Re: Yuurei's Language Log (ZH, KO, FR, JA, ES) [Now with more LR]

Continue or start your personal language log here, including logs for challenge participants
User avatar
rdearman
Site Admin
Posts: 7231
Joined: Thu May 14, 2015 4:18 pm
Location: United Kingdom
Languages: English (N)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1836
x 23120
Contact:

Re: Yuurei's Language Log (ZH, KO, FR, JA, ES)

Postby rdearman » Fri Jan 05, 2018 4:17 pm

Brun Ugle wrote:Wait! If I get cookies either way, what am I going to use as an excuse when I inevitably stray from the Spanish/German path?

Blame me, that is what you normally do.
4 x
: 0 / 150 Read 150 books in 2024

My YouTube Channel
The Autodidactic Podcast
My Author's Newsletter

I post on this forum with mobile devices, so excuse short msgs and typos.

User avatar
Stelle
Blue Belt
Posts: 580
Joined: Sat Jul 18, 2015 1:37 pm
Location: Canada
Languages: English (N1), French (N2), Spanish (advanced), Tagalog (basic), Russian (beginner)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=13312
x 1527
Contact:

Re: Yuurei's Language Log (ZH, KO, FR, JA, ES)

Postby Stelle » Fri Jan 05, 2018 4:54 pm

Brun Ugle wrote:Wait! If I get cookies either way, what am I going to use as an excuse when I inevitably stray from the Spanish/German path?

More cookies.
3 x

User avatar
Yuurei
Green Belt
Posts: 266
Joined: Tue Oct 20, 2015 8:57 am
Languages: German (N), English, French, Japanese, Spanish, Latin, Italian
Studying: Japanese, Chinese, Korean
Maintaining: French, Spanish
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1721
x 590

Re: Yuurei's Language Log (ZH, KO, FR, JA, ES)

Postby Yuurei » Mon Jan 08, 2018 1:09 pm

Hello, my name is Yuurei and I'm a language addict.

So, last week I stumbled over an interesting book - "Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World's Undeciphered Scripts," which I hope to find the time to read sometime this year. The real problem though, is that I was reading some reviews of the book and apparently it starts of with a brief overview of the decipherment of of some already deciphered scripts (namely Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Linear B and Maya glyphs) and that reminded me that once upon a time (before I got totally into languages) I wanted to learn Ancient Egyptian, and before I knew it I found myself reading through emk's fascinating old log on HTLAL where he writes a lot about his studies of Egyptian (and which I highly recommend to anyone who would like to be tempted into learning Ancient Egyptian! :lol: ). And now here I am, fantasizing about learning another language as though juggling 5 wasn't ambitious enough for me (and as though there wasn't already a 6th begging for attention)... *sighs* What am I going to do with myself?

And as though that wasn't enough, I also planned my next holiday - a short trip to Florence, Italy with my friend at the beginning of March - and of course that made me think that I really ought to learn a bit of Italian to make the best of that trip... =x

So, yeah, that was my week, basically, getting hit by a fierce bout of wanderlust. :roll:

Weekly Goals for Week 1 (2018) - All done \o/

Chinese
*Study chapters 3-4 of CB level 1 reader #1 (Wrong, wrong, wrong!)
*Read chapters 5-7 of Emma (MC level 1 reader) [Extensive reading]
Legend: RB: Rainbow Bridge; CB: Chinese Breeze; MC: Mandarin Companion

Korean
*Study I Hear Your Voice Substudy Anki deck (at least 5 days) [7 days]
*Study grammar sentence deck (at least 5 days) [7 days]

French
*Tadoku: Read 300 pages

Japanese
*Read 1 manga volume [無職転生 Vol. 1]

Spanish
*80 minutes of AV [Buffy S1 ep. 7-8]

Other stuff I did:
French: Watched 2 episodes of Grimm (S3 ep. 21-21). Read another 269 pages.
Spanish: Watched Buffy S1 ep. 9.
Chinese: Finished working through Wrong, wrong, wrong! (chapters 5-9).

French
I read a total of 569 pages for Tadoku this week, which averages to about 81 pages per day - slightly more than I'd need for my goal of 2000 pages. I had a bit of trouble figuring out what I want to read, but have found that I'm unexpectedly in a mood to read thrillers, so that's what it'll be for now. I finished one book so far - "Le Masque de l'araignée" by James Patterson (can't really recommend it unless you're impervious to giant plot holes and incompetent main characters =x) and then started on "Le symbole perdu," Dan Brown's 3rd novel in the Robert Langdon series, which I never previously got around to reading. I read the first two books in the series waay back when and remember liking them well enough.

Korean
I finished adding cards from episode 1 of I Hear Your Voice yesterday. After 28 days I now have 272 cards of that episode in my young and mature cards. I deleted and suspended quite a lot of cards - I think I had more than double that amount to start with (around 570 cards or something?). It is still, I think, too early to judge the effectiveness of this approach, but so far I certainly don't have anything bad to say about it. I do feel like it's helpful (I've certainly already internalised how to say 'I'll kill you!' - I'm sure that'll come in handy. XD) and it is enjoyable, but finding cards of the right difficulty is still a bit hit and miss. That's not a really big negative though and so I intend to continue using this method. I've decided to take a break from adding new cards this week though, since between this deck, the Korean grammar sentence deck and my Chinese flash cards there's quite a bit of flash carding going on every day and I'd like to tone it down a bit. So first I'll do reviews only to get my daily review count a bit lower and then I'll start adding cards from the next episode, but probably rather at a rate of 5/day instead of 10/day.



Weekly Goals for Week 2 (2018)

Chinese
*Study chapters 1-3 of CB level 1 reader #2 (Left and Right)
*Finish reading Emma (MC level 1) (chapters 8-10) [Extensive reading]
Legend: RB: Rainbow Bridge; CB: Chinese Breeze; MC: Mandarin Companion

Korean
*Review I Hear Your Voice Substudy Anki deck (at least 5 days) [no new cards this week]
*Study grammar sentence deck (at least 5 days)
*Watch episode 1 of I Hear Your Voice raw

French
*Tadoku: Read 300 pages

Japanese
*Read 1 manga volume

Spanish
*80 minutes of AV
7 x

User avatar
Yuurei
Green Belt
Posts: 266
Joined: Tue Oct 20, 2015 8:57 am
Languages: German (N), English, French, Japanese, Spanish, Latin, Italian
Studying: Japanese, Chinese, Korean
Maintaining: French, Spanish
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1721
x 590

Re: Yuurei's Language Log (ZH, KO, FR, JA, ES)

Postby Yuurei » Mon Jan 15, 2018 4:07 pm

I somehow managed to push my wanderlust for Ancient Egyptian into a dark corner, where it will hopefully stay for a while. :lol:
Unfortunately my wanderlust for Italian, which I'd put on a leash as well, managed to escape and keeps bugging me. We went and booked our trip to Italy this weekend, so that certainly didn't help either. And now I keep thinking about ways to cram a lot of Italian into my mind before my trip.
Incidentally, I found out that you can watch the Italian version of Avatar on the Italian website of Nickelodeon - even if you're not in Italy. *coughs* I also actually have the Italian Assmil and an Italian grammar book lying around at home, since I got them from my Mum when she stopped learning the language. Yeah, I think we can all see where this is going.... :oops:

Weekly Goals for Week 2 (2018) - All done \o/
Chinese
*Study chapters 1-3 of CB level 1 reader #2 (Left and Right)
*Finish reading Emma (MC level 1) (chapters 8-10) [Extensive reading]
Legend: RB: Rainbow Bridge; CB: Chinese Breeze; MC: Mandarin Companion

Korean
*Review I Hear Your Voice Substudy Anki deck (at least 5 days) [no new cards this week] [7 days]
*Study grammar sentence deck (at least 5 days) [7 days]
*Watch episode 1 of I Hear Your Voice raw

French
*Tadoku: Read 300 pages

Japanese
*Read 1 manga volume [無職転生 Vol. 2]

Spanish
*80 minutes of AV [Buffy S1 ep. 10-11]

Other stuff I did:
French: Read another 216 pages. Watched Jurassic World.
Japanese: Watched ep. 1-8 of ネト充のススメ.
Chinese: Finished CB reader Left and Right (chapters 4-7).

