General language log

[sporedandroid]

I’ve been getting into nonfiction. Especially about psychology. At least when it’s not self-help. Which is pretty challenging. I also just like young adult page turners.

[sporedandroid]

I just compared my listening comprehension in three different languages. When I watched some French news, my comprehension was pretty low. I could tell when it was about Israel or Gaza. I could also tell what it was about if they used a lot of vocabulary that was shared in English. I’d say French is pretty easy for me to understand when it’s learner’s content. The news is nowhere near being similar to learner’s content.

For fun I compared my listening comprehension to Finnish. For the news I’d say I’m still better at understanding French. When I switched the video to a vlog or story time video, my comprehension went up a lot. I’m guessing the news in Finnish uses a lot more complicated sentences and it’s also written Finnish. I’m guessing vlog style videos use spoken Finnish, but they make an effort to tone down any dialects as well. I’ve been studying a mishmash of spoken and written Finnish, so I can understand what people say somewhat.

I also tried to watch a video in Icelandic. I wanted to find something similar to the news. I couldn’t really find any news, but I did find this 45 minute interview. While I did understand some words here and there and I recognized the way the structure feels. Pretty much nowhere near understanding it. When I compared it to a Finnish interview I was watching, I immediately noticed my listening comprehension in Finnish is better. I actually knew what several Finnish words meant even though I didn’t know what they were talking about. With both Icelandic and Finnish, I mostly feel like I’m pretending to understand. Which is an interesting feeling to have. It feels different than not understanding a language or actually understanding a language.

I’d say with Finnish I alternate between pretending to understand and somewhat understanding or getting the gist. I’d still consider this the beginner stage. So far my reading comprehension is at about the same level as my listening comprehension. While for Icelandic or French, my reading comprehension is noticeably better. I bet if I got subtitles for that Icelandic video I’d be surprised at how many words I actually know. While subtitles help me focus for Finnish, they don’t dramatically improve my comprehension either.

I predict I’ll start noticing more challenges with my listening comprehension in Finnish when I hit the intermediate level. Mainly because making progress becomes slower, but also because of the dialects. Right now my level is too low for me to notice the dialects all that much. I did watch a vlog where they poked a bit of fun at some dialects. I also watched a new learner’s channel called Finnish Painter. She did mention she’s from Oulu, so her dialect is a bit different. I definitely noticed she pronounced certain words differently and I found it harder to understand her. I’m still not sure if that’s due to her using less common vocabulary or her dialect. She did go into detail about the type of mushrooms and berries in the Finnish forest. While that vocabulary is probably culturally significant in Finland, it’s understandable why I haven’t come across that vocabulary yet. Another thing I found challenging was that she spoke very slowly. At least for Finnish, that doesn’t help me understand at all. I prefer natural, but slightly clearer and slower speech. At least I can somewhat fix this issue by speeding up the videos.

One controversial opinion I have is that Icelandic is one of the hardest languages to understand. At least compared to the other languages I’ve studied or dabbled in. This became pretty obvious when I dabbled in German. Even though I barely studied German at all, I still somewhat felt like I understood spoken German better than spoken Icelandic. When I asked about why German sounds clearer than Icelandic I didn’t get the nicest comments. Yes I know German is closer to English than Icelandic. Modern Hebrew also sounds clearer, but I think that’s somewhat cheating. What surprised me was Finnish. I thought that with all those scary dialects, it would be harder to understand than Icelandic. I still expect the dialects to make it super challenging to understand, but at least at a beginner level Finnish is easier to understand than Icelandic.

[sporedandroid]

It seems like my plan worked. My motivation to study Finnish is lower, so I’m not procrastinating as much. After studying ten new Anki cards a day, that brought down my accuracy. I decided that I shouldn’t add any new Anki cards today. I kind of feel like I’m getting slightly more motivated to study Hebrew, but I think I’ll wait until I hit a roadblock in Finnish before I get back to Hebrew.

I still don’t know how I’d distribute my study time. When I tried doing something 50/50 ish, I just ended up being wishy washy about both languages. I think when I get back to Hebrew, I’ll mainly focus on listening to an ebook at the same time as I read the book without having too much attachment to Anki. I no longer feel as stressed out by looking at Hebrew writing. I still do feel a bit stressed when I see a whole article in Hebrew open on one of my web browsers. I guess I haven’t closed all of my web browsers.

[sporedandroid]

Getting motivated to study Finnish has been challenging. I sort of skipped Anki for two days. Today I also didn’t study any new cards. My motivation was pretty low, so I watched a Finnish YouTube video. My comprehension wasn’t great, but I a lot of sentence mining done. My backlog before was 150 cards, but now I think it’s 183.

I think my challenge with these Anki cards is that I need to sit down and study a lot of the new cards on my computer. When I have to use ankidroid or ankiweb, I can’t do that. So I’m sort of getting swamped by cards I haven’t truly studied. Today I mainly focused on getting through my reviews. Maybe tomorrow I’ll see if I can actively study more of my cards. I’ll also not add any new cards. My monolingual Finnish cards also work pretty well. I think it is helping me slowly internalize some grammar concepts that are important for comprehension. I like monolingually translating different sentences in order to understand a word or grammatical concept better. It worked pretty well for Hebrew as well. A lot of the more bookish Hebrew words, had a less bookish counterpart.

