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

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rdearman
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Re: Rdearman 2016-23 I’m not superstitious, just a little stitious.

Postby rdearman » Thu May 25, 2023 9:01 pm

Italian
No exchanges this week.

French
No exchanges this week.

Korean
Only one exchange this week. I've been very busy with other things. I am still doing at least 30+ minutes per day. My anki streak went out the window because I had to send my phone back for a repair. But I've got it back now and back on track.

General Stuff
The @langchallenge API account has been suspended. Twitter, useful as a chocolate teapot.

More hassle for me. Thanks a lot Elon you arse.
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rdearman
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Re: Rdearman 2016-23 I’m not superstitious, just a little stitious.

Postby rdearman » Thu Jun 01, 2023 1:01 pm

Italian
No exchanges this week. I can't find anyone who will do weekly talks, other than one person who wants to do it at night, when I'm not really available for this type of activity.

French
No exchanges this week. All the French people have bailed on me.

Korean
I could have just copied last week's update, really. Not much has changed. I have managed to get my anki revision down to 500 cards per day. I've done only one decent language exchange. My pronunciation is really bad. So I've downloaded a couple of pronunciation guides to read and revise. Hopefully this will help me out some.

I continue to do the same thing, and I don't think I am progressing, so this would indicate that what I am doing is wrong. But I'm not really sure what else to do. I'm going to need to think about this a little.

General Stuff
I have been reading a lot of books, all in English, but I'm catching up with my target. I have a lot of Italian books I need to read, so I need to add one or two of them into the mix. Reading in Korean is a heart-breaking task of self-flagellation, so I've given up on that.

It is one of those weeks when you just seem to be trekking through treacle the whole time and never getting anywhere regardless of what you do.

BTW, if anyone knows of a job for an IT Director/CIO not in the USA or the UK, let me know. I'm ready to blow this joint! :)
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Re: Rdearman 2016-23 I’m not superstitious, just a little stitious.

Postby AndyMeg » Tue Jun 06, 2023 10:05 pm

rdearman wrote:
Korean
I could have just copied last week's update, really. Not much has changed. I have managed to get my anki revision down to 500 cards per day. I've done only one decent language exchange. My pronunciation is really bad. So I've downloaded a couple of pronunciation guides to read and revise. Hopefully this will help me out some.

I continue to do the same thing, and I don't think I am progressing, so this would indicate that what I am doing is wrong. But I'm not really sure what else to do. I'm going to need to think about this a little.

I think the book "Korean Pronunciation Guide - How to Sound like a Korean" could be of great help to you. You can buy it on Amazon and download the audio files from the official webpage.


rdearman wrote:General Stuff
I have been reading a lot of books, all in English, but I'm catching up with my target. I have a lot of Italian books I need to read, so I need to add one or two of them into the mix. Reading in Korean is a heart-breaking task of self-flagellation, so I've given up on that.

I commented this on another thread, but I'll include it here as well:

I think you could try using "Mirinae" to help you read in Korean. It has a free Google Chrome extension version and it is also available in the form of an app (iOS and Android). If you want to use all the features in the app, you would have to pay a subscription; but in the web browser extension version you get a lot of features for free.

What I love about "Mirinae" is that it divides each sentence into its components and lets you click on each component to get more in-depth information about it (whether is just vocabulary or a grammar point). And it also has other features as well. You could read my log if you want to know more about it. But here is a short video:


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Beyond The Story 10 Year Record of BTS Korean version: 36 / 522

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Re: Rdearman 2016-23 I’m not superstitious, just a little stitious.

Postby rdearman » Tue Jun 06, 2023 10:22 pm

Thanks. Actually I do read your log and I had checked that out before. I am still exploring different options so I will go back and look at that again.
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Re: Rdearman 2016-23 I’m not superstitious, just a little stitious.

Postby rdearman » Thu Jun 08, 2023 7:13 pm

Italian
I have an Italian exchange in about an hour. So finally something happening there.

French
I did a long language exchange with my regular partner. Her children where home so there was some background noise and people talking, but it was fine. I actually apologised afterwards, because I was thinking my French was deteriorating too much. But she said.

Non, je me suis même dit à un moment que tu étais très clair.
Désolée pour le bruit aujourd’hui !


So it seems that perhaps a little time off helps rather than hinders. We'll test that theory in Italian in about an hour! :lol:

Korean
I started the 30:30 challenge which will commence on the 1st of July, but I've been trying to learn 50 words per day for the last week or so, just to see if I could do it. I have to say that it is bloody difficult, and I'm going to have to work in some kind of review system. But there are already results. I can puzzle out a lot more of the pre-made anki decks I use, and I have managed to puzzle out more of the short texts that I have been reading. So I actually have high hopes for the efficacy of the 30:30 challenge.

