Rdearman 2016-24 You Can't Have Your Kate and Edith Too.

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rdearman
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Re: Rdearman 2016-22 원숭이도 나무에서 떨어질 때가 있다 (Sometimes even monkeys fall from trees)

Postby rdearman » Wed Oct 19, 2022 11:46 am

Mandarin
I have a LE tomorrow, first time in a while.

Italian
Couple of LE scheduled, both cancelled. One scheduled for tomorrow, so hopefully I will get one in. Still reading, sporadically.

French
One LE scheduled for tomorrow, otherwise nothing.

Korean
Still doing sentences. Still not reading. Still don't have a tutor.

But watching lots of k-dramas and doing a little bit during LEs. I often think this is just a waste of time, and I'm tempted to quit. But I remind myself.

By the fall of water-drops the pot is filled; such is the increase of riches, of knowledge and of virtue. -- Hitopadesa

The river cuts through rock not by power, but its persistence.


General Stuff
I have decided that I'll just write up my Italy trip in English. After all, I have to do at least 30 minutes in Korean to keep my score up on the 365-day challenge, so another 30 minutes typing up my day in English isn't that big a deal. Plus, I'll probably have a headache after a full day of Italian only.

I've also decided to clear some of these maths books I have on the shelf, so yesterday I took the plunge into Discrete Mathematics. Wheeee!
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Re: Rdearman 2016-22 원숭이도 나무에서 떨어질 때가 있다 (Sometimes even monkeys fall from trees)

Postby jackb » Wed Oct 19, 2022 7:03 pm

I vote for any language. Writing in another language at the end of a long day will be tough, but it may be harder to switch gears. You could do an Italian vlog and post it on youtube while you are there. Then when you get home you can take your time to write it out....or not.

Reading your log of Korean was a treat. I hope you decide to go that route
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Re: Rdearman 2016-22 원숭이도 나무에서 떨어질 때가 있다 (Sometimes even monkeys fall from trees)

Postby rdearman » Sun Oct 23, 2022 12:45 pm

As per normal, I have set myself up for failure. I've decided to set yet another completely unrealistic goal for myself. Recently I was reading about the fact that the average person will read less than 600 books after leaving school and before they die. Depending on the country you live in, the hours you spend reading varies.

The number of books read per week also varies, as you would expect. There is also some updated data from 2011 for European countries and their reading habits. According to that data, people in Luxembourg read the most out of all of Europe per annum.


Previously, I mentioned that I had created a reading list because I wanted to get through more books. Subsequently, the algorithms have decided to throw me lots of news about how people don't read. So I thought if the average person reads ~500 books between leaving school and dying, then I would read 5 times that amount. Assuming I can dodge the grim reaper for at least another 15 years, this means I need to be reading at 3 books per week. Here I am assuming 2 weeks off each year and that I only have 15 years left. If I manage the statistical average, then I've got another 22 years to go.

(It is strange how things seem to pop up around a topic. Like the discussion on the forum about just reading in a TL. )

So in order to read more, I have watched a few videos for tips. Nothing that isn't really just common sense. But the top tips are:
  1. Intent ! You must intend to read and you need to maintain a list of what you're planning on reading next.
  2. You need to have reading materials with you all the time in order to take up any slack moments you might encounter.
  3. Try to increase your reading speed. (I read fast anyway, I don't subvocalise)
  4. Have more than one book on the go at anytime.
  5. Audio books count as books.
  6. Schedule reading time into your day.

I've added another 50 books to my planned reading list, so I have an even 100 and I've read 13% so far. I've converted many ebooks from epub to mobi so I could use my Kindle app and the "word runner" program. (See below) This allows me to crank up my normal 300/400 words per minute to a nice 500/650 words per minute. I download a lot of classics from Gutenberg as mobi as well. So about 25% of the books on my list are actually on my phone in the Kindle app. Another 10% are Italian books and I use FBReader for those.

I added a ton of maths books to the list and jumped into them. Then while researching other books on the Maths Wizard channel (see below), I bought another 15 maths books. So... this isn't really helping me to cut back on the stuff on the shelf!

For audiobooks, I'm trying to kill two birds with one stone. I have a list of "1000 books to read before you die" and many of them are classics like Dracula, Dickens, etc. So I've downloaded a few of those in French from LibriVox, there weren't any in Italian that I could find. I did once have a link to a fellow that was reading the classics in Italian because I managed to download "Treasure Island" in Italian, but I can't find that link now for love nor money. :(

I have a Korean book on my list, the remaining Italian books, a ton of maths books and the remainder in fiction. I haven't actually listed any of the audiobooks in my reading list. At the moment, I'm just considering them as "bonus books" and not count them towards my 2500 book goal.

For someone who can stick to things I don't think 2500 is an unrealistic goal, but since my attention is a bit like the dog in Up... it will be difficult.



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Re: Rdearman 2016-22 원숭이도 나무에서 떨어질 때가 있다 (Sometimes even monkeys fall from trees)

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Sun Oct 23, 2022 5:19 pm

rdearman wrote:As per normal, I have set myself up for failure. I've decided to set yet another completely unrealistic goal for myself. Recently I was reading about the fact that the average person will read less than 600 books after leaving school and before they die.


Does "after school" mean after high school or the equivalent, or after all schooling, like college? In any case, no way I could calculate how many books I have read since then. Probably I could come close to an accurate count for target languages, even the handful I've read in German (5).

Word Runner does not appeal to me. Using a gizmo to read faster would be like listening to a podcast while walking, which ruins both the walk and the podcast. :x Brunugla mentioned this once, IIRC.

The fact that Koreans read so little is probably the reason learning Korean is giving you trouble. :)
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Re: Rdearman 2016-22 원숭이도 나무에서 떨어질 때가 있다 (Sometimes even monkeys fall from trees)

Postby LupCenușiu » Sun Oct 23, 2022 6:16 pm

MorkTheFiddle wrote: Using a gizmo to read faster would be like listening to a podcast while walking, which ruins both the walk and the podcast. :x


I don't think I'm inclined to use such a thing for speed reading, but the part with walking and podcast is a matter of perspective. Many would appreciate the opportunity to use the same slot of time in the day for two activities that hardly impede each other. For some with a busy schedule, is almost mandatory.
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Re: Rdearman 2016-22 원숭이도 나무에서 떨어질 때가 있다 (Sometimes even monkeys fall from trees)

Postby rdearman » Sun Oct 23, 2022 6:18 pm

MorkTheFiddle wrote:Does "after school" mean after high school or the equivalent, or after all schooling, like college? In any case, no way I could calculate how many books I have read since then.

They didn't define it very well but I assumed it was after all schooling.

LupCenușiu wrote:Many would appreciate the opportunity to use the same slot of time in the day for two activities that hardly impede each other.

Yes that is why I always do my anki cards when I'm walking the dog.
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Re: Rdearman 2016-22 원숭이도 나무에서 떨어질 때가 있다 (Sometimes even monkeys fall from trees)

Postby StringerBell » Sun Oct 23, 2022 6:57 pm

rdearman wrote:I'm also concerned about showing off my very poor Italian writing skills. :shock:


Well my Italian writing sucks so I certainly wouldn't be judgmental (and I doubt most others would be) but it definitely will be less work to just do it in English. Maybe when you get back you could try translating what you wrote in English into Italian (just for yourself).

Btw, I don't know if you're into ossuaries but there's one that looks really amazing that's close to the center of Milan (I think within walking distance of the Duomo) that I was meaning to visit for years and never had the chance. It seems substantially larger than the ones I went to. Here is a link to a description of it: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/san ... -alle-ossa
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Re: Rdearman 2016-22 원숭이도 나무에서 떨어질 때가 있다 (Sometimes even monkeys fall from trees)

Postby rdearman » Sun Oct 23, 2022 7:00 pm

StringerBell wrote:
rdearman wrote:I'm also concerned about showing off my very poor Italian writing skills. :shock:


Well my Italian writing sucks so I certainly wouldn't be judgmental (and I doubt most others would be) but it definitely will be less work to just do it in English. Maybe when you get back you could try translating what you wrote in English into Italian (just for yourself).

