Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

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luke
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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby luke » Sat Apr 16, 2022 11:48 am

Idea - Use FSI "move ahead" trick on Cien años de soledad
The FSI "move ahead" trick is to get some parts of a unit (chapter) down before you dig in and try to learn it all. I've done that on trips. I learned dialogues and grammar points ahead. I did that with replacement and variation drills to some degree. It makes the later lessons less formidable when they come.

Last night I did the first subchapter of chapter 11 (of 20). The image of Anki cards added over the last 90 days tells what happened:
anyadidas.png

The spike at the right suggests luke can't control his Anki adding. He does have a better appreciation of Fernanda del Carpio though.

A few days ago I was trying to understand this tree from Los Secretos de Cien Años de Soledad: Una Aproximación Estilométrica para la Investigación en Psicolingüística:

arbol_de_capItulos_cien.png

Things that are close on the tree should share a lot of words, etc. Chapter 10 is a long way from chapters 1-9. That seemed to provide a reason why Anki got thick around there. Chapter 11 is right next to 10. I was surprised last night when a short subchapter added 15*2 = 30 cards.

Reading closer, it's a "style measuring metric", and not specifically mapping how many new words are in a chapter or how they are shared with other chapters, (which would have been more useful for my purposes).

Use that idea you always think when someone says they're going to Anki Assimil
I often think Anki is overkill for Assimil. I.E., one can just listen and read and repeat enough that Anki dialogues are comprehensible and close to memorized, if that's the goal. One might could make cards for a few words, but hundreds? Not a good use of time, in my humble estimation, learning an "easy" language.

Why not apply that approach to Cien años de soledad?

For about 10 runs of various types through the novel I'd been sailing through, picking up a bit more with each run; but then the Anki bug bit. It's been consuming more time than is prudent at this juncture. :lol:

So, go back to cruising through the novel. Continue where you're at. You can still be careful and meticulous and analyze. Just be cautious in accumulating cards.

Wish me luck!
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6 x
: 124 / 124 Cien años de soledad 20x
: 5479 / 5500 5500 pages - Reading
: 51 / 55 FSI Basic Spanish 3x
: 309 / 506 Camino a Macondo

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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby sfuqua » Sat Apr 16, 2022 4:18 pm

I think anki is overkill for most things, and I love anki. I think I do anki, not because it is efficient, but because I like doing anki cards. Anki burns stuff into your brain forever. Is it really necessary to burn some particular sentence from anki or a novel into your brain? Probably not. Would learning to translate the 3000 sentences that are in a "with ease" and a "using" book in both directions make you a CEFR C1 and an ILR 3 in a language? Definitely not. :lol:
I think I also like anki because it keeps things accessible in your memory more or less forever. But do I really need to remember which routes on the metro I use to get from montparnasse to the champs elysees? No, I can look it up.
However as an anki addict, I find myself considering it I want to download one of the medical school decks, to see if I could understand anything from doing it. :D
4 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby luke » Sat Apr 16, 2022 5:23 pm

sfuqua wrote:I think I do anki, not because it is efficient, but because I like doing anki cards. :D

I like making cards too. There's an opportunity to be creative.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not giving up on what I want to accomplish. I'm just adjusting the sails.

When I started this intensive read with Anki, repeating what I'd done before wasn't an effective strategy. What I've learned doing the Anki process is that spending more time understanding sentences and words is fruitful and fun.

The current challenge is that everything seems relevant and significant in the story. If I decide, "nothing goes into Anki right now", it makes a big task evaporate.
3 x
: 124 / 124 Cien años de soledad 20x
: 5479 / 5500 5500 pages - Reading
: 51 / 55 FSI Basic Spanish 3x
: 309 / 506 Camino a Macondo

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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby luke » Mon Apr 18, 2022 2:40 am

FSI Basic Spanish 10/11s complete
I just finished unit 50 of 55. This unit went through the past subjunctive, clitic review, "tú" commands, and contrasting Past I, Past perfect and Present perfect. The reading was short, fun and thoughtful. I wrote out 15 responses.

