elco2's sure but slow log (Cebuano, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, etc.)

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devilyoudont
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Re: elco2's sure but slow log (Cebuano, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, etc.)

Postby devilyoudont » Fri Nov 23, 2018 11:12 pm

I just want to let you know that having trouble with word boundaries is a totally normal phase of learning a language sometimes, and eventually this phase will come to an end.

Japanese words are really different from English words, so this may contribute to the problem. I believe most if not all the other languages on your list are stress accent languages, like our native language English. Japanese of course has no stress and instead uses a pitch accent.

There's no way around doing a lot of listening practice to resolve the issue, but here are some facts about Japanese words that might help in some way or another

1) There is no pause between words (This is also the case for English, we just imagine the pauses to be there because we can already correctly segment the language)

2) Pitch in Japanese is binary--the pitch of a mora is either high or low.

3) Once a downstep has occurred in a word, the pitch can never rise again.

Anyway, hope this helps and がんばって
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elco2
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Re: elco2's sure but slow log (Cebuano, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, etc.)

Postby elco2 » Sat Nov 24, 2018 12:20 pm

so are you saying tokoro must all be the same pitch, or that if it pitches down on "ko" that it stays there?
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devilyoudont
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Re: elco2's sure but slow log (Cebuano, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, etc.)

Postby devilyoudont » Sat Nov 24, 2018 3:52 pm

elco2 wrote:so are you saying tokoro must all be the same pitch, or that if it pitches down on "ko" that it stays there?


Tokoro is a heiban word. Heiban words have no downstep. Their pitch accent pattern looks like this:

__koro
to

In other words, the first mora is low, and all following mora, including any particles, are high.

Now, heiban is probably the hardest pitch accent for you to start hearing as a beginner. The chief reason for this is an upstep in Japanese is less dramatic than a downstep. This is why Japanese people sometimes describe words with no downstep as "accentless" in English. So, it will be easier for you to start hearing downsteps before upsteps most likely.

So, as a quick over view there are 4 types of patterns:

Heiban (Accentless)
__ko-no
ko
(here)

Atamadaka (downstep after the first mora)
A_____
_isatsu-wa
(greetings, set expressions)

Nakadaka (first mora low, second and following are high, downstep occurs somewhere in the middle of the word
__be__
ta___ru
(eat)

Odaka (base word is heiban-like, but the particle attaches low)
_mouto
i______-wa
(little sister)

It's not mandatory to learn pitch accent patterns to learn Japanese (Japanese people can understand incorrect patterns, speaking completely flatly, and the specific pitch pattern assigned to a word varies by regional dialect), but as you can see, the second mora of a word always has a shift up or down. If you can start to detect the pitch accent first on words that do have a downstep, and then eventually recognize upsteps as well, this should help somewhat with determining word boundaries. Again it's not mandatory, and you will have to do a lot of listening practice either way.

If you are interested in learning more about pitch, with a specific focus on improving your own pronunciation, Dougen's Japanese Phonetics video course is the best I've found that's easily available, but the majority of the course is behind a paywall.
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elco2
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Re: elco2's sure but slow log (Cebuano, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, etc.)

Postby elco2 » Thu Nov 29, 2018 8:52 am

Thank you for that detailed response. I was under the impression that Japanese was "accentless", but it didn't seem that way to me. Maybe I should have read that chapter in Tuttle :p

I haven't been doing any listening lately, but have been able to push forward with my Japanese reader. I can't explain why. I think I suddenly caught on to some of the more compliated sentence structures.

Also, still reviewing those Kanji in Anki. Goldlist is my preferred method, but the pre-made deck is so nice. I've taken a different attitude to it though. My goal is to try to recall these words 8 times. That is to say, with the default settings, I'm perfectly happy with a leech dropping out. This means that flashcards will do me no more good, which is my goal with Goldlist. Also, I plan to filter out cards that I remembered after 2 weeks or more. I also cut down review cards for one day down to 50 from the default 200. I started felling stressed when it when over that amount today.
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elco2
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Re: elco2's sure but slow log (Cebuano, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, etc.)

