Ané's brownian motion in language space

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anestrom
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Ané's brownian motion in language space

Postby anestrom » Sun May 16, 2021 6:18 pm

I decided to start off with a summary of my language journey so far. It all started a while ago with Bulgarian (native) and English (as a second). Then I pretended I'm not any good with languages for a while until...

(Japanese)

Around 2005 when I started studying Japanese. Initially with two years of language classes and then continued with an AJATT-inspired immersion approach that I maintained for a few more years. Eventually I realized that I'm just watching Japanese sitcoms with English subtitles and not really paying much attention to the language. And in all that time I never managed to accumulate enough vocabulary and kanji to actually start reading native material, so finally frustration settled in and in the last decade I've only made half-hearted attempts to revive it.

Even so I seem to have the Japanese bug. There's a lingering attachment with the language and there simply is so much I like about it - the lego-like grammar, the onomatopoeia, the subtle nuances of the writing system... And then there's the culture, which never seems to stop throwing surprises, sometimes fascinating and sometimes deeply disturbing.


(German)

As my motivation for Japanese was winding down I started German with intense self-study + immersion and then with the help of some lessons to work on speaking I managed to pass TestDAF in about 2 years. The plan was to move to Germany, but then the plan changed at the last moment. Since then I've maintained good passive level by reading and listening to podcasts, but currently struggle with any kind of output.

And although I enjoy the occasional clever word construction or dialectical quirk of German, there isn't much particular about the language that excites me (unlike Japanese). Possibly the most significant factor keeping me around German is the Chaos Computer Club producing a large amount of materials that I have a genuine interest in following and understanding. (as it often provides a good complement to the English version, which invariably has a US/Silicon Valley tint)


(French)

In summer 2020 on a bit of whim I decided to go play with languages again and started French following the self-study + immersion approach I had used for German (although at a lower intensity). However, for some reason French grammar just grinds my gears, so progress has been slow and motivation has been dwindling. I'm still maintaining some expose, but will likely drop it unless I find some compelling reason to stick with it.


(Chinese)

It has been on my wanderlist for a while, but got promoted to actively studying in February as French was starting to annoy me. So far I'm enjoying the shiny new linguistic toys that I'm discovering (e.g. sentence ending and verb modifier particles). I don't enjoy it quite as much as Japanese, but it's close and I'm curious to see where this project goes.


(honourable mention to Russian, which I've studied, without much effect, for several years in school; I may still get around to learning it one day though...)
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anestrom
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Re: Ané's brownian motion in language space

Postby anestrom » Mon May 17, 2021 11:27 pm

As mentioned above I'm currently spending most of my learning time on Chinese. I don't have any specific goal (yet?), it's more a case of "this looks interesting, I wonder how much of it I can understand". As far as motivation sources go it's fairly weak, so I thought keeping a journal about it might provide some extra incentive (fake internet points have to be good for something right? :D )

I was lucky to find an app with a ridiculous amount of graded content starting from absolute beginner. There seem to be thousands of "lessons", which are actually either short dialogues or a paragraph or two of text. (they even have some short stories that are formatted as a sequence of 5-20 such lessons). What I like the most is that there are both sentence level (i.e. semantic) and word level (i.e. literal) translations, which helps with puzzling out grammar patterns and strange expressions. And as an added bonus some of the texts are about grammar and specific expressions, so I'm not missing completely on the meta-learning that textbooks provide. But it's all in Chinese and at a level that's comprehensible.

In slightly more detail what I do with each lesson is the following:
- listen to audio only (mostly as a test for myself, but also to give me some practice in real-time decoding)
- intense reading of the text (in the sense of checking unknown words and putting them into srs deck)
- listen again while reading the text (may repeat a few times, paying extra attention to pronunciation of specific words/characters)

I'm currently hovering around the "intermediate" level (which I think corresponds to the old HSK3). By which I mean that for the lessons at this level I get around 95% reading comprehension with no lookups and maybe around 70% listening comprehension on first pass.

