A Words Enthusiast

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Axon
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Re: A Words Enthusiast

Postby Axon » Sat Jan 21, 2017 2:54 am

Again, a few days with less motivation and a few with really high motivation. Definitely missed one day for all languages with Anki. No zero days though, I'm still interacting with at least one language every day in some manner.

General progress with Spanish, no milestones except that reading is easier and easier each time. I intensively read a page from a short story collection and made three flashcards for each unknown word, which will keep me up on flashcards for a few more days. Radio, Explicador, the rare ClevverTeve.

I've hardly touched German, just news headlines and one long session of Alternativlos, the tech/politics podcast. I listened to it while doing Photoshop work, which was a lot less passive than listening while reading things in English.

Chinese is going good, with near-daily Glossika and even some double days where I go back and repeat older Glossika lessons from before. I rarely read anything, which leads to a cycle of being intimidated by text, but happily whenever I make myself read text it's always easier than I expect. Still so many unknown words, which occasionally turn into flashcards.

French and Russian are trucking along with Anki, Lingvist, and Clozemaster. I'm off the Glossika Russian horse for sure, when I'm scrolling through my phone it's more rewarding to do Chinese than Russian. But I did notice last time I did Glossika Russian that I was pretty overwhelmed and tongue-tied at the start of the 15 minutes, then by the end I had gotten completely into the groove.

I've continued most days with the Danish deck, which seems to be working pretty well because today at the library I glanced at TY Danish and could read the dialogue a lot better than before, where I was just working off English/German cognates. And it seems like I can repeat after the TTS voices without much trouble.

The odd Pimsleur plus one session of looking up song lyrics makes up the Vietnamese progress.

And finally, today at the library I picked up an Indonesian textbook that I'd used before and Pimsleur's conversational set. Will post my thoughts on each later.
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Axon
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Re: A Words Enthusiast

Postby Axon » Sat Jan 28, 2017 6:19 am

I've had a resurgence in spoken Chinese practice the past few days, with one conversation lasting about an hour! I can absolutely tell that the Glossika practice has loosened up my tongue a lot, even with subjects that aren't in the course. It's been about a month since I started it (Business Mandarin, Mainland accent for those just tuning in) and it's now very clear that it's working for me. I suppose you have to trust the method for a while. I did the GSR about daily for the first 20 days or so, going back and doubling up sometimes too. I have every fifth lesson on my phone, so I've gone on some good long walks where I can cover a huge amount of material. Someday I'd like to sort of reverse-engineer the spacing times, but I think every fifth lesson is an entirely or almost entirely new set of sentences. Reading is still laborious, and I took a single day's break from Anki and really noticed. I can puzzle my way through headlines occasionally, which is a great feeling.

This morning in the shower I surprised myself by speaking my inner monologue aloud in relatively fluent Spanish. Interestingly, I've been alternating a whole international gamut of TTS voices but my natural speech tends toward the inflection of the Explicador narrator. Good. He does trill his Rs a bit overmuch, but on the whole I find him very pleasant to listen to. This increased ability is very exciting because all I've done is passively listen to about 10 hours of Explicador and do daily sentence flashcards with audio. I've hardly touched the Youtube videos I listed in my earlier posts.

After Spanish I tried to switch the monologue to German. Equally surprisingly, it didn't work very well. I could get into it a little bit with time, but there was lots of pausing and I made simple mistakes with cases. So I listened to more Alternativlos and found it very dry, so I put on Easy German and enjoyed a high level of comprehension. In the past few days I've also done some more Calvin and Hobbes reading, sometimes aloud. I've got to integrate German further into my daily routine further though, especially speaking it.

I'm on a three or four day long pause from progress in French or Russian. This post will probably get me to do some perfunctory Lingvist or Clozemaster, but the more I try to juggle five languages the more I realize it's not very doable for me. Spanish and Chinese are very fun for me these days in a way that French and Russian are not.

