Judith's language learning blog

… a continuation from part 1.

Here I will cover how to improve your pronunciation, reading comprehension, listening comprehension, writing, speaking and anything else.

Are you interested in language learning? If you’re reading this blog, then probably yes. However, I’m sure that you’re not aware just how much the internet can help you in learning languages. My favorite resources below – this is going to be a lengthy post…

A personal blog post – no language-learning wisdom, just a report of what I did and where I stand now.

I handed in my last two university essays (minus the final thesis) during this time and celebrated my birthday, both of which took away some of my traditional study time. Most notably, I had left my mp3 player in Berlin and was prevented from doing much Assimil. On the bright side, I read a lot of Greek Harry Potter, found a Greek reader for Greek kids, and had quite a few Chinese lessons with my online tutor.

Chinese: 16 hours!!! This was totally not my plan, considering Chinese is not a focus language. However, I’m not complaining, because I was enjoying myself. I’m using a different Anki deck now, a huge, well-designed one kindly provided by forum member irrationale. I suspended a lot of easy words of course and I’m prioritizing or adding words to the deck based on my Boya Chinese lessons and the Skype classes. In this time I’ve studied 1636 new words in that deck (and 232 leftover ones in my old HSK words deck, which I’m abandoning).

French: 6 hours. Not good, but I DID write one of my essays completely in French.

Greek: 11 hours, mostly reading. Only 2 new Assimil Greek lessons, so I’m now on Assimil lesson 79.

Swahili: 1 hour. Really awful. Only 1 new Assimil Swahili lesson, so I’m on Assimil lesson 52 now. I found that Assimil really isn’t very useful if you’re not using the recordings.

I’m now debating what to do after June, as normally I should be switching focus languages then. I might do Swahili intensively if Assimil can be done intensively. Arabic would also be an alternative, since for Arabic I’m not planning to use Assimil. I’m also interested in doing a Listening-Reading experiment with Russian, but only for two weeks or so.

I’m unhappy with my progress in weeks 20 and 21 of my quest, except for what I did for Greek and Swahili.

Chinese: 3 hours; learned 212 new HSK words in Anki. On the bright side, I now have Anki on my boyfriend’s iPhone, so that reviewing while lounging on the couch or while commuting is an awesome prospect. I’m tempted to get an iPhone or iPod Touch for myself just because of this.

French: 3 hours.

Greek: 10 hours; 4 new lessons, so now on Assimil lesson 77. My Myngle flat rate for Greek lessons is over, so I will be able to focus more on other materials, but I’m afraid of my conversation skill deteriorating too quickly.

Swahili: 4 hours; 5 new lessons, now I’m on Assimil lesson 51. Active wave, yay!

Esperanto and Spanish: Almost nothing, since that trip to Argentina is not looking so likely now.

January started another intensive language-learning year for me (well, as intensive as I can make it, given my workload). I’ve been quiet about it on the blog because I was logging everything on the How-to-learn-any-language-forum, however I now want to drastically cut down my time on that forum, which has sucked a lot of time and energy out of me. That is not to say that it isn’t a good place to get inspiration for new ways of learning languages, or also to find fellow language learners who are going through the same process (go Team H!), but… anyway, I decided to log things here instead.

[Read on about how am I learning languages, what my goals are this year and what I achieved so far]

Since today, I know 2000 Chinese characters!

I’m really grateful to the creator of the cross-platform vocabulary trainer Anki and the creator of the Hanzi statistics plugin, which allowed me to learn this many characters and to keep track of the number – a great motivator for me.

The characters I know split as follows:

By HSK Level
Basic: 99.75%
Elementary: 86.97%
Intermediate: 44.31%
Advanced: 20.6%

By frequency:
1 – 500: 100.0%
501 – 1000: 94.8%
1001 – 1500: 78.6%
1501 – 2000: 51.8%
2001 – 2500: 35.8%
2501 – 3000: 19.4%
3001 – 3500: 8.2%

Neato!

I love being able to recognize most of the characters in the subtitles of the Chinese Romance of the Three Kingdoms TV series. I’m already on episode 41, so that’s 30 hours spent watching Chinese with Chinese and English subtitles. Actually a lot more because I tend to re-watch, and I’ve also watched some future episodes that were recommended to me. Studying Chinese has become a really fun activity, I’d love to spend entire days on it. Alas, I have to work and also prepare a trip to the states, starting next Wednesday.

I am still adhering the schedule, though I overslept once again. These days I am feeling approximately as tired as on a Monday morning when I have to set up an alarm to get into work early. So I can do work and study, but I’m still looking forward to feeling better.

I am spending most of my time now watching the “Romance of the Three Kingdoms” on Youtube in Mandarin Chinese with subtitles in simplified Chinese and in English. LordMaChou176 cut up and uploaded the entire TV series!
I find that I am recognizing more and more Chinese because of this activity, which is vaguely reminiscant of Listening-Reading. Often I stop the video, read the characters and find that I recognize most of them, even if I didn’t recognize the words as they were said. A problem is also that some of the characters speak in dialect or use other words than written, but not too often, so it’s still a good exercise. I am up to episode 20 now, though I’ve watched some key scenes beforehand (that’s how I got sucked into it).

