What are the nuts and bolts of what you actually do?

[Axon]

The word lists article on the wiki is a beautiful piece on Iversen's method and I don't want to muddle it up, so here's mine:

It's very simple, just combining a few elements of other methods. I write 20 words on a notebook page with Indonesian in one column and English in the next. I try to keep definitions as short as possible while also accounting for additional information.

bocoran - a leak
panggung - a stage (performance)
peluncuran - a launch (product)
...

I repeat the word aloud as I write it and as I write the translation. Once I have the page finished, I read the Indonesian aloud while looking at the English. I read 5 words and then go back 4, so each word gets repeated 5 times.

Then the next day I look back at the previous few pages. This is kind of the review session. Are there words I feel I should know but can't recall quickly? They go on the next page first. Then I add new words I want to memorize.

After I complete a day's page, I review the last several days' pages until I get bored.

It works relatively slowly, and there are some words that I feel are "leeches" that take several repetitions to stick. But it doesn't take a lot of time each day, and for me it's the perfect way to consolidate messy class notes into remembered vocabulary.

[leosmith]

But she's talking about choosing level appropriate material there?
Are you saying at B1 you can't find material where you understand 50% or more?

Good point. I've only used it on "real" TV and movies where I definitely understood less than 50%. I could have used it on learning material I suppose.

[StringerBell]

here's why I've found it's not very useful to me:

Aim for 50-80% general understanding when you do a ‘test listen’

If that's native material, it's a very good B2 level she's talking about imo.

I'm a little confused by this response. Here's how I do the transcription exercise she's explaining...I don't have anywhere near a very good B2 level in Polish, I don't see why that would be required.

I have a series of extremely short stories (like 10 sentences each) which I started using as an absolute beginner, in addition to some higher level graded reader type stories (about 1.5 pages of text). I used these for the transcription practice. These are stories that I've read AND listened to at least 20+ times, so I am very familiar with the stories.

Without looking at any text, I listen to the audio and pause to write down exactly what I hear. When I'm done, I compare what I've written down with the text. I make corrections with a brightly colored marker, spend a few minutes re-reading the text with the corrections, then repeat the process with that same text. My goal is that the second time I do the dictation exercise on the same story, I will have significantly fewer mistakes.

After doing this every day for a few weeks, there was a noticeable improvement in my spelling, and I found that when I listened to that particular audio without text weeks later, I could remember how I'd spelled difficult words and which mistakes I'd made (case endings), which then helped my listening comprehension. With consistent practice I started to get a "feel" for how to spell certain things, and then I'd be able to visualize words when I listened without the text.

I think this exercise is a really great way to change up a listening comprehension practice routine (I was surprised to see how much I struggled to hear exactly what was being said and how it was spelled in certain parts, even if my general comprehension was very good). It's also a good way to practice spelling without having to rely on rote memorization, word lists, or drills. I think this is an exercise that can be done with snippets of dialogue from language textbooks, from native material, or really anything where you have a piece of audio and the matching text. I don't see why anyone would need a very good B2 level; I certainly didn't have that level.

[StringerBell]

It's very simple, just combining a few elements of other methods. I write 20 words on a notebook page with Indonesian in one column and English in the next. I try to keep definitions as short as possible while also accounting for additional information.

Then the next day I look back at the previous few pages. This is kind of the review session. Are there words I feel I should know but can't recall quickly? They go on the next page first. Then I add new words I want to memorize.

Axon, this kind of sounds like the Gold list method except that you seem to be reviewing the words sooner. Do you have difficulty only choosing 20 words per day? You mentioned there were some "leeches" that took repeated listing; do you find that there are a lot of words that you remember the next day but then don't stay in your long term memory, or that you just can't remember other words no matter how many times you add them to a new list?

