Not all those who wander are lost

Continue or start your personal language log here, including logs for challenge participants
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
x 6299

Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Sun Mar 20, 2022 5:14 pm

still shadowing and doing anki. I'm slowly increasing my Anki cards per day. I want to get all of the strain I can comfortably handle, but I don't want to get swamped.
I have three Assimil books made into anki decks with audio. Instead of mixing them up like I usually do, I'm going to do them one at a time. I probably have started with the harder of the two "with ease" books, but I think I will be OK. I think Russian is hard enough that two "with ease" books will be OK.
After each Assimil book I will take the ODA https://oda.dliflc.edu/?fbclid=IwAR0qDCQCCgLasy2JVZ0CXBCUXuAkqa1hJtNcoZfhEUwIc1QtMTdZVv9WUMs to see where it places me. I hope it shows that I have learned something. If I don't learn much, I will at least answer the question that the Internet has been clamouring for -- "How much can an older learner learn from Assimil, while he fools around with a bunch of other languages too." The ODA is the best online placement test I could imagine.

I need to figure out how to consume some Russian media, at least some books and newspapers. It would be nice to see some TV too. The way the world is as I write this, I probably will go on some kind of NSA or FBI watchlist, but actually I probably do have as FBI file on me ever since I did my correspondence with the Soviet embassy back when I was ten years old and they helped me write my school report on the USSR.
I actually stumbled across a thread out there on the big bad Internet where people were angry that people were studying Russian or had anything good to say about Russia. Really stupid. One can deplore policies of a country and still admire the country and its people. Several times in my travels over the last 50 years, I have been attacked verbally because I am a citizen of the United States. I don't engage with these people. I often would completely agree with them about whatever shenanigans the US has been up to at any time, but they really don't deserve attention if they start off rude and stupid.
The worst one I saw was 1978 in Samoa at a party at the New Zealand High commissioner's house. An older New Zealand woman there (I think she was famous) decided to tell me how much she hated American's, and how she had worked with the North Vietnamese during the war. she had been on the radio and had gotten US planes to bomb US troops there. She told me how much she enjoyed thinking of Americans burning. Nasty, nasty, nasty. I was rescued by the high commissioner himself. who noticed what was happening, and who reminded her that they would be speaking Japanese right then if it hadn't been for US Marines in WWII. And then the conversation went down predictable paths, but at least I wasn't the target. It was a totally stupid incident which probably stopped me from drinking beer for at least ten minutes.
Anyway, it completely cured me of blaming or giving credit to anybody for what their country does, or doesn't do.
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...

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
x 6299

Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Sun Mar 20, 2022 9:12 pm

Not to be a smarty-pants, but the recent discussion by Dr. Arguelles about how word lists are a waste of time, have convinced me to add a big Russian frequency list to my study routine. I think that word lists by themselves are of limited value, but that they can be magic for making an L2 passage comprehensible.
There is also the point that there are actually very few sentences that you learn while studying an L2 that are important to remember forever, but there are several thousand words...
Now I need to play with the thing a little and see if I want to make it into and Iversen wordlist, with the words grouped by 5's, or if I want to keep it a simple one at a time wordlist...
10 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
x 6299

Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Mon Mar 21, 2022 11:09 pm

Wow, I had an awful day with anki today. Russian knocked me back on my heels.. It took me 50 minutes to add on 20 new cards. And with my reviews, my "correct count" was 60.8%. Totally awful. :lol:

I think the problem is that there just isn't enough that is familiar in Russian to help me along. I'm going to adjust my interval modifier so that I am increasing my steps by 2X instead of by 2.5X as happens with the normal anki setup. I'm also going to adjust my new cards down to ten a day until my correct count gets better. :o

Another thing that I am going to do is to flip my activites so that I am starting new lessons shadowing before I do anki for a given lesson. If I am having trouble with anki because Russian is unfamiliar, perhaps I can shadow it until it is more familiar before I try to hit it with anki... :D

Shadowing is a very different process the way I do it. If I don't understand something, I just look it up when I repeat it. If I mispronounce something, I just try to get it right next time. With anki, I either get it right or get it wrong. :D
Added:
and too often get it wrong. :o
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
x 6299

Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Thu Mar 24, 2022 4:19 pm

Well, I watched a bunch of Arguelles videos yesterday, which reminded me of the techniques i was using seven or eight years ago. There certainly is a place for activities that have no chance of failure built into them, like shadowing or reading aloud. With both, if you make a mistake, you just try it again until it works. As they said in the old glossika documentation years ago, you an always mumble. If you have strict deadlines for completing things, or you do only activities like anki which have a constant pass/fail component to them, you can "fail" or fall behind. The way I have been doing anki recently tries to remove the "fail" part of the equation, but I think I have learned something, at least for me. But with Russian I have been just having too much failure. I think anki will be good when I develop more automaticity with Cyrillic. :o
I've done 480 000 reviews on anki over the years, so I guess I like it :lol:
When I face a nonLatin alphabet, anki isn't the best way to start. I know people use it extensively for Chinese and especially Japanese, but I'm not sure I would enjoy that. :D

I am going to try to approach Russian with ASSiMiL and eventually L-R.
I'm going to try to approach Russian in a way where "failure is not an option." :lol:
Last edited by sfuqua on Fri Mar 25, 2022 1:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.
9 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...

Lawyer&Mom
Blue Belt
Posts: 980
Joined: Sun Mar 04, 2018 6:08 am
Languages: English (N), German (B2), French (B1)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=7786
x 3767

Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby Lawyer&Mom » Thu Mar 24, 2022 4:49 pm

I’m really enjoying Clozemaster with Russian. The right answer is always one of the four choices. I don’t always get it right, but at least I always have a chance. Way, way less frustrating than Memrise asking me to recall *and* spell Russian words I’m barely familiar with. After a couple hundred reps in a Clozemaster set the words become old friends. I’m never have a problem in Memrise with words I’ve already seen a million times in Clozemaster. It’s a shame because Memrise is so fun with all the videos, but Clozemaster is better consistent vocabulary exposure.
8 x
Grammaire progressive du français -
niveau debutant
: 60 / 60

Grammaire progressive du francais -
intermédiaire
: 25 / 52

Pimsleur French 1-5
: 3 / 5

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
x 6299

Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Sat Mar 26, 2022 5:55 pm

OK, I really like anki. It gives me something I can do while I am waiting in line, or waiting while my wife shops. I think that recently I have over emphasised it. It really is better when you are working with material that you already have some familiarity with. With Russian, the unfamiliar alphabet takes away the cognates, and even the few Russian words I know, so it makes it hard... To use Anki effectively, I need to really keep the new card count down to avoid the "I just saw 20 cards I don't know and now I'm seeing them again and I still don't know them" feeling. :lol:
Russian and Russia continue to fascinate me. This has little to do with current events, however tragic and compelling they are. I think it has more to do with my fascination with Russia as a teenager and in my 20s. Russian is so cool and so hard. :D
I wonder if I will ever get to the point where I can read a full fledged Russian novel without too much pain. I would say that will take a long time. :o

I'm going to start hitting Pimsleur and Michel Thomas again. They are both slow, even with the pauses edited out, but I've got to admit that when it comes to Russian, I'm a complete beginner...

I'm listening to Dr. Zhivago while I walk these days. I think the last time I read it I was still a teenager, and my reaction to it is very different as a grownup. Larissa seems less of a paragon of romantic love and more like a real person. It seems to me this time through, that the world revealed in the book is actually more interesting than the story. The landscape, the weather, the train... it all is fascinating... alien and yet familiar. I don't know how many years it will be before I can take a look at this book. I've got at least a year or two of working through what Arguelles calls didactic materials before I start reading. It looks to me like Harry Potter is available in Russian. I think reading in Russian might be enough to get me to finally read Harry Potter in an L2.

It's funny, but we just had an incident in the family that shows something about legacy learners. My daughter seems to understand Tagalog pretty well and her mother talks to her in both Tagalog and Cebuano. She doesn't seem to be able to speak it. My spoken Tagalog is a thousand times better than hers. I don't know Cebuano; 33 years of being in an environment where Cebuano is fairly common has taught me nothing. I sometimes understand some, because Tagalog and Cebuano are closely related languages and both have a lot of Spanish in them. Anyway...my daughter doesn't speak Tagalog or Cebuano, but she has heard both since she was a little kid.

My wife just said a paragraph in Cebuano, and my daughter translated it into English for me. I couldn't understand a thing. So even though she doesn't seem to be able to speak it, she has obviously learned a lot, whether she speaks it or not. When we visit the Philippines, her cousins, whether Tagalog or Cebuano speaking, always want to speak English with her. I wonder how long it would take her to start talking if she was in a place where she really had to do it.

We are in full Spring mode here in the Bay area. The birdsongs are absolutely wonderful for a couple of hours around dawn. I get up before dawn (old teacher habit) and I listen to the birds as they tune up for the day. It is unbelievably beautiful. I should walk then, in the early morning, but it is still a little cold that early. It is a little warmer each day, so soon...
10 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
x 6299

Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Tue Mar 29, 2022 12:51 am

Well, I've figured something out, at least for me. :D
It might be useful to anybody else who is facing the problem of trying to use anki with unfamiliar material.
I've always had a love/hate relationship with Pimsleur courses. They work for what they try to teach, but I find them miserable to do. The way that they work is mostly through slow, thorough, repetition. You don't learn very much, but you learn the little pieces of language that they try to teach. :lol:
I was having trouble using anki for my complete beginner Russian. It is just too strange to start out with the anki algorithm. I would keep looping through the same set of 20 new cards without learning them, just circling and feeling stupid... :o
But what about Pimsleur? The old algorithm was " 5 seconds, 25 seconds, 2 minutes, 10 minutes, 1 hour, 5 hours, 1 day, 5 days, 25 days, 4 months, 2 years" ( the courses don't follow this exactly). Pimsleur reviews repeatedly in the first few minutes. Hmmn. :shock:
I had been trying to study more from the Assimil books to build up my knowledge before I would go on to anki, but what was I really doing to learn material in the book? I was looping through sentences a few at a time until I understood an entire lesson before I would move on to anki with the same material, but....why not learn in anki?
The default review schedule for anki when you start off with a new card is to review it again at 1 minute and 10 minutes. I reset my anki schedule so that I was reviewing again after 1 minute, after 2 minutes, after 4 minutes, and after 8 minutes, and well things got much, much better. Anki was actually reviewing me so fast that my success rate went right up. Today I tried the following review schedule: 1 minute, 1 minute, 1 minute, 1 minute, and 10 minutes, and it seemed to work well also. I'm not sure what I will set as my default, but after learning the cards this way the first day, they seem to fit into the regular anki algorithm pretty well for reviews on later days. I also am using the same set of review for my cards that I get wrong on later days, my lapse cards. :D

For me this seems like a breakthrough. Suddenly I want to revive my old Irish, Old English, and Old Norse decks and use this schedule. All this review takes less time than you might think, since much of the time you are actually overlearning the new cards, so they go pretty fast. However, this probably isn't appropriate for all learners. :roll:

But it seems to work for me. :D
9 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...

Beli Tsar
Green Belt
Posts: 384
Joined: Mon Oct 22, 2018 3:59 pm
Languages: English (N), Ancient Greek (intermediate reading), Latin (Beginner) Farsi (Beginner), Biblical Hebrew (Beginner)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9548
x 1294

Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby Beli Tsar » Tue Mar 29, 2022 11:10 am

sfuqua wrote:Well, I've figured something out, at least for me. :D
It might be useful to anybody else who is facing the problem of trying to use anki with unfamiliar material.
I've always had a love/hate relationship with Pimsleur courses. They work for what they try to teach, but I find them miserable to do. The way that they work is mostly through slow, thorough, repetition. You don't learn very much, but you learn the little pieces of language that they try to teach. :lol:
I was having trouble using anki for my complete beginner Russian. It is just too strange to start out with the anki algorithm. I would keep looping through the same set of 20 new cards without learning them, just circling and feeling stupid... :o
But what about Pimsleur? The old algorithm was " 5 seconds, 25 seconds, 2 minutes, 10 minutes, 1 hour, 5 hours, 1 day, 5 days, 25 days, 4 months, 2 years" ( the courses don't follow this exactly). Pimsleur reviews repeatedly in the first few minutes. Hmmn. :shock:
I had been trying to study more from the Assimil books to build up my knowledge before I would go on to anki, but what was I really doing to learn material in the book? I was looping through sentences a few at a time until I understood an entire lesson before I would move on to anki with the same material, but....why not learn in anki?
The default review schedule for anki when you start off with a new card is to review it again at 1 minute and 10 minutes. I reset my anki schedule so that I was reviewing again after 1 minute, after 2 minutes, after 4 minutes, and after 8 minutes, and well things got much, much better. Anki was actually reviewing me so fast that my success rate went right up. Today I tried the following review schedule: 1 minute, 1 minute, 1 minute, 1 minute, and 10 minutes, and it seemed to work well also. I'm not sure what I will set as my default, but after learning the cards this way the first day, they seem to fit into the regular anki algorithm pretty well for reviews on later days. I also am using the same set of review for my cards that I get wrong on later days, my lapse cards. :D

Good to hear it's working so much better. I've found the same - not the exact settings, but the general principle. The Anki manual still says that Anki is for recalling things you've learned, not learning them, and this is reflected in the learning steps. So if we are learning things with it, the setup needs to be slightly different.

I find that if I am learning things with it, increasing the number of learning steps as you've done saves a lot of time in the long run. An extra step much later in the day - 3-5 hours later, as with Pimsleur, seems to be really helpful too. A batch of learning early in the day with several reps of each card, followed by that later in the day, and then putting it into the normal queue, seems to work well with unfamiliar things.
3 x
: 0 / 50 1/2 Super Challenge - Latin Reading
: 0 / 50 1/2 Super Challenge - Latin 'Films'

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
x 6299

Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Tue Mar 29, 2022 11:56 am

Adding learning steps is pretty obvious, now that I thought of it. :lol: I'll try other variations too :D
Thanks vror be he advice, Bel Tsar :D
2 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
x 6299

Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Tue Mar 29, 2022 12:32 pm

Russian cursive .. All I can say is OMG...
7 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...


Return to “Language logs”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests