worry about the proximity of the inevitable (don't mean taxes, nor Hillary) ;)

In the spirit of the title's second half, I have recently got back in touch with a certain friend from China; I got back to Anki'ing (should be finished with all the HSK1-6 vocabulary within a week, currently only reviewing Pinyin->Definition, but I'll also be going through different types of cards, and I don't intend to stop at the puny 5k either. But more on that next week); and having someone to talk with, as well as something to do, throughout the day, seems to have pretty much solved my problems with getting up in the morning I had the last couple years. Instead of a 3PM-3AM 12-hour day, I usually manage to begin my day between 7:30AM and 9AM, and fall asleep with relative ease by 1 AM, literally adding some 3-5 hours to my day. Even my depression seems to have (at least for now) turned into more of an occasional nuisance, rather than the nearly daily (or shall I say, nightly) beating I've grown used to.

Last but not least, I've hit a bit of a milestone in Anki today. A grand total of 500,000 reviews... Crikey, that's half a smegging million! It took my laptop ~13 seconds to generate the life-long, collection statistics xD
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Ezy Ryder
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Re: Ezy Ryder's Endeavour (中文,台語)

Postby Ezy Ryder » Tue Aug 23, 2016 1:04 pm


What I've been up to recently:
中文:
-Finished learning the HSK1-6 vocabulary (Pinyin->English) on the 9th, IIRC (anyway, that's how I spent the 七夕節 xD).
-Added TOCFL1-5 vocabulary to the deck (~8,624 notes in total now, after deleting the duplicates). Began learning shortly after.
-The Chinese friend has recommended a YouTube channel to me - "谷阿莫". He speaks with a Taiwanese accent, has a sense of humour, all videos seem to be captioned in Traditional characters, and usually just a few minutes long (so shouldn't be much of a problem for completionists). He does speak quite quick (comparable to “Zero Punctuation” I once mentioned), so it should be really good for pushing your limits.

臺語:
-Since there still isn't gonna be much to un-learn, I decided to change my focus to a more southern accent (臺南腔).
-Finally found a word, seemingly, roughly equivalent to 次 (a classifier for occurrences). When listening to an interview (or at least, trying to), the subtitles said 如果你說一次, or something; and about an hour later, at last I knew: phiàn (遍) (the sentence was probably something like “lí nā kóng tsi̍t phiàn kóng“ (你若講一遍講); also, the first /g/ sounded more like a /ɣ/, so maybe that allophone works before back vowels in general, and not just /u/? Don't know about /o/, though.).
-I don't recall mentioning it before, but someone recommended to me a Mandarin-subtitled show mostly in Hokkien: “戲說台灣” .
-Also, some new 老歌. Including, “愛妳乎我做太太“ by 黃西田, which I was amazed to find out, was a version of “Stupid Cupid”.

Both(?):
-”寶島全世界”, you can find a fair few interviews, usually with pretty decent audio. Depending on the interviewee, there might be some, up to a lot of, Hokkien in them.
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Re: Ezy Ryder's Endeavour (中文,台語)

Postby Ezy Ryder » Thu Oct 20, 2016 8:27 am



And so the classes begin again. Since I'm repeating the semester, I was told I only need to attend the classes (and lectures) I failed. The best thing though, is that I get to speak in Mandarin a lot more, and in person as well. I think I conversed in Mandarin easily over two hours, over just the last fortnight. So, that's a lot of fun.

It's also really motivating to see both my listening comprehension having (somewhat) improved, and that people can actually understand me speaking at full speed (most of the time). Now, my listening is still severely lacking – I often find myself having to guess what someone is saying, based on just a few words I'd manage to pick up. But apparently my guesses must be close enough for me not to appear as if I'm (unknowingly) changing the topic every so often... Speaks with someone mostly in Mandarin for over an hour, and wants to put it to “guessing what the other person is saying” - if that's not the “impostor syndrome”, I don't know what is 紅紅火火恍恍惚惚

As for other Mandarin-related activities, I haven't (re)learnt any new characters from my character handwriting deck (at 2k now/again) in a few days, but I'll usually try to do the reviews on the train and in between classes. I attempt to take notes in (mostly) Mandarin whenever feasible (during the Latin class; as well as the History of England, and British Literature lectures). And I usually can get in at least 40+ minutes of listening walking to the university, back to the railway station, and waiting for the train (which makes it a bit more difficult to hear my train a comin' ;) ).