I also religiously do my Anki several times a day for my Chinese. I am not too good at memorizing because of the brain being somewhat foggy, but I do know 1754 unique Hanzi now and am about to enter in some fresh characters. So it looks like I learned 254 characters since writing my Attack Plan 18 days ago, an average of 14 a day… if I can keep up that speed, I could learn 1890 more characters until the end of the year. However, keeping up the speed is not going to happen, because I will be on a 4-week vacation in the USA in September/October and I don’t see myself doing much studying around Christmas and New Year’s either. I will keep aiming for a grand total of 3000 characters known by the end of the year.

I also took some Greek classes on Myngle, from the package I still had. However, now my Greek teacher is on holiday and my package is about to expire with two lessons not taken – sometimes I want to curse Myngle for not giving students a reasonable amount of time in which to take those package lessons; leading to a lot of prepaid lessons simply expiring. On the other hand, it probably also succeeds in motivating some people to take some extra lessons just before the package expires; if they and their teachers can fit it into their schedule.

Okay, so here’s what I plan to do in order to improve my languages in what’s left of 2009. I meant to do a lot more until now, but work and graduating and life interfered, you know the story. I still haven’t graduated, but I believe that it’s time for a new resolution.

1. Chinese – Learn 1500 characters for a total of 3000, improve conversational ability, be able to read “The Little Prince” looking up less than 10 words per chapter.

This will be my main target. During the IJK I studied nearly 250 brand new characters in just 7 days and I have 1603 characters right now in my Anki (Hanzi statistics keeps track of them for me, great plugin!). However, I will need to spend more time on about 100 of these cards, so I’ll count it as ‘knowing’ 1500 characters right now. In January 2009 I only knew 833 characters!

In terms of conversational ability, I can get by in China, but I couldn’t talk about what’s going on in my life without first looking up one word per sentence or so. I’m working on this with my Myngle teacher Aileen.

Apart from my special easy reader “San Ren Xing”, the easiest Chinese reading I have available to me is “The Little Prince”. It has been getting a lot easier lately with all the characters I studied, but there is still a fair amount of words I need to look up, including words consisting of characters I already know, or characters I forgot. Wenlin makes it easy, but my goal shall be to have to look up less than 10 words per chapter by the end of the year.

2. French and Italian – Read two novels each

Reading in a foreign language other than English still takes me a LOT of time, so I want to practise that. Right now I have started on two novels: “Ségou” and “Il giro del mondo en 80 pizze”. I started on a different Italian book before but it was too hard. I will not set goals for active usage because I will have to finish two essays and one thesis in French in the near future anyway, for my degree. I will try to find a tandem partner for Italian though, because my Italian is so rusty.

3. Modern Greek – Finish reading “The Little Prince”, practise talking, increase Anki deck to >1500 facts

Right now I have only read four chapters of “The Little Prince” in Greek and my Anki deck contains 443 facts. My vocabulary is bigger than that, but here I don’t have the possibility of indicating words I know to get a better count. However, I will probably add all new words and phrases to Anki, so that progress shall be visible.

4. Spanish, Swahili, possibly Arabic, Indonesian or Maori – will chip away

I can’t say more than that I will continue to give these a bit of my time. For Spanish I currently attend an Edufire conversational class twice a week, for Swahili I’m slowly going through Assimil Swahili and I’m considering taking up the others again.

Everybody, please wish me luck and keep me faithful to this plan!

German – my native language, which I also teach at GermanPod101.com, Edufire and Myngle.

English – I speak it totally effortlessly and at a near-native level, but employing a curious mix of British, Scottish, Canadian and American vocabulary and pronunciations. Never managed to keep them apart in my head.

Esperanto – my third strongest language. I speak it as a secret language with my boyfriend and I’ve been attending more and more international meetings as well. I had to resign as a board member of Edukado@Interreto (Esperanto-based educational non-profit org) though because of lack of time. See my online Esperanto classes, also I wrote most of the articles for Esperanto.info.

French – I’m basically fluent and my degree involves reading lots of French literature classics in the original. I would appreciate the chance to practise speaking it more often though, especially with French Canadians because I love their accent and would like to copy it.

Latin – I can read it fluently and have taught Latin for more than 7 years. I’m not one of those who’d have conversations in Latin though, that’s what Esperanto is for. Check out my Latin classes on Edufire!

Italian – Studied it for 3 years at high school, after which I spoke it pretty much fluently and got an A- in my final oral exam. However, since 2003 I have used it at most once a year and now it’s seriously rusty. I would love to revive it.

Chinese – Following a summer course in Beijing and some serious studying in Germany, I can get by in Mandarin. At this point I know approximately 1500 characters and am always working on that. I study lots of characters at once, then counter it by studying lots of texts or textbook dialogs and also taking conversational lessons.

Modern Greek – I initially started learning Greek from and because of a friend, with whom I’ve been out of touch for a while now. I still like the language though, take the occasional Greek lessons on Myngle and try to at least not let it fall into disuse. At the moment I’d classify myself an upper beginner.

Arabic, Indonesian, Maori, Spanish, Swahili – All languages that call out to me and that I’ve studied at some point or am still studying on occasion. I’m a beginner in all of them. For Swahili I’m trying to study Assimil every day, but something always comes up…

Czech, Dutch, Lithuanian, Swedish – Studied these for concrete purposes, such as upcoming travels, but they don’t really call out to me and I’ve already forgotten everything or almost everything I learned. I can still understand Dutch because of my German of course, and same goes for most Romance languages.

In a perfect world, I’d be speaking all of the world’s known languages by the time I die (yes I am a Unilang member), but I don’t think it’s going to happen. I don’t have a talent for languages, just an immense love for them. I’ll give it a shot.