General language log

Continue or start your personal language log here, including logs for challenge participants
User avatar
sporedandroid
Blue Belt
Posts: 656
Joined: Mon Jan 07, 2019 6:54 am
Languages: English (N), Spanish (heritage/intermediate), Hebrew (A2-B1)
x 1371

Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Thu Mar 09, 2023 11:04 pm

I’m about one month into studying Finnish. Since my vocabulary is still very limited, it’s hard to notice too much progress in my listening comprehension. I am noticing that I’m identifying more and more words when I listen to music. One time I noticed my progress a lot was when I listened to a learner video on working from home. Since a lot of premade decks have work-related vocabulary my comprehension was pretty decent despite never watching that video before. Since my vocabulary is still small it’s hard to be 100% sure of the words I hear. The same thing happened when I started Hebrew. It can be slightly challenging keeping up with Anki, especially because energy has been so low and inconsistent.

The one thing I like about Anki is that it helps give me super specific task based goals. Right now I found a notion template that looks pretty good. It doesn’t seem too complicated and it has some nice looking progress bars. I watched a video on how to set SMART goals. One thing it mentioned was to enter the most emotionally resonant goal. Even if you won’t achieve it.

My goal for Finnish is to be able to watch Finnish YouTube videos that aren’t aimed at learners by January or maybe February. What I’m going to do to achieve that is watch 30 learner videos per month. I think monthly goals are better than daily goals because I don’t expect myself to be consistent day by day or even week by week. It’s probably not enough. I’ll probably think of other specific tasks that can help me work towards that goal.

Hebrew is a bit trickier right now. I did think of an emotionally resonant goal, but it’s not all that specific or achievable. I’m at the stage in Hebrew where it’s hard to measure progress, but I’m not fluent enough to really do things for fun/leisure. One way I’ll achieve it is by trying to read 30 articles per month. That goal is hard to measure because a lot of articles end up varying in length or difficulty. Finnish sort of has the same issue, but a lot of the videos seem to be roughly the same length. The videos by Finnished are shorter, but I often spend more time analyzing and sentence mining.

Right now getting a hang of basic Finnish grammar is slightly more important than vocabulary. I’ve started using production cards once in a while. I’ll mainly use them when there isn’t too much unfamiliar vocabulary and they seem “easy”. I put easy in quotation marks because those production cards don’t end up being all that easy. I think they’re good for getting a hang of basic grammar.

My Hebrew reading deck is actually pretty manageable. Probably because I’m not reading enough cards for reviews to pile up. I hardly ever fail cards either, unlike the Finnish decks. It seems like the energy I have for each language differs. I’ll obviously do better at both languages if I’m doing well overall. But a lot of times I’ll notice it’s easier to study one language compared to another. I’ll also get into the flow of studying one language a lot. That’s another good reason to have month by month, rather than day by day goals. When it’s 30 per month, I can assume it’s doable to do it once per day. Just not in a strict way. Some days it will be zero and some it can even be three.
4 x

User avatar
sporedandroid
Blue Belt
Posts: 656
Joined: Mon Jan 07, 2019 6:54 am
Languages: English (N), Spanish (heritage/intermediate), Hebrew (A2-B1)
x 1371

Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Sun Mar 12, 2023 6:46 am

I just watched a tv interview with the Finnish prime minister for fun. I wanted to see how much I can understand. I heard her saying something about singing and dancing over and over again. That didn’t really make sense until I looked at the title and it mentioned a video. I do remember hearing about a leaked partying video. Then it clicked. I’m at that stage where I can recognize a lot of words, but it’s hard to be sure if I’m hearing what I’m hearing. I watched a few more videos for fun. At this stage it’s not exactly studying, but it was fun to see where I’m at. I have this playlist where I save all the non-learner Finnish videos I watch so I can see my progress.
4 x

User avatar
sporedandroid
Blue Belt
Posts: 656
Joined: Mon Jan 07, 2019 6:54 am
Languages: English (N), Spanish (heritage/intermediate), Hebrew (A2-B1)
x 1371

Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Thu Mar 16, 2023 6:03 am

Like I expected, studying Finnish is starting to feel like more effort. I’m more on Anki than I’m used to. I think about 30-40 minutes a day on average. That’s about average for a new language for me. I can’t imagine doing that for Hebrew right now, but it makes perfect sense for any new language. I think after one month the Anki reviews really start to get larger if you’re not careful. Since I have three Finnish decks, I kind of have to take my time. I’m already starting to get leeches. Mainly on production cards. I’m not surprised that’s happening. I only really do production cards to practice grammar. I end up suspending most of them.

Right now my monthly goal is to read 30 articles in Hebrew and watch 30 Finnish learner videos. I’m starting to rethink that goal. For this month it was a rough estimation, so it’s not entirely accurate. Either way it seems a lot easier for me to read Hebrew articles so far. Probably because my brain sort of gets tired of studying Finnish after 30-40 minutes of it. So it’s just hard to get myself to watch those videos. At this stage I don’t really mind this ratio. I think I need a lot more vocabulary and grammar knowledge for listening practice to be doable. Maybe I’ll try doing 30 for each, but I might consider lowering the goal for Finnish a bit and maybe raising the goal for Hebrew a bit.

It does seem like reading Hebrew is starting to get easier. The reason I made 30 articles a month a goal is because it should average out to reading one article a day. Reading “one article a day” isn’t a very good goal because sometimes I just have bad days. I don’t want to feel guilty about it and quit because I “lost a streak”. It’s also pretty doable to read two or three articles on some days.

For Finnish, I’m not sure if it’s doable. Maybe if I rearrange my study routine a bit, it will be more doable. My goal is to be able to watch native level YouTube videos next year. Since I keep hearing about how hard dialects are to understand, I’m not sure how doable this goal is. I mostly have that goal because it’s fun to think about.

I don’t have huge ambitions for improving my listening comprehension in Hebrew. My main goal is to make it feel like less effort. My issue is that my listening comprehension feels decent, but it just feels like I put way too much effort into it. Rather than challenging myself too much, I just watch YouTube shorts while trying not to put too much effort into understanding. Since I don’t necessarily like a lot of YouTube shorts, I don’t care as much if my comprehension is low. It’s not like in a tv show, where losing any comprehension instantly makes you feel like you’re missing something good.

It’s kind of hard to know if this has really improved this issue. Maybe it’s just general listening comprehension. I do notice days that seem to be bad days. I won’t be doing a great job with the Finnish Anki cards. I’ll get a bit tired of that and start watching some videos in Hebrew. Compared to that it will feel like barely any effort.
4 x

User avatar
sporedandroid
Blue Belt
Posts: 656
Joined: Mon Jan 07, 2019 6:54 am
Languages: English (N), Spanish (heritage/intermediate), Hebrew (A2-B1)
x 1371

Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Fri Mar 17, 2023 9:48 pm

It really seems like my mood affects how well I do at studying a language. Yesterday I was really in the mood for Hebrew. I was doing a decent amount of reading and watching a lot of videos. It felt good. At the end of the day I was guilty about how many Anki reviews I had for Finnish. So I forced myself to finish them. It didn’t go the best, but oh well.

Today it’s the other way around. I don’t even want to look at Hebrew. I’m just in the mood for Finnish. I’ve been studying Hebrew during my main study block for a few years or so. I’m just so used to it. Normally when I didn’t feel like studying Hebrew, I would procrastinate by reading articles in English. Now I’ll use that time to study Finnish and watch a few learner videos to make more of my own Anki cards.

I guess I associate studying Hebrew with productivity. Maybe one reason is because I had to sort of fight to be able to learn it. Most of the resources I found didn’t seem to click with me. I still wanted to, so I sort of made my own resources. Finnish almost seemed to fall in my lap. I didn’t really plan on learning it, but I stumbled upon resources I liked. I’ve liked Finnish music for a while, but liking music isn’t really a “reason” to learn a language. I was happy enough just listening to music without understanding the lyrics. I also feel a lot better about telling people I’m learning Finnish. Learning Finnish doesn’t seem to say all that much about you.

Anki makes learning multiple languages harder. I get a bit nervous about missing a day on Anki because of reviews piling up. I shouldn’t be too worried about Hebrew because the amount of reviews and new cards are pretty low. Finnish is a bit more challenging because it has super short intervals.
4 x

User avatar
sporedandroid
Blue Belt
Posts: 656
Joined: Mon Jan 07, 2019 6:54 am
Languages: English (N), Spanish (heritage/intermediate), Hebrew (A2-B1)
x 1371

Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Mon Mar 20, 2023 9:19 pm

It seems like having specific monthly goals is pretty motivating. Since I’m barely hitting the target for watching Finnish videos, I’ve been more motivated to watch Finnish videos. Mainly when I’m not all that motivated for language learning in the first place. I don’t always have great comprehension, but I don’t have to worry about that. I also get to make a decent amount of Anki cards.

I accept that as a beginner, listening practice isn’t always the most efficient. Most of these videos are either 3 minutes long or maybe 15 minutes. So it’s not a whole lot of wasted time either. At the same time I do think I should be getting more listening practice. I’ve been spending most of my time on Anki. Since the reviews are getting a bit overwhelming, I took a bit of a break from adding studying new cards. When I feel extra motivated to study Finnish and I’ve already studied a lot of new cards, I’ll just do more listening practice instead. A lot of my studying will involve Anki and memorization at this stage, but I also don’t want to feel like I’m only doing Anki. I find that when I spend too much time on Anki, I lose motivation to do other stuff.
2 x

DaveAgain
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1968
Joined: Mon Aug 27, 2018 11:26 am
Languages: English (native), French & German (learning).
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... &start=200
x 4049

Re: General language log

Postby DaveAgain » Mon Mar 20, 2023 11:30 pm

sporedandroid wrote:I’ve been spending most of my time on Anki. Since the reviews are getting a bit overwhelming, I took a bit of a break from adding studying new cards. When I feel extra motivated to study Finnish and I’ve already studied a lot of new cards, I’ll just do more listening practice instead. A lot of my studying will involve Anki and memorization at this stage, but I also don’t want to feel like I’m only doing Anki. I find that when I spend too much time on Anki, I lose motivation to do other stuff.
You might want to consider adding a daily limit to the number of reviews Anki gives you. I've set a maximum of 110 daily reviews, and a maximum of 10 new cards a day.
2 x

User avatar
sporedandroid
Blue Belt
Posts: 656
Joined: Mon Jan 07, 2019 6:54 am
Languages: English (N), Spanish (heritage/intermediate), Hebrew (A2-B1)
x 1371

Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Wed Mar 22, 2023 5:01 am

DaveAgain wrote:
sporedandroid wrote:I’ve been spending most of my time on Anki. Since the reviews are getting a bit overwhelming, I took a bit of a break from adding studying new cards. When I feel extra motivated to study Finnish and I’ve already studied a lot of new cards, I’ll just do more listening practice instead. A lot of my studying will involve Anki and memorization at this stage, but I also don’t want to feel like I’m only doing Anki. I find that when I spend too much time on Anki, I lose motivation to do other stuff.
You might want to consider adding a daily limit to the number of reviews Anki gives you. I've set a maximum of 110 daily reviews, and a maximum of 10 new cards a day.

I’ll consider it, but I think part of the issue is the fact that I’m getting used to a new language. Some days I can handle a lot of cards and some days I can barely get through them. I don’t think I actually have a crazy amount of reviews, but it can sure feel like it when my motivation or energy level is low.
3 x

User avatar
sporedandroid
Blue Belt
Posts: 656
Joined: Mon Jan 07, 2019 6:54 am
Languages: English (N), Spanish (heritage/intermediate), Hebrew (A2-B1)
x 1371

Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Thu Mar 23, 2023 8:53 pm

I think one thing that happens with Anki is that when I’m first learning or getting words correct it’s mostly rote memory. I’ll reach a point where I’ll “forget” a bunch of words, but I’ll do a better job of actually understanding them once I relearn them. My goal is to eventually effortlessly understand the language. My premade Anki decks have around 990 cards left each. I’m hoping that by then I’ll transition to mostly using the Anki deck I made myself. I might also start using subs2srs to fine-tune my vocabulary and learn more random vocabulary. I know I’ll reach a point when those premade decks aren’t useful anymore. I’ve gotten rid of most of my Hebrew decks.

I don’t have effortless listening comprehension with Hebrew, but I’m sure trying. That’s kind of an oxymoron. I kind of make a game out of watching YouTube shorts and trying not to try to understand. Since I’m so used to trying to understand more, I still end up putting effort into it anyways. It’s kind of hard to notice if listening to Hebrew is becoming more effortless or not. I’m not sure if I’ll reach this goal any time soon, so my main goal is just to read more and improve my reading comprehension. It’s the dreaded intermediate plateau. My comprehension feels decent, but it does feel like I’m putting too much effort into it.
4 x

User avatar
sporedandroid
Blue Belt
Posts: 656
Joined: Mon Jan 07, 2019 6:54 am
Languages: English (N), Spanish (heritage/intermediate), Hebrew (A2-B1)
x 1371

Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Tue Mar 28, 2023 11:20 pm

Today I was watching a Finnish learner video. It was a vlog style video with some everyday vocabulary. I sort of understood it, but my brain was working super hard to understand it. After watching that video I watched a video that I was watching earlier. It was a lot less effort to watch. The main difference I noticed was that the video I was watching earlier had slower and clearer speech, while the vlog style video has more natural sounding speech. I noticed the same thing with Hebrew and I think it applies to language learning in general. I remember when I was doing some DLIFLC GLOSS courses there was some listening exercises. They recorded some studio versions that were supposed to be easier to understand. They didn’t really make me understand more. The main difference I noticed was that they were more relaxing to listen to. I guess I have to keep this in mind when I’m listening to something and it feels like a lot of effort without me knowing why.

I guess I’ve been pretty productive with Finnish. I watched some videos and did a bit of sentence mining. I also did some sentence mining from wiktionary. I think when wiktionary has example sentences, it really helps me understand how words are used. It’s pretty interesting for me. I’m trying to keep a reasonable ratio of watching videos/sentence mining and doing Anki. Since watching videos and sentence mining is pretty challenging as a beginner, I’m studying some premade Anki decks to help me along. I guess the main thing I have to do is make sure the amount of reviews I have doesn’t demotivate me. One mistake I make is that a low amount of reviews will make me eager to learn new words, but then I end up with more reviews when I may or may not have the motivation. I’m trying to redirect that motivation towards more listening practice. If I don’t have too much motivation on one day I’ll just have an Anki only day. That’s no big deal as a beginner since being a beginner is mostly memorization anyways.

It’s not just too many reviews that demotivates me. Not enough reviews can demotivate me as well. I think Anki provides me with some easily measurable goals. When the amount of vocabulary I learned in Hebrew slowed down, my motivation went down again. Now that I challenged myself to read a certain amount of articles in Hebrew my motivation is back. Right now the main challenge with learning multiple languages at once is keeping up motivation for both. It seems like I can only be super motivated to do one language at a time. This kind of alternates day by day. The main reason I did more Finnish was because I couldn’t stay purely interested in Hebrew anymore. Now I feel truly motivated to study it more often, but it can’t be all the time like it used to be. I never planned for Hebrew to be the only language I learn in my whole entire life. I just planned for it to be one of the languages I study. I knew that one day I’d have to learn to somewhat manage multiple languages. Especially because there isn’t a clear point when you “stop” one language.
5 x

User avatar
sporedandroid
Blue Belt
Posts: 656
Joined: Mon Jan 07, 2019 6:54 am
Languages: English (N), Spanish (heritage/intermediate), Hebrew (A2-B1)
x 1371

Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Fri Mar 31, 2023 5:03 pm

I think for now I’ve figured out a good amount of Anki cards to learn per day for Finnish. At first I did 10 cards per deck because I barely had any reviews. That meant it would be about 20-30 new cards per day. Now I changed it to 5. Now it’s closer to 10-15. It doesn’t seem like I’ll meet my goal to watch 30 learner videos in a month. Maybe that goal will work next month. I’m not sure.

It just seems hard to get into the right head space to watch those videos even though it’s not super hard. I would have thought reading an article in Hebrew would be harder. I think the main challenge with watching Finnish videos is that it’s a lot harder to do other stuff at the same time. I just simply forgot how tedious it can be to get listening practice as a beginner. I already completed my monthly goal for Hebrew articles. I’m still getting some reading practice for Hebrew, but now I’m not as motivated to push through when it gets hard.
2 x


Return to “Language logs”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests