ASND's Language Log

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AllSubNoDub
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Re: ASND's Language Log

Postby AllSubNoDub » Tue Oct 26, 2021 11:06 pm

iguanamon wrote:
AllSubNoDub wrote:...Lastly, I'll mention that this HP sentence in particular, gave me a lot of difficulty just when I thought I was on a roll.
  • La mazmorra estaba llena de cientos de personas transparentes, de color blanco perla. La mayoría se movían sin ánimo por una sala de baile abarrotada, bailando el vals al horrible y trémulo son de las treinta sierras de una orquesta instalada sobre un escenario vestido de tela negra.
  • The dungeon was full of hundreds of pearly-white, translucent people, mostly drifting around a crowded dance floor, waltzing to the dreadful, quavering sound of thirty musical saws, played by an orchestra on a raised, black-draped platform.
A lot of the words could be guessed or were shaky, but in my Anki deck already. The thing that broke it was "son" - I had never heard of this noun which my brain (and google translate) kept trying to infer as the verb "to be". I guess it means a pleasant sound, especially in relation to music. If I were extensively reading, this whole thing would have gone over my head.

Yeah, whenever I think I've got anything down in a language, something else will come along to knock me down a peg too. Son (as a noun) is just a general term for a "sound" usually associated with music. In Cuba, "son" is used to denote a genre of music as well. As always, context is key. Good job.


Yes, the Cuban Son thing popped up and I found it really interesting! Then I found out there was Mexican Son too, among others. Honestly, where have I been? It reminds me of when I did a lot of reading on Santería (in English) and how interesting I found all the syncretic differences and similarities that took place among the Yoruba diaspora. I'm definitely going to have to read up on all this in Spanish. Cuba is such an interesting and (at least to me) somewhat mysterious place.

I'm really surprised that "son" doesn't have its own entry under "sound" on SpanishDict, as I have no idea what else it could be translated as. Score 1 for monolingual dictionaries (the RAE definition was simple to understand and right there, easy to find).
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AllSubNoDub
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Re: ASND's Language Log

Postby AllSubNoDub » Tue Oct 26, 2021 11:45 pm

german2k01 wrote:AllSubNoDub,

Firstly, how aggressively do you add sentences to your Anki collection from your intensive reading? Secondly, how many items in your Spanish deck do you have since you have started learning Spanish?

1. Too aggressively lol. With Anki, it's not reviewing cards that's most tedious and time consuming, it's making new ones. I did not start Spanish with Anki, I have only started using it since after I picked Spanish back up (a few months ago). As such, I have fallen into this trap (which from what I hear can be common), where, if it's not in my Anki, I feel like it's not mine. So I would say about 1/4 of the words I add, I actually "know", but for some reason think I'll either forget how to recognize them or, more commonly, forget how to say them (e.g. if there's some subtle difference between a Spanish cognate and what one might guess the Spanish would be, such as "aprensión" for "apprehension", not "apriensión").

2. This is actually tough to say. I added a pre-made deck for the 5000 most frequent words, but I found pretty quickly that I knew a lot of them, so I started removing them. I also ended up archiving all my Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal cards (HP1), because I found that the card format was not as efficacious as my current card format (I might go back later and reformat them all, but I've already added back a lot of them as I recognize them in the wild; the card format couldn't have been that bad though, because I remember the meanings of most of them). This puts me down to about a couple of thousand cards.

My only minor regret is that I chose to tear apart the much maligned Harry Potter of all books (and the second in the series at that), instead of a "good book" written by a native. This is all about appearances though. There are people on this forum that turn their nose up at it, but I actually really enjoy it (takes me back to my childhood). Also, I would not describe the language as "easy" really. I guess I'm just a plebeian.
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AllSubNoDub
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Re: ASND's Language Log

Postby AllSubNoDub » Sun Oct 31, 2021 1:07 pm

Japanese (10/23/21-10/29/21): 5 hours 10 minutes
Spanish (10/23/21-10/29/21): 19 hours 23 minutes

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Might be another light week, school is getting crazy again. I may only be able to do Anki, but I'll at least try to read a few pages a day.

I'm really envious of people that can do the passive listening in the background. I simply can't do it, especially the more of it I understand. My focus just goes 100% on whatever I'm listening to. I think this might have something to do with my aphantasia. Anecdotally, I've noticed that the more a person is a visual or textual learner, the easier it is for them to tune out speaking; for me, I'm extremely tuned in (pardon the pun) to audio. When I hear it I know it, and I don't really know it till I hear it. I think this is why I find things like Pimsleur and methods like shadowing so effective.

