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

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zKing
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Re: Stealing time and grappling with fickle devotion

Postby zKing » Mon Oct 29, 2018 9:51 pm

Cantonese Progress Report 10/29/2018

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: 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.
If I only do 5 cards one week, so be it. At least I will really really know them and they will certainly be words I need.


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...
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dicentra8
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Re: Stealing time and grappling with fickle devotion

Postby dicentra8 » Fri Nov 02, 2018 2:28 pm

My Love-Hate relationship with Anki has taken another turn, and in a cranky fit I've suspended all my Anki cards for now.


That's actually good. When that happens to me the result is usually me deleting the whole deck without looking back. Then a few days later I start panicking, look in the backup folder and realize it's all gone (I keep a limit of just 30 backups).

a) The desire to 'collect them all'


I still struggle so much with this one. I actually have been thinking about using Anki only for "difficult words" but then the desire to collect them all hits me. *sighs* And I don't think I'm one of those people that spends too much time on Anki. Lately it's been 25~30min each day.
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zKing
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Re: Stealing time and grappling with fickle devotion

Postby zKing » Mon Nov 05, 2018 8:49 pm

Cantonese Progress Report 11/5/2018

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: 45/52, 26 weeks into the project out of ~32.

Anki
Cards are Production only: Meaning -> Jyutping
All 4490 Card suspended (915 were mature, 669 Young)

I blissfully did zero Anki last week.

@dicentra8 Yep, I only do 20-30 mins of Anki when I'm doing it. But after 3-6 months I just get tired of the daily grind of it, no matter what the format (and I've tried them all). I think for me, it is great for cramming that first 600-1000 words or some small set of grammar rules, maybe a max of 2k-3k items in one project, but I'm just not someone who can use it to do those giant "learn all your words through SRS" multi-10k piles of cards.

Input
Total Content Run Time: 62:30
Last Week: 1:30

I spent a considerable amount of time watching 西DorSi videos on YouTube. I also typed up the burned in subtitles to a couple of the videos and put them in leosmith's Reading tool at https://languagetools.io/ (which I HIGHLY recommend and is FREE). Using the tool, carefully looking up each word (it works similar to LingQ) and listening many times has been immensely helpful. I realized that this kind of content is quite sparse for Cantonese learners, and many learners can't type in Chinese easily, so I wanted to share my transcripts with others. I ended up writing an email to 西DorSi (in both English and Cantonese) and got permission from him to share these transcripts with other Cantonese learners. So I plan on creating a lot of these transcriptions with links to the corresponding YouTube videos and sharing them at https://languagetools.io/. It will both help my Cantonese listening skills and hopefully give back a little to the Cantonese learning community.

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

No output beyond iTalki last week. Still planning on doing some writing, but the 西DorSi videos for listening skills are taking priority.

iTalki
Total Lesson Time: 17:00
Last Week: 1:30

I had my last (1 hour) session with Eldo for a while. He's moving to Taiwan and will be offline for at least a month until he gets his internet connection and the rest of life sorted. I also had a great (30 min) session with Jason, he was able to explain a few really new slang words from the 西DorSi videos that my wife didn't know. I'm also going to see if I can pick up another backup tutor while Eldo is out. We'll see how that goes.

Back burner Italian
I started reading a few pages of Twilight in Italian on Readlang. I think I'm going to try to keep a little back burner Italian reading going as it would be a shame to continue to let my Italian rust. My experience with passato remoto was limited even when I was fully focused on learning Italian and got to a fairly conversational skill level, so it will take some time for my brain to wrap around that tense in novels. I also have two Harry Potter books in Italian as well and I will likely move over to using the https://languagetools.io/ Reader as frankly it is more fully featured than the Readlang one... and free.

Onward!
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Re: Stealing time and grappling with fickle devotion

Postby StringerBell » Mon Nov 05, 2018 10:16 pm

zKing wrote:My experience with passato remoto was limited even when I was fully focused on learning Italian and got to a fairly conversational skill level, so it will take some time for my brain to wrap around that tense in novels.


I don't remember if you mentioned which parts of Italy you travel to most frequently. If it's the north, then Passato Remoto is all but useless, as they rarely use it (unless they're discussing something that happened in Roman times, or at least a few decades ago). In the south it's definitely more common, but even if you plan to have a conversation in Italian about the ancient past, you can still use the regular past tense and they'll know what you're talking about. Since my husband is from the north, I basically have chosen to shun Passato Remoto (at least for now) since it's mostly useless for me. It's become my arch-enemy. :twisted:

If you prefer to avoid dealing with it so that you can focus on the verb tenses you'll need for conversation, I've found that Italian non-fiction does not use Passato Remoto at all in the narration (unless it's legitimately describing something that happened a long time ago). Another great way to avoid it is to read websites/articles online. But maybe you don't mind dealing with it because you'd prefer to read fiction in Italian? If so, then disregard everything. :lol:
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zKing
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Re: Stealing time and grappling with fickle devotion

Postby zKing » Tue Nov 06, 2018 12:08 am

StringerBell wrote:
zKing wrote:My experience with passato remoto was limited even when I was fully focused on learning Italian and got to a fairly conversational skill level, so it will take some time for my brain to wrap around that tense in novels.


I don't remember if you mentioned which parts of Italy you travel to most frequently. If it's the north, then Passato Remoto is all but useless, as they rarely use it (unless they're discussing something that happened in Roman times, or at least a few decades ago). In the south it's definitely more common, but even if you plan to have a conversation in Italian about the ancient past, you can still use the regular past tense and they'll know what you're talking about. Since my husband is from the north, I basically have chosen to shun Passato Remoto (at least for now) since it's mostly useless for me. It's become my arch-enemy. :twisted:

If you prefer to avoid dealing with it so that you can focus on the verb tenses you'll need for conversation, I've found that Italian non-fiction does not use Passato Remoto at all in the narration (unless it's legitimately describing something that happened a long time ago). Another great way to avoid it is to read websites/articles online. But maybe you don't mind dealing with it because you'd prefer to read fiction in Italian? If so, then disregard everything. :lol:


Yeah, previously we've traveled mostly in the north and I know in those regions Passato Remoto is truly only used when talking about FAR in the past topics. But part of me wants to be able to read fiction and part of me is just lazy... I happen to have some fiction available to read that I will enjoy not hate. IIRC, I have one non-fiction book on my Kindle I could also read, but it's a little dry and honestly I'm not too worried about the PR problem. I just want to ensure that I do a little _something_ in Italian to keep it warm on the back burner. And I want it to be real Italian not flashcards/duolingo/whatever-bite-sized-language-app-of-the-month.

And come to think of it, I believe the last time my wife and I were talking about Italy we were considering trying Naples or Sicily so perhaps the PR will be more useful than I think. :D
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Flickserve
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Re: Stealing time and grappling with fickle devotion

Postby Flickserve » Tue Nov 06, 2018 12:54 am

zKing wrote:Cantonese Progress Report 11/5/2018



I spent a considerable amount of time watching 西DorSi videos on YouTube. I also typed up the burned in subtitles to a couple of the videos and put them in leosmith's Reading tool at https://languagetools.io/ (which I HIGHLY recommend and is FREE). Using the tool, carefully looking up each word (it works similar to LingQ) and listening many times has been immensely helpful. I realized that this kind of content is quite sparse for Cantonese learners, and many learners can't type in Chinese easily, so I wanted to share my transcripts with others. I ended up writing an email to 西DorSi (in both English and Cantonese) and got permission from him to share these transcripts with other Cantonese learners. So I plan on creating a lot of these transcriptions with links to the corresponding YouTube videos and sharing them at https://languagetools.io/. It will both help my Cantonese listening skills and hopefully give back a little to the Cantonese learning community.


Onward!
wonderful initiative

I am going to have to take a look at this. I miss some of the Cantonese words because they are just too infrequent in a normal conversation for me to grasp.

I have a problem in that it is a bit tricky to switch between Cantonese and Mandarin.
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smallwhite
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Re: Stealing time and grappling with fickle devotion

Postby smallwhite » Tue Nov 06, 2018 1:57 am

> I realized that this kind of content is quite sparse for Cantonese learners, and many learners can't type in Chinese easily, so I wanted to share my transcripts with others.

Unless your wife will be doing it, do you want me to spellcheck your transcripts? I don't know your level but learners in general often mix up the characters.

> reading... Twilight in Italian... passato remoto

The first few pages of the Hunger Games is in the present tense. The rest of the book I don't know. In case anyone's interested.
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zKing
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Re: Stealing time and grappling with fickle devotion

Postby zKing » Tue Nov 06, 2018 3:02 am

smallwhite wrote:Unless your wife will be doing it, do you want me to spellcheck your transcripts? I don't know your level but learners in general often mix up the characters.
I really appreciate the offer but I think I'm OK for now. The 西DorSi subtitles are almost perfectly word-for-word (here's an example if you haven't seen his videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8k8X3JsYmrc), and I'm familiar with 98% of the characters/words I'm seeing as well so I only need to be really careful with a few unknowns there and there. So barring a typo, I'm not too worried about messing them up. I'm also putting them through the Reader afterwards which should help me catch any simple typo/transcription mistakes that make it through as they will pop up with weird/unexpected meanings. And if I get lost, yeah, my wife is never too far away. :D

If I ever start to try to transcribe something WITHOUT accurate subtitles (i.e. only Standard Written Chinese), like some 鏗鏘集... then I'll likely be paying a tutor to help me correct them, haha!

Boy, as I was just typing one of these up, I remember how painful it was when I was a beginner and I was trying to puzzle things out of videos from only the sound and looking at burned in subtitles when I couldn't type at all in Chinese... I'm just hoping to save others a little bit of that pain. :)

smallwhite wrote:The first few pages of the Hunger Games is in the present tense. The rest of the book I don't know. In case anyone's interested.
Ah, that's good to know! I think I have it in Traditional Chinese, but not Italian. Thanks!
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Flickserve
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Re: Stealing time and grappling with fickle devotion

Postby Flickserve » Tue Nov 06, 2018 8:33 am

zKing wrote:
smallwhite wrote:Unless your wife will be doing it, do you want me to spellcheck your transcripts? I don't know your level but learners in general often mix up the characters.
I really appreciate the offer but I think I'm OK for now. The 西DorSi subtitles are almost perfectly word-for-word (here's an example if you haven't seen his videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8k8X3JsYmrc), and I'm familiar with 98% of the characters/words I'm seeing as well so I only need to be really careful with a few unknowns there and there. So barring a typo, I'm not too worried about messing them up. I'm also putting them through the Reader afterwards which should help me catch any simple typo/transcription mistakes that make it through as they will pop up with weird/unexpected meanings. And if I get lost, yeah, my wife is never too far away. :D

So far i can't register to language tools - it hasn't sent me a verification.

I watched another one of the videos. Sometimes, the pronunciation is a bit strange. It's almost like a varient cantonese with a deliberate lazy pronunication.

https://youtu.be/OOJsyC1Kpew?t=85

The pronunciation of pork has an s sound though interestingly later on in the video, it's pronounced correctly

https://youtu.be/OOJsyC1Kpew?t=130

朋友仔

https://youtu.be/OOJsyC1Kpew?t=174

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Re: Stealing time and grappling with fickle devotion

Postby smallwhite » Tue Nov 06, 2018 9:11 am

> 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.
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