I do FSI everywhere, but the sequence of drills in each location is different:
*) CD in the bathroom - sequential going forward.
*) Memory stick for commuting - Sort of sequential, but "mastered" drills are removed and I go back to the "beginning" after naps and sleeps.
*) Live Lingua while walking - I start at the end, the Review Drills. I jump towards the beginning doing "Presentations of Patterns". Occasionally I switch directions. As I get easy drills down, I work on the harder ones.


All together, about an hour of FSI each day. I read the manual for Illustrations and the current unit. It helps.

: 50 / 55 FSI Basic Spanish
: 44 / 55 FSI Illustrations (2x)
: 58 / 124 Cien años de soledad (10x)
: 513 / 1249 Vivir para contarla (3x)
: 220 / 1473 Vargas Llosa - Historia de un deicidio

I have a new audiobook
Mario Vargas Llosa's García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio is his 600+ page Ph.D work on the then new Latin American Phenomenon, Gabriel García Márquez and his work up through Cien años de soledad. It is easier than Gabo novels or his autobiography. It's analytical. The 1 hour+ chapters have multiple sections which are apparent in the audiobook and super helpful.

Typical walk protocol (2x per day):
FSI drills for 7 minutes driving to where I walk.
Listen to Vargas Llosa dissect Gabo.
Do some FSI drills from Live Lingua.
Listen to Vivir para contarla for 10 minutes or so.
FSI drills driving back home.

The Vargas Llosa book is good because I can stop when a new subsection starts. I've been using that "rewind 15 seconds or more" trick to "reorient" in both books. Each book is over 20 hours.

3 months of Anki reviews
progno3.png


That's the "collection" (all decks). I was surprised to see 224 reviews per day on average for the last 3 months. It's showing card counts. There is a trend towards less cards each day. The orange (learning) cards are becoming less. The darker green (mature) cards are gradually going up. The "young" (light green) cards are also getting smaller. All that is good.

I'm still working on not giving too much time to Anki. The chart below shows I haven't made much progress yet. 56 minutes per day on average. The "be more judicious in adding cards" technique I mentioned a few days ago should help, but it will take some time.

time_reviews3.png
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6 x
: 124 / 124 Cien años de soledad 20x
: 5479 / 5500 5500 pages - Reading
: 51 / 55 FSI Basic Spanish 3x
: 309 / 506 Camino a Macondo

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luke
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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby luke » Fri Apr 29, 2022 2:59 am

LIX index of difficulty
The LIX index was created by a Swedish scholar and uses a simple algorithm to estimate the difficulty of a text. I found an online LIX calculator. I ran three Gabriel Garcia Márquez novels through it.

Cien años de soledad
Number of sentences (M): 5666
Number of words (O): 139162
Number of words with more than 6 characters (L): 38659
Average sentence length (Lm = O / M): 24.56
Proportion of long words (Lo = L / O * 100): 27.78
Readability index (LIX = Lm + Lo): 52
50% of words appear only once.

Interpretation
<30 Very easy to read, children's books
30 - 40 Easy to read, fiction, popular magazines
40 - 50 Moderately difficult, normal newspaper text
50 - 60 Difficult, normal value for official texts
> 60 Very difficult, bureaucratic Swedish


El coronel no tiene quien le escriba
Number of sentences (M): 1710
Number of words (O): 17826
Number of words with more than 6 characters (L): 4459
Average sentence length (Lm = O / M): 10.42
Proportion of long words (Lo = L / O * 100): 25.01
Readability index (LIX = Lm + Lo): 35
37% of words appear only once.

La mala hora
Number of sentences (M): 4139
Number of words (O): 49080
Number of words with more than 6 characters (L): 11982
Average sentence length (Lm = O / M): 11.86
Proportion of long words (Lo = L / O * 100): 24.41
Readability index (LIX = Lm + Lo): 36
39% of words used only once

Comments
That last line in each section, "50% of words appear only once", is a quick estimate. For example, Cien años de soledad has about 16,000 distinct words and about 1/2 of them only appear once in the text.

There has been sound criticism of simple metrics like this one for estimating the difficulty of a text. It uses sentence length and word length in it's calculation. What does it not consider?
* The overall length of a text doesn't come into play. A 1000 page novel and a single sentence could have the same LIX index.
* Word rarity doesn't come into play. "Discombobulation" is weighted the same as a shorter, more common word like "important".

