Glossy's Log

[Glossy]

Yesterday I went through 9 minutes and 9 seconds of the 49th episode of Luo-gical Thinking in 1 hour and 7 minutes.

I also did 371 Anki reps, which has been about average for me recently. For years I spent a lot more time on Anki than that. I had a one-hour subway commute each way. There’s no cell service in most of the underground portions of the New York subway. To concentrate on Anki I need to be shielded from distractions. Also, doing Anki reps in the office, while I was supposed to be working, felt naughty and exciting. Everyone is most productive when shirking from some other responsibility.

Like most office workers in NYC I’ve been telecommuting since March. At first my Anki numbers plummeted. Then I started to exercise by walking up and down the stairs in my apartment building while doing Anki reps. There are 6 floors here. I began on April 1st, the day I definitely got over covid-19, by walking from the 1st floor to the 6th 4 times. The disease had been like the common cold, except I lost the sense of smell for a couple of days.

I gradually increased the number of times I went through these 6 floors. By November I could do 36 rounds, 6 floors each, in an hour and a half, all while doing Anki reps. It was equivalent to walking up and down a 216-story building. Not a dry thread on me by the end. I even started to take salt tablets before these sessions to compensate for all the salt I was losing through sweat.

Sometimes, not often, I would pass people on these walks. It’s a narrow stairwell. You can’t wear a mask during strenuous exercise. Or at least that would have seemed ridiculous to me at the time. At first I was confident in my immunity. Then the case numbers dipped here to almost zero. But when they started to pick up again I began to think about switching to a different kind of exercise.

I needed something that could be combined with Anki reps. I hate running and love biking. But biking is dangerous. I’ve seen about a dozen memorials to dead bikers around NYC. White bikes with inscriptions, and sometimes flowers. And you can’t really bike in the dead of winter here. The thing with exercise is that you can’t stop. The conditioning will disappear.

I eventually settled on buying a stationary bike. Everyone here has heard of Peloton. It costs $2,250 plus a monthly fee. I got a $420 knockoff. It’s been great so far.

Unfortunately I haven’t been able to do Anki reps throughout my stationary bike sessions. I did an hour on the bike yesterday. Did Anki during the first half. After that I was really putting in an effort on the bike. Which is good. But I couldn’t combine that kind of a physical strain with anything else. Maybe I should decrease the difficulty level. There’s a magnetic damper on the fly wheel for that. The bike is still new. I’ll have to figure out what my priorities with it really are.

Anyway, that’s a long explanation for why my Anki numbers have gone down over time.

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[coldrainwater]

I gradually increased the number of times I went through these 6 floors. By November I could do 36 rounds, 6 floors each, in an hour and a half, all while doing Anki reps. It was equivalent to walking up and down a 216-story building. Not a dry thread on me by the end.

Great job on the conditioning with Anki. I have done something very similar for the last three to four years, this last year or two also using Anki while doing stairs. I live in Houston and we had an eight-floor and now a ten-floor office space and this year, learned to read in-motion for my part of the Polyglot Fitness Challenge using Anki. Our non-language training group added a couple of useful innovations that you might enjoy trying sometime. We tried doing burpees at the bottom and also walking with small to moderately weighted packs or vests. The cardiac benefits of normal stairs like you have done are awesome. Not a dry thread is exactly right. We normally didn't go over an hour, but it was still enough. I don't bike for the same reason you mention. Way too many white bikes at various points around Houston.

There is definitely an intensity trade-off when adding Anki to exercise. Exercise and language learning both suffer just a bit compared to full focus. Nevertheless, I have found that the extra blood flow usually makes up for it and that the after-effects of exercise lead to great language-learning (especially the first half-hour or hour after training). Pure listening and training may be the most ideal combo if you want to exercise intensely, but I am stubborn. In any event, keep up the good work. I know what you mean about how changes can throw off a routine.

[Glossy]

Nevertheless, I have found that the extra blood flow usually makes up for it and that the after-effects of exercise lead to great language-learning (especially the first half-hour or hour after

I’ve thought for years that my recall rate in Anki is better when walking than when sitting or lounging on a bed. I’ve never tested this though. Also, when I walk the stairs or to the subway, to stores or wherever, the temptation to check Twitter, look up something irrelevant in the Wikipedia, etc. attacks me much less often than when I’m just sitting around at home. I’m less likely to be distracted from Anki on walks or when exercising.

Thank you for responding, and Happy Thanksgiving!

[Glossy]

Yesterday it took me 1 hour and 1 minute to get through 8 minutes and 15 seconds of the Luo-gical Thinking show. I finished the 49th episode, which was about ancient Rome and started the 50th, which is about an ancient Chinese emperor.

The host quoted a couple of lines of this emperor's poetry. I was prepared to ignore them, because classical Chinese isn't my focus now, but was surprised to get most of the meaning. I think. From what I've seen, which is very little, when modern Chinese recite classical poetry, they tend to pronounce syllables very separately, with clear and distinct tones. Usually it's still incomprehensible to me because of the differences in grammar and vocabulary from Mandarin.

Now that I'm writing this blog entry I realized that I don't even know what dynasty the emperor in question is from. I should look that up during my next session. It's not the Qing, although that's the dynasty Mr. Luo talks about the most. I was a little disappointed in his focus on the relatively recent past, although this shouldn't have been surprising. Only history nerds like history for its own sake. Late 19th - early 20th century history is really just ammunition for current politics, and everyone is interested in THAT.

I did 643 Anki reps yesterday, which is an OK number for me.

[Glossy]

Yesterday it took me 1 hour 6 minutes and 45 seconds to get through 7 minutes and 13 seconds of the 50th episode of the Luo-gical Thinking show. This gives a multiple of 9.25, which is bad by my recent standards but OK for a show about ancient China.

I did look up the protagonist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Yang_of_Sui

Never heard of him before. The show's host described him as one of the biggest villains of Chinese history, then proceeded to defend him. There's an 18-volume Cambridge History of China. I've read the first two of these, up until the collapse of the Han dynasty. I'm extremely ignorant about the rest of Chinese history, including the period covered here. One of the reasons I chose Mr. Luo's show is that he talks about history a lot.

As I've written before, I watch these shows in an app called YouKu. I know it many times less well than YouTube, but most of the comparisons that I can make are in YouTube's favor. When I return to a YouKu video after I paused it, it opens 5 to 10 seconds before the pause. For some reason it doesn't remember the pause's timestamp exactly. The rewind function, which I use a lot, is jumpy. If I try to rewind just a few seconds, it won't rewind at all. I have to overshoot, then listen to 10 to 20 seconds of stuff I already understood before I get to what I really wanted to hear a second time.

I did 417 Anki reps yesterday, most of them while on my stationary bike. Compared to my last bike session I went too far in the other direction. Pedaled slowly, getting much less of a workout. Did Anki reps throughout, but I want to try the middle approach next time.

[Glossy]

Missed listening practice on Saturday. So I had to compensate yesterday by putting in at least two hours. Went through 13 minutes and 46 seconds of the 50th episode of the Luo-gical Thinking show in 2 hours 19 minutes and 32 seconds. The multiple is horrible: 10.14. But the show was about the 7th century AD. Archaic official titles, names of ancient taxes and administrative arrangements, ancient authors and their books. "Listen to what's interesting to you" is common-sense advice, and I'm interested in history.

When I was a kid, starting to learn English, I was shocked by how different its grammar was compared to Russian grammar. I can still remember my incredulity at seeing the same goals achieved in such bizarrely different ways. Chinese has no relationship with any of the languages I knew anything about before I approached it. I expected something like that to happen again.

Actually, I was surprised by how little I was surprised. If you have some feeling for the range of differences in European grammars, Chinese grammar doesn't stand out. It's not an alien world. The thing that trips me up most often now is failure to recognize that a sentence contains a rhetorical question. Chinese uses rhetorical questions a lot more than any major Western language. I wonder if other Asian languages do that.

But of course there are rhetorical questions in European languages. And measure words, just fewer. I'm used to analytical grammar from English and to roundabout ways of marking the plural from French. Something I would have never thought I'd say before I started with Chinese: German grammar feels more unusual to me now. Because of the word order.

[Glossy]

First December post. In November I spent 34 hours 24 minutes and 30 seconds on Mandarin listening comprehension. A lot more time than that on Anki, but I haven't counted that exactly. I do my own Anki stats once every few months.

Yesterday I did 373 Anki reps, most of them while on my exercise bike. Finished the 50th episode of the Luo-gical Thinking show. Went through 9 minutes and 6 seconds of it in 1 hour, 1 minute and 49 seconds. This gives a multiple of 6.79, which is much better than my previous multiples for that episode. In the end the host moralized a lot, drawing very general lessons for China's current situation. This was more boring, but easier to understand than 7th century politics.

For some reason I can't see the 51st episode in YouKu. The next one available to me is 52nd. This happened with a few previous episodes.

[MorkTheFiddle]

Finished the 50th episode of the Luo-gical Thinking show. Went through 9 minutes and 6 seconds of it in 1 hour, 1 minute and 49 seconds. This gives a multiple of 6.79, which is much better than my previous multiples for that episode.

Your method of gauging your progress interests me. Sometimes I calculate how many words per minute I am hearing. Do you know how many words per episode you are listening to?

[Glossy]

Your method of gauging your progress interests me. Sometimes I calculate how many words per minute I am hearing. Do you know how many words per episode you are listening to?

I don't measure words per minute for this exercise. I don't have a transcript. If I did, I could get characters per minute. But the show's host talks at a pretty consistent pace. These are prepared monologues about books he's read. I don't think his words per minute rate varies much. MY words per minute comprehension rate varies by topic and through time, as I improve. I don't measure it directly, but I think my method works well enough here. It wouldn't work for movies though.

If it took me 60 minutes to listen to 10 minutes of a show, I record a multiple of 6.

I've plotted this multiple over time.

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The four disconnected lines there show my progress with material of four different levels of difficulty. As I improved within a level, the line went down. Then I switched to listening to something more difficult. So the line jumped up. The first three segments are different levels of ChinesePod. The last segment represents this Luo-gical Thinking show that I'm now listening to. All of these lines are 40-period moving averages. Not 40-day averages because I sometimes miss a day.

I've measured my reading speed in words per minute:

LangProficiency8-18.png

That table is from 2018. My Chinese reading and listening comprehension have improved since then. Everything else has remained the same. Obviously, the same amount of information will be represented by a different number of words in different languages. My adjusted words per minute number is an attempt to account for that. All the numbers in that table that are on a 10-point scale are subjective estimates. I should measure my listening comprehension objectively some day, in words per minute.

[Glossy]

I don't have a transcript.

Well, I have subtitles. But I can't paste them into MS Word and use its word count feature. Plus, I think my method isn't much worse at measuring progress.