Learning A Language With Minimal Daily Study

General discussion about learning languages
Sayonaroo
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Re: Learning A Language With Minimal Daily Study

Postby Sayonaroo » Thu Jul 19, 2018 3:32 am

Anki works well for this for me with Korean. I would watch a 45?? Minute Korean talk/variety show sporadically like I would watch it once a week or once a month or twice a month (depending on many factors) because my love for American/Japanese tv is too strong. I cannot watch it everyday or on a consistent basis because I have life and other interests that aren't in Korean though I do have a lot of Korean talk/variety episode on my to watch list . I mine stuff and add to anki while I watch it or afterwards (taking a screenshot) and so I don't feel like I'm going backwards or that my Korean stagnating despite my inconsistent input. I didn't use anki for Korean for the first 6 months of doing Korean because I knew I'm wasting my time adding common words to anki because they are going to repeat anyway. Also I know Japanese so i have a foundation.

I tried reading a Spanish book 10-15 minutes a day while listening to the audio with lots of repetition using the workaudiobook program using google translate translations and no anki-ing and learning whatever I can from it rather than trying to figure everything out. The words do repeat so I do learn words effectively (no time wasted on looking up individual words in the dictionary or making anki cards or doing anki cards) but there's still sentences that I don't understand or I'm not sure of because of the grammar. I'm sure you can pick up more grammar if you read/listen more but I didn't get to that point. Also I really cannot hear some sounds of Spanish ... it just sounds like the guy is lisping or holding his tongue while making a sound. I'm sure more listening and reading will ameliorate that but I am not there yet. I feel pretty certain it'd be more effective if I did it longer like 30 minutes instead of those short chunks. I stopped doing it because I thought the book sucked despite my 50%?? 60?? Comprehension. I realized I'm interested in conversations rather than reading books in Spanish so I'm gonna try to do something but with conversations like interviews that have some kind of transcript
Last edited by Sayonaroo on Thu Jul 19, 2018 3:44 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Learning A Language With Minimal Daily Study

Postby Lawyer&Mom » Thu Jul 19, 2018 3:40 am

In Clozemaster you review sentences. For easier languages you can use the Fasttrack Mode, where each word has one sentence. So for French, where I have reviewed 16,000 sentences, I have seen 16,000 words. I could *easily* learn 2,000 words in 120 days. For Russian, I could never survive Fastrack Mode. I am slowly going through the *15,000 sentences* that cover the first 500 words. It’s slow going, because Russian is really hard! I like sentence learning, because while you study vocabulary you also pick up grammar and syntax by osmosis. It’s good stuff.
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Re: Learning A Language With Minimal Daily Study

Postby smallwhite » Thu Jul 19, 2018 3:55 am

Hashimi wrote:
I like the idea of learning a language as a side project for no than 10 minutes a day, but I'm surprised that using Clozemaster you learned 250 words only. I have done a similar thing few years ago but using Anki, and I remember it was around 2000 words in the first three months (or 120 days).

What's the difference between Clozemaster and Anki?

Outside of Clozemaster, eg. in Anki and Memrise, people usually carefully select their sentences to cover the most number of words with the least number of sentences.

Clozemaster, on the other hand, takes its database of sentences from Tatoeba, probably automatically, and it seems to take how-ever many sentences there happen to be in Tatoeba. No carefully removing redundant sentences. So, for the word "tired", you could get the sentences "I'm tired", "I am tired", "You're tired", "You are tired", "He's tired", "He is tired", "She's tired", "She is tired", "Tom is tired", "Mary is tired", "Peter is tired", "Jane is tired", "We're tired", "We are tired", "Really tired", ... ... ......
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Re: Learning A Language With Minimal Daily Study

Postby Lawyer&Mom » Thu Jul 19, 2018 1:34 pm

smallwhite wrote:
Hashimi wrote:
I like the idea of learning a language as a side project for no than 10 minutes a day, but I'm surprised that using Clozemaster you learned 250 words only. I have done a similar thing few years ago but using Anki, and I remember it was around 2000 words in the first three months (or 120 days).

What's the difference between Clozemaster and Anki?

Outside of Clozemaster, eg. in Anki and Memrise, people usually carefully select their sentences to cover the most number of words with the least number of sentences.

Clozemaster, on the other hand, takes its database of sentences from Tatoeba, probably automatically, and it seems to take how-ever many sentences there happen to be in Tatoeba. No carefully removing redundant sentences. So, for the word "tired", you could get the sentences "I'm tired", "I am tired", "You're tired", "You are tired", "He's tired", "He is tired", "She's tired", "She is tired", "Tom is tired", "Mary is tired", "Peter is tired", "Jane is tired", "We're tired", "We are tired", "Really tired", ... ... ......


And with Russian I *need* all that repetition.
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Re: Learning A Language With Minimal Daily Study

Postby Lawyer&Mom » Thu Jul 19, 2018 3:39 pm

Hashimi wrote:
Lawyer&Mom wrote:In Clozemaster you review sentences. For easier languages you can use the Fasttrack Mode, where each word has one sentence. So for French, where I have reviewed 16,000 sentences, I have seen 16,000 words. I could *easily* learn 2,000 words in 120 days. For Russian, I could never survive Fastrack Mode. I am slowly going through the *15,000 sentences* that cover the first 500 words. It’s slow going, because Russian is really hard! I like sentence learning, because while you study vocabulary you also pick up grammar and syntax by osmosis. It’s good stuff.


Right. Unlike French or Spanish, Russian is very hard, especially its grammar. But without audio, there is a serious risk of learning bad pronunciation. Don't you agree with me?


Absolutely! Except Clozemaster Russian has audio. It’s TTS, but I’ve downloaded the enhanced iOS Russian voice and honestly it’s pretty good. I use TTS for all my Clozemaster languages: Russian, German, French and Norwegian. I know the other three languages well enough to say that TTS has come far enough to be used for language learning.
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Re: Learning A Language With Minimal Daily Study

Postby Lawyer&Mom » Thu Jul 19, 2018 5:08 pm

Hashimi wrote:
Lawyer&Mom wrote:Absolutely! Except Clozemaster Russian has audio. It’s TTS, but I’ve downloaded the enhanced iOS Russian voice and honestly it’s pretty good. I use TTS for all my Clozemaster languages: Russian, German, French and Norwegian. I know the other three languages well enough to say that TTS has come far enough to be used for language learning.


So in the mobile apps it has audio. They should add this important feature to their website.


Not all the languages have TTS. I think it also depends on whether your particular device supports TTS for that language. I know I’ve done Norwegian TTS on the website, and that was before Norwegian TTS was available on the mobile app (even though my phone already supported Norwegian.) What they really need is a master list of which languages have TTS, and which don’t. I never been able to find something like that.
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Re: Learning A Language With Minimal Daily Study

Postby reineke » Thu Aug 16, 2018 10:28 pm

Warming Up the Language Engines: Short-Term Second Language Use Increases Subsequent Fluency

Results suggest that even a brief period of L2 use can facilitate retrieval, by increasing the relative activation of L2. Furthermore, improvement did not result from priming specific lexical items, suggesting increased relative activation affects the L2 lexicon as a whole.

Introduction
One way in which L2 use can boost subsequent fluency is by increasing the relative activation of L2. Models of bilingual language processing suggest that different languages differ in their activation level within the bilingual's language system. This activation level, however, is neither fixed nor dependent solely on the individual's level of proficiency, but may vary depending on context and task demands...

The present study was aimed at investigating whether there is a benefit to L2 fluency, in particular L2 lexical retrieval, from a relatively brief period of L2 use. For this purpose, we examined the effect of a short-term use of English by native Hebrew speakers on subsequent English verbal fluency.

Discussion
Overall results suggest that even short-term L2 use (less than 10 min) significantly increased letter verbal fluency. Furthermore, both comprehension and production of L2 facilitated subsequent fluency...

Importantly, an increase in fluency was observed after a purely receptive L2 use, suggesting it does not result from actual output practice...The improvement in the letter fluency task further suggest the increase in fluency is due to a global increase in the relative activation of L2, rather than to the local activation of specific lexical items.

Results suggest that initial adjustment to L2 can temporarily confer some of the benefits provided by longer L2 use, though obviously to a far weaker degree. Furthermore, the current results underscore the importance of recent language experience, even a brief one, in addition to the more stable language dominance pattern. Activation of L1 was not examined in the current study; therefore, our results are also consistent with accounts that suggest that language selection does not involve inhibition of the nontarget language, but rather preferential activation of the target language (Poulisse and Bongaerts, 1994; Grosjean, 2001).

These results are also consistent with Elston-Güttler et al. (2005) who argued that there is a gradual process of adjustment following a switch to L2, a process they coined “zooming into L2.”

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10 ... 00032/full
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Re: Learning A Language With Minimal Daily Study

Postby Teango » Fri Aug 17, 2018 1:05 am

Shintel & Faust (2018) wrote:"Overall results suggest that even short-term L2 use (less than 10min) significantly increased letter verbal fluency. Furthermore, both comprehension and production of L2 facilitated subsequent fluency... Taken together these findings suggest a global inhibitory mechanism that is both long-lasting and broad." (pp. 6-7)

This is a very interesting article, and one which I hope will lead to further related studies. It would be particularly helpful to have more data on how this "zooming into L2" (or "Monday-Friday effect") modulates relative global activation of an L2 over time, both after a short activity as described in the project, and during the course of a much longer period of L2 use. I'm also curious as to how different types of receptive and productive L2 activities impact the overall effect.

Good to have you back, reineke! :)
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