6WC 6 Week Challenge - Feb 2017

Ongoing language-learning challenges, and team challenge logs (but not individual logs)
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CarlyD
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Re: 6WC 6 Week Challenge - Feb 2017

Postby CarlyD » Tue Mar 14, 2017 4:22 am

I did my best, but I can't compete with the 7 to 17 hours a day people are logging, so the whole thing about competing seems useless. I've already started my language break.
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Re: 6WC 6 Week Challenge - Feb 2017

Postby Brun Ugle » Tue Mar 14, 2017 5:51 am

Teango wrote:Congratulations to our winners in this challenge and to everyone who took part! I was elated to be in bronze medal position for target language at the end of the challenge (and thought it was in the bag, given that the Hawaiian time zone is GMT -10 hours), but was sad to discover I'd fallen to 4th position the next morning. :( Never mind...the important thing is I levelled up from a complete beginner to a low intermediate signer in New Zealand Sign Language, and I look forward to continuing my studies over the rest of the year (although at a far more relaxed rate).

@smallwhite
Glad to hear you're feeling more recovered now, smallwhite. Ditto on what blaurebell said above (and you can look forward to diving into those 7 books later). :)



Wait. Isn't today, the 14th, the last day? February is a short month. So the last day is later than usual.
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Re: 6WC 6 Week Challenge - Feb 2017

Postby Teango » Tue Mar 14, 2017 9:17 am

Brun Ugle wrote:Wait. Isn't today, the 14th, the last day? February is a short month. So the last day is later than usual.

Yes, you're absolutely right...silly me...completely forgot about February being shorter! Teango's still in the running - wahoo! I better add my hours for today, and then I still have tomorrow (as it's still the 13th here in Honolulu)... Thanks for the correction, Brun Ugle!! :)
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Re: 6WC 6 Week Challenge - Feb 2017

Postby blaurebell » Tue Mar 14, 2017 10:24 am

CarlyD wrote:I did my best, but I can't compete with the 7 to 17 hours a day people are logging, so the whole thing about competing seems useless. I've already started my language break.


I gave up trying to catch up with reineke as well. My Russian is still at the "hard work" stage, so putting in 8h is still very very tiring. Russian also belongs to a language family that is new for me and where I have hardly any vocabulary overlap. I started my Russian from a very basic level, hardly even being able to decipher short sentences, and since reineke already put in like 6h on the first day I doubt that we started at the same level. Major headache after 2h for me in the beginning. Looking at reineke's log I would say that it's hard to make comparisons on time spent when I haven't yet pushed past the comprehension barrier and reineke seems to be watching TV with ease. Much easier to log an awful lot of hours when you already understand. It's difficult to compare in general when we all start at a different level with different languages and different levels of prior knowledge in related languages! Maybe we can think about registering with a comprehension level as affiliation next time round at least, if that's possible? That would make it at least a little more comparable for those who start a language from scratch.
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Re: 6WC 6 Week Challenge - Feb 2017

Postby DaveBee » Tue Mar 14, 2017 11:14 am

blaurebell wrote:
CarlyD wrote:I did my best, but I can't compete with the 7 to 17 hours a day people are logging, so the whole thing about competing seems useless. I've already started my language break.

Looking at reineke's log I would say that it's hard to make comparisons on time spent when I haven't yet pushed past the comprehension barrier and reineke seems to be watching TV with ease. Much easier to log an awful lot of hours when you already understand. It's difficult to compare in general when we all start at a different level with different languages and different levels of prior knowledge in related languages! Maybe we can think about registering with a comprehension level as affiliation next time round at least, if that's possible? That would make it at least a little more comparable for those who start a language from scratch.
As I understand it Reineke uses TV from day one. TV input is his method for learning new languages.
Last edited by DaveBee on Tue Mar 14, 2017 1:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: 6WC 6 Week Challenge - Feb 2017

Postby blaurebell » Tue Mar 14, 2017 1:10 pm

DaveBee wrote:As I understand it Reineke uses TV from day one. TV input is his method for learning new languages.


Ah I didn't know! Interesting! It totally wouldn't work for me. In fact it has not worked for me for Japanese at all. I think I learned 2 words in all my anime watching and I've watched *a lot*. Can't really say how much but surely hundreds and hundreds of hours. But then, I may have been doing it wrong ;)
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Re: 6WC 6 Week Challenge - Feb 2017

Postby DaveBee » Tue Mar 14, 2017 2:42 pm

blaurebell wrote:
DaveBee wrote:As I understand it Reineke uses TV from day one. TV input is his method for learning new languages.


Ah I didn't know! Interesting! It totally wouldn't work for me. In fact it has not worked for me for Japanese at all. I think I learned 2 words in all my anime watching and I've watched *a lot*. Can't really say how much but surely hundreds and hundreds of hours. But then, I may have been doing it wrong ;)
I asked him about his method:
Please note that I acquired Italian during summer vacations over a period of several years. There was no method involved and I believe that the process was largely subconscious. I was not interested in learning Italian and I don't remember ever getting angry or anxious because I didn't understand something. I do remember my dad mocking me that I was watching something I didn't understand and my going into simultaneous interpretation mode to counter him. As I already mentioned, I don't have an assembly line for learning new languages and I only speak and understand languages from three language groups.

How is it possible? Compound interest. I started out with a handful of words and a lot of shared cultural concepts. I learned to figure out meanings from context clues and I cared more about the message than the form.

That 'shared cultural concepts' bit may be why you haven't picked up much from your anime watching. An article Reineke linked to said:
In my English language classroom I show the kids videos, such as “Mulan” and “Kung Fu Panda.” The context is Chinese, and the stories are familiar. Mulan, for example is an ancient Chinese legend, which the kids had all read in Chinese, before seeing the Disney movie.

For myself, I use these and other Disney cartoons to practice Chinese listening. Disney DVD are equipped with a language switch, so you can choose English or Chinese, complete with same language subtitles.

Reading real German books or watching real German TV would require knowledge of the culture, history, and geography. By using American movies and books, I knew who the bad guy was without anyone telling me. In German I wouldn’y have a clue. For example when I was in Spain, parents were telling me they didn’t let their kids watch the Bill Cosby show because the children were disrespectful toward their parents. This was amazing because in the States, Cosby was considered a family show, which parents encouraged kids to watch.

When Germans saw “Rocky One” they said things like, “But he did not win. So he is not good.” They missed the point entirely. As I imagined I would miss the point entirely in a German movie I stuck with what I knew.

I once tried watching a Chinese movie, and when I asked who the bad guy was, the Chinese all looked at me like I was nuts. “Didn’t you see the opening scene? General Tsao walked in backwards. Clearly he was in defeat.”
Of course! How could I have failed to pick up on that culturally universal reference?

Eventually, to truly know a language, you will also need to master the culture. So I would eventually have to start watching German, or now, Chinese movies, but one thing at a time.
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Re: 6WC 6 Week Challenge - Feb 2017

Postby blaurebell » Tue Mar 14, 2017 3:59 pm

DaveBee wrote:That 'shared cultural concepts' bit may be why you haven't picked up much from your anime watching.


Sounds about right. I think Japanese culture was so alien to me that it took me those hundreds and hundreds of hours to get to that cultural basis. I still think it would be utterly inefficient for me though, I'm a really visual person, so I learn best by reading. With opaque languages I of course have to make sure to have the sound system tightly connected to what I read - TTS or audiobooks - but other than that reading is very efficient for me.
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