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 » Tue May 22, 2018 9:41 pm

A Slow Start
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!
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Re: Stealing time and grappling with fickle devotion

Postby zKing » Wed Jun 06, 2018 7:44 pm

Cantonese Progress Report 6/6/2018

Anki:
Daily New: 20
Daily Reviews: ~120
Daily Time: ~20m
Total Cards: ~5000 (~2500 words bidirectional)
Young: ~450
Mature: 1

I'm doing OK with Anki as it is still just under 20 minutes / day. Although to be honest, I don't think that counts the time when I edit a card to disambiguate it from another. I also realized that rather than a completely random ordering, every once in a while I should probably go into the browser on the desktop and select batches of cards and push them to the top of the "new" queue. There are definitely some words that are more important than others in my deck. That said, I'm not sure I care enough to spend the golden time to do it. All the cards will come eventually, and Anki isn't the _only_ way I'm learning words.

Goal - 20 iTalki lessons:
Progress: 2
Last week I had another session with Eldo. It went about the same as the previous week. It was good practice but my stuttered often-Tarzan-like speech is really a big obstacle to getting a good flow going. This lead my to the goal change (see below...)
This week I had a conflict and Eldo had no other open slot that worked for me, so I had to cancel my session for the week.
I will march on next week.

Goal - 50 Journal entries:
Progress: 1
I was really focused on my intermediate content (in particular, the Wedding Bells dialogs) and didn't do any more journal entries. If I were to be honest, this was mostly because the former is enjoyable and the latter is a lot of hard work. But I know this bitter medicine is one of the major solutions in getting my production flowing. And once I do it more, I know it will get easier... so I will try to come up with some mechanism to make this a regular habit and not so easy to ignore.

Goal - 10 Islands entries:
Progress: 0
I've deciding I'm holding off on the Islands until I'm at least half way through the rest of my goals as these will be partially generated from those other elements. Plus I've got plenty on my plate with the other four.

Goal - 99% comprehension of my intermediate content.
Progress AHK: 50%
Progress Minami: 80%
Progress FSM: 50%
Progress WB: Vocab Mining done, 25%
Progress CanCon: Vocab Mining 1/29

I finished getting Wedding Bells into WorkAudioBook and Vocabulary mining it. The chapters are shorter than Minami/FSM, but the vocabulary seemed a bit more slangy/advanced. I'll have to do a good bit of intensive listening to get my audio-only comprehension up on it.

I started looking at the first chapter of Cantonese Conversations, and it is REALLY fast. I know that this is what it's supposed to be, but it took me a little by surprise at first. I didn't think Minami or FSM were especially slow other than having a bit more spacing between sentences, but it is clear that CanCon is full tilt conversation between natives just having a chat... and the other dialogs are 'teaching' material. I think it is fair to say that this is likely Advanced, not Intermediate.

Given that, I will focus on the first four to lift my listening skill a bit before tackling CanCon. I also think it's a good plan because I have plenty of material to tackle with the first four anyhow.
One again, the battle of:
Breadth vs Depth, Focused Repetition vs. Varied Exposure, Boredom/Effectiveness vs Enjoyment/Leisurely-Pace?

Changed Goal - 50 hours of SLC or Shadowing
Progress: 0.5
I had an old goal of '200 fluent personal phrasebook sentences' which, similar to the Islands, was an attempt to get my speaking to a conversational level. After some thought, I realized I didn't like this goal as it seemed somewhat difficult to measure and covered similar ground to my other goals. I also realized that my ability to mechanically pronounce Cantonese _at speed_ is seriously lacking and I wanted to tackle that issue head on. I had already been messing around with SLC (Short Loop Chorusing), and I felt that it was effective and reasonably enjoyable. After some waffling about how to measure (time? number of sentence reps, ala Glossika?), I think raw hours of actual time on task is probably best. I also think that I'll start with SLC and once my ability improves, I'll slowly transition to Shadowing (when I have some hope of saying things right on the first try). I'm ignoring the SLC I've done up to this point as it wasn't a lot and much of it wasn't focused, so I started tracking progress from the point I set the goal.