French
Tadoku has been going pretty well and I'm on track for reaching my 2000 pages. Had some trouble finding something interesting to read to start with - that Dan Brown thriller turned out pretty bad disappointing and I decided to drop it after 140 pages, since in my opinion life is too short to read bad books. But shortly after I started reading Jurassic Park and I've been enjoying that one a lot. I'm almost done by now and can really recommend it to anyone looking for a good thriller. I did like the movie, back when, but I think the novel does a much, much better job. Also, dinosaurs - what's not to like? XD

Chinese
I finished my second Chinese Breeze reader yesterday by just reading the last 2.5 chapters straight. The fist reader was certainly not difficult for me, but I wouldn't have gone so far as to call it easy. The second reader, however, certainly was easy. On Saturday I actually had to go through a whole chapter (some 8 or so pages) to find my 5 unknown words to add to my flashcards, which was a large part of the reason I simply decided to read straight to the end yesterday. I do like the CB readers - they're somewhat repetitive, but that does make them very helpful and the stories aren't competely without interest. I have to say though, that I liked the Rainbow Bridge stories a bit more. They're far (far!) less repetitive (which makes them a bit more difficult by default, I suppose) and I enjoy that they're all Chinese folkales/legends/myths, since I gain some interesting Chinese cultural knowledge at the same time. [Speaking of which, one Chinese novel series that I'm currently reading in translation - The King's Avatar - actually made a reference to one of those stories - Tian Ji's Horse Racing - in one of the recent chapters. Made me all excited that I got the reference. :D ]
Also they weren't joking about the audio for Left and Right being slowed down - I listened to the 'normal' track on 1.25x speed and even so it was a bit slower than the 'slow' track of Wrong, wrong, wrong!. :lol:
In any case, I think at this point the remaining CB level 1 readers are more useful for extensive reading and/or listening than intensive reading/listening, so I'll probably go through them on the side while using the RB level one readers for my intensive r/l.
I also finished my Mandarin Companion reader, but I have to admit that it wasn't very interesting - even the rather repetitive CB readers were more enjoyable and since I can just use those for extensive reading there's no real reason for me to read any more MC readers.



Weekly Goals for Week 3 (2018)

Chinese
*Study 12 pages of CB level 2 reader #1 (If I Didn't Have You)
Legend: RB: Rainbow Bridge; CB: Chinese Breeze

Korean
*Study grammar sentence deck (at least 5 days)
*Study Substudy deck (at least 5 days)

French
*Tadoku: Read 300 pages

Japanese
*Read 1 manga volume

Spanish
*80 minutes of AV

Edit: Changed reader for Chinese reading goal.
Last edited by Yuurei on Tue Jan 16, 2018 7:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.
2 x

User avatar
Yuurei
Green Belt
Posts: 266
Joined: Tue Oct 20, 2015 8:57 am
Languages: German (N), English, French, Japanese, Spanish, Latin, Italian
Studying: Japanese, Chinese, Korean
Maintaining: French, Spanish
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1721
x 590

Re: Yuurei's Language Log (ZH, KO, FR, JA, ES)

