Amy's 非常好的 autrichien Abenteuer (FR, DE, 中文）TAC 2016

[amyhere]

Goals goals goals from last week:
1. 7 hours German reading & 7 hours listening: 3:52 & 5:32
2. Learn 100 new anki flashcards of opaque vocabulary: 152/140
3. Show up to German classes Still holidays
4. Work through FSI Pronunciation and Assimil Finish FSI Pronunciation and up to lesson 32 of assimil (I skipped through to lesson 16) Changing goal to working on assimil and NPCR for the next week
5. 1 hour of French listening & 1 hour of reading 0:05 & 1:00, woops about that listening
6. Write one French lang-8 post I ended up posting two, because I cross posted my French posts from here
7. 140 "SpoonFedChinese" Anki audio sentences 143/140 I'm changing this goal to 70 for next week, the proportion of sentences with new concepts is starting to go up..

Well... my reading and listening for this week was fairly pathetic. It was kind of caused by New Year's happenings (and the lack of study on New Years day ) as well as me getting a bit sick and wanting to sleep lots. For Mandarin it was a really good week, I'm now up to chapter 32 in assimil after skipping the first 15 lessons. That does mean that I did a total of 17 lessons in 7 days, which is a fair effort considering I was also doing FSI as well as anki as well as other languages at the same time. I'm going to continue doing at least one assimil lesson per day, then if I have spare time I'll go onto doing the NPCR2 lessons, since I've now managed to catch up with learning all of the NPCR1 vocab in anki. I'll definitely be going a lot slower now though, there won't be any more lessons done in two days. I'm thinking it'll be more like 2 NPCR lessons a week if I can. So pretty much I'm thinking 10 assimil lessons a week, 2 NPCR lessons and 70 SpoonFed sentences. I'll just have to see how it goes.

As for FSI Pronunciation, I found it really helpful for my pronunciation, I'd definitely recommend it to anyone wanted to improve in this area. It goes from isolated tones to tone pairs and through every consonant and vowel sound found in Mandarin Chinese. If you read the section at the end it also goes into word stress, sentence stress and sentence intonation. It was however, like most FSI, a bit dry, so I don't see myself picking up the rest of FSI Mandarin anytime soon, by the end of the week I was getting very easily distracted while doing the lessons.

For German, I've found a shared intermediate German -> English deck that I'm going through to catch any vocab that I've missed along the way. Once I get sick of it and miss my cloze cards I'll start going back to them. I've also got a shared cloze preposition deck, where prepositions are clozed out of sentences. So far I'm finding it quite good

Targeted study (excluding class time) since beginning of log (7.11.15):

German
Anki cloze vocabulary sentences: 1603
em-Übungsgrammatik exercises: 46/88
Novels pages read: 938
Total Reading since B2 Exam (4.12.15): 21:03 hours
Listening since B2 Exam (4.12.15): 25:02 hours
Lang-8 Posts: 6
Preposition cloze cards: 55

Mandarin
Chinesisch chapters: 8
NPCR chapters: 14
Assimil chapters: 32
SpoonFedChinese Audio sentences: 320/8142

French
Lang-8 Posts: 7
Listening: 3:08 hours
Reading: 3:05 hours

[AiyaLianxi]

I love your study system, it seems to be working for you! As for holidays, I think they mess all of us up, to one degree or another. I'm sure next week will have you back on track, though.

[amyhere]

I love your study system, it seems to be working for you! As for holidays, I think they mess all of us up, to one degree or another. I'm sure next week will have you back on track, though.

Yeah, I was definitely expecting it to go off track, although I can't say this week so far is going so well, I managed to do a grand total of 0 assimil lessons and no NPCR yesterday

[amyhere]

So how did I go?
1. 7 hours German reading & 7 hours listening: 6:21 & 7:00
2. Learn 100 new anki flashcards of opaque vocabulary: 100/100
3. Show up to German classes Last week of holidays!
4. Working on assimil (10 lessons) and NPCR (2 lessons) I actually somehow managed this!
5. 1 hour of French listening & 1 hour of reading 1:00 & 1:00
6. Write one French lang-8 post Done!
7. 70 "SpoonFedChinese" Anki audio sentences 78/70

I had a couple of lazy days where I still couldn't be bothered doing anything, but in the end, after a bit of a marathon effort on Saturday and Sunday (okay mostly Sunday, I may have done 4 assimil lessons and 2/3rds of an NPCR lesson as well as quite a few of the other things today alone) I got mostly everything done or at least close enough that it's good enough.