Other bits of Cantonese
I've started listening to a few RTHK podcasts in my car and, compared to the last time I tried long ago, I seems like I am tantalizingly close to understanding much of the content. I can usually figure out generally what they are talking about and pick out a ton of words, but I can't quite understand most of the full sentences. (Interestingly, it seems slower and clearer than the CanCon audio!) So for now, it is fun to just hunt for known words and do lots of guessing.
Here's hoping that someday soon...

Final thoughts
I know one weakness in my study plan is that I bounce between my five goals willy-nilly (really between four as the Islands goal is on hold.) I thought about "fixing" this problem, but for now I'm going to treat it as a "feature" to stave off boredom. If I get tired of SLC, I'll try to Journal. If I just can't focus on writing a Journal entry, I'll intensively listen to my audio, etc. That said, I do know that my natural tendency to avoid output will mean some things (Journal entries) will lag and others (Intensive listening) will charge ahead. So I'll _try_ to put things like Journal entries FIRST and only fallback to the others when I really need the break. I'm not going to do anything 'planful' about it, just yet. I'll see how it goes.
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Re: Stealing time and grappling with fickle devotion

Postby zKing » Wed Jun 13, 2018 10:56 pm

Cantonese Progress Report 6/13/2018

Goals - Target Date
Once again I've further refined my goals. While before I was avoiding setting a target date, I've now decided that my target date is going to be EOY (end of the year). For things of this scale I like working with weeks, and for measurement purposes I've decided my official starting point will be last week. Last week was Week #23 of the year (see: https://www.epochconverter.com/weeknumbers).
That means through the end of the year (Week #52) I've got about 30 weeks of time. I've adjusted my goals below such that I need to average roughly 1 hour/day for 25 weeks to hit my goals. That allows for about 5 weeks of slip/vacations/holidays.

One hour per day per week is something like:
  • Journal Entries: 2 hrs/week (one hour per Journal entry for both production and review)
  • SLC/Shadowing: 1 hr/week
  • Intensive Listening: 2 hrs/week
  • iTalki: 1 hr/week
  • + Anki

I'm currently mid-Week 2 of 30.

Anki
Daily New: 20
Daily Reviews: ~120
Daily Time: <20m
Total Cards: ~5000 (~2500 words bidirectional)
Young+Learn: 589
Mature: 5

My only real goal with Anki is to just keep using it through the end of the goal cycle at the 20 new / day pace. I should hit more than 4k cards (2k words bidirectional) in that time. As long as it stays in the 20 min / day range for reviews, and only takes dead time, I'll likely be able to maintain that pace. Note that I do spend some extra non-review time editing new cards to ensure they are unambiguous.

Goal - 50 Journal entries
Progress: 3
Target by end of this week: 4
Target Pace: 2 / week

I'm finding this writing to be incredibly helpful in getting my grammar and word choice into shape. I'm doing lots of look-ups, stretching my vocabulary and trying to use natural, long sentences. The corrections are fairly heavy, a lot of it to do with word choice and my superficial understanding of the meaning many of the words... and of course word order and some grammar nits. But it feels like I'm learning by leaps and bounds with this in a way that speaking alone just can't do efficiently.

Goal - 25 hours of SLC or Shadowing
Progress: 1:20
Target by end of this week: 2:00
Target Pace: 1 hr / week

I cut this goal in half. I did this mostly to balance it against the Intensive Listening goal and my roughly 1/hr per day target. But also I did it because I realized how intense this activity is when I'm doing it right. I think 15-20 min sessions are ideal, 30 mins is the absolute maximum. And so roughly 3x 20min per week is about what I'll try for. I'm using my Glossika sentences to Chorus over, but I skip the odd sentences that are too short or have weird names in them. I'm really digging how this gets my mouth to do the right thing; it seems very effective. Eldo, my iTalki tutor, already commented that my pronunciation was a bit better than before and I'm fairly certain this task is the reason why.

Goal - 50 hours of Intensive Listening
Progress: 2:30
Target by end of this week: 4:00
Target Pace: 2 hr / week

This goal used to be "99% comprehension of my intermediate content", but my anal nature didn't like the fuzziness of it. And it didn't allow for motivational progress tracking. So I've change it to something I can measure week by week. This also ensures that I can balance the time used against the other goals. The last few days I've been hammering the "About Hong Kong" monologues with WorkAudioBook, I short loop each phrase/sentence and ensure I can hear the meaning of each word as it comes at my ears before hitting "N" to go the next phrase. I've finished my pass of About Hong Kong and I'm just starting to cycle back through Fung Seoi Master.

As mentioned last time, on the side I've listened to some RTHK podcasts (捉心理 in particular) and I think I could fruitfully attempt some transcription work with it. For many of the sentences, if I loop it a couple of times, I can usually pick out most of it perhaps with a dictionary loop up here and there. I'm slightly afraid of getting pulled into that rabbit hole as in the past I've been known to spend 10 minutes trying to puzzle out one 4 second sentence and I don't think that this is a good use of time. So I'll have to be careful to ensure that the volume of semi-comprehensible L2 I'm progressing through is high enough to justify the time spent. We'll see, but I'm just SO tempted to take my recently strengthened listening skills out for a spin on some native content above and beyond just extensive listening to random stuff in the car.

Goal - 25 iTalki lessons
Progress: 3
Target by end of this week: 2
Target Pace: 1 / week

I've upped this goal from 20 to 25 to match the pacing of my other goals; although my progress count includes the sessions I had from the previous couple of weeks, technically before my new official start date. I missed last week's session due to a conflict, but I had one yesterday. Yesterday's session was tough as I was tired and my brain just didn't want to click into Cantonese mode. But I plowed through and we got a bit of flow going toward the middle and end of the session chatting about music. Eldo gave me a number of corrections on colloquial ways of saying things that were really valuable.
And in the last few minutes Eldo gave me some feedback:
  • My pronunciation had improved a bit since we had started (as I said above, I credit my SLC/Shadowing for this)
  • I say "ah/umm" a LOT as I try to work my way through putting out a sentence. This is typical but is even more distracting in Cantonese than English.
  • I should notice that in general Cantonese uses a lot more passive constructs than English does
Really good bits of data that I'll have to think more about how to fully utilize.
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Re: Stealing time and grappling with fickle devotion

Postby zKing » Mon Jun 18, 2018 11:03 pm

Cantonese Progress Report 6/18/2018

Anki
Daily New: 20
Daily Reviews: ~130
Daily Time: <20m
Total Cards: ~5000 (~2500 words bidirectional)
Young+Learn: 682
Mature: 11

Goal - 50 Journal entries
Progress: 4
Target by end of this week: 6
Target Pace: 2 / week

Goal - 25 hours of SLC or Shadowing
Progress: 2:00
Target by end of this week: 3:00
Target Pace: 1 hr / week

Goal - 50 hours of Intensive Listening
Progress: 5:30
Target by end of this week: 7:30
Target Pace: 2 hr / week

Goal - 25 iTalki lessons
Progress: 3
Target by end of this week: 4
Target Pace: 1 / week

I did about 2 hours of transcribing on the first episode of 捉心理 and I only got through about 3.5 mins of it. Being a radio program, it is non-stop fast-paced native speech, but that ain't a lot of bang for the buck. And there were several places where I know my transcription is far from accurate. So I think my level is still a little too low for this to be an efficient use of time, therefore until my skill improves I'll only use content with some kind of text, even if just SWC subtitles (e.g. 鏗鏘集 videos). It's also a good reminder to "not sweat the small stuff" when it comes to transcribing stuff you aren't really solid on; it really burns time.

