HAC 2018 - Karavinka

[Karavinka]

This is a log of my feeble attempts at multiple languages. Four of them.

Some of them I have studied for a long time, but I only have a half-ass competency in them. I want to see if I can make them more like whole-ass. Those are French and German. The other two, I have tried to learn in the past but only have minimal traces left in my brain. Even bringing them up to half-ass level would be an achievement. Those are Spanish and Russian.

And while I'm at this, I'm taking a leisurely approach. My primary project will remain Turkish for the foreseeable future, and this TAC will not really be much of "total" annihilation, but more like a half-hearted one. Let's call it HAC instead -- HalfassHalfhearted Annihilation Challenge.

As for the materials, it's nothing and everything. Even for Spanish and Russian, I've decided to do without textbooks. But it still helps to have a measurestick of where I am and how much progress I've made so far, so that's why I decided to start this log. My sources will be anything I come across in those languages that piques my interest, and they'll be stored in Anki. For the ease of management, all four languages share the same deck and are color-coded. What management? Even if I don't feel like to review, say, French -- I will have to do all four languages as I come across them in Anki.

As of Dec 29, 2017:

* German: 152
* French: 279
* Spanish: 90
* Russian: 14

Total 535

Why so little in Russian? Because Russian was added as the last minute decision. I may drop this, if I decide Russian deserves a fully dedicated own project like Turkish. This deck has been going on for a while, actually, since late October... shows how little work I've put into it over the time. If I'm keeping a blog, I'll be more motivated to actually work on the deck. Hopefully.

What's the goal? Well, first of all, let's get them all to some respectable number in four digits. The commonly cited magic number of the sentence methods seems to be 10,000 but I'm not in a rush to reach that number. I've done it already once with German, and reaching 10,000 (actually some 13k) in a year took some serious dedication. ...Wait, isn't German there on the list? Yes. Back then, I used to pour in sentences en masse from textbooks, grammars, conversation guides, etc -- while that got me pass Goethe B2, I don't think the German in my old deck was authentic enough. Maybe I'll talk about it in more detail later.

Along with the current Turkish project, this may be the year I finally break away from the artificial textbook language that no one without brain damage would actually use. Some of my cards are banal and stupid, they vary in length, but at least none will be from any "resource." Almost heartbreakingly heretical for a language nerd, I've grown sick and tired of them, which is why I only chose modern languages this year.

A few examples. Each line or paragraph is one card each, and some of them contain vocabulary notes as well but I'm going to omit them here.

Naja, das ist es jedenfalls, was ich mir ständig einrede, damit ich vor lauter Nervosität nicht umkippe.

Rise hat mir eine wirklich lange Mail geschrieben. Sie schrieb darüber, wie frustriert sie über unsere kurzen Gespräche war, wie sie nicht den Mut fand, mir zuvor eine Mail zu schicken.. ..darüber, dass der Anhänger, den sie für mich gemacht hatte, genauso aussah, wie einen, den sie für sich selbst gemacht hatte, nur in einer anderen Farbe.. und darüber dass sie das Stofftaschentuch, was ich ihr schenkte, immer bei sich trug, aber nie benutzte.

Muy pronto nos tendremos que enfrentar al fin del mundo. Sin embargo, ustedes que ahora están aquí conmigo... ¡Todos ustedes serán salvados!

Los seres humanos no volvimos a pisar la luna ni fuimos más allá. Supongo que, por como se ven las cosas, ya estaré muerto mucho antes de que se pueda sacar un boleto de ida y vuelta desde la Tierra hasta Alfa Centauri.

Какой чудесный на улице день.
Цветенье цветов, и птицы поют.
В эти дни, такие дети как ты...
Должны гореть в аду.

Я прошу, остановись, моя Валькирия. Здесь же все иначе, это вовсе не игра. Кнопки перезапуска здесь просто нет, и если умирают - значит, навсегда.

Un tranquille filet de fumée bleue s'élève dans les airs.

Il y avait d'autres personnes dans la rue ― peut-être une ou deux femmes au foyer qui rentraient chez elles après avoir fait les courses, et des jeunes qui allaient à la même fac que moi. Mais c'était loin d'être bondé. Cependant, le trajet jusqu'à l'université ce jour-là était décidément différent des autres jours. Tous ceux qui croisaient mon chemin me dévisageaient. Et je suis sûr à cent pourcent que bien que c'était parfaitement calme ― presque trop pour que je ne l'entende pas ― chacun d'entre eux lâchait une espèce de gloussement en passant à côté de moi. Et ça, j'en étais persuadé.

This wonderful deck is titled 西戎雜話, as I have a chuunibyou habit of naming all my Anki decks with 4 Chinese letters. Meant to mean Miscellaneous Dialects of Western Barbarians. I think it's fitting.

That said, I'm not sure what this thread will really be all about. I don't think I'm going to analyze Spanish or Russian in a way similar to my Turkish thread; that takes a lot of time. We'll see. Maybe I'll come up with an idea once the thread is up.

[voron]

Какой чудесный на улице день.
Цветенье цветов, и птицы поют.
В эти дни, такие дети как ты...
Должны гореть в аду.

Lol this was noir.

It'd be interesting to see your dissecting Russian (my native language) in the same way you do Turkish, but ok ...

"Hac" is actually a word in Turkish (and Arabic) which means "pilgrimage":
https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hac

[księżycowy]

I like the idea of a HAC. Sounds intriguing. (I'd say relaxing, but I'm not sure how relaxing HACing actually is. )

I'll be interested to see what you post here.

This wonderful deck is titled 西戎雜話, as I have a chuunibyou habit of naming all my Anki decks with 4 Chinese letters. Meant to mean Miscellaneous Dialects of Western Barbarians. I think it's fitting.

[Karavinka]

2017/12/30

152
279 → 297
90
14 → 25

Total 535 → 564

Hm, that looks pretty. I think the first good use of this year's HAC is to control the next-day review counts for Turkish deck. Adding 10~30 cards per day can give some unwieldy number of reviews in Anki in a short time. I've been facing 100~120 reviews last few days from a deck of 1146; that's a bit of a problem.

Какой чудесный на улице день.
Цветенье цветов, и птицы поют.
В эти дни, такие дети как ты...
Должны гореть в аду.

Lol this was noir.

It'd be interesting to see your dissecting Russian (my native language) in the same way you do Turkish, but ok ...

"Hac" is actually a word in Turkish (and Arabic) which means "pilgrimage":
https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hac

Haha, I hadn't thought about Hajj... but I like the coincidence. And that card is from the same source with my very first Turkish card on the first post of the thread.

Dışarıda çok güzel bir gün
Kuşlar şarkı söylüyor, çiçekler açıyor
Böyle günlerde senin gibi çocuklar...
Chennem'de yanmalı

It originates as a video game quote. Well, I think it's likely that Russian will be the problem child on the list, as I can enjoy some transfer for Spanish from French. But I'm not entirely blank about Russian -- it doesn't mean I know much of the language, but I know some things about the language -- because I once tried to study it. If I were to give it a full project, it'd be skipping the first phase and moving directly to the expressions.

I like the idea of a HAC. Sounds intriguing. (I'd say relaxing, but I'm not sure how relaxing HACing actually is. )

I'll be interested to see what you post here.

This wonderful deck is titled 西戎雜話, as I have a chuunibyou habit of naming all my Anki decks with 4 Chinese letters. Meant to mean Miscellaneous Dialects of Western Barbarians. I think it's fitting.

The hardest thing about language learning is trying hard. I'll tire myself. I don't want to tire myself. A language shouldn't be a 100m track, it should be a leisurely hike... And I'm too tired already to make a full speed in any case.

