More Korean than Japanese in 2022 - 2023

Continue or start your personal language log here, including logs for challenge participants
kraemder
Green Belt
Posts: 323
Joined: Fri Aug 28, 2015 12:10 am
Location: Tucson, Arizona
Languages: English (N)
Japanese (JLPT N2)
German (read several books)
Spanish (read a couple books)
Korean (studying for about a year semi seriously)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=21&t=1204
x 498

Re: Was learning Korean, now I'm doing Mandarin. The hard way of course.

Postby kraemder » Sat Oct 17, 2020 12:30 am

Well my Korean teacher cancelled on me again. She cancelled on Tuesday and then again today :cry: . I wonder if I'm a bad student. I remember teaching English to Japanese people online using a website and I was eager for lessons so I had turned on teaching lessons for classes where other teachers cancelled.. this one student it seemed everyone cancelled on him last minute. He was an English college professor and had an ego to go with being a professor at a university and the lessons were really weird. I hated it and it was a bit nerve wracking to teach him. I could totally see why people would cancel on him but really I think if they accepted the lesson in the first place they should follow through. Why accept the lesson if you're just going to cancel anyway? Yeah, so I'm wondering if I'm like that guy was. A really difficult student to teach :shock: . Oh noes. I hope not. When I do Japanese lessons I think it's more fun for the teachers because I can talk a lot and they can just sit back and listen but for Korean I'm such a noob they have to do a lot more work.
3 x

kraemder
Green Belt
Posts: 323
Joined: Fri Aug 28, 2015 12:10 am
Location: Tucson, Arizona
Languages: English (N)
Japanese (JLPT N2)
German (read several books)
Spanish (read a couple books)
Korean (studying for about a year semi seriously)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=21&t=1204
x 498

Re: Was learning Korean, now I'm doing Mandarin. The hard way of course.

Postby kraemder » Sat Oct 24, 2020 11:38 pm

So having my Korean teacher cancel on me twice in a row was demotivating for my Korean. I am continuing with Chinese instead. In our last class I had the pleasure of being partnered up with the half Japanese girl who attended Japanese weekend school growing up and whose Japanese is probably very close to kids growing up in Japan. Of course I'm naturally really curious about such people who have the unique cultural perspective of both my native culture and my favorite foreign language. I presume she's college age maybe 18 or 20 or so but I was actually nervous. On one hand I was really curious about her background and on the other hand there's not much time to make small talk as we have to get through the material. I couldn't resist speaking some Japanese. She was totally cool about it and was happy to reply in Japanese and we talked a little bit about our experience with Japanese and how it helps with Chinese. Just a little though.

As I think I've mentioned here it helps tons with the writing system and that came up with me in the class when it was time to present my homework. The teacher has told us that it's ok to just write the hanzi on our homework assignments and leave out the pinyin if and only if we can read the hanzi when we present the assignment. Somehow this concept doesn't seem to get through to a lot of students. They don't know what's difficult to understand it seems very straight forward to me but I think a lot of people taking on an Asian language for the first time they just get confused easily even though they're trying their best. So I read my assignment as expected. I was really nervous. More a stage fright thing than anything else. When the assignment was given last week and I looked at the paragraph the teacher had written I was already able to read it and understand it perfectly without checking or studying anything. (She only used the material we have been studying so for someone like me who is looking at all material and even a bit of native material it was pretty easy.) After I got through it and silently berated myself for butchering all the tones she praised me extensively and explained how -this- was what she meant by it's ok to not do the pinyin if you can present in class without it. Ikumi had been doing this already since a couple weeks before but she didn't do that with her just with me. I think because Ikumi is half Japanese and obviously has all this background with Chinese characters she doesn't want to put her out there as an example of how to perform to the others but I'm different. Except I don't think she understands just how much time I've spent on Japanese :D . So I don't think it's really fair for them to compare themselves with me (at least as far as reading Chinese characters goes). Listening and speaking I'm struggling just as much as anyone else.

