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

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Re: Rdearman (FR, IT, ZH) 2016/17 - The way of the lazy fist.

Postby smallwhite » Wed Sep 06, 2017 3:25 pm

rdearman wrote:Looking back at previous posts by people who are better at this than me:
"... importing 5,000 to 15,000 new words into your brain in 500 to 1,500 hours turns out to be THE major battlefield in language learning, representing 80 percent and more of your total effort."

I can see that I'm falling far short of the targets I should be setting for myself for listening. I've managed about 300 hours (non-continous) in French, but I need to ramp that up considerably. At the moment I'm averaging around 2 hours of French each day call it an hour of podcasts so straightforward listening and an hour of TV (with some cheating using French sub-titles). In order to get to 1500 hours I am 1200 short. I'd like to get that done in 6 months, so that is 200 hours a month, or 6 hours per day. I don't think I could manage that, but I could probably get in 4 hours per day, just doubling what I'm already doing. I have an 3 hour commute most weekdays, and an hour at home to watch TV. But this really eats into reading time, or study of anki reviews.

I wonder if I've misunderstood you or if you've misunderstood your quote. The 1500 hrs in your quote refers to vocabulary hours, while the 300 and 1200 hrs you wrote refer to listening hours. You seem to be trying to increase your 300 listening hours to their 1500 vocabulary hours.

But I didn't come to say that. I was wanting to ask you:

rdearman wrote:Now the card numbers are spread out a lot more and I'm only getting 200-400 cards per day, so I think I'll increase the amount of new cards to 30-40 for a month or so.


What sort of new words are you learning lately? What words did you learn yesterday, for example?
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Re: Rdearman (FR, IT, ZH) 2016/17 - The way of the lazy fist.

Postby rdearman » Wed Sep 06, 2017 5:09 pm

smallwhite wrote:What sort of new words are you learning lately? What words did you learn yesterday, for example?

I'm glad you asked me that!!

I just posted in a vocabulary thread about something I'm doing, which I have adopted from something you told me. I'm using Excel to quickly review and cloze deletion a lot of vocabulary words. At the moment I have a spreadsheet with about 20k words which I've stripped from a load of online recipe books I've found in French. I'm trying to get familiar with food, and cooking terms. I have these in Anki, but adding only 40-50 words per day isn't really cutting the mustard. So I decided to cram words.

I know lots of people dislike cramming and don't like learning words out of context, blah, blah. But I've decided that I need to get my vocabulary up, up, up in order to listen and to output. I also want to make sure that I'm learning how to spell these words not just pronounce them, hence the spreadsheet cloze deletion thing you've mentioned.

I'm concentrating on food and cooking words at the moment for a couple of reasons. I want to be able to watch a YouTube French chef / cook I found awhile back and understand everything he is saying. So really focusing on a single subject and see if I can boost my comprehension that way. Also I think I mentioned before when I was in Italy, lots of times I didn't know what to eat on the menu, because I didn't know as many food / ingredient words as I should have. I figure if I go to France for a couple of weeks, then I'm probably going to want to eat, so this is a good a subject to cover as any. :)

I am targeting 1500 words per day with the spreadsheet but even though the spreadsheet is a very quick and efficient way to do cloze deletion, it is still time consuming. So although I have managed it today, it is going to be rough because it took me over 3 hours.
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Re: Rdearman (FR, IT, ZH) 2016/17 - The way of the lazy fist.

Postby smallwhite » Wed Sep 06, 2017 5:33 pm

rdearman wrote:... about 20k words which I've stripped from a load of online recipe books I've found in French.
I know lots of people dislike cramming and don't like learning words out of context, blah, blah.

To me that's enough context already. "Nuts" would mean peanuts etc and not "crazy". I don't have to know whether they're chopped or blended or grated in the original sentence.

I don't know why you think the spreadsheet is like "cloze deletion" (fill in the blanks). I think it's just "typing test" which is available in Anki, Memrise and Quizlet. Don't know why but I really dislike the word "cloze deletion" :x

1500/day sounds fun. I might want to join you :P
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Re: Rdearman (FR, IT, ZH) 2016/17 - The way of the lazy fist.

Postby rdearman » Fri Sep 08, 2017 9:47 am

Well, minor update. 1500 words is too much. I managed the first day with only 3.5 hours of study. However, subsequently I have discovered it isn't as easy as I thought. The problem is that the word list I'm using was sorted from common to uncommon. I'm not a beginner, so I already knew most of the first 15k that I did. The next set however I only managed to get through 413 in 3 hours and that was a real struggle even though I knew a large number of those 400 too. So, I need to ratchet back on the amount I'm trying to do. I think 500 is probably possible, however I don't have 3 hours per day to dedicate to this! THe last couple of days were unusual because I did have the time. Still it does seem to be a useful exercise.

I have been doing 5-10 minutes here and there of intensive listening, and still trying to get at least 2 hours of TV or Podcasts in each day. I'm also reading each day. I spend a good portion of the day doing something "French", but still no decernable improvement.

I did a lesson with my French tutor and she commented that my speech was more halting and awkward than it was before. She figured it was because I wasn't doing enough lessons (we'd skipped a couple weeks for various reasons) however I'm pretty sure I was struggling because I wasn't just slinging out everything in present tense and tarzan talk. I was actually halting because I knew there was a better way to say it, and I was trying to construct more grammatically correct sentences with only semi-active words.
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Re: Rdearman (FR, IT, ZH) 2016/17 - The way of the lazy fist.

Postby smallwhite » Fri Sep 08, 2017 10:11 am

smallwhite wrote:1500/day sounds fun. I might want to join you :P

rdearman wrote:1500 words is too much.

I don't blame you. I joined you like I said I would, and gave up after 53 words :D
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Re: Rdearman (FR, IT, ZH) 2016/17 - The way of the lazy fist.

Postby rdearman » Sat Sep 09, 2017 3:31 pm

Hummm... this sustained effort of trying to do 1500 ... 500 per day is really difficult and a time sink. I think I need to modify what I'm doing. I think the typing test system inside of a spreadsheet is a brilliant exercise. But I think I need to reduce the amount of exercise to a manageable level, and I need to change from doing single words to sentences. I have no rational reason for this, just that I get the feeling that I would get more from the exercise if I were writing sentences rather than trying to type single words. So I'm going to switch it around for a couple of days and try to write 100 sentences. I have a lot of correct French sentences so that isn't a problem. So I'll try a little experiment with one subject. :)

I also thought last night as I was drifting off to sleep that I should volunteer to do another talk at the next gathering, but this time in French. I've mulled this over in my head today, and what scares me about the idea isn't doing a presentation in French, since I would have a lot of time to prepare and to practice. No the scary thing is the Q&A session afterwards, where I would have to listen, understand the question, then form an off-the-cuff reply all in French, while a few dozen French speakers stare you down.

Not to mention I have nothing interesting to say to people who already know 2 bazillion languages.
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Re: Rdearman (FR, IT, ZH) 2016/17 - The way of the lazy fist.

Postby DaveBee » Sat Sep 09, 2017 3:55 pm

rdearman wrote: No the scary thing is the Q&A session afterwards, where I would have to listen, understand the question, then form an off-the-cuff reply all in French, while a few dozen French speakers stare you down.
Watching a video the other day, the setting appeared to be some kind of local amateur speech evening. Is there such a thing, speech clubs? One or two dress rehearsals should prepare you.
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Re: Rdearman (FR, IT, ZH) 2016/17 - The way of the lazy fist.

Postby rdearman » Sat Sep 09, 2017 8:45 pm

DaveBee wrote:
rdearman wrote: No the scary thing is the Q&A session afterwards, where I would have to listen, understand the question, then form an off-the-cuff reply all in French, while a few dozen French speakers stare you down.
Watching a video the other day, the setting appeared to be some kind of local amateur speech evening. Is there such a thing, speech clubs? One or two dress rehearsals should prepare you.

Oh I could find a toastmasters or something locally, but not in French. It isn't the presentation that bothers me, but the Q&A afterwards. :)
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Re: Rdearman (FR, IT, ZH) 2016/17 - The way of the lazy fist.

Postby MamaPata » Mon Sep 11, 2017 6:43 am

rdearman wrote:
DaveBee wrote:
rdearman wrote: No the scary thing is the Q&A session afterwards, where I would have to listen, understand the question, then form an off-the-cuff reply all in French, while a few dozen French speakers stare you down.
Watching a video the other day, the setting appeared to be some kind of local amateur speech evening. Is there such a thing, speech clubs? One or two dress rehearsals should prepare you.

Oh I could find a toastmasters or something locally, but not in French. It isn't the presentation that bothers me, but the Q&A afterwards. :)


There is a French Toastmasters in London - I know you're sometimes here. Otherwise, you could always just explain that the Q&A will be answered in English?
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Re: Rdearman (FR, IT, ZH) 2016/17 - The way of the lazy fist.

Postby rdearman » Mon Sep 11, 2017 7:13 am

MamaPata wrote:There is a French Toastmasters in London - I know you're sometimes here. Otherwise, you could always just explain that the Q&A will be answered in English?

Yeah, but that is a bit of a cop out! Besides, I always like to make thing more difficult for myself than they really need to be. :)

Where is this toastmasters in London? That does interest me, and I might even spring for the train ticket to make it in once or twice a month.
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