I should probably also mention, last month I tried listening to a minute's worth of audio from a video in Mandarin (from the 阿滴英文 YouTube channel), pausing and trying to type down what I thought I heard. (For full disclosure, I'll admit that due to the nature of YouTube's rewinding function, I relistened to most of it, multiple times. But I'd try to avoid including words I only understood on subsequent hearings. I did however include words I technically misheard, but the meanings of which were close enough (AFAIK) not to affect the overall meaning of the sentence) And when comparing the end results to the captions (which I kept turned off before I finished transcribing), I got ~83% right. Now, I'm not quite sure what to make of it – it's not quite 98%, not even 95%. Should I follow the advice I hear most often, and just try to listen more, despite it most likely not being “comprehensible input”? Or should I choose a different approach?
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smallwhite
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Re: Ezy Ryder's Endeavour (中文,台語)

Postby smallwhite » Thu Oct 20, 2016 1:02 pm

Ezy Ryder wrote:中文進步-十月2016年

Wow! You're almost perfect now!
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Re: Ezy Ryder's Endeavour (中文,台語)

Postby Ezy Ryder » Wed Nov 02, 2016 3:27 pm

smallwhite wrote:
Ezy Ryder wrote:中文進步-十月2016年

Wow! You're almost perfect now!

多謝妳的鼓勵!說不定幾年後我會同意 紅紅火火恍恍惚惚

In my most recent attempt at re-thinking my approach to developing listening comprehension, I came to the realisation that I've been trying to tackle all the problems simultaneously. I thought that since our memory tends to mostly do just what it's de facto required to (I.e., productive review alone cannot guarantee equal results in receptive abilities, and the ability to recall information when prompted visually (e.g., spelling) doesn't guarantee equal results when prompted aurally (e.g., pronunciation)), I'd have to review recordings of entire sentences (and preferably as close to native content as possible, to account for all the Phonetic processes present in natural speech). But then I remembered that if I acquire a word in English whilst reading, and manage to guess the pronunciation, I can usually/often understand it just fine when listening. Which after skimming through some of the abstracts (I'm so lazy >.<) Reineke has been sharing on the forum, ended up being the proverbial drop that spilled the glass.

So I thought I could try out working on the individual aspects of listening, individually. Here's what I'm gonna do (other than my best):
  1. The ability to differentiate all the phonemes. Find/obtain recordings of minimal pairs, and then just drill, drill, drill (for example, 樂 /gak̚⁴/, 捔 /ɡ̊ak̚⁴/ and 咯 /kʰak̚⁴/ in Hokkien).
  2. Familiarity with the Phonetic processes. Re-listen to recordings of individual utterances, until I can hear what I see in the captions/transcript. Depending on what I'm working on, getting through 1 minute of audio this way can take me between 1 and 3 hours...
  3. Phonological memory improvement. Obtain a bunch of recordings of individual utterances/sentences, sort by length (syllable or word count). Listen once and try to repeat (at least sub-vocalise) what I just heard.
  4. Immediacy of recall. I guess I'll just look for a list of words I'd like to know, maybe learn some basics of Python, try writing a script to automatically create numbered audio files based on a TSV or CSV file (something like [Mandarin TTS][1-2 seconds of silence][English definition/translation TTS]), come up with a review schedule, and listen to them in a random order during commute and stuff.

臺語:One of the common inconveniences with preparing a frequency dictionary for languages such as English, is lemmatization. For Mandarin, it's tokenization. For Japanese, it's both. For Taiwanese, it's the relative scarcity of contemporary writing (so far as I can tell); and the not-entirely-standardised character-based orthography common in song lyrics videos, for example.
But I think it could be an interesting idea to try and compute a crude frequency dictionary based on the Southern Min Wikipedia (which claims 200k+ articles as of writing this post). Now, a lot of the articles aren't likely to be very long, which could affect the results. Nevertheless, it's written in Pe̍h-ōe-jī, so it has spaces between words and ignores the tone sandhi; and since it's Taiwanese, there's pretty much negligible inflection (AFAIK).

EDIT: IPA typo.
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阿波
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: 3750 / 48084,808 漢字 (handwriting) :

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Ezy Ryder
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Re: Ezy Ryder's Endeavour (中文,台語)

Postby Ezy Ryder » Thu Nov 03, 2016 8:28 pm

中文:Began reading 獵魔士 on the train. A little escapism ain't never done nobody no harm (quadruple negation... nice).
Saw this line "要是沒有鏡子想殺翼蜥根本是做夢". Which (very roughly) translates to "if you think you can slay an 翼蜥 without a mirror, you're in for a nasty surprise". Not particularly difficult to figure out "翼蜥" would be a "basilisk", and since I know 析 is pronounced ㄒㄧ (xī), the pronunciation wasn't much of a problem either (even the tone turned out to be the same) ^^

PS: Strictly speaking, it's neither the first time I "begin" reading this series in Mandarin, nor the first volume. IIRC the first one was mostly just a collection of short stories, so I thought I'd skip it.
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