When I finished Harry Potter book 1 in Korean it was really motivating and I had been thinking I would go all out extensive reading immersion as a result and I did for about a week but burned out. I'm back to the flash cards again. I've been working off the HSK list and using a deck I downloaded along with the Spoonfed deck and then getting some reading in on the side when I got tired of that. Even if I'm not going to go all out extensive reading I think I need to strike a balance. I have a lot of graded readers in Chinese and I don't want them to be wasted. So, even though I think the HSK list is great and the words I would study with it are in line with my level and what I need, I'm not going to use it. I'm going to vocabulary and sentence mine instead. I'll probably do more vocabulary mining than sentence mining because I'm wary of too many sentences causing me to burn out. Using the Chinese language add on for Anki it's really easy to add vocabulary if I'm at my computer while I'm reading. Just type in the vocab word into the vocabulary field and then the add on populates the rest and it looks great.

As I often do, I was thinking about why I keep using Anki when I didn't use rote to learn German and Spanish. And I think that's just because I didn't have SRS as an option back then. I probably would have abused SRS just as much as i do now had I had that as an option. I think sentence mining and limiting the amount of words each night to 20 tops and maybe just 10 so that when I run out of new words I have to go mine will help motivate me to keep immersing. Sentence/vocab mining is pretty fun. I'm very eager to learn new words. Reading a graded reader or native material isn't really all that much fun (yet) and motivating myself to just read for the sake of reading isn't quite working out but I think adding in the sentence/vocab mining element will help a lot.
1 x

kraemder
Green Belt
Posts: 323
Joined: Fri Aug 28, 2015 12:10 am
Location: Tucson, Arizona
Languages: English (N)
Japanese (JLPT N2)
German (read several books)
Spanish (read a couple books)
Korean (studying for about a year semi seriously)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=21&t=1204
x 498

Re: Was learning Korean, now I'm doing Mandarin. The hard way of course.

Postby kraemder » Sun Oct 25, 2020 12:08 am

I forgot to mention my latest bad idea. If you have studied kanji/hanzi (from my experience kanji) at one point you probably decided you would just brute force the sounds for each kanji into your head and got a deck for Anki or some other SRS type app to that. Maybe even one that seemed halfway credible like kanji damage. And then you studied it and while some of the kanji common readings stuck, and this was good, more than half were leeches. You ended up a couple weeks later or so with a really exhausted brain and a sense that maybe this wasn't such a good idea.

Well my latest bad idea is to do just this exactly. I'm telling myself that the ratio of hanzi that stick to ones that don't stick will be much better thanks to my years of studying Japanese kanji. I am using an app called StickyStudy which has its own variety of SRS and built in hanzi cards with audio. The layout is very nice and the SRS system is pretty appealing I think - you take one of the decks and then pick a date to 'finish' it and it tells you how many cards you need to get right every day to achieve your goal. It adjusts the number of needed cards based on how much progress you're making but in theory if you follow the suggested study amounts every day it will be the same every day. I chose to do HSK Hanzi 1-4 which is about 1000 hanzi. I don't know how many I already know I'm guessing about 200. I chose one month as a target. The app told me this was probably too aggressive but it lets me decide and it has me set to do I think 120ish right answers a day. It's Saturday and I started early this morning technically at 2 AM or so and I'm several hundred right answers ahead already. Of course that will be impossible to maintain during the week I just hope to get the minimum then. And I hope that it sticks. It may not. It would be smarter to do try to learn fewer in this amount of time. I'm doing this because as I was making my way through the HSK deck I was having some difficulty with multiple Hanzi words that had two really unfamiliar hanzi. It seemed like one would stick but the other wouldn't. So maybe doing them one at a time would work better? I'll find out.
0 x

alaart
Green Belt
Posts: 338
Joined: Sat Aug 03, 2019 6:58 am
Location: Kaoshiung
Languages: DE (N), EN
B1: NL, JP, PT (BR), ZH
A2: KR
A1: ES
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... hp?t=10867
x 1027

Re: Was learning Korean, now I'm doing Mandarin. The hard way of course.

Postby alaart » Sun Oct 25, 2020 1:32 am

Well my latest bad idea is to do just this exactly. I'm telling myself that the ratio of hanzi that stick to ones that don't stick will be much better thanks to my years of studying Japanese kanji.


