Episode VI: A New Hope, Cavesa strikes back

Continue or start your personal language log here, including logs for challenge participants
aravinda
Green Belt
Posts: 287
Joined: Tue May 16, 2017 12:27 pm
Languages: .
x 616

Re: Episode VI: A New Hope, Cavesa strikes back

Postby aravinda » Mon Jan 01, 2018 2:53 am

Xenops wrote:I was wondering as well: do you happen to know of anatomy and physiology lectures in French that also have subtitles? It's a long shot, but I thought I would ask anyway. I've found a few on Youtube, but not many. If not videos, do you have recommendations for French textbooks? Merci.

Hello Xenops, both my level of French and experience with French medical literature is much lower than that of Cavesa's. But you might find some French MOOCs interesting. FUN-MOOC has some MOOCs on medical themes.
fun-mooc
Even predominantly English sites like Coursera occasionally has some MOOCs in French (and other languages).
coursera
And they normally have both subtitles and transcripts.
2 x

Online
Cavesa
Black Belt - 4th Dan
Posts: 4960
Joined: Mon Jul 20, 2015 9:46 am
Languages: Czech (N), French (C2) English (C1), Italian (C1), Spanish, German (C1)
x 17566

Re: Episode VI: A New Hope, Cavesa strikes back

Postby Cavesa » Tue Jan 02, 2018 1:15 am

aravinda wrote:
Xenops wrote:I was wondering as well: do you happen to know of anatomy and physiology lectures in French that also have subtitles? It's a long shot, but I thought I would ask anyway. I've found a few on Youtube, but not many. If not videos, do you have recommendations for French textbooks? Merci.

Hello Xenops, both my level of French and experience with French medical literature is much lower than that of Cavesa's. But you might find some French MOOCs interesting. FUN-MOOC has some MOOCs on medical themes.
fun-mooc
Even predominantly English sites like Coursera occasionally has some MOOCs in French (and other languages).
coursera
And they normally have both subtitles and transcripts.


I'll look up some more links to great stuff later (I'll need to find the links again soon anyways)
For now: http://umvf.cerimes.fr/wikinu/wikinu.php
Above all, I recommend lectures from Grenoble, usually a ppt with audio of the whole lecture :-)
For textbooks, I have recommendations, but not for the basic sciences, the "earliest" I've got is sémio.
....................
I almost forgot to write about my tiny Spanish progress.

Half unit 3 in Fiesta 2. It is not a very difficult one, but with very useful exercises making me step outside my comfort zone.

1 unit of GdUdE, unit 78. A part of it was really ok, the rest was full of mistakes. I need to slow down a bit. Pretérito imperfecto de subjuntivo somehow made a complete mess out of my almost ok comprehension of the tenses.

I need to slow down a bit and repair these gaps and unstable points. For that purpose, among others, I am gonna switch the U.Souč.Šp 2 course (I am too lazy to write it all out) for Método 3, a coursebook published by Anaya. It is meant for the B1 level and looks quite intelligently done, so I hope revisiting all the past tenses and similar stuff this way will help. There is no rush, as I cannot progress without fixing this chaos anyways. Really, I was doing quite well with all the past tenses and the presente del subjuntivo, until the next brick broke the whole structure for me.
.......................
As we stand at the beginning of a new year, many challenges, resolutions, and similar stuff open up. I am thinking very carefully about them. I would like to participate in a few, but I cannot put too much on my plate. It takes a bit of careful consideration. I am tempted by the Output Challenge. It would take approximately 140 words and 8,5 minutes of audio per day. That is not much per se, but I need to consider the whole picture.
5 x

User avatar
Dandelion
Yellow Belt
Posts: 60
Joined: Sat Dec 09, 2017 3:54 pm
Languages: Chinese(N),English(beginner)
x 79

Re: Episode VI: A New Hope, Cavesa strikes back

Postby Dandelion » Tue Jan 02, 2018 5:27 am

Cavesa wrote:
7. ?
Who knows. I think I will add a new language at some point, no clue when. Perhaps 10 years from now, perhaps next year.


