I'm a long time lurker here and at HTLAL and it is probably about time I start a log.
Cantonese background:
I've been learning Cantonese on and off for about 10 years (yikes!), since my wife and I met. She is a native speaker of Cantonese, but speaks almost perfect native-like English without an accent. I don't like to bore her with my two-year-old level speaking and she has very little interest in Cantonese media, so she helps me mostly with "how would a native say X?" type questions. And after being essentially forced to learn English to a VERY high level (she is an attorney), she has very little interest in language learning and only sees it as a huge pile of work. We do both enjoy karaoke, however, and I sing Cantonese songs weekly. When she speaks with her family the conversations are all Cantonese. (I insist that they feel free to speak in Cantonese when around me.) I can usually follow the gist of most conversations, but I get lost easily and miss most of the details. We recently took our first trip to Hong Kong and visited some of my wife's relatives. People were quite stunned at my ability to both understand and read with Cantonese pronunciation. They were very encouraging and motivated me to push ahead and get truly conversational.
My reading is B range, listening is high A range and speaking is phrasebook level.
Over the years I've had spurts of serious focus and long stretches of little contact or study.
My real focus is to get my listening very solid, perhaps high-B2 or even C1-ish and then work on speaking.
Italian background:
My wife and I love to visit Italy so back in 2015 I took a stab at learning Italian.
Up to that point, I had very consciously avoided starting another language as I knew I would be very susceptible to language wanderlust.
(Mmm, Arabic, Hindi, French, Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, Russian, German, Portugese...)
But I told myself that I would learn a lot by learning a bit of a language different that Cantonese, i.e.
- Closer to English, lots of cognates
- Has a big selection of learning materials, websites, etc.
- Written phonetically
- Written mostly like it is spoken, i.e. no "second language" to learn. (Diaglossia sucks)
- And just plain faster and easier to see rates of progress.
And... it was all true.
Italian was fun and I was having conversations with iTalki tutors, all in Italian in a matter of months.
On our next trip to Italy, I was chit-chatting with waiters, giving directions to taxi drivers, making reservations on the phone(and making lots of mistakes as well)... all in Italian.
I could _function_ and it was a VERY fun experience and I absolutely love Italian even more than before.
In the past year or so, I haven't done much with Italian so it is a bit rusty.
I was probably around low A2 before, but I need to knock the rust off that.
Time:
This brings me to my biggest issue, time. I am not willing to allocate a lot of what I call language learning "Golden Time".
I think my langauge learning time divides up roughly as follows:
- "Golden time": time at my computer where I can exclusively concentrate on language learning and listen/speak/make noise.
I can do 'anything': type, click buttons, make noise, listen to stuff, watch and rewind videos, whatever.
- "Ears-Only time": I can listen, but have limited ability to otherwise interact (i.e. click buttons, etc.)
This usually includes driving time, jogging, etc.
- "Quiet time": I can interact with my phone a bit, but I either don't want to be "that guy" and have headphones buzzing or
I need to be interruptable or it is such a short period of time that I would lose too much of it if I try pulling out the headphones.
Think of standing in line, waiting for a meeting to start, hanging out in a room with someone who is quietly reading, etc.
- "Phone time": I'm not at my computer, but I can be a bit more self-involved and can put in the headphones and focus without being too annoying.
Life's demands and my other priorities mean that I don't spend much on the evenings and weekends.
So I get between 3-7 hours per week of Golden time.
I do get goodly sized chunks of the other types of time, so I need to be careful how I use it.
The Plan:
- Golden Time:
. Primary: Intensively study Cantonese Audio. Vocabulary mine as a I go.
. Occasionally I need to drop the mined vocab into Anki, but I do this in big batches to keep the time hit minimal.
- Ears-Only Time:
. Extensive Listening to familiar or comprehensible content, Cantonese
- Quiet Time:
. Anki Cantonse Vocabulary (has no audio)
. Extensive Italian Reading (with pop up dicationary)
- Phone Time:
(i.e. one of the three above)
. Extensive Listening to familiar or comprehensible content, Cantonese
. Anki Cantonse Vocabulary (has no audio)
. Extensive Italian Reading (with pop up dicationary)
The justification for the plan above has a few main driving forces:
1. Anki works, but it hurts.
2. Intensive Listening with Vocabulary mining can really only be done in Golden Time and it is the most directly effective process for my goals.
3. You can learn a lot of Italian with extensive reading, not so much with Cantonese (see diglossia)
On Anki:
I have used Anki a lot. And it is painful. I have tried a zillion variations to try to both make it more effective and less painful.
I have tried goldlists and word lists and spreadsheets and memrise and audio cards and subs2srs and use-a-goolge-image cards, etc. etc.
I have come to a few conclusions:
a. When I use Anki (or really any other spaced repetition question-answer testing things), I learn stuff.
b. If you spend more than 20-30 minutes a day on it, it becomes VERY painful and hard to keep up.
c. Most of the things you try to do to make it "work better" eat up as much or more time than they save. (And often they eat Golden Time)
d. No matter what you do, some cards will come easy, some will come hard, and some just won't stick with this kind of tool. Most will be somewhere in the middle.
e. It doesn't really matter if you don't get some cards, getting say 75% is just fine.
f. A HUGE chunk of the effectiveness is just seeing the card again and again and again over days, weeks and months.
g. Anki does not teach you a langauge. It only puts a mini-one-entry-badly-edited dictionary in your head. But that helps.
h. Perfectionism+Anki=Sadomasochism
So how do I use Anki?
a. While I always take a stab at remembering the card, I never "fail" a card. I always answer "Good".
I really don't care if there are some cards that I always "fail" at remembering. There are plenty of others I DO learn.
b. Due to the above, I have narrowed the ease interval thingy (whatever Anki calls it) so they show up a bit more often.
c. If a card is lame/ambiguous/too hard, I sometimes edit it to make it easier, if I still hate it later... I just let it go by.
d. I always use production vocabulary cards
. They are super easy to make, and I can bulk import them from a spreadsheet of mined vocab.
. They make me pay attention more (spelling, tones, etc.), so I remember more.
e. I spend the absolute MINIMUM time making cards that I can. This is usually Golden Time and Anki doesn't deserve it.
f. I do 20 new cards per day, and always try to spend less than 30 minutes on cards. 20 minutes is even better.
g. I ALWAYS do reviews during dead/quiet time. Usually the bathroom. Remember: Anki doesn't deserve any better.
And now I think I've spent WAY too much Golden Time writing this post...
JC