With your Japanese background it should work out I think. And focusing on characters should be a very good basis, provided you don't do it like me and avoid reading afterwards and forget everything again.

I currently study Hanzi too, what I do is search for all the words I have already learned which use the (new, or forgotten) character in Japanese and Chinese, and review those words together with the character. I also split all the characters in 2 decks: "same as Japanese" and "non Japanese and simplified".

And in general I just make a lot of cross references: For example yesterday I learned 邀请 (yāoqǐng - to invite). So this new character 邀 is new, and it does not exist, or at least is not really common in Japanese. But, conveniently I have learned a very similar Kanji before in Japanese, the 激 from 激しい. So like this I try to remember them. Also if you sometimes have a strange character and look at the traditional version, sometimes you can derive the relation to a known Japanese character from there, little by little it all puzzles together. Good luck!

[Edit]
Ah, and for pronunciation. In Chinese it is less difficult to know the pronunciation from the character as there is often a clue in the character, and there is usually only one pronunciation (sometimes 2). Another story is the tone however, and since there is no logic in the character which would give away the tone, it may be better to combine this with vocabularies rather than characters. Also reading texts out loud can help, and checking your tones afterwards. At least that's how I study tones - I keep forgetting them though, but I'm sure they will come back.
2 x

kraemder
Green Belt
Posts: 323
Joined: Fri Aug 28, 2015 12:10 am
Location: Tucson, Arizona
Languages: English (N)
Japanese (JLPT N2)
German (read several books)
Spanish (read a couple books)
Korean (studying for about a year semi seriously)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=21&t=1204
x 498

Re: Was learning Korean, now I'm doing Mandarin. The hard way of course.

Postby kraemder » Sun Oct 25, 2020 6:56 am

[quote="alaart"]

With your Japanese background it should work out I think. And focusing on characters should be a very good basis, provided you don't do it like me and avoid reading afterwards and forget everything again.
[quote]

Thanks for the reply. I think it has a chance of working and I’ll never know unless I try right. When I tried with Japanese and it didn’t work well at least I did remember some new kanji characters. Yeah I immediately think of はげしい too when I look at 邀请. But I’m not doing any mnemonics or anything really... just lazy SRS and depending completely on my used and abused brain that’s been forced to look at flashcards on a daily basis for over ten years now for almost ten years now. It’s gotten pretty good at rote memorization.
0 x

Sayonaroo
Green Belt
Posts: 256
Joined: Wed Jan 11, 2017 12:13 am
Languages: English(N), Japanese -fluent?, Korean - advanced?, Spanish (b1?)
Language Log: http://choronghi.wordpress.com
x 319
Contact:

Re: Was learning Korean, now I'm doing Mandarin. The hard way of course.

Postby Sayonaroo » Sun Oct 25, 2020 4:33 pm

have you tried subs2srs decks for mandarin? I've been doing them in addition to spoonfed/grammar decks and they're pretty fun and accessible since there's plugins like morphman, wordquery, pinyin helper (also generates meanings of all the words), automatically show answers after x seconds, multi-column note editor, search cards based on length, word search and wild card field name, batch editing . also deepl is a lifesaver (they have a windows pop-up translator program available for free)
0 x

kraemder
Green Belt
Posts: 323
Joined: Fri Aug 28, 2015 12:10 am
Location: Tucson, Arizona
Languages: English (N)
Japanese (JLPT N2)
German (read several books)
Spanish (read a couple books)
Korean (studying for about a year semi seriously)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=21&t=1204
x 498

Re: Was learning Korean, now I'm doing Mandarin. The hard way of course.

Postby kraemder » Fri Oct 30, 2020 8:40 am

Sayonaroo wrote:have you tried subs2srs decks for mandarin? I've been doing them in addition to spoonfed/grammar decks and they're pretty fun and accessible since there's plugins like morphman, wordquery, pinyin helper (also generates meanings of all the words), automatically show answers after x seconds, multi-column note editor, search cards based on length, word search and wild card field name, batch editing . also deepl is a lifesaver (they have a windows pop-up translator program available for free)

No I haven’t. It sounds fun. I’ll keep it in mind. I tried it for Japanese and the cards were both amazing but also above my level so almost everything was a leech pretty much.
0 x

kraemder
Green Belt
Posts: 323
Joined: Fri Aug 28, 2015 12:10 am
Location: Tucson, Arizona
Languages: English (N)
Japanese (JLPT N2)
German (read several books)
Spanish (read a couple books)
Korean (studying for about a year semi seriously)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=21&t=1204
x 498

Re: Was learning Korean, now I'm doing Mandarin. The hard way of course.

