500 hrs by May

[tiia]

You may have heard of selkouutiset before. I don't know if you use them, or if they may already be too slow for you. But they include questions about the news at the end of the page. So you could use that for listening practise by deactivating the text in the video and just scroll down to the questions and ignore the transcript in between.
The answers to the questions are quite directly from what you hear. No implicit stuff unfortunately.

You could also try out the material for YKI-testi that YLE offers. If you don't plan on writing the basic level, you should have no risk of using the material too early. Here's the link for the A1-A2 material. They also have some other material on yle, but it may not include questions.
There's also a bit more preperatory material for YKI.
If you plan to write YKI at the basic level in the distant future, then you should consider, that this is almost the only preperatory material specifically for this test. So you may not have any preperatory material left.
But if you actually want to prepare for that test right now, then of course feel free to use it!

[bombobuffoon]

Using AI is a splendid idea.
I just quizzed ChatGPT to test your concept with a couple of passages from literature that I've not read.
The first passage was the first 500 words or so of L'Immoraliste in French by André Gide. The second was again the first 500 words or so of the Third Philippic in Ancient Greek by Demosthenes. The 500 limit was suggested by ChapGPT. For each passage I requested five questions. To be given in French for L'Immoraliste and in English for the Third Philippic.
Here are the questions in English for the Third Philippic. I give them only so you can judge their appropriateness as questions.
[list=]What is the main concern Demosthenes expresses regarding the Athenian assembly?
According to Demosthenes, why does Philip of Macedon not only wrong the Athenians but also others?
How does Demosthenes characterize those who prioritize flattery over speaking the truth?
What does Demosthenes argue about the concept of freedom of speech in Athens?
What does Demosthenes suggest is the consequence of the Athenians' current attitude towards Philip of Macedon?[/list]
To me they seem both sensible and useful as a test of the reading.
Wow! You've struck gold, Bombobuffoon!

Yes my impression is that I think it can ask relevant questions.
But its not reliable for checking of answers. Its as if it imprints your opinion, true or false into any answer it gives.
Of course you can quickly validate the answers yourself by doing a translation.

[emk]

Yes my impression is that I think it can ask relevant questions.
But its not reliable for checking of answers. Its as if it imprints your opinion, true or false into any answer it gives.
Of course you can quickly validate the answers yourself by doing a translation.

Yes, this is about what I'd expect, too. The paid version (GPT 4) might be also able to give you at least some feedback on answers. It absolutely _can_ notice users' mistakes, but only sometimes.

Try a prompt including something like "You are a skilled language tutor helping me work on my reading comprehension. You ask me questions to test my comprehension about what I've read, and you give me feedback on my answers." Generally speaking, short prompts which tell ChatGPT what "character" to play are pretty powerful. Literally telling that it is "skilled" or "expert" will increase the quality of the results.

Also, if you paste the original text and the questions into a _second_ chat, you can get ChatGPT to give answers which aren't "contaminated" by any of your mistakes. These won't be 100%, but again, the paid GPT 4 model should be decent at simple questions about content that's actually in the text.

That $20/month to talk to the big model can absolutely get better results on many categories of requests.

[bombobuffoon]

Yes my impression is that I think it can ask relevant questions.
But its not reliable for checking of answers. Its as if it imprints your opinion, true or false into any answer it gives.
Of course you can quickly validate the answers yourself by doing a translation.

Yes, this is about what I'd expect, too. The paid version (GPT 4) might be also able to give you at least some feedback on answers. It absolutely _can_ notice users' mistakes, but only sometimes.

Try a prompt including something like "You are a skilled language tutor helping me work on my reading comprehension. You ask me questions to test my comprehension about what I've read, and you give me feedback on my answers." Generally speaking, short prompts which tell ChatGPT what "character" to play are pretty powerful. Literally telling that it is "skilled" or "expert" will increase the quality of the results.

Also, if you paste the original text and the questions into a _second_ chat, you can get ChatGPT to give answers which aren't "contaminated" by any of your mistakes. These won't be 100%, but again, the paid GPT 4 model should be decent at simple questions about content that's actually in the text.

That $20/month to talk to the big model can absolutely get better results on many categories of requests.

I will try that prompt. In fact any prompts which have served you well are worth a try. I only use 3.5 though.

So far, its a bit of extra effort, but I also use Bing Chat with Copilot to discover consensus. With "Does this sentence work" ChatGPT usually lies to me, Bing is more picky and almost always turns up a problem. However ChatGPT seems to produce more natural sounding sentences for comparison purposes. If the two agree then I trust that the sentence at least is readable.

[bombobuffoon]

Sometimes you just have to figure things out yourself.

In fact upon further reflection, the only input resources I use and that work for me are ones I have discovered myself. This is just the way it is with a smaller than average language. Finding stuff that is interesting to you and at your level is a major challenge.

So maybe this is useful to someone learning Finnish. As everyone learning Finnish knows, YLE Areena has a wide range of shows with varying complexity. Most of it is unwatchable junk (not all of us want to torture ourselves watching the news) however there is probably something there to be found that is your level, or just beyond it.

Everything here is free.

1. YLE Areena, enable subtitles and use a browser plugin called simple translate. You can watch a show with subs and then hover the mouse over to get a translation for sentences you get stuck on.

OR, as the most interesting shows do not usually have subs

1. Download YLE show here https://github.com/aajanki/yle-dl
2. Upload to https://turboscribe.ai (3 free uploads a day)
3. Download transcription and SRT
4. Watch show for free with subs in https://www.languagereactor.com/ or just VLC etc
5. Paste transcription into ChatGPT and get it to ask you questions

I find the transcription pretty decent especially as I am transcribing pretty trivial stuff targeted towards 8-9 year olds so the language is simple and very clear, and very rich in everyday vocab. Here young people are describing their work -


Seems legit to me. I suppose it may struggle with tougher language but if you are that advanced you can maybe just comprehend it anyways.

[tiia]

Did you know about https://kielikoulu.yle.fi/? Because except for the asking questions part, it sounds pretty much like what you can get there?

[bombobuffoon]

Did you know about https://kielikoulu.yle.fi/? Because except for the asking questions part, it sounds pretty much like what you can get there?

Yes I've known about all that stuff since I started. Its quite a broken app and it only has partial content.

There was once a really good app that got scrapped. It used to be that you could type in a word and it would find a video of that word being used in a sentence. Now that was useful. However using on a mobile was completely bust from what I remember.

[bombobuffoon]

At least with this plugin (and there are 100s of flavours) you can translate the whole or partial sentence or word. Of course you would still need to use something like LR to do word tracking, dictionary lookup, etc, plus it doesn't have the finer control of rewinding hence the need to download. In fact I think VLC is the only way I found to accurately control rewinding.

Probably there is even a plugin that saves words, I haven't taken the time to find out.

[bombobuffoon]

A small improvement?

Haven't done that much lately besides the tech fiddling stuff, mostly just watching cartoons with the kids in the mornings, and reading. I have started to read out loud, I watched a video with this guy who reckons its really important to read out loud, it gets the language going round the system. He may have a point.

But anyway I noticed something odd. During morning cartoons I was able to understand pretty much everything, that is by way of reading the subtitles. I tried translating to English speaking out loud and was able to keep up for minutes, although shortly my kids told me to shut up. Its more complex than peppa pig, certainly A2 level themes. But as you can imagine its painful viewing.



And no, I could not comprehend anything audio wise without subtitles. Or at least I could not keep up.

I then decided to go upstairs to look up an old series that had given me a bit of trouble last time. I had binge watched it 3 months back. Its supposedly a super simple show, goofy in a kind of like meet the parents simplicity. To my surprise I could understand most(not all parts) of the dialogue with subs, but I do have to pause. I certainly was able to summarize and explain each part out loud. I have watched the show a few times before so am familiar with its humour and can sort of project what the dialogue is going to be.



So its not so clear yet if there's actually any improvement or if its my brain playing tricks on me. I'll dig around for a few new episodes and see what happens. Its not so always easy to actually measure improvements. This sort of thing has happened before and after digging a bit deeper the improvement is always much much smaller than the initial excitement expectation.

Anyway one aspect that has me excited (and thats if I am able to understand Luottomies) I can start pretending I am the actors and practice delivering the lines. I think that will be a great exercise.

[bombobuffoon]

So, was it a small improvement after all? Well yes and no.
It seems I can understand series that I have watched. I understand them a lot better.
Yet unfortunately there is no carry over and I don't understand new series.

But this is an interesting phenomenon, I have heard others baring witness to the same experience of the above. Its very queer indeed all the mind tricks that get played upon yourself when language learning.

I suppose its something I can test over a longer time frame. Its as if, you sew the seeds and then a few months later reap the harvest. So I shall test this hypothesis after a couple months.

Anyway I tried this, it looked fun, I tried 10 minutes, it was far too difficult. Lots of figures of speech and slang vocab. But, sewing the seeds, and maybe reap the harvest in a few months.


I also decided to do a quick end of month test of the A2 material. Not even close to understanding the listening material it all. I glanced over the transcript and I had forgotten most of the vocab even though I recognized all of the words, but no way in hell am I going to look them up again "räätä" something...oof damn I know that word, what is it??? 8 Hours later I suddenly remember it again.

Also had an opportunity to speak at the supermarket. "No thanks, those aren't ours", but I couldn't find the words in that split moment that it was needed. Only half an hour later on the way back in the car did the words come to me. So, that phrase goes into the language island spreadsheet marked for practice.