Glossy's Log

[MorkTheFiddle]

Your method of gauging your progress interests me. Sometimes I calculate how many words per minute I am hearing. Do you know how many words per episode you are listening to?

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That table is from 2018. My Chinese reading and listening comprehension have improved since then. Everything else has remained the same. Obviously, the same amount of information will be represented by a different number of words in different languages. My adjusted words per minute number is an attempt to account for that. All the numbers in that table that are on a 10-point scale are subjective estimates. I should measure my listening comprehension objectively some day, in words per minute.

I really like this table for reading, grammar, and so on, which gives you standards to go by and compare with. I'm going to give some thought to making this help me for French and Spanish, though my listening comprehension is far below yours for Russian and English, and Mandarin as well. I will continue to count words heard per minute. That measurement measures speed, but leaves out measuring the slurred words of ordinary conversation etc.

[Glossy]

On 12/07/20 my streak of at least an hour a day of Mandarin listening comprehension reached 3 years. It's not strictly a streak. I sometimes miss days. But I always make up for that later. The main thing is that I've spent much more than 365*3 hours on this task in the past 3 years.

Yesterday YouKu, the YouTube clone that I've been using, had some kind of an overhaul. Everything changed. For a long time I couldn't find the video that I wanted to watch. When I found it, it was at a much lower resolution than before.

I spend a lot of time looking at subtitles. They weren't so blurry yesterday as to hinder comprehension but definitely blurry enough to create an unpleasant, low-rent sort of feeling. So I remembered that I'd seen the Luo-gical Thinking show on YouTube. Found the episode I needed there. It had better resolution.

I pay YouTube $14.00 a month to get rid of commercials. I haven't done this with YouKu. So I had to sit through a lot of Chinese ads in the last few months. I like YouTube's navigation tools more, but I'm not used to using them for language study. I do a lot of rewinding. The muscle memory will have to be retrained.

Yesterday it took me 1 hour and 2 minutes to get through 7 minutes and 41 seconds of the 53rd episode of the Luo-gical Thinking show. This gives a multiple of 8.07, which is OK. By the way, I don't make these calculations by hand. I have a spreadsheet in iOS Numbers where I enter the start and the end of each practice session. There's a button there called "now". If you press it, it will put the current time into a cell. If you subtract the start time from the finish time, you'll get the elapsed time. Another simple formula gets me the multiple.

Yesterday I did 795 Anki reps, a lot of them while on my exercise bike.

[Glossy]

Yesterday it took me 1 hour 14 minutes and 1 second to get through 6 minutes 59 seconds of the 53rd episode of the Luo-gical Thinking show. This gives a multiple of 10.6, which is OK considering that the topic was the Qing dynasty, specifically corruption in it. Many more official titles, government departments and administrative practices that I've never heard of before.

I did 1,309 reviews in Anki, which is a lot by my standards. I think I started using Anki in 2008. For most of that time I finished all of my reps for the day every day. I developed a huge backlog during the pandemic for reasons I described in an earlier post. Mostly because I have no commute now. I used to do reps in the subway. There were no distractions there. It's harder to concentrate on such things at home. For now I'm trying to at least keep the backlog from growing.