Postby kraemder » Sat Oct 31, 2020 8:39 am

Ok an update for this weekend. I had fun drilling hanzi characters last weekend and this week. I crammed about 450 or so of them and then they came up for review after an interval of a few days. I forgot most of them. I do think this process is helpful and primes your brain for Chinese sounds, word patterns, and will help you memorize words in general but as I expected I will not be following through with it at this time. If my retention rate had been more around 50% then I probably would have continued but it's more like 10-20% for the hanzi I hadn't seen already. Stuff I had already been reviewing before in my vocabulary was a whole different thing but the point of this was to try to learn new hanzi and as you can imagine probably, a retenton rate of like 10-20% makes for a lot of reviews and hard work.

As always of course I watched several YouTube videos this week including one from Lucas Lampariello where he talked in German about how he learned German. Lucas doesn't believe in SRS or apps and likes writing stuff down in notebooks. And he talked about German which gets me thinking back to when I studied languages without apps. It would be nice if I had kept a log of how I studied to go back and check but for the most part I remember writing stuff down on flash cards, then giving up on thatand switching to notebooks, and then giving up on that too pretty much and just looking up words in books and continuing to read without bothering to save words for later study (much). And I'm thinking I want to try that again. A big reason why I think I and other learners fall back on SRS is that we want to speed up results and have something to show for our hard work as quickly as possible... like for a test or for our tutor or for any friends we have who speak the target language. I know that when I had my Korean iTalki lesson I felt pressured to know the vocabulary that we were using together along with the grammar. So this highly encouraged me to review and review the same stuff IE probably make some SRS flash cards. When I was in Japan I really didn't want anyone to explain what something meant to me and then forget and have them be like.. I told him this already and now he forgot. This was another reason to drill stuff using SRS. Well, since my iTalki tutor cancelled on me a few times I am not feeling any pressure to SRS stuff for our next meeting since I'm not bothering to schedule it. I am still taking the Chinese class and I have an Anki deck for that which I'll continue using at least until the course finishes.

I'm feeling motivated to study old school style without SRS. Almost. ahh habits die hard. I am thinking of keeping a grammar deck going. This is kind of the opposite of how most people recommend using SRS - it's best for vocabulary. I think it's best for vocabulary because vocabulary is simply just easier to learn and review because it's a smaller piece of information. But grammar flashcards can be ok, especially if I delete my vocabulary decks then there's nothing else to even DO. And because they're grammar decks I think I would feel a lot less guilty skipping a few days and only getting to it a couple times a week. And of course I could just delete these decks too. The alternative for grammar being just reading grammar books and or watching YouTube videos. I think an SRS deck would be helpful and keeping up with it wouldn't be too bad if it's the only SRS I do. A big problem with grammar SRS decks is that you burn out on the vocabulary and then don't really have energy for the grammar decks.

(edit: I deleted my grammar sentence deck too)

I did try briefly to do extensive reading instead of flash cards not too long ago with Korean and Harry Potter. I had mixed success and was hoping for better vocabulary retention and decided to go back to SRS as a result. But the result of that for me is that doing SRS I sacrifice too much time and energy that could be spent reading. I don't immerse enough. The SRS really works and i know this because when I am reading and I'll run into words I've been reviewing using SRS and I recall them really easily it's very nice. When I see an unknown word and look it up (but don't SRS it) I'll probably forget it and if I look it up again it'll stick but often only as long as my brain seems to think it's needed. At least over the course of my first book in Korean I had a lot of this. It felt like so many words were just going through my fingers. But even with European languages which are hands down easier you still need to read several books to really start seeing an improvement. The improvement is there after the first book and you may even sort of sense it but if you test yourself on vocabulary or grammar you probably won't see the difference. A difference would be seen I think simply in the time it takes to read your next book which should be a lot less but otherwise it's hard to see. You need to have faith. Or just really like reading.

