Cantonese Progress Report 12/3/2018
End Goal: For our next trip to HK (likely early 2019), I would like to be 'conversational' in Cantonese.
Start of current Project: 5/16/2018, Week of year 20/52
Current Week of the year: 49/52, 30 weeks into the project out of ~32.
Anki
Cards are Production only: Meaning -> Jyutping
All 4490 Card suspended
Input
Total Content Run Time: 70:30
Last Week: 1:00
Output
Writing: 2650 characters
Last Week: 0
ROL/Shadow/Chorus: 6:00
Last Week: 0
iTalki
Total Lesson Time: 18:30
Last Week: 1:00
I've been continuing to focus on ensuring my input is truly comprehensible and I feel like the process is more effective than what I've been doing in the past. Content-Run-Time wise, I get through a lot less content as I'm spending a lot more time on each bit of content, but I feel like I'm really getting all the meat off the bone without over doing it into the realm of diminishing returns. More specifically, I've been taking Cantonese YouTube videos with subtitles and doing the following:
1. Put the subtitles in the Reader app at LanguageTools.io and doing a full intensive reading pass, adding definitions that are missing, etc.
2. Ripping an MP3 and SRT subtitle file from the video and putting both into WorkAudioBook and looping each phrase/subtitle until I get to a 75%-95%+ understanding level 'as I hear it'. This can sometimes take 20-30+ loops of one phrase.
I'm not getting through a lot of new content, but I feel like my listening is noticeably inching forward in tiny consistent steps.
Some observations along way:
a. Some content is HARD (HappyKonger) and some is relatively easy (西DorSi).
Honestly in the past, other than slow beginner text books, I didn't have much of a 'hard vs easy' gauge. It was all just Cantonese, I usually knew many/most of the words, but there was always something I didn't know... whatever, it's all Cantonese. But I'm now getting to the point where I'm noticing that I know MOST of what 西DorSi is talking about, barring bits of new subject specific vocab. HappyKonger on the other hand goes off into deep philosophical or literary side bars that are fairly opaque until I decode them.
b. I still occasionally learn a somewhat 'common' word
It always amazes me how I still, now and then, will learn a word and then discover that it is popping up all over the place.
This week's example: 大把. I'm not sure why I haven't run into it before, but now I seem to see it everywhere.
c. Writing out subtitles takes about 20x content time.
I still very much enjoy 西DorSi's videos, but his subtitles are burned into the video, so I have to manually type them out in order to use them in my tools. I basically watch the video, pause at each line, type out what I see on the screen into Google Docs (sometimes needing to look up an odd character I don't know). I also type a rough guess of the subtitle timing in SRT format. I then import this hand made SRT file into 'Subtitle Edit' and fix all the subtitle timing so that they can later be accurately used by WorkAudioBook (or whatever else).
This 20x factor means that a 3 minute video takes about 1 hour for me generate a good SRT for... painful but doable. I share these, when I can, at LanguageTools.io for other to use... I hope that saves others some of the trouble.
d. The Dark Side of Reader apps
One bad habit I noticed developing as I've been using Reader apps lately (both LingQ and LanguageTools.io)... The format of normal text 'known' words / highlighted 'unknown words' makes my brain want to skip/skim over the known text and jump right to the few highlights/unknown words in order to 'fix' them. This means that what SHOULD be 'intensive reading' easily turns into only 'looking up definitions of the highlight words'. I recently noticed myself doing this in both LingQ/Italian and LangaugeTools.io/Cantonese at different points. I'm sure this is partially due to my anal nit-picky nature: I see a highlight as something that needs 'fixing' and I'm immediately drawn to 'complete the task'. Now that I'm aware of the tendency, I'm being careful to ensure I don't get sucked into that habit and make sure I'm really reading (and not skimming) the whole text with comprehension.
e. My metrics in this log are becoming nearly meaningless and will need an overhaul in the new year
My process has changed so much over this year's project, the metrics I was tracking aren't of much use to me anymore. Right now I'm thinking of a new measure of raw intensive listening time, and since I'm doing looping of phrases, wall clock time instead of content time would be far more feasible to measure. But I'll probably worry about that after the new year.
Speaking: Fluency / Accuracy / Complexity
After another session with Aaron, I realized that I've worked mostly on Fluency this year, which I desperately needed, but now I need to work a bit more on Accuracy. Before this year's project I had done almost zero speaking and I just needed to get my mouth moving. While I've not been a chatter box, I can now throw out semi-intelligible sentences, make myself understood and have interactions that could be called conversations (which was my goal: yay!) I told my previous tutors to only correct me if I was not understandable precisely because I wanted to exercise the fluency muscle as much as possible and didn't want to stop every 3 words for an explanation. But Aaron is a slightly more 'teacher-like' than my previous tutors, both in his disposition and his skills. He is quite good at quickly giving very precise corrections for my persistent mistakes and he does this without long English explanations, unless I ask for that. While my fluency still needs lots of work, Aaron has come along at the right time and feel that turning the focus slightly toward accuracy is a good thing.
Onward!
Stealing time and grappling with fickle devotion (Cantonese, Italian)
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zKing
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zKing
- Orange Belt
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Re: Stealing time and grappling with fickle devotion
Cantonese Progress Report 12/10/2018
End Goal: For our next trip to HK (likely early 2019), I would like to be 'conversational' in Cantonese.
Start of current Project: 5/16/2018, Week of year 20/52
Current Week of the year: 50/52, 31 weeks into the project out of ~32.
Anki
Cards are Production only: Meaning -> Jyutping
All 4490 Card suspended
Input
Total Content Run Time: 73:30
Last Week: 3:00
Output
Writing: 2650 characters
Last Week: 0
ROL/Shadow/Chorus: 6:00
Last Week: 0
iTalki
Total Lesson Time: 19:30
Last Week: 1:00
The year is almost over. As far as language learning, I'll be taking off Christmas week/the last week of the year, so I've only got about two weeks left in this year's project. As I've mentioned before, I've accomplished my goal for this project: my speaking and listening abilities have reached a level of 'conversational' that I'm satisfied with for the purposes of our next trip to HK. There is still much work to do on my Cantonese; I wouldn't claim to be B2 yet. I am likely in the 'solid B1' category. I can have conversations, they are still a lot of hard work and have a lot of holes, but I can talk with someone for 30 minutes on a variety of topics and have a reasonably interesting conversation.
My listening has taken a huge step forward in the ~7 months I've worked the project. I can now truly 'hear' if not understand a lot of the native TV content, even fairly complex stuff which was pretty opaque to me before, but I still don't understand good sized chunks of it without using the subtitles. This contrasts with before where I would need to pause at nearly EVERY subtitle and decode things. I honestly wouldn't 'hear' much of the language, previously much of it would be a stream of sounds and only after decoding the subtitles and replaying the audio could I match up the sounds with words I knew to be in the audio.
I believe that this increase in listening skill can be attributed primarily to three things:
1. A LOT more experience listening to REAL connected speech (not slowed teaching language) so my ear knows what to expect.
2. An increase in the speed at which my brain can decode Cantonese audio; this is getting closer to natural native speaking speeds.
3. A (relatively moderate) increase in passive vocabulary, particularly the more casual/spoken form bits.
As for the speed part, I still listen to much of my content on YouTube at 75% speed as this allows me to really follow a lot of audio on-the-fly. Fast spoken native content at full speed still often outruns my brain's audio decoding speed. I get chunks here and there but I'm often lost. And, of course, there is still plenty of vocabulary that I don't know, so I'm almost always using soft-subtitles with a pop-up dictionary for quick look-ups.
I think I mentioned this before, but I've also noticed that I'm now at a level where Extensive Listening (still with subs) may now be somewhat effective, although I will continue to do intensive listening/watching whenever I have the time and energy. Previously, I would say that, for me, Extensive Listening was in that 'pretty much useless' category, it was just too far away from Comprehensible Input.
It wasn't really Input: I just was not able to parse most of the audio into the correct discrete 'word sounds'.
AND
It mostly wasn't Comprehensible: what little I got wasn't enough to make reasonable guesses at the meaning of the many unknowns.
Because of this, I almost always did only Intensive Listening with Cantonese.