Postby elco2 » Thu Dec 06, 2018 11:46 am

My Cebuano is suffering. I need to make sure I do some listening every day, there's just been so much going on.

My Japanese Kanji Anki project.
I changed all the daily quotas to 0, that way whenever I have time, I can just add however many cards I want, thus making the sessions shorter and more addictive. Starting to make more liberal use of the "suspend" function. Suspend cards that I know already (like 1 & gold), suspend cards with a gap of 28+ days (This means I remembered it after 2 weeks). It would be easier if I could reset a mature card to be 28 days instead of 21.

Random Language Achievement -- confused a clown by not speaking English.
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elco2
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Re: elco2's sure but slow log (Cebuano, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, etc.)

Postby elco2 » Wed Dec 19, 2018 4:40 pm

Cebuano:
Made sure I did some listening since last time. Not much dedicated time to that to be honest, just an hour or so, but my Ceubano is boosted.

Japanese:
working through anki still while pushing through my reader. I'm musing that even though I like goldlist, anki may be faster. My time spent per day so far has leveled out at around 20-30 minutes, and I will see all the cards at least once in 3 months. So far I have 85 suspended or mature cards, over 602 minutes. For Goldlist this would be roughly 425 minutes, but I already have active recall of the mature cards. More data to work with in the future. forcing Anki to do shorter sessions really makes me like it more.
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elco2
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Re: elco2's sure but slow log (Cebuano, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, etc.)

Postby elco2 » Sun Jan 13, 2019 3:34 am

I think I have enough data to declare Anki more efficient than Goldlist. Average time spent on a word for Goldlist - 8 min. So far I've spent 5 minutes per word, 20% recallable, and about 2% where Goldlist would put it (leech). So less time, and better memorized! I think it's important that I set all the daily limits to 0 and do a day's work in pieces. The only drawback I can see is there's no real plan for missed days. Goldlist well, the timing is not crucial. So I don' think I'd ever do a deck of 20k words because I would have to fall back somewhere.
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elco2
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Re: elco2's sure but slow log (Cebuano, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, etc.)

Postby elco2 » Thu Jan 31, 2019 3:58 pm

Cebuano:
Went back and re-watched some old soap operas. Wow. I automatically understood some things that I never really understood before. It's a good motivator to know I'm improving over time. EDIT: to put this in perspective, some guy tried to talk to me the day after this, and I got a general idea eventually, but it was very hard to understand. Given, he was out of town and had an accent that sounded like he was talking through his nose, but some people do that here too.

Japanese:
should have seen all the basic kanji in anki in about a month. Also, I picked up a Chinese Bible, looked at the first few verses, and recognized most of the characters.
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elco2
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Re: elco2's sure but slow log (Cebuano, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, etc.)

Postby elco2 » Mon Feb 18, 2019 8:52 am

We'll here's a fun one. Someone was talking to me about the different hospitals and the frozen cones. I was like, "what? frozen cones?" Yes, "frozen cones", he said. Then some else seeing my confusion said "he means pros and cons".
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elco2
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Re: elco2's sure but slow log (Cebuano, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, etc.)

Postby elco2 » Tue Apr 09, 2019 9:40 am

Fastest vocab method?
Well I "finished" that anki kanji thing. After all the cards had been seen at least one day, after a few days dropped it. Why is that? because the words that I get wrong I re-remember quite quickly. Only 32% is mature but I think they are all as good as they are going to get without some reading. Just considering this 32% I spent 4 minutes per card, but considering ALL the cards, it was about 1.4 minutes per card. This seems vastly superior to goldlist based on the time, but it is a bit stressful to keep up with. I also wouldn't do a batch larger than 1500 words in the future with the same settings. I think I would try doing an anki algorithm where I just drop the words after a week, and would have the same results, and probably about half the time. I would not use anki when many words could get confused, which is what happened to me when I was studying Hebrew.

Cebuano: Didn't use this for a while. Spent about 4 days of 20 minutes of listening before it got going again.
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