A Language Log Reborn: Ellasevia —> Denzagathist

[Denzagathist]

I haven’t yet organized my thoughts enough to be able to write about my current levels in my target languages and my goals for them going forward, so that will have to be left for yet another future post. In the meantime, though, I’ve recently discovered the archive of wonderful talks from the past Polyglot Gatherings on YouTube and have been watching many of them. Listening to some of those talks has been highly motivational and was likely one of my sources of inspiration for finally deciding to start a new log. In one talk, the speaker said that if we don’t keep track of what we’re doing for our language study, it feels like we’ve done nothing. I believe that to be very true, and find that I am far more motivated and goal-driven when I can clearly look back and see what I’ve accomplished. With that in mind, I’d like to make a few notes about some of my recent study activities.

ANKI
My primary and only regular study activity of late has been my daily Anki reviews. After years of using Anki very irregularly and ignoring reviews for months at a time, I’m trying to finally get back into the habit of doing my reviews every day. I know that when you do the reviews regularly and exactly when they become due, the whole system is more effective and it is less burdensome on the user.

So, for almost two months now, I have been keeping a detailed spreadsheet where I track my progress through catching up on my Anki decks. It has been challenging, considering that when I started this project I had over 12,000 total due cards across all of my active decks. I simply do not have the patience or time to sit through thousands of reviews at once, and I also know that trying to review them all at once would significantly increase the short-term workload (since I had inevitably forgotten a large number of those words) and make my studying less effective overall. Instead, I started by setting a cap of 100-120 reviews per day per language and slowly working my way through the backlog that way. At some point I modified by strategy somewhat to review all of the cards due on that particular day, and, depending on how determined I felt and how many cards were already due for the next day, perhaps some 50-100 extra.

By this point, I’ve caught up on the backlogged reviews for all my decks except for Croatian and Japanese, which each started with about 4000 overdue cards. Barring any setbacks, I expect that I could be caught up on my Japanese deck within a week, and on my Croatian deck within about a month. I have averaged about 850 total cards due every day over the past two months, although the past two weeks have had much higher due counts at around 1100 per day. It typically takes me 1.5-2 hours to get through all of them, depending on how many there are, how tired I am, etc. I usually get most or all of them done while on the bus to work in the morning or during my copious amounts of dead time at work.

中文
Studying Chinese independently feels strange to me because it's the only one of my target languages that I've ever learned primarily in a formal classroom environment. My two years of Chinese during college were fairly intense -- my professor prided himself on making the class so difficult that at least half of the students would drop it before the midway point -- so I never felt the need to do much outside of class, and combined with coursework from other classes, I rarely had enough time anyways.

In addition to having never studied it on my own in any structured way, I’m unsure about my current level. It’s been over three years since my last Chinese class and I’ve done next to nothing since then other than occasional bursts of vocabulary reviews in Anki and listening to a handful of podcasts. I was certainly B1 or better three years ago, but at this point I feel like I could be anywhere in the range of high A1 to solid B1. I tried to speak as much Chinese as possible during a trip to Taiwan last October, and was pleasantly surprised that I had no real difficulty communicating. The Taiwanese accent in Mandarin was a little hard to understand at times, but it wasn’t my first time hearing it so I knew what to expect. Thus, in an effort to gauge my current level somewhat, I’ve started going through a list of HSK vocabulary. It’s mostly quite easy so far, if a bit slow-going since I’m not accustomed to reading 简体字 (simplified characters).

In addition to that, I purchased a Chinese reader of traditional short stories and fables a few years ago. It has been sitting on my bookshelf unused since then, but I finally decided to crack it open yesterday and began studying from it for the first time. I had very little trouble with the three stories that I’ve read so far, only missing a few less common words.