I don't think I'll learn all 900 words, but every word I learn is another crack in the wall that keeps me from learning Korean.

I did think at one point while reading through thread about how to learn 50 words a day that people seem to have a lot greater expectation of my abilities than actually exist. :)

I have done a YT video on what I'm planning to do in order to get these words into my brain.

Basically my plan is to:
  • Get all the words from a news article and the memorise the most frequent. (Words which show up more than once.)
  • Put the 30 words I'm learning that day into a mp3 using the OpenTTS to output Korean, and listen to that on a loop all day long.
  • I will use a lot of paper, and write each word out multiple times. At the start, I'm also going to write all the letters of the word backwards. (Apparently this makes you focus on the letters, and it used by some spelling champions)
  • Free recall, where I sit down with a blank piece of paper and write out all 30 words and translation.
  • Test myself at the end of the day, and the ones I still don't know roll into the next days list. Up to a maximum of 40 words in a single day, 30 new, 10 old.
  • Read the article which I've extracted these words from. This is just an additional review and I see the words in context.

Before the challenge starts I'm also planning on writing a python script which will out put the days 30 words, randomised to the screen, but either the word or the prompt will be obscured, and I have to fill in the blank (on a separate bit of paper). Like this:
개가 _____
____ a drawer
한잔 _____
꽃이 _____

I'm hoping that reading the article repeatedly where I got the words will be sufficient review and as it stands I have no intention of using anki, although I do plan to dump the entire 900 words into anki at the end of July.

General Stuff
I finally completed the book: "Gödel, Escher, Bach and Eternal Golden Braid", what a monster! It took me almost 7 months to read, which was an average of only 5.5 pages per day. The problem was I would read a chapter and leave it for 2 weeks, but I got there in the end. As for the rest of the reading plans, I'm well behind. At this point in the year, I should have already hit 55 books read to hit my 125 book target, but I've only completed 39. So 16 books that I need to catch up. This should be easier since I've plugged a lot more fiction into the mix, and it is quicker to read.

I've also managed to catch up on my writing thanks to AI. I can type fairly fast, but I can talk faster. I used to use dragon speaking and I used to get a good word per hour rate, but it had lots of mistakes. My friend turned me on to Whisper AI, which is a transcription engine (not dictation) which gets the words 100% correct, or at least it has for the 20k words I've done so far. The only snag is because it isn't a dictation engine, you can't tell it "new lines" or "quotes", etc. Still, there is a python API, so I might be able to roll my own dictation engine. It is still faster than dragon, and more accurate. As soon as I get some money, I'm going to upgrade my GPU's. Someone has probably already written a dictation script for whisper, I just need to do a search before I spend time making my own.

In case you're wondering, I still don't like Python, but I'm getting used to the whitespace stupidity. RIght, got to get on with my language exchange! Ciao!

EDIT: This was my 7000th post on this site. :mrgreen:
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Re: Rdearman 2016-23 I’m not superstitious, just a little stitious.

Postby DaveAgain » Fri Jun 09, 2023 7:30 am

rdearman wrote:I finally completed the book: "Gödel, Escher, Bach and Eternal Golden Braid", what a monster! It took me almost 7 months to read, which was an average of only 5.5 pages per day. The problem was I would read a chapter and leave it for 2 weeks, but I got there in the end.
Would you recommend it to someone else?
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Re: Rdearman 2016-23 I’m not superstitious, just a little stitious.

Postby rdearman » Fri Jun 09, 2023 9:00 am

DaveAgain wrote:
rdearman wrote:I finally completed the book: "Gödel, Escher, Bach and Eternal Golden Braid", what a monster! It took me almost 7 months to read, which was an average of only 5.5 pages per day. The problem was I would read a chapter and leave it for 2 weeks, but I got there in the end.
Would you recommend it to someone else?

If you're looking for something which is relevant to modern AI systems, then no, I wouldn't recommend it. The book was written in 1979 and some things (very few actually) didn't age well. For example, speculation if a computer would ever beat a human at chess.

However, if you're interested in the mathematical and philosophical arguments around human thought, cognition, and creativity, then yes I would recommend it. It is an exploration into how the inanimate can become animate and thinking. It does help to have some knowledge of programming and maths before you start. It isn't light reading by any stretch of the imagination. I think a lot of the reason it took me so long to complete is I would often have to stop reading the book and go and lookup things like.

An explanation of the Goldbach conjecture, Cantor's diagonal proof, the 5 Peano postulates, also known as the Peano axioms, divergent series, Cauchy criterion for convergence sets, or non-euclidean geometry. These are just a few of the things I had to research (ChatGPT to the rescue!) So I probably spent as much time making sure I understood these sorts of things before I could return to the book with a fair idea of what I had just read! The author does reference these things, and explains them in the context of what he is talking about, but I needed more information (I'm not that smart or informed). The bibliography and further reading section at the back of the book lists 147 books. :geek:

I understand a lot more now about meta-cognition, pattern recognition, formal system theory and language as a cognitive process than I ever did before. You're probably not as uninformed or slow as me, so it might be an easier read for you. I struggled to read it, but I'm glad I did.
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Re: Rdearman 2016-23 I’m not superstitious, just a little stitious.

Postby sfuqua » Sat Jun 10, 2023 2:13 am

Gödel, Escher, Bach and Eternal Golden Braid blew my mind back when I first read it in the 90s. It took me months to read it too, and I skipped around some. It revolutionized my thinking on consciousness. It still affects my thinking about thinking.

I highly recommend trying to read it even if you don't finish it. :D
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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: Rdearman 2016-23 I’m not superstitious, just a little stitious.

Postby rdearman » Mon Jun 12, 2023 9:21 pm

Well, my plans for gathering words for July's 30:30 challenge hit a bit of a snag. I showed my LE partner the words I'd gathered from an article and the article, and she immediately pointed out some flaws.

Firstly the most common word I was learning from this article translates as "west" but in fact it was the name of the professor who was being interviewed, not the word for west, although it does form part of the word for west. Then some other problems cropped up, because it seems the space separated word boundaries in Korean are not a rigid and inflexible as English. They kinda insert spaces where they feel like it, and skip the spaces in some other places. So.... That is a problem for the software. Now this doesn't happen all the time, so 80% of the words I'd gathered were OK, but it didn't leave me with a lot of confidence about using AntConv to get word frequency lists.

Now I'm thinking I might just revert to using the TOPIK lists of words. I have the vocabulary lists from a couple of years back with 1847 TOPIK I and 3873 TOPIK 2 words. I did consider trying to work up some conversations I'm likely to have and learn those words, but I think the TOPIK thing is probably sufficient, and it has already been vetted and parsed.
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Re: Rdearman 2016-23 I’m not superstitious, just a little stitious.

Postby rdearman » Thu Jun 15, 2023 10:44 am

Italian
I did my Italian exchange and it went well. I started in Italian, which is probably why we did it. If we start in English it tends to carry on that way because I'm lazy.
French
Didn't speak in French this week, everyone bailed on me again.
Korean
Continued focus on a language I'm increasing sure I'm not going to live long enough to speak, assuming I die before I'm 140.

I'm still doing dry runs of the 30 words per day. The dry runs have highlighted various problems with my plan, like the issue around the gathering of words. The corpus software probably would work, if the Korean language consistently used white space like English does. I discovered this issue while going over my list with a native speaker, who pointed out the flaws. Anyway, this isn't a major setback since I have copies of all the TOPIK vocabulary levels I, II, III, so I've got almost 10,000 words to learn.

The biggest obstacle seems to be coming up with "linking images" for words. This is a mnemonic technique where you have something which links the native language word to the target language word. This can be difficult, but mostly it is time-consuming. I would ignore it, but in fact this memory technique actually does work very well. I tested it and counted up the amount I got correct using and not using the technique, and although it takes time, it is worth it because my retention rate increases and spelling errors decrease.

I show what I'm doing each day in this video:

I might drop the writing the word backwards part, since that doesn't seem to help much. I think it is more useful for English vocabulary when I was in school. So the linking mnemonic is probably the most useful thing, other than "free association". Which is sitting with a blank piece of paper and trying to remember each word, both NL & TL and spell them all correctly. :)

I have also decided that I need to incorporate a review for each day, so I basically go back and test myself of the previous days words. I'm not putting them into anki religiously yet, but I will when the 30:30 challenge starts because I will need to review words in order to get a better score at the end of the month.

General Stuff
My reading still isn't good. I've caught up a little but I'm still 18 books behind where I should be at this point in the year. Sometimes I think commuting wasn't so bad, since I got 3 hours of dedicated study/reading time every weekday. I remember reading 5-7 books every week. Oh well.
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