I've also been using the Cantonese Conversations in WorkAudioBook, tagging the text for subtitles as I go. This content is purpose built to be "full native speed" dialogs and while it was a bit shocking when I first starting listening to it, I'm starting to get used to it. Listening to this along along with Short Loop Chorusing (SLC) my Glossika sentences is allowing me to see how 'connected speech' works in Cantonese. Things like:
但係 (daan6 hai6) can turn into something that sounds identical to 大 (daai6) at full speed.
係唔係 (hai6 m4 hai6) gets squished into all kinds of short forms (amai6?)
etc.

I've got a small head start on my goals and I'm going to try to keep slightly ahead of pace for a bit to make up for any future slow downs or temporary stops... and heck, who wouldn't like to meet their goals early? I also need to make sure I finish my weekly goals first before toying with any other Cantonese stuff as I am one who is easily distracted by shiny objects (Oh, look! a new Cantonese YouTube channel!)
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Re: Stealing time and grappling with fickle devotion

Postby Axon » Wed Jun 20, 2018 3:13 am

Hey zKing, hope you're well. In another thread I saw you mentioned you might be ready for Cantonese cartoons at a higher level than Peppa Pig. Here's a very extensive playlist of Doraemon dubbed into Cantonese with no subtitles. I understand these playlists go up and down regularly, so if this one disappears you just need to search for "哆啦a夢 粵語" and you'll find more. The same user has some more big playlists on their account too.

Cheers!
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Re: Stealing time and grappling with fickle devotion

Postby smallwhite » Wed Jun 20, 2018 6:15 am

zKing wrote:... how 'connected speech' works in Cantonese. Things like:
但係 (daan6 hai6) can turn into something that sounds identical to 大 (daai6) at full speed.
係唔係 (hai6 m4 hai6) gets squished into all kinds of short forms (amai6?)
etc.

That's definitely me, full speed or otherwise. It's very difficult for me to read something aloud character-for-character, very foreign.

I think the tone is the most important so we only keep the tone intact. I've noticed that with some easy-to-predict phrases you can just hum the tone clearly and people will still understand you, the same way people understand "f**k" in writing.

但係 (daan6 hai6) ----> daa*6 *ai6 ----> daai6
係唔係 (hai6 m4 hai6) ---> h**6 m4 *ai6 ---> h6 m4 ai6
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Re: Stealing time and grappling with fickle devotion

Postby zKing » Wed Jun 20, 2018 6:23 pm

Axon wrote:In another thread I saw you mentioned you might be ready for Cantonese cartoons at a higher level than Peppa Pig. Here's a very extensive playlist of Doraemon dubbed into Cantonese with no subtitles. I understand these playlists go up and down regularly, so if this one disappears you just need to search for "哆啦a夢 粵語" and you'll find more. The same user has some more big playlists on their account too.

Thanks for the link! Yep, I've noticed a lot of Doraemon in Cantonese on YouTube in the past and tried listening a little, but I haven't looked much recently. I should try listening to them again. I've also searched generically for 動畫 粵語 and filter to "Long" videos, which is anything 20mins or longer. That excludes all the 2 min videos that are just the theme songs or tiny clips. Lots of stuff there.

smallwhite wrote:I think the tone is the most important so we only keep the tone intact. I've noticed that with some easy-to-predict phrases you can just hum the tone clearly and people will still understand you

Wow, that is really interesting as the tones are usually the first to get mangled when us Canto-newbs try to speak fluidly. That is super helpful information. Thanks once again, smallwhite!
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Re: Stealing time and grappling with fickle devotion

Postby zKing » Mon Jul 02, 2018 8:03 pm

Cantonese Progress Report 7/2/2018

I didn't do a report last week as I was busy, but also I was playing with some new methods (as always) and I wanted to let that play out a bit before I wrote another report.

Goal Pace
Start: Week 23 of the year = Project Week 1
End: Week 52 of the year = Project Week 30
Current: Week 27 of the year = Project Week 5
I'm trying for a pace that finishes in 25 weeks, allowing for 5 weeks "slip" (vacations, etc) to the EOY. This means I'm 20% in.

Anki
Daily New: 20
Daily Reviews: 120-150
Daily Time: <20m
Total Cards: ~5000 (~2500 words bidirectional)
Young: 839
Mature: 134

Anki continues to be relatively pain free and I'm noticing it's impact on my output, particularly tone accuracy. I'm resisting all urges to temporarily up the new count or add any other Anki processes as I know how quickly that can turn into Anki hell.

Goal - 50 Journal entries
Progress: 8
EOW Target: 10

I've now got 8 entries corrected on either iTalki, Lang-8 or both. Other than just looking them over, I haven't really done much with the corrections. I'm now thinking I should go back and catalogue my errors. Many of them are word choice or measure word mistakes, a few are grammatical, etc. This way I could gather them and look for things that are systematic that I could focus on as I write or speak. One of the proof readers pointed out a mistake I've made repeatedly and it really burned into my brain such that I'm unlikely to make it again. (i.e. in sentences like: 每次XXX, XXX都XXX, I was missing the 都.)

Goal - 25 hours of SLC or Shadowing
Progress: 3:20
EOW Target: 5:00

I got behind in my Shadowing this week. It's not something I like to do in my office at lunch time as I'm too self-conscious that someone will hear me through my door repeating the same phrase over and over again like a mad man. So I do it at home, but I have trouble setting aside the time for it. I'll have to focus on it this week in order to keep my pace.

Goal - 25 iTalki lessons
Progress: 5
EOW Target: 5

My tutor, Eldo, is on vacation this week, so I'm not going to get a session in. Fortunately, I'm a week ahead of my desired pace, so this won't be a problem.

Goal - 100 hours of Listening
Intensive: 10:00
Extensive: 5:00
EOW Target: 20:00

As is my way, I've changed this goal once again. Based on some advice I've received here and testing my abilities again, I've decided that I'm expanding this goal from just "Intensive Listening" to include my extensive listening as well. I've doubled the hours to 100, so I'll need to get a total of 4 hours per week to hit my goal. I'm still tracking Intensive/Extensive separately out of curiosity, but the goal is combined. I'm also not including some "junk" extensive listening that I do (listening in my car on the way to work) as I often get distracted while listening, it is a little short (10 mins?) and frankly sometimes I'm just not really paying attention to it. I'm also fairly stingy when measuring my intensive listening time as I'll cut out any long stretches of minutes I spend looking things up if I do it for too long and I'm not really listening.

The best part of this new turn of events is that my wife is now on board to watch some of her childhood cartoons with me in the evenings. While my understanding is still VERY spotty, they are as good as it gets for comprehensible input for me. The stories are mostly easy to follow by just the images, and my wife doesn't mind pausing and giving me a quick explanation when someone has a long monologue that loses me. She's having fun reliving her childhood and sharing it with me. And frankly the stories are often pretty fun and creative, even the 'girl' cartoons. Also each episode is only about 20 mins long so it is easy for us to watch one here and there without having to dedicate big blocks of time. I'm still only catching snippets of phrases and words here and there, but hopefully this will improve over time.

Lastly, based on the discussions below, I'm thinking I'm going to do some long free form journalling or talking to myself or both. I haven't quite solidified in my head what form this will take, but I realize I really need to up the volume of my output in some way to build the automaticity I want.
https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =17&t=8514
https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... php?t=1153
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Re: Stealing time and grappling with fickle devotion

Postby zKing » Mon Jul 09, 2018 10:47 pm

Cantonese Progress Report 7/9/2018

Goal Pace
Start: Week 23 of the year = Project Week 1
End: Week 52 of the year = Project Week 30
Current: Week 28 of the year = Project Week 6
Target Pace: Finish in 25 weeks (allows for vacations, etc.)
Progress 24% of 25 weeks effort

Anki
Daily New: 20
Daily Reviews: 120-150
Daily Time: <20m
Total Cards: ~5000 (~2500 words bidirectional)
Young: 869
Mature: 244

Goal - 50 Journal entries
Progress: 10
EOW Target: 12

Goal - 25 hours of SLC or Shadowing
Progress: 5:00
EOW Target: 6:00

Edit: Target should have been 6:00, not 7:00.