日本語
I didn’t mention this in my initial post, but I’m actually leaving Japan permanently at the end of this month. Because of that, I’ve had stronger than usual motivation for studying Japanese lately. I believe that this is due to the fact that I currently have little to no intention of continuing to study Japanese after leaving Japan, so however good my Japanese is by then will likely be as good as it will ever get. As such I have been trying to reach a level at which I can feel comfortable essentially calling it quits. Last week, I reread an entire Japanese grammar book and did some practice JLPT exams to test myself. I’m confident that I could easily pass the N3 exam at this point, and given a bit more study, maybe barely squeak by with a passing score on the N2 (especially since such a low score is required to pass and it only tests passive skills). I usually consider B2 to be the point at which I’m willing to stop studying a serious target language, but I think claiming B2 level in Japanese now would still be a stretch.

My Japanese level is somewhat hard to pinpoint, though, because I feel like my passive and active skills are at very different places. Although I constantly read and hear Japanese every day, I rarely have to speak more than a couple sentences in Japanese. Because of that, I feel remarkably comfortable reading and listening (depending on the topic, of course) but my active production outside of routine situations leaves something to be desired. Still, I sometimes surprise myself. Yesterday, for example, I needed to inquire at an electronics store about the process of canceling my phone and Internet service contracts in a few weeks — a topic which I’ve never had to deal with in any language before — and was able to navigate the entire interaction fully in Japanese, and am fairly confident that I made myself understood and was able to correctly comprehend the information I received.

Paradoxically, living in Japan has more or less destroyed all of my motivation for learning Japanese. I simply do not enjoy living or working here, and my strong feelings of resentment for my job and where I live have, unfortunately, translated into a distaste for the language as well. I used to consider Japanese to be one of my favorite languages, but now I often find it grating to even listen to (though, this is more likely due to the incredibly annoying voices that Japanese people constantly use rather than the language itself). For several months, I stopped studying Japanese altogether because I could already speak and understand it well enough to complete all of my regular, day-to-day activities without any difficulty and felt that I had no reason or need to learn more. I wonder whether these negative feelings will abate somewhat after I leave Japan. At any rate, as of now, I have no plans to continue with active study of Japanese after the end of this month.

[brilliantyears]

Paradoxically, living in Japan has more or less destroyed all of my motivation for learning Japanese. I simply do not enjoy living or working here, and my strong feelings of resentment for my job and where I live have, unfortunately, translated into a distaste for the language as well. I used to consider Japanese to be one of my favorite languages, but now I often find it grating to even listen to (though, this is more likely due to the incredibly annoying voices that Japanese people constantly use rather than the language itself). For several months, I stopped studying Japanese altogether because I could already speak and understand it well enough to complete all of my regular, day-to-day activities without any difficulty and felt that I had no reason or need to learn more. I wonder whether these negative feelings will abate somewhat after I leave Japan. At any rate, as of now, I have no plans to continue with active study of Japanese after the end of this month.

This is how I felt after a year in Japan. It was easily the best year of my life, but I was a student. I knew exactly how different it would be if I'd be working in Japan. After I left, I felt pretty negatively about Japanese (even took up an entirely different direction of studies), and was sure I'd never go back to live there. I'm still 200% sure I never want to work there (I'd like to live there again short-term but without any responsibilities, please ), but my love for Japanese and Japan has come back in waves Right now I'm riding the loving-it wave again. I don't ever feel negatively about it anymore, at most I feel indifferent.

Out of curiosity, what kind of job are you doing?

[Elsa Maria]

Welcome to the forum! I remember you from the HTLAL forums. Congratulations on graduating from college and all of your other accomplishments. My youngest is looking at colleges now, and is filtering them based on their language offerings.

I look forward to reading about your current language studies.

(You wouldn't remember me from the other forum. I only posted a little bit and I had a different user name there.)

[Denzagathist]

This is how I felt after a year in Japan. It was easily the best year of my life, but I was a student. I knew exactly how different it would be if I'd be working in Japan.

I don’t doubt that my experience would have been significantly different if I were studying rather than working, or even if I just lived in a city that I liked. As it is, though, my experience has been such that I’m counting down the days until I leave, and can’t really imagine ever wanting to come back.