Btw, I don't know if you're into ossuaries but there's one that looks really amazing that's close to the center of Milan (I think within walking distance of the Duomo) that I was meaning to visit for years and never had the chance. It seems substantially larger than the ones I went to. Here is a link to a description of it: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/san ... -alle-ossa

I will have to check that out! Looks interesting.
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Re: Rdearman 2016-22 원숭이도 나무에서 떨어질 때가 있다 (Sometimes even monkeys fall from trees)

Postby rdearman » Wed Oct 26, 2022 12:26 pm

Mandarin
I told everyone that I'm not doing any LE for the next two weeks or so. In fact, I'll probably stop Mandarin all together just because I have too much on my plate.

Italian
Still reading but I'm not enjoying this book. I've read it before, and I very rarely re-read books. I'm seriously considering just throwing out all the books I'm not interested in rather than forcing myself to read books I don't want too. Also, I could simply replace them in Italy with new books that I want to read. We'll see.

French
My regular French partner is actually going to be in the UK, but she will not be anywhere near me until the week I go to Italy. So I'll miss her.

Korean
Sigh... Korean. I really miss having weekly lessons, and it doesn't look like my tutor will be returning. So I have started to look for someone else. Meanwhile, I continue with Anki. I have two decks, one from words I got during my lessons and another which is a premade deck from AnkiWeb. I'm getting about 500 cards per day, and I'm seriously approaching burnout on anki, so I'm going to put a cap on reviews for a little while on the first deck, and reduce the amount of new cards on the second. I've also been watching a lot of mnemonics and memorisation tips for languages, and I'll plan to trial some of those out.

I have managed to get my LE partners to teach me some new grammar. Conjugation of future tense, etc. I continue to generate random sentences and try to translate them into Korean. I get these checked by my LE partners and also get them to help me pronounce the corrected sentences. One thing I have noticed is that I need to look up a lot of nouns. Nouns and verbs are normally the most used parts of speech (in English, and anecdotal for me Korean also)


So to that end I really need to learn more nouns and then work on the verbs. This is why I searched around to find a corpus for Korean and started a thread. But alas the comprehensive corpus I found, doesn't list the PoS! :evil: :ugeek:

So I'm going to ignore that and try to memorise words from the Lonely Planet Guidebook that I have, which has a small 14 page dictionary at the back.

I have to admit that I'm floundering a lot here. I haven't been reading my book because it is exhausting to look up each and every word. I watch some k-dramas or comprehensible input channels on YT. I really do feel like I'm hammering my head against a wall. :cry:

General Stuff
I've done better at reading English books (for obvious reasons) than Italian or Korean. I've managed to get about 50% of the way through my first Discrete Mathematics book. I decided that I'm not going to do the exercises in these books just yet. I'm not getting rid of the maths books, so I can always go back and do the exercises. I thought I would read them first, then go back and do exercises. This is probably a mistake, I know, but I'm going to go ahead and make it.

I have made some progress with memorisation and I have had some advice about using mnemonics for languages. What I was doing was attempting to use a giant thematic city as a memory palace. But I've been reliably informed this is suboptimal simply because of the huge number of words in a natural language. A better method is simply word association type stuff where you imagine the thing, or action like: butterfly, which in Korean is 나비 which sounds like "nabi". So if you picture a butterfly landing on your arm and some guy with a cockney accent saying "na a bee!" (not a bee).

The idea here is that you can do this with any word (depending on your imagination) and there is no need for premade gigantic memory palaces. I'm going to try this. I did try Iversen's 3 column page thing, but it takes too much effort for a lazy git like me.
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Re: Rdearman 2016-22 원숭이도 나무에서 떨어질 때가 있다 (Sometimes even monkeys fall from trees)

Postby DaveAgain » Wed Oct 26, 2022 1:03 pm

rdearman wrote:I have to admit that I'm floundering a lot here. I haven't been reading my book because it is exhausting to look up each and every word. I watch some k-dramas or comprehensible input channels on YT. I really do feel like I'm hammering my head against a wall. :cry:
You could try re-reading a short story/article English>Korean>English a few times and see if more words stick.
I've done better at reading English books (for obvious reasons) than Italian or Korean. I've managed to get about 50% of the way through my first Discrete Mathematics book. I decided that I'm not going to do the exercises in these books just yet. I'm not getting rid of the maths books, so I can always go back and do the exercises. I thought I would read them first, then go back and do exercises. This is probably a mistake, I know, but I'm going to go ahead and make it.
Galileo Galilei's laws of falling were a recurring point in The Story of Mr Sommer, so I know he was Italian! :-)
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