General language log

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sporedandroid
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Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Wed Jun 12, 2019 8:05 pm

I was so fed up with Hebrew yesterday, I decided to start my Hebrew holiday today. I’ll probably make the break last until next Monday. I’ll still brainstorm about ways to study Hebrew, but I’ll focus more on German. I set my Hebrew anki decks to have 0 reviews and new cards. I wanted to study Hebrew, but I didn’t. As I did my regular study routine I replaced it with German. I caught up on the German phrases anki deck and also tried out another deck with frequent German words. I did not like that they showed English words first, but I know how to fix that.

I also found a thegermanproject.com, which had a selection of beginner stories. I’m copying and pasting one into readlang. Since German is easier to read, it might be easier to adjust to readlang studying German. I wonder if I can find some Hebrew stories in that format. I won’t be looking for them on my break from Hebrew. I think in German I benefitted a bit from the pausing effect, but I don’t think I studied it enough to truly benefit.

I just tried a bit of a beginner story. It was nice to have an English translation. I think I also liked that it wasn’t a wall of text like Harry Potter is.
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sporedandroid
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Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Fri Jun 14, 2019 12:39 am

Today is the second day of only studying German. I tried to read more of the beginner story, but I kept forgetting words I knew I’ve looked up before. I decided to try out the flashcard feature on readlang. I’m finding it harder to retain new German words than I do new Hebrew words. But unsurprisingly I’m still retaining German words better than I used to retain Hebrew words. I don’t have trouble remembering words that are extremely similar to English, but I’m not likely to study them on readlang.

One thing that trips me up with German and other languages is short grammar words. Especially in German because they keep changing meaning. They don’t seem to change meaning nearly as much in Hebrew. What does trip me up about these short grammar words is that so many languages are likely to share them, but they have a different meaning. Like I’m never sure when the word “so” in has the same meaning as English. I know they’ll cause me less trouble after I study grammar more and just get more exposure. Overall German is doing a good job of keeping me busy.

Maybe on Monday I’ll mainly focus on trying out new ways of studying Hebrew, but still take a break from anki. What I’d ideally have is a beginner story like I do for German with text, audio and an English translation available. I don’t care too much for textbook dialogues. I prefer stories because I feel like I learn more vocabulary and sentence structures. Stories can also have dialogue, so it’s not like I’m missing out dialogue. I guess what drives me crazy about dialogue in textbooks is that it focuses too much on output. I don’t want worry about output when I can barely remember a word for a minute!
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Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Sat Jun 15, 2019 7:50 am

I continued following along to German stories. With the story Henry Hühnchen I studied a bunch of words as flashcards on readlang. For the Goldilocks I just followed along with bilingual text. Since I didn’t study any vocabulary before hand it was harder to follow along. The vocabulary was fairly repetitive, so I picked up a few words. I’m still trying to adjust to the German word order, but I thought going through those stories did help me get used to German. I’ll probably go through a few more stories and then quickly create flashcards on readlang for the words I missed. Maybe I’ll try exporting them to anki. I’ll also experiment with parallel reading apps. I’d ideally want a way to easily read two versions of one text and easily play an audiobook along with it.

I found this video a few days ago. It could be possible Hebrew audio for the little prince. Once I find the text I’ll check if the audio matches the text or not. Ironically it’s originally in German. The fact that it’s a cartoon makes me unsure if it will match the text. I’ll start looking for the Hebrew version of the Little Prince on Monday, but I’ll mainly be trying a new chrome extension that can help me study languages on Netflix. Maybe I can find simpler books to download. If I can’t find The Little Prince or other stories I guess I'm stuck with Harry Potter. Guess I’ll be an expert on the first chapter of Harry Potter.
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Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Sun Jun 16, 2019 6:42 am

It’s day four and I found it hard to focus on German. Probably because of bad sleep and the fact that I just started German. I always seem to find languages harder when I’m first starting. I find I often forget new words within a minute. Things seem to get way easier at around 1,000 words.