[vijayjohn]

"Hac" is actually a word in Turkish (and Arabic) which means "pilgrimage":
https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hac

Voron, I'm a moron. Sometimes at least. It's been three days, and I literally just realized why you suddenly mentioned hac. Before that, I was like "wait, Karavinka said something about hac?? When did he say that? I don't see it on this thread. It must have been on his Turkish thread!"

[Karavinka]

2017/12/30 → 2018/01/04

152 → 191
297 → 298
90 → 115
25 → 35

Total 564 → 639

Weird. I don't remember being in German mood.

I can't really tell yet if this kind of one-deck-to-rule-them-all a.k.a. kitchen sink approach makes any sense in terms of acquiring a new language, but I feel like it's a nice way to maintain what I've already learned. And the fact that I can't predict what language the next card even is actually adds to the fun of the review. Forcing the brain to shuffle through multiple languages may not sound appealing to everyone, but I think it works well for someone with a short attention like me.

I'm fancying what if I add yet another language to the deck. Well, that would mean first slowing everything else down, but there are only so many colors to really contrast with each other. Still, I'm reserving green and violet for certain languages in mind. Maybe HAC 2019.

In the mean time, I'll pick one random, long-ish card per language that was recently added since the last thread update, so I have something to stare at when I am in front of a monitor screen with web access but not allowed to use the phone. What kind of situation is that, you might ask? It's called work. The French card gets chosen by default.

Eine Tür scheint die Beine einer Spinne an ihre Oberfläche gesteckt zu haben. Eine andere sieht aus, als hätten dutzende blutverschmierte Hände dagegen geklopft, im Versuch sie zu öffnen. Eine andere wiederum scheint ein lebendes feuchtes Auge auf sich zu haben. Eine andere ist bestickt mit Neonlichtern, wie die in den gefährlichen Teilen der Stadt, wo man fast schon Kopfschmerzen von den hellen, blinkenden Lichtern bekommen könnte …

Para las personas que se mantienen buscando maneras para hacer amigos, ellos notarán la información oculta en este anuncio. Por otra parte, las personas que no tienen algún problema social, sólo leerán el párrafo y lo dejarán. En otras palabras, no necesitamos escribir explícitamente la vergonzosa razón de 'se buscan amigos'- y aún así podemos conseguir personas con las mismas metas que se nos unan.

Вообще-то, Судзумия Харухи почти наверняка действительно стремилась вызвать НЛО, демонов или даже открыть портал в другое измерение. Наверное, провозилась на площадке всю ночь, но ничего не вышло, и она была жутко разочарована, будто весь смысл ее жизни был потерян.

Pour un agent rationnel, ces coûts irrécupérables ne devraient pas peser dans la balance pour les choix qui sont réalisés après qu'ils ont été engagés. En pratique cependant, ils interviennent souvent dans le raisonnement, du fait de l'aversion à la perte. On désigne en anglais ce biais par le terme de sunk cost fallacy.

[Karavinka]

Something happened. I made a little decision while taking a shower, and acted upon it -- it's more prudent to cut the losses before getting too late. The HAC deck now looks like this.

191
115
355
370

What happened to Russian? I can't remember the words. I was a bit overconfident after making through the initial vocabulary roadblock with Turkish.

What happened with Turkish was that I relied on the translations whose originals I could cite verbatim, so I could peg the Turkish words into the known contexts -- but more importantly in retrospect, I was "reviewing" the entire deck almost every day to identify different pieces of grammar, during which I saw and read the same cards many more times than Anki would show me. And I still left this comment:

91 Cards.

The pace is a bit slow, as there's only so much I can remember at once. I find myself intentionally tapping 'Hard' on Anki even when I supposedly understood the sentence. Fine, it's a part of the process.

Russian is out. I'll need to think of a different tactic and give it a full project that it deserves. After Turkish.

