General language log

[sporedandroid]

I just found a bunch of Hebrew books at my local bookstore. I’ve been checking the foreign language section on and off for a while. Before I mainly bought them as collector items, but now I can actually think about how much I want to read a book. Right now books in most languages are often mostly collector items anyways. Including English books. Maybe I’ll get motivated to get more into reading Hebrew. My motivation to read books in general is slowly coming back and so is my motivation to study Hebrew.

[sporedandroid]

I’m starting to struggle with my OCD symptoms again. This is related to language learning because language learning seems to “cure” me. I’ve been studying sort of obsessively since 2019. It stressed me out, but it kept my OCD symptoms in check. I’m not “officially” diagnosed, but I did see an OCD specialist who said he was sure I have it. Since OCD makes you doubt things by nature, I obviously end up doubting I have it. Especially since my symptoms seem to be on and off. OCD symptoms seem to sneak up on you. I’ve been noticing more and more compulsions popping up. Last night I ended up having an anxiety attack the whole night.

I think this means I’ll have to try out Icelandic again. Finnish is a fun language to study, but I don’t seem to be passionate enough about it to pull me away from OCD. I’ve been avoiding Icelandic because it feels like it’s “contaminated”, but maybe I’ll have to get back into studying it to feel good again. I just can’t help, but be intense about something. If I don’t pick something, my brain will. It usually won’t be the best choice.

[sporedandroid]

It seems like I’m getting better at understanding some things in Hebrew even though I’m not really actively working on it. I’m mainly just doing anki reviews when I feel like it. I’m just noticing I’m understanding more nuance in the songs I listen to. My goal is to just understand Hebrew with less effort. Maybe taking more breaks is good for that. I’ve been studying hard for a while without really noticing much progress.

I just bought a book in Hebrew. It’s the Hebrew version of Thinking Fast and Slow. The last book I bought is slightly too hard. Maybe the book I bought is closer to my level. It’s popular non-fiction. I’ve read decent portions of popular non-fiction books in Hebrew before. They were e-books and now I get to read a physical version.

I'm also getting some decent progress in Finnish. One slightly annoying thing is that my brain feels like it’s working harder listening to Finnish music because I’m starting to understand more and more words. It still doesn’t feel like comprehension yet. I'm still at the stage where I'm happy to catch words. I’m starting to notice it’s getting easier to find i+1 phrases.

Some Anki phrases that I added a few months ago are starting to make more sense. Before I’d sort of just rote memorize them, but now I’m having an easier time understanding each component. It also feels like the Finnish learner videos are easier to memorize or learn. I’d say I’m actively studying Finnish more than Hebrew. I’m nowhere near finishing the premade Anki decks. Since I have so many decks, I’m sort of taking them slow. I try to make my own Anki cards from wiktionary and learner videos. They’re more fun to study, but I also accept it’s harder to make my own Anki cards at the stage I’m in.

Since I’m a beginner, I still need sentences that have an English translation available. I’ll consider myself more intermediate when I can start figuring out Finnish sentences without English translations. Another sign I’m intermediate is not finding subs2srs helpful. I’m taking subs2srs slow. Right now I’m still studying it mainly for fun. I find it’s not as helpful for Finnish. I am starting to sort of understand some stuff from a few months ago more.

So far my motivation to study Finnish is okay. I study it pretty consistently. It’s a fun language, but I still don’t seem to be the most passionate about it. Even if I don’t end up sticking to it, I feel like it’s a good palate cleanser. I’m getting way less intrusive thoughts when I listen to Icelandic. If I don’t start feeling more passionate about Finnish maybe I’ll get back to Icelandic.

[sporedandroid]

I guess my strategy of only studying Hebrew when I feel like it is sort of working. Sometimes I notice small signs of progress. I wasn’t really noticing any progress when I forced myself to be consistent. That approach worked when I was at a lower intermediate level. It doesn’t work when you’re in an intermediate plateau. I guess the main thing I want is for Hebrew to feel like less effort. My issue is that my comprehension is decent, but it sometimes feels like too much effort. Reading also feels like too much effort. I recently started getting back into it. I’ll usually reread some articles and sometimes read new ones that seem interesting enough. I also got started with a book. My pace is still very slow. I hope it gets a bit easier. I seem to do better when I do a lot in short bursts when I really feel like it. I usually do Anki reviews at least every other day.

I guess for Finnish I also try to do Anki reviews at least every day. Since I’m a beginner, most of my listening practice is still music. I do notice that I keep noticing more words that I know and sort of understanding sentence fragments or simple sentences. When I’m craving more Finnish I’ll watch learner videos. My progress is slow and steady, which seems to happen to me in the beginner stage. I don’t know if I’ll get more excited about Finnish. In some ways it’s a good thing because I don’t care as much about how well I’m doing. I might end up switching to a more practical language or just go back to Icelandic. Right now I’m just sticking to two languages.

[sporedandroid]

I didn’t have the best time studying Hebrew yesterday. It just feel like too much effort. I just want it to be lower effort already. Some days it feels nearly effortless. That made me want to focus on Finnish more today. It felt pretty easy to go through my Anki reviews. Today I was in the mood for watching YouTube videos. Even though my comprehension is pretty low. I found this YouTube video with captions. I sort of got a few phrases here and there, but not a whole lot. After the video I decided to try deepl. It has Finnish, but no Hebrew. The translation made sense to me, so I made a few Anki cards with it. Back when I used google translate for Hebrew it did a really bad job, so I never used google translate for language learning. I think one issue with Hebrew is that a lot of words have a lot of meanings. I think machine translation can handle that when it happens once in a while, but I think it happens a lot more with Hebrew. That’s also something that confused me.

[sporedandroid]

Today I had a pretty good time studying Hebrew. I finished pretty much all my Anki reviews and read several articles. I managed to add a few new cards to my new Hebrew Anki deck. It’s been pretty hard for me learn new Hebrew words. I’m mostly learning sayings or other meanings for common words at this point. So I need to read and concentrate a lot. It’s not something I can do every day. My reading level also isn’t all that great.

Finnish is a whole different story. I’m a beginner, so it’s not all that hard to find unknown words. I think DeepL opened up a lot of possibilities. I just subscribed to the YouTube channel that had that video. The videos seem interesting enough and most of them seem to have captions. I’m also using DeepL to help me study my subs2srs deck. Since I did more Hebrew, I didn’t watch any Finnish videos today. Since I’m a beginner, it still doesn’t feel useful to watch Finnish videos most of the time.

It’s mostly something I do for fun when I’m fed up with Hebrew and language learning in general. I still don’t expect much out of it and maybe I’ll understand more than I expect. Right now it feels like I understand 30% of those videos that are aimed at native speakers, but spoken clearly with subtitles. It’s not ideal for listening practice. I’d say that when I watch some learner videos I might understand half. I’ve mainly been focusing on my premade Anki decks with production cards. Right now I just say it in my head and check how accurate I am. I’m getting better at it, but obviously this slows down the process of learning new vocabulary. I’m doing it because being bad at grammar really lowers your comprehension in Finnish.

I’ll still do production cards, but maybe I’ll start making more of my own Anki cards which will be a lot easier with DeepL. I’m also noticing more and more i+1 sentences. There’s also quite a bit of i+0.5 sentences where I kind of know all the words, but I’m less familiar with the grammar. Naturally that means there’s i+1.5 and i+2. I try to avoid adding i+2, but it still ends up happening sometimes. I guess I’ll keep taking the production cards slow, but I’ll pick up the pace in making my own Anki cards.

[sporedandroid]

I think finding this YouTube channel has made me more motivated to study Finnish. The channel is called For YA and it’s about writing and YA(young adult) novels. I find their voices very pleasant, so I don’t mind having a low comprehension. So far all the videos I’ve seen have captions. The captions are in written Finnish, but they speak in spoken Finnish. I think that helps make DeepL more accurate and it makes it easier to look up words.

The topics are sort of relevant to me. I’d sort of like to get more into writing and I also want to be more familiar with the Finnish book scene. I think the videos being mainly about one topic will also make it easier to learn vocabulary and start understanding the videos more easily.

Following the i+1 rule is hard. I don’t really follow it if the sentence structure is super straightforward. I skip over long sentences or sentences with too many long words. Long words only really bother me if I’m dealing with unknown words. They weren’t a problem in Icelandic. Icelandic just bashes words together. Long Finnish words are more complicated. And Icelandic comedian even made fun of long Finnish words. At first I thought he was a bit hypocritical, but now I kind of understand why. At the moment sentence mining is more repetitive and time consuming than anything else. I don’t have to figure anything out. This makes it ideal for days I don’t feel super sharp. I know having to figure things out is “better” for learning, but I’m at a stage where that’s not possible. I can still get by on rote memorization and noticing patterns. At this point I can pretty much do anything I want and still progress. I’ll enjoy it.

[sporedandroid]

Even though I’m still a beginner at Finnish, it seems like I’m at a different stage now. For a long time I’ve been in the “easing into it” stage. I guess I sort of started “studying” in 2020, but even before that I was randomly learning words. I guess I “officially” started studying around February or so. I think after a few months I had to take a break. I was doing too much “boring” stuff.

Now I think I’m getting closer to the “cramming” stage. My brain feels more eager to soak up more knowledge. Since I like the way Finnish sounds, it’s easier to get listening practice with low comprehension. I can just enjoy how it sounds without understanding all that much. I think it also has to do with being a more experienced language learner. In the past low comprehension or mismatched subtitles would have driven me crazy. Now I don’t really care. Since I’m still a beginner, I still have to press again a lot on Anki. So I’m making sure not to learn a ridiculous amount of new cards. I also just deleted my tatoeba deck. I’ve been thinking about deleting it for a while. It’s not the best made and it’s such a slog to study. Now that I’m making my own cards super fast, I don’t feel the need to have that deck.

I don’t know what this will do to my motivation to study Hebrew. Maybe I’ll just let myself take more of a break. I think I’ve been needing a break for a while. I think that will also help me focus more later on. I just find it a lot easier to study Finnish right now.

[sporedandroid]

I’m still figuring out what my pace will be for adding Anki cards. For now I’m doing 5 a day, which seems pretty safe. Maybe I’ll try 10 a day. My issue is that I still don’t retain things very well. That’s just the nature of being a beginner. One thing that kind of annoys me about Anki is the order that it shows me new cards. It only seems to focus on the cards I made the most recently. For now I suspend a lot of them and only study cards that seem easy. I’m sure there is a way to fix this, but I kind of like looking at a bunch of Anki cards.

One thing that is fun is pretending I can understand YouTube videos. Mainly vlogs and videos where people are doing specific things. I know my comprehension is still low, but it’s high enough I can pretend I understand. At least for some things. I feel like if I didn’t take a break from Finnish, maybe I’d be able to understand for real. Or maybe not. I really wasn’t feeling it.

I’m just not feeling it for Hebrew. I haven’t been for a while. I think I’m overdue for a break. I just haven’t been able to let Hebrew go since I’ve been so consistent about it. Now that Finnish wants to be the main language, it’s a bit easier. Icelandic wanted to be the main language as well, but I didn’t let it. I guess Icelandic is next in line unless a random language like Hebrew pops up.

Even if taking a break doesn’t improve your level, I think it at least helps with motivation. Since my heart isn’t into it. My brain just doesn’t want to put the effort into Hebrew. Even looking at or hearing Hebrew stresses me out. So I just won’t even try to get motivated for a while. Eventually I’ll miss it and then I’ll be way more motivated.

Another issue is that I can’t truly be motivated to study two languages at once. I’ve been sort of wishy washy about two languages for a while. I guess that’s the best I could do at the stage I was at. I don’t understand how people can be passionate about ten languages at once. Or even two. I think I was starting to gravitate towards Icelandic and Finnish because there’s certain things about Hebrew that just frustrated me. I’m sure I’ll find things frustrating about Finnish and want to switch to another language. Right now one thing I enjoy about Finnish is the low expectations. Unfortunately that won’t last forever.

[sporedandroid]

I guess I’m officially at what I like to call the sentence gold rush stage. I remember being at this stage for Hebrew in about 2019. I’d say this stage starts when you’re still a beginner and it stays until you’re intermediate. It’s sort of the opposite of the intermediate plateau. For Hebrew I sort of “wasted” it. I didn’t make a whole bunch of Anki cards. I just kept analyzing sentences in some subtitled videos.

Right now I’m sort of doing that with the help of DeepL. I do try to use wiktionary and make sense of things myself when I can. If a sentence really makes no sense, I won’t add it. Sometimes I can find a lot of good sentences easily. It barely uses any brain power at all. Sometimes it really does use up a lot of brain power. In this stage I find I’m super motivated to push way beyond the point of discomfort. Even if I end up doing that, at least I’m not wasting it. I’ve been creating a lot of Anki cards. I don’t know if all of them will even be useful to study, but I think making them helps me learn.

Right now I feel exhausted. So I won’t make more for now. I guess in the last few days I’ve made about 100 Anki cards. So I have the right to feel exhausted. I guess I’m sort of on schedule. What I mean by that is being able to constructively use YouTube videos and podcasts as listening practice after one year of studying. That’s roughly how long it took for Hebrew.