This week, as I posted on the "Cette Semaine en Français" thread, I finally put in my application for the Interpreting/Translation undergrad program at UniWien in the English/German/French combination. I've got an emailed that they've received everything but they haven't officially processed everything so now it's a bit of a waiting game.

I finished Harry Potter 2 yesterday, so I'm now beginning my first "new" book in German, aka the first time I'm reading a book that I haven't already read in a different language. I'm reading 'Das Schneekind' a memoir about a family's year long trip through Canada and Alaska on horses and dog sleds, which I'm hoping will be interesting, especially since it was loaned to me with a lot of praise for the book.

And as posted in the East Asian team thread:

Today I was feeling a bit distracted and I didn't really want to do assimil straight away, so I decided I'd have my first go at reading away from a textbook. I used a graded newspaper, http://www.thechairmansbao.com/, to find HSK3 level articles and then read them in LWT. I was wondering how I was going to get LWT to work with Mandarin, but now I've found a method that seems pretty good so far, I thought I'd share it here.

What I do is copy the text into a Mandarin word segmenter so it's split into "words" with spaces in between and then I put it into LWT, but changing the settings so "each character as a word" is set to off but "remove spaces" is set to on. This means that the spaces don't show up when you're reading, but when you click to search a dictionary for an unknown word it already knows where the word boundaries are. I've found LWT very useful right through all levels (I find it incredibly useful to streamline intensive reading at a C1 level as well), so I'd definitely suggest people try it if they haven't!

I also started watching an episode 非诚勿扰 ('If You are the One'), something that I may have watched a bit too much of on SBS in Australia I watched it with both English and Mandarin subtitles, as I was mostly just picking out words I know at this stage.

Targeted study (excluding class time) since beginning of log (7.11.15):

German
Anki cloze vocabulary sentences: 1700
em-Übungsgrammatik exercises: 46/88
Novels pages read: 1100
Total Reading since B2 Exam (4.12.15): 27:24 hours
Listening since B2 Exam (4.12.15): 32:02 hours
Lang-8 Posts: 7
Preposition cloze cards: 182

Mandarin
Chinesisch chapters: 8
NPCR chapters: 16
Assimil chapters: 42
SpoonFedChinese Audio sentences: 398/8142
Reading: 1:45 hours
Listening: 0:20 hours

French
Lang-8 Posts: 7
Listening: 4:03 hours
Reading: 4:05 hours

[amyhere]

So how did I go?
1. 7 hours German reading & 7 hours listening: 6:16 & 6:37
2. Learn 70 new anki flashcards of opaque vocabulary: 72/70
3. Show up to German classes I actually did this so well done me!
4. Working on assimil (10 lessons) and NPCR (2 lessons) I managed this.. by doing a large amount on the last day
5. 1 hour of French listening & 1 hour of reading 0:48 & 0:52
6. Write one French lang-8 post Done!
7. 70 "SpoonFedChinese" Anki audio sentences 72/70

Okay so I may have left a few things to the last minute... so I'll write the rest of this post tomorrow..
Reminders for things I want to mention:
- Prepositions
- Holidays
- difficulty assimil
- synergy
- Tintenherz
- How I get ridiculously distracted and leave everything to the last minute even when I have heaps of time

Targeted study (excluding class time) since beginning of log (7.11.15):

German
Anki cloze vocabulary sentences: 1772
em-Übungsgrammatik exercises: 46/88
Novels pages read: 1236
Total Reading since B2 Exam (4.12.15): 33:40 hours
Listening since B2 Exam (4.12.15): 38:39 hours
Lang-8 Posts: 7
Preposition cloze cards: 311

Mandarin
Chinesisch chapters: 8
NPCR chapters: 18
Assimil chapters: 52
SpoonFedChinese Audio sentences: 470/8142
Reading: 2:45 hours
Listening: 0:20 hours

French
Lang-8 Posts: 8
Listening: 4:51 hours
Reading: 4:57 hours

[Rotasu]

Okay so I may have left a few things to the last minute... so I'll write the rest of this post tomorrow..
Reminders for things I want to mention:
- Prepositions
- Holidays
- difficulty assimil
- synergy
- Tintenherz
- How I get ridiculously distracted and leave everything to the last minute even when I have heaps of time

This is how I feel on my days off and the weekend. There are so many think I could be reading in JP but instead I go and read mangas or fanfiction in EN x.x I end up waiting until 8pm before I do anything with my languages. I'm just so tired from work and classes that I dont want to do anything but relax. I guess I need to find a way to use my languages while not feeling like it's a chore.

How was your Week 3? Did you meet your goals?

[amyhere]

So how did I go?
1. 7 hours German reading & 7 hours listening: 5:20 & 7:27
2. Learn 70 new anki flashcards of opaque vocabulary: 72/70
3. Show up to German classes I may have chucked a sickie on Wednesday, but hey, I'd had a really painful sore throat for over a week and I knew I just needed that day of rest to get over it. And it worked.
4. Working on assimil (10 lessons) and NPCR (2 lessons) I managed this 6 assimil and 2 NPCR, I'll live though.
5. 1 hour of French listening & 1 hour of reading 1:00 & 1:00
6. Write one French lang-8 post woops
7. 70 "SpoonFedChinese" Anki audio sentences 66/70

So I ended up getting a reasonable amount done, but kind of fell behind at the end because of snow (snow men and snowball fights and rodeln (sledding)) + multiple hour skype with my family + organising transport for my Spain/Portugal trip with my mum in March + movie night with a good friend. It was totally worth it.

As of now I'm trying to cut back on anki to get my reviews down, I'm now only adding Mandarin vocab from NPCR and not assimil, and I'm not adding any new German vocab and I've finished the preposition card deck. Hopefully this'll bring my review time down because it's really becoming a drag.

Targeted study (excluding class time) since beginning of log (7.11.15):

German
Anki cloze vocabulary sentences: 1776
em-Übungsgrammatik exercises: 46/88
Novels pages read: 1331
Total Reading since B2 Exam (4.12.15): 39:00 hours
Listening since B2 Exam (4.12.15): 46:16 hours
Lang-8 Posts: 7
Preposition cloze cards: 329

Mandarin
Chinesisch chapters: 8
NPCR chapters: 20
Assimil chapters: 58
SpoonFedChinese Audio sentences: 536/8142
Reading: 2:45 hours
Listening: 0:20 hours

French
Lang-8 Posts: 8
Listening: 5:51 hours
Reading: 5:57 hours

[amyhere]

This is how I feel on my days off and the weekend. There are so many think I could be reading in JP but instead I go and read mangas or fanfiction in EN x.x I end up waiting until 8pm before I do anything with my languages. I'm just so tired from work and classes that I dont want to do anything but relax. I guess I need to find a way to use my languages while not feeling like it's a chore.

How was your Week 3? Did you meet your goals?

Oh sorry, somehow I completely missed this message. I'm sad to report that my procrastination has not reduced.. but at least I'm getting somewhere aha.

[amyhere]

So how did I go?
1. 7 hours German reading & 7 hours listening: 4:00 & 5:52
2. Show up to German classes Done!
4. Working on assimil (10 lessons) and NPCR (2 lessons) 0 & 1, whoops
5. 1 hour of French listening & 1 hour of reading 0:43 & 0
6. Write one French lang-8 post Done!
7. 70 "SpoonFedChinese" Anki audio sentences 51/70

