Saim's log 2017-2019

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Re: Saim's log 2017-2018

Postby Luís » 2018-08-14, 9:51

Saim wrote:
Ciarán12 wrote:Ehm, because they are 3 different words?
Lit. "You hungry Q"


I mean that the font seems different. Sometimes the characters (i.e. the second two in that sentence) look crisp and nice when I input them into Anki and sometimes they look kind of shit. :hmm:


Are you using Anki's Chinese support plugin? That helps a lot...
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Re: Saim's log 2017-2018

Postby Saim » 2018-08-15, 16:27

Luís wrote:Are you using Anki's Chinese support plugin? That helps a lot...


I downloaded it but it didn't make a difference. I must need to change the settings or something.

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Re: Saim's log 2017-2018

Postby Saim » 2018-08-16, 9:01

Mandarin

I've decided to do screencaps of lessons from Le chinois sans peine and cut out the characters so I'm not relying on the pinyin and translation to understand the text. I think I will do this as a character recognition exercise on days when I don't have any flashcard reviews for Mandarin. First I will try and read it aloud without listening to the audio, then I will read it along with the audio.

Image

My main goal is to associate the characters with phonetic information so I slowly develop an internal reading voice for Mandarin that will make it easier to use reading to study at a later date, and this is the best way I can think of doing that.

I don't have the time or energy to do much handwriting: I'll keep using the Heisig book but I can't see myself doing it every or almost every day. I'll treat it more the way I'd treat a learner's grammar; i.e., as something to skim through and make notes out of rather than as a primary study resource.

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Re: Saim's log 2017-2018

Postby Saim » 2018-08-17, 17:44

Hungarian

While in Debrecen I bought a nice little preteen novel about mice that are also pirates or something. It's also not so long so even while doing intensive reading and then SRS on the new vocabulary I should be able to get through the whole thing (but I'll take it on chapter-by-chapter).

My technique so far has been to read a chapter, underlining all the words I didn't understand or was unsure of in pencil. The next day I add them all into a spreadsheet, and then find example sentences for the words. I add the example sentences to Anki in batches of fifteen or so (the first chapter gave me 80 new words so I should be at this for a while!). Then I rub out the underlines -- my plan is to go back through it after adding all the new words to Anki to see if I understand much more.

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Re: Saim's log 2017-2018

Postby dEhiN » 2018-08-17, 22:10

With the new vocabulary and sentence examples that you're adding to Anki, do you plan to keep going through them essentially ad infinitum, or only review them for say a few months or half a year and then stop? I know the idea with Anki or any SRS is that if you keep reviewing a card, the interval time will grow. So you could eventually be reviewing cards you added a year or more ago, but the interval time for the next review would be another year or so. But I'm just curious if your plan is to eventually phase out these cards once you feel you have a good grasp of the vocabulary and how to use it? (This question is for all your languages.)
Native: (en-ca)
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Inactive: (de)(ja)(yue)(oj)(id)(hu)(pl)(tr)(hi)(zh)(sv)(ko)(no)(it)(haw)(fy)(nl)(nah)(gl)(ro)(cy)(oc)(an)(sr)(en_old)(got)(sux)(grc)(la)(sgn-us)

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Re: Saim's log 2017-2018

Postby Saim » 2018-08-27, 6:19

I've been enjoying vocabulary tag as an activity in my studies of Basque, Turkish and Arabic. It increases the amount of cards I make in a given study session since I look up words from example sentences, translations and definitions rather than having to find new texts to study. Thankfully the elhuyar Basque dictionary has very good example sentences, and bab.la is great for Arabic because all of the sentences are vocalised. :D It makes these three rather difficult languages seem much more manageable.

dEhiN wrote:With the new vocabulary and sentence examples that you're adding to Anki, do you plan to keep going through them essentially ad infinitum, or only review them for say a few months or half a year and then stop? I know the idea with Anki or any SRS is that if you keep reviewing a card, the interval time will grow. So you could eventually be reviewing cards you added a year or more ago, but the interval time for the next review would be another year or so. But I'm just curious if your plan is to eventually phase out these cards once you feel you have a good grasp of the vocabulary and how to use it? (This question is for all your languages.)


I suspend cards if I feel like I've learned them well (for example, I had the card Miért ugat ez a hülye kutya? - Why is that stupid dog barking?, and then this summer when I was in Hungary I heard ugat a couple of times in class and knew I didn't need the card anymore), or alternatively if I feel like I'm sick of them. The latter happens much less now that I'm only reviewing sentences, but when I was training recall of isolated vocabulary it happened all the time.
Last edited by Saim on 2018-10-21, 9:02, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Saim's log 2017-2018

Postby dEhiN » 2018-08-28, 3:04

Not a bad idea.
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Re: Saim's log 2017-2018

Postby Michael » 2018-08-28, 3:27

Wow, you're learning Mandarin now? :o

And I, meanwhile, have been getting into Polish and MSA/Lebanese again. I started flipping through Polish Verbs & Essentials of Grammar 4-or-so days ago; I spoke to my functionally-monolingual godmother again today, and she told me (in Polish), "Just a few days ago you could barely speak Polish, and today you're actually trying to speak it correctly! What's up with that?!" I forgot how much I love the language. It competes with Latin in terms of morphological complexity!
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„Çdo njeri është peng i veprave të veta.‟
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Re: Saim's log 2017-2018

Postby Saim » 2018-09-04, 7:23

German

I am going to stop adding new cards to my deck for a while now, or at the very least limit it to just a couple per week; I'll start adding cards again if I notice my vocabulary plateauing. I've noticed I am able to read internet comments without a dictionary and understand most of it (depending on the topic of course), so I think I've come to the point where it'd be more efficient to use extensive activities to acquire vocabulary. I think watching an entire season of a TV show in German would be a good acttivity for me at this point.

Tomorrow I have a tutoring session in German so we'll see how far my speaking has come along, as well.

Arabic

I'm going to stop adding Arabic sentences to Anki and just do words. I'll keep the audio going, but finding good sentences to mine is just too hard -- glosbe's sentences are all way to long, bab.la fortunately has shorter ones that are even vocalised but the variety is too small (I have to settle for weird sentences with words that are not high-priority all the time). Since I don't care about producing active skills at the moment my goal should be to just recognise the largest amount of word roots possible to eventually make intensive reading less torturous.

Michael wrote:Wow, you're learning Mandarin now? :o


I'm only just wading in. Slow and steady wins the race. :D

So far I have 34 cars in my Mandarin deck, all containing sentences drawn from Assimil (along with the audio cut out from Assimil using audacity).

And I, meanwhile, have been getting into Polish and MSA/Lebanese again. I started flipping through Polish Verbs & Essentials of Grammar 4-or-so days ago; I spoke to my functionally-monolingual godmother again today, and she told me (in Polish), "Just a few days ago you could barely speak Polish, and today you're actually trying to speak it correctly! What's up with that?!" I forgot how much I love the language. It competes with Latin in terms of morphological complexity!


Cieszę się, że znowu się uczysz polskiego. Powodzenia!

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Re: Saim's log 2017-2018

Postby Saim » 2018-09-04, 16:03

Arabic

I've started reading news headlines and adding the new vocabulary to Anki rather than trying to read entire articles. This way I'm exposing myself to native media without biting off more than I can chew, while also working on my vocabulary.

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Re: Saim's log 2017-2018

Postby voron » 2018-09-04, 17:36

Saim wrote:I've started reading news headlines and adding the new vocabulary to Anki rather than trying to read entire articles. This way I'm exposing myself to native media without biting off more than I can chew, while also working on my vocabulary.

Why don't you join Vijay and me in doing the book 'Al-3arabiyya bayna yadak'? Do you find it boring?

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Re: Saim's log 2017-2018

Postby Saim » 2018-09-05, 7:21

Someone on reddit just recommended this great resource for German, Italian, French and Swiss German: http://www.podclub.ch. The Swiss German podcasts are transcribed in German rather than in Swiss German but I'm not sure what better content there is for getting started with Alemannic languages (and for the time being of course the only Germanic language I'm learning is German, and I think I'd sooner revive my Dutch than pick up another one).

voron wrote:Why don't you join Vijay and me in doing the book 'Al-3arabiyya bayna yadak'? Do you find it boring?


I did start yesterday and I've been enjoying it! I finished the first text in Unit 1 and then made sure to understand the exercises (like you I didn't bother writing them out; I almost never do, anyway). I wasn't sure what to post in the Arabic Study Group because you and Vijay are ahead of me and Antea and eskandar aren't using the textbook.

I also watched all of the videos in the study group (not necessarily to completion) and noted down some words from each of them.

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Re: Saim's log 2017-2018

Postby voron » 2018-09-05, 16:27

Saim wrote:I did start yesterday and I've been enjoying it! I finished the first text in Unit 1 and then made sure to understand the exercises (like you I didn't bother writing them out; I almost never do, anyway). I wasn't sure what to post in the Arabic Study Group because you and Vijay are ahead of me and Antea and eskandar aren't using the textbook.

You can write down vocabulary lists or grammar notes, like you do in the Turkish study group, or just any comments about the texts. I like reading such posts.

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Re: Saim's log 2017-2018

Postby Saim » 2018-09-06, 7:26

German

Yesterday I had my first German lesson over Skype. I was able to say quite a lot and didn't have much trouble understanding my tutor (a couple of times new vocabulary tripped me up but in general I understood most of it).

One thing that I need to work on to make my spoken German more functional is time expressions: I know the words Tag, Woche, Monat and Jahr but I don't know what gender they are, nor do I know what prepositions or cases they go with in specific expressions. I need to learn how to say per week (/month/year/day), every week (/month/year/day), x weeks ago, in x weeks...

I think it would also be good for me to do a bit more writing.

voron wrote:You can write down vocabulary lists or grammar notes, like you do in the Turkish study group, or just any comments about the texts. I like reading such posts.


OK. :)

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Re: Saim's log 2017-2018

Postby Saim » 2018-09-08, 11:35

I've been using the LingQ mobile app and I must say it's much more enjoyable and addictive than using it on the computer. I can spend hours and hours on it without getting bored. :)

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Re: Saim's log 2017-2018

Postby Car » 2018-09-08, 12:49

Why do you prefer the app? I prefer the desktop version since it's more comfortable to type on a real keyboard and I spend quite a lot of time adding or editing translations. But nice to see another LingQ user on here. I'm Car2017 over there, should you want to follow me.
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Re: Saim's log 2017-2018

Postby Saim » 2018-09-08, 16:48

Car wrote:Why do you prefer the app? I prefer the desktop version since it's more comfortable to type on a real keyboard and I spend quite a lot of time adding or editing translations. But nice to see another LingQ user on here. I'm Car2017 over there, should you want to follow me.


Followed!

When I'm on my computer I get distracted more easily and keep switching tabs onto Facebook and forums and such whereas on mobile it's too much of a hassle, basically. :lol: So I can sit and read for much longer.

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Re: Saim's log 2017-2018

Postby Car » 2018-09-08, 20:32

Saim wrote:Followed!

When I'm on my computer I get distracted more easily and keep switching tabs onto Facebook and forums and such whereas on mobile it's too much of a hassle, basically. :lol: So I can sit and read for much longer.

Thanks! You're Saim on there? I don't seem to be able to see who's following me.

Yes, that's all too familiar, but actually, I find it worse on mobiles with all the push notifications. But it's one of the reasons why I like my Kindle so much and still use an MP3 player.
Please correct my mistakes!

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Re: Saim's log 2017-2018

Postby Saim » 2018-09-11, 15:53

Besides Lingq, I've also gotten back into Readlang in a big way. What I really love about it is how I can import subtitles into the library and then synchronise them with the YouTube video. It's the easiest way of studying YouTube subtitled videos I've found so far. I've been very slowly going through a bunch of Basque videos subtitles in Basque and I'm really enjoying it; I don't bother to try and "finish" texts because Readlang saves my progress. I also alternate between videos so that I'm increasing exposure (so I'll do two minutes of a six minute video, one minute of a forty minute video, etc. in a single session, rather than trying to complete any of the videos at once).

I'm definitely starting to make away from flashcards and back to natural exposure again. :lol: I think I'll keep making flashcards for more "opaque" languages (including Basque), but for Romance, Germanic and Slavic I find it pretty boring and pointless. I've exported and deleted all of my decks for languages in those families.

EDIT: It seems Euronews Turkish has gone the way of Euronews Arabic and no longer makes videos of their news reports being read out (all the videos are just of the events themselves with no commentary). Great timing, just when I was going to start using it more... thankfully Hungarian, German and Russian are still good.

Car wrote:Thanks! You're Saim on there? I don't seem to be able to see who's following me.


Yep!

Yes, that's all too familiar, but actually, I find it worse on mobiles with all the push notifications. But it's one of the reasons why I like my Kindle so much and still use an MP3 player.


I don't get any notifications from Lingq on Android. :hmm:

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Re: Saim's log 2017-2018

Postby Car » 2018-09-11, 19:22

Saim wrote:Besides Lingq, I've also gotten back into Readlang in a big way. What I really love about it is how I can import subtitles into the library and then synchronise them with the YouTube video. It's the easiest way of studying YouTube subtitled videos I've found so far.


I really wish there was an easier way to import Youtube videos and their subtitles into LingQ. Speaking of YouTube, someone on LingQ recommended https://www.channelcrawler.com/, but unfortunately, they don't offer the option to search for subtitles and I got no reply to my e-mail where I asked for that to be added.

Car wrote:Thanks! You're Saim on there? I don't seem to be able to see who's following me.


Yep!


I'm now following you. Man, you really are making a lot of progress!

Yes, that's all too familiar, but actually, I find it worse on mobiles with all the push notifications. But it's one of the reasons why I like my Kindle so much and still use an MP3 player.


I don't get any notifications from Lingq on Android. :hmm:

No, I meant the general notifications you get on Android from all kinds of apps.
Please correct my mistakes!


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