Slow-cooked Korean

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Evita
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Joined: Tue Aug 11, 2015 7:02 pm
Location: Latvia
Languages: I speak: Latvian, English, Russian, German
I study: Korean
I'm slowly forgetting: Spanish, Finnish, French
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1141
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Re: Slow-cooked Korean

Postby Evita » Mon Oct 23, 2017 8:57 pm

Studying words with Anki without reinforcement from other sources is very, very tough, and even if you learn them you still don't know which nouns typically go together with which verbs. Even knowing this, I still study vocabulary with Anki but I'm not strict with it, I press Good often even if I couldn't quite remember the meaning. The idea is that once you see this word somewhere else, you'll remember it easily. It seems to work for me. But you should definitely do some other activity (like watching Korean TV) besides Anki to make studying more fun.
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: 6480 / 8000 Korean Vocabulary

My Korean Anki decks: Grammar Sentences | General Korean Sentences | Vocabulary | Hanja

AndyMeg
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Re: Slow-cooked Korean

Postby AndyMeg » Mon Oct 23, 2017 9:06 pm

Maybe you could focus on your listening? It seems you had a hard time understanding your korean family.

I think that Variety Shows could give you a good practice ground. Some TV shows have korean subs in "ondemankorean" website. For example: 1Night2Days

For example, you could watch a segment and try to understand as much as possible, then you could replay the segment with korean subs, then you could take note of the korean words or grammar you don't understand and look for them, then you could watch the same segment but this time with english subs to make sure you understood right, and then you could compare the korean subs with what you are actually hearing so that you get used to how different people pronounce the same words or phrases/sentences. I would like to try this out when I'm on a higher level with my korean. But I think this may be a good activity for your current level and needs. ;)
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AndyMeg
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Re: Slow-cooked Korean

Postby AndyMeg » Mon Oct 23, 2017 9:13 pm

Evita wrote:The idea is that once you see this word somewhere else, you'll remember it easily. It seems to work for me. But you should definitely do some other activity (like watching Korean TV) besides Anki to make studying more fun.


That's more or less the main idea behind my use of Memrise: I don't try to perfectly remember, I just try to get aquantinced with vocabulary and sentences, so that when I see them again while enjoying native material, I have a better chance of recognizing them and creating enough "real life" associations to put them on the long term memory.
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qeadz
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Re: Slow-cooked Korean

Postby qeadz » Mon Oct 23, 2017 9:20 pm

AndyMeg wrote:Maybe you could focus on your listening? It seems you had a hard time understanding your korean family... <suggestions for methods>


True enough. Listening is a weak point. Along with everything else :)

Right now I'm spending about 50% of my time listening to Korean. So I don't know what is an appropriate ratio for various activities, but I'm loathe to push this any higher for fear that my other activities would become too irregular. Anki, for one, relies on regularity to be effective.

So it is possible that a change in what I am listening to may be the key to broadening my abilities here. It may also be, as you suggest, that a change in how I work with audio content might be the key.

If I can find the time, perhaps watching shows might be good - right now I'm only listening to podcasts and the like and reading their transcripts.
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qeadz
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Re: Slow-cooked Korean

Postby qeadz » Wed Oct 25, 2017 11:00 pm

The daily grind:

30 minutes - Listening podcasts and other audio-only content
20 minutes - Anki of sentences/vocab

Then 20 minutes of whichever of these I havent done in a while:
- Reading (usually a bit more of this than the items below)
- Translating
- Study Grammar
- Writing

Missing: Speaking Practice is _still_ lacking.
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qeadz
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Re: Slow-cooked Korean

Postby qeadz » Tue Nov 21, 2017 9:23 pm

Listening + Reading
Listening + Reading + Grammar Lookup
Listening + Reading + Grammar Lookup + Writing
Listening + Reading/Translation + Grammar Study + Grammar Practice (in Writing)
Listening + Reading/Translation + Grammar Study/Practice + Anki (vocab)
Listening + Reading/Translation + Grammar Study/Practice + Anki + Reviewing Pure Korean/Sino Korean roots

This has been the evolution of my language learning experience in a nutshell. Each step preceded by reasonably comprehensive reviews and some stats tracking to identify weak points. So in a few weeks it'll be December and I'll be due for another review.

At this time I feel all my skills are lacking. My recent trip to Korea showed that there are Korean speakers whom I largely do not understand when they speak. When translate texts, I frequently find seemingly simple sentences which I feel I understand but actually cannot translate into English (which means I am not actually understanding the meaning). I'm still reviewing and looking up grammar points I've seen and looked up and studied many times before. My writing still comes back all too often with "I have no idea what this sentence is supposed to mean".

So now I am looking at my Anki stats and things are starting to go south. It's not huge, but as the volume of words I'm actively learning increases, my typical (or average) daily statistic is starting to go down. For example my accuracy for 'Young' Cards for the last 3 days has been: 83.8%, 95%, 86.8% (note its also evidently quite variable!)