The slightly more objective numbers are 1800 words in my srs deck covering 1100 distinct characters. (I'm not studying characters independently; I've tried it with Japanese and it didn't feel very efficient in terms of effort/benefit ratio)
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MorkTheFiddle
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Re: Ané's brownian motion in language space

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Tue May 18, 2021 5:32 pm

What is the name of the app you are using?
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anestrom
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Re: Ané's brownian motion in language space

Postby anestrom » Wed May 19, 2021 1:08 pm

It's called DuChinese and I believe they have it for all platforms (including a web version). As far as apps go the subscription is a bit pricey, but given my heavy usage I'm quite happy with it.

edit: just checked and it seems quite a few lessons are free, so it should be usable even without a subscription (I just got hooked very quickly :D )
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anestrom
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Re: Ané's brownian motion in language space

Postby anestrom » Mon May 24, 2021 7:49 pm

Almost a weekly update. I've done another 20 lesson adding about 200 words to the srs rotation. Half of those were from the "upper-intermediate" level (I guess HSK4), which is still a bit of a stretch, especially for listening comprehension (partly due to lower vocabulary coverage, but also the recordings at this level use faster speech compared to the lower levels). My phone tells me I've been spending about 1-2 hours per day with Chinese, so I'd say I'm chugging along nicely.

I've had some distraction with Japanese as I found interesting threads about it in the forum and in particular the Nihongo con Teppei podcast. Given how rusty my Japanese is, I was a bit surprised that if I focus I can follow it with almost complete comprehension.

That also meant I've noticed a shift in the interference between the two languages in my brain. When I started with Chinese my brain was producing Japanese pronunciations for hanzi, but now it's the other way around and if I look at a Japanese text most of the kanji get a Chinese reading (not as in on-yomi, but as in pinyin). Obviously some of this is just due to recent exposure, but I suspect it's also partly due to the (relative) regularity of hanzi pronunciations. The fact is that I can often enough guess the pronunciation of unknown hanzi or be reasonably close (e.g. up to a dice throw for tone and j/x/q initial). In comparison, predicting kanji pronunciation has always felt like playing the lotto. So somewhat unexpectedly reading Chinese feels a bit like reading an alphabet (e.g. the conscious task is "given image + approximate sound recall meaning" as opposed to Japanese where reading is essentially "given image recall sound + meaning"). So overall that makes me slightly more optimistic about reading Chinese than I've ever felt about reading Japanese... On the other hand I'm not even at 1/4 of the character count for reasonable reading proficiency, so there's plenty of time to change my mind.
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anestrom
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Four months of Chinese

Postby anestrom » Mon May 31, 2021 8:13 pm

This week I had a bit of an awkward realization - I've been studying Chinese for four months now. The bulk of the awkwardness was from me going "Eh, what? Four months already?!? But I still don't understand any of this". So I decided to test that assertion with a bit of an experiment.

A couple of weeks after I started with Chinese (so basically pinyin + a hundred or so words in) I binge watched a Chinese TV series called Go Ahead (以家人之名). As expected it was essentially incomprehensible and not useful for learning, but I still wanted to get a bit of a feel for what Chinese sounds like (and as far as soap operas go it was actually nice).

So fast forward a few months and rewatch the first episode, but this time with the Chinese subtitles instead of the English ones. On the positive side there was some progress, because I managed to get several non-trivial exchanges in full, but it was nowhere near enough follow the plot.

In theory I "knew" about 90% of the words (checked by going through the subtitles and also close to expectation given my srs deck and the subtlex frequency list for Chinese). In practice however the speech was too fast for me (not to mention a lot less clear than textbook recordings). And the subtitles seemed to be even faster, because I could definitely not read fast enough to keep up with them.

Overall, it seems like reasonable progress for the 2-300 hours that I've spent on this, so the plan is to keep going and see where I end up.
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anestrom
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On flashcards

Postby anestrom » Wed Jun 09, 2021 10:24 pm

I think I learned something important about flashcards last week. In the past I've only found them useful to bootstrap a language quickly and then they become rather tedious after several hundred to a thousand words. Yet here I am with 2500 Chinese words on rotation and it still feels like an effective way to learn new words. How come?

