Cantonese Progress Report 10/8/2018End 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: 41/52, 22 weeks into the project out of ~32.
AnkiCards are Production only: Meaning -> Jyutping
Daily New: 10
Daily Reviews: ~80-100
Daily Time: ~20m
Total Cards: 3490
Unseen: 100
Young: 668
Mature: 772
Suspended: 1950
OutputWriting: 2650 characters
Last Week: 0
ROL/Shadow/Chorus: 6:00
Last Week: 0
No Output (beyond iTalki) this week.
I saw a video this week that at one point talked about pronunciation and suggested an interesting exercise... I might try it.
The exercise:
- In your L1, write one rather long 'island' introducing yourself, why you are learning your TL, job, family, etc. It should be something like 5 mins total if spoken.
- With the help of a native speaker, get it translated very accurately and native-like into your L2.
- Practice reading it out loud (no need to memorize it)
- Record yourself reading it out loud.
- Give the L2 transcript and your recording to a native speaker, have them mark each point in the transcript where your pronunciation was not correct.
- Ask some questions about those issues, then go back to step #3.
The important ideas behind this exercise:
- You get fluent in a nice long talk which contains 90% of what you are likely to say in your TL to any new speaker of your TL.
- By recording yourself and having a native mark the pronunciation mistakes, you get very specific point by point feedback, can spot patterns, can avoid only getting generalizations about your mistakes, etc.
- In a talk this long you are likely to encounter a very large portion of the pronunciation challenges in your L2 and can practice getting them right over and over.
- Early on, you can instruct your tutor: "Please only mark my really bad mistakes, stuff you barely understand" and later on say "Please mark anything that doesn't sound 100% native"
- Even though you won't explicitly make the effort to memorize this island, if you practice it over and over until you can say it quite fluently and accurately, many of these sentences and phrases will likely come to you in time of need.
The claim was that this exercise can help you develop a VERY good pronunciation. I believe it. Now the question is: do I believe it is worth the effort.
InputTotal Content Run Time: 53:00
Last Week: 2:00
I spent a considerable amount of time watching YouTube videos with subs this week, I even found some that had accurate Cantonese subs (instead of SWC). Some of these were with non-native (but quite fluent) speakers. While I normally would not use non-native speaker content, these videos had accurate subs (which is exceedingly rare) and I believe that they spoke a tiny bit slower and more simply allowing MUCH higher comprehension. I won't be using this content exclusively, but it was nice to be able to mix in this novel content which was so much easier to understand.
On another topic, I think I'm going to try to LR the novel 男人唔可以窮. I've had this book for a while and it is one of the rare books written completely in spoken form Cantonese. Not so long ago, I found a podcast where some radio show had read the book out loud over the course of about 30 half hour shows. It doesn't follow the book EXACTLY word for word, but its is pretty darn close. They throw in some extra sentences here and there for radio drama, mostly exclamations or lead ins to new paragraphs. The book is pretty advanced, vocabulary-wise, but I think I'm ready to tackle it. I may repeatedly short-loop listen through some chapters, sentence by sentence, or just straight up LR it... I haven't decided.
Also, I think I've noticed a pattern with many (not all) really successful language learners: They do a lot more repetition than I do with each bit of their content. I usually listen to content 1, maybe 2 times and move on fairly quickly. I may come back to it, but usually it is months later after I've completely forgotten all of it and it is 'interesting' to me again. As just one example, Luca will take the same dialog and listen to it through multiple passes, first with just audio, then LR, then he'll look up all the vocab, then he'll listen to it again until he really understands it all... and later he'll even translate L1 -> L2. While I make progress by listening just 1-2 times and moving on to something else, I think I could progress FASTER if I really focus on one bit of content through a few passes until I'm getting 90-98%+ transparency with it before moving on. To mix metaphors: I think I'm leaving some low hanging fruit on the table when listen just 1-2 times. This will have to be balanced with my boredom meter; I'm not going to turn my language learning time into a grind. But I think even a slight upward adjustment of the "repeat knob" would be a good thing.
iTalkiTotal Lesson Time: 13:30
Last Week: 1:30
I had a 1 hour session with Eldo and a 30min session with a new Tutor, Jason. I used to do 1 hour sessions with Eldo once per week. But that schedule had two issues:
- It was hard to fit a full 1 hour block in my schedule regularly (and schedule it way ahead)
- I felt that the single session per week was too spread out. After the single session my brain would be spinning intensely with Cantonese, but after a few days it would sort of die out and the next week it would feel like I had to cold start the engine all over again.
So I decided I would try to do multiple 30 min sessions each week. Eldo only does tutoring Monday and Tuesdays, so I needed a second tutor for other days of the week, and I found Jason. Our first session was great, Jason basically just kept asking me questions and I did almost all of the talking. It all felt pretty fluid, although the introduction 'get to know you' questions are a pretty easy topic for me to talk about.
This week I have two 30 min sessions with Eldo (Mon, Tue) and one 30 min session with Jason (Thu).
Until next time...
