Nandemonai's log (Mandarin, German, Tadoku)

[Nandemonai]

Japanese
February goals
- ✅150 new words core10k -> 190 learned

Pretty much going on auto-pilot, not much to say here. Started watching JoJo which has been entertaining.

Mandarin
February goals
- ✅200 new Spoonfed sentences -> 196 learned
- ❌Read 100 pages of graded readers -> 6 pages
- ❌Study 2 NPCR lessons -> Did half a lesson

Spoonfed: 6380/8085 (+223) (my previous number must've left out my filtered deck as it doesn't add up)

Sigh, I really need to work on forming habits for Chinese. At this rate I won't be making any progress :/ February was a shorter month so I fell a couple words short of my target. I'll need to do things daily like I'm doing with Anki. March is also a new round of Tadoku, and this time I will not read in Japanese to make time for Chinese.

I'm thinking of doing the following:
- Read at least one page of my graded readers during lunch
- NPCR: one lesson a week, 20 mins every morning
* Monday: Mine new words and add to Anki
* Tuesday: Read text 1
* Wednesday: Read text 2
* Thursday: Review text 1
* Friday: Review text 2
* Saturday: Reading exercise
* Sunday: Review all reading

March goals
Japanese:
- 150 new words core10k

Mandarin:
- 200 new Spoonfed sentences
- Read 30 pages of graded readers
- Study 4 NPCR lessons

[Nandemonai]

Quick mid-month check-in. Changing to a daily target for Chinese has worked really well. I'm already halfway through the first volume of my graded reader. I haven't made this much progress in Chinese ever before. Finally feels like achieving literacy in the language is a reachable goal.

[Dr Mack Rettosy]

Would you recommend the Anki spoonfed deck for Chinese? I'm considering using it to break into reading characters instead of graded readers.

[Nandemonai]

Would you recommend the Anki spoonfed deck for Chinese? I'm considering using it to break into reading characters instead of graded readers.

In general I think it's a great resource for people that don't wanna bother mining a bunch of sentences themselves. I've used a similar deck for Japanese (Core6k) and it has helped me build a large vocabulary when reading was too much effort to do efficiently.

I've noticed the pinyin can be slightly wrong at times, but that's a fairly minor issue IMO. I always check the sentence in a dictionary before studying to increase my retention. The one thing I'm missing is highlighting of the new word in a sentence. I find that reviewing the deck can be quite slow when you always have to read the whole sentence. That's something I'll make sure to have when mining my own sentences/start a new language.

[Dr Mack Rettosy]

Would you recommend the Anki spoonfed deck for Chinese? I'm considering using it to break into reading characters instead of graded readers.

In general I think it's a great resource for people that don't wanna bother mining a bunch of sentences themselves. I've used a similar deck for Japanese (Core6k) and it has helped me build a large vocabulary when reading was too much effort to do efficiently.

I've noticed the pinyin can be slightly wrong at times, but that's a fairly minor issue IMO. I always check the sentence in a dictionary before studying to increase my retention. The one thing I'm missing is highlighting of the new word in a sentence. I find that reviewing the deck can be quite slow when you always have to read the whole sentence. That's something I'll make sure to have when mining my own sentences/start a new language.

Thanks for your opinions! It sounds like a good fit, especially since I want to crack into the sentences without doing upfront work. I've read elsewhere that there are minor mistakes scattered throughout the deck, so I'll keep that in mind.

Regarding your Mandarin progress, you may benefit by changing your study methods? You could take a month-long break from spoonfed and invest that time in graded readers, or perhaps couple sentence mining with a compelling TV show? Making new habits with old methods can be hard, and shaking things up might reinvigorate your interest.

Letting go of goals is not easy, especially SRS-based goals whose algorithms are not conducive to extended breaks. But be wary of the sunk cost fallacy... the bigger the goal the more alluring it is to finish said goal, even if detrimental to your long term progress. And 8085 sentences is a VERY big goal, so I imagine the sunk cost is very strong..

[Nandemonai]

Regarding your Mandarin progress, you may benefit by changing your study methods? You could take a month-long break from spoonfed and invest that time in graded readers, or perhaps couple sentence mining with a compelling TV show? Making new habits with old methods can be hard, and shaking things up might reinvigorate your interest.

Letting go of goals is not easy, especially SRS-based goals whose algorithms are not conducive to extended breaks. But be wary of the sunk cost fallacy... the bigger the goal the more alluring it is to finish said goal, even if detrimental to your long term progress. And 8085 sentences is a VERY big goal, so I imagine the sunk cost is very strong..

Yeah, I'm going to finish Spoonfed no matter what, but that's mostly because I can do it on auto pilot. Anki is so integrated with my life at this point I might as well keep up with it as long as it is providing me value. I'm also crazy enough to have learned 3000 sentences in Japanese in one month back in 2013 haha. That was stressful and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. What I'm doing now with SRS is nothing compared to that. I'm averaging 25 mins a day with Japanese and Chinese combined, spread over the day.

I do, however, agree that I needed a change in my study methods. I was only doing Anki for a while because my time was prioritized for other things. I have more time to spend on Chinese now that my life has become more balanced and settled down. I have 5 pages left in my Mulan graded reader! I'll probably finish that today or tomorrow. I bought these graded readers in late 2019 but always postponed getting my hands dirty and read them. Visualizing my daily progress with a quick & dirty tracker taped to my door has worked well!



I'm confident that I'll achieve a fairly good (passive) level of Chinese at some point as long as I keep up my daily habits. My motivation for the language has always been kinda weak when I compare it to Japanese. With Japanese I was hyper-focussed on being able to consume content in the language. Chinese is more like "I like the characters so I wanna study it". I'll be happy if I can consume content online in the language when I run into it. I'm not sure if I'll ever pursue speaking it. I'm not too big into TV shows that aren't anime, so that makes consuming TV shows in Chinese less interesting for me.

[Nandemonai]

Japanese
March goals
- ✅150 new words core10k

Mandarin
March goals
- ✅200 new Spoonfed sentences -> I switched to mined cards sometime during the latter half of the month
- ✅Read 30 pages of graded readers
- ❌Study 4 NPCR lessons -> Did 3 lessons

So after thinking about DrMack Rettosy's posts I started to reflect a bit on my study habits. I decided to set no goals for April, and will not set any for the next couple months. I'll look back on this decision in a couple of months so I have more data to look at it.

I've set a very low minimum bar for myself every day. I learn 5 new words in both Japanese and Mandarin. Japanese is mostly on auto-pilot and not really an issue. I'm immersing enough by just living here & talking with my wife in Japanese.

For Mandarin I switched to mining my own cards from the content I'm consuming. Mostly translated manga, webtoons, and anime. I've been able to keep up with my daily study that I started in March. I'm not doing the exact same things anymore, but I'm reading/listening to at least something every day. I've read two volumes of Yotsuba and started watching a Mandarin dub of Sword Art Online (which I've sentenced mined in Japanese in the past).

[Nandemonai]

...nearly one year later.

Japanese

Language learning progress has been quite steady. I took the JLPT N1 in December last year and passed with a pretty good score:

Language knowledge: 60/60
Reading: 49/60
Listening: 52/60
Vocabulary: A
Grammar: A
Total: 161/180

I've mostly been reading and listening and only started doing more JLPT specific prep a couple months before actually taking the test. I did the following to prep:
* Study a grammar Anki deck of the N1 Nihongo no Mori videos made by Doth
* Started mining vocab from the books I was reading, learned an extra ~750 new words
* I built a tool to lower the burden for creating new cards
* Did most of the 完全マスターN1読解 book
* Did a couple of past papers to see how I'd do
* Conquest most of the Kotoba grammar N1 quiz, I think I stopped at around 70%

Never expected to get a full mark on the language knowledge section, I never really scored well on that one. Grammar studies really paid off here.
Now I'll be putting Japanese back on maintenance. I've gotten into the habit of learning 4 new words a day, and listen to audio books/read books for fun when I have the time for it. That combined with speaking Japanese on a daily basis is enough to keep improving at a slow rate.

Mandarin

Haven't made significant progress here to be honest. Did about ~900 sentences of Spoonfed and some minimal reading. I've got 726 sentences of Spoonfed left but I'm thinking of dropping it in the near future. The reviews take quite a while and imo they're not worth the time investment anymore. At this point I'm better off switching to vocab cards + more reading. I'd be able to handle more new words every day while spending less time per day on Anki.
In order to do this I will have to update my Anki Miner tool to support Chinese. I've done some work towards that already, but the biggest roadblock is finding a good dictionary to use. Ideally I'd have one monolingual dictionary and one Chinese-English dictionary. Pleco has the best dictionaries available that I know of but those are not accessible programmatically.

I started reading a translation of 無職転生 in Traditional Chinese. It's a struggle but I can use Pleco to help me read it. I know the story well so it's not a big deal if some sentences fly over my head. I can mine the words I'm interested in.
Apart from reading I will also have to start increasing my listening input significantly. My ability to understand the spoken language is so low at the moment...

Anki-wise I've been able to keep up my streak, close to hitting 1000 days!

[Nandemonai]

Language learning was put on the back burner as I had prioritized studying other things in life. I was focused on data structures and algorithms in order to prepare for software engineering interviews. Now a couple months into my new job I have time again for languages.

Japanese

Mostly been reading and listening. Read 17 volumes of 盾の勇者の成り上がり and a couple business books. Also watching quite a bit of anime again. Rewatched all of Bleach (without the fillers) in preparation of the anime restarting. Gonna read the remaining manga volumes in the next Tadoku contest. I still speak the language at home daily so it doesn't feel like I need to put in much effort to maintain Japanese.

Mandarin

This is a bit more interesting to talk about. I started reading One Piece in Mandarin because reading manga is how I developed my reading skills in Japanese initially. I tried reading light novels earlier this year but it was just too difficult. I need something to bridge that gap.

Initially I started reading on my ipad while having Pleco open to do dictionary lookups. However, this is a really cumbersome and slow process. Reading 90 pages took longer than a week because of that, and mining words with that process is even more manual work. So a week or so ago I set out to build a tool that fits my needs:

• Create a transcript from an image
• Automatic dictionary lookups when needed
• Hover for quickly checking the reading of a word
• Export words as vocab or sentence cards to Anki

Now I'm working on being able to make this workflow work on my iPad. In order to do so I'll have to store the cards that I generated on a server so that I can later grab those and import into Anki. I'm thinking of adding that functionality to my Anki Miner tool this week. Another idea I had was generating audio for the sentences/words through Google's text to speech API. They have a free tier of 1 million characters a month so that should be enough to cover my use case.

After all of that I have a couple more ideas of things I can add (support for plain texts, or YouTube videos similar to languageplayer.io). However, those are more a nice to have and I don't have an immediate need for these. I'll spend more time actually reading before tackling those.

I want to increase the intensity with Mandarin or I feel like I'll go nowhere with it. Going from intermediate to basic fluency is not going to happen with just 15 minutes a day. I want to get my Mandarin to a level similar to what my Japanese was like before moving to Tokyo. At that point it should be easier to maintain and slowly improve before tackling Korean (again) or German.

Tadoku

I've been preparing to migrate the user system to a new platform, hopefully should be live towards the end of the year. I'm hoping that by doing so I'll be able to release Tadoku-related projects with a unified account. Some of these immersion learning tools could be improved and be part of Tadoku at some point in the future. So many ideas but so little time to actually make all of them reality.

[Nandemonai]

Started reading the graded reader "猴爪" from Mandarin Companion. It's one of the few things that I can read fluently so that's been motivating. Hopefully reading manga will go faster as well after finishing a couple graded readers.