Stealing time and grappling with fickle devotion (Cantonese, Italian)

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Flickserve
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Re: Stealing time and grappling with fickle devotion

Postby Flickserve » Tue Nov 06, 2018 11:33 am

smallwhite wrote:> The pronunciation of pork has an s sound...

I can hear it. I used to mispronounce my S's, and got sent to speech therapy.

His tones also shift at times, sort of transpose, but many Hongkongers can't read transcripts properly or can't speak comfortably into a mic.


OMG, that means possibly a lot of times I was thinking my Cantonese listening skills were really poor when in fact native speakers are mispronouncing words!
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zKing
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Re: Stealing time and grappling with fickle devotion

Postby zKing » Tue Nov 06, 2018 7:13 pm

Flickserve wrote:So far i can't register to language tools - it hasn't sent me a verification.
Hmmm, let me know if that doesn't clear up today, we can ping leosmith to try to resolve it.

Flickserve wrote:I watched another one of the videos. Sometimes, the pronunciation is a bit strange. It's almost like a variant cantonese with a deliberate lazy pronunciation.
Yep, he most certainly uses 懶音 and while I wouldn't use his speech as a model to imitate and shadow, I want to be able to easily understand it.

smallwhite wrote:
Flickserve wrote:> The pronunciation of pork has an s sound...

I can hear it. I used to mispronounce my S's, and got sent to speech therapy.
His tones also shift at times, sort of transpose, but many Hongkongers can't read transcripts properly or can't speak comfortably into a mic.
Hmm, this is a bit more concerning, but neither my HK tutor nor my wife discouraged me from listening to him for listening comprehension practice. Smallwhite, is it really bad? Again, I don't plan on modelling my speech after him, but I do want to be understand young people using the the lazy pronunciation. I'd also love to find a resource of more formal pronunciation with accurate Cantonese subs, but I haven't found anything yet. At some point I think I'm going to need to try to transcribe more formal content using only SWC subs but I'll definitely need to get a tutor to correct them as my ear isn't quite good enough to pick up everything yet.

Flickserve wrote:https://youtu.be/OOJsyC1Kpew?t=130
朋友仔
haha, yes 貧友仔 is a bit of a joke. His whole theme is 窮L遊記 (i.e. "broke bastard travel log" or more literally "poor penis travel diary"). So he calls his fans 貧友仔 (poor friends) as pan4 jau5 sounds like 朋友 pang4 jau5.
When he does something more upscale for a video he labels it 偽中產遊記 (quasi/fake middle class travel log)

Edit: Another pair of channels I've found with accurate Cantonese subs is FHMedia/FHProductionsHK. There are others I have but they often only have a few videos here and there.
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Re: Stealing time and grappling with fickle devotion

Postby smallwhite » Tue Nov 06, 2018 10:27 pm

I'd say... you don't want to speak like him, but you have to learn to understand people like him.
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Re: Stealing time and grappling with fickle devotion

Postby Flickserve » Tue Nov 06, 2018 11:52 pm

Thanks for the background information on the person behind the videos. That's pretty much something I am very weak on with all the slang as I am not in the age group.

For Cantonese pronunciation, I have the glossika MP3's and I have to say, the Cantonese pronunciation is excellent. It's also a male voice! I have not listened Cantonese for the Web version of glossika.
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zKing
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Re: Stealing time and grappling with fickle devotion

Postby zKing » Wed Nov 07, 2018 12:24 am

smallwhite wrote:I'd say... you don't want to speak like him, but you have to learn to understand people like him.
Yes, that is my thought/understanding exactly.

Flickserve wrote:Thanks for the background information on the person behind the videos. That's pretty much something I am very weak on with all the slang as I am not in the age group.
Yeah, I'm a bit far from that age group as well, but I run into that pronunciation quite a lot, so I know I'm going to have to be able to grok it.

Flickserve wrote:For Cantonese pronunciation, I have the glossika MP3's and I have to say, the Cantonese pronunciation is excellent. It's also a male voice! I have not listened Cantonese for the Web version of glossika.
Yeah, I have those MP3's as well. They are pretty good but I'm kind of done with the disembodied random sentences thing. (And I think my wife didn't like something about his pronunciation as well, but I don't recall what it was... I'll try to remember to ask her.) I'm trying to find real > 2 minutes, semi-interesting content to listen to... and I want it to have accompanying text. Most of the time I have to make do with SWC subs. I really like RTHK's podcasts like 捉心理, but since there's no text to go with it, I get lost a bit too often. I also have a number of TVB dramas on DVD and I've ripped them into vob files, most have SWC subs. Anyhow, I really was hoping to find something on YouTube that could be shared with others as the post "Teach Yourself Cantonese" stage is a very rough barren road once you've exhausted the greenwood press books.

As a side note, my model for pronunciation is the announcer guy on RTHK's 鏗鏘集. And, of course, for karaoke there's 張學友. :D
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Re: Stealing time and grappling with fickle devotion

Postby zKing » Mon Nov 12, 2018 9:01 pm

Cantonese Progress Report 11/12/2018

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: 46/52, 27 weeks into the project out of ~32.

Anki
Cards are Production only: Meaning -> Jyutping
All 4490 Card suspended

I'm continuing to take a break from Anki for a while.

Input
Total Content Run Time: 65:30
Last Week: 3:00

I've done more transcriptions of some videos from the few Cantonese YouTube channels (西DorSi, 毛記電視) I've found with real Cantonese subtitles. I put these transcriptions into the Reader app at LanguageTools.io (its similar to LingQ/LWT). For the metrics above, I'm counting the content run time 3-5 times over:
1x = reading the subtitle (as I pause at each line)
1x = typing out the subtitle for the Reader app
1x = listening to the sentence behind the subtitles (when I resume playback)
1x = Reading the subtitle again when I use the Reader app in LanguageTools.io to lookup all the definitions.
1x = listening through (at least) one more time as I use the Reader app's float over definitions I created.

I'm hoping this is an effective use of time as it takes me something like a 10:1 to 15:1 ratio in time to do this process for these videos.
e.g. a 10 min video can take me 2.5 hours (150 mins) total to get through.
But I think this is working pretty well, I'm picking up all kinds of new slang and wording from these videos so far.
Accurate Cantonese subtitles are really rare and this content is allowing me to really pick through a lot of real native speech with a fine tooth comb. That said, some of the subtitles aren't truly accurate to the audio, but it is FAR better than trying to guess from audio only or audio with only SWC subs.

My only gripe right now is there is a bug in the Reader app on LanguageTools.io where I sometimes lose all my manual joins for a text. I've reported the bug and leosmith and his team are usually quite quick about fixes, so I'll wait and see...

In addition I've found a YouTube channel (HKTVNetwork) that has Cantonese audio, but SOFT subtitles (unfortunately in Standard Written Chinese - SWC, but I'll take what I can get). Normally almost all Cantonese (and other Chinese) videos you find will have SWC subtitles burned right into the video image, which can make looking up unknown words a big time sink: I have to either accurately hear/guess the pronunciation from the audio, know how type based on shape (I don't do this well), do a reverse lookup based on guessed meaning from context, or hand write the character in my phone. With SOFT subtitles (the kind you can click on/off) in YouTube, I can easily copy/paste the text from the subtitle transcript directly into my online dictionary. On top of that, in YouTube you can click on any line in a soft subtitle transcript and the video will jump to that line... which makes re-listening to the same line really easy! This channel is also great because it is a TV network channel with TONS of long full TV series posted.

Edit: For specifically how to get at the soft subtitles in YouTube see my short guide here:
https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =17&t=9509

Output
Writing: 2650 characters
Last Week: 0
ROL/Shadow/Chorus: 6:00
Last Week: 0

No real output.

iTalki
Total Lesson Time: 17:00
Last Week: 0:00

Eldo is still moving and I had a conflict last week in my regular time slot with Jason so I didn't get an iTalki session in.
I really should pickup another back up tutor but I haven't taken the time to do that just yet.

Until next time...
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zKing
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Re: Stealing time and grappling with fickle devotion

Postby zKing » Mon Nov 19, 2018 9:01 pm

Cantonese Progress Report 11/19/2018

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: 47/52, 28 weeks into the project out of ~32.

Anki
Cards are Production only: Meaning -> Jyutping
All 4490 Card suspended

Input
Total Content Run Time: 69:00
Last Week: 3:30

Output
Writing: 2650 characters
Last Week: 0
ROL/Shadow/Chorus: 6:00
Last Week: 0

iTalki
Total Lesson Time: 17:30
Last Week: 0:30

I found the holy grail... for intermediate Cantonese learners at least.

For those of us in that bucket, the biggest issue is the nearly complete lack of audio with accurate matching (electronic) text. For the most part, this content just doesn't exist beyond the small handful of teaching dialogs. Spoken form Cantonese isn't written down very often, and when it is (in some magazines, for example) there is rarely matching audio. Subtitles are usually not written in accurate matching spoken form (almost always SWC), and even when they are, they are usually burned into the video making it an extra slow process to do look-ups as you can't use a popup dictionary or electronically copy/paste them into on online dictionary. The burned in subtitles are especially painful for those who are weak in written Chinese as their ability to see a Chinese character and type it is usually very minimal or non-existent... even hand drawing them is very slow.

While my written Chinese skills and ability to type have now reached a level that the burned in subtitles are less of a problem, it still eats time having to re-type the characters in order to do a quick look up or, even more painful, re-type the whole transcript out so that I can use the Reader app at LanguageTools.io. And accurate spoken form subtitles are still just very hard to find... until now.

