raikiro's log - Swedish, Japanese & Russian

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raikiro
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Location: Bonn, Germany
Languages: German (N), English (3332)
learning: Japanese, Spanish, Russian
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Re: raikiro's log - Japanese & Russian

Postby raikiro » Thu Apr 30, 2020 2:33 pm

This update will be for two months. I saved my statistics, so they should still be accurate.
Due to the health concerns, I had to leave Bavaria and return home shortly after my last update mid-March. No more classes means I have to use the scripts and supplementary materials to learn everything myself, without the help of teachers or further explanations. It's going okay, but as you can imagine, after sitting at my desk for hours every day I do not feel overly motivated to spend much time on language study.

Statistics for March:
Russian:
words read: 6.836

Japanese:
new kanji: 21
I also studied 10 new words every day from the beginning of March up until about two weeks ago. But since I currently use anki for reviewing my school stuff, I did not want to push my reviews further up, so I stopped for now. Without the additional flashcards for school it would be fine, so I'll probably get back to doing that once the worst here is over.

Statistics for April:
Japanese:
words read: 12.200
hours listened: 1,5

Russian:
words read: 4.773
hours listened: 0,5

Spanish:
words read: 4.003

For whatever reason I've been feeling the urge to read Spanish. Since I already read Harry Potter 1 in both Japanese and Russian recently, I did not want to start it a third time. So I thought about which books I knew that were somewhat easy to read. My "knowledge" in Spanish consists of very basic grammar I remember form my classes about 8 years ago and passive understanding of vocabulary thanks to my knowledge of Latin, German and English. I decided to go for Crepúsulo, the first book of the Twilight series. I read those twice before, once in German and then in English in my early teens. The series is moderately interesting and quite easy to understand. Another plus is that the audio book narrator has a very pleasant voice.

Anyways, that should be everything for now. I hope you're all doing well.
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raikiro
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Re: raikiro's log - Japanese & Russian

Postby raikiro » Sun May 31, 2020 6:31 pm

Time for a May update!
I'm still at home, teaching myself what I originally should have learnt in school for my apprenticeship. My main tool for reviewing is anki, so my apprenticeship-deck is my focus currently.
This caused me to not add any new cards to my others decks recently. So no new kanji, no new vocabulary. I still review what is due every day though, and I'm actually pleased to see the amounts of average reviews go down. Seeing a high number of due reviews is very detrimental to my overall motivation, so I'm happy to see it getting better - after my non-language related studies, I should be able to add quite a couple of new cards without feeling overwhelmed (or at least I hope so). But yeah, that is the reason why there is no new kanji in my statistics. I'm still learning some passively through reading, but no deliberate studies.

In general, my kanji studies come in several forms. Under normal circumstances, I use 3 methods.
First is the passive kanji reviewing and learning through reading. Definitely the most enjoyable for me personally, but it also makes it very difficult to keep track of my progress in terms of kanji.
Second is the normal vocabulary study. I study Japanese -> German, so passive recognition only. The front card never has Furigana though, so that means if I don't know the kanji I at least learn to recognize them, if only in this specific word initially. Then, after seeing a kanji in several vocabulary words, I start grasping it. But again, this is only passive.
The third method is deliberate kanji study. This means working through my kanji book consecutively. I know that a lot of people nowadays do not bother with being able to actually write kanji per hand, for typing being able to recognize it is sufficient. And, to be fair, I have yet to come across a situation in real life where I thought "dang, if only I knew how to write this kanji per hand", if you disregard the language classes I used to take at university. And even then, at an intermediate level we were allowed to use digital dictionaries to look them up if we forgot a word or kanji. And if I ever felt the necessity to write it, I could look it up on my phone. Still, I like to be able to write them per hand, for no reason whatsoever. So I write them down several times initially, add them to my anki, and review them. Anki has a function that allows you to draw on your phone screen, so I have an easier time seeing if I recalled it correctly or not, without having to have a pen ready. With this method, following a certain order, I can also keep track of how many kanji exactly I know actively. Counting my passive knowledge is much harder because of the first two methods.

The reason I explain this in so much detail is because I am actually contemplating getting rid of, or at least modifying, method three. Due to aforementioned reasons, learning to write kanji from memory more and more seems like a waste of time. I adjusted the anki intervals several times, but my % correct is only about 75% for my kanji deck. I believe there are two factors to this. First, kanji meanings can be ambiguous. There are quite a few terms or meanings that can would fit several kanji, so I think of the "wrong" one for that particular card. I have started tagging these cards that I mix up frequently, and I'm planning on checking if there is another way to make it easier for me to distinguish between them so I get the right one. Of course, I could also just write out both of the kanji that could be referred to by a particular card, but sometimes I just don't think about it.
The second factor is probably due to the lack of actual use I am getting out of this. I never write them down in every day life, which also means that I am getting absolutely no repetition outside of anki. One option would be to just write more by hand, but I don't have huge amounts of time to spare and I'd rather use the time I have on reading. As I suppose is apparent from my log, reading is my general goal for languages, active usage is not a primary focus of mine.
Now that I have spent many weeks just reviewing what is due, I can very clearly notice that the majority of the kanji reviews are the meaning -> writing cards, the kanji recognition cards don't cause me that much trouble. So I do feel like it would save some time that I could otherwise spend on acquiring more kanji passively. Maybe it is time to give up on the dream to be able to write them all because, realistically, I do not need it. My university is finished, and for my apprenticeship there might be a use for some languages, Japanese not being one of them. I now (should) know about 800 kanji actively from memory, and perhaps it is time to be satisfied. If I ever were to need them, knowing them passively should make it easy enough if I were to put in some time for dedicated study.
If anyone reading has been in a similar position, feel free to share your input if you like. I appreciate it.

But now, onto the numbers:
Japanese:
words read: 19.876 (7.676 more)
hours listened: 2,5 (1,0 more)

Russian:
words read: 30.026 (25.253 more)
hours listened: 4,6 (4,1 more)

Spanish:
words read: 44.797 (40.794 more)
hours listened: 5,5 (5,5 more)

All in all, this was a very good month. I knew I read a lot, but looking at the numbers, I'm still positively surprised.
In Japanese, I continued Harry Potter 2, next is chapter 6 (of 18).
In Spanish, I continued Twilight, next is chapter 10 (of 24).
In Russian, I finally finished Harry Potter 1.

So the next question is how to proceed for Russian. It took me much longer to finish Harry Potter 1, because I realized halfway through that reading it twice in short succession was not particularly enjoyable. But my pride forced me to still finish it before being able to move onto something else. Now I can move on and I have to consider my options. I still have Metro 2033, but it is not said to be a particularly easy book and I have never read it, so I think I still need some more practice before tackling it. So I went through my calibre (a program used to organize ebooks) in search of interesting books or series I have that I'd like to re-read and checked whether or not there were Russian versions available. For most, there weren't but I found one series by one of my favourite authors, Trudi Canavan, "The Black Magician Trilogy". I read this particular series only once, in my teens, but I enjoyed it very much. I feel like I still remember enough to not get lost, but not enough to make it boring to read. So I will take a shot at it sometime this month and see how it goes. I also found an audio recording. The quality is not optimal, it seems to have been recorded by someone non-commercially. But it should be good enough.

Despite, or perhaps because of my newly found interest in Spanish there has been another thing on my mind: Arabic. It used to be on my "maybe some day" - languages list for a while now, and every once in a while the urge to pick it up is coming through. But, considering my non-language related studies, I don't think it would be a good idea to pick it up at this point in time... Then again, a bit of dabbling with the script can't hurt, right? We'll see if I manage to restrain myself.

This was a very long update, but those are the things that have been on my mind recently. Thank you for reading, and stay safe.
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Just_a_visitor
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Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... hp?t=14557
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Re: raikiro's log - Japanese & Russian

Postby Just_a_visitor » Sun May 31, 2020 7:32 pm

raikiro,
wouldn't you like to try one of these:
https://www.coursera.org/search?query=r ... Technology
There are general language classes there, and courses focused on a certain book (например, курс Томского университета по "Мастеру и Маргарите").

Или что-то отсюда (немного "на вырост" :) ):
https://arzamas.academy/courses
https://openedu.ru/course/#query=%D1%80 ... 1%80%D0%B0
Забавно: по этой последней ссылке есть и русскоязычный курс, посвященный японской литературе. 2-в-1 (читается "два в одном").
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raikiro
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Location: Bonn, Germany
Languages: German (N), English (3332)
learning: Japanese, Spanish, Russian
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Re: raikiro's log - Japanese & Russian

Postby raikiro » Tue Jun 30, 2020 3:24 pm

Time to update.

