General language log

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sporedandroid
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Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Sun Aug 04, 2019 5:35 am

I just downloaded a bunch of Hebrew resources. So I’m going to try a bunch of them and see which one I’ll use. I feel hopeful about Hebrew from scratch. I have a bunch of anki cards for it that I learned out of context. I quit studying from it, but if I end up liking Hebrew From Scratch I'll get back into it. I also downloaded hebrewpod, which I kind of like. I like that hebrewpod doesn’t just have touristy stuff. I just find touristy stuff so pointless for me in particular. I’m guessing Hebrew From Scratch won’t be all that touristy either based on the vocabulary. I find it pretty stressful to try out new resources, so I think I’ll have to pace myself. Even when I’m too stressed to try out new resources I’m still able to maintain my progress with the anki decks I have. Since I’m studying from movies and tv shows that interest me, I can also learn vocabulary that interests me.

I’m trying to get some good Hebrew resources I can use without internet for a long flight. It’s not to Israel, so some people might find it silly I’m studying Hebrew instead of the local language. The reason I’m not interested all that much in the local language is because I heard it’s hard and I’m just not prepared to put all that energy into something I’m not interested. I’m not exactly interested in language learning itself. I tend to get more interested in specific cultures. Right now it’s Judaism, so I’m studying Hebrew. I’m doing modern Hebrew because I think it’s easier to do my preferred study methods with modern languages.

If I don’t find any Hebrew resources I like I’ll study my Tatoeba anki deck on the plane. When I first started studying from it I could barely make it through a sentence and I constantly had to look up words. Now I know pretty much all words, but struggle to understand the meaning. So it’s pretty much perfect for me to study from, but I won’t really be learning all that many words from it. I guess this is some interesting progress. A few months ago I thought that if you knew all the words you would automatically understand stuff. I’m starting to find that’s not really the case. I’m finding more and more sentences where I actually know all of the words, but don’t understand it.
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Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Thu Aug 08, 2019 10:45 pm

I found a pdf of all the songs on HaKeves HaShisha Asar by Yehonatan Geffen. I really enjoy the way his poetry sounds. They’re are children’s songs and poems, so that makes them easier to understand. When I read the lyrics I really notice how slow my reading is. Sometimes I’ll want to look up a word, but after thinking about it for a few seconds I realize I already know it. Most of the time I’d probably understand those words if I heard them. Some lower frequency words like clouds are a bit harder for me to understand.
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Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Mon Aug 12, 2019 3:09 am

A few days ago or so I went through the songs and poems and looked up unknown words. They didn’t make sense to me when I did that. Today I went back to the poem Johnny Giraffe. I still had issues with some words and phrasing, but when I looked up words again and relistened it started to make more sense to me. It seems like when I alternate between concentrating on remembering what words mean and listening in a relaxed way I start to understand it better. I’ve also been playing a lot more clozemaster. I think it’s helping me understand how phrases work better, so I understand better. I’ve known for a while my lack of grammar knowledge was holding back my comprehension.
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Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Wed Aug 14, 2019 5:39 am

I tried watching some Sesame Street. I couldn’t understand it completely. I don’t know if it’s effective. Afterwards I watched Arthur. I don’t know if this is the right thing to do, but I look up every word I’m not familiar with. A lot of the words I look up are words I already know. Sometimes I just pause the video and let myself think. Sometimes that does the trick. That happens a lot when I’m reading. I’ll see a word I don’t understand and as I’m looking it up I remember what it means. This delay is kind of annoying, but I think it will go away. I just keep running into more and more sentences where I know all the words, but it takes me a while to figure out.

I guess I’m at the ideal level for tatoeba. When I first started I had to look up pretty much every word. Now I pretty much don’t have to. When I first started those sentences I wondered how I’d study them while I was traveling. I didn’t know a lot of the words and I kind of thought it would be pointless to study them if I knew all of the words. I wanted to be able to just know all the words in those sentences. I pretty much do now, but it didn’t give me as much comprehension as I thought it would.
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Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Wed Aug 14, 2019 6:28 am

I notice that after I do intensive activities like this I seem to understand songs better. One thing I like to do when I’m studying like this is return to stuff I studied before. I find I can understand it in a more natural way.
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Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Wed Aug 28, 2019 7:29 pm

I just went on a trip to Vietnam. Several people I knew in real life joked about how I should learn Vietnamese instead of German. I still pretend I’m learning German instead of Hebrew. I tried to study some German at the same time as Hebrew, but I’m just not into studying two languages at the same time. Which is why I can’t study Vietnamese either. For the trip I mostly didn’t do anki. I did some clozemaster when I had wifi.

I’m getting more into clozemaster so I can close the gap between my vocabulary and ability to understand meaning. I’d often encounter sentences where I know all the words, but the sentence makes no sense to me. I also got into it to improve my reading comprehension, my spelling and my grammar. On clozemaster I think I do a mix of text input and multiple choice. I have a 31 day streak and I think I’m improving at all those skills. I’m not encountering as many sentences that are full of familiar words, but make no sense to me. I notice a bit of a delay understanding them, but I’ve heard from other people it goes away.

