raikiro's log - Swedish, Japanese & Russian

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

Postby raikiro » Mon Dec 06, 2021 10:56 am

This'll be the last update of this year.
In November, I spend two weeks of writing a test every day on top of my regular classes, followed by another week of exams. Needless to say, my attention was elsewhere.
During the few hours I did not prepare for my exams I socialized and enjoyed the snow. Where I usually live we don't get any snow, so I wanted to enjoy it as best as I can.

My Spanish statistics:
words read: 103.783
hours listened: 07:30:55

Finally finished Sinsajo! This brings me to 27 books finished this year. Realistically, it's going to be the last one. Currently I am reading through an English book I had been waiting for and my finals are coming up in January.

My overall opinion on the Hunger Games series is mixed. I really enjoyed the first two books, but the last one kind of lost me. I can't really pinpoint what it is. Maybe I realized that I did not really like the protagonist, maybe because the setting is pretty different - more politics, less being trapped in an arena.
There is a fourth book, "The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes", which takes place many years before the trilogy and has a protagonist which I am quite interested in. I might give it a try some time.

Currently reading:
Juego de tronos (31 chapters in; ~40%)
Harry Pottery la Orden del Fénix (audio; 26 chapters in)

With the year coming to an end I should probably start considering my goals and projects for next year. However, with my finals coming up, and getting into a completely new workplace, I really have no idea how realistic any of my plans would be at this point.
I might just spend the first 2-3 months of 2022 waiting for all the stress to be over and see where to go from there.
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raikiro
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Re: raikiro's log - Spanish, Japanese & Russian

Postby raikiro » Fri Dec 31, 2021 3:28 pm

Time to summarize the month and the year overall.

This month I did not do anything particularly noteworthy: a couple hours of listening, some reading in Japanese, and that was mostly it. I started reading ハンガー・ゲーム (上): so far, so good. Not sure yet if my reading has become very rusty (probably due to not reviewing my kanji cards in recent months) or if it is mostly due to the vocabulary being unfamiliar. I have started tracking the exact number of characters I read (I have most texts I read digitally, so this is not time-consuming). I'm planning on keeping track of that and calculate my reading speed to see how it develops over time. Right now it is somewhere around 95-115 characters per minute. Not very impressive, but I look up a lot of words so I expect this number to rise.
I finally managed to fix my issues with using a Japanese dictionary on my kindle. The books that I did not buy through amazon (which is most books, as they aren't available on amazon in my country) did not recognize words. My dictionary would only select one character and not recognize which word it belongs to, making everything much slower because I had to manually select the characters every time. But I found an easy solution, so now everything works as intended, even the texts that I created and imported myself.

Another thing I did was cancel my subscription to LanguageCrush. I really liked the concept, and it had some advantages over LingQ. But it is incredibly slow and prone to crashes. I had to refresh the page every couple of minutes. Otherwise lookups would take several seconds each, and the page would regularly crash. These issues persisted even with a very limited amount of words per page. I love gaming, so my PC definitely can handle a browser page and I never encountered these issues with other pages or programs. This leads me to believe that it must be server- or website-based.
Anyways, I stopped using it because technical issues really annoy me more than they should. For now, I'm reading Spanish and Japanese on my kindle. My Spanish is good enough, and with my Japanese dictionary fixed everything works fine. Plus, I prefer not looking at a computer screen all day anyways.
If I decide to go back to Russian, or another language, I might have to look around for an alternative again. I've been browsing r/languagelearning on reddit recently, and I saw two new projects that look promising. Maybe I will try them out when the time comes.

Now a look at my statistic for the overall year:
Japanese:
finished books: 5
read pages: 5.219
read characters: 2.597.717
read words (estimate): ~1.000.000
hours listened: 141

Spanish:
books read: 18
audiobooks: 4
books finished: 22
read pages: 4.074
read words: 1.190.275
hours listened: 122,25

Incredible how these five books in Japanese were so long that I read more pages in Japanese than in 18 books in Spanish. Granted, I had a handful of short novels with only around 120-150 pages in there, but still.
Overall I finished 27 books this year, with two more about halfway through.

What did I learn?
My goal was phrased badly. I set myself a goal to finish books. The first half of the year went really well, by July I had 23. So what went wrong? I started reading Juego de tronos. A huge book.
By giving myself a total number of books as a goal, disregarding the amount of pages or difficulty, I made my own goals impossible to reach. In between I read short novels that I might not have read otherwise - simply because they counted as a book each. When I started Juego de tronos, and I read and read and read and still did not finish, I lost motivation. The better choice would have been to quit either my goals or the book, but I am too much of a completionist. I could not bring myself to change my plans and this led me to essentially stop reading alltogether because I was demotivated.
Lesson No. 1: Making a goal based on a number of books, instead of something else (e.g. pages) lead me to go for shorter books, and brought me to quit reading because I felt I could not attain what I set out to do.
Another thing is that I stuck with one language for too long. I used to rotate between languages every quarter of a year, or at least after six months. My motivation changes. But I told myself, if I only stuck with Spanish, I would be able to get it to a level comfortable enough to be able to mostly drop it (drop as in: only read it for pleasure and not for studying).
Switching languages always did wonders for my energy. When I was frustrated with Japanese I would switch to Russian, which in comparison felt easier. After getting stuck in Russian I would switch to Spanish to relax and recharge. And then I would be motivated to tackle Japanese again. This must have been a big factor why I felt unable to move on with my goals. I started reading in Japanese this month, and so far I'm feeling good.
Lesson No. 2: I need to go back to planning not an entire year, but a quarter and switch languages. It worked in the past, and not doing it this time around was a huge factor in why it did not go as planned.
Lastly, I should get away from setting overall goals in "totals": books, pages, words, you name it. Because my reading speed in my languages are different. Again, to hit my goal this year, I stuck with Spanish because of the three languages I wanted to work on it is my fastest to read in. I completely ignored Russian, because I did not want to lose time knowing that finishing a book in it would have taken much more. Instead, I should count the time spent. Half an hour of reading is half an hour of reading, not matter which language or at what speed.
Lesson No. 3: Going forward, when setting goals that span multiple languages, count in time spent with the language to prevent myself from favouring the "easy" one.

This all sounds very negative. However: I finished 27 books, while having work and exams. This is still an accomplishment, and more than I managed in previous years. So this does not mean that I failed completely, but that it taught me a lot about how to optimise and formulate my goals better going into the future.


I struggle with setting a goal for the next one though - January to February I have my finals coming up. Passing these are crucial, so languages will be far from a priority.
However, as I did these past two weeks, I will instead aim to read for 30 minutes every day. This is an amount of time that should be doable most days.
For the first quarter of 2022 it will probably be mostly Japanese, as I just started ハンガー・ゲーム and I am enjoying myself. I also redid my spreadsheet with a list of books that I could read this year - I kept all the ones I did not finish in 2021, and I added a couple of new ones. This list is not binding, but just serves as an inspiration and something to look at for reference.

But this is it from me for this year. I wish you all a good start into 2022.
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raikiro
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Re: raikiro's log - Spanish, Japanese & Russian

Postby raikiro » Tue Feb 15, 2022 10:20 pm

This update is about two weeks late, but better late than never.
Today I passed my finals with flying colors. That is a huge accomplishment and I'm happy that I have managed. Even though we were always told that nobody cares about your grades after passing anyways, at least I can feel proud having been one of the very best.

But obviously I had many other things on my mind and did not spend too much time with languages.
For January:
Japanese
characters read: 61.342
time spent reading: 545 minutes (~9 hours)
average reading speed: 112 characters/minute

Spanish
time spent listening: 4 hours 19 minutes

Besides that, I started writing short diary entries about my studies and my personal feelings in Japanese once a week. But I don't feel like counting the amount of characters I write there, so no statistics on that.

Just after I ended my subscription to LanguageCrush because of the reasons mentioned in my previous post, I learned that LingQ finally released its new 5.0 version. I took a quick look at it on my tablet, but since I would only ever use it properly on my PC anyways I'm looking forward to checking it out more once I am back home. If they fixed the layout issues (which were my main points of criticism) I might get back to it eventually.
On Friday I will be driving back home, and I have taken two weeks off before I start at my new workplace.
So far I have not done a single language-related thing this February. Depending on my mood I might try to get right back into it as soon as I'm home, or I might just skip February alltogether and continue my studies in March.

For now, I'm definitely satisfied with my January statistics given that I was studying hard for my finals.
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raikiro
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Re: raikiro's log - Spanish, Japanese & Russian

Postby raikiro » Fri Apr 01, 2022 9:16 am

As I alluded to in my previous post, I spent most of February just relaxing after my finals, doing very little in terms of language learning. That is why I have not bothered posting an update yet.

I did exactly one thing in February: on my way to an appointment I listened to my audiobook in Spanish. So 1 hour and 57 minutes of listening, and that's it.

In March, I started working at my new job. This allows me to at least get some listening in, because almost every day that I drive to the office I listen to my audiobook. On other days, I work from home. Luckily my job is not very stressful, so I occasionally can find an hour or two that I can use to study.

I also had the great idea to add yet another language to my studies that had been on my radar for quite some time now - Swedish. For now, I've only started working with Assimil, which tends to be my go-to for languages in general. Especially given the closeness of Swedish to English and my native German I figured it would be a good method to use for this language in particular.
I started on the first of March and was planning to do roughly one lesson per day. So far, I'm 25 lessons in, so it's going quite well. Admittedly, I am quite surprised by the difficulty of it. I was expecting it to be much more comprehensible, but right now it's feeling like it is the most difficult Assimil I've ever worked with. Which is strange, given that I worked through significant parts of the Russian Assimils and about half of the Japanese one.
However, part of the reason at least might also be that I was expecting the language to be easy and I don't invest as much time into every lesson as I have done with the other ones. Mainly it's phonetics that makes it tough. Words at times look completely different than they are written, I definitely need to get used to that. I found a post on the old HTLAL, where one member went (or tried to go) through six different Assimils simultainiously. Disregarding this huge experiment itself, they posted weekly updates on how it went, and one of the Assimils they used was Norwegian. They also spoke English and German, so our experiences might be somewhat similar. And they expressed pretty much the exact same feelings as me - the first set of 7 lessons was very easy. The second and third got very hard all of a sudden, as the sounds just did not make sense. In the second half of the fourth set, they write that all of a sudden it just clicked. This is pretty much were I am at now, so I'm hoping that it will all fall into place soon.
In the end, the poster wrote that Assimil Norwegian, despite the initial issues, turned out to be the most successfull of the six. I also know that they used anki as a complimentary tool for Assimil, and I don't. I still hope that our experiences will be similar.

Apart from Swedish, of course I continued my listening in Spanish, and I got in quite a noteworthy amount of hours (for my standards, anyways).
I've also continued reading in Japanese and tracking my reading speed. It definitely seems to be improving, but some days are better than others. I did not get too much reading in, but it's better than nothing.

So my statistics for March:
Japanese
characters read: 40.383
time spent reading: 316 minutes (~5,25 hours)
average reading speed: 121 characters/minute

Spanish
time spent listening: 16 hours 19 minutes

Swedish
Assimil lessons 1-25

In my previous post I also mentioned that I wanted to check out LingQ again after the big update. I have given it a quick look, and the interface definitely looks much cleaner. When using the correct settings, you also seem to be able to get more text on one screen, which was always a big issue for me - I just don't feel like turning the page every four sentences. However, not all the text on the platform allows for that. I suppose it is a matter of formatting. Since I am not a paying member currently, I don't have a chance to import something to test it with my own books.
They sent an email that, to celebrate 5.0 (and to re-gain customers, of course) you can enter a code they gave you for one month of free premium. But I don't want to waste this just to try it out once.
Right now, none of my languages require the use of LingQ - my Japanese and Spanish are good enough to mostly read on my kindle, and my Swedish is probably not good enough. I could try to imitate what worked for me with Spanish, throw away my Assimil and jump right into a novel I am familiar with, but for now I'm happy with the way it is. And let's not talk about Russian. It's staring at me furiously from the corner like a neglected, unloved child. Maybe one day...

But this actually is starting to become a problem for me. There are so many languages that I want to learn, but I can't do them all at the same time or I'll feel like I will never get anywhere. I don't want to be that person with an A2 in ten different languages. Not that there is something wrong with people that want to do exactly that - I just don't feel like it's for me. I am a reader, so I have to be able to read in a language. And read well, with good comprehension, not having to look up every fifth word. Luckily, my Spanish is getting along very nicely. On the one hand, I would love to just put everything into it, on the other hand I have learned that I should not neglect my Japanese. The struggles of a language learner...

For now, this should be it though. This was a rather good month overall, so my goal is to be able to continue doing pretty much that. On the 27th I have surgery, with a couple of weeks spent in hospital. Hopefully the pain is bearable enough so that I can spend my time reading. For obvious reasons, expect my next update to be delayed.
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Re: raikiro's log - Spanish, Japanese & Russian

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Fri Apr 01, 2022 5:14 pm

Best of luck with the surgery!
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Many things which are false are transmitted from book to book, and gain credit in the world. -- attributed to Samuel Johnson

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

Postby raikiro » Sat May 14, 2022 11:02 am

Just a very quick update for April.

The hospital let me go yesterday, a couple days earlier than anticipated, due to my good healing abilities. Surgery went well, but I still need more time. I struggle with walking or standing and my movement in my right arm is impaired, making it difficult to type. I'm hoping that I can recover soon.

Initially I hoped that I could spend my time in hospital reading, but I could not. For the first days I couldn't move or get up at all, and even after that the medication made my brain way to foggy to concentrate on anything. The only thing I did was catch up on my anki kanji reviews. After having dropped all reviews over a year ago I had about 2000 cards due, which I worked through over the course of a couple of days. No idea if I will stick with reviewing, though.

My statistics for April:
Japanese
characters read: 18.057
time spent reading: 138 minutes

Spanish
listening: 10 hours 1 minute

And I think that's it. Not much more to mention. May so far is not going great either, but after surgery, that's fine.
See you next time.
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raikiro
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Re: raikiro's log - Spanish, Japanese & Russian

Postby raikiro » Mon Jan 30, 2023 7:58 pm

It has been a long time since my last post.
I will attempt to get back to updating this more regularly. This post will mostly be catching up, and knowing my tendency to ramble, likely quite extensive.

My last post was just after I got out of hospital. I had trouble walking, I could not move my arm, and all in all I had many things in mind - none of them related to language study.
I am glad to say that, though I still suffer from minor complications that require another surgery in the hopefully not too far future, I have recovered my walking ability and my range of movement for my arm is back to around 95%. There are no noticeable restrictions unless I actively try to stretch.

However, about two months of not really being able to do anything, followed by my physical therapy, on top of still having been quite new at my workplace and having a lot to catch up on after my sick leave, I rarely found any time for languages for a good chunk of the past year.
I had deliberately not set goals for the year 2022 overall, or for the different quarters because I knew that I had to finish my exams, get surgery and then familiarize myself with a new environment.

For whom it might interest I will still try to give a brief overview of my language-related activities last year and the lessons learned from them, and then get into what I have been doing more recently.

From April through most of June I did not do anything at all.
As someone that gets tempted by projects way to big, I let myself become inspired by a topic on the old HTLAL which I previously referred to in my post from April 1st, 2022 - one member set out to do six Assimil manuals simultaneously.
Bothered by the amount of unfinished Assimils in my bookshelf, I thought this would be a great idea to try to finally tie some loose ends and get through some of them. I ended up with five of them, all at varying stages of completion. In some I went back a handful of lessons to have an easier time getting back, but I did not start back from the beginning. I managed for around two weeks before getting derailed by real life obligations, then got frustrated for being behind schedule, and quit entirely.

This is, unfortunately, quite typical behavior - first a desire for radical change and improvement, accompanied by a surge in motivation. Then, for one reason or another, something prevents you from continuing at the same pace. Perhaps motivation is low and you can't muster enough discipline to power through, perhaps external factors come into play. Whatever the reason, you fall behind and get frustrated.
This in turn makes you stop the behavior entirely - until you get the next surge of motivation, that is. And the cycle repeats.

I know for a fact that I am not the only person that struggles with this. So, in an attempt to make a more permanent improvement, the next time I was hit with a high level of motivation to study languages, I did not. Instead, I invested this energy into trying to actually learn how to change my behavior and build more solid foundations and expectations for myself and my routines.
They say, that to form a habit you need to repeat the same behavior again and again, until it becomes automatic. Most guides and pieces of advise I found revolved around using motivation in the initial stages to repeat the behavior frequently enough so that it becomes a habit.
But most of these guides never say anything about the amount of time spent.
This seems so obvious now looking back, but I should have started smaller. Way smaller. I always thought half an hour is a good "small" amount of time - given that theoretically I have many hours in the day to spend whichever way I like. Half an hour is not much compared to the 6+ hours of free time I usually get. Still, I never managed.

The main resource that changed the way I go about these things is "Atomic Habits" by James Clear. I have heard several polyglots mention it, so it is a rather well-known book by now. He has all the relevant info available on his homepage if you would like to know more, so I will not go into detail on his strategy.
To me, the main takeaway is: go smaller. Small according to Mr. Clear means about two minutes. BJ Fogg, the author of "Tiny Habits", a book with a similar goal in mind but a slightly different (and more scientific background) speaks of only thirty seconds.
This very quickly made me think "but where will I ever get if I only study for two minutes a day?" The goal is not to only study for two minutes a day for the rest of your life. The goal is to set yourself an absolute minimum. Something that is easy, something that you can do even on the busiest of days. Something that will help you actually build a habit.
And once the "getting started" part is automatic, you can expand. To many, the two minute habit might only be getting your book out, sitting down at your desk and opening it. Nothing more. Task completed.
Mr. Clear also explains several ways of making a habit easier, such as placing the "trigger" somewhere you can always see it to remind you, or "habit stacking", which is tying a new habit to an already existing habit. Triggers I used in the very beginning, when I was afraid that I might actually forget it. But I am not a very forgetful person, so I don't think it was necessary. I never used habit stacking.
What I did and do use is tracking. The motto is: don't break the streak. This was very easy for me to do. For every habit I took a differently colored pencil and wrote a check mark in my study calendar. On the rare occasions that I contemplated not doing it, I thought of having to have a day without a check mark. This was incentive enough for me to do at least the bare minimum and keep the habit going.

The two habits that I started with feel quite firm now. I have not missed a single day. I always allow myself to fall back to the two minute - version at any time, shall there be a need. There very rarely is, though.
Initially I was afraid of how to properly scale the habits over time. But I have found that once I feel comfortable I want to to more automatically. How far this goes only time will tell, but for the first time I actually feel like I have some kind of consistency.

In a bit more detail, my two main habits include:
Japanese: intensive reading. Minimum is just one sentence per day, or one line of text, whichever is longer (to avoid having two-word sentences count). That is what I started out with. Initially I intentionally kept it small and actively prevented myself from doing more as to lower the risk of overshooting again and failing. But over time, I went from one line to one paragraph, and now I am pretty consistently reading one to two pages per day intensively.
Intensive meaning - first read: look up every unknown word, and all the readings that I am unsure about. Then re-read twice. Everything is read out loud. The first reading takes about 50% of the time spent, with the two re-readings taking up around the other 50%. Depending on the complexity and amount of text it takes me around 15-20 minutes per page overall. Up until a few weeks ago it took me longer and I felt fatigued much more. After about 20 minutes of very concentrated study I usually reached the point where I felt like my concentration was dropping off, but this has gotten much better now. Of course, at the pace of one page per day it will take a long time to get close to finishing the book. I could potentially cut around 50% of my time by not doing the re-reading. For comprehension, I don't need it. But since I decided to drop all deliberate kanji study I feel like I should do that just to have a better chance at remembering the readings.
Tomorrow I will finally have finished the first chapter, and I intend on reading through it once more, potentially writing down the words and readings that I am still missing for statistical purposes. If I feel like I forgot much, I will probably try out only reading it once and see if my retention is comparable - if yes, it would mean I'd be able to cover twice the amount of material in the same time, leading to more input and hopefully better returns in the long run.

My second habit I started is extensive reading in Spanish. For weeks, I only did the bare minimum, which was one page per day. It worked, I did not skip a day, but I never really felt like doing more. When I realised, the solution was obvious - read something else. I was still trying to finally finish Juego de tronos, which had already been my downfall in 2021. It's not that the book was to difficult. It's just that I found it boring. It did not feel engaging. I want to like it. I do find the overarching story interesting. But there is just sooo much of it, it drags on endlessly.
As soon as I switched to another book, I read several pages, sometimes entire chapters in the evening right before sleeping. Problem solved. At least, until I finish the series and have to find something new.

As mentioned previously, I have heard several language learners write or speak about Atomic Habits, but none actually gave a more detailed overview how they approached it specifically with languages in mind. But for now, I feel like I have figured out some things.

What are my plans in terms of habits?
I have considered trying to get back to deliberate vocabulary study. Not anki - I have given this so many attempts, different card formats, different approaches - it just did not work. I never stuck with it for long, but not because of a lack of habit (I had one streak for over two years). I just decided one day to stop because I hated it.
In the past I did try out Iversen-style word lists and those have proven to be very effective for me. But, in my typical fashion, I did too much of it and dropped it alltogether. Perhaps if I chose one set of words (5-7) only as my minimum habit, it should only take very few minutes. Might be enough to get going. Trying this out could tie in with my plans to reread the entirety of the first chapter of my intensively read Japanese book, considering I was planning on writing down the words I forgot anyways. That would give me a list of recently studied/read words that should lend itself quite well to this method.
I have also - once again - considered going back to trying to finally finish an Assimil. When making literally just sitting down and opening the book, or perhaps shadowing one lesson once, I might be able to do it. I have been dreaming again about Russian lately...
Long term, I definitely want to read Japanese extensively as well. Just intensively feels like I am learning a lot of words and reading, but I think I could still benefit from getting much more input at a quicker pace. No concrete plans for now though.

I will test out a couple of things over the next weeks and months, now that my habits feel very solid. I'm definitely very optimistic now that I am on the right track.

Outside of habit formation, I have been doing some active study of Spanish, using my Langenscheidt Komplettpaket Spanisch. It offers some grammar explanations and exercises, which I have not done at all. So far, I'm up to lesson 6 of 20. I'm not too confident yet that it actually helps, so I will try a few more lessons and then contemplate whether it is worth finishing.

I think this covers the main considerations and activities I've had since my last post.
If you have read this far - thanks for staying around :D This was quite lengthy indeed.
Hopefully I should be back to posting about once a month now that my private life is a bit calmer.
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raikiro
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Re: raikiro's log - Spanish, Japanese & Russian

Postby raikiro » Wed Mar 01, 2023 1:24 pm

After reading through my last post again, I noticed that I completely forgot to include any kind of statistics, so this post will be about both January + February.
In general, I've done a fair bit of reading, so prepare for a lot of statistics :D

Time spent in January:
Japanese: 06:29h
Spanish: 06:44h

Time spent in February:
Japanese: 16:29h
Spanish: 04:29h
Russian: 03:38h

This does not include my extensive reading in Spanish, which would add a fair amount of time. But since I read in bed, I don't bother with recording it. I finished one book, El Gremio de los Magos, with 448 pages.
When I go back to the first chapter, my kindle estimates slightly below 10 hours remaining based on my reading speed. So roughly 45 pages per hour - that seems very fast. According to a quick google search, the average person reads around 30-40 pages per hour. But then, what qualifies as the "average person"? The average person is not equal to the average reader, I presume. But still, that would mean I read faster in Spanish than the average person in their native language. I'm definitely a quick reader in German and English, but I'm not sure how realistic that is for Spanish. I don't stop frequently to check a word, but I'm not actively trying to read quickly either.
I'm currently reading La Aprendiz, the second book in the series. Is has about 470 pages left, and my kindle tells me another 10 hours to go. Not sure how accurate these estimations are, but they are consistent with each other at least.


Now lets go into more detailed statistics for my Japanese intensive reading. For every chapter separately, I took the amount of words I looked up in my dictionary app, calculated my reading speed, and the same again during my re-reading to get an estimate of how many words I learned.
When I'm talking about intensive reading, a page counts as "read" when I went through it three times. Once to look up the unknown words (mostly compound words), and twice more to solidify the knowledge. After I went through the entire chapter like this, I reread it again in its entirety. All the reading was done aloud.

Epilogue + Chapter 1:
30.10.2022 - 31.01.2023
13:42h for 32 pages -> 25.6 min/page
lookups: 428 -> 13.37 lookups/page

rereading:
01.02.2023 - 06.02.2023
03:40h for 32 pages -> 6.8 min/page
lookups: 148 -> 4.6 lookups/page

Which means that I learned 280 words out of 428, so 65%. This is graded strictly, so if I had a hunch but got it slightly wrong, it still counted as a mistake.
This endeavor took me close to 14 hours, which means about 20 words per hour learned. Not particularly time-efficient, I would say.
The decreased time per page makes a lot of sense, because I only read it once in my rereading-stage, instead of three times.

All in all, after having compiled these statistics, I did not feel very good about my progress. Only 65% retention for this many hours invested? But I wrote down my times per day and how many pages I read, so I had an indicator that the further I progressed the quicker it became. People always say that the first chapter is the hardest, so I was determined to continue for now to get more data to compare.

Chapter 2:
07.02.2023 - 20.02.2023
07:03h for 29 pages -> 14.5 min/page
lookups: 201 -> 6.9 lookups/page

rereading:
21.02.2023 - 22.02.2023
02:19h for 29 pages -> 4.8 min/page
lookups: 115 -> 4 lookups/page

I learned 86 words out of 201, which is 43%. Considering the time, that is 12.2 words per hour.

Comparison
It is obvious that my reading speed improved drastically, going from 25.6 to 14.5 minutes per page in the initial phase and from 6.8 to 4.8 during the rereading phase.
The amount of lookups per page also got much better, from 13.4 to 7 per page in the initial phase. So there were less unknown words overall. Reasons for that might be
1. I got used to the authors favourite words and
2. there were less uncommon words because detailed descriptions of characters and scenery usually happen more during the first chapter, so in the second chapter there is more focus on dialogue and what is actually happening, which tends to be easier.
I'm willing to believe that both of these factors played a major role. So, all in all, progress. Right?

The amount of words learnt was significantly worse - from 65% to 43%. I used the same strictness in both cases, counting every little mistake as a "fail".
What is the reason for this? I did not do anything differently. If anything, I would have expected the retention in chapter 2 to be better, simply because I worked through it in much less time. So even the words in the beginning of the chapter still would have felt more recent and therefore I should have had an easier time remembering them. But this was obviously not the case.
Perhaps what happened in chapter 1 is that I picked all the low hanging fruits, and by chapter 2 these fruits were gone? There were less "easy" words for me, because the unfamiliar but common ones were already picked up in the beginning, leaving mostly uncommon and obscure words behind?

So I started to consider changing my strategy. The fact that my reading speed improved drastically felt amazing. It really makes the 20+ hours I spent on this worth it.
But in terms of vocabulary progress, it was disappointing. I spent too much time looking up obscure words that realistically I won't need now, and perhaps ever. And at this speed, reading half an hour a day on average meant that it would take me half a year to finish one book like this. The entire series consists of twelve (six in English, given the tendency of the Japanese to split books in smaller chunks), and most of them longer than the first one. The prospect of reading this series for the next six years was not particularly motivating. Sure, I would have become faster over time, but the improvements would have become smaller and smaller the more I progressed, which is natural. Perhaps I would have been able to spend more than 30 minutes per day consistently in the long run. It still would have been a long, and ultimately frustrating experience.

The solution was obvious: go for a more extensive reading approach. The same approach that worked so well for me in English and Spanish.
So I gave myself a few days to ponder the results as I worked through chapter 3. I got through another 7 pages in 01.43h, the statistics were very similar to those of chapter 2: 14.7 min/page and 6.8 lookups/page. Since I did not reread this, I do not have more numbers on this.

Extensive reading
I picked up where I left off in chapter 3 and finished it: 29 minutes for 11 pages -> 2.6 min/page.
Yesterday I read the entire (admittedly short) chapter 4: 59 minutes for 21 pages -> 2.8 min/page.
So more than five times the speed at which I read intensively.
There is the occasional sentence that goes over my head, but it's not as bad as I feared. It absolutely helps that I know the books, though.
I enjoyed this much more than the intensive reading, but I also know that my desire for change comes in phases. There is a good chance that in a few weeks time I will feel frustrated that I'm missing details and I will do another couple of pages of extensive reading before switching back yet again. In the end, this does not matter - so long as I'm reading, whichever form it may take, I'm progressing.
The main point is to keep my habit going, and I am very happy that no matter my frustration with extensive reading I never thought about just quitting. I only thought about changing things. A year ago, I'm sure this would have turned out very differently.

I've browsed the forums to learn about peoples approaches to intensive and extensive reading. One thing that stuck with me is the way that rdearman does it. He reads 50 pages extensively, and 1 intensively. This way you get a ton of input, but also the occasional close look on things that you might otherwise be missing. I will consider incorporating a similar strategy, and maybe read one page per chapter intensively or something along those lines.


Apart from Japanese, I have also continued to work on my Spanish textbook. I finished lesson 11 of 20 today. I might be able to finish it this month, and I've put it down as my priority. No idea if I will actually manage without overdoing it. Though, with my Japanese feeling less like studying I do feel more motivated to dedicate my concentration to something else.
I still don't know how beneficial this course actually is for me, but I'm not hating it and it is relatively short overall. No plan what I do with Spanish afterwards though. I started using a lovely notebook for it and it would be a shame to not fill it with more.

Just a short one on Russian: I started some shadowing of old Assimil lessons and went through a couple of new ones. Nothing to systematic though, just going with what I feel like.

With this I should have covered most of the interesting bits and statistics.
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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 » Fri Mar 31, 2023 6:23 pm

Let's look back at March.

I finished my Japanese book, now on part two. I'm hoping to finish this until the 10th of March, after which I will be leaving to have surgery again - I hate the idea of having to pack a book with only one or two chapters unread, so I want to finish it to pack a unread one instead.

My statistics for extensively reading book one (トワイライト上):
242 pages in 10:52h. That comes down to 2.65 minutes per page or 22.64 pages per hour. I recorded everything meticulously, but there are no big outliers - the extremes for some days being 2.3 min/p and 3.1 min/p, but most seem to be around 2.6-2.8.
Given this consistency, I also decided that it was not worth recording all my times. Sometimes I just want to pick up a book without extra steps. Previously I had to open the tab in my browser or the app on my phone, select the tags, pause the timer when I had to get up or got interrupted. I never read just for a couple of minutes because it seemed more of a hassle to get started. So instead, I just read every day and don't worry too much about the time. I can always estimate it now that I know how fast I read.
In the future, maybe in a couple of months, I might do another "test" to see my improvement (hopefully).

On a normal day, I read somewhere between 15-20 pages, so a bit under an hour. Therefore I am progressing through the book quickly.
So far, I can't say I notice much of an improvement. But that was to be expected - for extensive reading, progress is expected not within a couple hundred pages, but more within several thousands. I have a bit under 4000 pages left with the トワイライト series (including the "extra" books), so at my current pace I'm looking at about another year to finish it.
But all in all, I feel very good. My habit is strong. I have to take my book with me to the hospital, and I will do my hardest to do the absolute minimum (i. e. one line of text) per day no matter what, just to keep it going.


Now onto Spanish.
My extensive reading is progressing, though not quite at the same pace as previously. I've had many days where I just did not feel like it, so I did my mandatory page and went to sleep. I still believe that having the book in bed might not be the best idea, but I can't really think of a much better time. I don't want to put more than one book on my desk to read during the day, so I need to separate them somehow.
I am now at 44% of La Aprendiz, but I did not write down where I was when the month started. I probably read around 30% of it this month, so roughly 175 pages.
That pace is relaxing enough that I don't stress about it, but still fast enough to get at least somewhere over time.

I also finished the Spanish textbook I was working through, Langenscheidt's Komplett-Paket Spanisch. I went through it at about 2 lessons per week. My feelings are mixed.
Given the huge discrepancy between being able to read fiction without much effort but also being unable to form a simple sentence I did not know what to expect. I wanted it to be a way for me to gain some insight into how sentence structure and grammar works.
Problem was, I understood everything easily, which lead me to progress at a rather quick pace (about 1 hour per lesson). But this quick progression also did not allow me a lot of time to really digest the grammar points covered. Going through it more slowly would have been too boring though.
All in all, I now know that there are different grammatical forms. I knew that before, obviously, this is not my first foreign language. But I always felt like I understood but could not recognize the differences actively. So there is some progress there.
However, those 20 hours might have been equally well or better spent just working through a grammar overview to familiarize myself with the different forms and then pay more attention to them when reading.
I would not say that my time was completely wasted, and I am glad I finished it. But I don't think I would do it again. Instead, I might make some grammar overviews using my handy grammar book.

This also ends this quarter of having Spanish as a focus. Next quarter will be Russian. It's about time :)
I did do some Russian over three years ago, since then I have revisited some old Assimil lessons every couple of months, but nothing more really. So my passive knowledge is buried somewhere, I'm interested to see how quickly I can get it out again.


Next month is going to be more turbulent, as I will be having surgery again. This time it should be a much easier and quicker recovery though, so hopefully by the end of the month I'll be fine again. I will also subscribe to LingQ for a month so that I have something other than my Kindle to keep myself entertained in the hospital.
6 x

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 Apr 30, 2023 11:55 am

A rather short update for April.
My surgery was a success, but being in hospital and on sick leave has had an impact on my studying. The good news is, my habits are still there. I did not do more than the minimum for most days, but I'm still sticking with it.
I have another week of sick leave until I should be able to return to work, and I'm expecting things to improve naturally as I fall back into my routine.

I finished both トワイライト1下 and La Aprendiz, and I'm now reading through the next parts.

My focus language for this quarter is supposed to be Russian.
This language requires more concentration than Japanese and Spanish, and therefore I have not spent too much time on it. I worked through some things at LingQ, but I struggle finding interesting content. The lessons I did years ago are somewhat boring, since I already worked with them. Though I've definitely forgotten a decent amount, it feels tedious reviewing them. Instead, I started reading a novel - very slowly, of course. Not sure if I will stick with it, because it is very difficult. I'm used to dealing with the ambiguity that comes from jumping into native material early on, and I'm quite okay with only getting parts of it, but it can get frustrating after a while. Perhaps I should get a handful of graded readers or short stories to get back into it, but I haven't yet looked into it much.

In May I'm expecting to fully recover from surgery and get back into my routine. After that is done, I'll consider where to go from there.
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