Lisa's Language Log

[Lisa]

I have put a halt on french audio, both listening and speaking. It's a time sink and my efforts weren't very effective, and it wasn't a core part of my french goal which was reading. For a few more weeks I'm going to keep on the vocabulary and grammar - I don't want to give up quite yet on the parts that I can feel working (I think my reading is improving day by day), and I'd like to get to 1000 on vocab as a nice round number.

Pushing myself more on german listening - it does seem better; trying to get more variety of sources and doing some every day. Listening is the easy part. I've got some ideas about what else to do to get myself producing... still considering how to make this work. Right now, though, until the work release is done (that keeps getting pushed out), I'll sometimes need my entire brain to keep up with the day job and juggle everything else and then there's moving, so I need to be a little careful about big commitments.

[Lisa]

I've been using Anki heavily since 2019, first spanish then german, and my technique was NL->TL and TL->NL, with audio. Pictures didn't help. With German I added some plurals and participles. This was all very effective, except for the german twins (e.g. vergeben, vorgehen, etc.). However, this system just did not work with French.

Thinking back on something I read, about using facial recognition brain circuits to recognize words, I think I pick up the shape of the word and identify it, and can answer the TL->NL anki card, without really knowing much detail about the word. This is why only TL->NL didn't seem to work for me, although some people on this forum recommended it. Also would explain why vergeben/vorgehen were so hard to distinguish.

The audio, I think, inserts the word in a different part of my brain than plain memorization. Sometimes the TL audio comes out of my brain while my episodic memory draws a blank on the written NL->TL. Since in spanish and german the audio and written match, it didn't really matter. (There's also the problem of presenting an NL word with multiple possible TL translations, and a TL word with multiple NL translations, but while I've got at least three workarounds, none of them are satisfactory. But that is really a different kind of problem.)

With French, when the audio comes out of the brain, you can't tell how it might be written. So I see the NL "near", and the sound "prɛ" comes up, but then I don't actually get pushed to notice the letters of the word. This makes it much more difficult to learn the words. (It doesn't help that the french audio I had from various anki decks plus sound of text was very mixed and sometimes low quality, relative to my similarly collected spanish and german)

Last week I put a halt on specific audio learning (that is, no TL audio only ->NL), though most of the cards still produce audio since it's so helpful. Since I'm currently doing kwiziq for grammar and using anki to learn conjugations, and I needed the details of how they were written since all the forms may look different but sound the same, so I put in cards where I have to type in the answer. This has been very effective at forcing me to notice the details, I'm surprised at how easy it has been to pick up the conjugations. Of course making cards is half the benefit. I don't like doing these cards on the phone, but on the computer I can go through these very fast.

Also having given up specific audio learning, I feel like vocabulary is going faster and is easier. However, that may be since the TL audio only ->NL cards were 1/3 of the number of cards and were the most likely to get wrong.

Earlier I had tried typing cards for some of the more difficult french words, but this was not successful. Possibly the audio interferes with the written version (e.g. TL audio-only->TL written); I might try NL->TL typed and see if that works.

The interesting idea I had, is if typing cards would help with the vergeben/vorgehen problem. I might check the audio too, and see if it's clear and distinguishable.

[Lisa]

On Wednesday, I met my quizIQ goal (50% A2, 75%A1, 100%A0). wheeeee! I still have 14 days on my month. A lot of the A2 was passe compose which was just great to learn. Like modals in german (I really love those), but the added twist of having the participle agree for être and the extra unexpected twist of using être for reflexive verbs. And given the loose goosey possibilities of vous (or perhaps on) for singular or plural and masculine or feminine... it's crazy but in a defined and finite way.

I'm at 985 words although some of those are not unique (fâcher/fâche, casser/cassé), so I'd need a margin if I was to say 1000. But still, should be only a matter of a few days.

I think that what I'm doing in my book could now be described as reading. Sometimes I have to stare at each word before it individually resolves, and remember grammar rules and apply them, to make the sentence make sense... so it's not always very fast. And there are a fair number of unknown and unguessable words, including those that matter to the meaning of the sentence... so there are parts that I'm not getting. But it's not like when I started where I was scanning for anything recognizable, and sometimes it goes fairly smoothly. At this point I can read for more than a few pages before I'm too tired to go on, so possibly I should keep going and finish this book. I timed myself and I completed a page in about 2 minutes (not noting down any unknown words). I'm at page 120 or so (of 324) in Mort sur le Nil. So it's about 7 hours of reading to finish this, although I would expect it to get faster over time.

There is probably some grammar that I need more than vocab for reading comprehension, there were some constructions that I couldn't work out (I think it was the use of en). Learning imperfect was very helpful in figuring out the root verbs, but I need more simple past, and I'm seeing some conditional or subjunctive or something. The idioms topics have been very helpful too.

[Lisa]

Yesterday I formally closed down french. I was at a bit over 1000 words and had met my goals in grammar, still only halfway through my book but the time just had come. I do feel like the pronunciation was a failure; I think if I try again it will need a teacher that can help more specifically with that, it's not that easy to do on your own in any case. And after all, it is french. Oddly, the grammar as bizarre as it is wasn't necessarily an issue; but that might have just been that since I was at the top of A2 and starting into B1 I hadn't reached the really fun parts yet. And then, it seems less arbitrary than German.

This is a generalization based on too few examples but I think learning starts with a flailing around period, then settles into an explosion period, then into the slog part. It's great to get past the flailing stage; duolingo was completely unhelpful in getting me through that, and I credit not using duolingo that I didn't give up this time. But... I think I love the explosion period where you learn something and can immediately apply it. With my false beginner languages I didn't have the flailing, I went into explosion right away. And get stuck in slog.

So: Back to german, and back into slog, which only gets worse until possibly someday it gets better. I now understand better the language-dread LeBaron mentioned... as I was thinking about 15000 anki cards after 3 1/2 months away... and I seem to have lost my edge on adjective endings and even vocabulary. I continued to read german while on french, but I don't think that preserved much. <sigh> what a delight it is to learn a language in which every bit you learn is new and useful.

However, I am looking forward to applying some anki tricks I needed to develop for french to german, and to consider how to start forward progress and what I can do to keep motivated... some measurable goal that doesn't itself become the goal. I think that source of motivation needs to change between the explosion period and the slog period but it's basically a new problem for me.

I do mean to get those adjective endings, though. Even dative plural and non-preceded genitive.

[Lisa]

Either I've got better at searching, there are more there since couple of years ago or whenever I last tried to find something, or my level is better - whatever the reason, I've been finding interesting youtubes and podcasts that are the right level (I get about 80%). I don't have a lot of suitable time (I need to pay pretty close attention), but even if I get in 10 minutes a day it will make a difference.

Still unhappy with the online grammar learning + overall scoring offerings. I might consider trying some of the paid ones. The paper book could work... but I've got a poor record (looking up answers in the back!). And I haven't done anything towards production. But I've been having to do a whole lot of things I don't really want to deal with in real life, so I'm not pushing myself very hard. And perhaps the magic is real and if I listen and read enough whazaam I'll be able to speak and write grammatically.

I have been adapting my anki grammar cards, especially adjective endings, and I was also working on prepositions. I don't think blindly throwing more vocabulary into anki is going to help, though it's certainly the easiest approach. I think I am just going to keep on erasing my scores and starting over... it's meaningless, really; my intervals don't really strongly correlate with my knowledge, and after this pause and the past pause which I wasn't quite caught up with, well, I'm presented with a mix of very overdue 1 dayers and slightly overdue 6 monthers and 1 year olds that are just coming due... easier to treat them all the same, and Anki handles the flow of new words very well. I'm putting my easy interval way high. The key is to not think of those words as chore looming; anki is something you can never, ever finish, but that's okay. Anyway, I don't want to make Anki so central, vocabulary is not a limiting factor for me. Though you can always use more new words.

Oh, and I have also a resolution to move off of my agatha cristie diet (I have about 34 of them now) and tackle some of the others in my stash. Very different experience, reading in a different language - the speed is so different that it creates a very different experience. Agatha christie is great that way, the pacing works and the action is straightforward. Although some of them I don't enjoy in german, they seem far-fetched and ridiculous. Which was true for Harry Potter too; I reread that couple of weeks ago, and with much better reading ability I didn't enjoy it as much as when I was struggling, I could see the er logical gaps.

[Lisa]

Really happy with listening comprehension. They don't speak that slow in podcasts and yet I can follow, much better than 4 or 6 months ago or whenever it was I was trying to listen. And topic matters; I don't have the vocabulary or all that much interest in politics, I'm afraid.

After finishing my AC I read one of my native-german krimis and it went well. There are a lot more difficult expressions, which I didn't note down since I'm trying to avoid the single-minded new-words-in-anki system. I just went back to the book before that in the series and start that, much easier than the first time around.

I've been browsing in my german grammar, though not really working on it (grammarwise I've resumed the anki work on adjective endings and prepositions). Studying french was a very interesting experience in language learning. As a false beginner in spanish and german, I knew the pattern of grammar, even if I'd forgotten all the specific details. It's almost like I couldn't see the grammar as a thing, or rather a whole bunch of little sets of rules. With spanish and german, I felt like I could read just fine without studying any grammar, once I just knew a few more words... I only started studying Spanish grammer since I was so worried about that class, and my german study has been very little. I haven't sorted out how I really think about this and how it applies to german, but I could be a bit more systematic about german grammar.

Which matters if I produce, which I've been doing a VERY small amount of.

[Lisa]

I caught some horrible cold and was out for the best part of two weeks, so all my intentions and plans fell apart and I just did anki (I have even been reading entirely in english). Though I am finally beating my adjective endings to death so that's something. But now moving and related tasks have become urgent, and summer arrived and the garden/sheep have become urgent, so I can't get back on track quite yet.

However, I happened upon a great video on vowel sounds that was very helpful (as I'm still feeling the weight of my failure with French vowels, and I've slightly lost confidence in my German vowels).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdldD0-kEcc
It makes the messy pile of vowels seem much more more understandable, though I'd have to go through the details to be sure. I did get a book on phonemes that someone recommended but I'd only done the first few sounds before my brain melted; and I'm sure vowels come after the consonants. This also mentions the praat speech analysis (free) software:
https://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/
which could be exactly what I need to distinguish my minimum pairs.

[Lisa]

The house move is still in progress (with months to go at least, with some major work in September) and the summer garden lull over. I'm spending little time on languages and even that time would probably be better used sleeping.

I'd forgotten a lot of the recently-learned words and was so far behind that I basically started over again in anki, but that's going along.... not as fast as I'd like, but there's no fast way when you've got 15k cards. Reading some in german, but only a little and only rereading agatha christies, I have several more recent books but I know these will have new vocabulary, so I'm holding off until I'm more caught up. For a while I was watching youtube videos in german - mostly on minimalism/decluttering, these seem to have less specialized vocabulary than history and science videos and depending on the speaker were easier or harder to understand. I found a wealth of podcasts in german... but that resource is mostly untapped. We also booked our flights for next April... so I'll have to get much more serious once the weather turns.

[Le Baron]

Summer seems to derail a lot of people. I know I stopped listening to audio/podcasts in a heavy way once the weather improved. Time is such a premium!

[Lisa]

The house move/transition is still creeping along... with vast mountains of labor looming once the holidays are past. Up til early December I was only doing anki and reading, with very little attention to actual language learning, but then... I had to write german christmas cards again and felt illiterate again <sigh> and realized April was getting close and I needed to pay attention again.

Since summer, I've been very good about anki and have got through almost all - now about 5500 - of the words I'd had going in 2021-2022 and started from scratch this year. About 2.5 cards per word, so it's a lot of cards; I added example sentences as well as all the others... and am strategically using write cards for problem words which has been very helpful, but I delete those as soon as I think they've done their job since they are SO much work. I've been dealing in chunks of 500-1000 words, I pick the words that look easiest, and once I get a chunk to where the reviews are getting boring, I export it and delete it. This seems to be working for me - and quite a few months now; although I expect I'm forgetting the words I learned in summer.

I'm very impressed at how easy it was to relearn the words I'd learned before. Learning words is getting harder now that I'm down to the words I didn't really know, or had lots of problems with the first time around. But all this year I have only added a very few new words... I think my problems do not include not knowing enough words.

Sometime in fall I also went back to my german agatha christies... read them all again; I have 34 and two new ones recently arrived. They don't feel easier to read than they were... but I sure am reading them a whole lot faster. I do find that reading other unknown german text is less effort than it was.

In December (due to the christmas card writing problems), I started working with an italki tutor on speaking. That's been very useful; it's quite tiring, but I've got to build up stamina. It's also been good to identify words, and general sentence patterns, that I need to be able to get out in one go.

I put on a youtube television news segment and that's now fairly understandable, which is one of my marker signs. I mean to be listening more; it doesn't yet have a good natural place to fit in, since I'm not doing much driving. My former weekly office visits are on video now, which saves a lot of time -- but that was the german listening time.

And I still don't have ALL the adjective endings down pat - there are a few of the non-proceeded that I continue to get wrong and some others that often throw me in practice. But I'm close.