Postby Yuurei » Tue Jan 16, 2018 7:55 pm

So, just in case I had any doubt at all that the Chinese Breeze readers are easier than the Rainbow Bridge ones, they're all gone now. Completely. Yesterday I got through one small-ish paragraph of The Assassin and the King without being able to add all of unknown words - even though I added 7 or 8 of them - and then today I had a somewhat longer paragraph and after adding 7 new vocab terms and one name, there still remained 9 (nine!) unknown words. I mean, the story sounds interesting, but maybe it's still a bit too difficult even for intensive listening/reading at this point. To compare, I had a look at a level 2 Chinese Breeze reader and that one seems quite a bit easier. I read somewhere that the CB word/character counts actually refer to words, not characters, so maybe that's where the at least part of the difference stems from? The other part I think comes from the fact that the RB readers introduce more new words: The Assassin and the King introduces 78 new/glossed words while having a total length of 2,500 characters, whereas my CB level 2 reader introduces 66 new/glossed words in ca. 8,000 - 9,000 characters.
So, yeah, long story short, it seems rather silly (and unnecessary) to somehow fight my way through The Assassin and the King this week, when I have more appropriate reading material at hand, so I've decided to change my Chinese goal for the week from reading 12 pages of The Assassin and the King to reading 12 pages of If I Didn't Have You (CB level 2). There certainly isn't any less text in the CB reader pages - in fact, I'm pretty sure it's a bit more.

Also, for anyone else interested in Chinese graded readers, here's the order in which I would read these readers:
1. Chinese Breeze level 1 (300字)
2. Rainbow Bridge level S (150字)
3. Chinese Breeze level 2 (500字)
4. Rainbow Bridge level 1 (300字)?
5 x

User avatar
Yuurei
Green Belt
Posts: 266
Joined: Tue Oct 20, 2015 8:57 am
Languages: German (N), English, French, Japanese, Spanish, Latin, Italian
Studying: Japanese, Chinese, Korean
Maintaining: French, Spanish
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1721
x 590

Re: Yuurei's Language Log (ZH, KO, FR, JA, ES)

Postby Yuurei » Fri Jan 19, 2018 4:25 pm

And now for something completely different - Experiment time!

In the recent thread HTLAL vs LLORG, some people lamented the fact that there aren't many language learning experiments done anymore, as there were on the old HTLAL. I was also a longtime lurker on HTLAL and enjoyed reading about people's crazy - or not so crazy - experiments, so the discussion made me think that I might want to try experimenting with methods a bit more as well. It also reminded me that once upon a time I really wanted to try out the LR method (as proposed by atamagaii/buenaparte; you can find most infos on the method here, although there were also several threads on HTLAL about the topic). I did actually give it a very short try with Japanese back in the day, but it turned out to be very exhausting and frustrating and so I gave the idea up again very quickly and afterwards I sort of forgot about the method to tell the truth.

But seeing how Italian refuses to leave my mind, I thought: why not use this opportunity to see how (a modified version of) LR works for me? Admittedly, Italian being a rather transparent language for me, I wouldn't be able to use the results to conclude that I could use the method to learn, say, Polish or Korean, but it nonetheless seems like an interesting experiment to me.

For those who don't know what LR is and don't feel like wading through atamagaii's admittedly somewhat haphazard infos, the process, at its core, involves a long text (preferably a novel) in L1 and L2, it's L2 audio book and the following three steps:

1. Read the text in L1 to familiarize yourself with it.
2. Listen to the audio book while reading along in L2.
3. Listen to the audio book while reading along in L1.

Step 3 is usually repeated several times (atamagaii writes that going through step 3 3 times is usually enough for her to completely understand the audio of the book. Once that state is reached, you move on to the next book and repeat the steps until you have reached your desired level of understanding of natural language audio.

I will skip step 1, because I already know the book I chose (Harry Potter e la pietra filosofale) very well.

There's also a step 4 that involves repeating some of the audio as you listen along to work on your pronounciation and speaking skills and a step 5 where you translate the text from L1 to L2 (in a very Assimil active wave fashion, I guess), but I've decided not to include them for this experiment. I made this decision because I'm really much more interested in passive knowledge of Italian, since any active skills I gained would be gone again very soon, as I do not intend to spend much - if any - time on Italian after my upcoming trip, since I really neeed that time for my other languages. Moreover the time I have to spend on this experiment is somewhat limited as well.

Over in rdearman's log, smallwhite made the suggestion of taking Dialang tests before and after an experiment to measure progress and I decided to shamelessly steal that idea and subject myself to the painful process of taking Dialang tests for listening and reading in a language I've never learnt. :lol:

My plan looks as follows:

38 hours of Listening-Reading in a new, transparent language (Italian)

Previous learning: None.
Knowledge of related languages: French (~C1), Spanish (Passive ~B2-C1), Latin (Passive Intermediate)
Dialang pre-test listening: A1 (or below)
Dialang pre-test reading: A2*
Time frame: 19.01.2018 - 25.02.2018 (38 days)
Actual learning time: 38 hours
LR Material: Harry Potter e la pietra filosofale (Runtime: 9.5h)
Learning steps:
1. Listen to audio while reading along in Italian (9.5h)
2. Listen to audio while reading along in English x3 (28.5h)
Alternative:
Should I feel like I've already mastered the book after less than 3 repititions of step 2, I will opt to repeat steps 1 and 2 with HP2 instead. We shall see.
Test conditions: In order to prevent contaminating the experiment, I will refrain from doing any other Italian learning during the time of the experiments. The one exception to that is that I reserve the right to look through my Italian grammar book for an overview of the grammar and important verb forms etc. if and when I feel like it, but I will of course note it here if I do so.

In the original LR method, you're supposed to LR for several hours at a time, several days in a row without any real breaks, basically, but seeing how I have a full-time job and all that that's never going to happen. 38 hours in 38 days would beautifully work out to one hour a day, but the idea of spending an hour a day on this for 38 days is also not very realistic for me, so most (if not all) of the LRing will probably happen during the weekend. This is, I suppose, not ideal, but hopefully it will none the less be somewhat effective.

Furthermore 38 hours is not a lot of time for getting results with this method, but I'm hoping that the fact that Italian is a very transparent language for me will mean that I get some useful progress in less time.

As for what I'm expecting from this experiment - obviously I'm hoping to be magically fluent by the end of it! In the more likely event of that not happening, I am actually hoping to be in a position to read easier novels in Italian afterwards without much trouble (which would make my trip to Italy so much better, since I'd be able to enjoy browsing all of the bookshops!). At the same time, I hope that the deluge of audio input will leave a good impression of Italian pronounciation in my head, meaning I could actually read novels without fearing to completely cripple my Italian pronounciation. I would also hope to be able to enjoy easier TV shows in Italian - things like Avatar, certainly, but also maybe easier real TV shows dubbed into Italian.

Welp, guess this is actually happening now. Comments welcome. :geek:

*Even though I did expect to get a higher score for reading than for listening before taking the test, considering the anount of questions where I simply chose one option at random because I had no idea made me doubt the accuracy of the result somewhat. I really missed an "I don't know" option during the test to mitigate the chance of altering the results through 'lucky guesses'.
24 x

Christi
Orange Belt
Posts: 245
Joined: Thu Jan 18, 2018 7:56 pm
Languages: Dutch (N), English (C1), German (B1), Korean (high A2-low B1?)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... php?t=7574
x 330

Re: Yuurei's Language Log (ZH, KO, FR, JA, ES)

Postby Christi » Fri Jan 19, 2018 5:48 pm

Yuurei wrote:
Korean
*Review I Hear Your Voice Substudy Anki deck (at least 5 days) [no new cards this week] [7 days]
*Study grammar sentence deck (at least 5 days) [7 days]
*Watch episode 1 of I Hear Your Voice raw


Hi! I still need to read the rest of your post but wanted to ask this question before I'd forget.
Did you find the I hear your voice Anki vocab somewhere or are you making your own deck? It seems like an interesting way to study, I might like to try it some day.

I'll go read the rest of your log now ;)
0 x
2020 resolution words learned: 472 / 1000
Pages read at end of 2020: 220 / 1500

User avatar
Brun Ugle
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2273
Joined: Mon Jul 27, 2015 12:48 pm
Location: Steinkjer, Norway
Languages: English (N), Norwegian (~C1/C2), Spanish (B1/B2), German (A2/B1?), Japanese (very rusty)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=11484
x 5821
Contact:

Re: Yuurei's Language Log (ZH, KO, FR, JA, ES)

Postby Brun Ugle » Fri Jan 19, 2018 6:13 pm

I am so tempted to join you in this experiment. Not with Italian, but I've always wanted to give real LR a go. (Somebody stop me, please.)
5 x

User avatar
Yuurei
Green Belt
Posts: 266
Joined: Tue Oct 20, 2015 8:57 am
Languages: German (N), English, French, Japanese, Spanish, Latin, Italian
Studying: Japanese, Chinese, Korean
Maintaining: French, Spanish
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1721
x 590

Re: Yuurei's Language Log (ZH, KO, FR, JA, ES)

Postby Yuurei » Fri Jan 19, 2018 10:08 pm

Brun Ugle wrote:I am so tempted to join you in this experiment. Not with Italian, but I've always wanted to give real LR a go. (Somebody stop me, please.)

Do eet! \o/

Christi wrote:Hi! I still need to read the rest of your post but wanted to ask this question before I'd forget.
Did you find the I hear your voice Anki vocab somewhere or are you making your own deck? It seems like an interesting way to study, I might like to try it some day.

I'll go read the rest of your log now ;)

Questions are always welcome, of course! :D
ロータス already linked you to the relevant post, but to elaborate: I made the deck myself, with the help of emk's Substudy software. You can find more info on Substudy in the relevant thread here. It's not a vocab deck though, but a subs2srs deck - it's basically a TV show episode turned into Anki cards. The front has the audio of a sentence from the drama, plus a screenshot to give some context and the back has the Korean text and its English translation, both taken from the respective subtitles. You can find more infos on the format - and some nice screenshots - in the thread I linked. :)
Substudy makes the creation of a deck like this really fast and easy - provided you don't shy away from using a command line, that is.

ロータス wrote:I never understood how listening to L2 while reading in L1 was suppose to help with comprehension. What if the sentences aren't one to one and some are broken up in to two or three sentences? How would you know unless you already understand what you are hearing. I only say this because that is the case for my languages xD

Look forward to seeing your results.

Hah, I know exactly what you mean. I do think it doesn't work the same for opaque languages, and even atamagaii, the original proponent of LR gives somewhat different advice for such languages (she herself used the method for Japanese), including learning some grammar first and using a pop-up dictionary in the beginning. Volte writes a bit more about their own LR approach for distant languages here - but neither version sounds easy and personally, I'm not sure I'd want to try it for a completely opaque language as a beginner.
2 x

User avatar
Iversen
Black Belt - 4th Dan
Posts: 4768
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 7:36 pm
Location: Denmark
Languages: Monolingual travels in Danish, English, German, Dutch, Swedish, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Romanian and (part time) Esperanto
Ahem, not yet: Norwegian, Afrikaans, Platt, Scots, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Irish, Indonesian and a few more...
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1027
x 14962

Re: Yuurei's Language Log (ZH, KO, FR, JA, ES)

Postby Iversen » Sat Jan 20, 2018 12:19 am

For those that don't remember Atamagaii / Siomotteikiru /... / ... she was a contributor to HTLAL (under different names) who was fairly disruptive and not always very polite, but who also came up with some quite orginal ideas about language learning including the socalled L-R (listening-reading) method where you learn a language through massive listening to a text in L2 while reading a transcript (after you have read a translation first). And "massive" means hours on end - like 80 hours or so, not just an hour or two while watching TV. But why read a translation and then a transcript while listening? Well, the point is that you should know the gist of the thing you're listening to, and the language is then supposed to seep into your brain while you listen - but the danger is of course that you just read and forget to listen. I didn't remember the method in detail, but here you find the original message from HTLAL with the details, and here you find a list with Sio's main contributions. Actually Yuurei has already mentioned these sources, but I'll just add that I made an experiment with Persian, where I actually felt that it might work. But I dropped the attempt because I couldn't find enough interesting sources with both an original spoken version and a transcript and a (good and loyal) translation - and because it would take oceans of time, which I couldn't muster with a full job schedule and my own small projects running at the same time..
9 x


Return to “Language logs”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests