Work/life has been busy so for the last several days I've had limited golden time, but I've made some progess. I Short Loop Chorused (SLC) a couple batches of sentences and can say it is definitely helping me work my mouth into shape. My re-started Anki deck is going smoothly, I'm up to ~70-80 cards / day and it is still sub-20 mins, so I'm staying sane.
WorkAudioBook
Through recommendations here I'm now infatuated with the WorkAudioBook app and I'm now using it for my listening practice instead of Audacity as it is a bit more focused on just what I need. I really like that I can turn on auto-repeat, hit PLAY and it will start cycling the first phrase over and over, I then hit "N" to go to the next phrase and it loops that one over and over, etc. This is great as I don't need to manually drag-select each phrase in Audacity, which is less distracting to my listening. I just keep my finger on the "N" key and tap it when I've understood the phrase or just let it cycle when I need to hear it again. I will admit that I'm now using my texts to "subtitle" my audio in the app, and this is probably a bit of a time waster, but my anal nature requires it. Fortunately, the WorkAudioBook app makes this a fairly rapid process and it does add a bit of focused listening practice at the same time.
(And I'm STILL finding transcription/OCR errors in my texts, grrrr.)
New iTalki tutor
I had my first session with Eldo, my new iTalki tutor. He did a great job of making me speak Cantonese almost the whole time. He accomplished this by mostly asking me questions about our recent trip to Hong Kong, which made me do most of the talking. He would correct me, but only after I'd finally struggled to spit out something that resembled a sentence and he didn't stop the conversation cold and give lengthy explainations in English except when absolutely necessary. The typical brain freeze that overcomes me when trying to speak was already starting to thaw a bit by the end of the hour. I haven't really tried to speak more than a sentence or two in a couple of years, and even that was just 3-4 iTalki sessions with my old tutor. So it was a great feeling to break that ice.
Sentence construction
One thing I picked up from the iTalki session was that my speaking troubles mostly came from how slowly and clumsily I'd build sentences. I know a lot of vocabulary, but I don't have hardly any experience pasting it together into sentences. I understand the grammar fairly well, not that Cantonese grammar is terribly complex, but creating it on the fly is something I don't have much experience with.
New Goal
Looking at my list of Goals, I realized I didn't really have one that tackled the "sentence construction" problem head on, minus the iTalki sessions. Perhaps the Islands hit this a little, but I think Islands are less about building new output and more about practicing core output to fluency. So I decided to throw a 5th(!) goal on the pile: Lang-8 Journal entries in Cantonese (spoken form, not SWC). And today I wrote up the first one and posted it.
My complete revised list of goals:
- Conversation: 20 iTalki lessons
- Output: 50 Lang-8 Journal entries of 10 sentences+, corrected
- Listening: Able to listen to all 4 hours of my intermediate content and understand 99% of it unassisted
- Speaking: 10 2+ minute monologues (islands)
- Speaking: 200 personal phrasebook sentences that are fluently automatic and pronounced well
I'm only just getting started, and haven't really worked on the last two much, but hopefully the Lang-8 entries will feed content into them and I'll have more to report in a week or two.
加油!