Recently, however, I surprised myself by 'just watching' some new content from a show that I used to watch and I was pleasantly surprised that I could kind-of follow it without pausing. This was content at a level that was previously fairly opaque to me without the pause/read-subtitles/lookup-unknowns steps.
This is exciting both from an achievement standpoint, but also that I think I can do some semi-Extensive listening (only pausing if I get really lost or some unknown word keeps popping up and bothering me) which will be much faster from a 'Content volume per unit of wall clock time' standpoint. And I truly believe that the problem of learning to comprehend a language is solved simply by Huge Volumes of Comprehensible Input.
Or basically: Comprehension Skills = Content Time/Volume * Content Comprehension
This was underscored for me recently when I started using LingQ on the side to warm up my Italian. Italian for English speakers, with a little bit of bootstrap work, is a ridiculously comprehensible language. There are just SO many cognates. For example, once you know that most words ending in -ità in Italian are -ity in English, and -mente is -ly... you end up with LOTS of transparent words like:
abilità = ability
particolarmente = particularly
And there are MANY more that are nearly identical in other ways:
trasparente = transparent
incomprensibile = incomprensible
Every time I pick up my Italian studies, I'm reminded of how easy it is compared to a distant language like Cantonese. (Sorry, not trying to disparage all the hard work of those who are trying to hammer a romance language into their brain.) And this makes it abundantly clear to me why some claim 'Just Read/Watch/Listen your way to Fluency' works and become quite hostile when someone points out that this just doesn't work for some languages.
For an English native learning a language like Italian: I have no doubt that you can just read your way to C-levels of understanding. With the most basic of bootstrapping, a lot of Italian is probably 30-50% comprehensible or more on its face, nearly from day one.
For an English native learning a language like Mandarin or Cantonese: If you 'Just Read/Listen', you will understand pretty much zero.
And in the equation above (Comprehension Skills = Content Time/Volume * Content Comprehension), when one of the factors is zero it doesn't matter how large the other is.
And to complete the thought, I think some folks make mistakes on the other side of the equation as well:
People who spend hours upon hours focused on some tiny bit of the language trying to decode every nuance.
They reach a very high level comprehension on few sentences, but the volume is nearly nothing and they don't get far.
Ok, somehow this post devolved into a diatribe about the folly of breaking the natural laws of Comprehensible Input... not my original intent. I'll try to wrap this up.
One tactical thing:
I've been doing a bit of WorkAudioBook (WAB) looped-listening to sentences in order to work my ear. As I've said before, this seems very effective for me. I use an Mp3 and SRT file ripped from a YouTube video... and I correct the SRT timing to be sure WAB gets the whole sentence correctly in the audio. I let each sentence/phrase loop 20+ times, maybe as many as 50 (I really wish WAB had a loop count, I'm curious to know how many times I am looping them.) Usually on first listen, I 'get the gist' but many of the words slip through my ear. As the sentence hammers again and again into my ear, I'm reading the subtitle simultaneously... trying to time my eye with the audio so that I'm seeing the right Chinese character with the sound WAB is playing in that moment. When I've mostly got this (90% ish) while reading along, I then close my eyes and try to continue to 'hear' each word go by. In a lot of real connected speech, this isn't 100% possible as those words are often not actually there in the audio or are merely little blips of altered pronunciation of the neighboring words. However, I often can reach a sort-of 90% level where I've nearly got it word-for-word and I'm 'feeling' the meaning of the whole phrase as it goes by. This process seems to be very effective as I can tell my listening focus seems sharpened when I thereafter listen to other content more casually.
But this is also very hard, absolutely 100% concentration work. And when I'm doing it I'm not doing anything except listening, and the end goals of it are quite fuzzy, i.e. I stop looping a phrase when I think I've understood it word for word '90%-ish'.
And that's the rub... I get very fidgety when I'm doing it. There's no words to look up, no highlights to click and turn green, etc.
To be honest, I think this is also a problem I have when I'm just listening extensively: My brain wants me to DO something and there needs to be a clear point where I'm DONE with it. I guess I'm just a fidgety person and this makes it hard for me to concentrate that hard without doing something with my hands? I noticed that I've subconsciously started to procrastinate doing these sessions by 'preparing more materials'... not a good sign.
The only partial potential solution I have so far: I may do this in Pomodoros of 10-15 mins or so... it might help my goal oriented brain to tick off a count of Pomodoro cycles and keep the hard-concentration sessions time boxed.
Anyhow, I should bring this long winding thing to close as it is lengthy and doesn't really have a point.
In closing, I'm now starting to ruminate about my 2019 goals. I'll discuss that next time.
Onward!
End Goal: For our next trip to HK (likely early 2019), I would like to be 'conversational' in Cantonese.
Start of current Project: 5/16/2018, Week of year 20/52
Current Week of the year: 50/52, 31 weeks into the project out of ~32.
Anki
Cards are Production only: Meaning -> Jyutping
All 4490 Card suspended
Input
Total Content Run Time: 73:30
Last Week: 3:00
Output
Writing: 2650 characters
Last Week: 0
ROL/Shadow/Chorus: 6:00
Last Week: 0
iTalki
Total Lesson Time: 19:30
Last Week: 1:00
The year is almost over. As far as language learning, I'll be taking off Christmas week/the last week of the year, so I've only got about two weeks left in this year's project. As I've mentioned before, I've accomplished my goal for this project: my speaking and listening abilities have reached a level of 'conversational' that I'm satisfied with for the purposes of our next trip to HK. There is still much work to do on my Cantonese; I wouldn't claim to be B2 yet. I am likely in the 'solid B1' category. I can have conversations, they are still a lot of hard work and have a lot of holes, but I can talk with someone for 30 minutes on a variety of topics and have a reasonably interesting conversation.
My listening has taken a huge step forward in the ~7 months I've worked the project. I can now truly 'hear' if not understand a lot of the native TV content, even fairly complex stuff which was pretty opaque to me before, but I still don't understand good sized chunks of it without using the subtitles. This contrasts with before where I would need to pause at nearly EVERY subtitle and decode things. I honestly wouldn't 'hear' much of the language, previously much of it would be a stream of sounds and only after decoding the subtitles and replaying the audio could I match up the sounds with words I knew to be in the audio.
I believe that this increase in listening skill can be attributed primarily to three things:
1. A LOT more experience listening to REAL connected speech (not slowed teaching language) so my ear knows what to expect.
2. An increase in the speed at which my brain can decode Cantonese audio; this is getting closer to natural native speaking speeds.
3. A (relatively moderate) increase in passive vocabulary, particularly the more casual/spoken form bits.
As for the speed part, I still listen to much of my content on YouTube at 75% speed as this allows me to really follow a lot of audio on-the-fly. Fast spoken native content at full speed still often outruns my brain's audio decoding speed. I get chunks here and there but I'm often lost. And, of course, there is still plenty of vocabulary that I don't know, so I'm almost always using soft-subtitles with a pop-up dictionary for quick look-ups.
I think I mentioned this before, but I've also noticed that I'm now at a level where Extensive Listening (still with subs) may now be somewhat effective, although I will continue to do intensive listening/watching whenever I have the time and energy. Previously, I would say that, for me, Extensive Listening was in that 'pretty much useless' category, it was just too far away from Comprehensible Input.
It wasn't really Input: I just was not able to parse most of the audio into the correct discrete 'word sounds'.
AND
It mostly wasn't Comprehensible: what little I got wasn't enough to make reasonable guesses at the meaning of the many unknowns.
Because of this, I almost always did only Intensive Listening with Cantonese.
Recently, however, I surprised myself by 'just watching' some new content from a show that I used to watch and I was pleasantly surprised that I could kind-of follow it without pausing. This was content at a level that was previously fairly opaque to me without the pause/read-subtitles/lookup-unknowns steps.
This is exciting both from an achievement standpoint, but also that I think I can do some semi-Extensive listening (only pausing if I get really lost or some unknown word keeps popping up and bothering me) which will be much faster from a 'Content volume per unit of wall clock time' standpoint. And I truly believe that the problem of learning to comprehend a language is solved simply by Huge Volumes of Comprehensible Input.