Goal - 25 iTalki lessons
Progress: 5
EOW Target: 6

Goal - 100 hours of Listening
Progress: 23:00
Intensive: 14:00
Extensive: 9:00
EOW Target: 24:00

A quick update as I don't have time to write much. I've caught up on my shadowing and ran ahead on my listening hours. But I've got a conflict this week on the day of my iTalki session, so I'm going to fall behind on that goal. Oh well, that's why I've got some slack in the timeline. I also still haven't done anything with my Journal corrections, maybe this week.

My listening is running ahead as a) I had a day off on the 4th of July and got in some extra study time AND b) in the evening my wife has been happy to re-watch her favorite childhood cartoon with me: 我係小忌廉 aka Creamy Mami. I'm not sure how long that will last, but I'll take it while I can get it.

As part of my intensive listening I've watched the Internal Affairs movies (無間道) in my new favorite video player "PotPlayer" (http://potplayer.daum.net/). The best part of this app is that it will display dual subtitles! So I've been watching my content with SWC on the bottom and English on the top. Second, the skip back feature (left arrow) jumps back 5 seconds seamlessly which is just about perfect to hear a sentence one more time. The dual subs are REALLY handy as I sometimes don't catch a Cantonese word (glance down at the Chinese subs) and sometimes I don't get the meaning (glance up at the English). It just makes the whole process a LOT smoother and faster. As a side note, Internal Affairs, being a cop/gangster drama, has a LOT of dead air time where everyone is just giving each other dirty looks, posing and just looking cool without saying much, so I heavily under count my hours of listening to it... BUT I have noticed that it seems easier to understand this content as the spaced out dialog allows me to mentally let a phrase ring in my ears for a bit and decode it before the next sentence comes along.

I also had a pleasant surprise as I once again tested my listening against a podcast that was pretty opaque not so long ago (RTHK's 捉心理). I've been listening to episodes in the background in my car, but often not paying much attention to it and when I did comprehension was very, very low. However, last Friday I tried carefully intensively listening to some of the first episode in WorkAudioBook and, looping phrases a bit, I can catch MUCH more than I used to. With a bit of looping I think I can get 60-80%. This compares with maybe 25-40% last time I tried intensive listening to it. My "just play it through" extensive comprehension seems _slightly_ better than before, but I'm not sure if my measure of this can be trusted. I believe it was nearly zero just a couple of months ago, i.e. I could pick out a few words here and there and often guess the general topic after hearing repeated words after a few paragraphs, but now I'm getting a lot more words and I think it only takes a few sentences for me to be able to kind of guess what they are talking about.

What is interesting is that my understanding of cartoons seems to be at about the same level (of course, the visuals provide WAY more clues to understanding). In fact, I think the podcasts may be a little easier as the slightly more "high brow" topics mean the speech is less slangy and it doesn't have the odd fantasy vocabulary of Mr Dreamland or unicorns or whatever... although the cartoons always have a bunch of short easy phrases: "Wait up!", "I want to go home!" etc. And I think the fact that I intensively listen to content such as 鏗鏘集 (a '60 minutes'-like investigative reporting type show), probably means that the vocabulary I cram is a bit more fitting to the podcasts as well.

Once again, it feels like semi-comprehensible extensive listening of native content is just over the horizon, which I'm REALLY excited about. At that point, I feel like the floodgates will open as I could listen to a LOT of content and I'd be able to do it effectively without needing subs or looping or pausing for dictionary look-ups. But I'll need to understand more than a few words here and there on the first pass in order to make that a reality. Back to the grindstone.
Last edited by zKing on Mon Jul 16, 2018 6:48 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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eido
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Re: Stealing time and grappling with fickle devotion

Postby eido » Mon Jul 09, 2018 11:30 pm

Ah, this is so exciting! I'm happy for you. You're doing so well. <3 Keep going. I'll be excited to read of your progress.
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