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: 44/52, 25 weeks into the project out of ~32.
Anki
Cards are Production only: Meaning -> Jyutping
All 4490 Cards suspended (915 were mature, 669 Young)
My Love-Hate relationship with Anki has taken another turn, and in a cranky fit I've suspended all my Anki cards for now. I've decided that the value to annoyance ratio wasn't high enough to continue the process as I was doing it. A while ago I realized that Anki was a poor use of time (for me) for input acquisition and I killed all my input (L2 -> L1) cards. Volumes of regular native input make words stick much better and is FAR more enjoyable (for me). As I don't do enough output, I was using Anki as a crutch to force output practice. However, I was starting to get sloppy with both a) which cards I let into the new queue (synonyms and other less valuable cruft) and b) my review process as I was often rushing through them to finish before the end of the day. So at some point when yet another string of "why did I let this card through" cards came through, and I was cranky because I have a cold, and I was trying to rush through the last of the cards at midnight... I had had enough. This wasn't entirely a momentary illogical fit of anger, I'd been pondering this for a while now. While I do believe that SRS is a handy tool in small doses, I think (for me) I've pushed beyond its value to cost ratio. I now likely know somewhere in the 2k-3k range of words and I think it is time to focus even more intently on the actual language. I do, however, plan to continue to use Anki in a very limited way: When trying to speak or write (i.e. output only), if I encounter a word I don't know that I really think would be repeatedly useful in the near future, I will queue that word as new in my Anki deck. This is unlikely to give me anywhere near 10 new words per day, which is a good thing... and I will ONLY be collecting words that I truly need.
I hope to kill my three bad habits with SRS:
- a) The desire to 'collect them all'
b) The fear that running out of 'new' cards or not doing enough of them will somehow be a world ending event.
c) Sloppily rushing through my reviews and being a little too kind with the grading such that down the road there are too many cards I really don't know.
Input
Total Content Run Time: 61:00
Last Week: 2:00
It was a half-week as I was out of town, but I actually got a decent amount of listening in. I'm counting the "How To Train Your Dragon" I listened to on the plane that I talked about last time as I forgot to include it in that report. I also did an investigation into Reader apps like LingQ. I've been doing some beta testing for leosmith on his site (https://languagetools.io/) which right now IMO has the best reader for Cantonese. Some fun things I discovered: I now know how to bulk copy out the subtitles from a YouTube video. Readlang has a really cool YouTube sync'ing feature that will synchronously highlight your subtitle text as your YouTube video plays; you can even click on the text and the video will jump to that spot. LingQ automatically converts any Traditional Chinese text into Simplified when you import it (yuck!) and does other things that make it impossible to use for Cantonese even if you are willing to work at it.
Edit: I should mention that I've used Learning with Texts (LWT) in the past, but the setup is a pain particularly if I want it accessible at home, work and remotely. I don't want a second IT job keeping it running, so LWT is not worth the trouble for me.
I tried to transcribe more of the Cantonese podcast/novel I have, 男人唔可以窮, but it was just too slow going, so I don't think it was a good use of my time. I'll probably hold off on that one, again.
I spent a good amount of time listening to my favorite YouTube channel that has actual spoken Cantonese subs: 西DorSi. Each time I really dig in and carefully work with one of these videos, I can practically feel my Cantonese improving by a notch. I first use a reader on the subs to make sure I have all the meaning and then I repeatedly listen at 75% speed and try to hear each word as it goes by. And finally at full speed to make sure I can follow. Great stuff.
Also, given that I've regained some "dead time" from Anki, I'm thinking I'm going do some back burner reading in Italian on the side. The truth is there isn't a lot of 'just reading' that helps my spoken Cantonese (my reading is already way ahead of my listening skills), so if I can't listen, I can't use the dead time very effectively. But since Italian is phonetically spelled and is just plain WAY easier than Cantonese, I can get a lot of value from reading it in my dead time in a reader app/site. Plus it will make me happy to not let my Italian rust further and perhaps stave off the wanderlust monster. (I'm keeping my eye on you: Mandarin, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic, French, etc...)
Output
Writing: 2650 characters
Last Week: 0
ROL/Shadow/Chorus: 6:00
Last Week: 0
Given that I've mostly punted Anki, I'm going to have to get serious about some writing to keep the output machine moving. I haven't settled on exactly how I'm going to accomplish this yet, but one thought I had was that coming up with what I want to say is half the problem. I'm a notoriously quiet person and in my high school newspaper class I always got complaints from the editor that my articles were too short. I wrote what needed to be said and I was done; I can't be blamed if the facts are only 150 words. So to solve that part of the writers block, I'm thinking I'll simply start translating English texts into Cantonese. This will allow me to focus only on the 'writing in Cantonese' part vs finding the next interesting thought. I had the wild idea of translating my Italian Harry Potter ebook into Cantonese in an attempt to kill two birds with one stone, but that would probably overload some language center in my brain a bit too much.
iTalki
Total Lesson Time: 15:30
Last Week: 0:00
I had the short week and then the one lesson I had scheduled had to be cancelled last minute... so no iTalki last week.
Until next time...