I started Hebrew by just learning one word at a time and changed to sentences afterwards. I found studying sentences very hard at first, but eventually it got way easier as most sentences had about 0-3 unknown words. I thought that maybe I wasted time learning just words. So far with German I’m doing a deck that has German sentences ranked from easy to difficult and a deck of frequent cards. I’m finding them pretty hard right now.

Maybe this difficulty is due to a lack of context and it’s just easier to get context when you know more words. I have pretty good luck with the app Drops. I like the app when it works. It used to play whole Hebrew sentences with the text to speech voice. Now I think it wants me to pay. German works fine for me. Arabic does as well. So unfortunately it’s not a glitch. When I checked the desktop site it had nikkud and transliteration.

I also found some full text for The Little Prince in Hebrew, but I’m going to have to figure out which version matches the video I found. The video I found has some pretty long scenes without any narrator or dialogue. If it does match any text I find online I’ll have to edit out those scenes in the audio only version I have.

I kind of broke my no Hebrew rule, but I’m still pretty happy since I’m stressing less about Hebrew and focusing more on German. I also like that I’m able to use most of my language learning time to try out different resources. Before I felt unproductive doing that. There is a fair amount of “admin time” where I’m not doing the most efficient studying. I don’t really care for the readlang website so far. I want to find some other apps or websites. Lingq sounds like the best option, but it’s expensive.
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Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Mon Jun 17, 2019 3:08 am

Today I mostly researched parallel reading apps. I decided it was just a better idea to try to create my own parallel text document. I found this guide https://languagefixation.wordpress.com/ ... ng-part-2/

It does require quite a bit of technical skills, but I think it’s worth it. I’ve been wanting to also create some webpages to go through movies or audiobooks, but I’ll most likely learn about that later. For now I’m just sticking with making my own parallel texts. I’ll listen to the audio as an audiobook or maybe just something I save on my chromebook.

I think right now is the perfect time to learn technical skills that will help with language learning, but take away time from language learning while I’m learning them. I found I struggled to keep up with my studying when I was figuring out subs2srs. Maybe I’ll learn to make webpages or other interactive things on my next break/plateau. The reason I quit Icelandic was because I just couldn’t find stuff at my level. The online course I had was at about my level, but I wanted to do more extensive reading and listening. I can see the same happening for Hebrew. I’m noticing the same frustrations I had with Icelandic, so I’m trying to prevent myself from quitting.
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Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Mon Jun 17, 2019 7:33 am

Tomorrow I will return to studying Hebrew. I’ll still mostly be focusing on learning how new methods work rather than studying. I haven’t for example, finished all my German anki decks. It wasn’t too bad since getting a disciplined German study routine isn’t a current priority. I have to find German material that I can enjoy and just get into before I do that. It’s also a good excuse to just be lazy at it. I was very lazy when I first started Hebrew, but it was unwanted. At least now I’m giving myself permission to be lazy at German and just keep trying new ways of studying it.

I just notice that time goes a lot slower when you’re first learning a language. Like 19 minutes of German on anki feels like an hour. While on Hebrew I might study for half an hour or forty five minutes and barely even notice. One thing that demotivated me was spending time exploring different ways of studying and ending up spending less time on anki and just seeing a lower number. It’s just so motivating seeing that I’ve studied for over an hour on anki since I’ve always thought of myself as lazy. It’s kind of hard to keep track of how much time I study outside of anki. Especially if I’m mostly exploring different ways of studying or taking care of technical issues. I guess I can also explore ways of tracking how much I study. Those anti screen time apps probably won’t work because a lot of my studying does involve using apps.

