French the FLLO way

[emk]

For example, if there is a sentence like "It is a very interesting game", I can usually say "C'est un jeu très intéressant", no problem. But I sometimes have difficulty recalling whether that last word has two Rs and one S or vice-versa, which way the accent goes on the E, that kind of thing. Nothing that a couple of reviews hasn't been able to fix.

Ah, cool. So it sounds like these cards aren't turning into leeches at the moment. Keep an eye on them, though—once you get near the three month mark, you may find that you've forgotten the context of a particular lesson, or that you know two or three ways to say something and you can't remember which one to use on this particular card. If this happens, don't beat yourself up for not being able to answer these cards. You can always suspend them or convert them to an easier format. Like Rapp said, cards are disposable.

And on the topic of Buffy, I guess I could look at the process of picking out easy sentences to study as kind of the inverse of your "delete ruthlessly" method. I effectively pre-delete them by not including them in my filtered deck in the first place. And if my process actually succeeds in teaching me some French , I should find that the sentences I find easy should gradually get more and more complicated as time goes by. So maybe just soldiering on with more episodes is the way to go, rather than trying to squeeze every last drop out of each one before moving on. It is more likely to keep things interesting, too.

Yeah, I would definitely be inclined to move onto newer episodes. Buffy has this thing where certain characters (especially Xander) will suddenly start talking very quickly, usually while trying to say something clever and witty. The "difficulty level" of Buffy is very uneven, basically, even within a single scene. You're better off cherry-picking the easier and more useful parts of the dialog and blowing off the rest.

So I read a book that was artificially easy for me to understand to the best of my current ability, but made a point of trying to not get hung up on the hard parts.

An excellent strategy.

This is probably the most speculative part of this experiment. I know it is somewhat ludicrous to try to use full-speed native audio at this point, but there are a couple of reasons to believe I can succeed.

First, it seems to be common for people's reading comprehension to exceed their listening comprehension ability. Given that Buffy has very accurate transcripts available, I figured that could be a big advantage that other series wouldn't necessarily have. If I can read a line of dialog in the transcript, I should eventually be able to understand the audio. That essentially what Assimil has you do, just in a much more gradual process.

Honestly, I think it's totally reasonable to be working with Buffy (via subs2srs), especially if you're cherry-picking the cards. I mean, my Spanish is probably weaker than your French, and I'm having a great time with Avatar, and I could probably tackle subs2srs-ing an easy movie soon if I wanted. Like you say, it works just like Assimil does, except that it's full-speed native audio with all the reductions and other challenges you'd find in real conversation. It's awesome having good listening comprehension from the beginning, and you're right that subs2srs forces you to confront all sorts of details.

I'll be following your log, and don't hesitate to ping me if you ever reach a point where things seem frustrating or unproductive. It sounds like you're having a lot of fun right now, and making good progress. But I feel some responsibility towards people who try experiments based on the ideas in my log. Good luck with your very cool project!

[scivola]

Just a minor status update.

SRSing the Assimil course continues to go well. I am up to lesson 51. Today should have been lesson 52, but I've got so many cards entering the active wave that I needed to take a day to just focus on them.

My Assimil deck consists of two parts: the main deck in which I do reviews (I've got that set to show me zero new cards and up to 100 old ones) and a filtered deck that is intended to show me the new cards in that day's lesson as well as active wave cards as they get created. Each day's new lesson usually consists of 20-25 cards, so I've got that deck set to show me up to 30 new cards, just to give myself a little wiggle room so that I always see all of a new lesson.

At first, that wiggle room was enough to accomodate the active wave cards, too, but I'm reaching the point where sometimes as many as 20 cards are crossing the 30 day review interval threshold that triggers creation of an active wave card. I don't really want to increase the number of new cards I see in the filtered deck, because that would increase the number of reviews I have to do each day, which is getting close to the 100 card limit I set on that deck. All together, I'm spending about an hour a day doing Assimil card reviews. So I figure that every now and then I'll do no new lesson and only focus on working through the active wave backlog.

As far as native media goes, I'm approximately 15 pages into the third book in the Aldebaran BD series. I'm still surprising myself with how much I can understand from that, so that feels nice.

On the Buffy front, I haven't finished subs2srs-ing the third episode yet, maybe I'll get to that today. I continue to study the cards I have made from the first two episodes, and I have rewatched the episodes. Watching them in real time is still very difficult. I think I'm picking up more bits and pieces from sentences I haven't studied in anki, but I don't think I can really quantify that. But I'll keep plugging away and assume that my ears will eventually catch up to my reading ability.

[Tomás]

So there you go - a system that gradually increases in difficulty as you increase in skill, and which (due to the inherent srs scheduling algorithm) tends to focus your study on the sentences you're having difficulty with. Not too bad.

This is very ingenious. My first reaction was to think about doing that to my own Assimil. However, Assimil is already pretty easy for me, in that it works well just doing thirty minutes a day the way they recommend. So I'm thinking that your system would work best for me with more difficult material, like the subs2srs approach on tv shows and movies.

Where I think your system really adds value to Assimil is in the typed-in sentence cards. Because Assimil tends to encourage passivity, you've really added something important to it by making writing part of the study routine. Thanks very much for writing your system up and posting it here. I am going to think about how I can use these ideas myself.

[scivola]

So there you go - a system that gradually increases in difficulty as you increase in skill, and which (due to the inherent srs scheduling algorithm) tends to focus your study on the sentences you're having difficulty with. Not too bad.

This is very ingenious. My first reaction was to think about doing that to my own Assimil. However, Assimil is already pretty easy for me, in that it works well just doing thirty minutes a day the way they recommend. So I'm thinking that your system would work best for me with more difficult material, like the subs2srs approach on tv shows and movies.

Loads of people have attested that Assimil in its standard form has done wonders for them, so I would never say that anyone should adopt my method. I'm definitely doing something unusual here. I will say that part of my motivation for attempting this is that I've made a couple of attempts over the years of using Assimil to learn German, and I have found the standard method too amorphous for me. I invariably end up having difficulty with a few sentences here and there then find myself with no clear idea of how to move forward. Do I keep repeating a lesson that I understand 95% of, trying to master that last sentence or do I move on anyway? With every sentence entered into anki, I don't have that problem. The easy sentences get pushed out into the far future by the scheduling algorithm, leaving me to focus on only the more difficult ones.

I definitely think that subs2srs can be a very valuable tool. In my case, jumping straight into SRSing Buffy episodes at a very early stage is turning out to be very difficult. I think the trick to really maximizing the effectiveness of sub2srs/anki may lie in choosing material of the appropriate difficulty. You can make progress with very difficult material, as I have, but it is very slow going and requires a lot of faith in the method. I don't have any experience using material I think might be too easy, but I can imagine that could lead to boredom. Maybe it is just the "i+1" principle in disguise - maybe progress is maximized by choosing "goldilocks material" - material that is just challenging enough, not too hard or too easy.

Where I think your system really adds value to Assimil is in the typed-in sentence cards. Because Assimil tends to encourage passivity, you've really added something important to it by making writing part of the study routine. Thanks very much for writing your system up and posting it here. I am going to think about how I can use these ideas myself.

I am also feeling that typing the sentences out is very valuable. Somewhere in Khatzumoto's writing (of AJATT fame) on MCD cards, I seem to remember him making the comment that MCDs forced him to concentrate on little particle words that he was otherwise inclined to skim over, thinking he knew them when he really didn't. I'm getting the same feeling from typing out my active wave cards. It really forces you to concentrate on correct spelling, verb endings, having adjectives agree with their nouns, etc that it is very easy to think you have mastered when reading the cards passively when you really haven't. But the passive reviews have given me a strong basis for understanding the sentences, so the correct spelling and such is not a very large jump in comprehension as it might be if I tried to focus on that right from the start.

So I guess, in summary, SRSing Assimil so far seems to be a total win. SRSing Buffy right from the beginning is doable, but very hard. It might be more effective to start off SRSing episodes of News in Slow French or something first, moving to Buffy later. Or at least wait to begin Buffy until you're closer to the end of Assimil. I don't know. I do see value in engaging with native materials right from the start, but I don't think I've hit the bull's eye on that aspect of my studying yet.

[scivola]

To be fair to myself and not seem too pessimistic, emk did say earlier in this thread that he would expect to start to see significant comprehension of unstudied sentences when I had around 750 cards with a review interval of 20-30 days. I know that is just a ballpark guess, but I just checked and I only have 93 Buffy cards in that state right now.

So yes it is hard going right now, yes sprachprofi must be an astoundingly good language learner to achieve what she did diving into SRSing Japanese shows, but it is still very early days for me. It is completely possible that with another few hundred mature cards under my belt, my French language snowball will start rolling downhill and I'll find it difficult to remember when this stuff was hard. Sisyphus may have been doomed, but I'm not.

[emk]

Loads of people have attested that Assimil in its standard form has done wonders for them, so I would never say that anyone should adopt my method. I'm definitely doing something unusual here. I will say that part of my motivation for attempting this is that I've made a couple of attempts over the years of using Assimil to learn German, and I have found the standard method too amorphous for me. I invariably end up having difficulty with a few sentences here and there then find myself with no clear idea of how to move forward. Do I keep repeating a lesson that I understand 95% of, trying to master that last sentence or do I move on anyway? With every sentence entered into anki, I don't have that problem. The easy sentences get pushed out into the far future by the scheduling algorithm, leaving me to focus on only the more difficult ones.

Personally, my rule of thumb with Assimil's passive wave was to loop the recordings 8–12 times while looking at the L1&L2 text, which took around 20–25 minutes. After that, I'd be able to understand 90% of the audio with my eyes closed, and I'd move on. Most successful Assimil users around here have followed a roughly similar approach: spend a while on the material, understand most of it, move on. sfuqua is the only person I can remember who effectively memorized huge chunks of Assimil and FSI. You can ask him how he feels about that, but I get the impression that if he did it again, he would move onto native materials much sooner without trying to wring every last detail out of his courses.

That said, I think your decision to SRS Assimil is likely to work. I did something similar with Assimil's L'Égyptien hiéroglyphique, and the only real obstacle I hit was that my first batch of cards asked for overly complex responses involving too many different pieces of information. That became a drag, so I switched to much easier cloze cards, and the whole process became a lot more agreeable and effective. For more advice on why simple cards work well, see the oldest SRS package of them all, SuperMemo and look at item 4.

But as usual, most SRS advice can be simplified down to, "If the card makes you say ugh or bores you senseless, delete it."

I definitely think that subs2srs can be a very valuable tool. In my case, jumping straight into SRSing Buffy episodes at a very early stage is turning out to be very difficult. I think the trick to really maximizing the effectiveness of sub2srs/anki may lie in choosing material of the appropriate difficulty. You can make progress with very difficult material, as I have, but it is very slow going and requires a lot of faith in the method. I don't have any experience using material I think might be too easy, but I can imagine that could lead to boredom. Maybe it is just the "i+1" principle in disguise - maybe progress is maximized by choosing "goldilocks material" - material that is just challenging enough, not too hard or too easy.

Yeah, the material you use matters a lot. I started out with Y Tu Mamá También, at it was just too hard. (If you read my log, you may have noticed I've been suspending those cards aggressively as they come up for review.) Avatar has been perfect, and I'm really happy I could find subtitles for enough episodes. Something like Matando Cabos would probably fall in between the two. Unfortunately, it's hard to find easy French TV series with accurate French subs / transcripts: I'm only aware of Buffy and the Simpsons. And subs2srs loses most of its effectiveness instantly without accurate target-language subs.

But for the sake of argument, let's assume that you're manually choosing which Buffy subtitles to study, and that you're deleting any cards which are annoying or boring. In this case, the worst-case scenario is that Buffy acts as a native media supplement to Assimil, giving you lots of exposure to real-world French.

My game plan for Avatar has always been to see whether or not I'll reach "takeoff velocity", and be able to transition directly into extensive watching. I've gotten close—the last time I tried watching episodes unaided, I could follow the plot and have fun with 4 out of 6 episodes I tried. The other two were still too difficult. (I was also surprised to successfully decipher the first few pages of Blacksad BD before it got too hard.) But I know that if I were still working with Y Tu Mamá También, I wouldn't have any chance of reaching "takeoff velocity" just using subs2srs.

I am also feeling that typing the sentences out is very valuable. Somewhere in Khatzumoto's writing (of AJATT fame) on MCD cards, I seem to remember him making the comment that MCDs forced him to concentrate on little particle words that he was otherwise inclined to skim over, thinking he knew them when he really didn't.

As expected, I'm seeing exactly this effect with Spanish right now. "Oh, desde que and despues de are actually two completely separate things!" I've written a dodgy Anki add-on which makes cloze cards based on existing subs2srs cards. I'll post it later, and I'll let people know how the first couple weeks of reviews go.

(By the way, I'm sad to say that Khatzumoto seems to have disappeared, and his web businesses appear to be running on autopilot. His friends say that he's still alive (and still enjoying his languages), but that he's burned out on the internet polyglot thing for now. I would strongly advise against purchasing any AJATT products without at least emailing him first. Actually, I'd advise against purchasing most AJATT products, anyway.)

So I guess, in summary, SRSing Assimil so far seems to be a total win. SRSing Buffy right from the beginning is doable, but very hard. It might be more effective to start off SRSing episodes of News in Slow French or something first, moving to Buffy later. Or at least wait to begin Buffy until you're closer to the end of Assimil. I don't know. I do see value in engaging with native materials right from the start, but I don't think I've hit the bull's eye on that aspect of my studying yet.

Yeah, it's definitely a process of ongoing adjustment. This is one of those areas where people who've already learned one language as an adult have something of an unfair advantage: We know what success feels like, and if it's not arriving, we can fine tune our process. So if you ever get frustrated, don't hesitate to ask the forum for advice.

[microsnout]

Watching them in real time is still very difficult. But I'll keep plugging away and assume that my ears will eventually catch up to my reading ability.

I watched season 1 of Buffy and one thing that helped was to use the "Playback Speed" feature of VLC player to slow the playback by just one notch. You will hardly notice it is slower than normal but the faster speech bursts will be easier to understand. I also tried watching a familiar episode played one notch faster than normal followed by watching the next new episode at normal speed. This made it seem like characters in the new episode were speaking a bit slower.

[scivola]

Wow, I didn't realize it had been quite this long since I posted an update, but today was a big milestone. I just studied the last lesson in Assimil - lesson 113. Of course reviews will continue, but there is no more "new" material to learn.

I described earlier the system I was using in anki to gradually morph my cards over time, essentially dividing them into 3 groups based on the interval until the card will be shown again. The easy group has an interval less than 10 days, intermediate is 10 to 30 days, and advanced or mature is greater than 30 days. I just did a quick check to get a sense of how my cards are divided among those groups and here is what I found. Out of 3031 total cards, 793 are in the easy group, 490 are intermediate, and 1748 are mature.

To try to relate that to the normal way of doing Assimil, the book notes at the end of lesson 113 that the second-wave lesson for the day is lesson 64. Using a rough estimate that each lesson contains 25 new cards, then 1748/25 = 69.92. So roughly 70 lessons worth of cards are in the mature stage. So my method has at least kept me on par with the standard method, and arguably put me somewhat ahead, since that is 70 lessons worth of well-studied cards. I don't see a way to calculate the average interval of just those matured cards, but I know that many of them have intervals of 3 to 4 months.

So all in all, I'm very happy with how the anki part of my experiment has turned out.

On the Buffy side of things, the news in not so good, but it is not due to any fault of subs2srs/anki. Since the start of the year, I have begun transitioning onto a new project at work, and I have also begun studying for a professional certification, so I just haven't had the time to keep up with my Buffy studies. Given how long it takes to prepare each episode for subs2srs, I may well end up dropping that part of this experiment.

But I have signed up for the super challenge starting in May, so I will definitely be watching/reading a lot of French over the next year-and-a-half or so, but I'm thinking of just watching Buffy while reading along with the transcripts, rather than srs-ing everything. Or maybe be selective about choosing sentences to srs.

On the reading side, I have been playing around with readlang.com and it seems fantastic. I think I will definitely be using that a lot during the challenge. I need to experiment with using its srs versus exporting to anki, but that shouldn't be a big deal either way.

I think this experiment has been successful so far, with hopefully more good results to come.

[Tomás]

On the reading side, I have been playing around with readlang.com and it seems fantastic. I think I will definitely be using that a lot during the challenge. I need to experiment with using its srs versus exporting to anki, but that shouldn't be a big deal either way.

If you save Readlang to your Android home page, it functions like a full screen ebook reader app. That's how I've been using it.

[scivola]

On the reading side, I have been playing around with readlang.com and it seems fantastic. I think I will definitely be using that a lot during the challenge. I need to experiment with using its srs versus exporting to anki, but that shouldn't be a big deal either way.

If you save Readlang to your Android home page, it functions like a full screen ebook reader app. That's how I've been using it.

For some reason, it doesn't work on my Kindle Fire tablet. Maybe it is because I used firefox instead of chrome, but when I clicked on "save on home screen", nothing happened. No big deal, though, as that device is just a backup. Then main device I would use is a Microsoft Surface running Windows 10, and it works perfectly well to create a shortcut on the desktop that points to the "My Texts" section of readlang's library page.