Interestingly my mature cards are unaffected. In fact over the last month my accuracy for mature cards is slightly *higher* (94.48%) than my all time accuracy for them (93.95%).

It would seem that most of the failures are in the 'young' category. I frequently find that a word builds up its intervals from 2 to 3, 5, 7, 10 or whatever but then it all comes crashing down and I seem to completely forget the word. So back to the bottom it goes - starting again from 1 day interval and working its way up.

Because of this, cards are being marked as suspended & buried much more often these days. In total I think I've had 13 so far.

In total I've seen 1709 words since I began with this deck.

So I am hitting the 'hard' button quite a lot. I have adjusted some of the stats for the deck too. Yet my stats are still on a slightly downward trend (aside from the mature cards which are seemingly faring a bit better than ever before).

Now the question of course is: so is Anki working? Well I consider this: even though my stats are lower than many Anki users think they should be, I've still added a very considerable number of words to my receptive vocabulary. Compared to my time prior to Anki, my rate of vocab acquisition is much higher.

Also I am finding that this is finally starting to pay off in the material I read where I have to look up fewer words. It means I am opening up a wider variety of material I can reasonably work through without being bogged down in a dictionary the whole time. It also means I can generally work through material faster than before.

Despite my issues with vocab retention, I'm going to say that I think a focus on vocab acquisition is seeming to be in some ways more beneficial than many other activities I have introduced over my time studying.

Without having done any review on it, I think in an ideal world I'd only change two things about how I'm going about it:

1) Instead of a pre-fab deck (Evita's vocab deck), I'd diligently add to my own out of the materials I work through.
2) I'd include an example sentence for the words which have non-standard ways of being used.

It may well be that, for all the suggestions I've had about how to aid vocab retention, the above might prove the most effective.
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4valor
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Re: Slow-cooked Korean

Postby 4valor » Tue Nov 21, 2017 10:52 pm

Your Anki stats are fine, particularly if you are nearly at 95% on mature cards. I actually think your stats are too good and you might be over-reviewing. The problem with over-reviewing is that you limit the new material you learn. I think from memory research suggest the magic number you want is around 80-85% (could be even lower).

I am currently at 6800 cards in 16 months with an average of 56 minutes dedicated to Anki a day. My mature card rate is only 88%. I am close to getting through the grinding stage of learning Korean, which will allow me to just focus on more and more native materials in the future.
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Evita
Orange Belt
Posts: 182
Joined: Tue Aug 11, 2015 7:02 pm
Location: Latvia
Languages: I speak: Latvian, English, Russian, German
I study: Korean
I'm slowly forgetting: Spanish, Finnish, French
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1141
x 289

Re: Slow-cooked Korean

Postby Evita » Wed Nov 22, 2017 7:17 am

I agree, your Anki stats seem fine, but I don't think you should make any adjustments based on stats in any case. For example, I haven't looked at my Anki stats at all in a couple of years. It's better to make adjustments based on your feelings about retention and experiment a little.

qeadz wrote:It would seem that most of the failures are in the 'young' category. I frequently find that a word builds up its intervals from 2 to 3, 5, 7, 10 or whatever but then it all comes crashing down and I seem to completely forget the word. So back to the bottom it goes - starting again from 1 day interval and working its way up.

I would suggest setting the new interval in the Lapse section to 30% or something like that so that the word has a bigger interval than 1 day even after you press the 1 button. It will reduce the number of daily reviews for you.
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: 6480 / 8000 Korean Vocabulary

My Korean Anki decks: Grammar Sentences | General Korean Sentences | Vocabulary | Hanja

qeadz
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Re: Slow-cooked Korean

Postby qeadz » Mon Feb 26, 2018 6:49 pm

ロータス wrote:Your progress bars are looking really good. Any update on your Korean? Also how was it going through howtostudykorean?


Things are still going... slowly.

I intended on finishing out last year with increased effort, but actually became a little depressed because the changes I had made to my language learning had not amounted to anything substantial. So I was thinking about just closing this language log with some kind of final post... but then it just seemed easier to let it slide out of sight.

I haven't thrown in the towel, but my desire to try new language learning techniques has waned. As it is I have on my desk at work a full notebook from when I gave handwritten sentences a go. I didn't perceive any real effect or benefit after a number of months compared to just typing on the computer.

My HTSK progress is up to lesson 100 now. I made little progress on it, largely because some of the earlier points I had covered were starting to fade from memory. So I am going through doing refreshers now, and utilizing Anki to do so.

My earlier worries about my Anki stats starting to wobble a bit proved well founded. They began to plummet and I recall my worst stat was 69% across 100+ cards... my mature cards stat also dropped (below 80% on the worst days) and my leeched & suspended count skyrocketed. I have cut down my new words per day and this has stabilized things.

At the end of last year I was trying for 10 new words per day through Anki in order to hit a target count by year end. It would seem that 10 a day is a bit high - the stats bear me out that I wasnt handling that number sustained.

And that was all way more than I wanted to say! Thank you for asking though. My journey is still ongoing. I havent stopped yet :)
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