What I’ll do tomorrow is check if that Hebrew Little Prince video matches any of the texts I can find online. That will probably take awhile and I think it definitely counts as some kind of studying. If I do find a match, I’ll edit out the silent parts of the audio version since it does have a lot of scenes that just show actions. If I don’t have a match or have some extra time I’ll probably edit out parts that lack dialogue on the first and maybe second episode of Shtisel so I can start listening to episodes of Shtisel while cleaning, exercising or waiting for the bus. I have no idea how it will go. I’ll also install and look up tutorials for hunalign and continue to learn more about emacs. I managed to install an emac text editor which was a bit challenging already. Now I need to learn more about how it works.
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Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Tue Jun 18, 2019 6:28 am

It’s kind of nice to return to Hebrew. I didn’t do any German. The Little Prince video did not in fact match the text, so I have to search more. Today I spent time catching up on Shtisel flashcards and I edited a bit of the audio of the first episode. Just cutting out parts that don’t have dialogue so it’s more pleasant to listen to. My plan is to just study Shtisel and work on new ways to study Hebrew and German.

It’s pretty hard to find Hebrew audiobooks I’d want to study for. A lot of them look so challenging I’d even have a hard time reading them in English. So I’m happy studying from Harry Potter once I can make a nice parallel text. One new schedule I thought of was Hebrew would be Monday to Friday, German can be Saturday and Sunday can be administrative tasks like creating anki cards. I’m starting to suspend cards liberally now. So on Sunday I’ll probably go through my suspended cards and either split them up, delete them or return them. I’ll do other tasks that I need to do on Sunday. Maybe I’ll find some simple German stuff to do throughout the week. Drops seems to be a decent app.
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Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Tue Jun 18, 2019 1:22 pm

I couldn’t sleep. So I finished editing the audio for the first episode of Shtisel, I’m thinking of editing the second episode as well. I’m not going to count on having a productive study day. At least I’ll have these Shtisel episodes done. I almost never want to do this kind of work, so at least I’m helping myself out in the long run.
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Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Wed Jun 19, 2019 9:54 pm

Listened to the Shtisel audio for the first time today. I think I cut silences a bit too much. I also noticed the parts that I skipped over on subs2srs. Soon I’m going to go through my suspended cards and try to improve them by shortening them or maybe syncing them up better. Unfortunately subs2srs can be finicky and join subtitles that aren’t supposed to be joined. After listening to that for the first time I noticed I could catch more Hebrew words I know in songs, but it was very much a conscious process. That’s kind of how I felt when I was listening to Shtisel, a lot of the stuff I only understood consciously. It’s annoying, but I know it’s an intermediate step. I think I’ll also go through the hard to understand parts on speater and slow it down while listening to it repetitively until I can understand it. I’ve done the same thing successfully in anki, but I can’t slow it down or only focus on one specific segment.

I’ve also been messing around with LF Aligner. It didn’t align the English and Hebrew versions of Harry Potter very well probably because the Hebrew version had a lot line breaks. I had to use OCR on the Hebrew version. With the English version I could quickly find a clean text file for download. I think the OCR worked pretty well on the Hebrew text, but I still need to clean up the text. I’m trying to get used to emacs. It’s aimed at programmers, but I know there’s some good commands for cleaning up text files. I’ll look up some video tutorials for that and then try it out. This whole troubleshooting phase is kind of relaxing, but I want to get back into more intensive studying.
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Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Fri Jun 21, 2019 2:54 am

I made quite a bit of progress on some of the technical stuff. I finished editing the second episode of Shtisel and saving it to my phone. I also figured out how to import srt files into excel. So now I have the transcript for both episodes available on a pdf. So for sections I don’t understand I can just look up words and listen more closely on speater. I also have Harry Potter on an excel spreadsheet. I’m aiming for it to be good enough to do parallel reading. I can’t do a sentence by sentence match up because the Hebrew version seems to be longer. This is surprising to me because usually Hebrew seems to be more brief. I’ll try working on it on google spreadsheets. One cool feature is that you can use google translate. Google translate for Hebrew isn’t too good, but I think it will be good enough to help me make sure paragraphs match up.

All this technical stuff is so exhausting. I’m glad I’m letting myself spend less time studying. As I was listening to the Shtisel episode I definitely noticed how much I benefitted from studying some parts intensive. Before I worried I was going over studying, but I enjoy it and I like the results. I also noticed some parts made more sense as I listened to the whole episode.
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