Pimsleur Conversational Indonesian seems to be pretty much the same as Vietnamese, with so far (lessons 1-4) a man and a woman going through every combination of "I am Indonesian. I am American. I understand a little Indonesian" you can imagine. It's a different and slower pace than my older copies of Vietnamese (which I suspect were actually sped up at one point, I think the speed would put off a lot of learners) but I can put it on passively and still repeat the words many times. The danger with passive repetition is that even if the words become very easy to say, they're very hard to remember after I take a little break. I also got one of those massive pre-built pre-TTSed Anki sentence decks.

And finally, a little bit more Danish every two days or so to spice it up. Sometime mid-February I should have internalized my whole little sentence bank from DA-EN, then I'll switch it to only audio recognition and start over. Low stress, purely a new language for the sake of a new language.
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Axon
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Re: A Words Enthusiast

Postby Axon » Mon Feb 06, 2017 5:35 am

It's been a bit, hasn't it? I just feel like there's nothing to report sometimes, it's a strange situation when there are no noticeable milestones.

Chinese continues well. Mostly spoken practice, with one pretty frustrating conversation that left me tongue-tied. If I learn new vocabulary when in a natural conversation it almost never gets remembered. The worst is a sentence with three or four unknowns, at that point it's a pretty stressful task to guess from context. I don't like this feeling of stress when speaking, and it reminds me of the equally unwelcome feeling when speaking Russian. Strong Anki and Glossika though, I know the progress exists even if it's behind the scenes.

Spanish also continues. Lots of radio thanks to more driving time, and though I've laid off the Explicador a bit in this last week I've still done lots of reading with Anki. It seems that it takes three Spanish->English sentence flashcards to get me to internalize a new word like "caoba" or "farol" (mahogany, lamp respectively). Reverse flashcards, that is English-Spanish phrases or sentences, seem to help the most with grammatical structures, not vocabulary. I'm about 300 sentences in, and they're almost all from Spanishdict. That makes it easy to get several sentences for the same word, and also find different conjugations. When I run low on new flashcard words, I intensively read some news or short stories. Loving this method! I also had a native judge my pronunciation, and they said it was a good job even though I stuttered. I bet if I warmed up a bit (as per sfuqua's advice) I could probably read a similar unknown passage with fewer mistakes.

With German I'm just trying to maintain my level. I can watch Easy German and not look at the subtitles, and I watched some Let's Play videos and could follow them well too. There was a funny moment in one - I'm not sure how much people here are into virtual reality gaming, but it's really popular with my friends. The audio instructions in the game told the player to "put his hand to your hip to reload" and the player, being German, didn't know what "hip" meant but put his hand to his back and it worked for the game. "Ah!" he said, pleased. "Hip ist Rücken!"

Minimal work with French and Russian. Anki sentences with French and some Russian audiobook listening plus Glossika. I'm letting myself be okay with not juggling these as much anymore. If I keep maintaining them every so often they won't slide away, and I've already learned a good amount in the time of this log.

Danish is losing its charm a bit but Indonesian is not. Pimsleur Indonesian keeps me happy, though I have to repeat each lesson a few times since I never really pay close attention to it. I like my little Anki decks for both. In a few years Danish TTS should be even more advanced. Right now I have the Danish sentences read by two voices and they often don't quite match with vowel quality or stød. But the two-voice thing is working for getting a better inner Danish voice in my head.
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Axon
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Re: A Words Enthusiast

Postby Axon » Sat Feb 11, 2017 7:28 am

This week I got a job at a Chinese restaurant, and today I had my first in-person Chinese conversation since leaving China! It's a pretty busy place, but hopefully I can stop and have more chats in the future. The ability to speak relatively conversational Mandarin and parrot a few phrases of Cantonese has already won me points among the staff. Three of the waiters speak Cantonese to each other (giving me a perfect excuse to start it back up) and I was told the cooks and dishwashers speak Mandarin but among themselves they speak something else. I can't make head or tail of it - could be Min? It's not Hokkien though, no nasal vowels. Anyway as usual I've done flashcards and Glossika daily.