I attempted to try a Gold list method a few months ago, but like Anki it was a total fail for me. I found that I ended up devoting way too much time to lists of words (which I ultimately find extremely boring so then feels like a punishment and not what I want to do during my language time) which I probably could have remembered just fine without writing them on a list, or there were words that I could not produce 100% accurately no matter how many times I rewrote them on new lists.

Are you doing this as a recognition exercise (see the Indonesian word and recall the definition) or production exercise (see the english definition and then you produce the Indonesian word)?

[zKing]

I'll play --- The nuts and bolts of what I really do:

1. 80% of my language time: Intensive Listening

Content:
For my intensive listening, I'm usually using either a rip of one of the DVD's from Cantonese TV shows I bought or a YouTube video.
I have about 20 Cantonese TV shows on DVD, each with anywhere from 20 to over 100 episodes. I also have over 100 Cantonese movies, most of which I bought in multi-movie collection DVDs. I've ripped all of these into VOB format (via mplayer), so the files have all of the audio and subtitle tracks from the original DVDs embedded in them. Many of these have Standard Written Chinese (SWC) subtitles, some have English subs as well. I've got all those videos on a portable drive, which I copy/sync to both my home and work computer so that I have all my content with me in either location. For YouTube videos, I have a large number of Cantonese vloggers subscribed, most add SWC subs on their videos. I also often watch a TV news program called 鏗鏘集 which is somewhat like 60 minutes in the US... basically short documentary episodes, often about current events.

A digression about subtitles for Cantonese:
In Cantonese, the overwhelming majority of videos have SWC subtitles. Often, depending on the source/format, these are burned directly into the video. This allows content to be accessible to speakers of other Chinese languages. These SWC subs are a double edged sword: on the one hand, you almost always have some kind of text to go along with the audio. But on the other hand, they are pretty much never word for word and can often differ significantly in meaning depending on what kind of liberties the guy writing the subs took. The only bit of good news is that the more rare or formal the vocabulary, the more likely that word will be the same in Cantonese and SWC. But the word order and common words will usually be different. So as I get more advanced, the more likely the unknown words are something in the SWC subs.

The task in action:
I play the video until someone says a sentence and the SWC sub appears, if it is non-trivial and I feel I missed something, 90% of the time I will pause and carefully read the sub. (My reading usually isn't fast enough to do this in real time.) Almost always there will be a word or two I either don't know or am fuzzy on. I can often guess the pronunciation of the word from the characters OR I will have heard the word in the audio... although this is frankly more rare as catching words at speed and mangled in real speech is hard. I then attempt a lookup in CantoDict from my guessed romanization/pronunciation. Thankfully CantoDict allows you to do lookups without the tones and also does partial matches, e.g. a search of "zi cin" will find a word pronounced like "zik1 cing1". 95% of the time this will find the word. If I don't find the word in CantoDict and I'm seeing it in the subs, sometimes I will write the character by hand on my phone to find it. But I don't do this often as it is too time consuming. Usually if I don't find the word quickly, I'll just skip it.

Once I've found the word, I copy it from CantoDict. CantoDict conveniently outputs its search results with one word on each line and the word/romanization/meaning seperated by one tab each. I then paste this line into a "Raw Vocabulary" text document and keep going.

Once I'm done with a listening session, I copy my "Raw Vocabulary" into an "SRS Vocab" Google sheet where I collect my vocabulary. I set this sheet up so that it highlights any duplicates in red. I then delete all duplicate lines. This "SRS Vocab" is what I use as my source for my Anki cards.

As a side note, I have been doing the above process for a LONG time with Cantonese, basically right after I graduated out of my beginner textbooks. There was really no where else to go; there are almost no 'advanced' materials for Cantonese. And almost no audio that has accompanying word for word text (particularly in electronic form). In the beginning it was VERY painful and slow. My ability to read and guess the sounds of characters wasn't good. My ability to hear differences in Cantonese sounds was quite bad. I could spend an hour working on 2 minutes of audio. It wasn't efficient, but somehow I kept going. In hindsight, I started this too early. I should have jumped on iTalki earlier and worked with a tutor and focused on that more until I got better at hearing and reading.