Or basically: Comprehension Skills = Content Time/Volume * Content Comprehension
This was underscored for me recently when I started using LingQ on the side to warm up my Italian. Italian for English speakers, with a little bit of bootstrap work, is a ridiculously comprehensible language. There are just SO many cognates. For example, once you know that most words ending in -ità in Italian are -ity in English, and -mente is -ly... you end up with LOTS of transparent words like:
abilità = ability
particolarmente = particularly
And there are MANY more that are nearly identical in other ways:
trasparente = transparent
incomprensibile = incomprensible
Every time I pick up my Italian studies, I'm reminded of how easy it is compared to a distant language like Cantonese. (Sorry, not trying to disparage all the hard work of those who are trying to hammer a romance language into their brain.) And this makes it abundantly clear to me why some claim 'Just Read/Watch/Listen your way to Fluency' works and become quite hostile when someone points out that this just doesn't work for some languages.
For an English native learning a language like Italian: I have no doubt that you can just read your way to C-levels of understanding. With the most basic of bootstrapping, a lot of Italian is probably 30-50% comprehensible or more on its face, nearly from day one.
For an English native learning a language like Mandarin or Cantonese: If you 'Just Read/Listen', you will understand pretty much zero.
And in the equation above (Comprehension Skills = Content Time/Volume * Content Comprehension), when one of the factors is zero it doesn't matter how large the other is.
And to complete the thought, I think some folks make mistakes on the other side of the equation as well:
People who spend hours upon hours focused on some tiny bit of the language trying to decode every nuance.
They reach a very high level comprehension on few sentences, but the volume is nearly nothing and they don't get far.
Ok, somehow this post devolved into a diatribe about the folly of breaking the natural laws of Comprehensible Input... not my original intent. I'll try to wrap this up.
One tactical thing:
I've been doing a bit of WorkAudioBook (WAB) looped-listening to sentences in order to work my ear. As I've said before, this seems very effective for me. I use an Mp3 and SRT file ripped from a YouTube video... and I correct the SRT timing to be sure WAB gets the whole sentence correctly in the audio. I let each sentence/phrase loop 20+ times, maybe as many as 50 (I really wish WAB had a loop count, I'm curious to know how many times I am looping them.) Usually on first listen, I 'get the gist' but many of the words slip through my ear. As the sentence hammers again and again into my ear, I'm reading the subtitle simultaneously... trying to time my eye with the audio so that I'm seeing the right Chinese character with the sound WAB is playing in that moment. When I've mostly got this (90% ish) while reading along, I then close my eyes and try to continue to 'hear' each word go by. In a lot of real connected speech, this isn't 100% possible as those words are often not actually there in the audio or are merely little blips of altered pronunciation of the neighboring words. However, I often can reach a sort-of 90% level where I've nearly got it word-for-word and I'm 'feeling' the meaning of the whole phrase as it goes by. This process seems to be very effective as I can tell my listening focus seems sharpened when I thereafter listen to other content more casually.
But this is also very hard, absolutely 100% concentration work. And when I'm doing it I'm not doing anything except listening, and the end goals of it are quite fuzzy, i.e. I stop looping a phrase when I think I've understood it word for word '90%-ish'.
And that's the rub... I get very fidgety when I'm doing it. There's no words to look up, no highlights to click and turn green, etc.
To be honest, I think this is also a problem I have when I'm just listening extensively: My brain wants me to DO something and there needs to be a clear point where I'm DONE with it. I guess I'm just a fidgety person and this makes it hard for me to concentrate that hard without doing something with my hands? I noticed that I've subconsciously started to procrastinate doing these sessions by 'preparing more materials'... not a good sign.
The only partial potential solution I have so far: I may do this in Pomodoros of 10-15 mins or so... it might help my goal oriented brain to tick off a count of Pomodoro cycles and keep the hard-concentration sessions time boxed.
Anyhow, I should bring this long winding thing to close as it is lengthy and doesn't really have a point.
In closing, I'm now starting to ruminate about my 2019 goals. I'll discuss that next time.
Onward!
4 x
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rdearman
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Re: Stealing time and grappling with fickle devotion
I read this post with great interest since I'm trying to learn Mandarin and native speech is just a rapid fire machine gun of sounds that are completely incomprehensible. I'm interested how you find shows with the SRT subtitles? I should know how to find these, there is some search option on YT I think.
What did you mean here: Meaning -> Jyutping ??? I assume you mean you are prompted in your NL and have to produce the TL ??
What did you mean here: Meaning -> Jyutping ??? I assume you mean you are prompted in your NL and have to produce the TL ??
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zKing
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Re: Stealing time and grappling with fickle devotion
rdearman wrote:I read this post with great interest since I'm trying to learn Mandarin and native speech is just a rapid fire machine gun of sounds that are completely incomprehensible. I'm interested how you find shows with the SRT subtitles? I should know how to find these, there is some search option on YT I think.
What did you mean here: Meaning -> Jyutping ??? I assume you mean you are prompted in your NL and have to produce the TL ??
1. On finding YouTube videos with subtitles, there are two ways I know of:
a) Do a normal search but put ', cc' at the end of the query text, e.g.: "電影", cc
b) Do a normal search, and after the list comes up, you'll notice a "Filter" button below the search bar, at the top of the results list.
Click that. It will expand and under "Features" click on "Subtitles/CC".
(This filter section is also handy to filter to only ">20min" videos if you are looking for TV shows and movies)
Also note that in a YouTube list, any video that has soft subtitles will have a little "CC" icon below its description.
More info on how to play with YouTube subtitles here: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =17&t=9509
Once I've found a video I like, I use http://www.lilsubs.com/ to download an MP4 and SRT of it.
I will also often correct the subtitle timing in the SRT with Subtitle Edit if they are off.
There are many tools that can rip an MP3 from an MP4 video or rip an MP3 directly from YouTube.
2. Jyutping is (arguably) the most standard Cantonese romanization system. Similar to pinyin for Mandarin.
So my cards are English -> Romanization. (I show the Hanzi on the answer side of the card, but I don't TEST myself on it.)
My primary goal this year was to speak, and I believe in production cards generically, so those were my reasons for that setup.
I feel for you on the 'machine gun of sounds' thing... looping sentences/phrases in a tool like WAB or Audacity was the only solid proactive thing I found that really tackled that issue head on and made it feel like I was consistently inching forward. It's tedious work, but seems effective to me. I'll warn that I still find parts of some phrases just plain unintelligible, even when I "know" what the speaker "should be" saying and loop it a zillion times. I just give up and skip those when I can't get them. Connected speech is just a mess sometimes, native speakers have the experience to fill in the blanks, we learners just get left in the dust. But looping until I really understand 'almost all of it' word-for-word, as I hear it, really seems to push the ear in the right direction.
Good luck!
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zKing
- Orange Belt
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Re: Stealing time and grappling with fickle devotion
ロータス wrote:>For an English native learning a language like Mandarin or Cantonese: If you 'Just Read/Listen', you will understand pretty much zero.
I learned around 500 words just from reading Mandarin so I think I understood a bit more than zero lol. Can't do what I was doing before because military school is adding a bit of stress and little time to do anything but worry about passing my classes x.x But I try to do what I can everyday so hopefully I can get better no matter how long it takes.
Let me clarify as I suspect we may be talking about two different things.
The fact that you know that you have learned specifically around 500 words tells me that are you likely doing something more than the "just reading" I'm talking about. I'm talking about a zero-experience English native opening a Chinese book and only attempting to slowly read it. No dictionaries, no word lists, no flashcards, no parallel English text. This is the case where I say 'you will learn nothing'. And by 'nothing' I really mean so slowly and ineffectively as to be essentially useless and a waste of time given the other options.
(And I will also admit this was an extreme, straw man example used to contrast against the ease of doing so in Italian.)
However if your "just reading" in Chinese includes, say, a pop-up dictionary or even just a parallel text... then I agree with you. You can make a LOT of progress doing only that over significant periods of time, even if people might say that you would progress faster if you added other tools/methods.
The point I was trying to make in my original post was that using only "just reading" (my definition) in Italian with near zero experience can actually be reasonably productive (I'm not saying perfectly efficient) as so much of the language is so comprehensible to English speakers with just a little bit of deductive reasoning. This is not true of many languages and perhaps this is one of the factors as to why two very experienced language learners may have violently clashing ideas about the effectiveness of methods as their past experiences with their particular TL's may be quite orthogonal in some respects.
