2020: Learn Hard With a Vengeance [DE, ZH, ES, KO, GD]

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LunaMoonsilver
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Re: 2020: Learn Hard With a Vengeance [DE, ZH, ES, KO, GD]

Postby LunaMoonsilver » Tue Jun 02, 2020 12:55 am

1st June 2020 / Day 153
2020年6月1日 / 第153日


今天我很忙,我也昨天很晚睡觉,所以我累死了。可是我也学习(或者用)中文。我看《神农尝百草》,这是一本有意思的分级中文读物。在这本书主要人物发现了茶,我读了一次,明天我可能再一次读。我也看了一集《锦绣未央》(第二十三集)。我很喜欢这部电视剧,但是我知道这部电视剧可能没有个美满的结局。所以我看了慢慢的 :lol: 我也说一点儿,正在写一点儿。明天我打算用Anki学习新的词,看还一个集《锦绣未央》。我希望这个月我的中文能力改进!

Still tired, but I'm taking Friday/Monday off next week so four-day weekend, here I come!

But anyway, got a good start to June – well, I've managed to do some Mandarin today, at least, so there's that. Hit all four skills (for at least 15 mins each) and I've made an Anki deck with the HSK 5 vocab list (you don't want to know how long I messed around with that before I realised I could paste it all into a .txt and import). I pulled a list that's ordered by frequency so I'm going to work through that, but will add/use sentences as well.

I've already seen that one of the first five words is 杀 (sha1, to kill), which considering all the historical dramas I watch is a word I learnt pretty early on in my Mandarin journey. (Lots of “杀了他!杀了她!” going around.)

Aside from the Mandarin, did some Ojibwe – Memrise watering/planting and relistening to most of lesson four – and a teeny bit of Spanish. I actually realised, after my earlier post about June's goals and working out the numbers, that I don't, in fact, need to watch any Spanish films/TV this month to stay on track for the SC. I mean, I will, but it's kind of freeing knowing that I don't have to.

So, yeah, good day one, let's see what day two brings!

Mandarin | 中文
59 mins Anki | Anki 59分钟
8 mins Memrise | Memrise 八分钟
22 mins reading (Shennong Tasting Wild Plants) | 看书22分钟《神农尝百草》
41 mins TV (The Princess Weiyoung E23) | 看电视41分钟《锦绣未央》第23集
20 mins speaking | 说话20分钟
15 mins writing | 写字15分钟

Spanish
5 mins Duolingo

Ojibwe
10 mins Memrise
20 mins Pimsleur (L4)

Total: 200 mins (200 mins / 15,859 mins)

eta: accurate total mins
Last edited by LunaMoonsilver on Fri Jun 19, 2020 12:06 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: 2020: Learn Hard With a Vengeance [DE, ZH, ES, KO, GD]

Postby LunaMoonsilver » Wed Jun 10, 2020 11:45 pm

10th June 2020 / Day 162
2020年6月10日 / 第162日


我每天在这儿可是我觉得我学习了不多,所以我不写我的学习日记。可不可以说“学习日记”? :lol: 前的周末我不工作(也星期五、星期一不工作)可是我也看电视很多、也玩游戏很多。这个周末我也没有时间学习。星期天我回去伦敦,我搬走我的家。我不高兴可是我会省许多钱!

Yeah, just a little update on where I'm at - didn't realise nine days had passed since I'd last written anything! Anyway, I took my long weekend off, ended up not doing as much as I thought I would (played a lot of Sims, though that is in German!), but was feeling a lot better when I went back to work yesterday. I'm also moving all my stuff out of my flat in London this weekend, as we'll not be back in the office for the foreseeable, so that wipes out my entire Sunday, at least.

Aside from that, just plugging away. I haven't managed all four Mandarin skills every day - definitely underestimated the time needed there! Also, today was my last day with Ojibwe! I've enjoyed it, though the 18 days (especially at around 30 mins/day) meant that I spent a lot of the first few days adjusting to all new sounds and vocabulary. I ended up only making it to lesson five of the Pimsleur course because I had to repeat them two or three times to get it all to stick, but I was starting to make some headway at the end there.

Moving onto Basque tomorrow. I've tried to learn Basque before but dropped it because I couldn't see much practical use for it at that point in my life - so it's going to be interesting to see how far I can get, in 18 days, with a language I've had a fair amount of contact with before. I'll have a look through my resources, etc. in the morning and draw up a plan of action.

Gonna drop my total times per day below, will be back to regular reporting tomorrow!

