Language Learning

Yep, sticking with it! Pretty good week last week.

I'm using someone's transcribed notes from the grammar section in my textbook so I have them in a portable format (for use in my note-taking app, or to throw into Anki, etc.). It's not the cleanest transcription, and one thing I'm starting to notice is I'm getting really sharp at spotting typos. Typos--especially kanji conversion errors--work differently in Japanese than they do in English, so there's kind of a separate learned skill for it. It's super interesting stuff, and I'm recalling an interview with Alexander O. Smith (a video game localizer) where he said recognizing potential errors and understanding the scenarist's original intent is a key benchmark for being able to localize games well. Makes me feel pretty good about playing some more later.

I wonder if reading through stuff with errors is an exercise worth seeking out, too, for those at intermediate-level and up. It feels like a good way to reinforce learned but not yet mastered material.

Given the article about Anki and how that author was happily on 70%... I've decided to lower my Anki-FSRS from 90% (default) down to 80%. This should cut my workload significantly. It will take a week or so before the workload feels different, but the simulations suggest maybe 30% or 40% fewer cards-per-day and only losing maybe 5% of my memory. (Fewer reviews == more mistakes, which means more words "forgotten". But at only 5%-ish, its a good tradeoff)

The simulator also says that 70% is my optimal workload for fewest-minutes spent per card. So maybe I should keep dropping it down all the way to 70%?

As of today, I've completed 5 months of study. 3 of which were self-study, and 2-months under a tutor (twice a week meetings, 3 hours total). I have 3 weeks left in my tutoring session, meaning I need to figure out where my next steps are. Tutoring is expensive, both in time and in dollars. I 100% needed it, my speaking skills have gone from non-existent (with huge numbers of "unknown" mistakes in my pronunciation), to passable. I feel confident with the skills I've gained from our in-person practice. But I'm no where near my overall goals even with all the tutoring.

I feel the need to do more tutoring, but maybe later? My current bottleneck is clearly vocabulary and grammar. Subjects I can handle on my own. I also have significant amounts of self-study that I've built up (ie: Pokemon, "Das Maus", transcribing and/or translating songs, Grammatik aktiv. Vocabulary lists to memorize... etc. etc.). With all the tutoring sessions + homework, I barely have gotten any of my self-study done.

I'll at least work through my self-study goals (finish reading my A2 book. Maybe complete a full playthrough of Pokemon, etc. etc.), before I consider additional tutoring. I know this will stunt my speaking skills, but I'm also confident that additional tutoring in the future can "fix" my speaking skills later.

I did have one moment of "achievement" this past week. I've begun to remove the children songs from my playlist. While I haven't gained mastery of all the children songs of my previous playlist... I realize I am "strong" enough to be learning from real pop songs / normal German songs now.

I'll probably go back to some of the harder children songs (or at least, the ones with more complex rhythms / less boring songs). They really are great for learning vocabulary. But my skill level has evolved that I can be sampling harder songs / harder books / harder material successfully. So I should move forward and leave the easier stuff behind...

Yup!

Fun thing but I had an eureka moment (hehe it's a romance language loanword) yesterday during French class. According to my Anki log I should have a French->English vocabulary of 1500-1700 of the most frequent words now... which if I got it correctly, is close to what is needed for reaching A2. Of course vocab alone wouldn't be remotely sufficient for language learning, research has shown that... but I realized that I have all the basic foundation for fully understand every single word in many news articles now; and the ones I don't understand, a good number of them I can probably guess my way around using English

I'm hoping to use this newfound insight to significantly increase the amount of reading and listening I do in French... hopefully that can help me with getting my language skills up to A2. Goal is still to reach B1 so I think I am making progress

Been working on myself more again. Only still doing the 30 mins Japanese and Spanish and Irish, but now also doing an hour of programming and an hour of Blender and 5-20 mins of maths again. It's funny since before even with just JP, SP and IE, I always felt I could be doing more with the languages, and I find it funny because doing the programming and Blender stuff seriously made start maths and language studies feel a lot easier. If I don't study the harder subjects until later that is. Also always thought to myself I didn't have enough time in the day to focus on my languages for long enough, but this new schedule seems to make me realise I've been telling myself falsehoods all the time, (despite sorta knowing they were falsehoods, but at least now I can feel they're false).

As per Ashtear's advice from last week, I did look up online about JP courses for me, the only local one I can properly attends already doing a course, so I can't start a JP course there until maybe 2 months from now. So I'll be aiming to start around then if it's cheap enough.

Also the past 2-3 years I only learnt about 1000 words, but since the new year started, I now know 1500 words, I must have really put in the work effort the first few weeks of January to go that far in so quickly. I plan on ramping to that point again if possible.

So yeah, doing better again now. Thankfully.