I was reading Vagrant's log and it reminded me of all the Caribbean Spanish I grew up hearing. It reminded me of hearing this Latin radio station that I would always hear playing that used to broadcast predominately Caribbean music. I used to hear this song by Aventura all the time when I was a kid and I can actually understand all the lyrics now (I had to read them though, spoken Spanish is still tricky, especially music). One of the vocabs I just put in my Anki before hearing the song (love it when that happens), 'rozarse' = to touch, to graze.



I also remembered that Kauderwelsch makes dialect materials and I downloaded their Venezolano materials, since that's most likely the dialect I'll be learning. I also downloaded the Dominican and Cuban ones. They pronounce things way more clearly than you'd actually here, but the Venezuelan isn't too bad (aspiration on medial 's' but fully-pronounced terminal 's', which I don't think they actually do). I skipped through it (didn't log it) and picked up a couple of unique venezolano words like 'poceta' = toilet. Also, I guess I should start calling it 'castellano' not 'español' lol. Should be fun once I get to the dialect studies.


Edit: 'aphantasia' not 'aphasia'
Last edited by AllSubNoDub on Sun Nov 14, 2021 6:51 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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greatSchism
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Re: ASND's Language Log

Postby greatSchism » Mon Nov 01, 2021 1:58 am

AllSubNoDub wrote:Japanese (10/23/21-10/29/21): 5 hours 10 minutes
Spanish (10/23/21-10/29/21): 19 hours 23 minutes

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Might be another light week, school is getting crazy again. I may only be able to do Anki, but I'll at least try to read a few pages a day.

I'm really envious of people that can do the passive listening in the background. I simply can't do it, especially the more of it I understand. My focus just goes 100% on whatever I'm listening to. I think this might have something to do with my aphasia. Anecdotally, I've noticed that the more a person is a visual or textual learner, the easier it is for them to tune out speaking; for me, I'm extremely tuned in (pardon the pun) to audio. When I hear it I know it, and I don't really know it till I hear it. I think this is why I find things like Pimsleur and methods like shadowing so effective.

I was reading Vagrant's log and it reminded me of all the Caribbean Spanish I grew up hearing. It reminded me of hearing this Latin radio station that I would always hear playing that used to broadcast predominately Caribbean music. I used to hear this song by Aventura all the time when I was a kid and I can actually understand all the lyrics now (I had to read them though, spoken Spanish is still tricky, especially music). One of the vocabs I just put in my Anki before hearing the song (love it when that happens), 'rozarse' = to touch, to graze.



I also remembered that Kauderwelsch makes dialect materials and I downloaded their Venezolano materials, since that's most likely the dialect I'll be learning. I also downloaded the Dominican and Cuban ones. They pronounce things way more clearly than you'd actually here, but the Venezuelan isn't too bad (aspiration on medial 's' but fully-pronounced terminal 's', which I don't think they actually do). I skipped through it (didn't log it) and picked up a couple of unique venezolano words like 'poceta' = toilet. Also, I guess I should start calling it 'castellano' not 'español' lol. Should be fun once I get to the dialect studies.


19 hours 23 minutes is an impressive amount of time. I am not at the point where I could listen to Spanish music in the background and not butcher the lyrics. It's funny how there are so many songs in English that native English speakers misunderstand and create their own lyrics. I am one of those people.
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Dr Mack Rettosy
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Re: ASND's Language Log

Postby Dr Mack Rettosy » Fri Nov 05, 2021 4:46 pm

Nice log, I enjoy your approach! I’m toying with the idea of Spanish as an L3 and appreciate the meta discussions.

How goes RTK?
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AllSubNoDub
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Re: ASND's Language Log

Postby AllSubNoDub » Fri Nov 05, 2021 5:18 pm

Dr Mack Rettosy wrote:Nice log, I enjoy your approach! I’m toying with the idea of Spanish as an L3 and appreciate the meta discussions.

How goes RTK?

Thanks! I honestly don't know how people learn kanji/hanzi any other way. I'm using RTK1 with Anki and a mix of Heisig stories, Kanji Koohii stories, and occasionally my own stories. I do 10 a day. I could easily do more, but at the expense of Spanish, which I'm not willing to do. Depending on the strength of the story, I'd say RTK alone gives me about 70-80% retention right off the bat, then Anki inevitably picks up the rest for the mnemonics that provide a weaker "signal".

My tentative plan is after I finish RTK1 (all jouyou kanji, plus ~150 extra you "get for free" along the way) and all my cards are mature, I will consolidate my knowledge by reversing all my cards and going from kanji to keyword in randomized fashion (this should go much faster of course, since my recognition is already pretty good). After that I will probably do RTK3 in the same fashion. At that point, I will probably be satisfied enough with my Spanish to give Japanese full attention.

I will probably go through Dogen's Japanese phonetics course, read through Tae Kim's, speedrun the kana (I "know" kana, but it's shaky at best because I haven't really used it) then experiment with L-Ring the way aYa originally intended it. Will it work? I dunno. I definitely have my doubts. I will have more than the requisite knowledge she has prescribed. I believe she said she had 60-70 hours of recorded material and went through it in 200-250 hours. She knew all the bushu, but only know about 250 characters, so I should be lightyears ahead of her in terms of that. If I get a few weeks off work in the future, I'd like to try and prove her wrong or right.

Also, I've thought about switching to Kanji para Recordar, but I dunno. The Spanish translations pop into my head all the time when I'm reviewing Kanji and the characters pop into my head when I'm reviewing Spanish. I've watched quite a few videos of En japonés con Rafy because it obviously covers a lot of both of my current linguistic interests.
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Re: ASND's Language Log

Postby golyplot » Fri Nov 05, 2021 6:39 pm

It's funny because I can't understand why anyone would like RTK, other than it being free.
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AllSubNoDub
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Re: ASND's Language Log

Postby AllSubNoDub » Fri Nov 05, 2021 8:00 pm

golyplot wrote:It's funny because I can't understand why anyone would like RTK, other than it being free.

Why wouldn't I like it? What didn't you like about it when you tried it? How far did you get? It's effective and if I don't like a mnemonic, I simply come up with my own. The Kanji Koohii community is amazingly creative, so oftentimes I find a great mnemonic from them (a myriad of choices per character). Also, how is it free without pirating it?
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Re: ASND's Language Log

Postby golyplot » Fri Nov 05, 2021 10:34 pm

I assumed it was free since Matt mentioned the cost of WK as a downside.

Anyway, one issue is that the keywords can be a bit odd. I opened it up randomly and the first one I saw was "effulgent". I'm a native English speaker and I still have no idea wtf effulgent is.

A bigger issue is that it barely teaches meaning and doesn't teach readings at all and it doesn't teach you any words to reinforce and explain the kanji. It also doesn't order by frequency, so it takes longer before you can actually read anything.
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AllSubNoDub
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Re: ASND's Language Log

Postby AllSubNoDub » Fri Nov 05, 2021 11:59 pm

golyplot wrote:I assumed it was free since Matt mentioned the cost of WK as a downside.

So, Anki is free and there are free decks made from RTK, but I own the book. I believe he was referring to Anki, since after you complete WK there's no way to review unless you pay their subscription. No thanks. The book is very cheap and worth the price for the extra info it provides imo.

golyplot wrote:Anyway, one issue is that the keywords can be a bit odd. I opened it up randomly and the first one I saw was "effulgent". I'm a native English speaker and I still have no idea wtf effulgent is.

Yes, this can be confusing to the uninitiated. These keywords are chosen very carefully, however; they are not arbitrary. Most of the time, they're what you would expect, e.g. "石" = "stone". The problem is that multiple characters can sometimes be translated as the same word in English. This is where using different keywords is essential. The point is to teach you a character by giving you a keyword - giving you a "coat hook" if you will - then when you go to learn actual vocabulary, you can associate it with the character - you can hang several coats on your coat hook. Sometimes, the idea doesn't even exist in English. Does WK not do the same thing with kanji like "jade disk"?

I can't commiserate on not knowing what the word "effulgent" means. I actually already learned the related "refulgente" in Spanish from reading Harry Potter. But anyway, that's not really the point. The point is to give you an idea or a "signal" about a character, not teach you a translation (which is not possible since a character will have multiple meanings).

golyplot wrote:A bigger issue is that it barely teaches meaning and doesn't teach readings at all and it doesn't teach you any words to reinforce and explain the kanji.

RTK2 does. Also, I don't plan on learning vocabulary out of context. I've never been good at it and it just ain't my cup of meat. I took two semesters of Chinese at university and I think the only hanzi I remember is "女", because it was taught in order of frequency. It was hell trying to learn hanzi that way in addition to vocabulary. If I had to do that, I honestly don't even know if Japanese would be worth it for me at that point.

golyplot wrote:It also doesn't order by frequency, so it takes longer before you can actually read anything.

This is where RTK shines. I know I want to learn all the jouyou kanji now, so why not get it out of the way? Since you don't have to worry about vocabulary, it goes faster and more efficiently than you could possibly imagine. Every character builds off the previous, so that you can easily learn 10 characters that use the "心" radical in a matter of 30 minutes (which is what I did today). Though I could do so if I wanted, I don't care about learning how to read or speak Japanese right now, only Spanish, so this is literally perfect for me.

RTK has given me the ability to take characters that once looked like a bunch of arbitrary scribbles and easily deconstruct them and give them meaning. The more characters I learn, the faster I learn new characters. RTK is simply amazing.
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