Anyway, so I know I need to read a lot of books to start seeing an improvement from reading. With LingQ, it measures your progress and you color each word you know and don't so it's a bit frustrating to literally have the app remind you that you forgot this word again, and again. A paper book doesn't do that but then looking up words takes longer. So I'll probably keep using LingQ for now. I did find an interesting app called Manabi Reader that could be good for Japanese. I like that with LingQ I just tap a word and get its definition - I don't have to long press or select letters (usually) like on a Kindle or with another iOS app for reading Japanese called Wakaru. Quick lookups really enhance the reading experience. You might argue that the extra time it takes to look up a word in a paper dictionary or otherwise helps you remember it and I can't absolutely say that's not true but I know I've done it this way and already forgotten the word by the time I got back to reading.

I'd like to build a good reading habit in foreign languages going forward. It's great that I was ultimately able to learn Japanese and I know I had a hard time reading so relied on SRS. But if either method will get you the same end result I'd rather do it reading where I not only learn the language but maybe learn something just from reading. I know I eventually hit a wall with German where I didn't think I was improving my vocabulary any more. This was after several years and I think I had a vocabulary of over 10,000 words so I knew a ton of words but languages are just immense. I don't know if I stopped learning new words because they didn't repeat enough or maybe I was still learning new words at a rate of 3-5 a day or something (while actively reading) but due to how small that number was in relation to my overall known words I just couldn't feel a difference. Anyway, if I use it, I really want to make SRS a supplement to immersion and to me immersion means reading so I want to build a strong reading habit and later maybe think about incorporating some SRS if needed.

I know I seem to go back and forth on how I want to study regarding immersion vs SRS and how/what to SRS. Most people on YouTube and in the forums, unless they're beginners, which I'm not, seem to have their method and beliefs in place. They recommend no Anki, or they recommend a little or a lot of Anki, and here's the RIGHT way to use Anki etc. It's nice and reassuring to listen to someone confidently tell you the right way to do something. If you had met me before I started learning Japanese say 2010 or before, I would have been that person. Not so much in that I was into pontificating or starting a movement or anything, but I had been doing the same thing for about 10 years and hadn't changed very much at all and didn't want to. How does one go about studying a language? (ok, maybe I was just itching to pontificate).. "Thou shalt read. And thou shalt read more, and then thou shalt read some more. When thou becometh frustrated and feels the need to improve thy grammar then it's ok to open a grammar book that has good explanations but only concise ones and find a grammar point of interest to read but do not read in excess of 15 minutes for that is too long - it is time to return to reading. When thou cannot read, then thou shalt listen to recordings of native speakers such as talk shows, news, or audio books. Do not waste time reading textbooks or studying vocabulary lists as this will get you nowhere and you will quit language learning, doomed to live your life as a monolingual.

Then smartphones and apps appeared changing everything just in time for me to study this crazy Japanese language which I had no way of effectively read to save my life. And I haven't recovered my simple sense of direction with language learning since. Damnit.

But at the moment reading is where it's at for me. Or where I want it to be. I just located a web novel in Chinese I'm excited to read. The English title is The King's Avatar and I read a lot of the English translation when I was in Japan and wanted to binge something in English. If you ever enjoyed MMORPG games at any point in your life you will probably like the story. There's a Netflix drama based on it although I don't see how a live action drama could do this justice. I've got a pile of Japanese books that need reading starting with Tenki no Ko.

I definitely feel a strong desire to do something with foreign languages all the time. It's something I've channeled into SRS apps like Anki for the past nine years but I think that urge to do something everyday can just as easily be channeled somewhere else. I am not stuck trying to learn a language with an impossible (nearly) writing system like before. I think it's time to get back to studying languages the way that's more fun and rewarding.

I hope my next log isn't about a great new add on or way to use Anki. :D
7 x

Sayonaroo
Green Belt
Posts: 256
Joined: Wed Jan 11, 2017 12:13 am
Languages: English(N), Japanese -fluent?, Korean - advanced?, Spanish (b1?)
Language Log: http://choronghi.wordpress.com
x 319
Contact:

Re: Was learning Korean, now I'm doing Mandarin. The hard way of course.

