Postby Karavinka » 2018-05-15, 7:45
4117 Kart / 1605 Sayfa
Some observations at this point.
1. Anki cards are harder to read than novels. Yes, because in novels, even if there are a lot of words that I do not understand, so long as I can follow the general story, I do not force myself. Novels also provide a lot more context around; even as I try to make the Anki cards contain meaningful contexts in themselves, this is still not a natural way people read. Further, the expectation with the Anki cards is that I know the damn words that I see on the cards.
2. While I do learn new words from just reading, the pace is pretty slow. French loanwords or new patterns of derivational morphology from known roots are easier and they get added to the passive vocabulary, but that's about it.
3. I am reading extended Turkish more fluently than before, but fluently as in the ease of the reading process, not necessarily the overall comprehension. The known words and familiar constructions are understood as they are, as if I'm reading a language that I already know at an advanced level, and while that is important, the percentage of the known words could definitely see a few more points.
I was thinking about this for the past week, if I want to just press into reading blindly and see if the quantity prevails, or not. I know this is possible, that I have more than enough vocabulary already to force this and reach native-level comprehension. After all, that's how I learned English and Japanese. It somehow happened.
However, that's going to require much longer time and efforts. I'm not looking at 4k or 40k pages of texts (and the equivalent spoken media), but a figure with maybe one more zero at the end if I were to try that route.
To learn efficiently, I need to maximize the marginal utility. I am able to process Turkish much faster after having read 1605 pages of text, and that has helped the listening comprehension tremendously as well. But I'm seeing the diminishing marginal utility of one more page.
So, here's the change of plan. This is the Phase 3.5. As a side-objective of the Phase 3, I'm going to add one more thing:
Create a deck of 7,000 cards
That is, know roughly 3k more words. This is just my hope that the extra 3k words will tip the balance so that I know the language well enough to understand 90% of any given non-technical text. The other remaining 10% will of course be the hardest part to acquire, but a step at a time.
As for the reading goals, I'll modify it slightly: Read 4,000 pages, the original amount I had at the beginning of the Phase 3. If the reading goal goes up to 7k as well, that may delay the final phrase of the experiment a little too much.
Another major reason for this change of plan is that -- I just wasn't feeling like I was progressing enough. When the numbers go up slowly, that does affect the subjective sense of progress. And that in turn affects your motivation, which I must admit has been dropping recently.