2. 5% of my language time: Extensive Listening
I have a relatively short commute by car, 10-15 mins each way, and I use this to listen to a Cantonese podcast: RTHK's 捉心理. It is a radio program that talks about practical matters around psychology. The show is no longer running but I have 94 episodes on my phone that are 22-26 mins long. I often don't pay a lot of attention to it and when I do, most of the time I'm merely doing a 'word hunt' where I'm not really following the show, but I can pick out known words in most sentences. I also have the audio running at 80% speed, which still sounds 'normal' to me as those radio talk show folks talk at lightning speed (or so it seems to me).

3. 10% of my language time: iTalki
I now have a regular weekly one hour session with my iTalki tutor, Eldo. These sessions are not planned, we literally start with the Cantonese equivalent of "so, what's been happening" and just chat. I usually create a cheat-sheet beforehand with 10-20 words I might want to use based on what happened to me in the previous week. And during our conversation, when Eldo throws out new vocab, I'll either ask him or look it up in CantoDict on the fly and save it. At the end of our sessions I'll take that vocab and also put it into my "SRS Vocab" sheet. Our conversations are 95% in Cantonese, but I'll stop Eldo if I get really lost or need him to explain a word or rephrase and he'll switch to English for a sentence or two to explain if needed. He also will often repeat what I said back to me with corrected grammar and word choice. If I don't know a word, I will sometimes look it up in CantoDict on the fly or just say the English word and Eldo will correct with the Cantonese word.

4. 5% of my langauge time: Anki
When I get about 500 new words in my "SRS Vocab" Google sheet I will bulk import those words into Anki. I have about 3500 total right now and I'm somewhere around 1/4 to 1/3 the way through them. I've described this elsewhere, but I only use Anki for output cards now (L1->L2). I believe vocabulary comprehension training comes from the intensive listening. And since I'm focused on the spoken language I don't really care about the Chinese characters: I drill 'English -> Cantonese pronunciation(jyutping)'

My use of Anki is fairly 'standard' so I haven't tweaked the settings much other than the usual dropping the leech threshold down to 4. I also don't like spending a lot of time in Anki, so my new cards per day is 10. One thing I do that might be slightly different is that my raw "SRS Vocab" sheet has a LOT of words in it, so the bulk import generates a lot of cards, many of which I don't need to be able to output, at least not right away. So I control quality as new cards appear: I am very trigger happy with the suspend button. Anything too slangy, anything I don't remember seeing often, anything I already have a lot of synonyms for, anything I don't like the looks of... I suspend it. I figure I have literally thousands of unseen cards to work through, I can suspend half of them and still have months of cards to work on. If one day I get to the end of the unseen queue and have a huge pile of suspended cards, I'll un-suspend the whole lot and make another pass.

One other note about output cards (L1->L2): people often fret over synonyms. I have several solutions to this problem, the first is the suspend button.
Second, if I really want to keep synonyms or near-synonyms, I have a disambiguation field in my template. So I add hints to cards to make it clear which word I'm looking for. If there are two words I may simply say "not XX", XX being the other word. Or I'll give some hint about a character in the word I'm looking for.
Third, the definitions usually have multiple English words in a list, e.g.
"通常 tung1 soeng4 usually, normally, generally".
I will usually pick one of those words to be the "key word" for that card and put stars around it like:
"通常 tung1 soeng4 *usually*, normally, generally".
For any similar words, I'll ensure I pick a DIFFERENT English word as the key word, e.g.
"經常 ging1 soeng4 *regular*; day-to-day; everyday; normal"
Fourth, I have a "Related" field in my cards and I will put similar words in that field to help remind me of finer differences. I'll do this for words that have similar meaning like above or for words that sounds very similar, perhaps only differing in tone, e.g.
"注意 zyu3 ji3 take note; pay attention" vs
"主意 zyu2 ji3 an idea"

The rest:
I toy with LOTS of other language learning methods/tasks: writing on Lang-8, short loop chorusing/shadowing, reading out loud, reading my grammar books, etc. But what I have above is what I do the overwhelming majority of time for Cantonese.

I don't believe there's anything revolutionary or really even the least bit new in what I wrote above, but if someone is curious, there it is.

[StringerBell]

The nuts and bolts of what I really do:

That was awesome!!! Thank you so much for taking the time to go through all the details of what you do. I love hearing the nitty gritty of people's routines, and I especially love it when people throw in, "in hindsight, I should have done..." I find those reflections to be hidden gems.

Who's next???

[munyag]

@Stringerbell-Where are you now with your current study plan?What does it look like in 2021?

[Iversen]

Missing nuts and bolts:

* Speaking to other people (including native speakers) in L2:
Sadly not since somewhere around November last year when the Language Café of our library was sabotaged (and the library was shut down shortly after with covid as a lame excuse). Likewise travelling isn't really an option right now

* Listening to lengthy L2 speech on my computer:
I used to do that alot, but then I started to revise my music collection, and now I'm listening it through from A to Z instead - but I'm at Zamfir in this moment so there may be light ahead.

* Reading literature
Not really any more, - although I sometimes use short literary passages for intensive study, as with Harry P in Irish right now. I think the last complete fullsize novel I have read was "2031" by A.Clarke a few years ago on the library in Tomar, Portugal, and it took me three hours to get through it.

The rest of my nuts and bolts are still in use, like

* THINKING in my target languages - I am not keen of speaking to myself, but thinking is OK
* Listening to short clips on youtube
* Listening to TV in a number of languages if there (against expectation) is something relevant to watch - but normally I turn down the sound and activate the subtitles, if there are any
* Putting short passages into Google Translate to hear them spoken by a machine - sometimes with slight variations. I used to use a speech synthethizer named Acapela for that purpose, but it won't run on my old PC anymore.
*'Studying' a text passage:
When I write this in my log the idea is that I copy a text by hand while making sure that I understand everything -both words and grammar - and new words are noted down in a separate right margin column for later use in a wordlist
* Wordlists (of course) - 3 columns as described in my Guide to language learning and the wiki mentioned above - and with at least one repetition
* Grammar studies, where I use the idea that I have to concoct and summarize the materials - which may result in a green sheet for later use. With a bit of luck you can squeeze most of the things you need to know in a language down to a few sheets, and then you can look the details up in the big grammars later
* Writing stuff here - or writing for the paper bin

[mokibao]

My (kind of obsessive) gimmick is that I want to understand every single word I encounter, and likewise, I want to express myself as faithfully as I can, using the right words for what I want to convey, without resorting to periphrases to make up for my lack or vocab or sounding like a child (as some teachers infamously recommend) or a gesturing caveman. Vocab, vocab, vocab above all. My experience (having good marks at school while being inept) is that it is far less frustrating to make grammar mistakes than be constantly looking for words to express anything beyond the most basic stuff.

In that respect I really like both Duolingo and Assimil, because their emphasis on bidirectional translation means the vocab gets drilled into you through sheer repetition (you kind of have to binge though). Textbook appetizers can feel bland though, and switching to native material makes for faster (though more painful) vocab acquisition.

I usually have two processes: 1) speeding through a prebuilt Anki deck, so I learn stuff even when I don't feel like reading and it makes the reading I do less painful, and 2) looking up every single word I don't know on a dictionary and kind of hoping the 'natural frequency' of words will do the spaced repetition thing for me on its own. For languages that are really close to mine I don't bother with the deck (80+% of the words would be cognates anyway) and just read.

On one hand, this means I get through native materials, especially reading, kind of slowly. On the other hand, when I finish a thing, even something as rudimentary as a short story or a fairy tale, it feels much more rewarding.