Postby Sayonaroo » Wed Nov 18, 2020 4:14 am

kraemder wrote:
Sayonaroo wrote:have you tried subs2srs decks for mandarin? I've been doing them in addition to spoonfed/grammar decks and they're pretty fun and accessible since there's plugins like morphman, wordquery, pinyin helper (also generates meanings of all the words), automatically show answers after x seconds, multi-column note editor, search cards based on length, word search and wild card field name, batch editing . also deepl is a lifesaver (they have a windows pop-up translator program available for free)

No I haven’t. It sounds fun. I’ll keep it in mind. I tried it for Japanese and the cards were both amazing but also above my level so almost everything was a leech pretty much.


i had the same problem with mandarin subs2srs but i figured out what plugins make the decks useful. for anki 2.0 plugins i use search by length so that I can suspend all the cards that are too long since there's no way in hell i'll understand them. for anki 2.1 there's a bunch of useful plugins like pinyin on top of hanzi ( it parses the text and looks up the definitions for all the words and generates pinyin). I've also tried using morphman and Chinese Companion - frequency sort, HSK suspend, heisig support, and more. I notice just seeing only short cards really helpful ( by suspending and tagging cards longer than x characters long) and amazingly useful since i alrdy know japanese kanji inside out.


here's a longer write-up about it:

anki 2.0 plugins list

Wordquery – j/k/e dictionaries! + autohotkey https://postimg.cc/gXQ83C2B https://www.reddit.com/r/ChineseLanguag ... n_in_anki/

advanced copy

automatically show answer after x seconds – to get through cards as fast as possible and i’m not even really testing myself so i love this plugin. i set it to 1 second.

increase autosave frequency

morphman – to suspend/segregate comprehension cards https://massimmersionapproach.com/table ... /morphman/

search cards based on length – I use to this to segregate cards longer than 10 characters etc. there is no way in hell i’m going to understand a long ass mandarin sentence on subs2srs so it's best if anki doesn't even show it to me. as far as i know this or an equivalent of this does not exist for anki 2.1. i think you can still search using field:____* and -field:___ but it's a headache . I recently tried making a deck from all the decks with cards that are only 3 or 4 characters long and they're just very useful when the card is relevant ( you can get a lot of bs with shorter cards with people's names and whatnot but) and it's fun. I feel really bad for the duolingo people lol. subs2srs is so much better :ugeek: I highly recommend doing this if you don’t want to deal with morphman etc though the hsk sort plugin is pretty straightforward and easy to use. It’s so useful since the phrases are so short, the definitions and pinyin are already filled in, I can translate it on deepl if I want to, look up a word in wordquery if I want to etc

batch editing

multi-column note editor

multiple add and browser windows

open added today from reviewer

word search and wild card field name

tag toggler

anki 2.1 plugins list

chinese companion -frequency sort hsk suspend

chinese prestudy

Pinyin on top of Hanzi – holy crap this one’s amazing. it adds pinyin AND the definitions.

At one point I was searching for a plugin that loops the audio and just came the conclusion I am better off pasting {{Audio}} twenty thirty times since I will probably not listen to it more than that. Pressing R to repeat the audio is a waste of my time and energy and I don’t need radio silence to read. I can multi-task !

Also I figured out how to run deepl on anki efficiently using autohotkey.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Anki/comments/ ... ed_out_it/
1 x

kraemder
Green Belt
Posts: 323
Joined: Fri Aug 28, 2015 12:10 am
Location: Tucson, Arizona
Languages: English (N)
Japanese (JLPT N2)
German (read several books)
Spanish (read a couple books)
Korean (studying for about a year semi seriously)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=21&t=1204
x 498

Re: Was learning Korean, now I'm doing Mandarin. The hard way of course.

