Beli Tsar's log - Ancient Greek, Farsi, Latin, Hebrew

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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
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Re: Beli Tsar's log - Ancient Greek & Farsi

Postby Beli Tsar » Fri Mar 08, 2019 9:29 pm

Week 5/12 Review
: 5 / 12 Weeks

: 657 / 1275 Words (+110 words)
: 16 / 21 TY Modern Persian (+2 Chapters)
: 65332 / 100000 Words read (+3483)
: 19 / 42 Time listened (+2.5 hours)

Five weeks out of 12, and I’m more than half-way on words, despite another week of mild illness and hideous work deadlines.

Nonetheless, everything else is behind. I’ve even missed my listening target this week, for the first time. And there's a lot more work to do this weekend, too.

One of my problems is that word-entry for SRS is taking far, far too much time - it would have been better to spend £100 to get the electronic version of my frequency dictionary. But it’s taking even longer each week, as I use Forvo and online dictionaries to get deeper knowledge of each word. That’s helping learn words better, and so saves review time, but it isn’t fast.

Hopefully there will be much more time next week, but it would still be helpful to find ways to get more intensive study in during the day.

In an effort to find ways to do that, I went through the first five lessons on 'Persian Language Online' yesterday, since I could fit those in at lunchtime - in a way real textbook work doesn’t fit.

They were, incidentally, excellent. One of the creators is Narguess Farzad, who wrote TY Complete Persian. This feels like the project she actually wanted to do - it’s the same characters, the same kind of thing, but far, far more volume, far more dialogues, content that takes you much further. It’s more communicative - no grammar explanation that I can see - but all very well done. In combination with explicit grammar instruction it looks potentially very helpful. It’s also unusual in treating both written and spoken Farsi, rather than assuming you will magically pick up the other. It's great to find a resource this good that's free.

.
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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
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Re: Beli Tsar's log - Ancient Greek & Farsi

Postby Beli Tsar » Fri Mar 15, 2019 4:43 pm

Week 6/12 Review
: 6 / 12 Weeks

: 721 / 1275 Words (+64 words)
: 18 / 21 TY Modern Persian (+2 Chapters)
: 65868 / 100000 Words read (+5201)
: 24 / 42 Time listened (+4.7 hours)

Half-way through my 3-month focus on Persian, and I’m delighted with my progress.
I have hit a sudden inflection point in both my reading ability and my listening ability.
In reading, my vocab has hit the point where I can guess a lot more words, spot compounds, and understand fast.

Short BBC news articles are pretty easy with LingQ and no translation. I’m sure there are grammatical subtleties I’m not spotting, but there’s nothing incomprehensible.

Basically, I now feel I am really reading, with some words I need to check, rather than deciphering.

Listening to NHK world news has suddenly gone from incomprehensible walls of words to something I can get the gist of. Many of the words I don’t get are ones I would know, if I had more time to think about them - so that more easy gains should, hopefully, be ahead. Listening feels like I am really learning.

Hopefully, this means that reading can now help more positively with vocabulary acquisition. And I’m doing some fast reading through beginner materials to build fluency. And listening, too, should now allow me to get substantial amounts of useful native input.

So an encouraging week, despite a terrible start (ill, using up my weekend for work, anki problems dumping lots of cards, etc...). Those issues mean I am behind on words for this week, but still ahead overall.

Slowness on finishing TY has been annoying, but it's mainly from a change of technique. Chapter 17 is a simple but huge chapter on prepositions, and it's really just a collection of examples. I made most of them into cloze cards, since I really do want to master prepositions in the long haul. So it was (painfully slow) data entry rather than learning, but hopefully helpful in the long run.

I increasingly think it's a terrible book - full of errors, omissions, mistakes in ordering, etc. Since I'm not depending on it alone I'm fine, but it would be endlessly frustrating as a first book.
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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
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Re: Beli Tsar's log - Ancient Greek & Farsi

Postby Beli Tsar » Thu Mar 21, 2019 8:26 pm

Week 7/12 Review
: 7 / 12 Weeks

: 829 / 1275 Words (+108 words)
: 21 / 21 TY Modern Persian (+3 Chapters)
: 0 / 20 Routledge Basic Persian
: 70059 / 100000 Words read (+4191)
: 27 / 42 Time listened (+3.6 hours)

Posting this review of the week a day early, but still able to report that nearly everything is done for the week.

And I’m especially relieved that I am done, finally, with TY Complete Persian. It’s been a busy week, and the weekend was crazy (Persian Nowruz/New Year party), but I still got it all done.

It’s good to have finished TY. For four pounds, I’m not complaining about the book, but it isn’t good. It serves me right for choosing convenience over actual usefulness.

All that’s left to do with it is to try a little bit of bidirectional translation on some of the dialogues. And that does mean that I have covered most of the core parts of Persian Grammar - barring a few more unusual tenses. That’s pleasant to have done. I am disappointed, though, at how little opportunity the book gave to internalise it.

Therefore I’ll be heading onwards into Routledge’s Basic Persian, which as a Grammar Workbook, should work me much harder and get things in deeper. It looks excellently done. Now that I am far enough on not to need audio, I think it’s the right thing to do next.

I’m feeling the lack of production, but otherwise things are good.
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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
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Re: Beli Tsar's log - Ancient Greek & Farsi

Postby Beli Tsar » Fri Mar 29, 2019 3:12 pm

Week 8/12 Review
: 8 / 12 Weeks

: 888 / 1275 Words (+64 words)
: 21 / 21 TY Modern Persian
: 3 / 20 Routledge Basic Persian (+3)
: 6 / 60 Persian Language Online (+1)
: 75753 / 100000 Words read (+5694)
: 31 / 42 Time listened (+4 hours)

I hit a bit of a wall this week. I’m a bit burnt out and exhausted - more from some long hours at work than from language learning. But the effect has been a sudden loss of enthusiasm for learning over the weekend, and a mind that suddenly can't absorb words.

It’s not too surprising, and I scaled back things a little for this week, in order to carry on with key goals.

I’m on holiday next week, staying with friends, and between friends, family and travel, it’s probably unrealistic to keep up the pace. Between that and burnout, I’ll take the holiday as a break. I’ll read, listen if I can, and keep up on SRS reviews, but I’m not expecting to hit targets for listening or words.

For morale purposes, I'll cheat and not count the week towards my 12 week total.

In future, I might aim for 6-week blocks of language learning rather than 3 months, with then a review week to catch up and rest. Again, I’d read, listen a little and keep up with SRS reviews, but not add new cards or work on grammar.

Routledge Basic Persian is very good, but possibly a little over-detailed for this stage - it does cover the full detail of a topic on the first pass. That said, it’s great discovering all the little facts that answer questions I have and clarify the big picture a little more.

On another note, vocab has (other than the exceptions above!) got much easier. I no longer need any mems: as long as my words have sound, I’m absorbing 95-90% in the first learning session. It’s interesting how getting used to a language makes it much easier - especially as this isn’t due to an increase in reading rate. Having a bigger vocabulary is just making learning words easier. I could handle a substantially higher rate now if it wasn’t for card creation.

While I haven't been pushing any kind of output properly, I have been trying to do a bit of self-talk when commuting on my bike. It turns out my ability to mutter nonsense in Farsi as I ride along is enormously improved, in range, speed and fluency, and that has encouraged me quite a bit.
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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
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Re: Beli Tsar's log - Ancient Greek & Farsi

Postby Beli Tsar » Sat Apr 13, 2019 7:22 pm

Week 9/12 Review
: 9 / 12 Weeks

: 978 / 1275 Words (+90 words)
: 21 / 21 TY Modern Persian
: 4 / 20 Routledge Basic Persian (+1)
: 9 / 60 Persian Language Online (+2)
: 81801 / 100000 Words read (+6048)
: 35 / 42 Time listened (+3.5 hours)

Back after a week’s holiday - which was great fun, and we saw friends wall to wall, but even worse than expected for language learning. I didn’t have time to keep up with Anki reviews properly, let alone listen, read, or crack a book open. So I’m pretending that whole week never existed.

This week has been fine, though. Visiting in-laws have meant slow progress on grammar (which happens in the evenings) and words are a little behind, but I made real progress in reading and listening.

Plunging back into NHK World news in Farsi, I was frustrated by my lack of understanding, so I’m now listening to the same episode three days running, and reading articles from the NHK website on the main news topics to push that on a bit. It seems to be working pretty well.

Because repetitive listening is so very dull, I’m branching out into music too. Youtube launched Marjan Farsad’s songs at me, so I decided to LingQ all the lyrics and put them in my listening list. They are not really my style, but are easy to understand and very, very Iranian. They are songs of sad longing for the home you left as an exile, for loved ones far away, for family:

I’ll leave you with some lines:

Our house is far far away
Behind patient mountains
Behind golden fields
Behind empty deserts

Our house has happiness,
it has fish in its pool,

Our house, warm and cordial,
On its walls, old pictures,
pictures of playing in the Iwan,
on the seaside, in summer.
...
With a sob and a suitcase
Leaving people who are lovely and kind
...
Our house is on the other side of water
On the other side of restless waves
Behind cypress forests,
It’s in a dream, a fantasy

(reproduction allowed for non-commercial purposes, incidentally).

It's not really my taste, but there’s a whole lot of Iranian exile identity packed in to those lines.
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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
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Re: Beli Tsar's log - Ancient Greek & Farsi

Postby Beli Tsar » Sat Apr 20, 2019 8:19 pm

Week 10/12 Review
: 10 / 12 Weeks

: 1053 / 1275 Words (+75 words)
: 21 / 21 TY Modern Persian
: 5 / 20 Routledge Basic Persian (+1)
: 9 / 60 Persian Language Online (+0)
: 83236 / 100000 Words read (+1045)
: 39 / 42 Time listened (+3.8 hours)

A pretty poor week. Making progress, but nearly all targets failed - tired and busy. Hopefully will do better next week.
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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
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Re: Beli Tsar's log - Ancient Greek & Farsi

Postby Beli Tsar » Wed May 01, 2019 2:34 pm

Week 11/12 Review
: 11 / 12 Weeks

: 1148 / 1275 Words (+95 words)
: 21 / 21 TY Modern Persian
: 5 / 20 Routledge Basic Persian (+0)
: 9 / 60 Persian Language Online (+0)
: 83236 / 100000 Words read (+501)
: 42 / 42 Time listened (+3.7 hours)

I've only just realised I failed to post anything last week. I was on a week-long training course last week, which is why it was such an abysmal week for language learning.

I hit my overall 3-month target for listening one week ahead of time, but that’s all the good news.

Next week I finish my 3-month Farsi stint, and will give a bit of a review of where I have got to and where I go next.

Meanwhile I have been wandering about with the lyrics to Ey Iran, the unoffical Iranian national anthem, pounding through my head. It's an odd experience for someone from a country where we often regard singing our national anthem as bit... distasteful... to listen again and again to something that sends my Iranian friends wild with enthusiasm.
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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
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Re: Beli Tsar's log - Ancient Greek & Farsi

Postby Beli Tsar » Fri May 03, 2019 1:01 pm

Week 12/12 Review
: 12 / 12 Weeks

: 1280 / 1275 Words (+132 words)
: 21 / 21 TY Modern Persian
: 6 / 20 Routledge Basic Persian (+1)
: 9 / 60 Persian Language Online (+0)
: 85395 / 100000 Words read (+1658)
: 48 / 42 Time listened (+5.7 hours)

Done. That’s the final week of my three-month intensive Persian focus finished. I’ve learned a lot, made a lot of progress, and am feeling a bit sad about the prospect of shifting focus away from this language.

I have met my goals in vocab acquisition and listening, but not in grammar/textbook study or reading. As a result, I regard the last three months as a qualified failure. I just haven’t had enough time to do this project justice.

Yet I have enjoyed it, and B1 this year doesn't seem totally impossible.

In the next few days I’ll post a review of what I’ve done, which will be (too) long.

So now I’ll have a week off, just keeping up with SRS reviews and relaxing with a bit of Greek. Then next Friday I’ll post my plan of action for a six-week Hebrew intensive.
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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
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Re: Beli Tsar's log - Ancient Greek & Farsi

Postby Beli Tsar » Fri May 10, 2019 10:44 am

As I said last Friday, I regard this three-month push as a qualified failure. I made two targets - vocab and listening hours - and there is no question at all that I have made great strides in comprehension and grammar. I’ve built a good base in some areas. I missed my reading target largely because I refocused on intensive reading to support listening, and that was the right call. And I had my first experience of actually understanding (90-95%) a multi-way conversation between several friends, fully in Persian, this week. It was a simple and repetitive conversation, but that was still pleasing.

However, I didn’t complete everything I planned, and there are some things I should have planned and didn’t. Six weeks in I was very pleased with my progress. The last six were much less productive.

This is a long post, so some conclusions follow; if you want to see my conclusions in action, my next post will be about what I do next with Hebrew, and I’ll try and integrate the lessons I have learned.

These are of course the ramblings of a still very inexperienced language learner: so if anyone is bored enough to read all this, advice would be very welcome!

Big conclusions:
    I need to be more careful about sustainability
    I need to work harder at fundamentals
    I need to spend more time on intensive listening
    I need to spend more time on grammar drills
    I (probably) need output

Where next
I’m going to do a six-week Hebrew stint. I’m really looking forward to it, while also feeling a bit sad leaving Farsi behind. I’m at a point where a bit of concentrated work could do a lot, especially if I eased off on vocab for a while, pushed on grammar, and did some good, focused work on listening, reading and harvesting key vocab.

I will aim to keep my Farsi level steady. I will continue to review on SRS, including working through a backlog of grammar and drill cards, and adding stuff I come across in daily life. But the pressure will be off: I know from experience I can’t keep up SRS in two languages properly. I will also listen to an hour and a half of audio a week - hopefully enough to keep up familiarity. And I’ll read - not sure how much, but enough to keep going.

And then, hopefully, I’ll come back for another six-week stint soon.


How much time did I spend?
I haven’t been measuring time properly, and I think I might in future. Nonetheless, I’ve spent about 26 hours on Anki, more than 48 on listening, and I guess around 20 on grammar/textbooks. I don’t know how much of the Anki time was either card creation and editing or slowed down by those. But I’ve put in about an hour a day for three months. And that’s excluding reading time on LingQ. That’s covered more than 40,000 words, and can’t have been faster on average than 25 words/minute, so will easily have been another 20-30 hours. It’s also excluding a substantial amount of time in excel etc. sorting out vocab words, and likely much card-creation time also. That comes to a total of 125ish hours. That’s about an hour and 20-25 minutes a day.

To reach my goals, I did need to put in more time.

What stage did I reach?
Sadly there is no Dialang for Farsi - and no professional assessment either. So it’s down to self-assessment.
So I’ve gone through thorough CEFR guidelines:

    Reception - Listening - mid A2? I still miss a lot in news etc.
    Reception - Reading - possibly getting close to B1? I’m able to understand high frequency language and to read articles and personal things (slowly!)
    Interaction - Spoken interaction - A1. Oh dear. I should be A2, but haven’t practiced.
    Interaction - Written - A2. I can and do write regular short things on whatsapp; but I can’t ‘describe experiences and impressions’ which would be B1
    Production - Spoken - A1-A2? I can give a decent monologue on the usual subjects.
    Production - Written - A2-B1? I can do decent, connected text in a variety of tenses etc.


In conclusion, my speaking is generally still A1, with a few glimmers of A2, my writing hits A2-B1, and my reading skills are nosing towards B1.

To cross-check this, I have done a French Dialang test of passive skills; I had been feeling somewhat discouraged, as I thought I hadn’t reached the same point in Farsi as I have in French. But, after the test, I realised that is not true: I am better at reading in Farsi, and my grammar is infinitely better, even without all the loanwords that make French simpler. And, both French tests came out at B1. I imagine that’s optimistic, but even if it’s A2, I think that benchmarks my receptive skills in Persian as a solid A2.

As another cross-check, LingQ gives you a rough level according to the number of words etc. you have tagged as known, along with standards for what else you should have done by that point (words read, listening, speaking etc.) and I come out about the mid-point of Beginner 2, ie. A2. Obviously, this is extraordinarily crude, Again, that would put me at mid A2 in passive skills.

Sustainability
I have very little good free time; I spent essentially all of it on Farsi for three months. That was tiring. Browsing the forums in quiet moments at work kept me enthusiastic obsessed, which is why I managed to keep going. But I did hit a bit of burnout in weeks 7-8 and not see many gains in 9-12. That was largely triggered by work busyness/holidays/training courses, but a more sustainable learning style would help.

I think the general methodology was sound. But I do need to build in a few more breaks, perhaps half-holidays when I focus on review and reading, but don’t learn anything new, particularly vocab.

Methodology
Was my methodology right? It had obvious upsides and downsides. Essentially it ended up being a modified multi-track approach, with a bit less ‘multi’. So I learned vocab, did a course, and had real input every day.

Learning 20 words a day every weekday was feasible. I’d do it again - getting a big vocab base quick is great. I saw big improvements from this. But card-creation was slow.

I would love to do more courses, faster. I should choose my textbook more carefully next time - I suspect Colloquial Persian is the best first stage here. I’d stick with Pimsleur longer than I did. And I would like to do multiple courses sequentially again. However I did it, I would like to massively increase grammatical drilling in every way - textbooks, Anki, everything - for better automaticity.

LingQ, despite it’s limits, was great. For reading and listening on the bus, for good intensive listening and reading, it’s very helpful. Next time I’d go for more quality and less volume early on, if I had time.

Production was the big missing factor. I wish I could have dropped my utterly pointless and infrequent lessons for even a mediocre tandem, or some time writing things for correction online. Certainly, for the future, that will need to be a change I make.

Working at the fundamentals
With a little while to compose myself and think, I can slowly say ‘North Korea’s nuclear weapons are a danger to the whole hemisphere’ or ‘Every day my investments are growing, because I get interest payments daily’ or ‘The board of directors provided outstanding leadership to the company.’

But I can’t, actually, have a conversation - or, in real life, say anything remotely useful.

Chatting to friends with poor English, I can help them in the conversation - I can supply the word for ‘jeweller’ or ‘parsley’ or ‘parable’ or ‘giraffe’ or ‘astronaut’ or ‘warplane’ or whatever - but can’t actually make any sentences.

Similarly I can listen to a news report and sometimes easily understand several sentences together. But there isn’t much native material I can actually listen to and really grasp on first pass.

I should have narrowed down my reading and listening, and used focused study, multi-sided flashcards, etc. to really master things, as well as to get basic vocabulary automatic.

Intensive listening
This is a corollary of the above. I made much greater gains when I LingQ’d transcripts, and even then it was really on second and third readings that I made gains. I really should have harvested vocab from these as well, instead of concentrating only on frequency and textbook vocab. Where I did, it helped; where I didn’t, gains have stalled.
I wish I had a much longer library of well-studied audio to take into the next few months for regular listening. Instead of listening to many episodes of NHK world news and sporadically reading the relevant articles, I should have sliced a few episodes up with audacity and studied them properly with the articles, vocab and everything.
I wish I’d discovered music earlier for this, too - especially for early listening, where repetition is so key. As I go forward, I am mainly reading lyrics and listening to music as I try to build up that library.

Grammar
More time drilling grammar would have really helped. TY Persian was not helpful here, but anything extra would have been good. What I did made a big difference in speech and understanding. I just need more, a lot more.
Similarly, Anki as a medium for regular conjugation and cloze drills works very well, though they are much harder and slower than vocab cards. But I should have doubled what I did, because it works.
Other ways of getting good grammar practice would also have been good - bi-directional translation, for instance.

Output
I stupidly thought that my ‘lessons’ would provide plenty of output - both writing for them and speaking in them - at least enough to boost my regular interactions with Iranians. But as free lessons from a friend can, they became very irregular, perhaps four or five in three months. And we spent most of the time going over basic principles of grammar I knew - not even practicing them. And the other students held me back.
So time, soon, for some actual speaking, backed up by those grammar drills.

