Military historian's corner - EN, HE, ZH, AR, sometimes RU, FR and DE

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cjareck
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Location: Poland
Languages: Polish (N) English, German, Russian(B1?) French (B1?), Hebrew(B1?), Arabic(A2?), Mandarin (HSK 2)
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Re: Military historian's corner - EN, HE, ZH, AR, sometimes RU, FR and DE

Postby cjareck » Thu Dec 31, 2020 10:06 pm

I think it is a good time to sum up, my achievements this passing year. They are not that good, but mainly due to health issues. Also, writing a book took me quite a lot of time. Hopefully, 2021 will not be worse!

Hebrew
cjareck wrote:- improve listening comprehension
- improve reading comprehension
- reach vocabulary level of at least 10 000 in LWT
- make Hebrew a really useful tool in my academic work

Unfortunately, I didn't manage to reach any of those objectives. I didn't treat Hebrew as my main study field, which was a big mistake. I have to correct that and keep pushing forward until I will finally be able to put Hebrew into maintenance mode.
During 2020 I added 969⁩ Anki cards and spent ⁨284⁩ days learning (⁨78⁩%) and had 26 773⁩ repetitions and used 3586 minutes for that.
I've reached 7146 words in LWT.

Arabic
cjareck wrote:- have 50 lessons of DLI MSA Basic Course done (currently 12)
- have 15 lessons of Polish ESSK Arabic for beginners done (currently 4)
- LWT Vocabulary at about 2000

I've got tempted by Arabic and spent more time with it than with Hebrew. Nevertheless, I made only 5 5 DLI's lessons and 4 ESKK's lessons, completing the 17th and 8th, respectively.
During 2020 I added 2003⁩ Anki cards and spent 294 days learning (⁨81⁩%) and had 24 613⁩ repetitions and used 3914 minutes for that.
I've reached 677 words in LWT.

Mandarin
cjareck wrote:- finish both volumes of Assimil
- LWT vocabulary at about 2000


Well, I failed miserably here. Assimil is not that easy for me. I also try not to focus on Mandarin too much since Hebrew are Arabic are currently more important for me.
During 2020 I added 1461⁩ (and a Hanping HSK deck with 20 000 cards) Anki cards and spent 295⁩ days learning (⁨81⁩%) and had ⁨28 456⁩⁩ repetitions and used 2742 minutes.
I've reached 1056 words in LWT.

cjareck wrote:The long-range plan would be reaching fluency in Arabic in 2022, Mandarin, on that date or one-two years later.

Well, that seems to be unreachable either. I hope to improve my Hebrew listening and reading comprehension in 2021. That is why I registered for the 365 Day Challenge with the language. This should help me focus mainly on learning Hebrew since I feel close to reaching fluency. When I listen to veterans' interviews, I understand what generally they are talking about but not the details. It is already a success since I know which fragments I need to focus on, but I REALLY would like FINALLY to understand the details.
8 x
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Listening: 1+ (83% content, 90% linguistic)
Reading: 1 (83% content, 90% linguistic)


MSA DLI : 30 / 141ESKK : 18 / 40


Mandarin Assimil : 62 / 105

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cjareck
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Languages: Polish (N) English, German, Russian(B1?) French (B1?), Hebrew(B1?), Arabic(A2?), Mandarin (HSK 2)
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Re: Military historian's corner - EN, HE, ZH, AR, sometimes RU, FR and DE

Postby cjareck » Sat Jan 02, 2021 6:17 pm

It is time to say something about my plans for 2021.
Hebrew
On December 27th, I made DLIFL Online Assessment for reading and listening in Hebrew. It stated that I am on the 1 level.
In reading I scored the following:
Content Questions - 83.33% for the current level and 25% for the target (1+) level
Linguistic Questions - 90.48% for the current level and 63.33% for the target (1+) level

In Listening:
Content Questions - 83.33% for the current level and 50% for the target (1+) level
Linguistic Questions - 100% for the current level and 85% for the target (1+) level

It seems that especially in listening, I am not far from the 1+. Since Radioclare manged to improve her Russian from 1+ to 2+ so I also hope to achieve a similar success with Hebrew. That is the most important goal for me. That should allow me to use the sources in Hebrew freely. I'm planing to check my progress at the end of June, where I expect to have 1+ :)

Mandarin
I'm trying to keep my goals low. I intend to complete Assimil and complete cards for HSK in Hanping Deck for Anki. I also plan to continue LEs, especially to learn correct pronunciation and tones.

Arabic
With Arabic I hope to finish the 20th lesson of ESKK and 30th lesson of DLI. That should be 50% and 25% of the courses respectively. IF everything goes well, I'll focus on Arabic in 2022.


As for my 365 Day Challenge
1st January - 17 minutes of Anki, 18 minutes of adding vocabulary = 35 minutes total
2nd January - 15 mitunes of Anki, 20 minutes of adding vocabulary, 20 minutes of GLOSS (Reading, 1+ - rather poor performance) = 55 minutes total
8 x
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Listening: 1+ (83% content, 90% linguistic)
Reading: 1 (83% content, 90% linguistic)


MSA DLI : 30 / 141ESKK : 18 / 40


Mandarin Assimil : 62 / 105

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Radioclare
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Re: Military historian's corner - EN, HE, ZH, AR, sometimes RU, FR and DE

Postby Radioclare » Sat Jan 02, 2021 10:44 pm

cjareck wrote:It seems that especially in listening, I am not far from the 1+. Since Radioclare manged to improve her Russian from 1+ to 2+ so I also hope to achieve a similar success with Hebrew. That is the most important goal for me. That should allow me to use the sources in Hebrew freely. I'm planing to check my progress at the end of June, where I expect to have 1+ :)


Good luck with your Hebrew goal! I think those assessments are really hard, especially the listening, but it looks like you are definitely not far off the 1+ :)
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cjareck
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Location: Poland
Languages: Polish (N) English, German, Russian(B1?) French (B1?), Hebrew(B1?), Arabic(A2?), Mandarin (HSK 2)
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Re: Military historian's corner - EN, HE, ZH, AR, sometimes RU, FR and DE

Postby cjareck » Sun Jan 10, 2021 9:40 am

Hebrew
I am extremely happy with the 365 Challenge. It already motivated me at least two times to push forward and to complete 30 minutes of study. I prepared a spreadsheet that helps me counting time spend on learning. Measuring time is the most annoying thing but I'm getting used to it. Perhaps later I will use it also to track progress of my other languages.

Most of the watched videos are about the Pa'al conjugation rules. Interesting thing is that even if the rules are new to me, I could conjugate almost everything smoothly. Why? Because of the FSI strategy!
FSI Hebrew Basic Course page 245 wrote:However, if the student has thoroughly learned the Basic Sentences and verb drills of the preceding units he will find that he has already mastered the most frequent variations and that the following charts will merely diagram this knowledge

Yes, the videos, very good IMHO, on the Kefar playslist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vooYvh ... YIvFNG_xWn mainly helped me to understand why I conjugate the verbs that may, and not teach me a lot of new material. I almost watched the whole Pa'al there.

Nevertheless the time spend on Hebrew itself:
3rd - 68 minutes (28 Anki, 20 adding flashcards, 12 listening to radio, 8 LWT)
4th - 44 minutes (34 Anki, 10 watching video on Hebrew Verbs)
5th - 113 minutes (24 Anki, 28 watching interviews with veterans, 50 watching the Kefar on Pa'al, 11 studying grammar from FSI)
6th - 81 minutes (16 Anki, 10 adding flashcards, 30 warching the Kefar, 25 language exchange)
7th - 38 minutes (18 Anki, 20 watching the Kefar)
8th - 34 minutes (12 Anki, 22 watching the Kefar)
9th - 30 minutes (15 Anki, 15 watching the Kefar)

3rd - 9th together - 6,8 hours (408 minutes)
365 Challenge together - 8,3 hours (498 minutes)

I had to start my day with Hebrew, then the results are much better.

Arabic
I limited myself only to Anki, but also started adding DLI's 18th lesson that I will hopefully finish in the next few days. I also review all the new drills. They are quite easy since it is on pausal forms and the new thing is just to drop the case ending before the pause.

Mandarin
I'm doing just the Anki reviews, but I try to keep increasing the amount of HSK Hanping Chinese Deck by 10 new cards per day.


I don't know why, but Grammarly doesn't work with the forum anymore so sorry for the additional amount of errors!
11 x
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Listening: 1+ (83% content, 90% linguistic)
Reading: 1 (83% content, 90% linguistic)


MSA DLI : 30 / 141ESKK : 18 / 40


Mandarin Assimil : 62 / 105

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AroAro
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Languages: • Native - Polish
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Re: Military historian's corner - EN, HE, ZH, AR, sometimes RU, FR and DE

Postby AroAro » Mon Jan 11, 2021 5:03 pm

cjareck wrote:Hebrew
Interesting thing is that even if the rules are new to me, I could conjugate almost everything smoothly. Why? Because of the FSI strategy!
FSI Hebrew Basic Course page 245 wrote:However, if the student has thoroughly learned the Basic Sentences and verb drills of the preceding units he will find that he has already mastered the most frequent variations and that the following charts will merely diagram this knowledge




Sounds amazing! Maybe I should give it a try sometime in the future. How much time did it take you to finish the whole FSI Hebrew Course?
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cjareck
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Re: Military historian's corner - EN, HE, ZH, AR, sometimes RU, FR and DE

Postby cjareck » Mon Jan 11, 2021 5:20 pm

Well, I do not have an idea ;) At first, I was listening only about 10 times every lesson, but I wasn't satisfied with that. From lesson 34, I started creating Anki cards to the end (lesson 40), and then I created missing cards for lessons 1-33. I've counted 7790 of them. They are for vocabulary and all of the drills.
Audio for each lesson is about 20 minutes each with some doubles or even triples. So surely plenty of listening!

I can share my Deck with you if you wish, but remember that it was not intended for sharing, and I learned how to make cards while preparing the cards.
2 x
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Listening: 1+ (83% content, 90% linguistic)
Reading: 1 (83% content, 90% linguistic)


MSA DLI : 30 / 141ESKK : 18 / 40


Mandarin Assimil : 62 / 105

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cjareck
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Languages: Polish (N) English, German, Russian(B1?) French (B1?), Hebrew(B1?), Arabic(A2?), Mandarin (HSK 2)
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Re: Military historian's corner - EN, HE, ZH, AR, sometimes RU, FR and DE

Postby cjareck » Sun Jan 17, 2021 12:50 pm

Hebrew
I had some time to listen to the podcast about 188th Brigade again. However, the interesting thing was that I had more than 90% understanding of the first 18 minutes that I knew earlier or put into Anki to learn it. The rest was much worse - about 50%. And this is a podcast that I listened to really tens of times! So I will continue with adding cards to Anki since it works for me.

Again a 365 Challenge proved crucial for maintaining my Hebrew. I had some urgent work to do, so I skipped Arabic and Mandarin for a few days but not Hebrew! I even started to like the spreadsheet and registering my study time.

365 Challenge summary:
10th - 80 minutes (18 Anki, 15 reading the cursive script, 26 adding cards to Anki, 21 videos on Paal conjugation)
11th - 65 minutes (31 Anki, 34 minutes adding cards to Anki)
12th - 32 minutes (25 Anki, 2 adding cards, 5 watching an interview with a veteran)
13th - 47 minutes (22 Anki, 5 adding cards, 20 language exchange)
14th - 72 minutes (16 Anki, 20 adding cards, 16 listening to the podcast)
15th - 45 minutes (16 Anki, 29 listening to the podcast)
16th - 31 minutes (14 Anki, 12 adding cards, 5 watching an interview with a veteran)

10th-16th together - 371 minutes (6,2 hours)
356 Challenge together - 870 minutes (14,5 hours)

Arabic
Unfortunately, I didn't manage to add the cards for the 18th DLI lesson last week. I barely managed to keep up with the pending reviews yesterday. I hope to do it in the next few days. Starting today!

Mandarin
As mentioned above, I skipped even Anki for a few days, so yesterday, I had to review quite many cards but finally managed to do it. I plan to add an Assimil lesson just after I finally finish adding an Arabic one.
My Chinese LEP learns for his exams, so we also have a small pause now.
9 x
Please feel free to correct me in any language


Listening: 1+ (83% content, 90% linguistic)
Reading: 1 (83% content, 90% linguistic)


MSA DLI : 30 / 141ESKK : 18 / 40


Mandarin Assimil : 62 / 105

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cjareck
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Languages: Polish (N) English, German, Russian(B1?) French (B1?), Hebrew(B1?), Arabic(A2?), Mandarin (HSK 2)
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Re: Military historian's corner - EN, HE, ZH, AR, sometimes RU, FR and DE

Postby cjareck » Sun Jan 24, 2021 1:03 pm

This week I was distracted by various things. One of them was creating maps for my book about the battle of the Marne. I friend of mine does such things professionally, and since I've helped him with another thing, he helped me with the maps. He didn't make them for me but gave some guidelines on how to do it and prepared a base with terrain shape. I personally find it much better than receiving ready maps, but it requires me almost to start drawing from the beginning.

My daughters started learning Spanish. I also gave them some advice on learning a foreign language, but I had to be careful not to discourage them. I'm not interested in Spanish. I've considered learning it during my studies when I was interested in the Great Armada and naval clashes between England and Spain but eventually dropped the idea in favor of German and the Great War. The side effect of my daughters' activity is a temptation to start working on my French :) On the basic level, it is extremely similar, and I understand most of their materials. If they keep going, probably I will not be able to resist that temptation anymore ;)

Hebrew
17th - 36 minutes (17 Anki, 19 adding new cards)
18th - 69 minutes (18 Anki, 20 adding new cards, 22 watching about Nifal conjugation)
19th - 32 minutes (16 Anki, 10 adding new cards, 6 watching about Nifal conjugation, 9 listening to the podcast)
20th - 37 minutes (17 Anki, 20 listening to the radio)
21st - 43 minutes (11 Anki, 20 adding new cards, 12 listening to the podcast)
22nd - 42 minutes (19 Anki, 23 listening to the podcast)
23rd - 59 minutes (16 Anki, 43 watching the interview with YKW veteran*)
* It was Avigdor 'Janusz' (read: Yanoosh) Ben-Gal, commander of the 7th Armored Brigade. I watched it during map drawing, but there were places where I really understood a lot! Especially when he talked about 188th Brigade being split into platoons scattered over almost whole Golan Heights because it was prepared for "battle day" (some limited clash with Syrians), not for a war where you need to concentrate your tanks. I was delighted with this fragment. Nevertheless, my overall performance was much worse.

MSA
I finally finished the 18th DLI Lesson! Nevertheless, I had to skip reviewing cards for two days in a row. Now I have plenty of them to work with, but I hope to do it soon.

Mandarin
Here I also skipped reviewing for two days, so I had to struggle with a few hundred cards today, but luckily I managed it :) I finally managed to listen to the 31st lesson of Assimil a few times and add all the phrases to Anki and review it. Perhaps I will manage the next lesson this week!
7 x
Please feel free to correct me in any language


Listening: 1+ (83% content, 90% linguistic)
Reading: 1 (83% content, 90% linguistic)


MSA DLI : 30 / 141ESKK : 18 / 40


Mandarin Assimil : 62 / 105

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cjareck
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Languages: Polish (N) English, German, Russian(B1?) French (B1?), Hebrew(B1?), Arabic(A2?), Mandarin (HSK 2)
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Re: Military historian's corner - EN, HE, ZH, AR, sometimes RU, FR and DE

Postby cjareck » Sun Jan 31, 2021 3:48 pm

Hebrew
This week I was mainly focused on drawing maps to listen to interviews "in the background". After bringing my boys to school, I listened to a Hebrew podcast on my way home. Once I even did it while clearing snow. I'm happy since listening comprehension is my major problem.

24th - 32 minutes (14 Anki, 18 adding vocabulary)
25th - 86 minutes (14 Anki, 43 listening to interviews, 25 language exchange)
26th - 99 minutes (21 Anki, 25 adding vocabulary, 37 listening to interviews, 16 listening to a podcast)
27th - 86 minutes (19 Anki, 30 listening to interviews, 20 language exchange, 17 listening to a podcast)
28th - 48 minutes (14 Anki, 16 adding vocabulary, 18 listening to interviews)
29th - 40 minutes (19 Anki, 1 adding vocabulary, 20 listening to interviews)
30th - 93 minutes (14 Anki, 49 listening to interviews, 30 listening to a podcast)

Total in the week 484 minutes (8 hours)

31st - 42 minutes (17 Anki, 15 GLOSS lesson, 10 listening to a podcast)

Total hours in January: 28,57, activities that took more than an hour:
ANKI: 9,45
Listening to interviews: 4,7
Adding vocabulary: 4,58
Watching other videos: 3,27
Listening to podcasts: 2,7
Listening to the radio: 1,2
Language exchanges: 1,17

Arabic
I started adding an ESKK lesson to the Anki. It will take me quite a lot of time, but I may finish this one and the next one by the end of February and thus maintain the tempo of one lesson monthly.

Mandarin
I hope to finish the 32nd lesson tomorrow. Since most of the days I review 10 more cards of my Hanping HSK Deck, I should reach the HSK 3 level in about 3 months since 990 left.

French
I strongly consider improving my French because of the video I saw on MorktheFiddle's log. I have that temptation for quite a long time already...
7 x
Please feel free to correct me in any language


Listening: 1+ (83% content, 90% linguistic)
Reading: 1 (83% content, 90% linguistic)


MSA DLI : 30 / 141ESKK : 18 / 40


Mandarin Assimil : 62 / 105

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cjareck
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Re: Military historian's corner - EN, HE, ZH, AR, sometimes RU, FR and DE

Postby cjareck » Sun Feb 07, 2021 4:58 pm

Well, I hoped that 2021 would be better than 2020, but it doesn't want to! Last week my Mom died. She was 81 and had many health issues, but it isn't easy to accept. She wanted to be a good mother and good mother-in-law, so we had to put a border not to let her interfere too much what surely wasn't pleasant for her. Also, my own health made our contacts rare. There is nothing I can do about it now. "Show must go on" I have to care for my family.

There is also good news. I received results from the blood tests. The cancer marker CEA level is normal, so my chances for the upcoming future seem to look better and better. But I am aware that it may change at any time.

I wasn't able to keep up with all my Anki reviews and limited myself to Hebrew. Only on the last days of the week, I managed to review all due cards.

Hebrew
1st February - 55 minutes (17 Anki, 24 Podcasts, 14 adding vocabulary)
2nd February - 51 minutes (35 Podcasts, 16 veterans)
3rd February - 36 minutes (21 Anki, 15 Podcasts)
4th February - 30 minutes (14 Anki, 27 Podcasts)
5th February - 31 minutes (11 Anki, 17 Podcasts, 3 other movies)
6th February - 32 minutes (18 Anki, 14 Podcasts)

Total for February: 3,9 hours
Total 365 Challenge: 32,5 hours

I've canceled my LE on Wednesday. I was too tired due to a lack of sleep. Also, during the listening, I was not always focused enough.

Arabic
My LEP said that his health improved, and we had LE on Saturday. It was nice to speak Arabic again! Most probably, we will be discussing some pictures with a basic vocabulary. We started doing that, and I must say it was quite nice. I've recorded a whole session to learn vocabulary again and prepare myself for the next time. So I had to listen to myself again. Well, it wasn't a pleasant experience. I mixed Hebrew with Arabic, mixed plural with singular, and feminine with masculine. I hope to do better next time!

Mandarin
I've prepared cards for the next (32nd) Assimil lesson, but I had no time to review them.
4 x
Please feel free to correct me in any language


Listening: 1+ (83% content, 90% linguistic)
Reading: 1 (83% content, 90% linguistic)


MSA DLI : 30 / 141ESKK : 18 / 40


Mandarin Assimil : 62 / 105


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