As you can see, I didn't end up getting to all of my goals this week, but it was for a couple of reasons:
1. It was my first day back at work after nearly 2 weeks of holidays, I was kind of in holiday mode and it took a lot to get out of my holiday procrastination habits.
2. One of my friend ended up having her house to herself so we had a great movie night, one of the movies was in German, but the other.. wasn't.
3. Last week we had Australia Day so I spent all of Saturday afternoon and Sunday cooking up a feast for my host family + friend. It was a heap of fun, we even stuck Australian flag tattoos all over our faces!
4. I ended up spending a lot of time organising a trip to Spain for March, which took way longer than it should of because my (Australian) card kept getting locked by the bank because of 'suspicious purchases' in Austria and Spain

Targeted study (excluding class time) since beginning of log (7.11.15):

German
Anki cloze vocabulary sentences: 1776
em-Übungsgrammatik exercises: 46/88
Novels pages read: 1383
Total Reading since B2 Exam (4.12.15): 43:00 hours
Listening since B2 Exam (4.12.15): 52:08 hours
Lang-8 Posts: 7
Preposition cloze cards: 329

Mandarin
Chinesisch chapters: 8
NPCR chapters: 21
Assimil chapters: 58
SpoonFedChinese Audio sentences: 587/8142
Reading: 2:45 hours
Listening: 0:20 hours

French
Lang-8 Posts: 9
Listening: 6:34 hours
Reading: 5:57 hours

[amyhere]

So how did I go?
1. 7 hours German reading & 7 hours listening: 4:10 & 6:25
2. Show up to German classes Last German class
4. Working on assimil (10 lessons) and NPCR (2 lessons) 0 & 1.25, that's an improvement, right?
5. 1 hour of French listening & 1 hour of reading 1:00 & 0
6. Write one French lang-8 post Whoops.
7. 70 "SpoonFedChinese" Anki audio sentences 50/70

This week was a bit busy because I ended up working more than usual (yay for kindergarten holidays) and then I had a pretty bad cold for most of the week which meant I needed quite a bit more sleep than usual and when I was awake I wasn't super keen on studying. I also got accidently mildly stabbed in the eye by a playmobil figure's sword on Friday (why work why) so my eye was quite sore and I didn't want to read anything or look at a screen at all that day.

What I did get done this week though, was testing myself against HSK for the start of the new month. I first went through working out which HSK words and characters I knew:

------
New Characters/Words known for HSK1-4, percentages one month ago in brackets:

1C: 172/174 99% (96%)
1W: 151/153 99% (95%)

2C: 161/173 93% (60%)
2W: 139/150 93% (60%)

3C: 172/270 64% (21%)
3W: 166/298 56% (17%)

4C: 144/447 32% (7%)
4W: 123/595 21% (5%)
------

The main thing I noticed there was that it seems that I've essentially moved up a level, with all of the percentages going up a level or more.

Another thing to note is that according to this I know 579 words at HSK4 level or lower. This is interesting because from anki I can see that I've learnt about 1000 words at this point. I would say that these are likely a mixture of words that are in higher levels and either proper names or synonyms that aren't included in HSK.

I then decided to do a mock HSK test under test conditions, attempting the HSK2 as I said I would. I ended up finding this to be too easy, getting a close to perfect score on it, so I moved onto the HSK3 test and 239/300, which is a very clear pass (pass is 180/300). This definitely helped convince me that I'm actually getting somewhere, since it involved listening and reading that I was mostly able to do. Goal for the start of March: HSK4 mock test! I might as well keep going until I start failing them, right? I may also try to count my HSK5/6 vocab at the end of the month, which I haven't done until now just because of how time consuming it is. But I just want to know!

Targeted study (excluding class time) since beginning of log (7.11.15):

German
Anki cloze vocabulary sentences: 1776
em-Übungsgrammatik exercises: 46/88
Novel pages read: 1507
Total Reading since B2 Exam (4.12.15): 47:00 hours
Listening since B2 Exam (4.12.15): 58:33 hours
Lang-8 Posts: 7
Preposition cloze cards: 329

Mandarin
Chinesisch chapters: 8
NPCR chapters: 22
Assimil chapters: 58
SpoonFedChinese Audio sentences: 637/8142
Reading: 2:45 hours
Listening: 0:20 hours

French
Lang-8 Posts: 9
Listening: 7:34 hours
Reading: 5:57 hours