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zKing
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Re: Stealing time and grappling with fickle devotion
Cantonese Progress Report 12/17/2018
End Goal: For our next trip to HK (likely early 2019), I would like to be 'conversational' in Cantonese.
Start of current Project: 5/16/2018, Week of year 20/52
Current Week of the year: 51/52, 32 weeks into the project out of ~32.
Anki
Cards are Production only: Meaning -> Jyutping
All 4490 Card suspended
Input
Total Content Run Time: 74:30
Last Week: 1:00
Output
Writing: 2650 characters
Last Week: 0
ROL/Shadow/Chorus: 6:00
Last Week: 0
iTalki
Total Lesson Time: 20:30
Last Week: 1:00
Final Report. This is the last week of my 2018 Cantonese project. (I'm taking next week off)
I believe I've previously covered a lot of the detail about the results of the 2018 project, so this time I will talk a bit about goals and plans for 2019. I'll caveat this with the fact that my goals and plans change a lot over time... I'm not someone who believes in setting a hard far off end goal and sticking with it, come what may. But, at any point in time, I always want to have a somewhat well thought out direction in mind and some mileposts along the way to give me a little motivation.
At a high level, I have no plans to pick up any NEW languages in 2019. I won't consider that until I'm AT LEAST a very solid B2 in Cantonese... and likely in Italian as well. I've focused almost exclusively on Cantonese in 2018 and probably put more serious time and effort into it than I ever have in the 10+ years I've been toying around with the language. This has brought me to a solid B1 or so in conversational skills. For 2019, I would really like to continue to improve my Cantonese, hopefully to a smooth B2 level, if that is even possible in this time frame with the limited time I'll have to put towards it. Also, in the last few weeks I've also been doing some reading in Italian on LingQ in order to dust it off a bit... I'd like to continue that as well. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, I think I'm going to have some challenges continuing to allocate as much time to languages as I did in 2018... but I'm going to do what I can. This means I'll need to have even tighter time management controls and be constantly vigilant about the bang-for-the-buck I'm getting from my language learning activities. For example, I may be reading and posting on these forums a bit less often.
I will try to continue to be laser focused on my Cantonese listening and speaking skills.
The upside is that my Cantonese skills are strong enough now that semi-extensive activities are FAR more productive (per unit of time) than before. This really opens up a lot more options for how I can keep my studies going.
As for Italian, I really don't want to let my skills rust, but I need to squeeze any Italian study into an already overfull bucket and not allow Italian activities to sap much from my primary goal, i.e. conversational Cantonese. I think the compromise here is to continue a steady diet of dead time reading in Italian. This won't take much from Cantonese as there isn't much "just reading" I can do that will improve my Cantonese listening and speaking since there isn't a lot of true written Cantonese. There are plenty of "dead times" when it would be very impractical for me to be listening to (Cantonese) audio, so I can take those few minutes here and there to do a little reading in Italian.
While I recognize doing ONLY reading has its downsides, I'd be quite happy to be a very fluent Italian reader who later just needs to knock the rust off his listening/speaking skills (I really don't care about writing). This also seems to be a path a great many learners have taken before, and even if it may be slightly less efficient than a more balanced study diet, it is clearly very beneficial for my situation.
Drilling into some specifics on Cantonese, I will continue with iTalki tutors as my primary speaking practice. I'm also going to try to utilize some conversation time with my wife, which in the past never went far because of my low level, but now may be far more viable.
I will likely also experiment with other output methods such as Islands: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... cfc5eb8fba
And maybe some translation ideas I've had recently.
As for listening, I have four levels of activities I do. I list them here from most Intensive to most Extensive:
1. Repeat Short Loop Listening - using WorkAudioBook (or Audacity) to short loop phrases/sentences, hammering each line repeatedly into my ear until I really 'hear' all the meaning as each word hits me.
2. Intensive Listening - watching videos with subtitles, pausing and looking up any/all unknowns line by line.
3. Semi-Extensive Listening - watching a video with subs, only pausing to read/do look-ups when I really get lost or see a repeated word that is blocking my understanding.
4. Truly Extensive Listening - no pauses, using either video or just playing a podcast in my car.
While all of the above are useful, the more intensive activities are far more effective per unit of time spent... but they are also a lot more draining of mental energy, have more limits on content (i.e. you need subs) and require more tools at hand. I will always attempt to do more intensive activities until I get tired and then fall back to more extensive ones.
On the topic of my love/hate relationship with Anki, Anki will always play a SMALL role in my language learning activities. I won't go on (another) long rant here, but for me, Anki is useful when used for relatively short periods of time (1-3 months) to give me a step up the ladder on a specific batch of words, say 500-1000 or so. And I will only use it for production (English -> TL) as I believe any time that I would use to make and review "input cards"... I'd rather use to just do "input". So, I will soon be re-starting my use of Anki and I will only source words from times where I experience a need for a word during conversation and failed to remember it (or perhaps failed to remember the tones). By the nature of the source of these words, this process will limit the rate that I collect them and limit the set to words that truly have utility for me.
I wish you all lots of luck in your endeavors in 2019...
Onward!
End Goal: For our next trip to HK (likely early 2019), I would like to be 'conversational' in Cantonese.
Start of current Project: 5/16/2018, Week of year 20/52
Current Week of the year: 51/52, 32 weeks into the project out of ~32.
Anki
Cards are Production only: Meaning -> Jyutping
All 4490 Card suspended
Input
Total Content Run Time: 74:30
Last Week: 1:00
Output
Writing: 2650 characters
Last Week: 0
ROL/Shadow/Chorus: 6:00
Last Week: 0
iTalki
Total Lesson Time: 20:30
Last Week: 1:00
Final Report. This is the last week of my 2018 Cantonese project. (I'm taking next week off)
I believe I've previously covered a lot of the detail about the results of the 2018 project, so this time I will talk a bit about goals and plans for 2019. I'll caveat this with the fact that my goals and plans change a lot over time... I'm not someone who believes in setting a hard far off end goal and sticking with it, come what may. But, at any point in time, I always want to have a somewhat well thought out direction in mind and some mileposts along the way to give me a little motivation.
At a high level, I have no plans to pick up any NEW languages in 2019. I won't consider that until I'm AT LEAST a very solid B2 in Cantonese... and likely in Italian as well. I've focused almost exclusively on Cantonese in 2018 and probably put more serious time and effort into it than I ever have in the 10+ years I've been toying around with the language. This has brought me to a solid B1 or so in conversational skills. For 2019, I would really like to continue to improve my Cantonese, hopefully to a smooth B2 level, if that is even possible in this time frame with the limited time I'll have to put towards it. Also, in the last few weeks I've also been doing some reading in Italian on LingQ in order to dust it off a bit... I'd like to continue that as well. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, I think I'm going to have some challenges continuing to allocate as much time to languages as I did in 2018... but I'm going to do what I can. This means I'll need to have even tighter time management controls and be constantly vigilant about the bang-for-the-buck I'm getting from my language learning activities. For example, I may be reading and posting on these forums a bit less often.
I will try to continue to be laser focused on my Cantonese listening and speaking skills.
The upside is that my Cantonese skills are strong enough now that semi-extensive activities are FAR more productive (per unit of time) than before. This really opens up a lot more options for how I can keep my studies going.
As for Italian, I really don't want to let my skills rust, but I need to squeeze any Italian study into an already overfull bucket and not allow Italian activities to sap much from my primary goal, i.e. conversational Cantonese. I think the compromise here is to continue a steady diet of dead time reading in Italian. This won't take much from Cantonese as there isn't much "just reading" I can do that will improve my Cantonese listening and speaking since there isn't a lot of true written Cantonese. There are plenty of "dead times" when it would be very impractical for me to be listening to (Cantonese) audio, so I can take those few minutes here and there to do a little reading in Italian.
While I recognize doing ONLY reading has its downsides, I'd be quite happy to be a very fluent Italian reader who later just needs to knock the rust off his listening/speaking skills (I really don't care about writing). This also seems to be a path a great many learners have taken before, and even if it may be slightly less efficient than a more balanced study diet, it is clearly very beneficial for my situation.
Drilling into some specifics on Cantonese, I will continue with iTalki tutors as my primary speaking practice. I'm also going to try to utilize some conversation time with my wife, which in the past never went far because of my low level, but now may be far more viable.
I will likely also experiment with other output methods such as Islands: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... cfc5eb8fba
And maybe some translation ideas I've had recently.
As for listening, I have four levels of activities I do. I list them here from most Intensive to most Extensive:
1. Repeat Short Loop Listening - using WorkAudioBook (or Audacity) to short loop phrases/sentences, hammering each line repeatedly into my ear until I really 'hear' all the meaning as each word hits me.
2. Intensive Listening - watching videos with subtitles, pausing and looking up any/all unknowns line by line.
3. Semi-Extensive Listening - watching a video with subs, only pausing to read/do look-ups when I really get lost or see a repeated word that is blocking my understanding.
4. Truly Extensive Listening - no pauses, using either video or just playing a podcast in my car.
While all of the above are useful, the more intensive activities are far more effective per unit of time spent... but they are also a lot more draining of mental energy, have more limits on content (i.e. you need subs) and require more tools at hand. I will always attempt to do more intensive activities until I get tired and then fall back to more extensive ones.
On the topic of my love/hate relationship with Anki, Anki will always play a SMALL role in my language learning activities. I won't go on (another) long rant here, but for me, Anki is useful when used for relatively short periods of time (1-3 months) to give me a step up the ladder on a specific batch of words, say 500-1000 or so. And I will only use it for production (English -> TL) as I believe any time that I would use to make and review "input cards"... I'd rather use to just do "input". So, I will soon be re-starting my use of Anki and I will only source words from times where I experience a need for a word during conversation and failed to remember it (or perhaps failed to remember the tones). By the nature of the source of these words, this process will limit the rate that I collect them and limit the set to words that truly have utility for me.
I wish you all lots of luck in your endeavors in 2019...
Onward!
5 x
-
zKing
- Orange Belt
- Posts: 142
- Joined: Mon May 15, 2017 11:59 pm
- Location: Seattle Area
- Languages: English(N), Learning: Cantonese, Italian
- Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=7973
- x 729
Re: Stealing time and grappling with fickle devotion
Quantity over Quality... an experiment
I've been pondering my 2019 goals for a couple of weeks now and I've decided that I'm going to try a bit of an experiment.
As I've mentioned previously, extensive activities are becoming more feasible/effective now that my listening skills have improved such that I can parse sizable chunks of FNBN (For Natives By Natives) Cantonese audio and comprehend chunks of it. Before this point, most FNBN audio was overwhelmingly a blur of sound with the occasional short phrase I would understand. But now, if I really concentrate on listening, I can parse roughly half of what I hear and with some subtitle help, I feel like I get a good dose of comprehensible input.
On the topic of subtitles, I used to find English subtitles completely useless. I couldn't parse enough of the stream of sound and the usually massive difference between English and Cantonese meant that there was just no way to correlate them except for the rare single word exclamations. ("WHY?!?...WHY?!?" "點解?!?...點解?!?) So I would use the Standard Written Chinese subtitles (real Cantonese subs are as rare as hen's teeth). SWC subs don't match the Cantonese for most common words and grammar, but a lot of key nouns and verbs in many sentences would be the same, so they were helpful for looking up unknown words.
With SWC subs, I often needed to pause the video as my reading speed was too slow and if I didn't know the word in the audio, I often didn't know the meaning of the word in the subs and would have to do a dictionary lookup. And even worse, with SWC subs I noticed this tendency where my brain would focus on decoding the SWC text and really start to ignore the Cantonese audio as a lot of it was a blur of sound.
But now that I can understand goodly sized chunks of most Cantonese audio, I can utilize English subs' big advantage: I can read them at a glance and know what they mean. So if I understand most of a spoken sentence, but there is a key noun missing... I get the meaning at a glance from the English subs. This means with English subs I can consume video content at a much higher rate. Note that I will still often pause to look up new words to be sure I got the tones right or to be sure I understand the complete meaning.
I should also point out that with EITHER type of subtitle, I need to always be viligant to avoid 'just reading' and ignoring the Cantonese audio.
And while I'm a big believer in intensive input, ESPECIALLY when extensive input isn't very comprehensible or 'parsable' (i.e. can you break the stream of input into word sounds/phonemes)... I also believe that the pure VOLUME of input/output is the ultimate winner in language learning. Honestly, I'm sure a mix of the two is probably the most effective path. Extremes at either end are likely less optimal.
But personally, as extensive input was just a non-starter before, up to now I've been quite focused exclusively on intensive input.
So for 2019, I'm going to experiment with high volumes of (mostly) extensive input in my attempt to push from B1 to B2 with a focus on fluency/fluidity vs accuracy/complexity. I'm setting four targets:
Targets
● Cantonese Writing OC, 75k hanzi
● Cantonese Listening SC, 100 'films'
● Cantonese Conversation, 50 hrs
● Italian Reading, 500k words
Cantonese Writing OC, 75k hanzi
I'm doing a writing Output Challenge that will basically require me to write a small (~300 character) journal entry roughly 5 days a week. I will not have my writing corrected, except when I want to say something, I know I don't have it right, and it bothers me... I will then save it for later and ask my wife or iTalki tutor for a correction on that sentence. This target should push my ability to quickly and fluidly produce Cantonese sentences/vocab/grammar (even if flawed) and help keep my head in Cantonese mode. If I feel I'm running out of things to say in my journal, I may just take an English book and translate pages of it into Cantonese... perhaps Harry Potter or maybe Barry Farber's "How to Learn Any Language".
Cantonese Listening SC, 100 'films'
I'm doing the 'films' part of a Super Challenge, i.e. watching the equivalent of 100 (90 minute) films. This will likely mostly take the form of 30/60 minute Cantonese TV shows, when the commercials are removed they are really about 22/44 minutes and according to the SC rules are worth 0.25/0.5 'films' each. I really wish the progress bars on this site could handle decimal values.
I am going to watch these videos 'mostly extensively' as it is likely the only way I'd be able to get through that much content in a year. I will almost certainly start by using English Subs, but I may experiment with watching the same content with English then SWC then no Subs... but I'm not too sure of that as I generally can't keep my focus when re-watching the same TV content.
Note that according to my less-than-accurate record keeping, last year I intensively watched/listened to about 75 hours of content in roughly 8 months... so 150 hours of extensive input in the coming year doesn't seem too unrealistic of a target.
Cantonese Conversation, 50 hrs
This will cover my iTalki tutor time, which I may discount if we spend any time chatting in English, but I am going to try to start some regular conversations with my wife as well. In the end, I actually hope to overshoot this target, but we'll see what happens.
Italian Reading, 500k words
I've been using LingQ during dead time to read Italian and over the last month I already finished Kaufmann's book "Il linguista: la guida all’apprendimento delle lingue". The stats show I've done over 50k words of reading in ~30 days. This wasn't at all difficult or time consuming, so I'm going to keep doing it in order to continue refreshing my Italian. 500k words for the year (roughly 10 'books' in Super Challenge units) seems like an easy target to hit as long I have just a bit of consistency.
In summary, I'm going to focus on volume, volume, volume. And I'm going to try to avoid getting bogged down in details, playing with tools, preparing content, etc. I ALREADY have all the content I need for all of the targets above, there's no need to search for it or re-format it or find some new way to use it... but I'm sure I'll find a way to convince myself otherwise.
Anki/SRS
Some readers may also notice a distinct lack of any mention of Anki/SRS so far. My current thinking is that I will likely create some production cards based on interesting sentences/phrases I want to remember how to say, but Anki/SRS will be at most a small supporting role in my language learning activities and will definitely not be a priority.
What happened to Islands?
In the same realm of 'not a priority': I recently wrote a bit about possibly doing some work with Islands. I've backed away from that idea, not because I don't think it has merit, but mostly because I believe Islands are more of a 'quality over quantity' type task... and as I considered my push for B1 to B2, I think adding volume to my skills is more important that improving on a smaller sub-set of what I know. (Not that both aren't needed.) In addition, the complexity of making Islands 'work' (i.e. lots of native feedback at multiple points) seemed like it was going to be difficult for me to pull off in the coming year.
