2017 L4, L5, and L6

[sfuqua]

I'm going to start a new log for the new year.
I'm a 63 year old language learner. English is my native language. I lived overseas for two decades after I finished my undergraduate degree. I learned two Austronesian languages in my 20s and 30s, Samoan and Tagalog. My Samoan reached a high level for a foreigner (FSI 4+) while I lived in Samoa, but I haven't had much chance to use it since then. I learned Tagalog while I lived in the Philippines. Since I married a Filipina, I have used Tagalog every day for the past 32 years.

I started Spanish four years ago, with no real intention of getting very advanced in it, but daily study, and a Super Challenge worth of input has probably bumped my listening and especially reading up to an advanced level. My speech remains shaky, intermediate at best.

This year wanderlust got the best of me and I started French. Unfortunately, this year my teaching job took a turn into darkness with a change in management. I never could have imagined how unpleasant teaching could become. The time that I had for language learning has mostly been eaten up by trying to do impossible work tasks with little resources and constant criticism. In June this school year will be over and I will have 2 months of blessed freedom. I plan to wander Europe and use some of the languages I've been studying. I hope to transition to a better work environment for the next school year. I am pretty certain that the unpleasantness of my work environment is unhealthy.

Language learning remains one of the major positive things in my life.

I'm going to put 2017 goals in my next post.

Here's what I think I know about language learning:

1. Age itself is no real impediment. The many demands on time and energy that come with work and family can be.
2. It is probably more important to find a way you like to study than it is to find the "best" method. Different people may enjoy and have success using very different methods.
3. Assimil is a wonderful resource for developing passive skills, but it will not produce much active skill without supplementation.
4. Shadowing is great, especially for accent, and exercises many of the skills needed for conversation.
5. FSI drills are great, if you don't have enough opportunities to speak. Some people can't stand them. There is a definite limit to how far they can take you, by themselves.
6. You learn what you study, there is a limit to transfer between active and passive skills, for instance.
7. For me at least, anki and SRS is a very good tool for learning. It can probably build skills up to an A2, maybe B1, by itself, if you have audio.
8. L-R can be an almost magic way to understand language that is way over your head, but the sudden increases in comprehension can disappear quickly if you don't follow up.
9.Extensive reading and listening, even with incomplete comprehension in the beginning, can bump an intermediate student up into advanced levels of passive skills in a matter of months.

[sfuqua]

Since work is eating up so much of my time and my soul, it is difficult to come up with goals that I am pretty sure I can achieve, but I'm going to assume things will improve so that I can catch a breath and get my dedicated hour a day of study back into my schedule. If not I'll do what I can. Here's what I'd like to do:

2017 Goals
1) Complete the 10K SRS challenge
2)Complete the Romance Family Super Challenge.

My 2017 goals are to complete the two challenges I'm in, the 10K SRS challenge and the Super Challenge. I'm pretty far behind in the super challenge, but I can read Spanish pretty quickly, and if I can get some extra reading and listening done this summer, it is still quite possible that I will be able to complete it. The SRS challenge is on schedule; I just have to get over my tendency to delete cards when they annoy me. If I can keep enough cards in my deck, I should be OK. If I can find a reasonable work situation for next year, it will be easy.

Long Term goals:

1)SRS
One long term goal is to complete and then maintain anki decks, both in the passive and active directions for French and Spanish. I bet that a completely mastered Assimil course, mastered through anki, would give someone pretty solid B1 speaking skills. The cards may have only taught you to translate L1->L2 without really building up a great deal of speed or fluency, but B1 is not a high level standard. I think that you could, as a B1, with circumlocution, communicate on almost anything, but you probably would still have major comprehension problems reading and listening to language intended for native speakers. You need more than the 4000 words or so that the Assimil with ease and using books give.
I plan to complete anki decks for both of my languages and then maintain the decks, at least until I finish the 'massive input' part of my long term goals.

2)Input
C1/C2 level comprehension of a language seems to require that the learner learn to comprehend around 10000 words. Researchers suggest that a learner needs between 3 million and 6 million words of input(12000 to 24000 pages of novels, 300 to 600 hours of audiobooks, or some combination) before they can hope to have enough exposure to have learned the 10000 words they need for high level comprehension. The experiences of members of the forum suggest that these are reasonable numbers. Therefore, goal 2 is to get 3 million words of input in both French and Spanish. This would best be done with a mixture of movie/TV watching and reading. This would still leave the learner with vulnerabilites to unfamiliar genres/authors/accents -- and if you avoided TV and movies, you would still have difficult comprehension of actors emoting, slurring, screaming and so forth.

[sfuqua]

My French is getting to the point where I can struggle through a novel, especially a parallel novel in French.
I am very impatient to get started, but my time is pretty limited.
Maybe I'll try to read a little each night before going to sleep, but if I'm as sleepy as tonight, this isn't going to go very well.

I think anki is still very useful, so I think that I will keep it whether that leaves time to read or not. When I get through with the passive wave, maybe I can start reading some.