Out of curiosity, what kind of job are you doing?

I have the stereotypical gaijin job: (assistant) English teacher at a Japanese high school. I was interested in teaching English abroad for a year after graduating from university, and this seemed like the best option for doing so since you could apply without already needing to be in Japan, and since they pay for your flights to/from Japan, arrange your visa and housing for you, and it pays quite decently compared to some other countries/programs. I had also studied Japanese back in high school, so I figured this would be a good chance to finally visit a country I had had a longstanding interest in and revive a mostly-forgotten language (as opposed to, say, Vietnam, where I would have had to start with the language from scratch). The downside is that you don’t get to pick where in Japan you’re sent.

The reality of the job is so utterly different from what I had imagined that it's both painful and laughable to reflect back on. I can't stand it, for a whole list of reasons that I could go on about for hours (but won’t). Suffice it to say that between Japan’s oppressive work culture and the truly horrendous quality of its foreign language education, I simultaneously feel overworked, underworked and unfulfilled. Considering what a huge toll it’s taken on my mental health, at this point I’m just thankful to have made it (almost) out alive.

To give you an idea, here is just one depressingly accurate comment about this program that I’ve found on Reddit:
“As others have said, you'll probably be okay as long as you're aware that you will very likely be sitting at a desk all day and what little teaching you do get to do is likely going to be reading vocab words or texts aloud in front of a class of either dead silent students or disruptive students with discipline standards so low that you will be shocked what they get away with. [...] When people say that Japanese language education is different from what you might expect, that's just code for "Japanese language education is somewhere between abysmal and non-existent." If you have experience with either teaching or language learning you'll pick up on just how woefully bad it is within the first few days and then have to go through the 5 stages of grief over the next 6 months until you settle on just accepting that you can do nothing about it.”

The same thing happened to me. I was no where near your level but once I lived in Japan for a month and half, I lost the motivation for it. Maybe it is because I lived in a tourist city but I couldn't stand how many people was just every where I needed to go and people just standing in the middle of the path. There are parts I loved like buying bentos every day to try new things, hiking up mountains, the public transportation, the quality of the fast food (miss you Mos Burger) and the massive stores you can get lost in. The people there were very nice to me(got a Mimikyu in a crane machine moved to a 99% win spot[twice because I got 1% the first time x.x] without asking x3) and I never even noticed any long stares at me. While I dont hate Japan or the language, there are parts of it that I dislike and have only come to realize it after living there.

Hmm, we seem to have had rather different experiences. I live in a big city, but it’s by no means a tourist city. It’s actually more of a conglomeration of several smaller towns that all just grew into each other, so it still has a very provincial, conservative feel to it. The total population is nearly 1 million but it's spread out over such a huge area that I thankfully don't have to deal with hordes of people all the time, like you do in places like Tokyo, Osaka, or Kyoto. There are basically no foreigners here aside from other English teachers, though, so I frequently get stared at like I’m an escaped zoo animal — random strangers even take pictures of me while I’m waiting at the bus stop, and children often run away when they see me — which obviously makes me super uncomfortable. It’s one of the reasons why I no longer go out in public beyond the bare minimum.

Welcome to the forum! I remember you from the HTLAL forums. Congratulations on graduating from college and all of your other accomplishments. My youngest son is looking at colleges now, and he is filtering them based on their language offerings.

I look forward to reading about your current language studies.

Thanks for stopping by! Is your son interested in studying foreign languages and/or linguistics as his major?

[Teango]

Поздравляю, как замечательно! Are you and your wife planning on raising her bilingually with English and Russian?

Спасибо! We're raising our daughter "try-lingually", that is, we're trying our best to raise her in English, Russian, and New Zealand Sign Language.

[Denzagathist]

WEEK 1: JULY 5 - 8, 2018
Study Time This Week: 15.8 hours
Average Study Time This Week: 4.0 hours/day

Total Study Time in 2018*: 15.8 hours
Average Study Time in 2018*: 4.0 hours/day
* Since starting to keep track on July 5, 2018


Introduction and semi-relevant musings
I want to get into the habit of logging my activities each week, so I might as well begin now, even if it's a bit late. I was floundering about earlier in the week, trying to figure out how to begin since it had been so long since I had organized my studies in any structured way. I have been slowly gearing up again over the past month or so, but I expect that I'll still need the rest of this month to finish getting organized. Starting in August I'll (temporarily) have significantly more free time because I won't be working and won't be in classes yet, so I hope to be more or less organized in terms of thoughts, evaluations, goals, materials, etc. by then. I also want to have a plan and a routine to fall back into since I anticipate some chaos within the next two months, as I'll be moving countries/continents not once, but twice -- did I mention that I'm starting a Master's program in Germany in the fall?

Anyways, while floundering about I looked up some of my old language logs on the HTLAL forum from ~6-8 years ago (!!!!) to remind myself of what I had done in the past. I was a little shocked to see just how much time I consistently spent on language study back then, but I have to remind myself that I was still in high school and had no job or any real obligations other than schoolwork. Still, I drew some inspiration from my former self and decided to resurrect my study spreadsheet that I used to keep track of study time and activities. It's amazing how much simply keeping track of your activities motivates you (or at least me) to do more. I studied far more than usual over the past few days since restarting my study spreadsheet. I hope I can keep up this starting momentum.

Just a couple more notes before getting into what I actually did this week.

Reading my old log was quite nostalgic and entertaining. Maybe the most beneficial aspect of looking at it was simply remembering how much fun I used to have studying languages. One of my favorite memories that I rediscovered was from when I first started learning Croatian and was absolutely baffled by the pitch accent, and commented that I could tell it was going to give me problems. That just delighted me, since I went on to write my BA thesis on pitch accent in BCMS last year.

Another factor in my former and newfound productivity: no social media. I had no social media accounts at all until 7 years ago. I recently decided to delete my Facebook account, for a number of reasons, and although I had been aware that I spent a fair amount of time on it, I had no idea just how much time until I deleted it. Not only am I in a noticeably better mental/emotional state, but also I feel like I have so much more time now. Whenever I reflexively go to open a Facebook tab or the app on my phone, I now notice and instead direct myself to do something productive and/or beneficial for my mental health. What a difference that has made. I'm so pleased.

As I mentioned previously, I've also been watching a lot of the talks from former Polyglot Gatherings -- and I'm hoping to attend one in the future, now that I (a) know they exist and (b) will be living in Europe. I came across this talk by Alex Rawlings in which he describes his experience trying to learn Hungarian while living in Hungary, and I was struck by how uncannily similar many aspects of it were to my experience with learning Japanese in Japan. It's given me a fair amount to reflect on, especially as I now prepare to relocate again and don't want to repeat this experience in Germany. Maybe I'll write about it at some point, maybe even in Japanese. More likely in German. No promises either way.

Study (and related) activities
So, as the top of this post indicates, I spent nearly 16 hours studying languages this week, by which I really mean since July 5th, since that's when I started recording my time. I should note that almost 9 of those hours were just my daily Anki reviews, so actually it was only ~7 hours of what I consider to be "real" study. On the Anki front, I've caught up on my Japanese deck, and revised my strategy on my Croatian deck, so I aim to be caught up on it, too, within another week. I should note that by "caught up" I simply mean "having completed all of the (over)due reviews," not that I've necessarily studied all the cards in the deck.

