General language log

[sporedandroid]

I’ve been taking a break from studying new cards on my Anki deck. I’ll create new cards when I feel like it, but I’m not adding anything new to my review load. It’s still fairly challenging to finish my reviews, even though it’s not a huge amount. I think it’s because the Anki cards I created are above my level. It’s hard to stick to my level. I’ve been “procrastinating” on finishing my Anki reviews by watching Finnish YouTube videos. It’s still questionable how productive this is at my current level. My guideline is to pick videos that feel comprehensible. If I don’t feel like I can understand, I just switch to something else. I’m not really aiming for any particular amount of listening practice at the moment. Today I watched Finnish videos for 46 minutes. I guess I was procrastinating for 46 minutes.

[sporedandroid]

My level is still pretty low, but it seems easier to find Finnish YouTube videos and books that are interesting to me. I’ve always knew that I resonate better with Finnish compared to a language like Hebrew. At least that’s my first impression. Right now my plan is to just watch Finnish YouTube videos until I’m bored. That’s usually about an hour. Maybe that’s not the most efficient study session, but I’m really finding it hard to get motivated to do more deliberate studying.

Right now I’m just making an effort to keep up with my Anki reviews. I think lately I haven’t been doing all that much listening practice anyways. I was mostly doing Anki reviews, creating Anki cards and studying a little bit of grammar. Listening practice felt pointless because my vocabulary is still fairly low. Now I’m doing a lot of listening practice because I’m just not motivated to “study” more and I enjoy it up to a certain point.

[sporedandroid]

I think my Anki reviews are starting to get easier now. Sometimes I study ten new cards, but sometimes I’ll study five or zero. I’m also allowing myself to study more “easy” cards. By that I mean sentences I should understand in theory, but I don’t. I’m still creating quite a few new Anki cards and my backlog is huge again. It’s about 240. Right now I try to suspend cards where I have to learn multiple new words. I’ll study the card and then suspend it. Usually I’ll look up the unknown words and make new cards based on them if I find example sentences. I’m still watching Finnish videos when I feel like it.

It’s still hard to notice progress from my listening practice. I’m at a lower level than I was when I started listening practice for Hebrew. I remember I made a lot of progress in just one month by listening to podcasts every night for about half an hour. Right now I appreciate the visuals of vlogs. Language-wise my comprehension is pretty low, but I can usually follow what’s going on based on visuals. I still haven’t gotten around to looking for podcasts. People often recommend “fun” podcasts, but “boring” and predictable podcasts are better to start out with. Fun and narrative based podcasts often rely on a wider range of vocabulary and being able to keep up with multiple details.

[sporedandroid]

I still feel like I’m catching up with the Anki cards I sort of rushed through. I mainly wanted to learn a bunch of new vocabulary without overthinking anything. Now I’m letting myself overthink things again. A lot of those sentence cards were rote memorized, but I didn’t feel like I truly knew them. Now that I’m forgetting and relearning those cards I get the sense that I actually know them better. I’m just letting myself press again more, analyze things more and study less new cards. I’m also not focusing as much on sentence mining because I have a backlog of over 200 cards.

I’m not noticing a dramatic improvement in listening comprehension yet. I’m getting more listening practice in for sure, but it still feels like I’m mostly faking it. So I don’t mind too much if I don’t feel like getting any listening practice. It seems like my vocabulary and grammar is not at a high enough level for listening to be all that effective. At least I enjoy it, even with low comprehension. It does start to get tedious at about one hour and I don’t think listening for twenty minutes a day vs one hour a day makes any difference at this point. I didn’t exactly enjoy listening to Hebrew until I felt like I had more comprehension. I think it’s a combination of being less comfortable with ambiguity, not liking how the language sounds and feeling less connected to the culture.

[sporedandroid]

Christmas and feeling exhausted has also made Anki reviews harder to keep up with. I used to be very strict about Anki, but now I’m more relaxed. I think I’m way more balanced. So far it seems like a good stage to watch YouTube videos. It’s quite a bit earlier than I started listening to podcasts and watching YouTube videos for Hebrew. Some day in the life and vlog videos pretty much describe what I’m seeing, so they can be fairly comprehensible. Even as a beginner. Since I’m behind on Anki reviews, I think I’ll try to prioritize comprehensible input and deprioritize videos that are way above my level and happen to have subtitles.

[sporedandroid]

It’s almost a year of studying Finnish. I think I pretty much started in February. The timeline is a bit fuzzy. I dabbled in the past and I also took about two months off. I’m gradually starting to understand YouTube videos. Sometimes I pretty much know what’s going on and sometimes I barely do. I still feel like I’m mostly guessing. Studying still feels fairly overwhelming once in a while.