Postby kraemder » Sat Jan 02, 2021 9:39 pm

Happy New Year! It's been about two months since my last update. I posted a couple of YouTube videos during the two months. I think it's really better to update at least once a month even if you think nothing has changed you forget stuff after a bit and even if not much has changed it's still nice to write about it. So I finished the Chinese course. I really wouldn't do it again if I were to go back in time. I'd just finagle something on my own and maybe do some iTalki lessons or something. iTalki isn't always great for me. I wonder if the people who like it spend a lot of time finding a tutor that works well with them. If you're yearning an in person classroom experience, then Zoom is a poor substitute I think. Of course with a pandemic I didn't really have a lot of choice. Some of the other students in the class helped make it more fun but the teacher was a bit abrasive. I can't tell if it's her personality or just the way her English sounded due to her accent. It sounded like she spoke every English word using the 4th tone which made her seem angry all the time. I don't know how far the other students will go with their studies but some of them definitely seemed to have talent for languages and would do well I think. Except that studying a language is a huge time investment and most people have other things going on their life. I don't know if anyone is willing to prioritize pounding their head against the Mandarin wall for years on end to finally speak broken Chinese and maybe keep up with someone in a one on one conversation. Yeah, those of us that do are a little weird probably.

We had two final assignments. One was a presentation in English that just had to be related to China in some way. It was really wide open what we could pick. As is always the case, students get a bit excited and get enough material to go on for 20 to 30 minutes when the presentation really should be very short. I'm not a very good YouTuber but I've been making videos somewhat regularly and I can tell you that the time difference between the two for an inexperienced, (or maybe just undisciplined) speaker is crazy. If I write a script that can be read in say 4 minutes, to go over the same material off the cuff free talking would probably take 20 minutes. We had a small class so there was actually enough time for everyone to do their presentation even if they ran long so that wasn't an issue. But Everyone packs in a lot of information and by the 4th presentation you're generally pretty tired and paying attention is quite the effort even if they do a good job. I wonder how much people retained about me blathering about World of Warcraft in China. I basically gave a summary of video games in China using Wiki, my own experiences, and a few random articles I found in Google. I enjoyed making the presentation at least. I don't know that anyone else in the class had the least bit of interest in MMO games.

The other last assignment was to watch a Chinese movie on YouTube called Youth. It's extremely well done and the story is interesting. It's a coming of age story about a group of Chinese college age kids who join the army as part of the dance troupe. For whatever reason there's a lot of drama and discrimination against the protagonist and this made it very hard to watch for me. I really sympathized with her but nothing good ever happened to her. The 'happy' ending even was a let down although it could have been worse. The version on YouTube includes English and Chinese subtitles and we had to look up and write down 30 Chinese words and then write a summary or review or just something in English about the movie. I really liked this assignment and if she had a similar assignment every week I think I would have been really happy. This vocabulary mining is my favorite way to study a language.

I was really happy the class ended. Actually, I had started playing Chinese world of warcraft a few weeks before thinking this would be a fun way to engage Chinese. It backfired. There's a couple reasons it backfired. One being that I hadn't played World of Warcraft for so long that the game itself was just too distracting and I didn't want or care about studying for a while. The other reasons it didn't work are that if you use the Chinese client there's some limitations when playing on an English server. You can't view or participate in any global chat channels so good luck finding a group. The other reason this failed for me is that I ended up listening to the web novel The King's Avatar in the English translation while I played. This novel is never ending. There's 1800 or so chapters. It was like a non-stop Netflix tv drama binge. So I ended up taking a month off from language studying except for attending Chinese class and doing the required homework.

I felt a bit burned out on Chinese afterwards and missed Korean so I started watching some k-dramas and rekindled my interest in Korean again. I can't follow along yet but I pick out more Korean words than I do Mandarin when I watch TV. Korean seemed more interesting to me and I've been studying it again for about 3 weeks now. At first I was trying to catch up on old Anki / Flash Cards Deluxe decks but then for some reason I decided to try writing down vocabulary in a notebook similar to what I did with German years ago. Many years ago. I did this with the intention not that I would memorize everything I wrote in the book like I do with SRS but instead I dated each entry so it's a kind of vocabulary diary and it makes for easy reviewing. I've always scoffed at people that say if you want to remember something write it down or it's the making of the flash cards that helps you remember not reviewing them. It's true that making the cards or writing it down did help me remember but that didn't last - I'd always forget and that's why I put my faith into SRS instead for the past 10 years. But with a small attitude adjustment towards the vocabulary book I found that I was remembering stuff much easier and it stayed in my head longer too. I was really blown away and I'm trying to work out what about it is so helpful and how to maximize it. I was thinking at first that I would completely ditch SRS but I tried mixing the two a couple of days ago and haven't made up my mind yet. On one hand it's very tempting to ditch SRS and on the other hand it could still be helpful. I'm not showing any restraint writing words in my book and may add over 100 words without blinking. I'm currently playing with the idea of making an SRS deck for each month and then I can just retire a deck after a certain amount of time - 2 to 3 months maybe. I have a test deck with about 200 words I randomly added and I'm going to just leave it at that number of cards for a week or two and see what I think. I'm afraid that the allure of SRS makes me rely on it too much to remember everything and it's helpful but not -that- good.

But neither is writing it down. I still forget the words if I don't see them after a certain amount of time it seems. I like reviewing them in the notebook though so like always I'm looking at pros and cons on how to proceed and if it's better to use SRS and a vocabulary notebook together or not. I think it might be so that's how I'm leaning at the moment.

I've discovered Webtoons in Korean and I'm reading the Tower of God. I've know about WebToons already but looking up words in a dictionary is much easier using e-text and this put me off a lot. But it's worth it and you only need to look up a few words per page at most anyway. And the toons are really fun and interesting. This is going to be great learning material for the next year I think. It's tempting to pull up a translation and read it dual language style because sometimes the grammar or whatever is too hard but my instinct tells me that it's the using the imperfect definitions for each word in the sentence (that I can look up.. unfortunately a lot of words I don't find) and struggling to understand the sentence as a whole that leads to progress in the language. Looking at an English translation is too easy I think. But so tempting.

Lastly, one of the YouTubers I follow has published his language learning tool/website called Journaly. I don't watch all of his videos so I don't really know more than what the title entails: writing a journal in your target language will help you learn the language better. It's a website only and in beta so very rough but it looks fun and Robin is a nice guy with a lot of energy which also makes it seem more fun. It really seems a lot like lang-8 to me though. Since it's in the early stages if you like lang-8 but had some ideas on what would make it better he's very interested in feedback right now. I'm sure later if all goes well he'll be less interested in the user experience and more interested in making money off of it lol. That seems to be the way for most products.

I have no confidence in my Korean so I wrote an entry in Japanese and commented on other Japanese entries in Japanese. As it's just beta I don't think he's even written rules of etiquette anywhere and I don't even know if you're supposed to reply in the target language or if any language is ok. I will say that that is my biggest peeve with lang-8. I write something in Japanese and the Japanese people respond in English. Ugh. What's the point? At least that's how it feels sometimes but writing the entry in itself is probably the point. Sometimes the corrections you get are invaluable. If you're in a language class trying to cheat on your homework then you surely don't care what language they talk to you in you just want the answers.

Oh and I'll be watching the hakone ekiden 箱根駅伝 race today with my Japanese language partner. It's a two day college relay race from tokyo station to hakone station (a lake near mount fuji). I believe each runner runs 20 kilometers. They're obviously super fast and it seems to take them just over an hour to finish each leg. We watched it together yesterday. A foreign student (from Kenya maybe?) named Vincent set an individual record for his stage putting his team out in front. It was really impressive. He did a short interview after but had to have one of his friends translate Japanese for him. I'm always a bit fascinated when I watch other foreigners speaking Japanese. I understood all but one of the questions from the announcer. His friend's Japanese was a little slow and halting although of course he was on national TV and translating not speaking naturally at all. I understood all but one of the questions. He understood all of the questions so I think that means his Japanese is better than mine :D . My friend's son is on the leading team 創価大学 and she is a nervous wreck. She's possibly the most dramatic person I know but she's really nice. I don't think she slept last night at all worrying about the race. Her son will be appearing today. Each team keeps it a secret which runner will race each stage and she told me but I can't post it here in case they are watching ;) . I slept fine except for staying up too late studying Korean.
3 x


Return to “Language logs”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests