General language log

[sporedandroid]

I just completed my goal for Finnish. It was pretty challenging. I feel like I’ve actually been progressing more in Hebrew, which I didn’t expect. Hebrew is supposed to be my intermediate plateau language, while Finnish is supposed to be my exciting new language.

Managing two languages at once is challenging for me, but at this stage it seems to make me more motivated to do language learning stuff in general. Maybe I’ll keep the 30 videos per month goal because it sort of means I’m getting 10 minutes listening practice on average. Which actually means there will be days when I’m getting something like 20-40 minutes and days where I don’t really do anything besides Anki and maybe some listen to some music.

Maybe 25 is a more reasonable goal for now. I just have to find ways to make listening more entertaining. I did find some Finnish cottage videos that looked promising. They weren’t aimed at learners, but that seems like the sort of video where I feel like I have a higher comprehension despite my small vocabulary. At this point listening has diminishing returns super quickly. Once I get closer to that lower intermediate level, I know I’ll be able to make quick progress by listening two hours a day. I know I’ll be able to just pick any podcast and go for a walk or play simple video games. I don’t want to only do Anki

[sporedandroid]

I’ve mentioned this before, but I’ll try it again. I need to get into the habit of reading more. I used to love reading as a kid. When I can get myself to read, I really enjoy it. Along with my other goals, I think I’ll add reading to my list of goals. To be more specific, I’ll see if I can read ten chapters of any book this month. I don’t even care what language it is. I’m guessing I’ll try to read in Hebrew, but I’ll quickly decide English is less effort. Or maybe not. It seems like it takes less effort to get myself to read things in Hebrew even though it’s way harder. This system in notion has been working super well for me so far, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I can’t make this goal. This feels like a pretty ambitious goal. What I like about it is that it doesn’t punish a lack of day to day consistency like streak systems or even trying to change a habit normally. If I feel super motivated one day I’ll feel rewarded for it. If I don’t, I can just take a break. When I see how far along I am on my goal, I can also think of more ways to fit my goal in even if I’m not the most motivated. An example is during my study blocks for Hebrew. Sometimes I really don’t want to touch Hebrew for whatever reason. I used to procrastinate by reading articles in English or scrolling on social media. Now I try to watch some Finnish videos.

[sporedandroid]

I just calculated how long it will take to finish up my premade deck. It looks like I’ll finish it up in about November. Maybe by then I’ll mostly be making my own Anki deck and quit studying from those decks. Right now I rely a lot on those decks because it’s pretty hard to make your own Anki deck as a beginner.

I don’t study my Hebrew reading deck every day because it doesn’t have all that many cards to begin with and I hardly ever fail the cards. I’m probably not using that deck “properly”. I just study it when I feel like doing more Anki for Hebrew. I also put in a link to the article I got the phrase from, so if I feel like it I reread the article. I haven’t been using that deck as much as I thought. Usually when I’m reading it’s kind of hard, but nothing in particular seems to be making it hard. It’s kind of just there to note word usages that seem weird to me and remind me of which articles to reread.

Clozemaster is what I use when I want to study more Finnish sentences. Some days I can only take so much Finnish. I find on the low motivation days I just get more wrong answers on Clozemaster. Clozemaster keeps trying to encourage me to keep a streak, but I don’t think that’s a good idea at this point. I still don’t do listening practice every day for Finnish. Since my vocabulary is small, my listening comprehension isn’t improving super quickly. I know my listening comprehension will probably get way better when I’m at an upper beginner/lower intermediate level. At that point I’ll do a lot more listening practice.

[sporedandroid]

Being a beginner in a language doesn’t seem as exciting to me. I think the most exciting stage for me is upper beginner/lower intermediate/pre-intermediate or whatever you want to call it. When I first started Hebrew one of my top concerns was that I didn’t connect enough with Hebrew or Israeli culture. When I hit the pre-intermediate stage that worry went away. It’s not that I necessarily felt super connected. I was just caught up with the fast progress I was making. When I sort of hit the intermediate plateau, those worries popped up again. These worries sort of make sense to me, but at the same time they don’t. I feel more “connected” to French and German, but that sure didn’t help with my motivation. I got excited about the fast progress I was making and the fact that I was learning a useful language. For both those languages I just crashed. For German I was doing some Anki. It felt like an hour, but I was only studying for ten minutes. For French I was just listening to InnerFrench. I wasn’t having too many issues. I suddenly wanted nothing to do with French. Even though that’s a pretty good podcast for learning French.

For Finnish I have a totally different worry. I’m worried I’m not “passionate” enough. That’s why I’ve been sort interested in Finnish music for maybe eleven years, but I’ve only actually started Finnish super recently. So far I’ve been able to stay consistent with Finnish for about two months or so. Before that I was intentionally inconsistent. Even on days I don’t really feel like studying, I can at least stay caught up on Anki reviews. I had even more issues getting motivated to study Hebrew at first. The only thing that really helped at first was finding music I liked. Actually Finnish is doing pretty well for a beginner language. At least compared to other languages I’ve studied. There’s some upsides to not feeling as “passionate” about Finnish. I feel like I can talk about like a normal person in real life. The downside is that my lack of passion/struggle seems to make people on Reddit angry at me. It’s not that I think Finnish is easy. I’m just intentionally glossing over the hard stuff for now and I’ve had a harder time with other languages.

[sporedandroid]

I’ve noticed a pattern. It’s hard for me to study more than 30 minutes for a beginner language. If I have to do Anki reviews for 30 minutes, I’ll find it hard to be motivated to do anything else. Obviously as a beginner a lot of my studying will be Anki, but this time I’m trying to not exclusively study with Anki. I reduced the amount of new words and my Anki load went down to 20 minutes. When that happened I got motivated enough to watch more learner videos and get some listening practice. My comprehension right now isn’t all that great. I think that’s mainly due to my vocabulary being small. I have made some progress with listening practice in Finnish, even at my super low level. But I do sometimes feel like listening practice is a waste of time.

Another thing that is beneficial is to analyze sentences I come across and see what’s going on grammatically and look up etymologies. If I’m trying to make it through an Anki deck I’m not as likely to be motivated to do that. I did this a lot for Hebrew, but I gradually did it less and less. I’ve been used to not doing it and I forgot how much I do this when I’m starting out in a language. Since Icelandic doesn’t have the best resources, it was a lot harder to do that. That’s one of the frustrating things about Icelandic. They have free online courses that seem pretty good, but I can barely look things up in the dictionary. The course also moves way too fast.

I’ve been getting some migraines again, so it’s been hard to keep up with my reading goals. That means I’ve been doing a lot more listening practice for Hebrew. It’s hard to know if I’m making any progress. Maybe I’m making subtle progress in understanding podcasts. Maybe something that was hard to follow a year ago would be super interesting and engaging now. It’s hard to know. I haven’t found any interesting TV shows, so I haven’t really been watching any. I have been reading a bit in Hebrew, but I’ve mostly been partially reading articles. I usually just decide they’re boring or not worth the effort. Or they feel too short to count. I haven’t been doing too well with reading books either. I think the book I picked was too academic and dense. Maybe I should find a fun YA book with short chapters. I’m trying to become more of a reader in general, so the language doesn’t matter.

[sporedandroid]

My migraines seem to be improving. They mainly make my eyes feel weird, which makes it hard to read properly. I can still speed read pretty well when I’m dealing with migraines. That means I can browse the internet fine. Unfortunately it makes it nearly impossible to enjoy any novels or read in any other languages. In order to complete my reading goal I decided to reread one of my favorite books. It’s a young adult book and it’s in English. Since I made everything easy on purpose, I did notice I could read for way longer than before. That’s the goal. Since I’m getting more used to reading for a longer time, I’m also finding it easier to read articles in Hebrew. I’ll start getting back into Hebrew books as well.

I’m finding it hard to feel consistently motivated to study Finnish. It makes me question it as a language choice. Maybe I should have gone with German instead. I don’t want to quit so early. I think I’ll give it a year and see if I start enjoying it more consistently. At least I seem to be doing fine for my monthly Finnish goal.

[jeff_lindqvist]

My migraines seem to be improving. They mainly make my eyes feel weird, which makes it hard to read properly.

Migraine can really ruin the day. I feel your pain.

[sporedandroid]

My migraines seem to be improving. They mainly make my eyes feel weird, which makes it hard to read properly.

Migraine can really ruin the day. I feel your pain.

I’m glad most of my migraines aren’t full migraines. I usually end up having issues with reading instead of a full-on headache.

[sporedandroid]

I’m having issues getting motivated to study Finnish. I think I’m going to start watching movies and TV shows in Finnish with English subtitles to see if I get more excited. If I manage to get subtitles, I’ll make a subs2srs deck or something similar. One thing that’s more complicated about Finnish is that people will be speaking in spoken Finnish, but the subtitles will be in written Finnish. I was pretty intimidated by that difference at first. I listened to some Finnish folk music and some of the song titles were written weirdly. I thought that was spoken Finnish, but I think it was actually Karelian instead.

I think I’ll also delete one of my Tatoeba Anki deck. It just isn’t working too well for me. The sentences are way too short which isn’t very helpful for me. It’s also irritating that I keep getting synonyms for words right after each other. The vocabulary also feels relatively low frequency. At my level I’m not getting any chances to come across the words I’m learning.

[sporedandroid]

I’m still unsure about how much I want to learn Finnish. It’s in a weird grey area for me. I think it’s fun to study, but a lot of the time it feels kind of tedious to study. I can still manage, but it makes me question my decision. If it just feels like I’m “managing” I feel like I should either switch to a language that’s more practical or something I feel more passionate about. I think I’ll consume some Finnish media translated into English to help me decide.

I’ve been kind of tempted to try German again. It’s challenging enough to give me a sense of accomplishment and it has a decent amount of resources. I can also find a decent amount of German books in local bookstores. I also like that you can go to university in Germany if you can prove you understand German. You don’t even have to speak German. I think the issue with German was that I was studying it when I was trying to get Hebrew to an intermediate level. Maybe I was just learning it at the wrong time. Maybe I’ll try a bit of German again. If I end up hating it, maybe I’ll get more passionate about Finnish. This sort of happened with Hebrew. I felt like I was losing my passion for Hebrew. As soon as I had to study Finnish consistently I got more passionate about Hebrew again.

Another option is going back to Icelandic. I seemed to have a passion for it when I tried to study it again. I had to take a break from it because I was too passionate and it was a distraction for me. I still have my Icelandic Anki decks. I also get happy whenever I see my Icelandic book. Can’t say the same about my German Anki deck. Maybe I’ll start dabbling in German again to see how I feel about it. If I can tolerate it maybe German is a good option.