A Language Log Reborn: Ellasevia —> Denzagathist

[Denzagathist]

WEEK 2: JULY 9 - 15, 2018
Study Time This Week: 26.1 hours
Average Study Time This Week: 3.7 hours/day

Total Study Time in 2018*: 41.9 hours
Average Study Time in 2018*: 3.8 hours/day
* Since starting to keep track on July 5, 2018


Introduction
Normally I should be asleep by this time, but tomorrow is a public holiday (海の日 -- "Marine Day") here in Japan and there is no school, so I wanted to get my weekly log post done. It was probably still just the initial excitement from "officially" restarting my studies, but this was an amazingly productive week as far as language study goes. Having been crippled with depression for so much of the past year, I honestly didn't realize I still had it in me to get this much done. I hope I can keep it up.

日本語
This week I finally started working through a JLPT N3 grammar prep book (日本語総まとめN３文法) that has been sitting on my desk at work for ages. I don't love its format and I don't have the accompanying answer book, but I think it will be useful nonetheless. Most of the grammar points that have been covered so far I already know, but there have been a few new ones that have surprised me. I was originally hoping to do a full "week" of grammar points every day so as to finish the book within a week (given that I already know most of the material), but I've already fallen behind on that goal. I already have too many books to schlep back across the Pacific with me, though, so that's quite good motivation to finish it quickly. I also just recently found the N2 book from the same series in my office, so that's even more motivation to finish the N3 book quickly so that I can move on to the N2 material. I've focused a LOT on my vocabulary in Japanese this year, at the expense of grammar, so I'm not too worried about getting through the accompanying 語彙 (vocabulary) books.

This coming week is the last week of the school semester, so I will have to make a farewell speech in Japanese in front of the entire school (~800 students plus staff) on Friday. I've written the text of the speech (or rather, adapted and added to a model speech that we were given) already, but I really need to practice it. Public speaking is not my forte in any language, and I'm very nervous about doing so in Japanese. This past Friday was my 送別会, or "farewell party", with the Japanese teachers of English at my school. I spoke a good amount of Japanese with them during the course of the evening, which was a nice change from the norm of always using English together. At the end of the evening, I was asked to say a few words in Japanese. I was caught off guard and didn't have anything prepared, so I mostly just borrowed from the contents of my speech. Considering that I hadn't yet worked on memorizing it at all, though, and that I was already several glasses of beer and umeshu (Japanese plum liqueur) into the evening, I was happy that I was able to make a coherent speech at all. All my coworkers seemed really impressed, but I also don't think they had ever heard me speak so much Japanese before.

I did make one interesting mistake at the party, though. At one point, I was trying to say 'technology' in Japanese, and the word that came out was じしゅ (jishu). My coworker couldn't understand, and I was perplexed because I was sure that that was the word for 'technology'. The next day, as I was doing my Chinese Anki reviews, it clicked. The word is written with the same characters (技術) in both Japanese and Chinese, but, of course, pronounced differently: ぎじゅつ (gijutsu) in Japanese, and jìshù in Mandarin. I thought this was funny because up until now, my Japanese and Mandarin had mutually benefitted each other in terms of learning vocabulary and pronunciations of characters, so this was the first time that Mandarin had actually interfered in my Japanese.

普通話
I haven't continued at all through the HSK wordlist that I mentioned previously. It's just so boring to go through. Instead, I've been enjoying reading the stories in my Chinese reader, Tales and Traditions. The stories are about one page each and just about perfect for my level so far. I also appreciate that the texts are written in both simplified and traditional characters, side by side. So far I have only been reading the traditional characters, but I should really make myself practice reading in simplified more. Back in university, we could choose to focus on (i.e. learn to write) either traditional or simplified, but we were required to learn to read both systems. Since then, though, I have neglected simplified characters and they're much more difficult for me to read now.

Italiano
Italian is a new (re)addition to my language palette, so I should probably say a few words about why I've chosen to take it up again. I studied Italian for a couple years what feels like ages ago (~2009-2011), but I eventually lost interest in it for some reason. I think I had perhaps just overdosed on Romance languages; it was around then that I started delving into Germanic, Slavic, and non-Indo-European languages more. Anyways, since dropping Italian, I have visited Italy a number of times and quite like the country, and so have been meaning to return to the language. I was previously a member of a Facebook group that voted for one language to study together as a community every six months. Due to various circumstances, I hadn't been able to participate in any of the previous challenges, but in May I decided to study whichever language they chose (in part because I liked all the top choices). Italian won, but I could just as easily be explaining my reasons for studying Finnish, Georgian, or Polish right now. I'm relishing studying an "easy" language again, though. It's a nice break after having been focused on Japanese this past year, Turkish before that, Mandarin before that, and Croatian before that.

This week has seen some of my first actual study of Italian since deciding to "study" it again; up until now I had mostly just been reactivating my old Anki deck. I've found a podcast that I seem to like and listened to a few episodes of it, making note of any new words while listening. I also took a Dialang test for Italian reading, and was placed at B2 level, but I don't think that's much of a surprise given my level in French/Spanish/Portuguese and my previous study of Italian. Active skills -- and specifically, not "speaking Italian in Spanish" -- are a bigger issue. I have never had any trouble communicating in Italian in Italy, but people there tend to think I'm from Spain.

Türkçe
I completed two new lessons from The Delights of Learning Turkish this week. I do feel like I should definitely be beyond textbooks in Turkish at this point, but this textbook seems quite comprehensive and I never finished it, so I think it would be beneficial to do so. Although I do know the majority of the content already, it is still useful to review some grammar points since I haven't really studied Turkish grammar for two years, and there are some points that I never learned formally, but rather picked up just from living in Turkey and watching Turkish dramas. There is also the occasional grammatical structure or word that is totally new to me. I'd like to try to finish this book within the next few weeks.

Deutsch
I need to start making German a much higher priority, since my move to Germany is only about two months away. All I've really done for German this week is listen to a couple podcasts (e.g. Echo des Tages), watch a bit of YouTube, and read an article in German.

Português
I've continued watching the Brazilian show, 3%, which is why I have so many hours clocked for Portuguese. Not much to comment on here other than that I'm enjoying it.

Español
Having seen that La Ciudad de las Bestias won the poll for the forum book club, I decided to download it to my Kindle. I'm barely a chapter in, but I'm enjoying it so far. I want to start reading more again, both in English and in my target languages, so this looks to be a fun read.

That's about all for tonight! I had hoped this post would be shorter than my previous ones, but I guess I ended up having a lot to say. お休みなさい！

[Denzagathist]

Just a quick update. Later tonight I’m flying to Tokyo for the weekend (my first time there since I first arrived in Japan last summer) and so might not have time for my weekly summary until later next week. I probably won’t have time to do much language study, either. On the other hand, it will be so murderously hot and humid that maybe all I’ll want to do is hide inside air conditioned cafés and read.

I made my farewell speeches in Japanese this morning. Both (one in front of all the school staff members, and then another in front of the entire student body + staff) went well, although I was visibly shaking from nervousness the whole time. Making a speech in your target language in front of hundreds of native speakers is slightly terrifying. Thankfully I had I spent several hours practicing the speeches over the past few days, so they were more or less memorized. A number of teachers approached me afterward, complimenting me both on my Japanese in general, and especially on my intonation. I am going to choose to believe them. I feel so relieved now that they are finished.

That’s all for now! またね！

[Denzagathist]

WEEK 3: JULY 16 - 22, 2018
Study Time This Week: 16.3 hours
Average Study Time This Week: 2.3 hours/day

Total Study Time in 2018*: 58.2 hours
Average Study Time in 2018*: 3.1 hours/day
* Since starting to keep track on July 5, 2018


I just arrived home from Tokyo, so it's time for an update. I quite enjoyed my visit Tokyo (+ Kamakura), despite the unbearable 蒸し暑い weather that plagues most of Japan during the summer. The whole city felt like a wet sauna. I live in Kyushu, and it was actually hotter in Tokyo this past weekend than where I live. Anyways, I got a much better impression of the city this time than when I was there briefly last summer, when I was mostly confined to a hotel for orientation seminars and didn't see or do much. Although it isn't my favorite city in Japan (that honor would probably go to Nagasaki), I won't deny that it is a very cool city and has no shortage of interesting things to do. It almost felt like a different country altogether compared to where I live in Japan. Whenever I travel elsewhere in Japan, my fondness for Japan rekindles a bit because I'm reminded that the city I live in is not representative of the whole country.

Anyways, between having been out of town all weekend and having been busy with moving out preparations earlier in the week, I didn't get as much studying done as last week. I suspect this current week will be similar, since it is my last full week in Japan and I still have a ton to do before I leave.

I actually have very little to comment on for this week, other than some Anki-related issues that I'll describe below. Otherwise, most of my study hours came from listening to podcasts in German and Italian, reading a little of La Ciudad de las Bestias, practicing my speeches in Japanese, working through my N3 grammar book, and watching some TV in Japanese and Portuguese.

Anki Rambles (probably very boring, feel free to skip)
I'm proud of myself for not breaking my Anki streak during my trip to Tokyo. I now have a 22 day streak for having finished ALL of my reviews due each day across all of my decks, which is longer than.... probably anytime in the past 3 years. I hope this means that Anki has finally become a daily habit again.

A few days ago, I decided to make a change to the way I use Anki, just on a trial basis. I had been getting increasingly frustrated with some of my decks where I had reached the point of studying rather advanced vocabulary. The frustration was due to the fact that

1. I felt like I was expending too much effort trying to learn to actively produce words that I likely won't ever need to use myself, and
2. my English cues were often insufficient and/or not clear enough for precisely indicating which TL word/expression was on the other side, due to learning more and more synonyms and words with different nuances and/or slightly differing usages.

For I don't know how many years, I had only been studying in the direction of English --> TL (except for Japanese and Chinese, for which I did both directions due to the characters). My logic was that since production is more difficult than recognition, if I could produce the words then surely I would be able to understand them. I never questioned that logic for years. Starting last week, I started toying with the idea of deleting or suspending the recall cards for Japanese vocabulary items that I didn't think I would ever need to actively use myself, just to lessen my Anki load a bit since Japanese is my biggest and most time-consuming deck. Before doing so, I did some research, both on this forum and elsewhere, and discovered that the overwhelming opinion seems to be that (unless you are a total beginner in the language) it's generally better and more efficient to study in the direction of TL --> L1. Here are a few notes that I jotted down about why that is:

• SRS is good for drilling passive knowledge, but it is much less effective for active knowledge. Being able to correctly produce a word in the artificial context of SRS does not guarantee that you will be able to do so when using the language in a natural setting. For that you need to actually practice speaking and writing.
• It's significantly more difficult, boring, and time consuming to try to produce every precise vocabulary item in the target language than to study in the opposite direction. The more difficult/boring/time consuming it is, the less likely you are to complete the activity at all.
• By the time you reach the point where recognition study is more efficient than production, you will have presumably already encountered the most important words/expressions enough times between SRS and other study activities for them to have entered your active knowledge anyways.
• It's better to train yourself to simply understand the target language automatically than to make yourself reliant on an L1 cue. When reading/listening, you'll be dealing with the TL directly, so the L1 cue would be irrelevant, and when speaking/writing, it's both inefficient and often very unnatural to use your L1 as a crutch; it's better to just think in the TL.

Having assembled this list, I was a little surprised that I had never thought of some of these points before, because some of them seem fairly obvious. In any case, I've now edited all of my decks to be TL --> English only. I'm not totally sure if I'll stick with it, but I like the change so far. It seems to solve a lot of the issues I've had with SRS lately.


...and that's all for this week!

[kulaputra]

Do you use monolingual cards at all? That might be even better for solving the problems you listed.

[Denzagathist]

WEEK 4: JULY 23 - 29, 2018
Study Time This Week: 9.0 hours
Average Study Time This Week: 1.3 hours/day

Total Study Time in 2018*: 67.2 hours
Average Study Time in 2018*: 2.6 hours/day
* Since starting to keep track on July 5, 2018


A very short update this week. I'm exhausted and there's not much to mention.

Shockingly, it turns out that packing up one’s home and preparing to move to a different continent are not terribly conducive to language study. I’ve been busy and stressed out all week, trying to reduce my entire life to two 23kg bags. (It would be much easier if I didn’t have so many language books — most of which I hardly touched all year — to pack.) It was also my birthday, and spending it alone here sent me spiraling back down into another depressive episode, with some unsightly results. All in all, the amount of study that occurred this week aside from daily Anki reviews was negligible.

T-40 hours until I leave Japan.

[Cavesa]

WEEK 4: JULY 23 - 29, 2018
Study Time This Week: 9.0 hours
Average Study Time This Week: 1.3 hours/day

Total Study Time in 2018*: 67.2 hours
Average Study Time in 2018*: 2.6 hours/day
* Since starting to keep track on July 5, 2018


A very short update this week. I'm exhausted and there's not much to mention.

Shockingly, it turns out that packing up one’s home and preparing to move to a different continent are not terribly conducive to language study. I’ve been busy and stressed out all week, trying to reduce my entire life to two 23kg bags. (It would be much easier if I didn’t have so many language books — most of which I hardly touched all year — to pack.) It was also my birthday, and spending it alone here sent me spiraling back down into another depressive episode, with some unsightly results. All in all, the amount of study that occurred this week aside from daily Anki reviews was negligible.

T-40 hours until I leave Japan.

You're awesome!!! I get it, birthdays can be rather sad at times, I wish you all the best in the next year and all the others yet to come.

I admire the way you're facing so many life changes. And reducing one's posessions into a few bags is a challenge. What country are you headed to from Japan?

[MamaPata]

Lots of sympathy - I hope things improve for you.

[Denzagathist]

You're awesome!!! I get it, birthdays can be rather sad at times, I wish you all the best in the next year and all the others yet to come.

I admire the way you're facing so many life changes. And reducing one's posessions into a few bags is a challenge. What country are you headed to from Japan?

You're too kind, Cavesa. Thank you. I'm headed to the United States for the next six weeks. After that, I'm going to Greece to visit family, and then will be in Germany from the end of September onward.

Lots of sympathy - I hope things improve for you.

Thank you. I love how supportive this community is.

Do you use monolingual cards at all? That might be even better for solving the problems you listed.

Sorry I didn't respond to this earlier. I have never used monolingual cards. I don't really have a good reason why not. At this point it would be more effort than it's worth to change all of my cards, though, so I would probably only consider doing it with a brand new deck. It's something to consider for the future.

[Denzagathist]

WEEK 5: JULY 29 - AUGUST 5, 2018
Study Time This Week: 12.1 hours
Average Study Time This Week: 1.7 hours/day

Total Study Time in 2018*: 79.3 hours
Average Study Time in 2018*: 2.6 hours/day
* Since starting to keep track on July 5, 2018


Another week has passed! This past week hasn't seen a lot of study activity, but for legitimate reasons. I was very busy at the beginning of the week trying to finish packing up my whole life in Japan. Monday was my last day of work in Japan and then I flew out on Tuesday. I only slept about two hours on my last night there because of all that I needed to do, and then proceeded to spend 25 hours traveling back to the US. After that, the exhaustion, plus the jet lag, really hit me. I could hardly stay awake, much less study actively for the next few days. The jet lag has never really bothered me when flying in the opposite direction, but when coming from Asia to North America it hits me hard.

