General language log

Continue or start your personal language log here, including logs for challenge participants
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sporedandroid
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Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Sun Mar 17, 2019 2:05 am

I got a new chromebook which can also run android apps. I got ankidroid. The Hebrew from scratch works way better on ankidroid than ankiweb. So I can get back to studying as I’m figuring out subs2srs. I’m also getting the urge to listen to more Kaveret skits. I mostly can’t understand them, but I love their music and I find their voices entertaining enough. They’re also fairly short. As I repeat them I can understand more snippets from the skits.
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Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Sun Mar 17, 2019 11:44 pm

Today I worked a lot on sorting the Peter Rabbit subtitles by difficulty. I’m not sure splitting long subtitles is worth it since they’ll be cut off funny and just annoy me. I studied some and I felt it went a lot smoother. I’m no longer just memorizing the phrases by rote. I’m learning some vocabulary and getting used to different sentence structures.
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Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Tue Mar 19, 2019 7:32 am

I’m back to shadowing, but today I did it while I studied Hebrew From Scratch flashcards since they often use a female voice. I do it for the usual reason, but I think I can also get some kinesthetic memory for the words. This also motivated me to study subs2srs cards which can feel fairly tedious or hard on my brain. I guess it’s good to do more nerve-wracking tasks first and then I can move onto more cognitively demanding or tedious tasks.
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Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Wed Mar 20, 2019 7:15 am

Shadowing went way better. It didn’t make me panic like last time even though I had some difficulty on some words. I didn’t make myself remove one headphone unless I felt I was doing fairly well and couldn’t hear myself. When there’s guttural sounds I struggle so much I can’t even keep time. When words have an L sound I also struggle. I’m not surprised since the Hebrew L sound has always sounded different to me. I was pretty laid back about it since my main goal was to practice vocabulary.
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Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Thu Mar 21, 2019 7:03 am

I was originally going to post this as a whole thread, but since it became self-indulgent I’ll post it here instead. I still consider myself a beginner at Hebrew, but I seem to be at a distinctly different stage compared to when I just started. Words actually feel like words. When I first started words didn’t feel like words to me, so they took forever to stick. I just couldn’t feel the language at all. Now I can feel it. That could be why I found Finnish words faster to learn. It just has a similar “feeling” to other Scandinavian languages even though it’s not Indo-European.

I notice I can recognize a lot of words when I hear Hebrew spoken, but I still lack a lot of the vocabulary necessary to actually understand. Listening to Hebrew can get pretty tiring, as opposed before when I didn’t know enough words to make that effort. I also notice a lag between recognizing a word and understanding the word. I may or may not mentally translate words depending on how complex the sentence is. If it’s simple and I’ve seen it used in a lot of contexts I probably won’t mentally translate. If it’s an unfamiliar sentence structure or a new word I will mentally translate.

I think my Icelandic was at a similar stage. It was very exhausting to listen to and I could read kid books and watch kid shows if I really concentrated. At that point I quit because of a lack of resources. I also tried to understand a lot of things way above my level. I don’t really challenge myself like that in Hebrew and I sometimes get surprised at how much I manage to understand. I don’t know if I should. I feel like my Hebrew is still at a slightly lower level than my Icelandic was at its peak.

Maybe it was at the same level since I seem to be hitting the same milestones. I haven’t really listened to all that much Icelandic lately. When I have I noticed I could still pick up on some snippets. Maybe I was at the same level. It’s easy to overestimate how much you understand a Germanic level. When I tried to guess a Norwegian duolingo phrase I was totally off. With Hebrew I just end up feeling clueless.

When I was learning Icelandic I liked learning it from song lyrics. So I often understood the music I listened to pretty well. But it made music tiring to listen to. I still get mentally tired listening to Icelandic music. So now I avoided this approach with Hebrew. So as a result I don’t understand Hebrew music as much. So music isn’t really a reliable landmark. It makes music less exhausting to listen to, but it still seems to strain my brain a bit.
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Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Sun Mar 24, 2019 1:34 am

I’m not sure shadowing through anki is as effective as the more focused Olle Kjellin method. I keep hearing my own voice and being unsatisfied. I’ll still continue to kinesthetically learn some vocabulary words even though I’m not really . I do notice some clips are easier than others. Usually the closer to my age she sounds, the easier it is. If it’s an old lady or it sounds too robotic or like an announcement I find it nearly impossible to harmonize with. Slow, natural sounding speech with someone roughly my age is the easiest. That works out well since that’s what I’m aiming for.

I’ll take note of those and make a compilation of them in audacity. Unfortunately for me there’s still a huge gap between harmonizing with the voice and sounding how I want. I’m not surprised because I often don’t feel like I’m really changing the way I talk when I’m able to harmonize with the voice. When I do the Olle Kjellin method for long enough I do notice talking starts to feel different.

When I first tried the Olle Kjellin method I had no idea what clips would be good for me. Now I have a better idea. When I first started I couldn’t get sync up at all. Now I’m pretty quick to sync up. I still don’t know if that’s because I chose easier clips or if I made actual progress. I just have a hard time getting over the idea of being caught doing it. I’m still figuring out if doing the Olle Kjellin method alone will automatically make me improve. I think I’ll also try some of the mimicmethod as well where they slow down the intonation and copy it afterwards. It’s just too anxiety inducing right now. I’m taking steps to reduce my anxiety in general. It really gets in the way of everything, not just language learning. I’m finding it really hard to strike a balance.

Thankfully speaking Hebrew isn’t a huge priority for me. I’m just using it to test pronunciation techniques. If I permanently mess up my Hebrew pronunciation by doing things wrong it won’t matter too much. I’d be happy to just read some good Hebrew literature and watch a bit of tv and movies. Both mimicmethod and Olle Kjellin say reading is bad for pronunciation. Maybe it is, maybe it’s not. I just know that being illiterate doesn’t automatically make your pronunciation perfect. It’s also way harder and slower to progress in understanding a language if you don’t do some reading.

In Hebrew I’m working towards good general comprehension. I often notice my listening comprehension is a bit ahead of my general comprehension. Like I’ll recognize a word and its English meaning a second later but ultimately not feel like I’m understanding. At first I thought flashcards would encourage mental translation so I avoided them. But I find when I know the concept of a word and the sentence structure well I automatically stop mentally translating. So I’m trying subs2srs and the premade sentence decks that are already available on anki. I find it quicker to learn vocabulary words from sentence cards, but there’s a catch. I can only effectively learn words if I only have to learn one or two words in the sentence. So this would have been very exhausting if I did this from the beginning. So mental translation happens if ideas aren't self-contained, it’s a new word or the sentence structure is odd to me.
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Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Sun Apr 14, 2019 6:02 am

Just tried out the site Bliu Bliu which is mainly meant to help you read in a foreign language. Unsurprisingly I didn’t score well enough on the Hebrew test and it’s in beta anyways. I think it’s a good opportunity for me to improve my Spanish reading level. I definitely find my listening comprehension in Spanish is better than my reading comprehension. Spanish isn’t a huge priority, but I’ve always wanted to improve my reading level in Spanish. It seems less tedious than learning Spanish like a foreign language or trying to read Spanish I find on the internet. For now I like to read it at the same time as a recording of the text.
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Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Fri Apr 19, 2019 7:02 am

I finally quit being a perfectionist on subtitleedit and made a subs2srs deck for Shtisel. I just did episode two for now, so I’ll test out that deck tomorrow. My Peter Rabbit deck is pretty annoying. Maybe I’ll clean it up on subtitleedit and remake it. I’m getting better at subtitleedit, but also pretty sick of it. I always try to finish studying my premade anki sentence deck before I mess around with subs2srs stuff. I do think all this subs2srs stuff has improved my listening comprehension. At least I got that.
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Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Wed May 08, 2019 8:59 pm

I have in fact been studying Hebrew regularly since I updated. I just don’t like to get into the habit of talking too much about studying. I’d rather use that energy to actually study. I’ve continued to study subs2srs cards and I’ve been slacking off on the premade anki deck with example sentences. It’s way easier now that I have ankidroid and I can get rid of bad cards. I recently decreased the new cards per day by a lot and I decided to just keep replaying the audio on cards where I knew all the words until I felt I could understand it well. I actually enjoy doing that. Some interesting progress that I noticed is that the speech on the premade anki deck now seems slow to me. When I first started studying it, it seemed slightly fast but understandable.
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Re: General language log

Postby sporedandroid » Mon May 13, 2019 7:38 am

I think it’s time for me to return to an old experiment I tried. I did it based on this video.

At the moment I picked Arthur because you can’t really find Hebrew dubs of adult shows as far as I know and it’s kind of a guilty pleasure of mine. Turns out I pretty much only like the early episodes. I found this experiment ineffective at the level I was at and tedious since I didn’t like all the episodes I picked. Maybe I’ll just watch the Arthur episodes I find interesting in English during my downtime and track down the Hebrew version afterwards. It might be easier since my reading level is better. My overall comprehension and vocabulary is better so hopefully I will benefit more from this exercise.
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