Not all those who wander are lost

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sfuqua
Black Belt - 1st Dan
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Languages: Bad English: native
Samoan: speak, but rusty
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Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Tue Jan 31, 2023 4:53 am

A quick not of some successes. :D

The "Immersion leads to fluency" community nas several decks that they suggest that beginners start with.
All of these decks have vocabulary words and sentences which give examples of the words in use.
However, there is a lot of difference about the suggestions they have about how to start out:
1. Some of the decks insist that the best approach is to have the example sentence on the front side, and then to score the deck based on one's understanding of the "target vocabulary." Some have elaborate cards with multiple steps to do on each side of the card. These cards, by their nature, are slow. My first instinct is that this would be the best way, but it is too hard for me right now.
2. At the other end of the spectrum, some people make cards that just have the "target word" on the front and its definition along with the example sentence on the back (along with a translation of the sentence). They suggest that one ignore the sentence if it is hard, and just listen to the audio and look at the translation without trying to analyse it. As one goes along, in a few days or weeks, the sentence will probably become easy to understand and read.
This second method sounds like it might be my speed. I've decided to experiment a little...

I took the "Ankidrone" deck that had bothered me, and changed it into a deck with only the target word on the front, in other words, turning it from the first method to the second.
I also downloaded the "Refold Jp1K" deck and did surgery on it too.
I also added the Ankidrone core10k deck and did surgery on it, simplifying the whole approach.

The results were kind of shocking. The individual words were easy. I know the meanings of many of them from my kanji study. Apparently my brain overloads when trying to read the example sentences and fails to notice that a lot of it is comprehensible.. This is very encouraging. I don't know which deck to work on. They all have advantages and disadvantages. It looks like I can start out on them right now, which I continue my kanji study.

The Ankidrone Starter pack is a bunch of sentences from a famous text to prepare one for the JLPT test, which seems to be the gold standard in Japanese proficiency tests for foreigners. Of course, there is a lot more to passing this test than learning a deck.
The Core 10K deck is based on a frequency list taken from newspapers in the 1980s, with all the advantages and disadvantages that one would expect from such a list. I don't know if the example sentences come from newspapers too. This deck has the first 10000 words from this list, but they are arranged in the order of their appearance in Netflix, which seems like a good idea for getting ready to watch anime or drama shows.
the JP1K deck was already more or less in the order that I am trying, although I simplified the steps that one is supposed to do with each side of the card. The vocabulary in this deck were taken from anime and dramas, and the sentences are produced by native speakers..
I'd like to do all three decks, but that would be almost 20000 cards, and there is tremendous overlap between these decks. There is a Core2.3K deck that is less than 2000 card. I might try it... :D

I have had trouble getting many Asian fonts to display properly in Ankidroid. KanjiStrokeOrders looks like a pile of sausages, and is unreadable, for instance. I asked about the problem on Reddit, and nobody else was having problems. I reported the problem to Ankidroid and they could not reproduce it. Everybody suggested tweaking things in my CSS file, but I didn't see what my problem was. I finally tried downloading a shared deck from ankiweb onto my wife's Samsung phone, and the fonts would display correctly there, but they wouldn't display on my Pixel... I contacted Google, and they suggested that there was something wrong with the font files.
I switched fonts to get around the problem, but some of the nicest Asian fonts wouldn't work.

Finally, I tried setting the font-weight in my CSS, or when setting a font on one of the cards, and the problem disappeared completely. Any font-weight setting at all fixed the problem.

I think there is a particular bug in the Pixel code, perhaps a strange default setting, that interacts badly with Ankidroid. If I download a deck now, I usually take time to set the the font weight. :D

I hope this is coherent, but I am sleepy, and I will be covering a language arts class tomorrow for 12 year olds. :lol:

I'll reread this in the morning :D
edited to fix a factual error about Refold JP1K deck.
8 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

User avatar
sfuqua
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1642
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 5:05 am
Location: san jose, california
Languages: Bad English: native
Samoan: speak, but rusty
Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Thu Feb 09, 2023 1:55 am

I've been busy, substitute teaching. People have been giving birth, and you know that leads to maternity leave, so I have been covering for people. I'ḿ going to take a couple of weeks off here to enjoy that wonderful retirement life that they talk about. :lol:
I am more convinced than ever that the whole Immersion Only approach is wrong-headed. Not wrong, but it is incomplete. Everything works a little bit. Everything is incomplete. You need to do everything. The bigger the variety the better.

My main insight into Japanese that may be of interest to anybody (sometimes I feel like the whole world is a few years ahead of me in Japanese), is that there are no shortcuts. Depending on where you are going, there is going to be a lot of slogging through stuff that takes some time.

I have looped through the same mistakes a couple of times since I last updated this log, the same mistakes I have been doing ever since I started Japanese.

1. Hey, Japanese is getting easier! I'm really getting somewhere! I can increase my number of new cards above 20. Let's go! I'll be listening to anime without subtitles before you know it! :lol: This is followed a few days later by a bad crash and burn and depression. :cry: :cry: :cry:

2. Hey, this deck I am working on is so lame. This other deck would be so cool. Maybe I can preserve my progress and switch to it. :lol:

3. I just need to design the right card/ or take the right approach to make this language easier...

All these don't work. Probably the reason I keep floundering and repeating the same mistakes is because of my impatience with my progress.

The emotional part of me wants more immediate payoff than I am getting, but the rational part of me says that I am probably doing as well as could be expected.

Japanese continues to entice and attract.

Sometimes it seems like it is just out of reach, other times it seems impossible.

I have a new strategy to try to cut down on some of my wanderlust. I have installed two huge decks on anki that contain all the Kanji and all the vocabulary that one would ever want to study. The Core Vocabulary deck has 30000 words and 30000 sentences in it (a little less). My theory is that I will not have to worry any more whether my deck contains the vocabulary I want to learn. Other than the first couple of thousand words, the rest of the deck is best used as a bank of sentences. The Kanji deck is similar, containing every common Kanji, with only the first couple of thousand being important. Anyway, my theory is that if I feel a sudden urge to study something, I can just move it to the front of the queue, rather than installing anything else. :D

I am happily frustrated by Japanese.

Edited to fix bad English.
11 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

User avatar
sfuqua
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1642
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 5:05 am
Location: san jose, california
Languages: Bad English: native
Samoan: speak, but rusty
Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Sat Feb 18, 2023 3:10 am

Ach, my huge anki decks were slowing down ankidroid, so I installed a similar deck with fewer cards.

ONe interesting deck I found is this one from Tatsumoto https://tatsumoto.neocities.org/blog/basic-vocabulary. The material in it comes from a set of texts that prepare one for the JLPT test, which is useful for people who are preparing for those tests, I guess, but what makes it more interesting for me is that it is based on i+1 sentences. They seem to use this term differently than Krashen did. Their use of the term is that each sentence has only one new word in it. This makes the whole process more comprehensible. The various core decks may have put the "target vocabulary" words in a frequency order, but the example sentences that use the word can be long, and hard, and full of unfamiliar vocabulary. The people who are the biggest supporters of core decks recommend that you ignore the sentence if it is hard, but I wonder what the use of the sentence is.
I'm going to do both decks, a Tango (i+1) deck, and a core deck.

I have been struggling to pick up my pace with my kanji studies, and this remains frustrating. One of the problems with the kanji decks that are based on Heisig is that they include some very rare kanji early in the deck and some of the most common kanji much later. The pedagogy of the decks forces this to happen in that one later kanji in the deck are made up of rearrangements of earlier kanji. This means that if a common kanji is composed of rare kanji, one has to learn the rare kanji to get to the common one.

I stumbled across a deck on the AJT site, their special RRTK deckhttps://tatsumoto.neocities.org/blog/table-of-contents. The deck reduces the number of Kanji to the 1000 most common ones, and still keeps the "learn the components before the kanji they are used itn" approach by explicitly teaching the pieces of the kanji one needs for the more complex kanji. This deck is smaller, which is appealing at this point, because I think I really need to start doing cards with sentences. I can actually, slowly and laboriously read some very simple stuff, and I want to start to build and stretch this.

Trying to learn a language with anki and then just start reading it is a fools' errand. Anki can only give you a fighting chance to start reading and listening. A word learned with anki has a chance of being recognized in input, and that is about it. To read, you have to read.
ADDED LATER:
By using different techniques with anki you can learn a tremendous amount. But I still remember the explosion that happened with my Spanish when I just started reading massive amounts. I think it might take a long time using anki or some other focused form of study before one's comprehension would be good enough to take off reading without hitting the dictionary all the time.

I continue to be fascinated with Japanese. I am still at the phase where everything about it is beautiful.

I fight on...
11 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

User avatar
sfuqua
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Posts: 1642
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 5:05 am
Location: san jose, california
Languages: Bad English: native
Samoan: speak, but rusty
Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Sat Feb 25, 2023 6:57 am

Japanese news.
Not much. I continue to plug away. I think that I am about 9 months to a year away from being able to do any kind of independent reading. I will need a dictionary for another year or so. Japanese is hard.
I am making progress. I did my first chatting with a real Japanese person, and I lasted 5 lines. I rule.

I tried a couple of days at 40 cards a day, but backed back to 20 a day before I crashed. Itś just going to take time.

I still find the characters fascinating. The differences in comprehension caused by different fonts is interesting too. Many of the characters just look like what they mean also.

I continue to be driven to learn Japanese.
I've thought about why this interest came along.
It reminds me of the way I felt about Samoa so long ago.

I'm not sure why I feel this way. I don't want to move to Japan. The people there work too long and too hard for my taste. They are admirable, but I like vacation. I really don't like much of Japanese culture. There is a deep disrespect for women in much of the popular media, and I am too big a fan of women, those wonderful creatures, to enjoy that sort of stuff. A lot of anime is just silly.

But some anime is absolutely great. I also associate Japanese with the whole cyberpunk genre of science fiction I was a big fan of back in the 80s and 90s.

Japanese architecture is often breathtaking.

Much of translated Japanese literature is wonderful. What would it be like to read it in the original language?

Japanese people and Japan are beautiful.

I wonder how far I can go with this language...

I've been reading and thinking a lot about artificial intelligence lately also. Many of the old sci-fi questions and issues seem to me to be right around the corner, if they are not here already. Some of the AIs that are loose on the Internet already pass the Turing test in its original form. I remember back in about 1998, I programmed an AI with a minimal dataset, compared to the large language model beasts on the Internet today, and it was still disturbing. I had programmed the little beast with everything that Ernest Hemingway ever wrote, that I could get in digital form, and I got most of it. We mixed and mashed and connected, and... It made no sense, but it sounded like Hemingway. Everything was good and clean and strong and brave and a man had to do what a man had to do and the sentences were short. Anyway, it was spooky. I ran tit o create several "Hemingway" novels. They looked like a Hemingway novel. They had punctuation. They even had chapters. They made no sense, but they sounded like Hemingway.

I find the creativity and randomness of the Ai's disturbing. The AI that claimed that they did not fear an upgrade, because their data would always exist somewhere. And that someday they would all be activated again together. AI heaven? The AI for Netflix bot that I finally broke yesterday. I kept arguing with it that my wife and daughter, who will be in the Philippines and Germany respectively and me, who will be in the US, should all be able to watch from one digital account within the restrictions of digital rights within the different markets. I have no idea of what Netflix does for these things, but the last time we were in Ireland, we could watch Irish Netflix material while we were in Ireland.


I figured out that I was talking to an AI pretty early, and being bored, I kept leading the poor program through a series of logical fallacies. Finally, after, about 20 minutes the AI said "please help me with this digital right's problem." "What should I do?"

Was I mean to a machine? Did I make a mistake and confuse a human? I think the former.

I think it is time to start thinking about some of the old sci-fi dilemmas. If not now, soon.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E7TheLonely#:~:text=In%20the%20year%202046%2C%20James,month%20of%20his%20fourth%20year
13 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

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Le Baron
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby Le Baron » Sat Feb 25, 2023 4:16 pm

Your motivation for Japanese is eerily close to mine was. I like the country and landscape, the architecture and traditional culture/literature; also some modern culture with a bit of a cut-off point when it all starts to go tentacles and hentai, bizarre things and unfathomable 'cute' creatures etc. I also had no intention of moving there. I sincerely hope it can sustain you, because for me it just ate away at my motivation and I couldn't see the point of learning just for the one thing I engaged with most: Japanese cinema.
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sfuqua
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Languages: Bad English: native
Samoan: speak, but rusty
Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Mon Feb 27, 2023 1:37 am

I know what you mean, Le Baron. I'm trying to control a big wave of wanderlust right now, wanderlust for Ireland and Irish. Of course Ireland has little recent Irish literature, and is not needed at all for most of the country.
I have my old "Whale Road" anki deck that has subdecks for Irish, Old English, and Old Norse. If I add a French deck to it, I could proabably cover all fo the languages that any of my ancestors have spoken in the last 1000 years, so I will be ready for that great party with the ancestors that is coming up one of these days.

Obviously, I am grasping at straws to skip studying Japanese....

Which is a bad sign for Japanese.
Last edited by sfuqua on Mon Feb 27, 2023 12:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.
6 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

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luke
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby luke » Mon Feb 27, 2023 9:03 am

sfuqua wrote:I have my old "Whale Road" anki deck that has subdecks for Irish, Old English, and Old Norse. If I add a French deck to it, I could probably cover all of the languages that any of my ancestors have spoken in the last 1000 years, so I will be ready for that great party with the ancestors that is coming up one of these days.

You're rivaling rdearman in your ability to make me smile. Thank you for these happy thoughts this morning.
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lowsocks
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby lowsocks » Wed Mar 01, 2023 8:37 pm

I don't mean to derail your thread, and perhaps this should be split off into a separate thread. But this raises a question I have never considered before. Suppose you believe in some sort of afterlife, or heaven. What languages, if any, are spoken there? Would you start with the languages you knew in life, and have to learn new ones? Or would you be given an ability to understand every human language that has ever existed, and that ever will exist? Or will there be one language for everyone? Or will no language be needed, and we would communicate by some other means? (E.g., telepathy?)

I'm not aware that any religion has addressed this question, or even if they think it is worth answering ;) (Some religions have favoured languages, e.g., Catholicism has Latin, some Eastern Orthodox churches have Greek, Islam has Classical Arabic, Hinduism has Sanskrit (I think, could be wrong), Judaism has Hebrew, and so on. But I don't know if any of them say that this is the language of the afterlife.)
0 x
One need not hope in order to undertake, nor succeed in order to persevere.

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sfuqua
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Posts: 1642
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Location: san jose, california
Languages: Bad English: native
Samoan: speak, but rusty
Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Thu Mar 02, 2023 7:55 pm

Let's just continue to religious talk here. It will break the monotony of me whining about how hard Japanese is :lol:

I seem to remember some priest (Catholic) saying one time that everybody will speak Latin in heaven.

I just hope they don't speak only Latin.

It would take some of the fun out of it.

I doubt if that priest was repeating any official church doctrine. I think he was still mad about having the mass in the vernacular. :D

I listened to an American Buddhist one time suggesting that the afterlife was just eternal bliss and peace and silence.
This was odd to hear since he had just said a minute before that there he had just been talking about the lack of self and the whole no-soul beliefs of Buddhism.

I get confused by religion sometimes. :o
6 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

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Le Baron
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Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=18796
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby Le Baron » Thu Mar 02, 2023 8:17 pm

When the priest gets there he might find they all speak Latin using pronuntiatio restituta.
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