Using the LIX index on these three books does help one know that El coronel no tiene quien le escriba should be less challenging than Cien años de soledad. The LIX index is lower, 35 versus 52. The total word count is less, 17,826 versus 139,162. The calculation that only 37% of the distinct words appear just once, as opposed to 50%, should make the shorter novel easier as well.

3/5s of the way through the Cien años de soledad vocabulary quest
My current pass through the novel is intensive and just happens to include Anki card gathering. I just finished chapter 12, so 12/20 = 3/5.

This is what the card count is today:
conteo.png

Almost 75% of the cards are "mature" (over 30 days between reviews). 11 are buried because I saw the "other" side today.

If we wanted to make a mathematical guesstimation of how many cards there will be at the end, here are few possibilities:
1) 2500 cards. I add about 500 cards every 4 chapters. 8 chapters left. 1500 + 1000 = 2500. Easy.
2) Somewhat less than 2500. The cumulative adding of words will gradually reduce the "new words" and make the later chapters have less "new" words.
3) A lot less than 2500. I'll get my Anki habit control.
4) More than 2500. I like sentence cards. The later part of the book has the longest sentences. I won't be able to control myself.

So you looked at FSI Basic Spanish some lately too, huh?
I noticed volume 4 (of 4) was published in 1962. Volumes 1 and 2 have a 1961 date. Volume 3 is from 1959. What can I say about that? The creators of the manual seemed to not go quite so easy on the student as the years rolled by. Volume 3 seems easier than the earlier volumes. Volume 4 is the most challenging. The drills are more complex. The grammar is more subtle. The readings are better. They're getting away from governmental reports and into short stories that are both pedagogical and well written.

A walk in the woods is the best place to do FSI drills.

Progress bars for posterity
: 50 / 55 FSI Basic Spanish
: 50 / 55 FSI Illustrations (2x)
: 69 / 124 Cien años de soledad (10x)
: 692 / 1249 Vivir para contarla (3x)
: 429 / 1473 Vargas Llosa - Historia de un deicidio

And your "distraction limiting challenge" - what's happening there?
I'm 6 full weeks undistracted. I did not eat a half gallon (1.5 liters) of ice cream tonight and that put a cherry on the milestone.
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8 x
: 124 / 124 Cien años de soledad 20x
: 5479 / 5500 5500 pages - Reading
: 51 / 55 FSI Basic Spanish 3x
: 309 / 506 Camino a Macondo

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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Fri Apr 29, 2022 6:17 pm

Just out of curiosity I ran a couple dialogues of Plato and a part of Proust through LIX räknare and got these results. I just got Google to translate the first.
Apology
- Number of sentences (M): 401
- Word count (O): 8834
Number of words with more than 6 characters (L): 8545
Average sentence length (Lm = O/M): 22.03
Proportion of long words (Lo = L / O * 100): 96.73
Readability index (LIX = Lm + Lo): 119

Gorgias
Antal meningar (M): 175
Antal ord (O): 2659
Antal ord med fler än 6 tecken (L): 2527
Genomsnittlig meningslängd (Lm = O / M): 15,19
Andel långa ord (Lo = L / O * 100): 95,04
Läsbarhetsindex (LIX = Lm + Lo): 110

Proust
Antal meningar (M): 576
Antal ord (O): 18073
Antal ord med fler än 6 tecken (L): 4585
Genomsnittlig meningslängd (Lm = O / M): 31,38
Andel långa ord (Lo = L / O * 100): 25,37
Läsbarhetsindex (LIX = Lm + Lo): 57

The high readability index for Plato probably results from the fact that sentences in Ancient Greek do tend to go on and on. I am not alone in thinking that Plato is one of the easier standard Ancient Greek writers, so this measurement may not work for that language.
The numbers for Proust seem more in line with the numbers for García-Márquez.
Interesting brain challenge. Thanks.
3 x
Many things which are false are transmitted from book to book, and gain credit in the world. -- attributed to Samuel Johnson

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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby luke » Thu May 05, 2022 12:00 am

FSI Basic Spanish 51/55s complete
Unit 51 went through uncertainty, probability, the passive voice, and more.

