Hmm. . .has been a while once again hasn’t it? Not that long actually when I compare myself to some of the other bloggers out there who have ridiculous multi-month long hiatuses. . .compared to that an entry every 2weeks isn’t so bad, but I would like to bring that number up to once every week. That, I think, would be sufficient to keep up to date with things.
Language wise, I’d have to say I’m impressed with myself. I’ve been doing a bit of critical thinking about how I study and have been reading other language blogs, websites, and forums to get ideas on effective ways to study specific languages as well as improve my own methods. While doing this, I stumbled across another blog that…well…to be honest, sparked some major competitiveness in me. The blog is by a guy who is about the same age as me, and has many of the same interests, and was also able to learn Japanese rather quickly and now is interested in learning Korean [my turf!!]. I really respect his achievements, but have to say I got pretty jealous while reading his site and am now doing everything within my power, to 1up him in the nigh-impossible chance that we should ever meet face to face haha. [I usually hate people who react like this, but a little motivational e-competition never hurt anyone. . .]
In spite of this I have been doing very good consistent studying [even before I found aforementioned blog] and also recently decided to breakdown my studies into smaller more extant goals.
A problem I have, that I think probably extends to many of you out there, is that I tend to horde learning resources. I gather a million things that I can do to study from various websites, and do a lot of what I call “mental masturbation” about how it will take me to new heights when I get through with it. . .but then, inevitably, what happens is that I just end up very excited about these resources and continue looking for more and more information without really doing any actual studying [its funny because I actually realized this during one such info digging session]. Looking for resources and info is great, but of course as with too many other things in life, only to a point. Don’t spend your days being a language keyboard jockeys [yes, us language lovers can be KJ’s too].
So I once again made a list of the languages I plan to learn in order of importance to me, and then wrote the one [sometimes 2] minimal things each day that I would do to study that language. The beauty of this is that since it is “minimal” it should be the thing that you would work on if you only had say an hour to study a day as many of us living in the real world do. It forces you to be effective [well me at least so I don’t waste my friggin' time] and target something small enough that you can track your progress in it. You may be wondering at this point, why having a million tiny resources is bad if you do them one-by-one like I mention below...well, its kinda like what a Gestaltist would say
Anyway, here is my daily minimum breakdown:
- Korean: 30mintues of my Anki Korean file repetitions, and 30min of Korean TV or movie inputting new sentences in Anki.
Korean is my best L2 right now and takes a little less effort to sustain it. My focus here is on getting exposure to natural speech. [Notice how this is a self-propagating process stemming from tv and movies]. Also, in the midst of cleaning up my study habits I got rid of Mnemosyne on my computer. It’s still a very good SRS, but I just like Anki’s interface more and had only been using Mnemo for my Korean files. Easier to have all my language SRS’ing in one place.
-Mandarin Chinese: 1hour of Character study (usually about 30 new characters) and listen to 3 Chinesepod Lessons. This is the same as I wrote before, I realized it would be best if I learn the Hanzi before all else so I am going through the frequency list of 3,000 in groups of about 500.I’m still only at about 300 [the 300 I had said I achieved before was more like 150 when I went to review] but I’m picking up momentum. The Chinese pod lessons are just so I don’t lose an ear for the spoken language.
-Japanese: Kanji. Same process as Hanzi, 1 hour of Kanji study probably using Hesig’s Remembering the Kanji.
As I have Hiragana and Katakana down, I need to get the Kanji down as well. According to AJATT the magic number is supposed to be 2046. Not sure if I’ll get confused or not doing this in conjunction with Hanzi, but I’m a proponent of simultaneous language study.
-Hindi - Get the alphabet down. 1 hour of LiveMocha’s Hindi101 lessons or 1 hour of UniLang’s basic Hindi lessons.
I can’t seem to keep the Hindi alphabet, Devanagari, in my head nor figure out exactly how to pronounce them [ the whole . . .vs. . . series is completely beyond my westernized pronunciation ability]. So I just want to see a lot of words and how they are pronounced, Livemocha’s free Rosetta Stone mimic lessons is perfect for this, as it is pretty much a giant basic vocabulary/sentence source.
-Arabic: learn the rest of the alphabet. 1 Madinah Arabic lesson or any 3 Youtube Arabic alphabet lessons.
I want to start building my Arabic up from what I know already, see my previous entry about the great intro to the Arabic alphabet.
- French and Spansish: 15-30min of common phrases.
These two are on my hit list, but since they are latin based languages I am not going to do anything intensive with for another 2-3years+. So building familiarity with them using phrases books seems like a good way to get into them when I finally decide to get more intense.
So that’s my minimalist studies for now. Clearly I don’t do all of it each day, but I just choose a language or two of the day and do the task, pretty easy.
-
Just realized this was supposed to be my Korean Language Approach entry. . . .ooops, my bad, next time??
Reminder:
- Little things lead to big changes.
- Don’t get caught up in language theory/research.
- Entry on Utility of online Language exchange
[More]
Language wise, I’d have to say I’m impressed with myself. I’ve been doing a bit of critical thinking about how I study and have been reading other language blogs, websites, and forums to get ideas on effective ways to study specific languages as well as improve my own methods. While doing this, I stumbled across another blog that…well…to be honest, sparked some major competitiveness in me. The blog is by a guy who is about the same age as me, and has many of the same interests, and was also able to learn Japanese rather quickly and now is interested in learning Korean [my turf!!]. I really respect his achievements, but have to say I got pretty jealous while reading his site and am now doing everything within my power, to 1up him in the nigh-impossible chance that we should ever meet face to face haha. [I usually hate people who react like this, but a little motivational e-competition never hurt anyone. . .]
In spite of this I have been doing very good consistent studying [even before I found aforementioned blog] and also recently decided to breakdown my studies into smaller more extant goals.
A problem I have, that I think probably extends to many of you out there, is that I tend to horde learning resources. I gather a million things that I can do to study from various websites, and do a lot of what I call “mental masturbation” about how it will take me to new heights when I get through with it. . .but then, inevitably, what happens is that I just end up very excited about these resources and continue looking for more and more information without really doing any actual studying [its funny because I actually realized this during one such info digging session]. Looking for resources and info is great, but of course as with too many other things in life, only to a point. Don’t spend your days being a language keyboard jockeys [yes, us language lovers can be KJ’s too].
So I once again made a list of the languages I plan to learn in order of importance to me, and then wrote the one [sometimes 2] minimal things each day that I would do to study that language. The beauty of this is that since it is “minimal” it should be the thing that you would work on if you only had say an hour to study a day as many of us living in the real world do. It forces you to be effective [well me at least so I don’t waste my friggin' time] and target something small enough that you can track your progress in it. You may be wondering at this point, why having a million tiny resources is bad if you do them one-by-one like I mention below...well, its kinda like what a Gestaltist would say"the whole is greater than the sum of its parts"When a million tiny things are put together?? It becomes very BIG, almost infinite. You have this insurmountable task ahead of you that you just keep adding to because when you eventually get through it, it will be just oh so beneficial. Nope, ignore pretty much all those things and just focus on the 1 or 2 that you think are most pertinent to your needs NOW. . .and then you can move on. Now in terms of your knowledge the quote above is just as powerful, you want all the little pieces of knowledge you garner to come together as one massive library while the things you do to get that should be the opposite, that is, not something that seems will take forever to finish.
Anyway, here is my daily minimum breakdown:
- Korean: 30mintues of my Anki Korean file repetitions, and 30min of Korean TV or movie inputting new sentences in Anki.
Korean is my best L2 right now and takes a little less effort to sustain it. My focus here is on getting exposure to natural speech. [Notice how this is a self-propagating process stemming from tv and movies]. Also, in the midst of cleaning up my study habits I got rid of Mnemosyne on my computer. It’s still a very good SRS, but I just like Anki’s interface more and had only been using Mnemo for my Korean files. Easier to have all my language SRS’ing in one place.
-Mandarin Chinese: 1hour of Character study (usually about 30 new characters) and listen to 3 Chinesepod Lessons. This is the same as I wrote before, I realized it would be best if I learn the Hanzi before all else so I am going through the frequency list of 3,000 in groups of about 500.I’m still only at about 300 [the 300 I had said I achieved before was more like 150 when I went to review] but I’m picking up momentum. The Chinese pod lessons are just so I don’t lose an ear for the spoken language.
-Japanese: Kanji. Same process as Hanzi, 1 hour of Kanji study probably using Hesig’s Remembering the Kanji.
As I have Hiragana and Katakana down, I need to get the Kanji down as well. According to AJATT the magic number is supposed to be 2046. Not sure if I’ll get confused or not doing this in conjunction with Hanzi, but I’m a proponent of simultaneous language study.
-Hindi - Get the alphabet down. 1 hour of LiveMocha’s Hindi101 lessons or 1 hour of UniLang’s basic Hindi lessons.
I can’t seem to keep the Hindi alphabet, Devanagari, in my head nor figure out exactly how to pronounce them [ the whole . . .vs. . . series is completely beyond my westernized pronunciation ability]. So I just want to see a lot of words and how they are pronounced, Livemocha’s free Rosetta Stone mimic lessons is perfect for this, as it is pretty much a giant basic vocabulary/sentence source.
-Arabic: learn the rest of the alphabet. 1 Madinah Arabic lesson or any 3 Youtube Arabic alphabet lessons.
I want to start building my Arabic up from what I know already, see my previous entry about the great intro to the Arabic alphabet.
- French and Spansish: 15-30min of common phrases.
These two are on my hit list, but since they are latin based languages I am not going to do anything intensive with for another 2-3years+. So building familiarity with them using phrases books seems like a good way to get into them when I finally decide to get more intense.
So that’s my minimalist studies for now. Clearly I don’t do all of it each day, but I just choose a language or two of the day and do the task, pretty easy.
-
Just realized this was supposed to be my Korean Language Approach entry. . . .ooops, my bad, next time??
Reminder:
- Little things lead to big changes.
- Don’t get caught up in language theory/research.
- Entry on Utility of online Language exchange