Good luck for your languages. :D I think that you are a struggling person.It's a new start in 2018.I believe that you can achieve your goals through efforts.
2 x

Online
Cavesa
Black Belt - 4th Dan
Posts: 4960
Joined: Mon Jul 20, 2015 9:46 am
Languages: Czech (N), French (C2) English (C1), Italian (C1), Spanish, German (C1)
x 17566

Re: Episode VI: A New Hope, Cavesa strikes back

Postby Cavesa » Tue Jan 02, 2018 5:40 pm

Thanks, Dandelion. I am indeed in a part of life full of struggle. :-D

I am continuing with learning, even though slowly. I added Memrise courses by edthird (that trinity of conjugation courses) again. There are approximately 250 old review per course waiting for me. I am doing quite well, even though the verb caber is a pain.

There are a few things I am considering as they could be extremely helpful. But at the same time, they might be putting too much pressure on me.

One that I have already implemented: A bought a larger diary. One that doesn't fit in my handbag, but it is more for planning my studies, checking the completed stuff, and so on. I am more and more convinced paper helps.

I don't know about Habitica or Pacemaker. I should be using them, but I'll concider them more thoroughly in a week or two, after I see my new routine settled.

The Output Challenge is really tempting. I am considering two half challenges (25/25), French and Spanish. Or one full, but I cannot decide which language. My Spanish needs such an improvement and my French needs the maintenance. But I still can't decide, whether I can take this on my plate or not.

Counting my hours and minutes, like PeterMollengurg or Yuurei does. Another tempting thought that could be extremely motivating. But should I start falling behind the plan too much, seeing the numbers might bury me even deeper.
1 x

Online
Cavesa
Black Belt - 4th Dan
Posts: 4960
Joined: Mon Jul 20, 2015 9:46 am
Languages: Czech (N), French (C2) English (C1), Italian (C1), Spanish, German (C1)
x 17566

Re: Episode VI: A New Hope, Cavesa strikes back

Postby Cavesa » Tue Jan 02, 2018 6:37 pm

I want to turn this year into success both in term of results and in term of my quality of life. That means handling a lot of stuff. I have found some very practical and good advice on logs of various people I admire. I think I should apply these two pieces at this time:

Henkkles wrote:On Inertia

I've seen lots of people complaining that they can't study effectively because they procrastinate. I can easily empathize with the sentiment, and here's what I came up to address this issue.

I understood this when I was doing my first gig as a language tutor. A high school aged lad, only motivation to learn was to improve grades at school, so quite a difficult job you can imagine. I noticed that the fewer tasks I gave him, the more he would actually do. If I gave him lots of things to do, he'd only have done 25% of them by the time we had our next meeting the following week. However when I sliced the amount of his tasks in half, he actually managed to do 75% of them, increasing the actual studytime I could get him to put in. He was also more keen on doing the things that needed little to no preparation to get started.

In light of the experiences as a tutor and a learner myself, I created a few 'tenets' if you will.

1. Always know exactly what you're going to do before you start studying. Determination leaves no time for procrastination.
2. Have a clear cut plan whose end is not in the far future. This means to make yourself missions that you can accomplish say, within a month. Instead of saying "study the full Glossika course", set yourself a target to complete Fluency 1 within 28 days or so.
3. Do not study only on one occasion. I'd say that the optimal daily studytime is divided into three chunks, the 25/50/25 way. Half an hour in the morning/before noon, half an hour in the afternoon/early evening and half an hour later in the evening, for example.
4. Make your routine light at first and then add stuff later, not the other way around. If you make a four hour gargantuan routine that you try to do every day, most likely you'll just end up dreading to start which leads you to procrasting and eventually dropping the entire thing.

The take-home lesson is:

The inertia to start studying is going to be insurmountable if you have to figure out what you're going to be doing every single time you sit down with the books.


This is extremely good. I don't know whether I can do number 3 (I am NOT a morning person, and I am juggling a bit higher amounts of time, as languages + my normal studies are a bit heavier load (but there will never be more free time for languages, so complete giving up is not an option and I like learning them).

But number 1: yes, I need to do that. Better definitions of what does it mean to go through a chapter in medical textbook the first time, the second time, and so on. What does it mean to finish a unit of a language textbook, and what is a good dose of a coursebook for one session.

Number 2: excellent. I need to learn doing this. My life has been damaged enough by the loooong term thinking. The problem is, that other people are actively adding to that. All those "just keep going, you will get your prize after graduation" or "you can work the way you want one day", all that is making me extremely depressive. The Language version is "finally getting that DELE C1 exam" and similar stuff. Nope, nope, nope. Everything needs to be chopped in smaller pieces.

Number 4: this goes against a lot of other "good advice" I have been given over the years. During one session, all the "just do the worst thing first, so that you can look forward to the easier stuff" advice is horrible. For long term planning, the "do as much as you can as soon as you can, you know how horrible it is to postpone and then having too much left" piece of advice is not great either. I am trying to do it the other way now, planning reasonable chunks of work, so that I can enjoy some feeling of accomplishment, and "yesssss! I am doing more than I am supposed to! I am awesome" :-D

Yuurei wrote:
LunaMoonsilver wrote:Oh, wow, I know you said you didn't feel like you used a lot of time between Christmas and New Year, but looks like you got loads done! :D I think I'm going to have to borrow your weekly goals idea to make sure I keep on track like you're doing haha.

Happy 2018!

Happy 2018 to you as well! And welcome to the language logs section - I already bookmarked your log earlier and look forward to reading about your progress! (Your use of colors totally won me over :lol: )

As for how much I got done, I suppose I sounded more disppointed than I meant to, but there was, I think, no noticeable difference between last week and my usual weeks (where I work full-time), so I was wondering where my extra 40 hours went, is all. :D

I can totally recommend the weekly goals, especially if you're going for consistency, as you stated over in your log - I've never been as consistent in my learning as when I was using weekly goals. One tip for those goals though: Shoot low. Really low. Make it the lowest amount you would still feel somewhat satisfied with. The amount you could still (most likely) do, if you were to come down with a cold and be unexpectedly busy. This has several advantages:

1. Completing your goals will be almost effortless and thus you're much (much!) more likely to actually do them. And even though you think that you would do those few things anyway even if you didn't set them as goals, the fact that you do write them down will ensure that you do them. And so you complete your goals week after week and voilà - consitency has been attained.
2. Derived from 1.): Actually completing your goals will lead to a sense of accomplishment (and let's not kid ourselves - who doesn't like that?), which in turn will make you even more likely to accomplish the next week's goals as well. Rinse and repeat. :D
3. The goals represent a lower limit, not and upper limit and nothing stops you from doing more than your set goals - in fact easily finishing your goals before the end of the week will make it very likely that you feel motivated to do some more.
4. Get an extra dose of that sense of accomplishment for having done a lot more than your original goals.
5. If you do get slightly ill or unexpectedly busy, you've still got a pretty good chance of completing your goals.

Heh, I didn't actually mean to get carried away like this, but I could totally talk about this topic for hours (but I already created one wall of text today, so I'll stop here). :lol:


Yes, yes, and yes.

Time to apply this. The next post will be an experimental planning one.
9 x

Online
Cavesa
Black Belt - 4th Dan
Posts: 4960
Joined: Mon Jul 20, 2015 9:46 am
Languages: Czech (N), French (C2) English (C1), Italian (C1), Spanish, German (C1)
x 17566

Re: Episode VI: A New Hope, Cavesa strikes back

Postby Cavesa » Tue Jan 02, 2018 6:48 pm

Weekly goals:
1 unit of a German coursebook (Německy s úsměvem)
1 unit of a Spanish coursebook (Método 3)
0,5 unit of an Italian coursebook (Učebnice současné italštiny 1)
2 double pages of a grammar book (Gramatica de Uso B)
3 Spanish verbs on Memrise

at this pace, I'll have finished these courses by ... at the very latest:
Německy s úsměvem by the end of May
Método 3 at the beginning of March
Učebnice současné italštiny by the end of the year
Gramatica de Uso B in the middle of April
0 x

User avatar
MamaPata
Brown Belt
Posts: 1019
Joined: Tue Jun 21, 2016 9:25 am
Location: London
Languages: English (N), French (C1*), Russian (B1), Spanish (B1).