I think a month ago some of those sentences would have made no sense to me at all, so I guess this delay is just part of the process. I could also understand a bit of native level tv show maybe a few weeks ago by pausing a lot of and reading the subtitles. I was surprised at how I had to take a few seconds to understand what they were talking about, but I didn’t really need to look up any words. The audio seemed to be kind of crappy, so it’s possible a lot of natives might need subtitles as well. I found the narrator on the tv show had a clearer voice, but he used more advanced vocabulary. This delay shows up whether I’m listening or reading.
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Re: General language log

Postby brad-alm » Thu Aug 29, 2019 8:07 pm

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Brad-alm
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Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Fri Aug 30, 2019 6:25 am

I have a cold. I notice it seems harder to learn new vocabulary. But I also noticed that I focus less on words I don’t know and more on words I do know. So I feel like I understand Arthur better. I also notice that I *feel* like I understand Hebrew better when I’m falling asleep, drunk or high. It’s probably mostly a feeling, but maybe it helps that I’m not analyzing what I don’t know. I think I also find Arthur more easy because I’ve already looked up a lot of the words I don’t know. That isn’t a very fun method, but so far it’s been pretty effective. At first it feels annoying and forced, but after I rewatch it a while after doing that I notice I have a more natural and fluid understanding of it. Maybe clozemaster is also helping because I think it’s giving me more ideas about how the language works.
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Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Tue Sep 03, 2019 5:48 am

I have a 36 day streak on clozemaster. That time flew by. I didn’t realize I was using it every day for over a month. So far it’s been most effective in getting me to understand syntax better. Passively looking at sentences whether they’re from a premade anki deck or something more interesting like subs2srs didn’t seem to help all that much. I don’t know if the method is fundamentally flawed or if I was simply at a lower level. I think those passive sentences did help with vocabulary, but I remember reaching a plateau with that method about a few months ago or so. I think since those sentences always came with audio they did really help with listening comprehension. They’ll help with pronunciation in the future as well. They also took the learning curve out of reading. I didn’t have to read, but I could see how the text relates to the audio and gradually get better at reading that way. I think it’s how I naturally learned to read as a kid. At this stage I find clozemaster very helpful. When I first started studying from sentences I probably wouldn’t have found it helpful because I wouldn’t have known most of the words in the clozemaster sentences. I think before I regularly studied from sentences I didn’t find sentences all that helpful because they had too many unknown words for me. I don’t know if it would have been useful to start studying from sentences earlier. I honestly found it less painful to study words out of context than trying to deal with sentences. Maybe I should have started clozemaster when I found it more comfortable to study from sentences.
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Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Sun Sep 08, 2019 5:08 am

I seem to be having a plateau on subs2srs. I noticed a plateau several months ago when I realized that I knew most of the words in sentences, but still couldn’t understand them. Most of that plateau disappeared when I got into clozemaster. I can still get confused by syntax, but not nearly as much. There’s a bit of delay in processing it, but before I couldn’t process it at all. I don’t seem to get nearly as much out of review as I used to. I also don’t feel the need to repeat an audio clip a bunch of times in a row. I still do it once in a while. I think it’s why I can process phonemes so well. I got the idea from Olle Kjellin. I think part of the reason his method works is the listening part. Actually getting muscle memory is a big part of it as well. One big advantage of doing it silently is that I pretty much don’t need privacy. So it’s convenient and it works for listening comprehension.

I hear from people like Olle Kjellin or The Mimic Method that reading ruins pronunciation, but I think relying too much on reading and being lazy on listening is what causes problems. I don’t even know what they count as reading. I need to read at least a bit of my target language in order to even access resources. Having a good reading level will also make it easier to find interesting things to watch and listen to. Like I’ve said before I’ve also found clozemaster very helpful to increase my general comprehension. I don’t think I’d ever have access to as many sentences as clozemaster has with audio. So I have to rely on reading and a robot voice. Another thing I’ve noticed in clozemaster is that my short-term memory improves when I use text input. Even if I end up switching the word to multiple choice. I guess my mind gets lazy when I’m on multiple choice.

I think seeing all these vocabulary words I already know the dictionary definition of in a bunch of different contexts helps me not translate in my head as much. I used to be terrified of translating in my head. I think it’s a necessary evil when you first start out in a language it’s hard to have a concept of a word. But there’s already some Hebrew words that I know the meaning of, but I find hard to translate into English. Usually they’re words that are a very simple concept or they don’t exactly match up to an English word, but I’ve seen the word used enough to know what it means.
I think the mood I’m in also affects how much I’ll be translating in my head. If I’m feeling nervous and OCD-ish I’ll be more likely to translate in my head. By OCD-ish I mean nervously checking for things in general and also being prone to intrusive thoughts. Since I can get so worried about mentally translating that will just cause me to mentally translate more. Trying to avoid mentally translating doesn’t really help. Making sure I have good concept of the words and syntax and paying attention to the sound of someone's voice instead of my own thoughts gets rid of mental translation. So even though clozemaster uses a lot of translation it still helps me rely less on mental translation. So not all translation is evil. Luca Lampariello mentioned that his translation method helps him think more in concepts.
I think I’ll just increase the amount of new cards I get and not focus as much on review. Focusing narrowly kind of made sense when I was at a lower level, but right now I know it’s time to get more broad. I’ve already been starting by watching Arthur episodes. I think I’ll try that Netflix subtitle application with shows on Netflix as well.
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