Observations on Vocabulary learning
This was much slower and harder than my previous experience had led me to expect - even compared to learning Hebrew words, where I know nothing and the script is just as hard. Some reasons for this:
    I switched to Anki - this was for simplicity in adding and editing cards. Anki is far less effective than Memrise for initially learning words from lists.
    I needed audio, and adding it took a long time
    The definitions in my frequency book were poor, and so I spent a long time on Glosbe.
    I used production cards - great until I ran into lots of synonyms...
Nonetheless it got easier with time. Mems were necessary at first, but fell away after a while. And learning vocab really helped everything else. I wouldn’t sacrifice it next time around, just streamline it.
The biggest change I’d make next time would be being more deliberate in my choice of words. I’ve picked up a lot of stupid vocab from textbooks (5 words for carpet?! Hemisphere?) and plenty from my frequency list (6 words for financial ‘interest’??). That was stupid of me.
I still think frequency lists are brilliant. But I trusted my frequency list too much, simply because being used to New Testament Greek and Hebrew, with their small fixed corpi, I assumed a list would actually be what you needed to know. When I realised the extent to which the list was drawn from newspapers, I tried to capitalise on that by reading and listening to news. I still don’t know if that was the right decision. I can now read the news pretty well.
But I should have been far more selective nonetheless. I should have filtered much more. .
One tip I picked up from Smallwhite was brilliant: I’ve used it a bit in the last few weeks. It is her habit of taking lists of words, including frequency lists, and skimming them for the words you will learn next. It isn’t rocket science, but it acknowledges the fact that you can easily learn some words, but need to wait a while to learn others. I have almost entirely eliminated leeches in the last couple of weeks like this.
Overall, my changes for the future, for my next bout of Persian vocab-learning, if I stick with Anki:
    Dump the entire frequency list into a slush-deck on Anki;
    comb through regularly this for words to learn next, both by usefulness and ease
    move them to a real deck, adding audio as I go
    Harvest many more words, particularly for listening, and add these straight to the main deck.
    Focus on key areas, my interests and topics that are likely in conversation
    From the start, flag key functional words, and multi-card them - at a minimum, audio-recognition as well as reading, and usually also production.

The challenge of Farsi
There are obvious challenges in learning Farsi - the ABJAD script, the diglossia, wildly variant pronunciation and dialects, somewhat inadequate learning materials.
But the thing I really found awkward was the difficulties of utilising modern tools to learn. Compared to users of minority languages, I had it easy. But I am still deeply frustrated that I can’t get an ebook into LingQ to do some interesting reading. The LingQ importer doesn’t really like the Farsi sites I use. It’s impossible to get a Farsi textbook in a format that allows you to copy and paste excercises or anything else into Anki. TV is pretty limited. And building my own SRS deck felt, to me, like a colossal waste of time. Add to that a variety of awkward computer problems whenever I tried to do things in Farsi - even copying and pasting text!
None of these are massive issues, but solving (or failing to solve) these ate many hours that could have been much better spent. I salute those who learn languages that are far less well resourced.


Conclusion
I've had some fun these last few months, even if I've forgotten how to actually switch off or relax. The last week has done me good, and I really did need a break. But I am encouraged that I have made real progress, and look forward to making more in future. And as it takes at least a month for SRS learning to really hit a well-internalised spot, I am anticipating harvesting more gains in the weeks to come.
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Re: Beli Tsar's log - Ancient Greek & Farsi

Postby Gordafarin2 » Fri May 10, 2019 1:20 pm

Nice log, Beli Tsar! Khosh be haalet :)

Sadly there is no Dialang for Farsi - and no professional assessment either. So it’s down to self-assessment.

By the by, what I use for benchmarking is the DLI's Online Diagnostic Assessment - https://www.dliflc.edu/online-diagnosti ... sment-oda/ . It uses ILR language levels (1-4) instead of CEFR, but it's a good way to measure progress and identify my weaknesses.

They have separate tests for reading and listening, and they also offer both Iranian Persian and Dari.
It does emphasise military, political, and technical vocabulary. (My vocab falls more in the literary and everyday conversation categories... But as you've been practising with news articles, you might be better prepared for ODA than me) The nice thing is at the end, you get not only your score, but feedback broken down by category and a list of GLOSS exercises suited to your needs.
0 x
Persian... 10 novels: 4 / 10

Mandarin...
4000 words: 4000 / 4000 / 2000 characters: 1640 / 2000

she/her


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