raikiro's log - Swedish, Japanese & Russian

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golyplot
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Re: raikiro's log - Spanish, Japanese & Russian

Postby golyplot » Thu Dec 31, 2020 4:28 pm

raikiro wrote:Time to sum up the month, and the year overall.
So I'm happy overall, but I can't help but think sometimes that I could have gotten way more out of my time had I just picked "easy" languages.


You absolutely could have gotten to an higher level in more languages if you picked easy ones. The Romance and Germanic languages are basically "buy one, get one free". As a German native, you could probably learn Dutch without even trying. But it's a question of what your goals are. If you want to learn Russian and Japanese, you learn Russian and Japanese.
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raikiro
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learning: Japanese, Spanish, Russian
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Re: raikiro's log - Spanish, Japanese & Russian

Postby raikiro » Sun Jan 31, 2021 2:25 pm

The first month of the year is already over, so it's time to take a look at how far I've gotten with my plans.

The first two weeks of the month went well, the third week was slightly worse because I had to drive through the country and take some exams. This last week was quite bad - I'm currently back to working full time, which means about 12 hours a day that I am not home just for work. I used my time commuting for listening to audiobooks, and this has been working out very well for me. This means I get about 8 hours a week of listening in. However, when I get home in the evening I rarely feel like sitting down for another two hours to continue reading, so I have been losing a bit of progress there.

In terms of kanji study, it has been going okay. I did 10 new cards every day for the first three weeks of the month, so that's great. But of course, my reviews have been going up a lot as well - about 220 cards a day, and my review time is going up to 50 minutes which is too much. I've not added new cards the last couple of days to hopefully decrease these numbers a slight bit. I do feel motivated though that there aren't too many new cards left - I'm looking forward to being done with new cards and just slowly watching my daily reviews go down. I can't wait.

As my main focus for the first quarter of the year I chose Japanese, so let's take a look at my statistics:
words read: 332.525
hours listened: 42,6
new kanji: 248
Looking good so far, in my opinion. I made a spreadsheet after calculating how many chapters of Harry Potter I have left to finish the series, and how many I would need to read per day to get it by the end of March. It came out to pretty much exactly 2 chapters per day. With some calculations using the audiobook lengths, one chapter averages slightly under an hour for the Japanese version. (Interestingly, of all the languages I can see on audible, Japanese is the longest by a long shot. The series in Spanish adds up to 123 hours, while the Japanese version has over 180 hours - a tremendous difference! The speed does not feel very different, which says a lot about the low information density the Japanese language has.)
As of today, I am 4 chapters behind my schedule. This might increase next week, but after that, I'll have two weeks off where I should easily be able to get back on track.

Apart from Japanese, I have also been spending some time with Spanish - both reading a bit in the evenings and listening to my audiobook in the car. Since all of that happens outside of LingQ, these statistics do not include the two books I have not yet finished, so they are not 100% accurate.
words read: 81.998
No recorded listening yet, but I will finish my current audiobook next week. It will then count towards my February statistics. The same goes for the book I'm currently reading - I can't be bothered to split the file and count the chapters seperately.


My overall (perhaps hopelessly optimistic) goal for the year was to finish roughly one book per week. This month I finished:
ハリー・ポッターとアズカバンの囚人
Sangre enamorada #4
La segunda vida de Bree Tanner
(3/52)

Next week I will probably finish two of the three books I'm currently working on, which means that it is still going good so far.
So for February, I'm expecting two very good weeks because I'm on holiday, and two rather bad weeks because of work.
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raikiro
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learning: Japanese, Spanish, Russian
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Re: raikiro's log - Spanish, Japanese & Russian

Postby raikiro » Sun Feb 28, 2021 9:20 am

This month's update is going to be rather short. I don't have too much time and nothing too noteworthy happened.

Even though I had two weeks off work, a lot of time was spent looking for an apartment. I have to move out of my current one in September at the latest, and since I want something nice I decided I'd best start looking early. Therefore, I simply did not have the nerves to do as much as I had planned language-wise.

Statistics Japanese:
words read: 392.050
hours listened: 39.5
new kanji: 28

I'm surprised to see that I actually have more words read this month than in January - I was not expecting that. Less listening though, because I read a couple of chapters during my breaks at work without audio. Finished books 4 and 5 of Harry Potter, and just started the 6th one today.
I barely did any kanji because my reviews are still high. There are about 200 left, and I am planning on rushing through them next week. Since I have 3 weeks to spent in a hotel (unless they send us home because of corona), I have more free time (or less distraction) to hopefully get my review count under control until the last week of March.

Statistics Spanish:
words read: ~75.000
hours listened: 8.25

The words read is an estimation. I read Vida y muerte, which contains two stories - the original first Twilight and the version with switched genders. Since I read only the latter, I just took the overall words in the book and divided by two. It felt like the second part was slightly longer, but it should be fine.

This month I finished:
ハリー・ポッターと炎のゴブレット (Harry Potter 4)
ハリー・ポッターと不死鳥の騎士団 (Harry Potter 5)
Vida y muerte #2
Harry Potter y la piedra filosophal
(7/52)

I got four books in four weeks, so I'm still on track actually - looking at this I realize I might have been a bit too harsh on myself. I am behind schedule with my Harry Potter chapters and kanji though. Also, I'm still more or less reading Sol de medianoche, I just didn't feel like sitting down and reading a lot recently and it is a rather big book compared to my previous ones.

Currently reading:
Sol de medianoche
ハリー・ポッターと謎のプリンス
Harry Potter y el prisionero de Azkaban (audiobook)

Like I said, tomorrow I will be leaving for a business trip, which is planned to be three weeks. I have not gotten any info on it getting cancelled or changed, but I will know for sure on Tuesday. If everything stays as planned I will spend three weeks in a hotel with not much more to do than reading and studying; otherwise I will be working from home for three weeks.

But that is all I have to say for now - thank you for reading.
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raikiro
Yellow Belt
Posts: 55
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Location: Bonn, Germany
Languages: German (N), English (3332)
learning: Japanese, Spanish, Russian
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Re: raikiro's log - Spanish, Japanese & Russian

Postby raikiro » Thu Apr 01, 2021 5:10 pm

This marks both the end of the month and the end of the first quarter, so let's take a look at what I've achieved.

My goals for both the month and the quarter overall were: 1. finish the Harry Potter series in Japanese and 2. finally finish the jouyou kanji.
I'm very happy to say that I achieved both of those. In the beginning of March I rushed through the remaining jouyou kanji, so my reviews are still quite high. But so long as they are slowly decreasing, it's okay. Also, the prospect of never having to add more kanji is very satisfying (unless Japan decides to change the list, but even then it should be a manageable number). I even added ~50 non-jouyou kanji, some of them I already knew and a couple that I felt like would be useful.
I finished the last Harry Potter on Sunday, so two days behind my original schedule. But I had a couple of free days planned in the end of the month, so that didn't matter. In fact, I'm suprised I got it. I only made it because I powered through the last ~10 hours on the weekend. However, I've had a couple of days "off" now, and I'm feeling good going into the next quarter!

My statistics for this month:
Japanese:
words read: 437.511
hours listened: 56,4
new kanji: 258

Spanish:
hours listened: 9,7

The last HP I read without the help of LingQ, and significant parts of it without simultaniously listening to the audiobook as well. It went really well and helped boost my confidence to read Japanese without any aids.
Also finished another Spanish audiobook, but I'm only a couple chapters into the next one. I usually listen to them while driving, but I did not have a long commute the last two weeks, plus my favourite band released their first new album in 10 years, so I've mostly been listening to that while in the car. I'll get back to listening more though, once the initial excitement over the new music is gone.

I also participated in the Hard Core 90 Day Japanese Challenge on LingQ, and I got first - with quite a lead, as well. The three months statistics for this challenge in detail (challenge goals in brackets):
known words: 4034 (2730)
LingQs: 12.786 (1183)
LingQs learned: 931 (546)
hours of listening: 136,5 (45,5)
words read: 1.146.982 (50.050)
You can clearly see what my focus was: reading, and therefore, LingQing. I exceeded the set goals greatly. For listening and words learned/known I easily met the goals as well, but not by a margin that big. Now admittedly, I read the last book completely on my kindle, so I counted the reading, but did not mark any new or known words - but even considering that you can clearly see that my reading was more intensive and I did not bother too hard to learn new words deliberately. And honestly, considering that reading is my favourite language-related activity, I am perfectly fine with that.

The books I finished this month are:
ハリー・ポッターと謎のプリンス
ハリー・ポッターと死の秘宝
Harry Potter y la cámara secreta
(10/52)
also the jouyou kanji (not a book, but they are on my spreadsheet)

Currently working on:
Harry Potter y el prisionero de Azkaban (4 chapters in)
Sol de medianoche (yes, to my shame, I'm still not done - 86%)


So, what's next? My focus will be Spanish, so I've joined the Hardcore Challenge starting today. I have not yet decided on what to read exactly, though of course I have some ideas. One thing I'll definitely read is the Hunger Games series. The movies I know (surprisingly - I rarely ever watch movies) but the books I am unfamiliar with. Many say that the language is fairly easy though, so this will likely be the next series after finishing Sol de medianoche.
Also on my list is the Song of Ice and Fire series. However, I think I will get to those at a later point, maybe towards the end of the year. Firstly, because they are huge. Secondly, they have many characters and different plots and apart from the occasional thing I've heard people talk about, I don't know much. Thirdly, it seems that the language is quite difficult compared to what I'm currently reading. I've listened to the 5 minute snippet you can access on audible and it sounds more difficult for sure. So I feel like for now they would just slow me down, and I'd rather do something else.
Another series on my list is La Biblia de los Caídos. I've never even heard about this series before I stumbled across the first book for free on amazon. I have not yet checked it out, I only read through the summary and saw that it has very good reviews. If I start reading it and find that I don't like it, I will have to look for an alternative. But I will deal with that at a later time - there are so many books out there, it should be easy enough to find something else.

Apart from reading novels, I'm also playing with the idea of actually working through a textbook or two to start working on my active skills. It is starting to feel a bit surreal that I can pick up a novel (albeit a relatively easy one) and read through it without much trouble, but I'm still unable to form a single sentence. If someone held me at gunpoint I might get out a thing or two, but being somewhat understood and actually having some idea of how the language works actively is a huge difference. And I think by now my passive knowledge is decent enough that it should come to me a bit easier.
I'm leaning towards getting an Assimil Spanish, to get a somewhat more systematic exposure to certain grammatical themes while still maintaining my "passive" style initially before the active wave starts.
Another set that I own already is the Komplett-Paket Spanisch by Langenscheidt. It has very good reviews as well (not that this guarantees quality). But it contains a textbook, a workbook, a vocabulary book and ~9 hours of audio content, so it seems promising.
I will use the next week to take a closer look at it and then make a decision whether or not using one or two textbooks complementary to my usual reading is worth it.

Another thing I've been thinking about is what do to with my Japanese. I'm definitely excited to shift my focus mainly on Spanish for now, but I should not completely neglect Japanese. Naturally I will continue my daily kanji reviews in anki. Apart from that I've been thinking - maybe try to make it a habit to read one news article a day once my reviews have gone down a bit? For now, I'm spending roughly 30 minutes a day on anki, which is too much. But when I get down to maybe 150 reviews a day, I will give it a go to see how it works.

As for Russian - I am aware that it still exists. I have not been doing anything with it lately, and I have that planned for the third or fourth quarter of the year. I feel like having one main focus and one language on the side is doable for me, but adding a third to my active studying schedule seems a bit too much. Considering how weak my Russian yet is I would need to put much more time into it; just doing a couple of minutes a day would not cut it. So I might as well wait until it's time to get it back out again later.
I understand that there are people who really enjoy and benefit from just jumping around between several languages on a daily basis, but personally it's not something that I feel comfortable with doing.

Due to the quarter being at its end it was a rather long post, but I think this should be it for now.
Thanks for reading.
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raikiro
Yellow Belt
Posts: 55
Joined: Sun Jan 15, 2017 7:34 pm
Location: Bonn, Germany
Languages: German (N), English (3332)
learning: Japanese, Spanish, Russian
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Re: raikiro's log - Spanish, Japanese & Russian

Postby raikiro » Sat May 08, 2021 9:58 am

I apologize for the late update - I was on a business trip for the last two weeks and in the weekend in between I moved to my new apartment. Because of all the moving I did not spend a lot of time on languages. I'm still sitting surrounded by boxes that are waiting to be unpacked, and it will take a little while before everything here is ready. All the stores being closed (except for supermarkets, of course) makes it much more difficult to buy all the new stuff that I need.

But enough of that, let's talk about languages.
April was when I shifted my main focus from Japanese to Spanish, and it has been going alright. I read through the first two parts of the Hunger Games trilogy. I did not really feel like continuing just yet, so I started looking for something else. I wanted to read some light fantasy/action romance and browsed through the ebook library. What I found was the author Margotte Channing, who wrote several romance fantasy series, one of them around vikings. Since I never read anything in that particular direction, and I was intrigued by the good reviews, I decided to give it a go. Being able to buy the first 8 books of the series for only a couple of euros in a pack definitely was a pro as well.
I finished the first book, and I'm about a third into the second now. So far, I'm enjoying it and I am planning on continuing through the series once I have some time.
One thing I am a bit unsure about is how I am supposed to count them. They aren't your typical full-length novel. The first book was about 150 pages, and the ones after have more around 120 pages. In a way it feels unfair to count all of them as one book when other books on my list (e.g. the Song of Ice and Fire series) have about 10 times the length.
On the other hand, I'm not in a competition or anything, I don't need to justify to anyone whether I should count it or not, so I might as well do it however I want. For now, I will be counting all of those books separately.
Maybe I will change the counting and instead of actual books I'll count average book points - so every 350 or so pages would count as one "book". This would mean that I would need about three of the short books to get one book point, but reading something like the Song of Ice and Fire would give me several book points per actual book based on the length.
Since I have everything digitally, I can always do that retroactively though. For now, I will just count them all separately and be done with it.

My statistics:
hours listened: 21.5
words read: 487.976


Moving on to Japanese.
My plan was to wait for my reviews to go down and then start reading some articles. The problem is, that my reviews did not go down. I don't have enough retention rate, so I'm seeing the same cards every other day. At first I did not really notice it, but it became quite apparent that I still average about 270 reviews a day - the same as when the month started.
To counteract this, I started writing them down while reviewing. Not I always take out a sheet of paper and write down every kanji I did not remember, every time. Since I started doing that, my retention has gone up by about 8%, and after doing this for a week I am slowly starting to see a decrease in reviews. So I will continue doing this, even though it is more time consuming, until I feel more comfortable. Perhaps it was not the best idea to stop focusing on Japanese immediately after I went though all the jouyou kanji. Perhaps I should read more to get some exposure to them until my knowledge is more solid. However, I simply do not have a lot of time right now anyways, and I feel like focusing on Spanish.
As long as my reviews do not got up that means that I'm at least not losing anything, and I will see how it will develop over the course of this month.

Another thing I wanted to do is take a closer look at some textbooks. However, thanks to moving apartments, my textbooks have spent the last three weeks in boxes. So that did not happen. Perhaps this month.


The books I finished in April were:
Sol de medianoche (finally!)
Los juegos del hambre
En llamas
Cautivas del berserker (1) - Cautiva
(14/52)

Currently working on:
Harry Potter y el prisionero de Azkaban (6 chapters in - the bit of commuting I did I had a co-worker with me, so just music in the car)
Cautivas del berserker (2) - Erika


So for this month I will continue reviewing my kanji while writing them down, and hopefully by the end of May the reviews will have gone done.
As for reading: like I said, this month my be very slow because of all the things I still have to do with the apartment and around it. I will do my best, but after a long day I usually just want to relax with my PC and not read until nighttime.

Thank you for reading.
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raikiro
Yellow Belt
Posts: 55
Joined: Sun Jan 15, 2017 7:34 pm
Location: Bonn, Germany
Languages: German (N), English (3332)
learning: Japanese, Spanish, Russian
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Re: raikiro's log - Spanish, Japanese & Russian

Postby raikiro » Tue Jun 01, 2021 4:00 pm

It's update time! This might be a longer one.

Starting with Japanese, because this will be short.
My anki reviews have been fluctuating. These last couple of days were quite high still, with around 270 cards per day still. Tomorrow it will be 230 and the days after are starting to look better.
Part of the reason is probably that I changed my intervals. There is a formula on the anki manual how to calculate your ideal interval modifier based on what your current vs. your desired retention rate. This did not seem to work, so I doubled the interval modifier. I set it low previously because I wanted my retention to be high, and wanted to learn thoroughly. But I've been starting to get really frustrated feeling like I'm just hitting a wall - wirting down every kanji everytime I fail it and after a month my reviews have not gone down. It is too much, I had to make a change. I don't want anki to feel like a constant battle. It is supposed to work for me, and not me working for it.
In case anybody is interested, according to anki I spent 1153 minutes on my kanji deck these last 30 days. That is over 19 hours, so about 38 minutes on average. My goal would be more towards 10-15 minutes a day. Considering that I'm not adding any new cards anymore I should get there at some point, preferably before the end of the decade. So I hope that the new intervals will help me decrease the time more quickly.

Let's stick with anki for just another minute.
I added a deck for Spanish vocabulary. It's a shared deck called "Spanish 9000 sentences with native audio". I know that many people advertise heavily for creating your own cards, but honestly, I can't be bothered. The amount of time required to create high quality cards with sentences would not be worth the results, and even if I wanted to, I could not create native audio for it.
The last week I've worked through 260 cards. I understand all the sentences and words, so the entire point of this deck is to help me activate my vocabulary.
It's just something I felt like doing for fun, so I have something nice to look forward to after being done with my kanji. No idea how long I will keep this up, perhaps I will get rid of the deck within the next days and rely on something else.

I bought a new book - Spanisch ohne Mühe. This is the German version of the original Assimil without toil series from the late 40s. Having used an older Assimil for Russian in the past I was interested in seeing what it's like. I found it on ebay for 3€ and couldn't pass up on it.
It only arrived today, so I have not had too much time yet looking at it.

Onto the statistics for Spanish:
hours listened: 7,5
words read: 117.154

The words read are slightly higher effectively, because I am literally one chapter away from finishing another book.

The books I finished in May:
Cautivas del berserker books 2 - 5
(18/52)

Technically I finished Harry Potter y el prisionero de Azkaban on my commute today, but since it is the 1st it will count towards the next month.

Currently working on:
Cautivas del berserker (6) - Astrid (one chapter left)
Sinsajo (3 chapters in)
Harry Potter y el cáliz de fuego (starting on my commute tomorrow)

I've been considering cancelling my LingQ subscription. I use it quite rarely, because in Japanese and Spanish I've been enjoying reading on my kindle more. I would use it again for Russian, but I don't know yet when I will get to that. And if you stop paying, you loose your saved LingQs (unless they changed that). This kind of pressures you into staying subscribed, which I am not liking.
So I have been looking for alternatives. I took a closer look at readlang, and I might try out OPlingo as well.

My thoughts on readlang:
It looks rather minimalistic. I've always been annoyed by the gimmicky feeling of LingQ. I don't need an inspirational message every time I open up a lesson. I don't need to earn coins with which I can buy outifts for my avatar. And one thing that has been bugging me quite a bit is how few words fit on one page. Even with the smallest font size, there are huge borders around the text, so you can't fit a lot of text on it. With readlang, you just have one screen with text. And I like that.

What I don't like right from the start is the missing text to speech. It seems that this is included in a premium membership, which I might consider for this reason after some more testing. For Spanish, this is not too problematic. But when I think of learning Russian in the future, having TTS for single words would be crucial. On LingQ you could just click a word and it would autoplay, saving you the hassle of always having to move your cursor around the screen while reading.
It also does not count things like words read or the words you know. While the former can quite easily be done using a simple spreadsheet, having some point of reference for you vocabulary size would have been interesting. On the other hand, these tools counting every form of a word as a single word blows up the numbers quite significantly. Out of curiosity I did a couple of placement and vocabulary size tests for Spanish to put the LingQ number into perspective, but I will get to that at a later point.
On readlang you can choose whether you want words you looked up previously to be underlined or to appear as normal words. I would like them to underlined. However, when I look up a word that is already underlined, it will open a pop-up window below the word, thereby covering up the next line of text. So I have to manually close the pop-up again. Annoying.
If words are not underlined, it will add a new line above the word and write the translation. This is neat, but 1. creating a new line moves the rest of the text further to the bottom and onto the next page. I don't like my text shifting around like that. 2. I don't like the font for the translation. You can change the font for the normal text, but seemingly not for the translations.
Readlang does give you an option to translate phrases. This is limited in the free version. One thing I have not quite figured out yet is whether the limit applies to Japanese. The tool does not know which kanji form words, therefore everytime you look up a word it will count as a phrase. I have done some testing and was able to go beyond the normal limit for free users - if this is a bug or a feature I don't know. It this is not the intended behaviour, using readlang for Japanese without the premium account would be pretty much pointless.
What I also dislike is that you can't see which words are new or unknown to you. It is mostly psychological, but seeing your known words increase is nice and give you some reference. The color coding on LingQ might have been a bit too intense for me with its bright yellow, but I liked the idea. You also could jump between new or unknown words on LingQ using the arrow keys, enabling you to quickly click check translations while following an audiobook. On readlang, using the arrow key just turns the page. If you want to look up words in quick succession, you better get your mouse accuracy up.
A big pro: you can import a book, and it will just be one file. No more importing chapter by chapter or having the tool split the book after every 2000 words, completely ignoring chapters.
The option to use it as a browser extension (even on the phone) without having to actually import anything is another plus.
So all in all:
Readlang looks really nice. I can see myself getting used to its drawbacks, but I will try another alternative first. Plus, the fact that the developer seems to have stopped working on it many years ago leaves me a bit worried that no further improvements will be made and the service might even be taken down in the future.

The next tool I want to look into is OPlingo. It seems to mark words that are new, which is a plus, and it has TTS. What I could not find any info on is how long a "passage", so a text that you can import, is. If it also counts one book as one passage like readlang does, that would be great.
Another pro is that the devs seem to be actively working on it.
I will probably try this tool within the next month or so, and then maybe make a decision on whether I want to "give up" LingQ and all the statistics stored there.

But enough about reading aids.
I already mentioned that I took a couple of placement tests and tests that are supposed to measure you vocabulary for Spanish. The results were extremely mixed. Most of them did not only test vocabulary, but also grammar or even listening/reading comprehension. Here is what I got:
LingQ (according to my statistics from some months ago): 10.107
LingQ placement test: 33.200 (Advanced 2)
Now keep in mind, that LingQ counts every word form as a separate word, so these numbers are highly inflated.
arealme: 5062
17-minute-languages: 3600, B2
Lengalia: B1 (the test does not seem to go higher, it just wants to sell me classes for business Spanish...)
How accurate are these results? I have no idea. Excluding LingQ for its highly inaccurate counting method, 3600 to 5000 Is probably a good idea. A huge factor is me not having learned words by frequency, but by reading. So I know many words that might be considered are, or useless, but when confronted with the Spanish word for "Friday" in one of the tests I was absolutely clueless. This might make it very difficult to get a good estimation.
Like I said, most of the tests also wanted me to pick between different grammatical forms. I do not have any experience using Spanish, I've only ever read and listened to it. So if asked to choose between to forms I could only ever go for what feels "right", without having any idea if it is correct.
One thing that struck me as strange: 17 minute languages classifies 3600 words as B2. Not sure, but this feels way to low for me. I would have put 3600 at a B1, B2 starting maybe at 5000. But perhaps I am just wrong here, and there does not seem to be any official rule on that. After a quick search on the internet it seems that the numbers are different depending on who you ask.
In the end, these tests were only meant to be a little experiment to see which results I can get - I won't go as far as to take any of these as particularly accurate.

June will be the last month of this quarter. So it is time to start thinking about the next quarter. I am unsure whether to try to keep it rolling with Spanish and move Russian to the end of the month, or do 3 months of Russian and maybe get back to Spanish.
The way it is going right now, I will probably stick with Spanish some more, to solidify my knowledge before I feel comfortable putting it in the background. Keep the momentum going.
Knowing myself, I might change my mind. I have also been looking at Icelandic recently.... but perhaps I should wait with that until next year.
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raikiro
Yellow Belt
Posts: 55
Joined: Sun Jan 15, 2017 7:34 pm
Location: Bonn, Germany
Languages: German (N), English (3332)
learning: Japanese, Spanish, Russian
x 219

Re: raikiro's log - Spanish, Japanese & Russian

Postby raikiro » Wed Jun 30, 2021 5:24 pm

The end of a month and of a quarter year, let's see what happened.

Starting off with Japanese:
In my last post I wrote about my issues with anki. Changing the intervals did not help too much, because I have a rather high fail rate, leading to too many lapses. I have therefore decided to change the lapse intervals. Ankis default options has it at 0%. I had already increased it to 50%, because it does not make sense that you would always need to start from 0 with cards you are already familiar with just for failing them once. I saw a post recently about how you should set your lapse interval to 100%, so that the intervals can never get shorter - after all, if you've already managed to remember a card after x amount of days, it shows that you brain should remember them sufficiently well. After that, I set my lapse interval to 90%. Meaning, if I fail a card repeatedly (on the same day) the interval gets shorter, but just failing it once does not set me back too much. The result: after about 5 days of ankiing with the new lapse interval, my cards/day have decreased from about 230 on average to about 150.
The anki simulator addon (which calculates based on your settings and your retention and lapse percentages) shows the reviews decreasing further in the next couple of weeks. If I run the addon with the old lapse interval of 50%, it predicts the number of reviews to stay the same for the foreseeable future. So right now this seems to be my best bet to finally get those numbers down.
Is this the solution to all of my anki problems? Probably not. It is probably not optimal, because the frequent lapses show that it is not working the way it should. But considering that I've been doing anki for months now, and no real improvements have been made, anki is not the solution. The solution is more exposure and reading. Which is what I wanted to do anyways, but I was lacking the time. Spending ~50 minutes a day on anki left me not wanting to "waste" any more time with Japanese, while my main focus should be on Spanish.
The solution would probably be just to get rid of anki. And rely on that I will get exposed to all the characters I need if I just read enough. But since I like reading in multiple languages, I am afraid I would forget large amounts of kanji when not using Japanese for a while, only to have to re-learn them every time.
So this is my attempt so fix it. Reduce my reviews further, and instead use the gained time to read more. Already the time that I spent on my flashcards daily has gone down quite significantly, and I have started reading a bit every day.
Another change I made recently is that after lapsing I wanted to get the word correct twice. I thought that if I saw it more frequently after failing I would remember it better. But after getting it correct the first time, the chance to fail it the second time that day is only 3%. This means two things - firstly, seeing it a second time did not, in fact, increase my overall retention and and decrease my reviews and secondly, considering that I almost always get it correct the second time, if it does not help me remember it the next day, I'm wasting my time. So I have removed the second lapse step again.
After having read the Harry Potter series, I started looking for other interesting fantasy novels, preferably ones that I am already familiar with. Unfortunately, whilst the big series such as Twilight (my go-to besides Harry Potter) or the Hunger Game series have been translated into Japanese, they only seem to be available in print. And importing it would be very expensive, plus I prefer having a digital version of the text anyways to read on my kindle or with the aid of other reading tools. And even with books that have digital versions, they are tough enough to find online. You could try to use amazon.jp with a fake address - but even for that you need a credit card, which I don't have (they are not common in Germany). I have found honto.jp, a page that explicitly allows foreign customers to order books and I might try it soon. However, from the series that I am interested in that I already know, I have not found to many results there.
So I decided to forget fiction for a moment. Many people say that fantasy novels are much more difficult than non-fiction texts anyways. Last week I bought 日本人とは何か。(上巻)神話の世界から近代まで、その行動原理を探る, which was available through the German amazon. I've read through the prologue and so far I don't feel like it is easier than novels. Maybe it gets better.
No statistics to report, as I did not listen nor finish a book.

Onto Spanish:
This month was definitely more listening than reading, which is very uncommon for me. I only finished reading one book, and two audiobooks. I started reading more, but like I stated previously, I will only count the words I've read when I'm done with the book.
I started working through the Spanish without toil I mentioned last month. The beginning is very easy, and I've worked my way up to lesson 78 (of 111) in the last weeks. It is not particularly challenging yet, but the active wave is taking quite some time, so I will probably be slowing it down a notch.
My approach to the passive wave: 1. listen without text 2. listen while reading 3. read out loud, check unclear words 4. shadow x3 5. read out loud again. The most difficult is the initial listening without text. I often find myself struggling to understand, but when I look at the text, it makes perfect sense. Considering that I am more of a reader than a listener, this is unsurprising. And then I sometimes struggle with the shadowing. Because I have no speaking practice I'm struggling to produce the sounds quickly enough, which is why I go through it several times in the lesson, and I plan on going through it again. I have used the programm audacity to remove the gaps of silence in between and created a file with all lessons after another, so I can listen to the entire course to review.
For the active wave: 1. read the Spanish text aloud once 2. cover the Spanish and, using the translation, try to write the Spanish text in my notebook 3. correct the text I came up with using a different color pen 4. take sentences that I struggled with or made weird mistakes in and add them to anki.
So far, this has been going great. I decided to make it a bit easier for me by reading though the Spanish text once first. Currently I am planning on perhaps doing another active wave later, then without first looking at the Spanish, and see if it helped. If could then use my current notebook to compare the mistakes and see my improvement (hence the different colors).
Statistics:
hours listened: 34,5
words read: 32.537

Books I finished in June:
Harry Potter y el prisionero de Azkaban
Harry Potter y el cáliz de fuego
Cautivas del berserker book 6
(21/52)

Currently working on:
Sinsajo (11 chapters in)
El beso carmesi (11 chapters in as well)

Moving onto reading tools.
I have now had some more time to use readlang, and I checked out LanguageCrush (formerly OPLingo) as well.
My criticism of readlang I already posted last month, so I will mostly write about LanguageCrush now. Since I have a lot of thoughts, I will use bullet points to try to keep it short.
- No option to import books directly -> need to convert into text document using calibre (I don't mind though)
- Passage length: with readlang, you have the entire book in one. The first time I imported something into LanguageCrush, it split the book into parts, or "passages" of 2000 words. Very annoing. I now imported some more: one book in Spanish, Russian, and Japanese. The Spanish and Russian ones were split into parts of about 7-7.500 words, which is fine with me. Having a book be split into a handful of parts is not a problem. Having it split into 150+ parts, like in LingQ, is an annoyance. The Japanese book that I imported, however, was split into only 4 parts, with about 25.000 words each - so they are very long. Perhaps this has something to do with Japanese being a beta language, or with the characters. I don't know, it just seems weird that there is such a huge difference.
- When importing a passage, the box for "share with community" is automatically checked; I always worry that I will forget unchecking it and getting into trouble for sharing books
- Hovering over a word shows the translation pretty much immediately, which is very convenient for quickly following an audiobook (make sure to have "display passages on one page" unchecked though, otherwise it is very slow)
- But: there seems to be an issue with RAM usage. Every once in a while the page would get very slow and start lagging. I noticed that at one point that once browser tab was using more than 2 gigabytes of RAM. Probably a bug? Closing and re-opening fixes this, but it happens every once in a while.
- It has auto tts, which I like
- You can split and link words, which is perfect for Japanese - LingQ would always assume, sometimes wrongly, which characters made up one word. Here I can choose for myself.
- You can not change the font size! LanguageCrush uses my monitor space much better than LingQ with its big borders, so the amount of words shown is better. However, the font size is much bigger than I would need. Zooming out in the browser makes everything smaller, but I would like an option to show more text on one page instead.
- There does not seem to be an option to add several passages to a course at once, by marking them. I imported one book without telling the tool to add everything to one course, and then had to manually edit every single part to add it afterwards.
- There is no clear indicator, how many words are in the passage. It only shows the amount of unique words, which is obviously lower. I'd like to tell with a quick glance how long the passage actually is.
- There is no switching between languages. You mark the language the passage is in, but there is no drop-down to choose which language you want to see like you have with LingQ or Readlang. Everything is mixed together. Therefore I am not sure if the "known words" are counted separately for each language as well, or if there is overlap. I would hope not.
- It color-codes unknown words and words that you are learning. There is a button at the end of a passage to mark all unknown words as known, which I will be using a lot, especially in the beginning, as the tool first needs to find out what I know. Considering I have quite long lessons (especially in Japanese) I would like an option to mark all unknown words until a certain point as known. By using a bookmark or something maybe?
- The colors are quite intense. Probably the biggest plus of Readlang is its minimalistic and clean look. In LanguageCrush unknown words are red and words you are learning are an intense dark green, which is a bit too aggressive for my preference. The light yellow LingQ uses is more pleasant to the eye.
This last point I'm not even going to try to put in a bullet point. The free version has a limitation on word and phrases lookups. This only goes for words you click: just hovering over them will always show the translation. Now, naturally, before I pay for something I like trying it out, and I have encountered tons of issues over these limitations.
If you have reached your 15 word lookup per day, you can not:
- Split/link words: in Japanese, this is horrible; if a word is split incorrectly, you can not correct it
- Mark words to be able to copy them for checking an external dictionary
- Set bookmarks (why not? I don't understand..). It opens the word lookup on the side, and then tells you that you have reached your daily limit
- Everytime the popup about how many lookups you have left comes up, it deselects words that you previously selected - even if phrase lookups are not yet exceeded
- Save/change translations: extremely bad. You can see a translation that is completely wrong, of a wrong reading of characters, and you can not correct it. You can save the word as "learning", but with the wrong translation

The issues relating to the word lookup limits can be removed by purchasing the premium plan. And at 7$ a month, this is cheaper than LingQ. I can definitely live with this. Some of the restrictions however, such as the bookmarks or being unable to correct translations, just seem bad. Saying that you can use the tool completely for free just isn't true. (Unless you only read one page a day anyways.)
Don't get me wrong, I am more than willing to pay for a tool that works. But some of the other issues and bugs are very annoying. I understand that this is a rather new project, and that the developers are working on it actively. So there is a good chance some of these will be fixed in the future, and more customization options (such as font size and color intensity) will be added.

So how do I move on?
I am pretty sure that I am going to cancel my LingQ subscription. The community courses are still available to free accounts, and the whole "losing your saved LingQs when you cancel" really tries to force you into staying. I would say that I got my moneys' worth out of it, but it might be time to move on. You can export all your LingQs and presumably import them again later on, which might be a workaround. However, it just spits out an excel document of everything - I've tested for Russian and got over 17 thousand LingQs, not sorted by known or learning. So I'm not sure how useful this would be.
Readlang has proven to be a very simple, clean looking, and effective tool. I would like more statistics such as known words though, and the fact that the word popups do not have Furigana makes it pretty much useless for quickly readingJapanese. You always have to wait for the dictionary to pop up. And since it is pretty much a dead project, no more work is to be expected. Having the entire book in one document is great - but without stuff like statistics, it is just a tool were I can click words to get their meaning - and for that, why not just use my kindle?
LanguageCrush seems to be the way to go for me here. Being able to customize words in Japanese is huge compared to LingQ, and the longer passage length is great. I just hope it stays the way it is right now, and does not decrease again. Plus, there is hope that the people continue working on it. I also still have to try out the android app.


The LingQ challenges were one of the reasons why I decided to break the year into quarters with a designated main language. I have not maintained my LingQ statistics, instead keeping track of everything in a separate spreadsheet. Therefore, this is not really important anymore.
I still liked the idea of having one focus for a set amount of time though, as it prevents me from wandering around between my languages too much.
How do I continue? I still have at least one quarter I wanted to spend on Russian this year. But I still have two Spanish book I started that I want to finish (and since one of those is from a series, I might want to finish the entire series). Plus, I should absolutely stick with Assimil for now. I don't want to drop it now that I'm starting to get somewhere with it. So, no Russian just now.
Current idea: finish Assimil Spanish, and continue focusing on Spanish reading in general. Once I finished Assimil Spanish, it might be time to get back to the two Assimil Russian that I have lying around. In the 1971 version I got to lesson 47 (of 100), and in the 1991 version I got to lesson 34 (of 71). This means that I am pretty much halfway with both of them, just a bit away from the start of the active waves.
Getting into reading Russian is much more difficult that it was for me to get into reading Spanish, so I feel like finishing the Assimils would help with that.

So, not really a clear goal this time around. I will just see how it develops over the course of the month.
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raikiro
Yellow Belt
Posts: 55
Joined: Sun Jan 15, 2017 7:34 pm
Location: Bonn, Germany
Languages: German (N), English (3332)
learning: Japanese, Spanish, Russian
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Re: raikiro's log - Spanish, Japanese & Russian

Postby raikiro » Sat Jul 31, 2021 6:08 pm

This month was rather uneventful.
I became a premium member of LanguageCrush, and it is working very nicely. However, I have not been in the mood for much reading last month.

I finished the passive wave of my Assimil Spanisch ohne Mühe (1948). The last ~15 lessons I found quite difficult at times, with many words that I did not know. Many of them I decided to just ignore - for example, there is one lesson about all the different parts of a car that could break and how you call them. Most of these words I don't even know in English, and while I might know the German terms for it, I have no idea what they actually mean exactly. Another lesson was about all kinds of different fabrics and materials for clothing. My general rule of thumb was: if I don't know the words in English, I will probably not need them in Spanish. I still went through the lessons in the same manner, but I did not spend extra time to make sure I understand 100% of the vocabulary.
The active wave is still going on. I wrote in greater detail how I go through those in my previous post. One change I made is that I repeat every sentence (of part of a sentence, depending on length) without looking at the text. This is recommended by Assimil, but it is not something I have ever done, thinking that it would probably be as effective to just shadow it. I was wrong. What I am struggling with the most is all those short words that I understand well enough but can't remember. Forcing me to get it right has been a great help in reducing the number of mistakes I make during the active wave.
I have also deleted my Assimil anki deck. Previously I put every sentence where I got significant mistakes in, or several minor mistakes in, in anki and have me type in the sentence manually. It quickly became way to difficult for me, having sentences that were three lines long. Whenever I made a single mistake I would "fail" the card. Way to frustrating, so I just got rid of it.
I've continued using the Spanish sentences deck, where I just have one blank to fill in per sentence. It is quite easy, and I've been doing 20 new cards a day. The reviews are no problem - my interval modifiers are set quite high, and I am still at more than 90% correct. And I started suspending all cards whose interval is longer than 6 months, to prevent me from building this large pile. I'm keeping them in my deck just for the statistics.

Speaking of statistics:
words read: 102.368 (excl. Assimil)
hours listened: 6,5

Last time I also wrote about my trouble finding Japanese literature and I found a solution: honto.jp. It appears to be the only/biggest Japanese store that accepts customers from overseas, and they sell ebooks as well. The caveat is that you can't download them properly, as they are only intended to be read on the honto reader. You can not copy from the file either. I have found a way around that though - setting my monitor to very high resolution and screenshotting allows me to easily OCR the text with google drive. I experimented a bit with how small the font size has to be to still be properly OCR'd and with those settings I need about 15-20 "images" per book, making it a matter of maybe five minutes to get a text document.
While I understand that all those copyright restrictions are there for a reason - if I pay the normal price for a book I'd like to be able to work with the text on my kindle or a reading tool.
Unfortunately they do not sell audiobooks. There is a website, audiobook.jp, and they seem to accept international customers. But I have not found the books I plan on reading there.

Books I finished in July:
El beso carmesí
Assimil - Spanisch ohne Mühe (not a novel, but considering how many times I read the dialoges I'll count it anyways)
(23/52)

Yesterday I started importing a bunch of books into languagecrush and my kindle. I will be spending four weeks attending a course, with probably not too many other things to do. I alluded to this already in previous posts - now starts the time where I will not have to work full time until February. The current plan is to always have one month of classes online and then one in person, until the end of February. With the covid restrictions slowly getting less though, we might end up spending more time there in person - meaning more time away from home, and with not much more to do than reading.
I'm hoping to get a lot done this month.
Currently I am seven books behind my goal, which is not as bad as I feared. I will try to catch up a little in the next weeks.
As for Assimil: with the passive wave of Spanish done, I will keep doing the active wave. I will also pack my two Assimil Russian books and continue working with them. I got to roughly the halfway point last year. Starting again from the beginning would probably be a waste of time, and trying to rush through the first half might just tire me out. I think I will go back maybe 5 or 10 lessons, but not further.

Just a heads up, the next update might be delayed. I am scheduled to get home on the 3rd of September, and I don't know if I will have an internet connection before that. On the 4th I will be getting eye surgery, which will render me unable to see (and read) properly for at least a week of two. My plan for that will be to just prepare a bunch of audiobooks to listen to, since I won't be able to do much else anyways.
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raikiro
Yellow Belt
Posts: 55
Joined: Sun Jan 15, 2017 7:34 pm
Location: Bonn, Germany
Languages: German (N), English (3332)
learning: Japanese, Spanish, Russian
x 219

Re: raikiro's log - Spanish, Japanese & Russian

Postby raikiro » Sat Sep 18, 2021 12:52 pm

This is just going to be a short summary of the last month. After my eye surgery two weeks ago, my vision is still problematic. Seeing stuff in the distance is pretty easy, but close up is very difficult, so reading is hard.

Spanish:
words read: 102.314
hours listened: 00:21:53

Russian:
hours listened: 02:47:29

I tried to work with the russian Assimils a bit, and spend about 3 days reviewing the lessons I had done previously to refresh them; overall 87 lessons (over two books). My hope was that I would just be able to continue where I left off about a year ago, but many of the lessons only seem vaguely familiar. I remember not being particularly thorough about them back then - perhaps that is the issue. For reference, I checked some of the Mini Stories at LingQ, which I worked through in a much more deliberate manner even before touching the Assimil, and even though I obviously forgot some words, they still felt pretty familiar and comfortable to understand.
Which then raises the question: should I start with the Assimil again? Not necessarily from the very first lesson, as they are easy enough, but more than I originally anticipated? Or should I just move on and try to jump into some books again?

I finished three books in August:
Cautivas del berserker, books 7-9
(26/52)

Currently reading (mid-September):
Sinsajo (I swear I will finish it at one point!)
Juego de tronos (3 chapters in)
Harry Potter y la Orden del Fénix (audio; 20 chapters in)

In the days after my surgery I've accumulated quite some listening hours, which of course will be included in my post.
During the last couple of days I also managed to catch up with my Assimil reviews that had been piling up for close to two weeks, due to being unable to read.

I stumbled across the Super Challenge recently, and was quite amazed at the way they count books - only 50 pages to count as one book! So, out of interest, I went ahead and counted up the pages I read so far this year. As I read exclusively digitally, mostly on my kindle, I took either the amazon page or goodreads to check page counts. In cases where these two pages differed, I took the smaller number.
The (conservative) estimation of my pages read this year so far is 8590, which would count as 171 books in the super challenge. Definitely sounds better than 26! Breaking it down, this would mean an average of 330 pages per book. That does not sound too far off. Some of the books I have read were definitely shorter than this, but I've had a couple of really big ones - namely the Harry Potter series in Japanese. The last five of these alone account for 5219 pages (again, checking both amazon.jp and goodreads and taking the lower numer). This I found extremely surprising, as I did not remember the physical books being that big. But then I remembered some calculations I did earlier this year, which showed that the Japanese audiobooks were about 40% longer than the Spanish equivalents! Back then I found that they did not have a significant difference in speed, and the page count is another indicator that the books are just much longer in Japanese.
Even if we were to disregard HP in Japanese completely, I would have read 3371 pages, or 67 books according to Super Challenge rules - quite impressive, especially considering that the Super Challenge always seems to span about 1 1/2 years.
(Just to be clear: in my "books finished" statistics I include audiobooks. In these page counts however, they are of course not included.)

But this is not the Super Challenge, and I am not going to change my goals now - I just felt it was interesting to put into perspective. I feel like I have been slacking a lot, but it's actually not that bad.
Starting out in the beginning of the year I also admitted that my goal was very lofty, and that I would already be pretty happy if I reached only half of it. Considering that I got 26/52 so far, I already did it! And it is still only September.
Not it is getting more difficult though, because I started with the Song of Ice and Fire series, which is rather long.

I will be away soon for another three weeks for my courses, which will likely cause my next update to be delayed again. Really, every update until March will probably be delayed - sorry about that. I'm always switching between being home for a few weeks and then being away, and that makes it difficult to post.
I hope that my eyesight will improve soon to I can make good use of my time away and read some more.
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raikiro
Yellow Belt
Posts: 55
Joined: Sun Jan 15, 2017 7:34 pm
Location: Bonn, Germany
Languages: German (N), English (3332)
learning: Japanese, Spanish, Russian
x 219

Re: raikiro's log - Spanish, Japanese & Russian

Postby raikiro » Sun Oct 31, 2021 11:54 am

Alright, this is just going to be a short one.
I did not get a chance to make a post for September, and when I realised last week that I had completely forgotten about it I decided to just wait until the end of this month to put everything together.

I have nothing much to report, my statistics for the last two months:
Spanish listening: 21:24:19
Russian listening: 01:12:00
Japanese listening: 00:20:00

Some of those listening hours are rounded, because I don't always record seconds as well.
In addition to that, I did some reading: a couple more chapters of Sinsajo, a couple more chapters of Juego de Tronos. During my last stay away from home I also worked halfway through Assimil Russian again. I paused it while at home, and plan on continuing it next time I'm away if I can - I have five exams coming up next month, so I might not be willing to put in too much time.

Overall, I'm currently not really feeling it in regards to languages. I do a little bit here and there, but nothing consistent as of now. My interest in Icelandic has been growing though. I have held myself back so far because I really don't want to start another language at this point. On the other hand I remember that some time ago I started Russian to distract myself from my frustration with Japanese and it certainly helped regaining my motivation. Maybe it would not be such a bad idea after all.

I'll be leaving home on the 14th and I'm scheduled to come back on the 3rd of December. If I'm lucky, and the preparation for my exams does not take away all the time I have, I might get something more done during it. Thanks for reading.
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