Long lost: Arabic and Latin.
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=3004
x 1807

Re: Episode VI: A New Hope, Cavesa strikes back

Postby MamaPata » Tue Jan 02, 2018 6:59 pm

Some really interesting points there! I've definitely noticed that personally, if I have too many tasks in a particular domain (so lecturers who give 5 or 6 tasks), I end up feeling overwhelmed and don't do any of it. It feels too big so I never start. Whereas, actually, if there's one or two fewer bits, I get loads done. So I definitely agree about setting lower goals in order to help yourself manage.

Paper planners are great! I have been using a paper planner for years and I love it. Though I am increasingly fussy about what I want from my planner, which is maybe a bad thing!
1 x
Corrections appreciated.

User avatar
Yuurei
Green Belt
Posts: 266
Joined: Tue Oct 20, 2015 8:57 am
Languages: German (N), English, French, Japanese, Spanish, Latin, Italian
Studying: Japanese, Chinese, Korean
Maintaining: French, Spanish
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1721
x 590

Re: Episode VI: A New Hope, Cavesa strikes back

Postby Yuurei » Wed Jan 03, 2018 12:32 pm

Good to see you converted to the one true faith of weekly goals Erm, I mean, welcome to the club! :lol:

I hope the goals work as well for you as they did for me and that you have a very successful 2018!

I definitely agree with Hekkles' point 4 as well: "Make your routine light at first and then add stuff later, not the other way around."
It's like getting ready to run a marathon: you don't start training by running 42 kilometers, you start by running a couple of kilometers and then slowly adding more. (<-- says someone who hates running and wouldn't run a marathon even if people paid her a million dollars for it XD)
8 x

Online
Cavesa
Black Belt - 4th Dan
Posts: 4960
Joined: Mon Jul 20, 2015 9:46 am
Languages: Czech (N), French (C2) English (C1), Italian (C1), Spanish, German (C1)
x 17566

Re: Episode VI: A New Hope, Cavesa strikes back

Postby Cavesa » Mon Jan 08, 2018 8:29 pm

I failed this week. I blame sleep and computer games. Or rather: it is not easy to tell where is the line between depression and laziness. There are more things that weren't going well now. It is not like me to not be excited even about my singing classes.

What I did from the list:
1 unit of GdUdE
the Spanish verbs on Memrise. I reviewed the old ones and a few were just like learning them again. Like caber for example.

The rest is failure. I did a part of the German unit though. But just a part.

I'll do better next week.

This week:
1 unit of a German coursebook (Německy s úsměvem)
1 unit of a Spanish coursebook (Método 3)
0,5 unit of an Italian coursebook (Učebnice současné italštiny 1)
2 double pages of a grammar book (Gramatica de Uso B)
3 Spanish verbs on Memrise
7 x

Online
Cavesa
Black Belt - 4th Dan
Posts: 4960
Joined: Mon Jul 20, 2015 9:46 am
Languages: Czech (N), French (C2) English (C1), Italian (C1), Spanish, German (C1)
x 17566

Re: Episode VI: A New Hope, Cavesa strikes back

Postby Cavesa » Wed Jan 10, 2018 9:52 am

Finished L2 of my German coursebook. YESSSSSSS!!!! Yeah, it was just review. But still, it is something!
One point for my Yuurei Challenge! :-D :-D :-D

Other than that: I opened Clozemaster again and it is fun to continue. There is also an app, I'm gonna have a look at it.
Assimil: I opened it. There was dust on it! I'm a horrible person. :-D Now seriously. I had completed 63 units passively and 19 actively.
Image
Well, a good course of action will be return. I will start the 20th lesson, but just passively. And continue from there on.
7 x


Return to “Language logs”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 3 guests