The epiphany came after I got one of the graded readers in Pleco and being my lazy self, I started adding words in its flashcard plugin (which I don't normally use). And almost immediately going through that deck felt like self-flagellation. Yet I was doing four times as many reviews on my other deck and was fine about it. So something was fishy.

My current theory is that the other deck includes the full sentence where I've seen the word. Just to be clear they are not sentence or cloze cards. It's more like having usage examples on the backside of the card in addition to translations. Well, practically it's more like a second backside, because it has a separate reveal. So if I draw a blank on a card I would reveal the sentence first and try to recall from context before looking at the translation. (also useful for words with vague translations)

To be honest I hadn't even noticed how extensively I use that particular feature when reviewing cards, especially recently added ones. Possibly important is the fact that it isn't just a random sentence, but is part of a story I've read (and listened to) recently so it's a much richer context than a generic example. (and would often trigger recall of some of the other new words from the same story, which feels a bit like cheating, but it works so who am I to judge :D )

So now I can't stop plotting how I'm going to use this with a Kindle book (lookups there automatically save the surrounding sentence), but that will likely have to wait for me to switch languages first (Chinese on the Kindle is a bit kludgy)
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Le Baron
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Re: Ané's brownian motion in language space

Postby Le Baron » Thu Jun 10, 2021 2:52 pm

You taught me a new word: 'kludgy'.
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anestrom
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Re: Ané's brownian motion in language space

Postby anestrom » Sat Jun 26, 2021 4:19 pm

Chinese

Fairly stable progress in building vocabulary. I'm currently at a bit over 3000 words in srs (covering ~1600 hanzi) so averaging around 150 new words per week so far. Based on a few experiments this seems to be enough to waddle through some native texts, but it's a very frustrating experience as my recognition speed is too slow.

In an attempt to fix that I've started the Pleco graded readers based on contemporary Chinese short stories (contemporary in this case seems to refer to the 80s and 90s). I've already read twice through the 500-word reader. The first time was without looking up words, which left a few blank spots, but I was able to follow the stories. The second pass added lookups and I clocked about 150 unknown words, which seems like a lot given that it's an easy reader that should be well within my vocabulary range...

Anyhow, I've now moved to the 1000-word reader and if anything it feels slightly easier to read. Not sure if that's due to me getting more used to reading Chinese or because the text is less contrived to fit the vocabulary limit.


Japanese

I've also started goofing around with Japanese again. I mostly blame Teppei, because he's too much fun to listen to. So I've started listening to old episodes of both the Nihongo con Teppei and Japanese with Teppei and Noriko podcasts. Rather surprisingly I can follow them with almost full comprehension (or at least fool myself into believing that).

In any case, following the excitement of me having fun in Japanese I started watching Midnight Diner on Netflix. Careful not to repeat old mistakes I left the subtitles in Japanese and could still follow enough to enjoy the show (but definitely not all, so obviously I need to get better at fooling myself :D ).
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anestrom
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Re: Ané's brownian motion in language space

Postby anestrom » Thu Jul 15, 2021 9:25 pm

Over the last couple of weeks I've slowed down my studies a bit as I was getting very tired. In practice that means that I've stopped doing new lessons, but I'm still doing reviews trying to cool down my srs deck and doing a bit of extensive reading with graded readers. As the reduced intensity leaves me a bit of spare time I've been doing some low-effort Chinese related stuff that I don't expect to be much useful for learning, but still keeps me partially engaged.

First one is listening to various Chinese music talent shows on youtube (think The Voice of X or X Got Talent kind of show). Given my level it's mostly a game of "let's see if I can understand anything at all", but it's still fun for a short while. And when I get tired trying to follow any of the words I can still enjoy the songs. For anyone curious I can highly recommend the performances of 谭维维 (to be even more specific, her versions of 刀剑如梦 and 数人玩, which are two of my favourites so far).

The second one is a book called Chinese Through Poetry. It's an introduction to classical Chinese using Tang poems as opposed to prose for examples. To be fair I suspect I should be counting that as a separate language, but I'm going to keep it in the Chinese bucket for now. So far I'm only on the second chapter (out of many), but if the introduction on hanzi and writing systems in general is indicative of the rest of the book I think it's going to be brilliant.
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