Weaknesses
All plans have their weaknesses and I'm aware of a few with the targets above. I've already mentioned that it is easy to ignore the audio and just read the subtitles when extensive watching content with subs. And with no/little use of SRS, repetition may be limited. As mentioned above, these two factors may push me to watching content twice, once with subs, once without.
Also my input is definitely going to be less 'parsed' and 'comprehensible' if I'm not doing it intensively: I'm not going to properly hear lots of words or know exactly what they mean. Hopefully the shear volume and occasional lookups will make up for that.
Some may also hand wring over the idea of having no corrections on one's writing. I've said elsewhere that I don't believe this is a real problem, in short:
a) My regular conversations with my tutor will give me ample opportunity for output correction
b) I'm told there is lots of evidence that (spontaneous) output correction doesn't do much for learners
c) When I want to know how to say something I don't know how to say, I will usually ask.
Finally, I fully recognize that there is probably a more efficient/optimal plan involving careful use of SRS systems, carefully chosen content, intensive input and input re-use on SRS schedules, etc. But as this is just a hobby for me, my targets will be (mostly) fun, and I believe this method will be efficient enough, I'm good with the pain/gain trade-offs I'm making here.
Caveats
I am NOT someone who is prone to sticking to year long goals. I generally use goals as motivation/guides at points in time and I change them at will. In some ways I don't even like the word 'goal' which is why I'm calling the above items 'targets'. The odds of me sticking precisely to the above targets all the way to the end of 2019 is exactly 0%. I have no doubt that I will be making changes along the way. I read somewhere that the true value of a plan is contained in the critical thinking that goes into creating that plan... in many fields, big plans are usually out of date or irrelevant before the printer has finished spitting out the pages.
I'm also going to take the 'deadline' of EOY 2019 with a grain of salt... if I'm enjoying/finding utility in the progress of one of the above targets, but I'm doing at a rate that won't match an EOY finish line (slower OR faster)... I'll just keep marching on or change the target.
Onward!
I've been pondering my 2019 goals for a couple of weeks now and I've decided that I'm going to try a bit of an experiment.
As I've mentioned previously, extensive activities are becoming more feasible/effective now that my listening skills have improved such that I can parse sizable chunks of FNBN (For Natives By Natives) Cantonese audio and comprehend chunks of it. Before this point, most FNBN audio was overwhelmingly a blur of sound with the occasional short phrase I would understand. But now, if I really concentrate on listening, I can parse roughly half of what I hear and with some subtitle help, I feel like I get a good dose of comprehensible input.
On the topic of subtitles, I used to find English subtitles completely useless. I couldn't parse enough of the stream of sound and the usually massive difference between English and Cantonese meant that there was just no way to correlate them except for the rare single word exclamations. ("WHY?!?...WHY?!?" "點解?!?...點解?!?) So I would use the Standard Written Chinese subtitles (real Cantonese subs are as rare as hen's teeth). SWC subs don't match the Cantonese for most common words and grammar, but a lot of key nouns and verbs in many sentences would be the same, so they were helpful for looking up unknown words.
With SWC subs, I often needed to pause the video as my reading speed was too slow and if I didn't know the word in the audio, I often didn't know the meaning of the word in the subs and would have to do a dictionary lookup. And even worse, with SWC subs I noticed this tendency where my brain would focus on decoding the SWC text and really start to ignore the Cantonese audio as a lot of it was a blur of sound.
But now that I can understand goodly sized chunks of most Cantonese audio, I can utilize English subs' big advantage: I can read them at a glance and know what they mean. So if I understand most of a spoken sentence, but there is a key noun missing... I get the meaning at a glance from the English subs. This means with English subs I can consume video content at a much higher rate. Note that I will still often pause to look up new words to be sure I got the tones right or to be sure I understand the complete meaning.
I should also point out that with EITHER type of subtitle, I need to always be viligant to avoid 'just reading' and ignoring the Cantonese audio.
And while I'm a big believer in intensive input, ESPECIALLY when extensive input isn't very comprehensible or 'parsable' (i.e. can you break the stream of input into word sounds/phonemes)... I also believe that the pure VOLUME of input/output is the ultimate winner in language learning. Honestly, I'm sure a mix of the two is probably the most effective path. Extremes at either end are likely less optimal.
But personally, as extensive input was just a non-starter before, up to now I've been quite focused exclusively on intensive input.
So for 2019, I'm going to experiment with high volumes of (mostly) extensive input in my attempt to push from B1 to B2 with a focus on fluency/fluidity vs accuracy/complexity. I'm setting four targets:
Targets
● Cantonese Writing OC, 75k hanzi
● Cantonese Listening SC, 100 'films'
● Cantonese Conversation, 50 hrs
● Italian Reading, 500k words
Cantonese Writing OC, 75k hanzi
I'm doing a writing Output Challenge that will basically require me to write a small (~300 character) journal entry roughly 5 days a week. I will not have my writing corrected, except when I want to say something, I know I don't have it right, and it bothers me... I will then save it for later and ask my wife or iTalki tutor for a correction on that sentence. This target should push my ability to quickly and fluidly produce Cantonese sentences/vocab/grammar (even if flawed) and help keep my head in Cantonese mode. If I feel I'm running out of things to say in my journal, I may just take an English book and translate pages of it into Cantonese... perhaps Harry Potter or maybe Barry Farber's "How to Learn Any Language".
Cantonese Listening SC, 100 'films'
I'm doing the 'films' part of a Super Challenge, i.e. watching the equivalent of 100 (90 minute) films. This will likely mostly take the form of 30/60 minute Cantonese TV shows, when the commercials are removed they are really about 22/44 minutes and according to the SC rules are worth 0.25/0.5 'films' each. I really wish the progress bars on this site could handle decimal values.
I am going to watch these videos 'mostly extensively' as it is likely the only way I'd be able to get through that much content in a year. I will almost certainly start by using English Subs, but I may experiment with watching the same content with English then SWC then no Subs... but I'm not too sure of that as I generally can't keep my focus when re-watching the same TV content.
Note that according to my less-than-accurate record keeping, last year I intensively watched/listened to about 75 hours of content in roughly 8 months... so 150 hours of extensive input in the coming year doesn't seem too unrealistic of a target.
Cantonese Conversation, 50 hrs
This will cover my iTalki tutor time, which I may discount if we spend any time chatting in English, but I am going to try to start some regular conversations with my wife as well. In the end, I actually hope to overshoot this target, but we'll see what happens.
Italian Reading, 500k words
I've been using LingQ during dead time to read Italian and over the last month I already finished Kaufmann's book "Il linguista: la guida all’apprendimento delle lingue". The stats show I've done over 50k words of reading in ~30 days. This wasn't at all difficult or time consuming, so I'm going to keep doing it in order to continue refreshing my Italian. 500k words for the year (roughly 10 'books' in Super Challenge units) seems like an easy target to hit as long I have just a bit of consistency.
In summary, I'm going to focus on volume, volume, volume. And I'm going to try to avoid getting bogged down in details, playing with tools, preparing content, etc. I ALREADY have all the content I need for all of the targets above, there's no need to search for it or re-format it or find some new way to use it... but I'm sure I'll find a way to convince myself otherwise.
Anki/SRS
Some readers may also notice a distinct lack of any mention of Anki/SRS so far. My current thinking is that I will likely create some production cards based on interesting sentences/phrases I want to remember how to say, but Anki/SRS will be at most a small supporting role in my language learning activities and will definitely not be a priority.
What happened to Islands?
In the same realm of 'not a priority': I recently wrote a bit about possibly doing some work with Islands. I've backed away from that idea, not because I don't think it has merit, but mostly because I believe Islands are more of a 'quality over quantity' type task... and as I considered my push for B1 to B2, I think adding volume to my skills is more important that improving on a smaller sub-set of what I know. (Not that both aren't needed.) In addition, the complexity of making Islands 'work' (i.e. lots of native feedback at multiple points) seemed like it was going to be difficult for me to pull off in the coming year.
Weaknesses
All plans have their weaknesses and I'm aware of a few with the targets above. I've already mentioned that it is easy to ignore the audio and just read the subtitles when extensive watching content with subs. And with no/little use of SRS, repetition may be limited. As mentioned above, these two factors may push me to watching content twice, once with subs, once without.