[sporedandroid]

My plan is continuing to work as I intended it to work. I still have a lot of projects to work on, so I don’t want to use Finnish as a way to procrastinate or get too much into Finnish and lose track of time. Learning ten new Anki cards a day is a bit overwhelming, but doable. It kind of makes me want to do the bare minimum. When I take it slower I notice I tend to be hungry for more. So I’m more likely to watch a video or do more grammar study. While I don’t really enjoy doing ten cards per day, I do think it’s good to do at the stage I’m in.

I’m in a stage where I just need to learn a lot of vocabulary and get exposed to a lot of sentences. Even if I don’t feel like I understand how they work. Seeing more examples helps me get a better feel for things.

[sporedandroid]

It seems like more people in Finland read. So far I’ve found it way easier to find YouTube channels on books. I stumbled upon one of those YouTube channels and now I’ve been recommended two others. Even the vlog channel I watch regularly gives book recommendations.

I did find one book oriented YouTube channel in Hebrew, but pretty much all the books that were mentioned were originally in English. The Finnish channels actually seem to recommend Finnish books. So far the Finnish books seem more interesting. It’s probably because I’m in the honeymoon period. It seems like genres I enjoy are more popular in Finland. One example is fantasy, particularly light fantasy. I love fantasy, but not when it’s too heavy. I like the world the characters live in to be somewhat relatable.

I’m obviously not at a high enough level of fluently understand these videos. I watch the video once, I usually understand the gist or maybe less and then I go through the transcript in DeepL.

I think one thing I keep doing is creating Anki cards that are too hard. I’m trying to only create Anki cards that are on the easier side, but sometimes they end up being too easy.

On a completely different note I just overheard a French conversation. They had microphones, so I assume it was for some podcast. I think they were interviewing this university student on what it’s like to study in BC. I’d say it’s hard to say if I’m better at understanding French or Finnish. I think in general I’m slightly better at understanding French. At least for now.

[sporedandroid]

I’m at the annoying stage where my listening comprehension seems to fluctuate a lot. Probably because I’m still not truly understanding stuff yet. Mostly pretending. If I’m in the right state of mind I can convincingly pretend to understand, but sometimes I just can’t. My Anki backlog is about 50 cards. I’ll see how many I end up adding or suspending.

When I catch up I’ll unsuspend all the cards I suspended. Right now over 200 cards are suspended. I think my plan to shallowly study a bunch of example sentences is working. It definitely seems like Finnish clicks better on some days than others. Today wasn’t one of the days it was clicking too much, so I just did Anki reviews. I’m still not at a point in time when practicing listening comprehension every day makes sense. Maybe I’ll give moomins a try again.

[sporedandroid]

It seems like today is a day where Finnish just clicked more for whatever reason. I barely slept and I definitely had issues focusing in the morning. Somehow that made Finnish easier. I decided to expand my horizons and watch more Finnish vlog channels. Most of them don’t have subtitles. I could do a decent job pretending I could understand them, but I’m not as good at that for more complicated videos. I didn’t study any grammar or analyze any sentences today. I added grammar explanations to a lot of cards, but I just skipped right over them today. On some days I really do analyze grammar explanations a lot. I’ve been studying quite a bit of grammar without too much listening practice lately.

If this pattern continues, Finnish probably won’t feel like it clicks as much tomorrow. Maybe I’ll end up studying more grammar or analyzing more sentences tomorrow. I’ve also been catching up on my backlog. Maybe in a few days I’ll unsuspend all the suspended cards and see how they feel to study. If I’m in the mood for it, I’ll watch some videos from my benchmark playlist and see if I understand them any better. Last time I did that, I didn’t notice any significant improvements. I just listened to a bit and I did notice I knew more vocabulary. I still feel more like I’m pretending to be able to understand than actually understanding.

[sporedandroid]

I just unsuspended all my Finnish Anki cards. I actually did a few days ago. Some of them have clicked better. Some of them have not. Sometimes I get a lot of reviews. It definitely feels like I learned a lot of my Anki cards shallowly. I’ve been having sleep issues, so my motivation has been a bit low. I haven’t been able to finish all my Anki reviews every day.

When I’m motivated I think I’ll focus more on watching “comprehensible” input than creating any more Anki cards. Comprehensible to me means anything that feels comprehensible. Even if my comprehension is low. So mainly vlogs. I guess when vlogs talk about super concrete things they end up feeling more comprehensible, but a lot of them don’t. Right now the news is completely out of reach. Of course I can recognize words in news stories, I just barely know what they’re about. Maybe I’ll try a learner’s podcast, but maybe it won’t work out for me. So far I’ve heard about the podcast Opi Suomea.

I think the best learner’s podcast is InnerFrench. I think it’s fairly doable to make beginner podcasts for less distant languages. It’s just not so easy for Finnish. So far a lot of the Learner’s content is simultaneously too easy and too hard. They often talk too slowly and use a bunch of vocabulary I don’t know. So I get frustrated. Working with native materials doesn’t end up being any harder and I enjoy the ego boost. I think eventually I’ll look for “boring” and predictable native level podcasts. They’re often not recommended because they’re boring, but I find them super helpful when there isn’t any good learner’s material. Usually the novelty of understanding a new language makes them interesting.

[sporedandroid]

I think I’m going to slow down how many new cards I study. I’m just not keeping up with my reviews all that well. Sometimes learning a bunch of new things quickly might help you progress more quickly, while other times I think it’s better to go slower. I think when I go slower I’m more likely to notice details and study more grammar.
I also watched an hour and thirteen minutes of Finnish YouTube videos today. I’m still not sure if that was an efficient use of my time. It’s still hard to know how useful listening practice is. I feel like my comprehension is about 50%, so it’s not all that great. It’s more for fun and to explore new YouTubers than anything else.