German
02.06.2020: 9 mins
05.06.2020: 170 mins
06.06.2020: 15 mins
09.06.2020: 87 mins

Mandarin
02.06.2020: 119 mins
03.06.2020: 91 mins
04.06.2020: 207 mins
05.06.2020: 104 mins
07.06.2020: 36 mins
09.06.2020: 4 mins
10.06.2020: 15 mins

Spanish
02.06.2020: 19 mins
03.06.2020: 4 mins
04.06.2020: 3 mins
05.06.2020: 52 mins
06.06.2020: 93 mins
07.06.2020: 26 mins
08.06.2020: 26 mins
09.06.2020: 49 mins
10.06.2020: 42 mins

Korean
05.06.2020: 53 mins
08.06.2020: 66 mins

Scottish Gaelic
02.06.2020: 10 mins
03.06.2020: 8 mins
09.06.2020: 8 mins
10.06.2020: 12 mins

Ojibwe
02.06.2020: 35 mins
03.06.2020: 32 mins
04.06.2020: 32 mins
05.06.2020: 35 mins
06.06.2020: 34 mins
07.06.2020: 37 mins
08.06.2020: 33 mins
09.06.2020: 31 mins
10.06.2020: 32 mins

Total: 1,629 mins (1,829 mins / 17,488 mins)

eta: accurate total mins
Last edited by LunaMoonsilver on Fri Jun 19, 2020 12:07 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: 2020: Learn Hard With a Vengeance [DE, ZH, ES, KO, GD]

Postby LunaMoonsilver » Fri Jun 12, 2020 9:50 am

11th June 2020 / Day 163
2020年6月11日 / 第163日


今天(昨天)我开始学习巴斯克(Bāsīkè),可是开始了很晚!我现在用Assimil学习,我试这本书很快看,因为我只有18天学习巴斯克。除了学习巴斯克意外,我也用Duolingo学习西班牙语,用Memrise学习中文。可是我学习了不多。这个周末我妈妈会退休,所以我昨天做许多纸杯蛋糕。(一起66个!)可是她拿蛋糕去工作,所以我不可以吃! :( :lol:

So, started with Basque today (well, yesterday, I guess). Like I said before, I studied Basque off and on for a while, so while I can't really say anything, I know I'm not going to have the same initial learning curve I've had with some of the other endangered languages so far this year.

Sooooo, I decided it was time for a little experiment. I've had this HTLAL post bookmarked for what has to be, at this point, literal years, and now seems like the perfect time to give it a try. I have a copy of Assimil - Iniciación al Euskara, so I'm going to use AML's basic method to try and race through it within a couple of weeks.

A few things that differ between my experiment and theirs: although I'm not fluent in Spanish, I can obviously understand a fair bit. This will save me some (but not all!) time on step five – looking up unknown words, as I can just have a look through the Spanish translation.*

(*this has not proven to be foolproof so far :lol: so there is still some dictionary work involved!)

Also, Assimil Basque only has 50 lessons, so I'm going to set a target of going through five new lessons per day. The exceptions will be day six, when I'll review lessons one to 25, and then I should be done by day 11, giving me day 12 to go and review the entire book.

I'm also planning to add a little more to the 'review' section for each day: I want to try transcribing what I hear (test listening skills), translating it into English (test understanding) and then read it aloud. I may go through the exercises when I review daily or I may just save those for the day six and day 12 long review sessions.

I've never completed an Assimil course because the consistency it requires is something that constantly eludes me, so I'm hoping this might be a good middle ground. Plus, I should get a nice boost when I finish it and it'll be interesting to see how far I've managed to get with Basque inside of 12-18 days.

Anyway, I made good on the first step last night (well, early this morning) and completed lessons 1-5. I have also noted down words I didn't know and added them to Evernote, which I'll look over as part of my review process – this is something AML said they didn't do, but that might have proven useful.

Mandarin
5 mins Memrise

Spanish
5 mins Duolingo

Basque
77 mins Assimil (L1-5)

Total: 87 mins (1,916 mins / 17,575 mins)
Last edited by LunaMoonsilver on Fri Jun 19, 2020 12:08 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: 2020: Learn Hard With a Vengeance [DE, ZH, ES, KO, GD]

Postby LunaMoonsilver » Fri Jun 12, 2020 11:57 pm

12th June 2020 / Day 164
2020年6月12日 / 第164日


周末在这儿!我今天工作很多,学习很多。我也看了三集《Community》,现在我第二剧看完了。我也当然学习巴斯克很多时间!

Not much to add from this morning, except that I finished the second season of Community today (Spanish), so that's 48 or so episodes down since the beginning of May, and I've done a lot of work on Basque. Reviewing the first five lessons wasn't so difficult - I think I'd done all of those the first time around - but with lessons six to ten, I've entered new territory, so it all took a lot longer! Also, I forgot that every seventh lesson is a review when I made up my schedule, but oh well, I'm still sticking to five lessons per day.

Mandarin
4 mins Memrise

Spanish
3 mins Duolingo
62 mins TV (Community S02E22-24)

Basque
7 mins notes (typing up from yesterday)
49 mins Assimil review
115 mins Assimil L6-10

Total: 240 mins (1,916 mins / 17,575 mins)
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Re: 2020: Learn Hard With a Vengeance [DE, ZH, ES, KO, GD]

Postby LunaMoonsilver » Fri Jun 19, 2020 12:03 am

18th June 2020 / Day 170

An Assimil update: So, I got up to lesson 25 tonight. A little behind but we've had thunderstorms most of the week so it's been migraine city for me. :( All better now though!

I did end up switching to AML's review method of just reading each lesson through once (from yesterday), because trying to transcribe and translate the texts was just taking far too long. It takes about 20 mins for me to get through each lesson, and the reviews were taking about as long as well. Today's lot, with the change, took less than an hour forty for the reviews and new lessons, which is much easier to fit into my day.

I've been making a list of the words I don't know in each lesson but haven't reviewed it, but it's nice that I know some words are sticking regardless, though I know if I were using Anki/Memrise as well, I'd be getting a lot more out of this. I'm reviewing lessons 1-25 tomorrow (one read through/one listen through) and I might try adding the words to Anki, as well as doing the exercises. Both of those are lower priority, though.

Aside from that, I've watched a lot of TV and just done bits of Duolingo/Memrise here and there.

Just putting my total times for the last few (uh, six) days:

German
155 mins

Mandarin
27 mins

Spanish
205 mins

Basque
585 mins

Total: 972 mins (2,888 mins / 18,547 mins)
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Re: 2020: Learn Hard With a Vengeance [DE, ZH, ES, KO, GD]

Postby LunaMoonsilver » Tue Jun 30, 2020 12:09 am

29th June 2020 / Day 181

Y'all, this Assimil experiment was a lot. I didn't quite make it - got up to lesson 44 - but I did those pretty well in-depth and then last night (my last Basque night), I watched the first episode of Avatar - The Last Airbender and then played around on the uTalk app for a little bit.

Despite not going over the words in-depth and not completing the course and therefore the final review, I still heard/picked up a fair few words and phrases in my episode watch (which I had no subtitles for!):

  • Ez dakit. - I don't know. I didn't pick this up from the course, but I heard it and instantly understood it when watching the show and, nicely, it was repeated a couple of times in the first ep.
  • Ez da ... - So, the missing bit was something about magic (I can't remember the ending of the word/don't know the spelling), but basically, he was saying 'he's not magic'. Obviously, this is not a phrase that came up in Assimil.
  • Lasai - This did come up in Assimil, wasn't one I particularly internalised, but remembered it enough to recognise it on TV.
  • Goazen / Ikusi / Begira - Very useful words from Assimil (let's go / look!); I still don't quite know the difference between ikusi and begira but 'let's go' is always suuuuuuuch a practical phrase.
  • Ikaskaia - lesson. This one just surprised me because I heard it... hmm, has to be a minimum of 800 (!!!!) times in the last 18 days so it was fun to hear it here too.

There were plenty of other things I recognised too; introductions, etc., but these were the ones that stood out. And, although I can feel the limitations in what I did, I think I've learnt more in 18 days on Basque than I've done on any other endangered language so far this year.

I mean, I did spend more time on it too, of course, to the tune of 1,264 minutes (21.07 hours). Not wild numbers (avg. 70 mins/day) but if you do 60-90 mins of pretty intensive study per day, then it turns out you progress pretty quickly! :lol:

Some downsides to this method...

I know the point is that you're using an Assimil book where you don't know the source language, but ooh, I didn't pick up any grammar, not really. I needed to either translate the notes or just jot down the Basque from the review lessons/notes and research explanations because, at a certain point, I was just internalising structures and knew I was missing nuance. I suppose this is part of the idea, too, that Assimil may not be ideal for complete beginners (which I wasn't, but also basically was).

I definitely agree with AML's assessment about retaining vocabulary; there's a lot I would want to add to this (which would take away from the key purpose: which is to go through the course as quickly as possible) but the main thing would be, if I ever do this with another language again, to either make an Anki deck and use it as I go, or to just make sure to review the vocabulary daily. I'd also make specific lists of things I'd need to memories (conjugation of important verbs, for example), as this was something else that tripped me up in a big way with Basque.

But anyway, overall I think this was a pretty successful experiment and one I may well repeat, though I'm not sure when/with which language.

Am moving onto German Sign Language for the next 18 days and will drop off all my times etc. tomorrow, when I do an end of June round up!
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Re: 2020: Learn Hard With a Vengeance [DE, ZH, ES, KO, GD]

Postby LunaMoonsilver » Wed Jul 01, 2020 8:34 pm

JUNE REVIEW
Days studied: 30/30
Total hours: 70.02
Total hours (year): 331

My study time this month:

Image

Smashed it out of the park with Spanish (again) and Basque (obviously) but, halfway through this year, I really need to look at my priorities and start spending a bit more time with Scottish Gaelic and Korean. My Mandarin plan didn't go amazingly well, especially as I got distracted by Basque, but I did do a bit more than last month.

German just keeps going - I've definitely spent time playing games that I haven't counted (I have uh played The Sims a lot) - but I've got to get those SC numbers up.

Speaking of the Super Challenge... ;)

Image

Image

Spanish is right ahead of track for films, so I can definitely afford to step off the gas on that a little this month. All of my reading needs work, so I'll try and fit in a 24 in 48 readathon this month to see if I can bump that up. But, you know, we're still only into month three!

Overall, I completed one of my four goals last month :lol: so here's what I have for July:

  • Hit my time targets for every language (30mins/day endangered languages and German; 15mins/day everything else)
  • Get both German SC numbers on target
  • Get ZH, KO SC film numbers on target

Happy July!
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Re: 2020: Learn Hard With a Vengeance [DE, ZH, ES, KO, GD]

Postby MamaPata » Wed Jul 08, 2020 6:58 pm

Would you be willing to share your google sheet template with me? I loved the original but I couldn't get the trackers to work in sheets
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Re: 2020: Learn Hard With a Vengeance [DE, ZH, ES, KO, GD]

Postby LunaMoonsilver » Tue Sep 01, 2020 8:14 pm

MamaPata wrote:Would you be willing to share your google sheet template with me? I loved the original but I couldn't get the trackers to work in sheets


omg so I'm only like two months late seeing this (sorry!) but do you mean jeffers' sheet? because I couldn't get that to work on google sheets either, basically I have my own on google sheets one that I fill out on the go and then jeffers' which gets filled out in bulk every so often. Am very happy to share mine if you want it lol but it doesn't have the really cool speedometre trackers sadly :cry:
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Re: 2020: Learn Hard With a Vengeance [DE, ZH, ES, KO, GD]

Postby LunaMoonsilver » Sat Oct 31, 2020 11:59 pm

End of October: Review

Yeah, things really dropped off there in the summer for me. I don't know what it was – usually I find summer quite motivating, not that I'm fresh out of school or anything, but that September-August year is still a real thing I notice, but this year it didn't work out that way. I did start going back to the office some of the time in July but obviously everything is still nowhere near normal and I didn't find myself wanting to do all that much for a couple of months.

Still, I took some time for myself – I've got really back into writing, which has been a lovely break – and I'm feeling ready to put some hours in again. Plus, I kind of want to start learning Arabic (yes, I'm nowhere with Scottish Gaelic and Korean, I know, but ugh I'm so beyond not letting myself do even more stuff this year. I already can barely go outside so new language it is!).

Anyway, instead of showing October's (boring) stats, here's what I've got for the year so far:

Image

Image

The languages highlighted in purple are my main ones; the others are the endangered languages I've been dabbling in this year. I'm glad to say I have done 30 mins on those every day and it's given me a lot of insight into not only the languages themselves but also into how I can learn better, in terms of resources I prefer to have or feel like I need, as well as methods that really do or do not work for me.

So yeah, time to set up for November! I'm doing the 6WC with Gàidhlig as my TL, so am hoping to get a few good hours in – I'm also doing NaNoWriMo, so hopefully I'll be writing every day as well.

(And after the news we've had in the UK today it is uh probably best to have some inside hobbies :lol: )

Happy Halloween!
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