First of all, thank you Just_a_visitor, some of these look very interesting. I have not actually done anything in Russian this month, but I have saved them and will definitely have a closer look at them in the future. I have actually gotten Мастер и Маргарита recommended to me before, I might have to check it out.

I have not done too many language-related things this month in general: I had two exams recently, and next month will be even worse - because I could not attend school due to the ongoing situation my teachers decided that it would be a fantastic idea to put all the tests and exams we were supposed to write over the course of six months into three weeks in July, so I'm looking at 14 exams in the coming weeks. This will likely not leave me with much time, considering that these exams are very important.

But for now, let's look at what I did this month:
Spanish:
words read: 34.000 (10.797 less)
hours listened: 7.9 (2,4 more)

Not too much. It was a very bad month, especially in contrast to May. I did get more listening than previously though - because I had an 8 hour drive where I listened to my audiobook. I only counted half the time though, to compensate for listening to it on the side while driving versus the more concentrated listening I usually do.

What else? I wrote quite extensively about my flashcard-problem in my previous post. I changed the intervals of my flashcards according to a calculation that tells you the optimal ease percentage based on your current retention and your desired retention percentages (about 85%).
My last post I wrote that my % correct for my kanji deck is about 75%. I decreased the interval according to the formula (so that I see the cards more frequently and remember more of them). But according to anki, my % correct is only at 70.7% for the last month, so it actually decreased further. Not really what I was going for, but perhaps it needs a bit longer than a month to adjust, considering most of these cards are mature and only show up less than once a month. I'll keep at it for another month to see how it develops, otherwise I think more drastic measures will be taken (e.g. deleting all production cards).
I also started changing a couple of cards that had very similar meanings to have a cue that will help me recall the specific kanji that is asked for - this seems to have worked somewhat, and I feel that I have an easier time now. But this process takes quite some time, so I did only go through a couple of the worst ones.

I followed the forum thread "SRS vs. Natural Repetition", where some users wrote that they set a maximum amount of reviews after which the card gets deleted automatically. This sounds viable for vocabulary, and I can see myself doing that for my word deck. For kanji however, I am doubtful, as they are not necessarily taught in logical frequency order. You could argue that I really don't need them then, but I'd still like to know them.
An easy solution to the problem might be to "just" read more. More natural repetition includes both vocabulary and kanji, but it also takes more time than spending a couple of minutes each day to flip through some cards, even if I have to repeat them several times.
When this self-studying phase is over for me, I hope to get back to the reading routine that I had for a while, where I would read something everyday, rotating through my languages. But for now, I feel too much pressure to do anything else.
Again, hopefully after July is over I will have more time and see how to progress from there.

Thank you for reading. My next update might be slightly delayed, because I will be writing a rather long exam on the 31st and than have a 6 hour drive home.
After July is over, I'm looking at (hopefully) about two months where I will have a lot of time. I'm thinking about setting myself a rather work-intensive goal to make some real progress, but I have not yet made a decision as to the specifics.
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raikiro
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Re: raikiro's log - Japanese & Russian

Postby raikiro » Sat Aug 01, 2020 7:37 pm

I finished my exams yesterday, and I'm feeling very confident that the results will be good. In my last post I wrote that I doubt I'll have a lot of time to spend on languages, but I think it turned out better than expected. Spending three weeks away from home in a small room with not too much to do might have been a factor.

In an attempt to hopefully solve my anki problem I spoke wrote about in recent months, I finally gave in. I suspended all production cards in my kanji deck. Realistically, there is absolutely no need for me to be able to write them all by hand from memory, and the lack of practical use contributed to constantly forgetting them. The reason I wanted to be able to write them all was just for the sake of it, out of pride, just 'because I can'.
I expected it to be better after suspending all production cards, but I was not expecting it to be that much better. For the first time in many months my reviews dropped really low, and I felt confident and motivated to add a rather large number of new kanji to my list - and even though I added so many, my reviews for the next days are still quite low. I will do more soon, and this is making me feel much more productive than in the last few months. The last time I added new kanji to my deck was in March. Since then, it felt like I was just fighting a constant battle against myself because I wanted to get it perfect, without actually making a lot of progress at all. This now feels really good.

Another thing that I've been considering is dropping my JLPT vocabulary deck, and for a rather similar reason. There are so many words, even in the lower levels, that I have not encountered in the entirety of my reading, such as scientific or political terms. But my completionism makes it very hard for me to just delete a card before I know it. Using LingQ to find out the most frequent words in the book I'm currently reading that I have not yet marked as 'learned' and review those specifically seems much more useful for my personal goal. As I don't see myself doing a JLPT exam, or even use the language professionally, there really is no necessity to stick to an official list that was not at all created with novels and other works of fiction in mind.

I'm considering trying to power through the rest of the Jouyou kanji within the next months (depending on how large the pile of reviews gets) and pause my reading activities for now. I feel like I recognize so many new characters that I have learnt recently. On the other hand, I struggle with remembering kanji, without having actually consciously studied them, just by reading. From my time at university I remember some people remembering tons of kanji just like that from seeing them once or twice in a word or context. It works somewhat if I see the word very frequently, but compared to deliberately studying them once it is much less efficient. Perhaps instead of spending the time to read it would be more beneficial in the long run to first get the kanji done. Also, I'm currently enjoying myself a lot in Spanish, and want that to be my current focus in terms of reading.

What else? I finished Crepúsculo, which is now officially the first book I've read in Spanish. It took about 4 months, but the number of days I actually spent are much lower - I almost always read at least one chapter in one go. Overall, it was much easier than expected.
Keep in mind that I do use LingQ, so looking up words is much quicker than it would be if I were using a traditional dictionary.
I've imported the next part in the series, Luna Nueva, and the percentage of unknown words (as in, words that I have not yet encountered in LingQ) is only 13% on average.
From having read it about 10 years ago I remember the seconds part of the series being my least favorite one. We'll see if I change my opinion, I am definitely planning on reading the entire series in Spanish.

After thinking about what to read in Russian next I decided on На полпути к могиле ("Halfway to the Grave"), the first part of a series that I've read a couple of years ago. I only finished the first three chapters so far though. My average unknown words is at about 30%, so this is a bit more cumbersome than reading in Spanish. To make it easier, I used LingQ to sort my saved words and exported the 100 most frequent words in the course that I don't know yet to anki. I took a couple of days to work through them, and I hope that by getting these most frequent words out of the way I can improve my overall reading speed. I deleted this deck after a couple of days, as most of the words seemed familiar enough and I did not have a lot of trouble remembering them. I might not have known their meaning previously, but most of them felt familiar enough to grasp quite easily.

But now, let's take a look at the statistics:

Japanese
words read: 23.647
hours listened: 3
new kanji: 153

Russian
words read: 11.063
hours listened: 1,4

Spanish
words read: 26.941 (7.059 less)
hours listened: 3,1 (4,8 less)

Less in Spanish, but more overall compared to last month.

Originally, I was going to have a lot of free time for the next two months, but due to the global situation there was a slight change of plans. It will be later this year, for now I'll have to work normally.
I do have two weeks off this month though, so hopefully I can spend some time on languages. At least, if the current heat wave allows it. I am very sensitive to high temperatures and it's not common to have air conditioning were I live.

In regards to my two weeks off work, I think I will set myself the goal to start and finish Luna Nueva. If I do one chapter per day, I will be fine and still have some days left in between. I also want to add more new kanji to my deck. No specific number though, as I need to keep an eye on my review count.
Thank you for reading, until next time.
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raikiro
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Re: raikiro's log - Spanish, Japanese & Russian

Postby raikiro » Mon Aug 31, 2020 8:39 pm

Time for another update.

After having suspended all production cards for kanji last month I managed to get more new cards done. My reviews are now quite high for the next couple of days (about 60 reviews), but I hope that these numbers will go down within the next week and I can continue with this pace. One of my problems seems to be that I like to add a bunch of kanji at once, instead of doing only a handful every day.
This is because I like sitting down for a couple of hours and do some concentrated studying of new kanji, and then I add them to my anki. But because I don't want too much time to pass between my first encounter with them and the first review in anki, I tend to do all new cards within one or two days, so that the memory is still fresh. This leads to "chunks" of reviews.
Until now, while perhaps not ideal, this has not bothered me much, so I'm going to continue doing it this way for now.

After considering it for quite a while, I also decided to drop my JLPT vocabulary deck entirely. I randomly picked a handful of words in the deck and checked whether or not I ever encountered them on LingQ while reading - most of them I did not. Now perhaps this was just a very unlucky random selection, but it validated my suspicion that most of the words from the JLPT lists are not relevant for my personal goal: reading fiction.
Initially it felt weird not having vocabulary reviews anymore, but it also gives more space for other types of cards (mostly kanji in my case). I now that some people swear by anki, and I absolutely see the benefits if you tailor it to your needs, but there is only so much anki I can handle in a day without hating it.

But now for the goals I set: an unspecified amount of new kanji and starting and finishing Luna Nueva.
I managed 110 new kanji, which included finally finishing the kyouiku kanji (the ~1000 kanji that are taught in the first six years of school). So I'm now in grade S or general use kanji territory. When flipping through the pages, there are many which I already recognize. This now makes me question how I should proceed.
Previously, I used the school years to group new kanji into smaller portions of ~150-200. Now I have a bigger pile before me. So I'm wondering whether it would be better to go through everything, and start with the ones I already am more familiar with, get them into anki and be done with it. That way, I would get a better idea of how many of the remaining thousand are actually new for me. That would mean ignoring the order they are in though.
If I stick to the order, that would mean that kanji which I would only need to look at once or twice to memorize would take me another couple of months to get to. On the other hand, having these "easy" kanji in between gives me an easier time when I'm doing a larger amount on one day.
I'm yet undecided, but my reviews should go down by the end of the week and by then I'll have to make my decision.
Also, just for the sake of clarity: the book I'm using, Henshall's "Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters" is from 1998, meaning it is still using the old list of 1.945 jouyou kanji, instead of the updated version from the year 2010, which contains 2.136 kanji. So technically, after I've finished the book, I'll still have a couple more characters to learn. But for now I'm focusing on the material I have at hand, as only five characters were removed in 2010 and therefore having the old list does not do any harm.

Now, for the second goal:
I'm nearly finished with Luna Nueva. There is one chapter missing, which I will get to tomorrow. It would have worked out alright, but I had one week where my internet broke (the disadvantage of being dependent on LingQ, but I didn't want to go from LingQ to unaided reading in the middle of the book, and at this level) and then I unexpectedly had a guest at my place for several days, leaving me with close to no time to study.
But like I said, I will get it done tomorrow so I'll count the goal as pretty much reached.
My memory turned out to be correct: I really dislike this part of the series. Next one will be Eclipse, which is better. In general, the series is getting longer with each book. In case you are interested, these are the amount of chapters I have in LingQ per book: 1. 68, 2. 79, 3. 95, 4. 119.
I only noticed yesterday that audible.de only has the audiobooks up to book 3. Looking at the dates of which they were released, it looks like the last one might be coming soon-ish. We'll see if it's going to be soon enough, otherwise I'll probably just read it without the audiobook. Considering that I don't really care for speaking anyways, I don't think it would be very detrimental to pronunciation.

But now for some statistics:
Spanish:
words read: 132.730 (105.789 more)
hours listened: 15,4 (12,3 more)

Japanese:
new kanji: 110 (43 less)

Obviously I concentrated heavily on reading Spanish this month, which does not come as a surprise. I will likely keep it like this for the time being. Reading Spanish is getting more and more comfortable, and I'm considering dropping LingQ for the last book of the series when I don't have an audiobook anyways, and read it on my kindle. This decision is still in the future though.
Next I'm going to start Eclipse. For comparison, while my % of unknown / yet unencountered words for Luna Nueva before starting it was at an average of about 13%, for Eclipse it is now at about 9%, with the extremes for chapters being at 6% and 15%. While the drop was only about 4% on average, I feel like these 4% are starting to make a difference. I even increased the speed of the audiobook further. When I started Crepúsculo, I was using 0.80 speed, and now I'm at 1.05 when I want a comfortable speed and 1.10 if I want to make it a bit harder.

Now for another set of goals.
1. Continue with new kanji once the number of reviews has settled down a little. How many probably depends on whether I decide to extract the familiar ones first or stick to the given order. So again, no fixed number.
2. Start and potentially finish Eclipse. Considering I was able to finish Luna Nueva in pretty much one month with over a week of not being able to do anything, I should be able to handle Eclipse despite it being longer by a few chapters.
There are 29 Chapters and the audiobook is 19,5 hours long, so it is definitely doable if I don't find myself too stressed from work. However, I will not push myself too hard here, so if I don't manage to finish it completely I'll still be happy in the end of the month if I get somewhat close to the end.
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raikiro
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Re: raikiro's log - Spanish, Japanese & Russian

Postby raikiro » Sat Oct 03, 2020 11:02 am

So this update is slightly delayed due to work and a couple of appointments that kept me busy those past few days. I did screenshot my statistics on the 30th though, so they are accurate.

I continued with my kanji deck and added a nice amount of cards, and after the first couple of days the number of reviews went down to ~60. Within the next couple of days they will fall to around ~40, and then I'm going to add new cards again.
In my last post I wrote about my preference to add new cards and deal with them in bigger chunks because that means that after initially studying them (by writing them down several times) I will see them the very next day, instead of perhaps only a week later, which would diminish the effects of the initial encounter. I think I'll try to split them up a bit more this month though, as an experiment. I don't think I'll like it, but it won't hurt to try it out.
I also wrote about how to proceed with the kanji. To quickly summarize: I finished the kyouiku kanji and the remaining ~1000 don't get split into smaller groups like the initial ones did. I was thinking whether or not I should just go through them in their original order, or quickly scan through the list and pick the ones I already know to get them out of the way.
I decided to go for the latter option, taking the kanji that I knew already first. I just scrolled through the list in anki, so I might have overlooked a couple, but I got 156. The rest of the list I will work through by using the official order. This might not be ideal (they are not sorted by frequency, which would seem more useful) but this is how I've been doing it until now and I don't want to change things too much.

Another thing I did was work through some vocabulary during my breaks at work. What I did is take LingQ to sort words by relevance (i.e. frequency in the texts that I've worked through) and get the ones that I have not yet marked as "known". Meaning, all of these words I've encountered several times, but they just don't seem to be sticking without some extra help.
I always printed out lists of about 200 words and worked with them. A couple days later, I would get this list in LingQ again and test myself on them, setting the ones I remembered to "known". Out of every chunk of 200 I could set about 150 words to known. Considering it took me about an hour per chunk that is not bad at all, but of course having seen them several times before makes remembering them much easier.
By doing this every once in a while I'm hoping to slowly close some gaps in my vocabulary - and because they are sorted by frequency from the texts that I have read, they are relevant to me much more than a normal everyday-vocabulary frequency list.
Overall I worked through 5 chunks of 200 this month (some Japanese and some Spanish), which isn't too bad.

There were two goals I set for the month: more kanji, and start + finish Eclipse.
For the kanji part I'm happy.
I did not read as much as I would have wanted, I only got about halfway through. I simply underestimated how tired I would be after work, and I did not want to spend my weekends trying to catch up. Last month I had my vacation to help me, but this month I did not have such luxury.

Statistics:
Japanese
words read: 4685
new kanji: 156

Spanish
words read: 63.603
hours listened: 7,8
LingQs learned: 525

The reading in Japanese was from a handful of news articles that I read at work the other day.
I usually don't include learned words statistics. I usually don't even pay attention to it honestly - this time it just caught my eye and made me happy, and that is a good enough reason for me to share it.

This month I'm going to a two weeks long seminar, and I'm expecting to have quite a lot of free time there.
So my goals will be the same as last month: new kanji and finish Eclipse, and whatever else I might feel like when I'm bored.
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raikiro
Yellow Belt
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learning: Japanese, Spanish, Russian
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Re: raikiro's log - Spanish, Japanese & Russian

Postby raikiro » Sun Nov 01, 2020 8:31 pm

This month I tried adding kanji in smaller amounts at a time, but at a higher frequency to prevent an "overload" of input and anki reviews. I did that for about 10 days and then my reviews went up uncomfortably anyways, so I stopped. It's been more than two weeks now and my reviews are still higher than I'd want them to be. I also did not really notice any improvement in retention as I was hoping. So overall, it did not help me to split up the load into smaller chunks, the result seems to be the same. Which means that I'll probably be going back to doing it like I did before.
Overall I did 59 new kanji this month. Not too many compared to the last couple of months, but it's okay. It was one of my monthly goals to learn new kanji, and I'll count it as reached - but I will definitely try harder in the month ahead.

The second goal of the month was to finish Eclipse. I did meet that goal, and started reading Amanecer - and I am more than happy to say that I already am halfway through. Considering Amanecer is the biggest of the series by quite a bit this is a huge accomplishment for me. So what happened?
Previously I wrote about there being no audio book available (at least not on audible). I decided to try to just read it without any aid, and loaded it on my kindle. And I must say, I am very positively surprised. I understand much more than I was expecting. Of course having read the previous installments in the series means I know the author's favourite words quite well, and having read this book a couple of years ago also helps.
I use the kindle dictionary to look up the occasional word if it seems very relevant or interesting, otherwise I just skip the unknown words as long as the sentence is clear to me. This is also the reason why I'm getting through it much quicker than when reading on LingQ, where I check every single word.
It also helped that I had quite a lot of free time at work recently, so I could spend a couple of hours reading last week.
I must say that I am very happy with the way my Spanish has been progressing. I started in March as a false beginner (having had one year of classes a while back, but forgotten most of it) and I am now at a point where I can quite smoothly read through a book and consider it to be "pleasure reading" instead of "studying". I am able to enjoy the book without the words I don't know taking away from my enjoyment. This is a huge accomplishment.
Naturally, when I switch to a book that I have not yet read it will probably be harder than it is right now, but I'm feeling optimistic.
I'm not yet sure what I'll read next. I have got the first part of the Sangre enamorada series, and I'm also considering Game of Thrones or the Hunger Games, which I am both unfamiliar with. I would assume that Game of Thrones might be a bit too complex, and probably too long for now.

Statistics
Japanese
new kanji: 59

Spanish
words read: 211.609
hours listened: 12,9

That's the most reading I've done in Spanish in a month.
For the next three months I'll be having a seminar and will mostly be away from home, so I'll probably have a lot of time to spend on reading.
No specific goals for the month, I'll just try to do as much as I comfortably can.
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raikiro
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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 » Mon Nov 30, 2020 3:28 pm

This was a rather productive month for me.
I finished reading Amanecer and started reading the Sangre Enamorada-series. I've read through the first two books for now, two more remain. It's going quite well, but I must say I am not a big fan of the plot and the general worldbuilding so far. It's not really what I was expecting. I will finish it, as I've already bought the series and the book are quite short at only about 150 pages each, and after that I'll move on to something more interesting again.
I haven't done a lot of Spanish reading recently, because I'm currently trying to catch up on a couple of English releases I've missed in previous months. But since I don't count English as foreign language reading, it does not matter for this log.

Being away from home also made it easier to be more productive with my kanji, and I covered about 300 in 3 weeks. I bought flashcards to supplement my digital learning. Anki does not really give you an easy option to review the same cards serveral times a day, and with the amount I'm adding I really need some additional reviewing. So I write every character with its meaning, readings and radicals on a card and go through them. I've made three stacks that I repeat at least once a day. After I've gotten the character correct three days in a row, I will discard of the physical card and rely on anki. So far it's been going well. My retention rate is lower than I would like (about 65%), but this comes from the large amount of new cards I'm adding every day. And I still feel like I'm making progress.
Under normal circumstances having 130+ reviews a day would give me nightmares, but here I am in a different environment from home and I have much more freetime than usual.
I'll be here for another 6 weeks (plus the Christmas break in between) and I'm hoping that I might be able to finally finish with the jouyou kanji during that time. If I keep this pace up, I will even have some time left in the end. However, I need to be careful to not push myself too far with anki, or I'll start dreading it again.

Statistics:
Japanese
hours listened: 4,3
new kanji: 302

Spanish
words read: 185.395

A bit less reading Spanish than last month even though I finished more books, simply because they were shorter. Still a good amount of reading I think. I could do much more, but as I've said earlier, I'm currently catching up on my English series.
Seeing the amount of kanji I've worked through makes me very happy though, and I'm hoping I can keep this up going forward.

So my goal for next month: more kanji. Depending on my luck, I might have to move over the Christmas break, which would take away a lot of time from studying. I also want to finish the Sangre Enamorada series, and think of what I'd like to read next in Spanish.
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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 » Thu Dec 31, 2020 3:16 pm

Time to sum up the month, and the year overall.

December
My goal was to continue with the kanji, and I did - though at a more relaxed pace. Because of more lockdowns and restrictions I got sent home earlier than expected, and I will be staying home for another week in January as well. This definitely has some impact on my studying.
I got exactly 150 new kanji in this month. Less than in November, but still okay.
I wanted to finish reading the Sangre Enamorada series, but I only got through the third book because I picked up some Japanese reading again instead.

Statistics for December:
Japanese
words read: 33.057
hours listened: 4
new kanji: 150

Spanish
words read: 47.639

Overall lower numbers than last month, but Christmas and other obligations tend to get in the way towards the end of the year.