One of my activities lately has been trying to assemble a document, which I will then summarize on this log, in which I aim to detail my current levels, goals, motivations, materials, etc etc for each of my target languages. When I've barely touched some of these languages for months, if not years, that is easier said than done, and takes some time. For example, I remember being solidly C1 in French several years ago, but can I still claim C1 level today? Maybe I'm still C1 in passive skills but not in active skills? How can I know for sure? Even as I use the self-assessment grid to evaluate myself, I can't help but wonder if I'm interpreting some of the descriptions correctly. Because of that, I've been motivated to seek out external evaluations by using online diagnostic tools such as Dialang and looking at sample CEFR-based exams. I've also been considering setting the goal of taking one official CEFR-based exam -- probably in German -- within the next year or so, if only just to determine once and for all if I really understand what X# level feels like.

Anyways, the point of that rambling paragraph was that I've taken three tests on Dialang so far in the past week: French reading, French listening, and Greek reading. I was assessed at C1 level for both skills in French, which was what I had estimated my own level to be. In Greek reading, I was assessed at B2 level, which was also what I had estimated for myself prior to taking the exam, but was pleasantly surprised to receive that score since I had struggled so much with the level of the vocabulary on the exam and was sure I had failed. Lack of vocabulary is definitely my #1 problem in Greek.

As for Japanese, for now I've simply evaluated myself using the CEFR grid. I previously stated that I felt like my listening and reading were at a higher level than my speaking and writing. Surprisingly, though, I actually evaluated myself as higher (tentatively B2 on a good day) in speaking and writing than in listening and reading (B1). The criteria for B2 in listening and reading suggest the ability to understand lectures, TV news broadcasts, films, and contemporary literature in Japanese, which I definitely do not think I would be able to do. That said, I've never actually tried, so who knows... On the other hand, and maybe this is the key issue, I have little to no interest in reading books or watching TV/films in Japanese. It's just never been a goal or interest of mine, even when I was more motivated to study Japanese. So I don't know if that's an issue that can be (or even needs to be?) resolved.

The only other activity worth specific mention is that I finally started watching a Brazilian show on Netflix called 3%, which I've been meaning to start for a few months. This is the first TV show that I've ever watched in Portuguese, and so far I'm pleased with my level of comprehension. I've been watching with subtitles (in Portuguese) for now, even though most of the time I don't need them. I've convinced myself that this is fine since I frequently watch shows with subtitles even in English.

That's all for tonight! My apologies for writing another mammoth post.

@Teango: I loved your wordplay there! Is there a specific reason why you chose NZSL?

EDIT: I wanted to include a graph showing my study time per language, but I can't figure out how to make it work and so I've removed the image link. A task for another day. Update: Fixed!

[gsbod]

For an objective evaluation of your Japanese comprehension, the JLPT practice papers should give a pretty good indication of where you are. From my experience of taking JLPT and using practice tests from Goethe Institut I would say that N3 is pretty close to B1 and N2 is pretty close to B2.

[zenmonkey]

Welcome back!!

[Denzagathist]

For an objective evaluation of your Japanese comprehension, the JLPT practice papers should give a pretty good indication of where you are. From my experience of taking JLPT and using practice tests from Goethe Institut I would say that N3 is pretty close to B1 and N2 is pretty close to B2.

Thank you! I had read about those approximate equivalencies somewhere, but it's helpful to have them confirmed by someone who has first-hand experience with both systems. Although I'll admit to not having looked very closely at any JLPT materials up until recently, I would wager that I could easily pass N3 at this point but that N2 would still require quite a bit more work.

@zenmonkey: Thank you!

[Teango]

Is there a specific reason why you chose NZSL?

My wife and I are really glad we chose to use NZSL with our daughter from the day she was born. It not only promoted intricate tactile movements, focused attention, and hand-eye coordination in the early stages of her development, but it's been simply amazing for facilitating relatively sophisticated dialogue early on.

As to why we chose NZSL specifically...it just made sense to stay with an official sign language set in the South Pacific with strong connections to Polynesian culture and language. NZSL also offers some excellent contemporary online resources, and although I do supplement my vocabulary with the odd ASL or BSL (and sometimes even JSL) loanword here and there, I just personally prefer the way NZSL is signed.