And what the hell is Mandarin doing there? Well, Mandarin was actually my primary learning project from Aug~Oct of 2017, which came to a standstill when this idiot came up with a suicidal idea that became the Turkish project. The last Mandarin sentence was added on Nov 7, which coincides with the time around which Turkish became more time-demanding. In short, Mandarin died when Turkish became a thing.

A deck of 370 doesn't sound like much for a three-month project, but the Chinese deck originally included Classical and Post-classical as well, with the total of +600 cards, and of course those got purged in the Cultural Revolution. But more importantly, most of the three-month project was spent building this.



This is not a sentence deck, this is a pure Hanzi deck, all traditional. There are variant forms, but hardly any Simplified vs Traditional duplicates. Say, 斗 is listed primarily as dou3 as it's a measure word in Traditional, and only secondarily as a Simplified of 鬥/鬪 dou4.

After cramming 3k characters, I took a step back and refrained from adding more to this deck so the number of reviews per day would calm down as the cards mature. The deck is now pretty mature, and adding Mandarin sentences shouldn't be much harder than adding Spanish sentences by this point. Maybe not, it's still very possible I haven't learned my lesson yet.

RIP Russian and the diachronical Chinese project. Given there's only so much time and energy I can spare, I can't do all the things. One day I'll Frankenstein them back to life.

So after the purge and merge, the HAC sentence deck of the four languages had to be renamed because Mandarin, barbarous it might be, is not Western. The pitiable deck is now called 中級煉獄 -- "Intermediate Purgatory."

----------------------

Unrelated to HAC, but I might leave a note of the current status of my Anki decks.

中文字譜 (3040)
Hanzi deck discussed above. The name comes from the Chinese title of the book Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary, though it contains quite a lot of characters not found in the book.

中級煉獄 (1031)
"The Intermediate Purgatory", the HAC.

北海隣語 (554)
"Neighboring Languages to the North Sea", this is the gulag where Manchu and Ainu live. The last new card was from Sep 17, i.e. this was the victim of the Chinese project, which in turn became the victim of the Turkish project. But still, the deck is sizable enough to have core words repeat each other so this isn't much of a strain on memory. Yet.

漢和夷音 (309)
"Sino-Japanese Barbarian Sounds", this is a Japanese word deck, which contains readings of Kanji compounds one cannot normally guess, such as proper names, historical words (e.g. 撐犂孤塗単于とうりことぜんう; a regal title of Xiongnu kings), onyomi of names from China (浙江せっこう; Zhejiang) and Korea (平壌へいじょう; Pyongyang) as well as a few technical words (天王星型惑星てんのうせいがたわくせい; Uranian Planet)

西海鐵勒 (1213)
"Black Sea Turks", the Spoiler Alert: Turkish. Both 西海 and 鐵勒 are antiquated names for what they refer to, because chuunibyou.

[Karavinka]

Total: 1117

191 → 222
115 → 135
355 → 367
370 → 393

Something I noticed a couple of days ago: I noticed I was reading German cards somewhat slower than French or even Spanish. Although I have logged in far much more time dealing with German than Spanish in my lifetime, I haven't really listened to German recently, whereas I was actively seeking out spoken Spanish. This is useful; if my brain can't shift gears to read a certain language right away, it means that language needs some extra attention.

How am I finding Spanish? I do find it really easy to get into at first, but I'm pretty sure that this will not last forever. Not only I'm completely passive (which I am convinced is the right thing to do after all), a lot of features of the language seem ... how should I say, delicate. Easy to understand, but hard to distinguish and still harder to produce correctly. After all, it's a Romance language, and I don't think Romance languages are by any goddamn means "easy." It's a noob bait that will bite you hard in the end.

On that note, I've modified the deck style a bit for French. Now it has cards that look like this.

En échange, il y aura une condition. Si ton amour se concrétise, je voudrais que tu me rédiges un rapport qui me tiendrait [...] courant de la progression de ta relation!
----
au

Et évidemment, après avoir rejoint le club pour une raison aussi débile, je m'étais retrouvé [...] jouer au solitaire à chaque réunion. Et pendant les temps libres en groupe, je jouais aux cartes dans la salle bondée avec des premières et des terminales. Mais qu'est-ce qu'on foutait franchement ? On aurait clairement pu passer notre temps à faire des choses bien plus intéressantes que ça.
----
à

Mais, ça aurait été terrible si j'avais ce genre de pensées à son regard. Alors, je faisais extrément attention pour ne pas montrer mes véritables sentiments. J'ai essayé [...] montrer le plus d'affection possible.
----
de

Cloze deletions. The eternal questions of à versus de, en versus dans, and some of the pesky words like donc. So far it's been a few days, and adding cloze doesn't seem to slow down my reading too much. That's a relief. I don't want to make these hard; it has to be easy, and it just needs to make me pay a bit of extra attention to the little words. French is still a test-bed for this; I'll let this go on for a while, and I might do the same for German and Spanish if I conclude it's worth the extra effort.

Because -- when I have to pause and think which of those little words I need, and especially when I find myself guessing, I cannot possibly become anywhere near fluent. The worst thing that could happen is to make a wrong guess, still manage to get my point across and get a nod from a French speaker. My brain will think it's done the right thing and will do it again. This is but a recipe for failure, it's going to take that much extra effort to unlearn.

Practice doesn't make perfect, it makes failures, which can range from pronunciation and accent and all the way down to the fine points of word choice. I struggled enough of this with English. I, in fact, still do. When I speak English, I pay more attention to my tongue than when I speak Japanese. This may sound ironic, but I lapse back to Korean accent when I don't pay attention in English, but not in Japanese, because -- I believe -- I didn't practice and didn't develop a fossilized failure accent in the first place.

-----

Speaking of unlearning failures, dans is one of the hardest words in French for me. Thanks to a stupid bitch some ten years ago. I took French 101 as I just wanted some relief and easy credit in college. Yes, that was a stupid reason to take a course. One of the students asked about the difference between en and dans, and this was the answer. "When I think of dans, I think of something like, inside a box."

For whatever fucking reason, I cannot unlearn this. What she said was not necessarily wrong; it was simply too narrow. But -- again, for whatever fucking reason -- it's stuck in my brain and keeps haunting me. Whenever I try to use dans in a context that is not spatial with clearly delineated borders, I cannot help but pause and re-think. And of course, if I have to pause and re-think, it hurts fluency and adds frustration. My cards say otherwise:

- Je me retrouve régulièrement dans cet état d'oubli total de soi.
- Tout le campus semble avoir été passé à l'eau pure et l'air aseptisé. La haute société dans toute son horreur.
- Je crois qu'il s'agit d'un cas très spécial, comme indiqué dans l'alinea cinq.
- Parfois au-dehors, les passants parlaient dans un dialecte incompréhensible.
- Dans ce cas, peut-être serais-je en mesure de vous porter conseil...

While I did get some easy credits, that bitch and her "French 101" left me with a damage that I still cannot repair. In fact, this indeed is the highest priority failure that I hope to remedy with cloze deletions.

[dEhiN]

What do the arrows plus increase in numbers indicate? How many new cards you've added in that language since the last time you did an update? Or how many new cards you've learned? Or both?

[Karavinka]

What do the arrows plus increase in numbers indicate? How many new cards you've added in that language since the last time you did an update? Or how many new cards you've learned? Or both?

The number of cards in that language as of the last update → the number of cards as of the new update.

[dEhiN]

What do the arrows plus increase in numbers indicate? How many new cards you've added in that language since the last time you did an update? Or how many new cards you've learned? Or both?

The number of cards in that language as of the last update → the number of cards as of the new update.

What about the number of cards you've studied? Is that the same number? Or how many (new) cards do you go through a day?

[Karavinka]

What do the arrows plus increase in numbers indicate? How many new cards you've added in that language since the last time you did an update? Or how many new cards you've learned? Or both?

The number of cards in that language as of the last update → the number of cards as of the new update.

What about the number of cards you've studied? Is that the same number? Or how many (new) cards do you go through a day?

That depends. After all, Anki is an SRS and I won't see every card every day.



This is what my last thirty days of HAC deck look like. Blue shows the new cards, and it says I've reviewed 67 cards per day on average. There aren't as much activity past 20 days, which is before I started re-thinking about this deck, and the number of new cards I add per day can vary. I'm only keeping track of the total deck size here, because I think that's the most important number after all. The rightmost column of 0d is today; Anki says I've studied 80 cards in 27 minutes today. That'd be about 7 mins per language on average. Since I don't drive, most of Anki reviews get done on the train.

Reviews are important, but the real time-consuming part is adding. Since I'm not using a premade phrasebook, I have to read stuff in any of the four languages to find stuff to add. Often I add only one language at a time, and I'd work on mining sentences from a different language at another time, though that depends on how much time and energy I have on the day. There are quite a lot of new cards yesterday, and those new cards are mostly Mandarin and Spanish.

When I feel like Anki shows me too many cards for review, I just stop adding new cards for a while. The cards interval will get longer, and I will start seeing less cards.

[dEhiN]

review count.jpg

This is my review count for my whole collection, because I split my decks up per language per resource (I've posted more pics of my decks and breakdown on Luís's TAC).

My process of acquiring new vocab is haphazard. I mostly add single words, though I have a few sentences. I use a notebook, and I write any new words down in the notebook first. Then, after a while, I will go back and add those new words to Anki. My biggest issue right now is balancing catch-up on the new cards with adding more new cards. I originally started using Anki back in 2014, and went through two different periods where I used it for a bit and then stopped. I finally started again last year in January 2017. And each time I stopped, I would reset the cards. So that means I have had to go through all the cards I added from 2014 - 2016, as well as whatever I added in 2017. I've gone through periods where I've tried to do 15 or 20 new cards per day, but that quickly escalates the number of reviews, mostly because my learning steps are 10 minutes, 2 hours, and then 24 hours. Lately I've been keeping it to about 8-10 new cards a day, and I just try to space out when I add more new cards to Anki.

Here's my breakdown of cards type:

cards type.jpg

[Karavinka]

review count.jpg

This is my review count for my whole collection, because I split my decks up per language per resource (I've posted more pics of my decks and breakdown on Luís's TAC).

My process of acquiring new vocab is haphazard. I mostly add single words, though I have a few sentences. I use a notebook, and I write any new words down in the notebook first. Then, after a while, I will go back and add those new words to Anki. My biggest issue right now is balancing catch-up on the new cards with adding more new cards. I originally started using Anki back in 2014, and went through two different periods where I used it for a bit and then stopped. I finally started again last year in January 2017. And each time I stopped, I would reset the cards. So that means I have had to go through all the cards I added from 2014 - 2016, as well as whatever I added in 2017. I've gone through periods where I've tried to do 15 or 20 new cards per day, but that quickly escalates the number of reviews, mostly because my learning steps are 10 minutes, 2 hours, and then 24 hours. Lately I've been keeping it to about 8-10 new cards a day, and I just try to space out when I add more new cards to Anki.

Here's my breakdown of cards type:

cards type.jpg

I took a look at your decks on Luis's thread. We might go to the Anki thread, but if I were to make any suggestion, you might want to simplify it a bit? I try not to create too many decks because that creates extra steps: moving from one deck to another, I may be tempted to stop after finishing one deck. I find it harder to go through 30 cards spread in 3 decks than 50 cards in the same deck, as the inertia works in my favor.

At the same time, the daily review counts will decrease eventually once you consume all "unseen" cards and the card interval gets longer in average. And you'll come across decks with just 5~6 reviews per day, eventually. That's just an extra bother even to click it by then. When I see a deck that I haven't added anything for a while, and the review counts get ridiculously low per day, I see that deck isn't going anywhere. And when I see a deck that is not going anywhere, I delete. The Chinese deck wasn't going anywhere at that rate, so I purged a big chunk of it (everything not Modern Mandarin) and merged Mandarin to HAC.

This is why, despite some long-ish uses of Anki, most of my decks are still relatively small and new. There were times I didn't use Anki at all, and I don't hoard cards that I've added in the past, as the moment I stop using the deck is the moment I delete it. Why would you reschedule old cards? Maybe you can just get rid of some of them. Where is the Japanese sentence deck? I built one in the past, and saw no more use of it, now it's gone.

I mostly prefer to use sentences rather than vocabulary, because of that exact reason. Basic sentence structures and vocabulary that I have learned from my _old_ German deck that I used for learning German years ago -- would repeat themselves again so long as I dump in sentences, because languages use finite set of vocabulary and grammar. I'm contemplating deleting Manchu-Ainu shared deck right now, because I don't see myself adding anything new to the deck for a long time. Not letting it slide so it can get rescheduled later, just deleting altogether. If I go back to Manchu later, I'll start adding new sets of sentences, and old vocabulary will also reappear. The time is not wasted.

And as for making cards based on a certain resource -- I think there's a certain aspect of human psyche that works against us. When we add vocabulary or example sentences from a textbook, we want to add everything from one chapter at a time, because we want to make sure everything is covered. And as a result, we end up creating a severely cluttered deck. You probably have vocabulary cards that appear only once or twice in the entire book that you find hard to remember. That's a clutter. And after all, your goal is to learn the language, not a book.

I try not to leave any unseen card for more than 24 hours. I don't trust my brain. They should get into the review cycle as soon as they're added, because, say -- if I break my rule, grab a Turkish phrasebook, and dump in 500 new phrases, I won't be able to review all of them at once. Say, I learn 50 per day. It's going to take 10 days for the unseen cards to run out, and who knows what I'll remember on day 10. The more time they remain unseen, the more likely they'll become clutter.

In the same way, I don't keep any yellow cards -- marked as leech -- as that's a sign telling me to delete it altogether. No worries, if it's important, the things I need to learn from the sentence - vocabulary or grammar piece - will resurface again in different cards, in different contexts. Anki reviews can get very painful if you let your decks get cluttered with the stuff you can't handle.

And well, this is my whole collection. This is still manageable because I spend very little time per card, and when I see a card that bogs me down in the process, I actually delete it on the fly. Again, this is the mantra -- if it's important, it'll be repeated again, in different cards. Since I usually see 50~80 reviews for my pure Hanzi deck, you can guesstimate how many sentence-paragraph length cards I read per day.

[Karavinka]

Total: 1165

Let's make this into a dog race. I wonder which one will come in the first place by Dec 31.

393 → 393
367 → 383
222 → 221
135 → 168

This is kind of sad. This whole thing kind of got left behind for almost a week. At least I tell myself I wasn't lazy; the card count went up pretty fast in Turkish in the mean time. 1445 → 1620.

I actually added 2 cards to German and deleted 3. I wouldn't go as far to call it "curating", but even if I do not necessarily like the card, I should at least feel positive. If a card doesn't remind me of anything in particular, it shouldn't be there.

I think adding cloze to French was a good idea so far. I used to confuse the gender of the word service. I don't think I will anymore. Although I don't necessarily cloze every new card; that's pointless extra work. So far, 30 cards in French are clozed.

And although I just talked about it a few days ago, I don't have a Manchu/Ainu gulag deck anymore. It's purged, all 554 cards are permanently deleted. Not only it stopped progressing, it came to a point of being clutter. A deck needs a sizable daily review count to be healthy, and it needs constant input to remain healthy.

[Karavinka]

Total: 1269

383 → 444
393 → 403
221 → 254
168 → 168

I haven't added anything to Spanish for four days? I didn't even realize it.

And a certain language passed to the first place. Screw the dog race, I expected this. Being physically in Montreal, there's more drive to improve la quelconque langue than others. Though that number looks a bit ominous. I swear, I didn't intend it.

Et bien, il y a une voix dans ma tête que je devrais commencer à pratiquer à la fin. C'est bien compris, mais encore je m'en doute: la quéstion est quand. Peut-être ce moment est encore loin; ou ce s'est déjà passé et je suis prêt. Je ne sais pas. Mais lorsque je me trouve encore en doute, je me permettrais un peu plus de temps? Non, assez de ces salamalecs, je vais commencer.

[Karavinka]

Total: 1338

444 → 460
403 → 411
254 → 278
168 → 189

To be completely honest here, I barely worked on any of this since the last entry on Jan 21. If I try to handle both Turkish and a bit of this on the same regular working day, I end up rushing a bit, and end up creating cards that I delete later as I don't reflect enough on each card that I add.

The deck is now pretty mature, and adding Mandarin sentences shouldn't be much harder than adding Spanish sentences by this point. Maybe not, it's still very possible I haven't learned my lesson yet.

And it seems that I clearly didn't learn my lesson. Well, the reason is because I keep a separate Hanzi deck. When I'm not sure how to read a Hanzi, there's a few steps of extra procedure.

I back-track to the Hanzi deck to see if I have it there in the first place. Since that deck is intentionally kept all Traditional, that means I need to track its traditional form, and see if Anki refuses to add it as it won't allow duplicates. If there is no duplicate and the character isn't there, I look it up in my Hanzi book -- Chinese Characters: A Geneology and Dictionary, and I make a check mark on the book. If the character's not in the book, I generally use Wiktionary's definition.

And I may add additional characters that look and sound similar, whether the character is used in the sentences or not. After all, I am familiar enough with them to break them down into components so that I can remember at least to recognize. All in all, this takes more time.

The deck has grown a little, now it contains 3101 unique Hanzi. I still feel very illiterate.

[Karavinka]

I haven't been updating this thread for a while. The reason is: I am not happy with the way this deck is going.

Understandably, dealing with five languages (four + Turkish) is just not a good idea. And I need to make this deck as low-maintenance as possible.

Two languages will need to be cut. One will be Spanish, as it is the language with the least investment of my life time so far. Being physically in Quebec these days, French will need to stay. Either German or Mandarin will need to die. I'm not even going to gulag them into a separate deck; it's going to be a purge.

And I'll purge a lot of cards remaining in the deck as well. The more and more I look at them, the more and more I realize that I just don't like many of the cards. They are usually the ones added after I started making this thread, that I felt like "I have to feed something into the deck." I might do that over next weekend. It's going to be fun trimming down the deck.

[Karavinka]

The hell with it. Might as well do it when I felt like it. Goodbye Spanish and German. For now.





The backgrounds are from eyecatch images of an anime series Gamers!. The one used for French originally had green neon color, but since green is reserved for Turkish, I turned it blue, and darkened both images to make the words stand out. The font colors themselves got whitened and less saturated, to make it easily readable against the dark background. The font size is Open Sans 17 for French, and Microsoft JhengHei 20 for Mandarin.

Why dark? Well, one day these will get merged with Turkish. One day. And I don't want Anki to give me a seizure. This batch of languages will have to share the dark background theme.

[Karavinka]

Burada yazılı uzun zaman oldu.

I'm deleting both French and Mandarin sets.

411 Cards
547 Cards

I have a different plan altogether for French which isn't compatible with the cards I have gathered so far. As for Mandarin, I'm not quite happy with the cards I have right now, although I cannot pinpoint what exactly I'm not happy about. As a result, this thread will come to a complete halt. It's more likely I'll start separate threads once I can divert some time away from Turkish.