Saim's log 2019-2020

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Saim's log 2019-2020

Postby Saim » 2019-11-08, 10:15

Starting a new log because I'm starting a new phase in life and the old one's gotten a bit long.

Serbian

I will be living in Novi Sad for the time being, so this is a good opportunity to push my Serbian to a more near-native level.

In my experience listening has more of an effect on active vocabulary and fluent expression, whereas reading has more of a direct effect on overall breadth of vocabulary and passive vocabulary. For this reason I will try and do a fair bit of both every day, although if I get hooked on a particular series or book I'll not worry if listening time is eating up reading time or vice versa.

I've also gotten quite good at pitch accent perception but I'll still have to listen a lot for it to fully sink in and for me to assign phonemic pitch to each word.

I have made a lot of sentence cards for Serbian over the past couple of months, but I think I am going to stop now since I spend enough hours reading and listening for it to not really be necessary. Better for me to spend that time making cards for Russian or Urdu, or just listening or reading more Serbian.

Summary: lots of listening, reading (speaking and writing will likely take care of themselves to a large extent, not something I need to plan so much)

Hungarian, French

These are two languages I already understand fairly well so I think it could be time to start doing more output so that I'm more readily able to use them actively and jump straight into speaking them. I might try and do some French classes over Skype or try and write short texts, although I'm not really sure based on what. I think I won't have to do as much for Hungarian

Summary: Some speaking, some writing, a bit of flaschards/listening/reading

Russian

I'd like to push this language closer to where my French and Hungarian are, i.e. to a higher level of aural comprehension. For now I'm going to mostly focus on reading and listening and making flashcards, not bothering to write or speak much.

Summary: Some reading, some listening, lots of flaschards

Urdu

Similar goals to Russian, although this will take much longer due to the sheer amount of vocabulary involved. I have three Urdu textbooks for children with short stories (Oxford's "Hamari Urdu" series), one novel, and two non-fiction books that I will slowly work through. I've learned to enjoy studying Urdu for its own sake and not worry so much about how good my production is, my priority should be to increase my comprehension and reading fluency.

Summary: Some reading, some listening, lots of flaschards

---

Other than all that, I've been jumping around between Mandarin, Arabic, Basque and Turkish a lot but I think I might slow down some of the other ones to push Turkish forward a bit. I'd like to spend some more time watching Turkish series although I'm not sure how to make time for it given the amount of Serbian I want to listen to. Maybe I can watch a season of something in Turkish or Russian for every two seasons of a Serbian series.
Last edited by Saim on 2020-01-06, 0:17, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Saim's log 2019

Postby vijayjohn » 2019-11-08, 19:55

Have you considered posting on forums (here, or Reddit, for example) for the purpose of language practice?

Also maybe we can revive our Turkish study group! :o

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Re: Saim's log 2019

Postby Saim » 2019-11-09, 8:20

vijayjohn wrote:Have you considered posting on forums (here, or Reddit, for example) for the purpose of language practice?


Post what though? :P

Also maybe we can revive our Turkish study group! :o


Sure, using what materials? Voron recommended this TV show:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W31lc7qd_d8

He told me it got better reviews than Hakan: Muhafız and since it's on YouTube rather than Netflix we could potentially watch it together if you have time. The only thing is that the episodes are crazy long, although I guess we can break them down into smaller chunks of twenty or thirty minutes.

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Re: Saim's log 2019

Postby Saim » 2019-11-10, 11:33

Mandarin

I'm going to take a break from Yabla for a while. I think the fact that I can conceivably look up every word in the subtitles makes it too tempting to do so, and that's not really the most efficient way to go about it, this will be more useful when I'm more intermediate. I need to focus on low-hanging fruit if I want to make any serious progress with the limited amount of time I'm willing to put into this, and whatever I can deduce from hard-coded subtitles and Google Translate is probably going to be common enough that it'll be worth studying.

I've decided to start watching the animated series 择天记 with hard-coded subtitles in both English and Chinese. To supplement this I will also look up example sentences in LINE. I've been using the Zhongwen Chinese Popup Dictionary to look up any new words in these sentences (thank god this exists).

I'm going to experiment with a new kind of flashcard to make it easier to cover more ground without burning out.

Image

The first sentence is from 择天记, the rest are from LINE. If I can't figure out the exact sentence, I will only put examples from LINE. I will not be testing myself on these sentences, but I will make sure to read all of them (including the characters, pinyin and translation) during each review. I've also started adding pinyin to the front side of cards, I think I've gotten to the point where I know enough characters that I don't get lazy when I see characters and pinyin side-by-side so testing myself on character > pronunciation > meaning in a single set of cards is probably overkill.

I'm not going to add any audio to these cards. Instead I'll record short sections of 择天记 (i.e. audio from the scenes that I made my flashcards out of) and listen to them on repeat. I'll aim to listen to one of these 1-2 minute recording every day at least once. I will move onto a new recording every time I make another batch of flashcards.

I think 择天记 is a bit closer to my level than 爱情公寓. 爱情公寓's episodes are too long, and it has too much humour, yelling and mumbly/dialectal speech, and a lot of the dialogue is muffled out by the laugh track. 择天记's dialogue is much clearer and most of it is fairly simple. There's also a lot of stuff going on in between dialogue scenes so it's harder to get bored even without the English subtitles, whereas 爱情公寓 mostly relies on its dialogue to further the plot. I've also always loved anime and although 择天记 doesn't have the highest quality animation in history I still find it very watchable. It's much easier for me to rewatch episodes or watch several of them in a row.

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Re: Saim's log 2019

Postby vijayjohn » 2019-11-10, 19:42

I finally remembered the name of that Chinese series my Sichuanese friend recommended to me: 大宅门.
Saim wrote:
vijayjohn wrote:Have you considered posting on forums (here, or Reddit, for example) for the purpose of language practice?


Post what though? :P

Depends on the forum. Here, I generally just look at posts I didn't see before (or even look up old posts sometimes) and see whether there are things I can respond to. For example, I find that the word-association game and especially games like the translation game and TPAM are pretty good practice. (You probably know by now that I also usually post in my personal thread to keep track of errors and quiz myself over vocab, but that's just me, I guess :D).

On Reddit, generally, what I do is to just go to the sub for learning the appropriate language and write a post in that language inviting everybody to talk about whatever in said language. Often, people say, "Suggest a topic to talk about!" (in which case I personally would probably just ask generic questions like "how are you? Where are you from?" etc. I think there has been at least one occasion where someone else suggested a topic first), but honestly, I find that even if you don't, starting a topic like this is enough to generate a decent amount of discussion.
Sure, using what materials? Voron recommended this TV show:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W31lc7qd_d8

He told me it got better reviews than Hakan: Muhafız and since it's on YouTube rather than Netflix we could potentially watch it together if you have time. The only thing is that the episodes are crazy long, although I guess we can break them down into smaller chunks of twenty or thirty minutes.

We could always try doing that and seeing how it goes. :)

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Re: Saim's log 2019

Postby Saim » 2019-11-14, 13:12

Don't want to bother adding this to any flashcard, so I'll just put it here:

چوڑا - mud (~کیچڑ، گُھلی ہوی مٹی); soaked, wet (~بھِیگا)
چَوڑا - broad, wide (~وسیع، کُشادہ)
چُوڑا - sweeper, cleaner
Last edited by Saim on 2019-11-14, 22:20, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Saim's log 2019

Postby Saim » 2019-11-14, 13:16

vijayjohn wrote:I finally remembered the name of that Chinese series my Sichuanese friend recommended to me: 大宅门.


Thanks! I think I'll stick to 动画 for the time being but I'll add this to my catalogue for when I feel ready to take on historical dramas. :)

vijayjohn wrote:Depends on the forum. Here, I generally just look at posts I didn't see before (or even look up old posts sometimes) and see whether there are things I can respond to. For example, I find that the word-association game and especially games like the translation game and TPAM are pretty good practice. (You probably know by now that I also usually post in my personal thread to keep track of errors and quiz myself over vocab, but that's just me, I guess :D).

On Reddit, generally, what I do is to just go to the sub for learning the appropriate language and write a post in that language inviting everybody to talk about whatever in said language. Often, people say, "Suggest a topic to talk about!" (in which case I personally would probably just ask generic questions like "how are you? Where are you from?" etc. I think there has been at least one occasion where someone else suggested a topic first), but honestly, I find that even if you don't, starting a topic like this is enough to generate a decent amount of discussion.


Not bad ideas, I'll see when I have energy for it.

We could always try doing that and seeing how it goes. :)


OK, sounds good! :)

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Re: Saim's log 2019

Postby Saim » 2019-11-15, 21:13

Saim wrote:I'm going to experiment with a new kind of flashcard to make it easier to cover more ground without burning out.

Image


Not bad, but I think single-sentence cards are more efficient, no use putting a bunch of information I won’t read on cards.

I think the reason my Chinese cards were frustrating before was the fact that I had the pinyin on the back rather than the front, which broke my rule against practicing active recall in Anki. From now on I will have the pinyin on the front and just colour in any new characters and their pinyin transcription with the same colour and also add text to speech audio for the examples from LINE. This will also make it easier to review cards with more than one word/character.

I might also try to colour in new words rather than bolding them for other languages, it seems to stick more.

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Re: Saim's log 2019

Postby vijayjohn » 2019-11-18, 3:58

Saim wrote:Thanks! I think I'll stick to 动画 for the time being but I'll add this to my catalogue for when I feel ready to take on historical dramas. :)

Don't feel like you have to add it, though! I was just trying to remember what the name of that series was because your post reminded me of my Sichuanese friend recommending it to me and I'd been struggling to remember it recently. :)
Not bad ideas, I'll see when I have energy for it.

Me too. :lol: (Or I guess just time in my case...).

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Re: Saim's log 2019

Postby Saim » 2019-11-18, 8:22

Mandarin

I've decided to keep going through the Heisig book on Memrise. Last time I switched over from handwriting all the characters from promts in Anki over to just training recognition in Memrise, and it worked alright for a while, but I was doing way too many characters a day (like, more than 20, what was I thinking?). This time I will only do 6 characters a day, that way I think I will be able to cast a wide enough net while not getting overwhelmed by reviews. There's really no rush and there's no sense in learning 3000 characters when I only know a couple hundred words.

It's kind of annoying that you can't "ignore" terms in Memrise's iOS app, but I guess the lessons are made up of 40+ characters so I can go through and check which characters I want to ignore two lessons in advance on the computer and then do all my study on my phone. I will press "ignore" for any characters where I feel fairly comfortable I would recognise them in context because I know at least one word that contains this character, and I will be very generous for what it means to "know" a word (if I vaguely remember that x character is used in y word but don't remember the exact form or pronunciation of the word, that's enough).

Once I can already read Chinese fairly comfortably I might go back through the book handwriting the characters to learn how to write, but that'll probably be several years from now.

vijayjohn wrote:Don't feel like you have to add it, though! I was just trying to remember what the name of that series was because your post reminded me of my Sichuanese friend recommending it to me and I'd been struggling to remember it recently. :)


No, it's actually quite helpful to have a sense of what sort of media exists in a language, I find it helps me to jump straight into reading or watching if I've already heard of it before. For whatever reason if it's something I've only just heard of and it's longer than a couple of minutes/a couple of pages I'm more likely to put it off.

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Re: Saim's log 2019

Postby vijayjohn » 2019-11-18, 20:03

I just learned what 动画 means. :silly:

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Re: Saim's log 2019

Postby Saim » 2019-12-03, 10:17

Mandarin

I'm going to start practicing reading the Chinese Wikipedia. Quite a lot of my Arabic, as basic as it is, was acquired through reading Wikipedia articles, but it was kind of a frustrating experience. I think I've figured out a way to optimise this activity by putting in less effort while spending more time on it. Generally I think a lot of the frustration in studying very linguistically distant languages at the beginner level is not allowing yourself to not understand most of it and focusing on what you can realistically acquire and working on breadth of exposure rather than hyperfocusing on individual words that may or may not be common, so that's a sort of "meta-skill" that I'm going to need to work on if I'm serious about moving beyond "Europe + Urdu" in my language studies.

I think my problem with reading in Arabic was technique: it was too tempting to try and read an entire text rather than jump around and skim for the sake of language exposure. That was exhausting and made me focus on words that were not common enough to help me push to the next level of comprehension. It did work in the sense that I acquired a lot from it but I burned out too quickly for me to be able to take it to the next level. Here is a post where I talk about my plan to read the Arabic Wikipedia.

What I'm going to do instead is set a timer to 20 minutes (for a start, maybe later I'll increase it) and then jump to a new article if I get tired or frustrated rather than stop reading or force myself to read further in the same article; this can even be after a single sentence or just a couple of sentneces, what matters is to just read and not worry about any single article. Wikipedia is ideal for this because of all the links to related subjects littered throughout the article.

Of course, I'll be reading with the Zhongwen Popup Chinese Dictionary, that makes this a lot easier as well.

I might also copy words that repeat a lot to a separate Google doc and then look up other examples of these word in the LINE dictionary, but I won't do this on the same day and if I see that this is making me less likely to spend time reading I'll stop. That is to say, I'll note down some words from articles I read to look up the next day, but only if I also decide to keep reading something else. I think this would be a good way to do "interleaving" rather than trying to get through a single bloc of information in any given session.

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Re: Saim's log 2019

Postby Osias » 2019-12-03, 14:24

About reading wikipedia: I've subscribed to several feeds of 'new pages' on my favorite RSS reader. (Oh, how I miss Google Reader) So far it's been an interesting experience. Maybe I'll eventually get so bored I won't anything from this, but so far even spams and vandalism are teaching me.
2017 est l'année du (fr) et de l'(de) pour moi. Parle avec moi en eux, s'il te plait.

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Re: Saim's log 2019

Postby Saim » 2019-12-03, 15:35

Osias wrote:About reading wikipedia: I've subscribed to several feeds of 'new pages' on my favorite RSS reader. (Oh, how I miss Google Reader) So far it's been an interesting experience. Maybe I'll eventually get so bored I won't anything from this, but so far even spams and vandalism are teaching me.


That’s not a bad idea, although it seems more suited to languages were I can already get the gist out of articles at least. Which reader do you use?

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Re: Saim's log 2019

Postby Osias » 2019-12-03, 16:15

2017 est l'année du (fr) et de l'(de) pour moi. Parle avec moi en eux, s'il te plait.

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Re: Saim's log 2019

Postby Saim » 2019-12-08, 14:07

Looks like I’m going to have to learn Aragonese. Thought I might end up skipping at least one branch of Ibero-Romance, but no.

http://alacarta.aragontelevision.es/pro ... 22019-0928

One thing I’ve noticed so far is that they seem to say “qué fas” (in Catalan “què fas” means “what are you doing”) to mean “how are you”. Coming from Catalan it sounds weird when someone gets invited to be interviewed and are immediately asked “qué fas?”.

Osias wrote:https://www.inoreader.com/


Thanks! :)

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Re: Saim's log 2019

Postby Osias » 2019-12-08, 14:15

When you create your account, tell us so we (actually it's just me) can add you as a friend/contact/follow you.
2017 est l'année du (fr) et de l'(de) pour moi. Parle avec moi en eux, s'il te plait.

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Re: Saim's log 2019

Postby Saim » 2019-12-08, 14:20

Osias wrote:When you create your account, tell us so we (actually it's just me) can add you as a friend/contact/follow you.


I’m “saimdusan” there. :)

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Re: Saim's log 2019

Postby Osias » 2019-12-08, 14:30

I couldn't find you. Do you have 'social features' enabled?
2017 est l'année du (fr) et de l'(de) pour moi. Parle avec moi en eux, s'il te plait.

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Re: Saim's log 2019

Postby Saim » 2019-12-08, 14:48

Osias wrote:I couldn't find you. Do you have 'social features' enabled?


I didn’t even realise that was a thing. :lol: I just turned it on.


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