General language log

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DaveAgain
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Re: General language log

Postby DaveAgain » Mon Aug 22, 2022 2:03 pm

sporedandroid wrote:One concern I have about learning Finnish is lacking good media beyond music. I also heard it’s heavily geoblocked. I’m still doing research on that. The lack of media seems to be a common complaint. The gap between spoken and written language also seems to be a common issue. Right now I’m dealing with that issue is watching some learner videos that are in spoken Finnish. I look up words in the dictionary, even when I don’t “need” to. That way I can sort of see how the dictionary/written form of the word differs from spoken form of the word. I’m hoping I can get some intuition for this.
What about radio & audio books?
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Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Mon Aug 22, 2022 7:03 pm

DaveAgain wrote:
sporedandroid wrote:One concern I have about learning Finnish is lacking good media beyond music. I also heard it’s heavily geoblocked. I’m still doing research on that. The lack of media seems to be a common complaint. The gap between spoken and written language also seems to be a common issue. Right now I’m dealing with that issue is watching some learner videos that are in spoken Finnish. I look up words in the dictionary, even when I don’t “need” to. That way I can sort of see how the dictionary/written form of the word differs from spoken form of the word. I’m hoping I can get some intuition for this.
What about radio & audio books?

I was worried about not finding books in Finnish that I enjoy, but I also found it hard to find Hebrew good books. Maybe finding Finnish books won’t be any harder.
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Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Wed Aug 24, 2022 2:10 pm

I just tried watching Moomins in Finnish for the first time. I’m still not sure how much I like it. I obviously still had a low comprehension, but I actually could recognize words and phrases. It was a good way to add context to words I’m learning. It doesn’t seem to be a very popular show in Canada. It even seems to be more popular in Israel.

A few years ago I tried watching it in Hebrew. It just felt wrong. I know it was technically originally in Swedish, but the opening credits were in Finnish for some reason. I think this was one good sign I did want to eventually learn Finnish. Same sort of thing with LazyTown. Just feels wrong to watch it in Hebrew. It’s originally in English, but that show is from Iceland.

I’ve never stuck to watching kid’s shows since I was frustrated by the low comprehension. I think Moomins seems like something I can watch before bed on days I’m tired of Hebrew. I’m not sure how effective it is for language learning at this point. I’ve never really given learning things completely from context a try. I’ve always been impatient because it’s a lot slower than learning consciously. Even if it isn’t effective for language learning, it could be effective for falling asleep. That was how I felt when I first started listening to podcasts in Hebrew. I didn’t understand much at first, but it did tire me out pretty quickly.

Moomins seems like an okay show for comprehensible input because it’s a fairly visual show. Arthur isn’t actually that visual. Like a lot of adult shows they talk about a lot of things that are off camera and it’s fairly dense in language. Since I’m a beginner I prefer something less dense. I’m not logging how much time I spend on Finnish, so it’s another good reason for me not to care.

Right now the language I prefer to study fluctuates a lot. Some days I’m just sick of Hebrew and some days I’m pretty much fully into it and don’t even feel like studying Finnish. When I’m sick of Hebrew I still make sure I keep up with my Anki reviews and do a little bit of listening and reading. Just the bare minimum. I’ll either end up relaxing or I’ll study Finnish. It seems like the more I study Finnish the more I get motivated. If I’m really into Hebrew, I’ll usually end up not studying Finnish that day. I’m glad I don’t use Anki for Finnish right now. I’ll probably start when I reach a plateau.

Even though I’m not studying Hebrew as much, it does seem like I’m progressing more. I think it’s because I use the same method for two long and studying another language encourages me to try more things.
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Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Mon Aug 29, 2022 1:25 pm

I’m noticing I can read Hebrew for a lot longer now. I used to barely make it to ten minutes. Now I usually seem to make it to an hour. I still don’t feel like I’m great at reading, but I find it a lot more manageable. Part of the reason things seem to fluctuate is because the difficulty in native materials just naturally fluctuates. I think some of the things I struggle to read right now probably would have been the same things I gave up on a few months ago. Sometimes things are surprisingly easy to read as well.

One of my main issues with reading is not being familiar with a lot of proper nouns and concepts. So my main focus for reading is Wikipedia. On Wikipedia it’s easy to learn about a bunch of new topics at once rather than constantly having to Google everything. On Wikipedia I really notice a large range of writing styles. Some articles are pretty easy to get through and some are pretty hard. Some articles are pretty interesting and some are pretty boring.

Right now I use an app/website named Bublup to save articles for later. It’s good for saving things to read later. Especially if I found it on my phone. Since my reading still isn’t comfortable, I prefer to read on my computer. I also like that I can mark things I’ve read with a check mark and a bunch of other options. Another option I like to use is a question mark. I add that when I’ve sort of made it through an article, but I know I my reading comprehension wasn’t too good.

Even though my comprehension is Finnish is obviously still pretty low, I’m starting not notice fluctuations as well. Usually I notice my comprehension drops a lot if a lot of unknown vocabulary shows up. I also have more trouble when the sentences get more complicated. One thing I’m pretty decent at in Finnish is choosing whether I’m doing more extensive or intensive studying. When I listen to videos without subtitles I do more extensive studying. When I put subtitles on it becomes more intensive. So I don’t mind when I do things pretty slowly. Sometimes I’ll spend a lot of time on wiktionary reading example sentences or looking up grammar concepts. When I rewatch the same video I naturally do less and less intensive studying. Rewatching videos has diminishing returns, so it’s easier to not study Finnish every day.

I don’t know how far I can get in Finnish by watching learner videos and studying song lyrics. I’ll try other things, but I won’t be surprised if they don’t stick right away either. I’m happy with my progress so far, so I don’t really need to try too many things right now. I know I can’t learn a lot of vocabulary on learner videos. I think they’re definitely a natural SRS for the most high frequency vocabulary.
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Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Thu Sep 01, 2022 3:02 am

It seems like I’m making decent progress in Finnish. In one of my logs not too long ago(July 29th) I was mentioning that it doesn’t seem like I have enough pathways in my brain to process Finnish. It seems like a lot have been built now. There used to be these videos for beginners that had extremely slowed down speech. I could tell she was slowing down, but it was also the perfect speed for me. Now I can’t stand listening to it. It doesn’t help that I watched those videos over and over again. There’s still some complicated sentence structures and obscure vocabulary that isn’t sticking. If I speed up the audio to a more comfortable speed it starts to skip over words.

There seems to be a lot of Finnish lessons on YouTube that are entirely in Finnish. Some of them already seem fairly understandable to me. I’ll try a bunch of them, so I have more variety. I’ve only found two channels that have English subtitles and only one of them has consistent bilingual subtitles. I also see a lot of videos teaching grammar. I think they’re still too complicated for me, but I think they’ll be a good option for me. Some of those videos have English subtitles, but most of them don’t for some reason. I like watching Finnish lessons in Finnish because I’m still getting input even if I can’t understand the concepts they’re trying to teach me. I think it will give me a good balance of conscious study and language acquisition. I’m also guessing if the grammar explanations are in Finnish people will make more effort to simplify the explanations.
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Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Wed Sep 07, 2022 6:32 am

One frustrating thing about reading native content is that it’s not like a graded novel. The difficulty level fluctuates a lot and it isn’t always predictable. I think this makes it hard to see progress in my reading comprehension. Reading still feels hard a lot of the time. What I often don’t take into consideration is that less and less things are unreadable. I think a lot of unreadable things just became hard to read. I notice my progress more when I notice how much easier it is to read things like YouTube comments. It’s still pretty hard to enjoy myself, even if I’m technically reading something I’m interested in.

One thing that I’ve noticed more obvious progress in is my listening comprehension. I just seen better at catching certain details. Another thing I’ve noticed is that my ability to intensively read other languages has improved over all. That means my reading comprehension in Spanish has improved, even though I’m not actively trying to improve my Spanish.

Today I actually found some Israeli comedy that was sort of funny. I wasn’t expecting much, but I gave some short clips a chance. I think it helped that my listening comprehension has been improving. So I’m getting better at sort of being in the moment more.

I’ve also been thinking about what it means to dream in your target language. I dreamt a lot in Hebrew when I first started listening to podcasts and understanding them. Since that was March and April 2020, that overlapped with the first COVID lockdown. I often got Hebrew dreams/the din my head listened to podcasts for two hours a day. If I only listened to them for one hour, that stuff happened a lot less. I think the dreams also showed up because the podcasts I listened to were at the perfect level for me to progress quickly. Now a lot of those podcasts are probably too easy to make a difference. Quantity still seems to matter. Yesterday I listened for about four hours. That ended up giving me Hebrew dreams. I haven’t had Hebrew dreams in a while because listening hasn’t really been a priority lately. I about 40 minutes of that was active listening for a TV show. The rest was about half listening to easy podcasts and YouTube videos and half listening to university lectures. Since I wasn’t paying full attention to the university lectures it definitely wasn’t active listening. I also found it hard to understand because a lot of it was Biblical Hebrew.
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Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Thu Sep 08, 2022 3:04 am

It seems like my level in Finnish drops really quickly. Maybe I’m just imagining it. I haven’t been taking a super long break. I’m just going to convince myself that forgetting words and relearning them makes them more solid and natural. Learning Finnish has been very weird. Sometimes I’m super motivated and excited about it and other days I’m just not motivated to study at all. Today I’m just not motivated. My motivation to study Hebrew is back along with my motivation for other things. If I get more busy in general, I don’t think it’s likely I’ll feel motivated to study Finnish. It definitely seems like I’m more motivated to study Finnish when I’m not feeling good or my motivation to study Hebrew is low for whatever reason.

It’s my back-up language. When I got sick with covid back in January I studied Finnish on Duolingo. I had fun. One day I even spent two whole hours on it. Could I have spent them more efficiently? Yeah. But I'm not going to be all that efficient when I have COVID anyways. I’m going to be getting the new COVID booster when it’s available. I’m looking forward to more Finnish studies.

I know that one huge motivation for studying Hebrew is the fact that it’s part of my routine and I have to keep up with my Anki deck. I intentionally haven’t done that for Finnish yet. Yet is the key word. The more I’m studying Finnish the more I like it. I also know that my reading comprehension in Hebrew needs to improve a lot in order for me to be able to put it into maintenance mode. I’m hoping to get to some passive A2ish level by the time Finnish becomes my main language. Trying to learn a bunch of things as a beginner is really not fun for me and I’m glad I’ve found a slower pace that works for me.

I still honestly don’t know how much of a dent I’ve made with my dabbling. Even I haven’t, I still had a blast. I’ve wasted so much time taking things too seriously and quitting. I think it’s also easy for me to ramp things up if I notice my approach is too passive. I’ve already done that with Finnish. My first study routine was to just watch Finnish learner videos with bilingual subtitles. I think I maybe picked up a few words here and there, but I didn’t learn a whole lot. I decided to start watching those videos without subtitles even though I barely understood anything. That helped me pay more attention when I did turn the subtitles back on and it did seem to make me memorize words better. Another thing that helped a lot was analyzing sentences with wiktionary. That made me understand those videos better when I turned off the subtitles.
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Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Tue Sep 13, 2022 6:41 am

I just figured out how to get more passive hours of listening practice in Hebrew. Right now I just do passive listening while I work on digital art. I used to be really good at getting several passive hours a day. My habits have changed because of the lockdown being gone and a whole bunch of other reasons. I think another issue was that understanding Hebrew lost its novelty. I kind of think more active studying helps me break through my plateau better, but I think getting a lot of passive hours helps. Passive listening can get boring, but since I combined it with artwork I’ve been able to get in more hours of passive listening without even trying.

One way I can notice my progress is that I have the ability to listen to things more passively. Most TV shows are still for active listening only. The language level and the amount of details I have to keep track with need all my attention. Human interest stories used to be hard for me, but now I can passively listen to them. I think they’re good for listening practice because they offer a mix of formal language and everyday speech. I try to listen to university lectures passively, but if I’m being honestly with myself I don’t think I can passively listen without losing a lot of details.
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Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Wed Sep 21, 2022 6:23 am

I’m glad my excitement for studying Hebrew is sort of coming back. It was going away a bit because I had a bit of burnout and a plateau. It’s still up and down for me. Dabbling in Finnish helps because it’s so different from Hebrew. It also has a lot of resources that make it easy for me to study in a non-committed way. I couldn’t actually find those resources for Hebrew and I didn’t find them for Icelandic either. It doesn’t mean they don’t exist, but they definitely seem harder for me to find. I did find some Hebrew YouTube channels and podcasts aimed at learners in the format I like, but they were all made after 2020. A bit too late for me.

One issue I have is the Hebrew sort of “invades” when I try to remember phrases or song lyrics in weaker languages. It happened to me with Finnish a bit and it also happens with Icelandic. It’s probably not true language interference because those languages aren’t remotely related.

Unsurprisingly my art sort of “replaced” Finnish for now. I have been doing art on and off for my whole life, but I recently got a lot more into it. It’s a lot more compatible with Hebrew because I can just watch documentaries in Hebrew while I’m working on my art. There is no way I can do that with Finnish unless listening to Finnish music counts. Since I’ve started “studying” Finnish I spontaneously understand songs more and more.

I’m still noticing improvements in my reading comprehension for Hebrew. Obviously when more things are my reading level, I’ll end up reading more. At least casually. I tried to get more into reading books in general, but sadly that habit sort of disappeared. I think the vast majority of English books that I find aren’t actually too hard for me. I just don’t have the attention span or find them boring.

I have to admit that hardly anything is easy for me to read in Hebrew. A lot of stuff I come across is manageable, but slow. I think the more detailed Wikipedia articles are above my level, but if they’re interesting enough I can intensively read them for an hour. Apparently Wikipedia can be hard to read in English as well, but I hardly notice it.
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Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Sun Nov 13, 2022 12:14 am

I think I’ve been at the point where I don’t notice unknown words anymore. It doesn’t mean I fully understand Hebrew. It just means that I seem to tune out things I don’t understand. I feel like I understand, but if someone were to ask me what people are talking about I usually wouldn’t know what to say. I guess this is good to improve my endurance, but I think it’s also keeping me stuck at an intermediate level. I think this will somewhat improve when I do more intensive reading. I’ve just been dealing with migraines that make it hard to concentrate on any reading. I think it’s also good that I’m translating less and less into English, but that also kind of hides how vague my comprehension actually is.
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