Also my input is definitely going to be less 'parsed' and 'comprehensible' if I'm not doing it intensively: I'm not going to properly hear lots of words or know exactly what they mean. Hopefully the shear volume and occasional lookups will make up for that.
Some may also hand wring over the idea of having no corrections on one's writing. I've said elsewhere that I don't believe this is a real problem, in short:
a) My regular conversations with my tutor will give me ample opportunity for output correction
b) I'm told there is lots of evidence that (spontaneous) output correction doesn't do much for learners
c) When I want to know how to say something I don't know how to say, I will usually ask.
Finally, I fully recognize that there is probably a more efficient/optimal plan involving careful use of SRS systems, carefully chosen content, intensive input and input re-use on SRS schedules, etc. But as this is just a hobby for me, my targets will be (mostly) fun, and I believe this method will be efficient enough, I'm good with the pain/gain trade-offs I'm making here.
Caveats
I am NOT someone who is prone to sticking to year long goals. I generally use goals as motivation/guides at points in time and I change them at will. In some ways I don't even like the word 'goal' which is why I'm calling the above items 'targets'. The odds of me sticking precisely to the above targets all the way to the end of 2019 is exactly 0%. I have no doubt that I will be making changes along the way. I read somewhere that the true value of a plan is contained in the critical thinking that goes into creating that plan... in many fields, big plans are usually out of date or irrelevant before the printer has finished spitting out the pages.
I'm also going to take the 'deadline' of EOY 2019 with a grain of salt... if I'm enjoying/finding utility in the progress of one of the above targets, but I'm doing at a rate that won't match an EOY finish line (slower OR faster)... I'll just keep marching on or change the target.
Onward!
6 x
-
StringerBell
- Brown Belt
- Posts: 1035
- Joined: Mon Jul 23, 2018 3:30 am
- Languages: English (n)
Italian - x 3289
Re: Stealing time and grappling with fickle devotion
zKing wrote:Italian Reading, 500k words
I've been using LingQ during dead time to read Italian and over the last month I already finished Kaufmann's book "Il linguista: la guida all’apprendimento delle lingue". The stats show I've done over 50k words of reading in ~30 days. This wasn't at all difficult or time consuming, so I'm going to keep doing it in order to continue refreshing my Italian. 500k words for the year (roughly 10 'books' in Super Challenge units) seems like an easy target to hit as long I have just a bit of consistency.
I don't think I've ever posted on your log before (did I???
) Even though I have no interest or plan to ever learn Cantonese, I have been reading your posts from time to time with fascination; I am awed by the lengths you go to to learn such a distant language, especially with the lack-of-matching-subtitles issue. I really love hearing about the specific techniques you use and your insights into language learning.I know that you have got all your resources lined up, but I wanted to mention one since it would take about 1 minute to determine whether it's something you're interested in or not. There is a website called Efficacemente with 500+ articles that range from 500-2,000 words (I linked to an article that I like from the site, but if you click on the "archivo" link at the top of the page it will bring you to the master list of all articles). The writing style is ideal for an intermediate Italian learner in my opinion, because the author writes in an informal, conversational style and uses a good mix of colloquial expressions with some less-frequent higher-level vocabulary thrown in that you can easily ignore if you're focused on extensive rather than intensive reading.
I'm very much interested to hear how your strategies going forward work out!
1 x
Season 4 Lucifer Italian transcripts I created: https://learnanylanguage.fandom.com/wik ... ranscripts
-
zKing
- Orange Belt
- Posts: 142
- Joined: Mon May 15, 2017 11:59 pm
- Location: Seattle Area
- Languages: English(N), Learning: Cantonese, Italian
- Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=7973
- x 729
Re: Stealing time and grappling with fickle devotion
StringerBell wrote:I don't think I've ever posted on your log before (did I???
I know that you have got all your resources lined up, but I wanted to mention one since it would take about 1 minute to determine whether it's something you're interested in or not. There is a website called Efficacemente with 500+ articles that range from 500-2,000 words (I linked to an article that I like from the site, but if you click on the "archivo" link at the top of the page it will bring you to the master list of all articles). The writing style is ideal for an intermediate Italian learner in my opinion, because the author writes in an informal, conversational style and uses a good mix of colloquial expressions with some less-frequent higher-level vocabulary thrown in that you can easily ignore if you're focused on extensive rather than intensive reading.
I'm very much interested to hear how your strategies going forward work out!
Wow! Thank you so much for the kind words... and yes, that site is great! I'll definitely be using those in my reading. Thanks for the tip!
I'm going to do my best to keep up my log here, so hopefully you'll get to see how it all works out over time.
0 x
-
zKing
- Orange Belt
- Posts: 142
- Joined: Mon May 15, 2017 11:59 pm
- Location: Seattle Area
- Languages: English(N), Learning: Cantonese, Italian
- Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=7973
- x 729
Re: Stealing time and grappling with fickle devotion (Cantonese, Italian)
Progress Report 1/7/2019
Targets
● Cantonese Writing OC, 75k hanzi :
● Cantonese Listening, 150 hours (9k mins) :
● Cantonese Conversation, 50 hrs (3k mins) :
● Italian Reading, 500k words :
Generally speaking, especially with the short week and starting the year with a holiday/day off, as of this moment I'm slightly behind all of my goals except for IT reading. Currently if feels like I may have been overly ambitious with my goals and I won't be on pace take make them by the end of 2019 however, as I've said before, I'm likely to change things along the way so I'm not so concerned with 'missing my targets'. I just want to continue the process and currently these tasks are feeling very helpful for building my skills.
How do I know my pace? In typical software nerd fashion I built an overly elaborate spreadsheet.
If anyone cares, I can share what I'm doing with this sheet or the sheet itself. (Note that Monday isn't over yet...)
Edit: Yes, I just noticed something went wonky with the date field. I fixed that after I made the screenshot.
● Cantonese Writing OC, 75k hanzi
I'm finding the writing extremely useful. Trying to do this roughly daily has caused me to be constantly thinking about how to say things in Cantonese.In addition, the fact that I'm not getting corrections or really showing any of it to anyone has drastically increased the freedom I feel when writing, both from the lack of pressure to avoid saying silly or personal things as well as my willingness to attempt to say things a bit beyond my level. I also don't feel the need to explain things I want to say such that a third person would have the context to know what I'm talking about. I just write what I want to say and lots of it. I'm now a HUGE fan of this process. IMO quantity is winning big over quality.
Also, I have saved a few sentences I couldn't figure out how to say correctly and asked my tutor how to properly say them. This type of correction is 'just right' IMO. If there is something I want to say, and it bugs me that I can't say it right, I will take the trouble to ask someone and then I WILL remember the correction when I get it. The sort-of 'unsolicited' sentence by sentence feedback I get when I have someone correct a whole block of text is MUCH lower value for me and the suppressive effect on my original writing is too high.
● Cantonese Listening, 150 hrs
I've been trying to do mostly Extensive listening, but I am constantly fighting the urge to go full intensive and look up too many unknowns. I'm slightly behind on my listening pace because I've probably slipped into almost fully Intensive listening a bit too often. I've also noticed that the level of content is a MUCH bigger deal with Extensive listening than it is with Intensive listening. Frankly before with Intensive listening, barring extreme examples, the level of content didn't matter so much. If I looked up 1-2 words per subtitle for 'easy' stuff or 5 for 'hard' stuff, it was still a pretty slow task, but I would mostly get to the same level of understanding as I carefully decoded things subtitle by subtitle.
(Mostly) Extensive listening is a whole different ball game. I try not to look up more than one word every 10-20 seconds or so and just let things play through. But if the content is hard enough such that I'm not getting the gist of the sentences as I hear them go by, I get lost and I'm not longer in "comprehensible input" land. If the content is easy enough that I'm getting the structure of the sentences and some key nouns and verbs, I'm able to follow and really train my ear and pick up new things.
I also notice that my brain has a weird "locking into the speech" thing and I have to really concentrate to ensure that it kicks in. I am SO used to reading the SWC Chinese subtitles (which exists on almost every Cantonese video) and they are IMMENSELY useful as hints to the Cantonese audio, but it is incredibly easy for my brain to go into full reading mode and start kind-of-ignoring the audio. I try glancing at each sub when it appears to quickly grab any hints while listening to the audio, but if I starting really _reading_ the line I lose the thread on the audio. This is especially annoying when the SWC sub is quite different in word order or simplicity than the Cantonese speech (which happens often). As I've been trying to pay attention to it, I can now almost feel my brain flip back and forth like a light switch between focusing on the speech or the subtitles. I try really hard to keep it in "audio" mode, but when I hit a more difficult line, there is a panic moment where I suddenly try to read the subtitle to catch up and things go down hill as I get behind. I also sometimes try listening to stuff without subtitles, but this greatly reduces the % of the native speed content that is comprehensible to me so I don't think it is entirely optimal (yet).
Guilty admission: I love listening to fluent non-native speakers. They usually speak slower and more simply and I understand almost everything they say. In fact, it is has been a consistent pattern: If I find a random video with someone speaking Cantonese and I can easily understand almost everything they say, I will show it to my wife and without fail she will say they are not a native speaker.
● Cantonese Conversation, 50 hrs
I had a one hour session with my tutor, but we spent way too much time talking in English as I was asking a lot of gory details about some things I wanted explained... so I only gave myself 15 mins of credit for it. And, for the first time, I had a real conversation with my wife in Cantonese. Yes, in all the years I've been studying Cantonese, I haven't really had much of a conversation with my wife in Cantonese. That may sound crazy, but before last year, while I could understand a good bit, I had almost no speaking ability. In addition my wife isn't a language instructor, speaks English better than I do, and frankly we just didn't ever take the time. And earlier for me, there was a mix of emotions: I was kind of reluctant to speak because I had spent a lot of time learning and didn't speak well, it felt kind of embarrassing.
Also I didn't want to 'waste' my wife's time trying to speak to me like a 4-year-old. And lately, I think I was making a lot of progress and semi-unconciously I want to surprise her with the fact that I could now kind-of speak. I don't know... it was all silly, really.
But we had a chat about what we'd like to do when visit Hong Kong next time and it all went fine. So now that we've broken the ice, hopefully that will continue.
● Italian Reading, 500k words
I'm reading the first Harry Potter book in Italian on LingQ. When I imported the book, it was broken into 44 roughly 2k word chunks. I've been trying to read one per day, which is a bit ahead of pace, but I'm not quite completing them each day. Right now, that pace feels like a bit of a stretch, but I'm betting if I keep at it, my reading will get a bit faster and my pace will pick up making this rather easy. The good news is that this is a pretty enjoyable process and seems just right for keeping my Italian warm on the back burner.
Onward!
Targets
● Cantonese Writing OC, 75k hanzi :
● Cantonese Listening, 150 hours (9k mins) :
● Cantonese Conversation, 50 hrs (3k mins) :
● Italian Reading, 500k words :
Generally speaking, especially with the short week and starting the year with a holiday/day off, as of this moment I'm slightly behind all of my goals except for IT reading. Currently if feels like I may have been overly ambitious with my goals and I won't be on pace take make them by the end of 2019 however, as I've said before, I'm likely to change things along the way so I'm not so concerned with 'missing my targets'. I just want to continue the process and currently these tasks are feeling very helpful for building my skills.
How do I know my pace? In typical software nerd fashion I built an overly elaborate spreadsheet.
If anyone cares, I can share what I'm doing with this sheet or the sheet itself. (Note that Monday isn't over yet...)
Edit: Yes, I just noticed something went wonky with the date field. I fixed that after I made the screenshot.
● Cantonese Writing OC, 75k hanzi
I'm finding the writing extremely useful. Trying to do this roughly daily has caused me to be constantly thinking about how to say things in Cantonese.In addition, the fact that I'm not getting corrections or really showing any of it to anyone has drastically increased the freedom I feel when writing, both from the lack of pressure to avoid saying silly or personal things as well as my willingness to attempt to say things a bit beyond my level. I also don't feel the need to explain things I want to say such that a third person would have the context to know what I'm talking about. I just write what I want to say and lots of it. I'm now a HUGE fan of this process. IMO quantity is winning big over quality.
Also, I have saved a few sentences I couldn't figure out how to say correctly and asked my tutor how to properly say them. This type of correction is 'just right' IMO. If there is something I want to say, and it bugs me that I can't say it right, I will take the trouble to ask someone and then I WILL remember the correction when I get it. The sort-of 'unsolicited' sentence by sentence feedback I get when I have someone correct a whole block of text is MUCH lower value for me and the suppressive effect on my original writing is too high.
● Cantonese Listening, 150 hrs
I've been trying to do mostly Extensive listening, but I am constantly fighting the urge to go full intensive and look up too many unknowns. I'm slightly behind on my listening pace because I've probably slipped into almost fully Intensive listening a bit too often. I've also noticed that the level of content is a MUCH bigger deal with Extensive listening than it is with Intensive listening. Frankly before with Intensive listening, barring extreme examples, the level of content didn't matter so much. If I looked up 1-2 words per subtitle for 'easy' stuff or 5 for 'hard' stuff, it was still a pretty slow task, but I would mostly get to the same level of understanding as I carefully decoded things subtitle by subtitle.
(Mostly) Extensive listening is a whole different ball game. I try not to look up more than one word every 10-20 seconds or so and just let things play through. But if the content is hard enough such that I'm not getting the gist of the sentences as I hear them go by, I get lost and I'm not longer in "comprehensible input" land. If the content is easy enough that I'm getting the structure of the sentences and some key nouns and verbs, I'm able to follow and really train my ear and pick up new things.
I also notice that my brain has a weird "locking into the speech" thing and I have to really concentrate to ensure that it kicks in. I am SO used to reading the SWC Chinese subtitles (which exists on almost every Cantonese video) and they are IMMENSELY useful as hints to the Cantonese audio, but it is incredibly easy for my brain to go into full reading mode and start kind-of-ignoring the audio. I try glancing at each sub when it appears to quickly grab any hints while listening to the audio, but if I starting really _reading_ the line I lose the thread on the audio. This is especially annoying when the SWC sub is quite different in word order or simplicity than the Cantonese speech (which happens often). As I've been trying to pay attention to it, I can now almost feel my brain flip back and forth like a light switch between focusing on the speech or the subtitles. I try really hard to keep it in "audio" mode, but when I hit a more difficult line, there is a panic moment where I suddenly try to read the subtitle to catch up and things go down hill as I get behind. I also sometimes try listening to stuff without subtitles, but this greatly reduces the % of the native speed content that is comprehensible to me so I don't think it is entirely optimal (yet).
Guilty admission: I love listening to fluent non-native speakers. They usually speak slower and more simply and I understand almost everything they say. In fact, it is has been a consistent pattern: If I find a random video with someone speaking Cantonese and I can easily understand almost everything they say, I will show it to my wife and without fail she will say they are not a native speaker.
● Cantonese Conversation, 50 hrs
I had a one hour session with my tutor, but we spent way too much time talking in English as I was asking a lot of gory details about some things I wanted explained... so I only gave myself 15 mins of credit for it. And, for the first time, I had a real conversation with my wife in Cantonese. Yes, in all the years I've been studying Cantonese, I haven't really had much of a conversation with my wife in Cantonese. That may sound crazy, but before last year, while I could understand a good bit, I had almost no speaking ability. In addition my wife isn't a language instructor, speaks English better than I do, and frankly we just didn't ever take the time. And earlier for me, there was a mix of emotions: I was kind of reluctant to speak because I had spent a lot of time learning and didn't speak well, it felt kind of embarrassing.
Also I didn't want to 'waste' my wife's time trying to speak to me like a 4-year-old. And lately, I think I was making a lot of progress and semi-unconciously I want to surprise her with the fact that I could now kind-of speak. I don't know... it was all silly, really.
But we had a chat about what we'd like to do when visit Hong Kong next time and it all went fine. So now that we've broken the ice, hopefully that will continue.
● Italian Reading, 500k words
I'm reading the first Harry Potter book in Italian on LingQ. When I imported the book, it was broken into 44 roughly 2k word chunks. I've been trying to read one per day, which is a bit ahead of pace, but I'm not quite completing them each day. Right now, that pace feels like a bit of a stretch, but I'm betting if I keep at it, my reading will get a bit faster and my pace will pick up making this rather easy. The good news is that this is a pretty enjoyable process and seems just right for keeping my Italian warm on the back burner.
Onward!
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