The year 2020
Perhaps this is a good time to look back at this year in general. I started my apprenticeship, and thanks to covid, I spent 5 months at home studying for my mid-terms instead of having classes. This also made me feel like I needed to do something else, and I finally got back to Spanish.
I had one year of Spanish in school but dropped out because I did not get along with the teacher and his methods at all, and for a while I hated the language. All I could associate with it was that teacher. But after about 6 years, I finally managed to get into it again and I am more than happy I did.
It almost seems surreal that I only started Spanish as a false beginner in March, so about 10 months ago. I didn't spend insane amounts of time on it either, but already I am at a point were I can read it just to have fun, and without external tools like LingQ. My kindle makes the occasional lookup of a words quite easy, but I rarely use it.
As happy as my Spanish progress makes me, it also makes me sad. My understanding of Spanish is much better than Russian, even though I feel like I worked much harder on Russian. And even my Japanese, which I studied for much longer, seems worse in some aspects. The reading is slower due to the characters, and I still struggle sometimes to understand a sentence.
Of couse I have to be fair to myself and acknoledge that Spanish is much more easy to get into with my linguistic background - the grammar is much easier to understand, and the vast amount of cognates I know from other languages helped tremendously. 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.

Some statistics for 10 months of Spanish:
hours listened: 54,1
words read: 764.440
words "known": 8017

I definitely need more listening, and of couse more reading. As content as I am with my progress, I am still far from done - there are just so many more words left to learn!


Plans for 2021
In line with my activities in recent months, next year I will finally conquer the last of the jouyou-kanji. I've been progressing nicely, and though I slowed down a bit and won't be done by the end of January, I will definitely get through them, probably by February or March.
I'm not one to make extensive plans and schedules for everything, but I tried to make a list of things I would like to do next year.
This included breaking down the year into quarters. I want to rotate my focus through my languages, starting with Japanese for the next three months. I've signed up for the LingQ hardcore challenge, and I'm excited to see how far I can get. I plan on doing the hardcore challenges for Spanish and Russian later in the year.
In an attempt to get some overview over potential reading material, I made a spreadsheet. On this spreadsheet are 52 titles. The amount is pure coincidence, but it is very easy to calculate- if I wanted to get through this list in one year I'd have to read one book per week.
Is this realistic? Probably not. Should I give up right now? Absolutely not.
I have about half a year of practical instruction in my apprenticeship, and starting in June, I have a month of vacation and then theory and classes for the rest of the year. If the pandemic is somewhat under control by then, this means 6 months someplace far from home, with not too many things to do. Realistically, I will not have that much free time for many years to come. So I might get through a lot of books.
So could I get through one book per week on average?
With two or three exceptions at about 150 pages each, all of these are full-length novels. Notably longer are some of the Harry Potters and the Song of Ice and Fire series. For reference, some of these audiobooks are over 40 hours long - virtually impossible to read through while working full-time.
So in that case, audiobooks might actually come in handy. I have to commute about 2,5 hours a day anyways, so perhaps I can get through a couple of audiobooks during that time. I will have to see if my car speakers are decent enough to be able to follow it and it doesn't distract me too much. Then again, most of the time is spent on the highway, which doesn't require too much attention. So for the sake of making my goal somewhat realistic, I will count audiobooks as having "read" a book on my list, so long as I feel like I understood it well enough.
I will also not try to stick to strictly one book per week, as I will need more time for some bigger ones, and might get through other ones more quickly. I will use my spreadsheet to know if I'm somewhat on track still.
I know already that I will be slower in the beginning, as I chose Japanese for the start of the year and I still stumble over the characters. Though, hopefully, this will improve as I finish the jouyou. Also, for Japanese I only have 5 books on my list - the remaining Harry Potter books. I might throw in some manga afterwards, but I have no idea yet how I would count that, since it's not comparable to a book in terms of text length.

Now, to look once again at my next goals:
Finish the three month LingQ hardcore challenge. This includes finishing the jouyou kanji by the end of March at the latest. Finish reading Harry Potter in Japanese, and maybe throw a couple of Spanish books/audiobooks in the mix.
I know that my plan for the next year is very ambitious. But I will have a lot of time towards the seconds half of 2021, and it will keep me motivated. And, realistically, if I manage to get only half of those books done in a year, I'll still be happy.

Thank you for reading, and have a nice start into the new year.
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