This week's Chinese class was ok. We spent the first hour going over the homework. We had to present / do a presentation. I was like Woah woah woah! And said that pretty much to the teacher and whole class on my mic. The teacher isn't a native English speaker so I think she doesn't understand the dread and horror that is associated with the word presentation for students. It turns out she just meant we had to read our homework answers out loud to everyone. Not a big deal at all if you did the assignment. I work slowly and it took me 30 minutes tops to do the homework (two weeks worth). I think it took me less time. And I went slow. I was surprised how many students goofed it or did part and they seemed to have legitimately forgotten to do parts like just writing their answers in hanzi but no pinyin.. they couldn't read what they wrote basically. Some students put a lot of effort into it also. I got to partner with a young mom who's pregnant and plans to send her baby to an Chinese immersion daycare / preschool. I think she's one of the better students. I don't get the impression that she's studied a foreign language at length before from her attitude but she does really well and in particular I'm jealous of her pronunciation. I might be wrong but she seems able to do tones really well already. Some people have a good ear and can also hear their own voice I think so they can match the pitch of their voice to what they're listening to. My mom and sister both seem able to do that and my mom was a bit disgusted with me that I absolutely couldn't. I didn't realize that I couldn't but recording myself singing along to Queen songs I think she was right in her assessment and this carries over to foreign language tones and accents. I have studied the theory behind pronunciation of pinyin more than my partner though so I was able to give her some tips but I was sure to explain that I know theory but do not imitate my pronunciation as I can at least hear the pitch of my voice well enough to know it's off. But ignore pitch, just basic reading pinyin like the difference between "q" and "ch" or "sh" and "x" etc., I at least have looked over a few resources on that so I have the basic ideas down. The teacher's (book's) explanation was good for some of the combinations but lacking for others and I think the students are a bit confused. As is typically the case they don't seem to have spent a bit of extra time researching other resources on Google. I've noticed that with classes. A lot of students rely too much on just one resource: the class textbook and the teacher. They're great but you totally need to be alert to anything that seems out of synch that you don't understand and if you're not comfortable or getting it even after asking the teacher just go look online.
The class gave me a bit of motivation to study Chinese more as expected and I got caught up on my SpoonFed Anki deck. I switched it up so it's reading the audio to me and has a picture on side 1 but no text. Before I was making it as easy as possible to keep myself motivated and focused and well just doing the cards. But I think this way makes me hone in more on the pronunciation and tones and also learn the vocabulary better. But particularly the tones. I was jealous of my partner a bit I think in that her pronunciation was clearly better than mine.
For Korean I'm starting a new Anki deck. It's a sentence deck. I think a big reason I burned out on previous sentence decks is that I wasn't doing i+1 cards. I'm not good at mining i+1 cards. Which is why I was trying to mine sentences from the website howtostudykorean because I figured he would present example sentences more or less in an i+1 fashion. Sometimes yes and sometimes no. And in my sentence deck of course I wanted to add cards for words he didn't give sentences for and those sentences were pretty challenging. So as a solution I thought why not just pick one target word in the sentence and then on side 1 list the words and definitions of any words I don't or might not know if they're a little shaky. That's not quite i+1 but it should help. So I am doing that. But doing the SpoonFed deck I want to also try audio cards out. I don't know if it will work since it would be text to speech. Audio cards might need native audio to be understandable enough that you don't need any text. And putting the definitions for the unknown words on side 1 too. I hope it words if not I'll just go with the korean sentences and audio plus extra definitions on side 1.
I saw a youtube video reviewing an advanced reading comprehension textbook for korean learners:
https://youtu.be/BN3Soe7JsOQ. I found it inspiring and I got to thinking that I should be reading stuff like that. Forget LingQ. And for me it's not advanced but beginner / early intermediate level. The lowest reading level hehe. I already have something that looks good. I think it's called Essential Korean Reader. I bought it a while back and fought my way through the first chapter / unit but then stopped as it was boring and hard. Well it is a little boring but it's much better than just isolated sentences on Anki. And my Korean is a bit better since last time so reading it is easier. And there's a vocab list for each reading passage that's quite extensive and grammar notes. I like that this isn't a fake dialogue like you see in most classroom textbooks. They try to teach a bit of culture in each unit I think. The first unit they talked about how Koreans often bow to each other as a greeting and greetings in general in Korea. The next chapter which I just read for the first time tonight was about food stands and the food you can get there. Most people studying languages are really just foodies looking for excuses to try lots of new foods and they end up learning all the food vocabulary and little else. This isn't me but reading this sure made me hungry. I'll try to remember the food names but somehow my brain tends to tune food names out.
That's it. I'm continuing on with two new languages for now.