It is fun; I read a chapter or so of Bonjour Tristesse by by Françoise Sagan, and I loved it. I was very slow, but there was a steady feeling of eyes opening and things getting clearer, just as I felt when I started doing extensive reading in Spanish.

Maybe I can cut my new cards way down and have a little more time to read...

[sfuqua]

OK, a day in the life of me. I have written this for friends on the site, buft in case there is somebody out there who just stumbled onto the site, this is my language learning life. I'm primarily using anki right now; ask me if you don't know what it is


I have my decks for different languages set up as subdecks to a single deck. This mixes up the French and Spanish cards, which I find fun.

I get up in the morning and try to get through 20 new cards before I get up. After I get up, and try to do a hundred anki cards before I leave for work while I drink my coffee.

During the midmorning break in classes, I try to spend at least 5 minutes on anki while I drink my morning diet coke.

At lunch I walk off campus for a bit and then come back and sit on a bench near the parking lot and try to get through another hundred anki cards.

After school, once meeting and the stuff are down, I try to finish my cards before my wife and daughter show up with the car to drive us home.

If I'm not done, I try to finish the cards immediately when I get home.

Anyway my 60-90 minutes of anki are done before the family "Port Time". We don't usually drink port (my daughter has diet coke), but we do have a little family ritual of turning off the electronics, turning off the TV, pour wine (or diet coke), and settle down and talk, at least long enough to finish our glass.

After, then it is bed. (I think studying foreign language is having an effect on my English, but I'm going to leave the previous sentence the way it came out of my mind.)

I would really be doing better if I did a bigger variety of activities, but this routine is having a steady, building effect.

I try to listen to something in Spanish or French before I go to sleep, usually just radio.

I'm starting to get impatient listening to the audio on the L2->L1 cards; I can read it faster than the voice can say it. I'm much better at French pronunciation than I was a few months ago, although I am still capable of some horrible bloopers. On the L1->L2 cards I struggle a bit, I'm still putting French sentences together as an exercise in translation. I know the word order and I know the words, and I put them together in my head and then say them. Krashen and others have suggested that this sort of language production is not the same as fluent production which has appeared after enough comprehensible input. However there is a fairly strong pattern here on this site, and with legacy learners around the world, that without substantial opportunities for production, productive skills will remain rudimentary. I think stuffing (French|Spanish) with Ease into my head in a productive direction will at least make me a good tourist, and perhaps even get me into the B1 range.

If nothing else, active direction cards will force one to go through something similar to those first, survival level experiences in produciton. Active direction cards can be difficult, but I believe that by manipulating the number of new cards each day, I can eventually get through a complete deck of active direction Assimil cards. There are many problems with L1->L2 cards; there is a lot of ambiguity, but it seems like it comes closer to the demands of basic communication. I doubt if active direction cards can get one beyond the A2/B1 level.

Beyond that you need magic.

The way that a human brain responds to comprehensible input is magic. It seems to me that we really are built to learn languages. Even, uh, mature men like me.
It is hard to trust that comprehensible input will work magic, but my experience is that it does. You need some sort of beachhead to get into the language, and then, with partial understanding if you must, you just charge into the language. Until you approach the language the way a native does, you will never be able to handle it the way a native does. You cannot expect to have the same experiences that a child learning a language does, but you can expect to get receptive skills that are similar to a native speaker, at least for the modalities that you practice, if you study long enough.

Many people find that FSI courses break them out of the "fluent comprehension, shaky production" pattern. Others start off talking to people when they are at a low level, and never really experience the any difference in production and comprehension. I'm hoping that a modest investment in productive activities will allow me to "activate" the knowledge I'm going to get from extensive reading and listening (once I get this going).

If it doesn't work, and if I find that I am eventually an A2 productive C1 receptive in both French and Spanish, I'm going to enjoy the living daylights out of my languages for the rest of my life, reading, listening, and watching.

There is plenty to keep one interested in language learning, even if it is just for reading and listening.

I believe that extensive language reading and listening will eventually lead to fluent production; I just don't think that I have done enough yet. People quote 3 million to 6 million words as the amount of input one needs to get to C1 level magic. I'm pretty close, receptively, in Spanish, but I've only done maybe, a million and a quarter words. I've got a ways to go. And I haven't started French.

I don't know where I'll end up, except that I'll probably finish my run in this life working on some aspect of language learning.

I'm going to enjoy the ride more when I can do extensive reading in French (this is more a matter of time than anything else).

I'm going to consider carefully before I start another language from the beginning. It takes me away from what I love most, which is reading (or the occasional great movie).

I would like to work on my Tagalog (I'm probably C1/C2 receptive, but I still make stupid grammar mistakes).

But did I tell you that I'd like to learn Portuguese.

Or German (my father spoke German, surprisingly well from what I could tell, from his time in the Army right after WWII in Germany).

Or Dutch (memories of a very cool Dutch girlfriend)

Or Latin (my first L2)

Or Russian (the literature, the whole world I don't know about)

Or Ancient Greek (my God, the beauty and horror of Homer and the Athenian drama)

Or ....

Maybe I should get better at French.

[sfuqua]

Oops I did a double post.

[sfuqua]

Well, you know how I love Assimil and am cruising toward independent reading by studying it through an SRS deck. Well, a couple of days ago, I realized that I can't stand it. For once, instead of throwing out decks and starting something new, I put a bunch of new cards in the deck and moved Assimil cards to a part of the deck where they won't show up for a while and just let them sit. If I don't change anything, around April they will start showing up again. The cards that are in the review cards I will keep doing, but for now, I will stop doing new Assimil cards. I put Michel Thomas cards up front, so that I will do the cards in Michel Thomas Foundation, Advanced, and Builder, both Spanish and French, before I restart new Assimil cards.

What was bugging me about Assimil is something that can happen with sentence cards. Some of the sentences are long, sometimes what L2 word or phrase corresponds to what L1 sentence or phrase, and it also can take a long time read them out with the audio. So right now my plan is to Michel Thomas before I restart Assimil. There is nothing wrong with Assimil really, I'm just tired of it.

I'm doing Michel Thomas in the L1->L2 direction instead of continuing the active wave. For the L2->L1 cards, I have put in a couple of concatenated frequency lists in both French and Spanish. I made the lists from frequency lists from online, including subtitle lists made from opensubtitles. Some of the lists contain different forms of the same root word (good for learning different verb forms), and others include only root forms. Each of these concatenated lists is about 14000 words long; I don't really have any intention to learn them all, but they are really fast.

I hope that Michel Thomas will help me have a conscious grasp of French grammar and that the vocabulary will help me recognize more words when I try to read independently.

I bet I'm tired of these cards and swing Assimil back into the forefront in a few weeks

[Adrianslont]

I can identify with your last post, sfuqua. I love my cloze deck for weeks and then grow less fond of it and love my subs2srs deck and then tire of that and make some more cloze cards. Then I want more subs2srs and so on. Then I just want to read.
As we say, to the point of it becoming a cliche, in Australia, "it's all good."

[sfuqua]

I'm still just doing reviews on my Assimil decks, but I moved them so in a week or two new cards will show up. I deleted a few more cards that were annoying me.

I'm not writing a lot here, because I keep doing the same things. I'm grinding through anki. I dropped my new cards down to 40 from 60; my reviews were getting insane.

I looked at German over the weekend, and it has moved up in my queue of languages to study. German is HARD. It is pretty alien to French and Spanish, the two languages I'm studying now. It does have its own set of cognates with English, which is fun. As it is every time I play around with a new language, it sounds very cool. A quick glance at what is available in ebook form for a learner in the US, suggests that German may be easier to get ebooks in than French. I would learn more about languages by studying German than I would by studying Portuguese or Italian, but of course those are awesome languages too.
I'm not going to start German until I'm done with these anki decks for Spanish and French that I'm working on.

At current speeds,

Spanish passive wave is 56 days from finishing all new cards.
French passive wave is 290 days from finished (French Assimil is longer than Spanish and I started it later)
Spanish and French active waves are about 200-300 days from finished. (I'm not including the Using books in the active cards, the instructions in the books seem to say only passive wave for Using books)
Michel Thomas French and Spanish decks are about 260 days from finished.

This all assumes 10 cards a day per deck. I can push the cards per deck up once I start to finish decks, so the actual time to finish this is shorter than the figures I gave.

I'm sure I can start reading novels in French long before I complete the anki decks in French; it is a matter of having time, not of having ability. In fact my French novel reading is better than could reasonably be expected. I think that cognates let me read way above my 'learned competence.

I soldier on. I am definitely learning a lot. I'm pretty confident that I can get out a pretty close approximation of French pronunciation. I need to do a few hundred hours of shadowing Assimil and audiobooks to clean this up. My Spanish wants to come out pronounced as French quite a bit. With cards, I just treat interference as another error.

The problems I have had finding time to study this year, which has forced me to use anki more than I normally would, may have actually helped me to stick with basics longer than I might have and may eventually have a positive impact on my languages.

I continue to be disappointed about how hard it is to get translated recent novels in French. This is the way I like to start extensive reading. Harry Potter is there, but why is Tolkien hard to buy? I don't understand why publishers don't want my money.

[DaveBee]

I continue to be disappointed about how hard it is to get translated recent novels in French. This is the way I like to start extensive reading. Harry Potter is there, but why is Tolkien hard to buy? I don't understand why publishers don't want my money.

I had a little resolution to read authors I like in french rather than english, so I was a bit miffed to realise that they aren't published promptly, or sometimes at all, in french.

Re: Tolkien, there's a french radio programme 'une vie, une oeuvre' that does one hour programmes on writers. They did one on Tolkien that might be of interest to you.

[Brun Ugle]

It's funny that your French affects your Spanish pronunciation, because your Spanish is actually the stronger language. Isn't it? Yet, I have the same problem with Norwegian and German. My Norwegian is definitely a lot stronger than German. It's my strongest foreign language by far. Yet if I've been practicing German and then try to speak Norwegian, it comes out in a German accent at first.