There's not much to report for this week. Most of the hours that I logged this week were for Anki reviews. I got a double dose of due cards on the day I flew back because I forgot to adjust my Anki account for the time zone -- although it was still Tuesday in the US and I had already finished Tuesday's due cards before leaving Asia, a new batch appeared because it was already Wednesday in Japan.

The Six Week Challenge (6WC) started this week and I am participating .... with Persian! I originally signed up for Russian, but then realized that I really didn't want to revisit Russian yet. So I changed my registration to Mandarin, since it was my only eligible language. But I didn't really want to focus so much on Mandarin right now, so I finally decided on Persian. I've had a longstanding interest in the Persian language and have studied it on and off numerous times over the past several years. At one point I may have reached a high A2 or low B1 level in the language, but for now I'm back to false beginner level, probably around A1 thanks to what I have retained. I only got around to restarting my official studies yesterday. I'm currently using the following materials:
- Spoken World Farsi
- Colloquial Persian
- Assimil Le Persan
- Pimsleur Farsi
- Chai and Conversation

I'm currently staying at my parents' house, where I have access to my full collection of language materials that I have amassed. If any wanderlust is going to happen, now is simultaneously the best and the worst time for it to happen. Best, because I have resources for a great many languages on hand here, and worst, because... well, for exactly the same reason. It's harder to stray off into, say, Georgian when I have no Georgian resources available, but I just happen to have some here...

That's all for this week. I'm hoping to find a better study rhythm starting this week!
به امید دیدار

[Denzagathist]

WEEK 6: AUGUST 6-12, 2018
Study Time This Week: 15.6 hours
Average Study Time This Week: 2.2 hours/day

Total Study Time in 2018*: 94.9 hours
Average Study Time in 2018*: 2.4 hours/day
* Since starting to keep track on July 5, 2018


These weeks are flying by. Even though I'm not even working anymore, there still never seems to be enough time in the day to do everything that I intend.

The bulk of my study time in the past week was dedicated to Persian -- 6.5 hours out of the total 15.6 hours of study this week. A lot of that time was spent listening to Pimsleur, which I've actually listened to numerous times before, but I always like to use it as a refresher for the basics of Persian. It's also a great study activity to do while doing household chores. I'm now staying with my boyfriend and his kitchen really needed a good clean, so I listened to about 3 hours of Pimsleur just while cleaning the kitchen. Aside from that, I've been attempting (with varying degrees of success) to plod along with my other course books and podcast lessons. I'm currently in 21st place in the 6WC, which is just unacceptable. (Although if I studied just 10 more minutes of Persian I would already jump to 18th place.) I do also have several hours of Anki time that haven't been submitted yet, which I will submit all at once at the end of the challenge.

Podcasts and audio materials are some of my favorite tools lately. I don't seem to enjoy sitting down and working through textbooks as much as I did in the past, especially when I don't have a proper desk or workspace. But audio materials can be used almost anywhere -- lying down in bed, on the bus, on an airplane, while cooking or cleaning... So I have been doing a lot of listening. I found a new podcast in German called SWR2 Wissen that I like much more than Echo des Tages (which more often than not would bore me to sleep), and I've continued to listen to some in Italian as well. There is also an Australian broadcasting service called SBS that publishes podcasts in a variety of languages -- so far I've listened in Portuguese, Greek, and Persian, but I'm sure they have programming in others too. Some of the content is specifically about Australia, so I would prefer to listen to content about, e.g. Brazil, Greece, or Iran, but it will do in the meantime.

What else? I've continued watching 3% in Portuguese. I'm almost finished with the first season.

I want to start setting specific goals on a weekly basis, but I'm not sure how to begin/what would be a realistic goal because I always overestimate what I'll have time to do. I'll think about this more for next week.