Spanish radio finds a neat slot on the way to work, and Anki in the evenings. Nothing much to report here, though my short stories collection is still frustratingly opaque. I think I would have worked harder on Spanish in high school if I had to read literature. Reading news is nothing compared with reading fiction.

Almost nothing with German, just some Youtube videos.

Continued with Pimsleur Indonesian and read through some of the textbook dialogues more times. The Basic Indonesian textbook I mentioned is not bad at all, but it requires a dictionary or teacher to make sense of the exercises. I believe I'll get it from the library again soon.

I had a solid go at Russian Glossika again to keep that up, and learned one new French expression through reading tweets.

Nearly done with the Danish sentence deck, and will be quite content not to follow up on it much / at all once complete. Might try a similar experiment with Dutch next. I figure that more experience with the Germanic languages can't hurt, and it gives me a nice sense of filling in some gaps. I've noticed that languages related to ones you already know have a certain number of high frequency words that you don't get for free. Take for instance DK nøgler (keys), noget (something), bor (to reside). If you know German and English there's no denying that you get a ton of Danish vocabulary for free, but if you start reading texts you'll hit a lot of walls quick. But by studying a carefully chosen set of sentences, you can quickly learn a lot of the vocabulary and constructions peculiar to that related language. With that out of the way, native texts quickly become more accessible.
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Axon
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Re: A Words Enthusiast

Postby Axon » Fri Feb 17, 2017 6:12 am

Chinese is coming along better than ever. I wish they'd give me more hours at the restaurant (I've never done food service so I'm still training) because when I'm there I get a good dose of Mandarin speaking and listening in. Regular speaking these past few days with Glossika, voice chats, and now in person has had a big effect. Still don't know what the mystery dialect at the restaurant is, I'm now leaning toward some variant of Yue instead of Min. No voiced consonants or nasal vowels, but has ending stops. I've listened to a lot more Shanghainese and Taiwanese recently and I'm fairly certain it's neither. I also started up watching Ode To Joy (歡樂松) again but still need English subtitles to understand it.

Spanish has seen a bit of a slide in activity. I added lots of sentences to Anki and I still listen to the radio often but the fire isn't quite as strong as it was a few weeks ago. I also hear Spanish at the restaurant but haven't spoken it to any customers. Today I watched some videos and did some reading and my comprehension is very high for nonfiction, which I'm proud of. Fiction is just surprisingly difficult, I have a lot less tolerance for ambiguity there. I have a young adult book translated from English to Spanish and it's very easy for me, though I'm not sure how much of my understanding is language skill versus having practically memorized the book as a teenager.
I'm glad my city has good Spanish radio stations, the extra hour or so of free listening practice per week really does have an effect. Whenever the radio hosts crack a joke that I understand it's always hilarious to me, much more so than the same joke would be in English.

I've done more German than usual. Some good long reading sessions of Calvin and Hobbes (the same problem here - is my German perfect or do I just know the comic by heart?) and unsubtitled Let's Plays have crept into the rotation and if I'm not learning new words, I'm still improving my general sense of the language and getting those gears turning again. I definitely have the highest listening comprehension in German compared to any other foreign language. I guess I do have the most hours of listening, thanks to university classes, but still I'm surprised when I take a break from German for a few days but can easily understand it the next time I hear it.

Standstill on Russian. I have plenty of resources but no motivation for it. When I watch dramas on Viki a Russian commercial comes up, and now that I've seen it a few times it's pretty easy to parse out the Russian words behind the English subtitles. French limps along thanks to minimal Anki progress and the tiniest of listening moments. My French listening is really abysmal, as I've found out. Nothing for it but time and practice, I know.

Finished the Danish Anki deck. No plans to continue past reviewing those sentences more. I'd say Danish and French have the biggest gap between reading and listening proficiency for me.

I watched half an hour of an Indonesian drama today, and was a bit surprised by how the rhythm of the language sounds so different from the textbook and Pimsleur recordings. I also listen regularly to the Easy Indonesian street interviews, so I'm slowly building a picture of the language in my head, but the textbooks accentuate the pitch changes much more than natural speech does. I did take out the textbook from the library again and plan to copy out the dialogues any day now.
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Axon
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Re: A Words Enthusiast

Postby Axon » Fri Feb 17, 2017 7:16 am

A supplemental post, checking in at two months of this log.

Reading over the logs, this is definitely the most consistent and longest amount of language study I've ever done. Certainly the longest regular Anki usage I've had. I've been "into languages" since around the start of 2013, but since then I've always had many other things to balance in addition to language time, and any studying was just kind of slotted in when it fit. As the number of languages I was seriously interested in grew, I had more times that I devoted to focused studying, but still nothing like what I'm doing now.

In terms of advancement, my Spanish vocabulary has absolutely grown and my reading speed has increased. I'm glad about what I've done with Spanish, even though I haven't had a single spoken conversation. It feels a lot less ignored than it used to.
Chinese has improved, even if I may have forgotten a few of the words I learned while I was in China. I'd guess my reading comfort is about the same, maybe marginally faster, but my vocabulary has grown a lot. Glossika has really helped my speaking fluency and I'm glad I made the purchase.
German certainly hasn't gotten worse over the last two months, though I can't point to anything in particular that I've learned.
French has actually improved significantly, despite all the whining I do on the log about never having motivation. I've learned a good number of high-frequency words that clear up confusion in reading, and I believe my accent has improved too thanks to lots of sentence shadowing.
Russian hasn't changed much, I don't think. The longer I have Cyrillic in my head, the more natural it is for me to sound things out, but I still find reading hard and speaking harder.
I've flirted with various other languages, watching a video here, glancing at a phrasebook there, doing an online lesson, listening to a song, and so on. Polish, Italian, Danish, Indonesian, Cantonese, Vietnamese - these have all seen a bit of activity too, and I don't mind being a dabbler.

A few discoveries summed up: I can learn vocabulary from passive recognition, but it needs to appear in at least three different sentences. Consistent Glossika practice is better than I ever gave it credit for. I cannot maintain energetic study of more than three languages a day, often no more than two. There is a shocking amount of dead listening time where I can put on something in the background and be that much more in contact with the language.
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Re: A Words Enthusiast

Postby Axon » Sat Mar 04, 2017 5:47 am

I feel like it's hard to make meaningful posts when my daily routine is mostly sticking to the same resources as I have been.

Since the last post I explored more types of Chinese media. Netflix has a few Western things dubbed into Chinese, so I poked around that section a little. I watched Hero (2002) with Jet Li and picked up a few nuances of Chinese historical drama language. I thought it was interesting how characters would mix the use of older words and newer words in the same conversation - it clearly has much deeper significance than I can tell at this point.
Still enjoying my time at the restaurant though it's too busy to exchange more than a few words most days. A Chinese family came in and I had a short talk with one of them after the meal, and it went down the same route as so many scores of identical conversations that I had no trouble at all. "How long have you been studying? Have you ever been to China? How old are you?"
I had a very busy week last week and so I haven't done as much Glossika as I'd have liked, but that's kind of okay because I have been doing more speaking language exchanges over Skype. The guy messages me every day, and some days I skip out on him but most of the time I try to chat, either voice or text. I always get great listening practice because he talks so fast and prefers to use Chinese with me, and he's phenomenal at writing out example sentences for new words.

I've been plugging away at the FSI dialogues for Cantonese in Anki form. It's coming along great, and I'm focusing more on understanding than production at the moment so I'm not using any romanization. Two cards from each sentence, one with the Cantonese characters and one with just the audio. Each one plays the audio twice, so I'm hearing these sentences many, many times over the course of the review days. This is apparently enough for me to memorize some EN->CN sentence pairs despite never drilling that direction!

I've lost a lot of steam with Spanish. I did have a nice natural moment where I asked for more water in a restaurant without even thinking, but otherwise no speaking past repeating my flashcards. I've been reviewing them regularly but haven't added that many. However, the last ones I've added have been monolingual, with a Spanish definition of the words on the back instead of an English sentence. I'm not sure how taken I am with this method. It makes me think hard about every word in the sentence and I do learn a lot from making the cards, but on the other hand it's many times slower. The important thing though is that it keeps me in a Spanish environment while I'm even making the cards, whereas copying sentence pairs from SpanishDict has a lot of English involved. I can read Spanish Wikipedia far easier than I could in December, which means that my goal of increasing nonfiction reading speed has pretty much been achieved. News and literature still have enough unknowns for me to keep working on that genre.

Still doing a small amount of German reading. I finished the Calvin and Hobbes collection though it's always worth rereading. When I read my Penguin parallel text I find it a bit harder than most German text for me, but not as big as the difference between literary and nonfiction Spanish.

Somehow I'm able to comprehend the Indonesian textbook more and more every time I look at it. The audio is very different from natural Indonesian, but it's better than nothing. I'm not looking forward to doing lots of vocabulary cramming, but the little Germanic easter eggs in the vocabulary are welcome surprises.
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Axon
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Re: A Words Enthusiast

Postby Axon » Sat Mar 25, 2017 3:47 am

How is it that the days can fly by so fast?

I haven't done quite as many regular Mandarin voice chats as before but I've kept up the Anki and videos. I can apply myself to HSK 5 and 6 texts and get a lot of the meaning out of them, but of course there's always, always more vocabulary and that can really just grind fluent reading to a halt. I can now read Chinese subtitles fast enough that they always add to my experience. Several months ago they barely helped at all since my reading speed was so slow, but that's what practice does for you. I'm nearly finished with the 104-day Glossika course.

Spanish is still great. Just in the last week I watched La Reina del Sur episode 1 and liked it. Today I saw Perdiendo el norte (Off Course), a film about Spaniards looking for a better life in Germany. Neither of these works is particularly highbrow but they're both filled with lots of great usage and they both had accurate Spanish captions on Netflix. With the Spanish captions I still miss a few words but understand the plot and dialogue very well - but I know for sure that without captions I'd barely catch anything. I remember being at this stage in German, where I could only follow captioned media, so I know it's just a stage and more exposure is the answer. Still got plenty of flashcards to keep me busy.

A bit of daily reading and a few videos is all I can say for German. I found a German crime novel and it's much easier to read than when I got it, though the story hasn't quite done it for me either time I've attempted it. But it's something for the before-bed reading slot.

Still making the odd progress on the Cantonese Anki deck of FSI dialogues. I do like this way of studying and it does help when I hear Cantonese in the wild. Plus I'm starting to remember Cantonese pronunciations of common characters - all good things! I'd definitely use this method or my Danish method to expose myself to the basics of a related language. Maybe that's how I can give French a kick in the rear again...
My note about Chinese subtitles does not work when hearing Cantonese and reading Mandarin subtitles. Way too much difference there for me to get more than the gist, and often that's cued by the audio anyway.

I've copied out a few hundred Indonesian parallel sentences and have begun to grasp the sentence structure. I haven't put them into cards yet, but when I copy them out (from the textbook or the Easy Indonesian videos) I do my best to repeat them a few times.

French standstill, Russian near-standstill.
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Re: A Words Enthusiast

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Sat Mar 25, 2017 11:23 am

An Anki question - do you type the FSI Cantonese sentences or are they available somewhere? I've studied eight lessons and entered every single word, sentence, and drill manually. That takes a lot of time.
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Axon
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Re: A Words Enthusiast

Postby Axon » Sun Mar 26, 2017 2:31 am

Jeff, if I did that I'd be a whole lot better! I'm using a shared deck: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/763798048

I believe I also changed the card layout to get more audio plays with each card I see. Best of luck!
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