What's coming?
I'm a few weeks from finishing the first major run though FSI Basic Spanish, but some exciting ideas came to me for certain study slots once the current regime has run its course:

Anki - Wind down Cien años de soledad vocabulary growth and wind up the FSI Basic Spanish deck
Bath breaks - Switch FSI CDs for Assimil Using Spanish CDs and book.
Commutes - Switch FSI drills for La Pratique de L'Espagnol, an old advanced Assimil course with short dialogues.
Sitting - FSI Volume 4 focusing more on the book.
Walks - FSI Basic Spanish with more improvisation starting back at unit 46 (Volume 4) and Gabo Audiobooks.

Not a huge shift, but new and exciting variations and consolidations.

I want to slip a run through Don Quixote del siglo XXI into the current FSI trek when the units start teaching vosotros and vos.

fsi_1yr_repasos.png


That is 1 year of the FSI Basic Spanish Anki reviews. The "tiempo" (time) box is checked. You can see that the deck has been taking less and less time lately. The last 6 bars on the right are since I've set the "new cards per day" to 0. That is helping me build enthusiasm for turning up the heat down the road. You also see five "visits to family" last year, where the deck was ignored and then follow-up spikes to catch up when I returned. 6-7 minutes of Anki per day became 1 1/2 days over the course of a year.

Progress bars for posterity
: 51 / 55 FSI Basic Spanish
: 52 / 55 FSI Illustrations (2x)
: 73 / 124 Cien años de soledad (10x)
: 830 / 1249 Vivir para contarla (3x)
: 573 / 1473 Vargas Llosa - Historia de un deicidio
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8 x
: 124 / 124 Cien años de soledad 20x
: 5479 / 5500 5500 pages - Reading
: 51 / 55 FSI Basic Spanish 3x
: 309 / 506 Camino a Macondo

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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby luke » Sun May 08, 2022 3:11 pm

El famoso Don Quixote
I have a busy work week coming up. I will be in the office, far, far away. I have to tame Anki tout de suite.

The fastest way to do that is to switch up these two:

: 76 / 124 Cien años de soledad (10x)
: 1 / 96 Don Quijote del siglo XXI (5x)

Yesterday I wrapped up chapter 13 of Cien años de soledad and was surprised when several cards got added to Anki:
added_20220508.png

That bump of 10*2 = 20 cards yesterday wasn't me losing control. They were legit, "used a few times" words.

So I had to do something. The forecast below shows 42 minutes on the Cien años de soledad deck today. 80 cards took 42 minutes. The 60 or so cards forecast for the next 4 days will probably take 30, which is more than plenty:

100_years_prognostico_20220508.png


Synergy
The next two units of FSI Basic Spanish introduce vosotros and vos. What better way to preview and later reinforce them than our old friend Don Quixote del siglo XXI?

Changing the progress bars to more accurately reflect what I'll be focusing on the next week or so.

Speeding up Vargas Llosa
I'd been listening to both Virir para contarla and Vargas Llosa's Historia de un deicidio at 90% speed for pretty much all of the current run. That's a good pace for shadowing. But Mr. Vargas Llosa needs to get to the point a little quicker, or maybe I need to get to the end a little quicker. Either way, I started listening to his Gabo analysis at 140-160% yesterday. There's still the engaging content, but I'm not shadowing the narrator.

I continue listen-shadowing Vivir para contarla at 90%.

La variedad es la sal de la vida
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7 x
: 124 / 124 Cien años de soledad 20x
: 5479 / 5500 5500 pages - Reading
: 51 / 55 FSI Basic Spanish 3x
: 309 / 506 Camino a Macondo

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luke
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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby luke » Sun May 15, 2022 11:37 pm

The diversion in Quijote has been helping. I've only added 8 cards to Anki from my extensive reading of chapter 13 in Cien años de soledad since I've been following DQ XXI. I'm in the office most of this coming week too.

: 33 / 96 Quijote del siglo XXI (5x)

MorkTheFiddle wrote:I ran a couple dialogues of Plato through LIX and got these results.
Apology
- Number of sentences (M): 401
- Word count (O): 8834
Number of words with more than 6 characters (L): 8545
Average sentence length (Lm = O/M): 22.03
Proportion of long words (Lo = L / O * 100): 96.73
Readability index (LIX = Lm + Lo): 119

The high readability index for Plato probably results from the fact that sentences in Ancient Greek do tend to go on and on.

My favorite narrator has begun the Gabriel García Márquez novel El otoño del patriarca. In the first fragment he said some things that made me curious about its LIX:

Number of sentences (M): 115
Number of words (O): 89281
Number of words with more than 6 characters (L): 22692
Average sentence length (Lm = O / M): 776.36
Proportion of long words (Lo = L / O * 100): 25.42
Readability index (LIX = Lm + Lo): 802
Rough estimate of words used only once: 50% (of 11,700).



The LIX index is 16x higher than Cien años de soledad. The audible audiobook is 9 hours 43 minutes. At 115 sentences, that means the average sentence is 5 minutes long.

Time to get on the exercise bike, start watching, and see what happens. :)
6 x
: 124 / 124 Cien años de soledad 20x
: 5479 / 5500 5500 pages - Reading
: 51 / 55 FSI Basic Spanish 3x
: 309 / 506 Camino a Macondo

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Re: Luke's very confused Spanish Learning Log

Postby luke » Sun May 22, 2022 6:38 pm

FSI Basic Spanish 52/55s complete
Unit 52 covered adjective position, time frames like desde, desde que, hace, desde hace, hacía, desde hacía and special uses of sino. The review drills were on past tenses, subjunctives, and differences in the way English and Spanish nouns are sometimes expressed.

Three units remain. I am looking forward to finishing up this particular journey:
: 52 / 55 FSI Basic Spanish
: 55 / 55 FSI Illustrations (2x)

The second time through the FSI Presentations of Pattern was much easier than the first. Some of that was because it was review, and some was because the first time through took months, and in the meantime, I covered many of them in the unit-by-unit track.

Audiobooks
: 1182 / 1249 Vivir para contarla (3x)
: 1137 / 1473 Vargas Llosa - Historia de un deicidio

Mario Vargas Llosa's García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio [García Márquez: History of a Deicide] is getting more interesting. Chapter 29 is where he starts tying together Cien años de soledad with Gabo's other earlier works.

Some thoughts came on me today regarding some character names:

Amaranta (love)
Nigromanta (necromancer)

Amaranta is particularly intriguing. At least one literature analyzer characterized Amaranta as one of the most malvada women ever written. The root of her name is interesting. Úrsula's late in life reappraisal of so many of her own relations has me thinking once again. She's definitely an interesting character.

: 73 / 97 Quijote del siglo XXI (5x)

This 5th listen of Don Quijote del siglo XXI has been the most transparent. I'm reading the book and re-highlighting in yellow the passages from the original that turn up in this adaptation.

I've been doing about one "episode" per day. There are 20 and I have 5 left. Anki will be in much better shape in 5 days. That's when I'll turn back to the intensive read of Cien años in chapter 14 (of 20).

El Quijote is the graded reader I've been through a few times over the last year or so. I may do it again when I finish siglo XXI to get some more vos and vosotros exposure. Vosotros is taught in the current FSI unit (53). Vos is taught in the next (54).

Here's what one year of my El Quijote deck looks like:
dq_repasos_1yr.png


Thought for the future
After the current audiobooks, I want to listen to La mala hora, the novel Gabo published just before Cien años de soledad. That will be first time through. The chapters are around 40 minutes. If I set the audio speed to around 140%, I can fit a single chapter into a single walk and still have a bit of time for FSI drills.

12 weeks without ice cream
12 weeks without bringing the previously enumerated bingeables into the house and bingeing. It hasn't changed the scale, but it's got to be healthier. Dictionary.com had that interesting conjugation of binge.

Edited to add distraction limiting challenge progress.
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Last edited by luke on Mon May 23, 2022 11:48 pm, edited 2 times in total.
4 x
: 124 / 124 Cien años de soledad 20x
: 5479 / 5500 5500 pages - Reading
: 51 / 55 FSI Basic Spanish 3x
: 309 / 506 Camino a Macondo


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