This weekend I stumbled on this video by Luke Truman via a post on Reddit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_ktCgs ... e=youtu.be

There are three key insights in that video:
1) Putting ", cc" in the search will tell YouTube to only show videos that have a least one soft subtitle track
2) True spoken form Cantonese subtitles use a few characters not found in most Standard Written Chinese
3) When you do a text search in YouTube, it will search in soft subtitles in addition to the Titles and Descriptions of videos

I knew the the first two points, but not the last.

While not a perfect method for a couple of reasons, the upshot is that this makes it possible to somewhat efficiently find videos that have spoken form Cantonese soft subtitles. And I discovered that once you found a channel that has one video with that type of subtitle track, they often have a few more videos with them. (But interestingly, it would almost always only be a small subset of a channel's videos. I don't think I found a single channel that consistently had these subs for all their videos.)

So this weekend, I went to work. I searched and searched and built a big public Playlist with over 300 videos, which can be found here:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... p7vPz-zCeg

This is a playlist of all Cantonese videos with a soft subtitle track with spoken form Cantonese. Note that quite a number of these videos have multiple subtitle tracks, so if you start playing them and don't see spoken Cantonese text, check to see if there's another track. If you find a track that doesn't have good subs, let me know and I'll remove it.

And I'd like to add a few words of caution:
If you are easily offended, tread lightly in that playlist as I believe there is plenty of profanity, sexual talk, etc. to be found. I took any video that had, after few second's glance, what looked like accurate subs; so the content can be pretty much anything. There is likely some NSFW content and things I wouldn't show young children.

See here for how to make the most out of soft subtitles in YouTube:
https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =17&t=9509

I also shared this playlist on the CantoDict forums as I know that I'm not the only person dying to find a big batch of content in this format.

(Note that the above method can be used to find soft subs in other languages as Luke points out in his video.)

This new content comes at a perfect time as the recent discussion on Comprehensible Input (below) got the gears in my head working about my methods of using audio+text: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =14&t=9513

I believe that in the past my audio/video input hasn't been as "comprehensible" as I now think it should be. This happened partially because of the difficulty of making Cantonese audio comprehensible due to the lack of electronic text/accurate subs mentioned above and partially due to my laziness about re-listening to audio. I think there is a bell curve shape on how much time you spend with a bit of content, if you spend too little time you don't get familiar enough with it to really get some relatively 'high comprehension' listening passes with it. If you spend too much time, you're wasting too much time out on the diminishing returns tail of the curve, trying to pick out those last few words that are rare, slurred speech or mis-pronounced. For intermediate learners, I think we need to repeatedly capture the big meat section of the bell curve with each bit of audio: Listen and decode enough to get 75-90% of it clearly on 1-2 passes, then move on.

Since I now have audio content which I can easily make comprehensible due to the matching text; I am going to attempt to use it more consistently in a way where I'm getting those high value passes... i.e. I am going to decode it and re-listen a few times to make sure I'm really hearing it. In the past, I was content with a fairly low % of understanding a large portion of the time, mostly because it was so difficult without matching text to do much more without a HUGE expenditure of time... I'm hoping this new content and refined method will combine and noticeably accelerate my listening comprehension progress. I'm super excited about it! :D

Onward!
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Re: Stealing time and grappling with fickle devotion

Postby Axon » Wed Nov 21, 2018 8:48 am

How does it feel to be a game-changer? :D

In the last few years there have been more and more services popping up where you can pay people to subtitle your videos. I imagine the channel creator decides which videos bring in the most ad revenue and then makes the decision to hire a transcriber. I wonder what the economics are about subtitling in uncommonly-learned languages like Cantonese.

I have no doubt that your playlist will be very useful for many, many learners going forward. Every post of yours in this thread is better than the last. Thank you!
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zKing
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Re: Stealing time and grappling with fickle devotion

Postby zKing » Wed Nov 21, 2018 7:26 pm

Axon wrote:How does it feel to be a game-changer? :D

In the last few years there have been more and more services popping up where you can pay people to subtitle your videos. I imagine the channel creator decides which videos bring in the most ad revenue and then makes the decision to hire a transcriber. I wonder what the economics are about subtitling in uncommonly-learned languages like Cantonese.

I have no doubt that your playlist will be very useful for many, many learners going forward. Every post of yours in this thread is better than the last. Thank you!

Thanks for the support! :)

I'm not sure, but I think some of the translation subtitles are added via "community contributions" rather than by the original author given some of the wacky language combinations I've found. And I'm not sure exactly why people are putting Cantonese subs on their Cantonese videos... I'm guessing that perhaps it is to enable people to watch the video on their phone/tablet with no/low audio, i.e. in bed with no audio or on a noisy commute where even headphones might not do the job. Whatever the reason: I'm glad they exist!

I do notice that on most channels that have Cantonese soft subs, there will be an old batch of 3-12 videos that have them but at some point they stopped doing them (probably too much work for not enough gain). Or their old videos had Cantonese subs, but they switched to SWC in later videos (likely to widen their audience). And, of course, most Chinese subs are burned in... I'd guess for a few reasons: a) The subtitles easily travel with the video, i.e. if they want to publish their video outside YouTube, they don't have to port their subtitles w/timing. b) They can use pretty fonts. c) I'd bet the video editing tools most of these guys use probably have nicer tools for doing subtitles than YouTube's online tools. d) They rightly guess that many people wouldn't know that little "cc" button exists (particularly on phones), even if the user might want subs, so they'd rather burn them right in to avoid a "discovery problem".

I do hope this playlist is useful to many others... I know that up to this point I've been searching long and hard to find anything like this. I'm just glad I can share it as a public playlist without any copyright issues. (I was recently considering hiring someone to transcribe out some RTHK podcasts, but for copyright reasons I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be able to freely and openly share them if I had done so.)

I'm considering recording a couple videos of my own on how to go about using this content for new Cantonese learners who find my list, but I'm not sure if I'll get around to it... it might be a bit too much of a time sink on my LL time.
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zKing
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Re: Stealing time and grappling with fickle devotion

Postby zKing » Mon Nov 26, 2018 8:16 pm

Cantonese Progress Report 11/26/2018

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: 48/52, 29 weeks into the project out of ~32.

Anki
Cards are Production only: Meaning -> Jyutping
All 4490 Card suspended

Input
Total Content Run Time: 70:00
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

It was a short week due to the Thanksgiving holiday.

I had a great first session with a new iTalki tutor, Aaron. We chatted in Cantonese a bit and he was able to very rapidly narrow in on some consistent mistakes I was making, it was a really valuable session just for the couple of tips he gave me. We switched to English later in the session (at my request, to save time and gain some precision), and chatted at a high level about process and goals for future sessions. He rightly pointed out that I just need to speak a lot more and, when possible, take more advantage of the fact that I have a native speaker in the house... particularly now that my level is at the point where conversations can be a bit more functional. Aaron is a bit more of an 'instructor' than my previous tutors, but in a good way, i.e. not to an extreme where he feels the need to repeatedly interrupt with English explainations. I was really happy with the session and can't wait to continue with him.

I've also been using content from my Cantonese w/subtitles YouTube playlist. My process has been, roughly:
1. Listen/Watch through once (subs on)
2. Put the subs in the Reader at LanguageTools.io and do a full breakdown, i.e. get definitions on all words, mark them appropriately. This takes a while.
3. Listen/Watch subtitle by subtitle with the Reader open in another window. Click on each subtitle repeatedly to hear that one line over and over until I'm really hearing 75%+ of it with understanding.
4. In Theory: Listen one more time all the way through, although this hasn't happened yet as I'm usually sick of the content after step 3.
I also plan on coming back to the same video in a week or so and try steps #3 and #4 again to get some repetition on the same content. We'll see if that happens and how it goes.

This content is pretty advanced in places, so this takes a while. The tracking in my metrics is a guess as I'm reading/listening to each line many times over... even 5 mins of content takes an hour or two to get through, so metrics-wise I'm counting the content 3-6x over. That said, I'm really happy with this new "more comprehensible" process. It feels a lot more effective than what I've been doing before; it is really nice to experience a bit of content going from nearly opaque to nearly transparent in a relatively short period of time. Before I would lazily watch/listen and get that first "mostly opaque" listening pass, then read the subtitle and look up the unknowns such that I (mostly) understood the subtitle text, but then I would just move on. I was getting more content volume since I was spending less time on each bit of content, but the input was FAR less "comprehensible"... particularly the listening aspect. But the new method definitely takes a bit more grit, so we'll see if I can keep this up longer term. Note that I still get plenty of "extensive input" as I'm listening to Cantonese in my car and occasionally watch videos extensively here and there (I don't count these in my metrics). I've just upped the intensity of my intensive input.

In addition, for Black Friday, I picked up a subscription to LingQ and started using it a little for Italian.
I did this for three reasons:
1) I've never really used LingQ before (only LWT and LanguageTools.io) and I was very curious to try it to see how it compares.
2) LingQ has a lot of shared Italian content... I don't have to spend time searching for it.
3) I really wanted to warm my Italian back up, I feel a little bad that I've let it rust for the last couple of years.
I plan on doing a little Italian on the back-burner, mostly reading in LingQ, until either my reading gets strong enough that I will just extensively read or perhaps at some point I'll take a break from Cantonese and focus on pushing my Italian forward for a while. But for now this isn't really a priority, just something I'm doing on the side.

Onward!
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