I do a combination of passive studying by watching vlogs and simple to follow videos and more active studying by watching videos from channels like yle mix. Yle mix seems pretty good. Their videos are aimed at kids, but not in a babyish way. I’d say I understand a bit less than half right now, but I can study the transcript and create Anki cards. I started creating word documents that include the transcript and an English translation from DeepL. I use wiktionary to make sure the translation makes sense. That way I don’t feel as rushed.

I think I made slightly less progress than I did when I studied Hebrew. When I studied Hebrew, language learning was my whole personality. I needed to learn how I can even learn a language. Hebrew also felt more foreign. Despite that I feel like I learned it faster. Finnish has a more complicated sentence structure and more dialects to worry about. So I know it’s objectively harder.

Maybe my progress is also slower because I just didn’t study as much. I don’t claim to be the most passionate about Finnish. I’m sure someone who is truly passionate could learn way faster than me.

[sporedandroid]

I think I should be more serious about Finnish, not because I need to but because language learning is great for my anxiety. I’ve been taking it easy because I was burnt out by Hebrew. Hebrew was great for my anxiety and it really took the edge off things. I also made it my whole personality. Probably because it took the edge off things. I have no “reason” to learn any languages. I think I’ve been consistent, but casual about Finnish. That got pretty good results. Today I’m going to try out some podcasts. I’ll be focusing on self-development. I find that true crime, comedy or the news tend to be too hard. Self development is fairly generic in any language, so it tends to be easier. I don’t know if I’ll be able to understand any podcasts, but I’ve kind of been feeling like I can understand more and more Finnish videos. Especially when my anxiety is high. I had very bad anxiety today and I felt like my Finnish listening comprehension got better. I think because of adrenaline.

[sporedandroid]

I’m still not exactly more serious about Finnish. I’ve just been too exhausted to. One thing I recently started doing is pasting transcripts of YouTube videos into Microsoft word along with a DeepL translation. That helps me feel less rushed and get past the character limit. One issue I’ve had with multiple languages is feeling rushed to analyze something that “should” be easy. Usually that means a YouTube video transcript. It really isn’t easy at my current level, so it makes sense I’m slow at analyzing it.

I had the same issue with Hebrew YouTube videos. I really pushed myself to analyze a whole video in one study session. It went about as well as you’d expect. To make matters worse I didn’t make any Anki cards. Right now I do make Anki cards for the Finnish YouTube videos, but only when a sentence actually makes sense to me. I use wiktionary and context clues to make sure a sentence makes sense. I think IcelandicOnline has the same issue. There’s just way too much new vocabulary introduced at once. I think I did alright for a while when I dabbled in Icelandic back in 2019. I think the only reason it felt fine was because I had some previous knowledge.

[sporedandroid]

I’ve been getting a decent amount of passive listening practice. Maybe 40 minutes to an hour a day. Mainly because I got into it because I got used to watching Hebrew videos while doing other hobbies like drawing. Taking a break from Hebrew sort of left a void. I didn’t take a break from Hebrew until watching Finnish videos felt somewhat productive. I’m probably not getting the most efficient listening practice I could possibly get, but I want other hobbies as well. I think that helps me stay more well rounded and less stressed.

When I watch videos my comprehension does seem to vary a lot. I do sort of balance it out by studying video transcripts.

[sporedandroid]

Today I decided to go for a walk while listening to a podcast. I was continuing an episode I was listening to. I sort of got the gist. The podcast is called Elämänkoulu and it’s mainly just self-development, my favorite genre for learning new languages. I found that podcast on podtail and looked up the top podcasts for Finland. Most of them were overly hard genres like comedy, the news or true crime. Comedy is hard because usually that means there will be unstructured conversations and a bunch of inside jokes. At least on podcasts. I don't enjoy that format in any language. I think the news is a useful genre once I’m my level is a bit higher. I find for the news you have to keep up with a lot of details.
With self-help you just don’t. It’s mostly filler and cliches. This podcast was sort of interesting because it briefly mentioned SMART goals. I was already familiar with that topic. That’s another thing I like about self-development podcasts, they tend to use a lot of English words and familiar topics. They also mention self-development books, which are usually English books I’m familiar with such as Atomic Habits. An interesting thing she mentioned was that she considers SMART goals kind of boring. I guess I have to agree on that. I’ve never been able to keep up with any SMART goals or even create them.

After I listened to the podcast, I analyzed a transcript from a Finnished video. Even though it comes with an English translation, it still seems to be hard work for my brain. I didn’t finish it all in one go, but I did create some Anki cards. I’m glad I found a more realistic way to study this as a beginner. Since there’s so many words to look up and grammatical structures to analyze, it does end up being a lot of work. Even if I only analyze a few sentences. Even looking at sentences that are mostly familiar can feel like a lot of work. I think this is a good study activity to get me from the beginner level to a more intermediate level.