Judith's language learning blog

After 11 days and oversleeping a couple times, I was feeling worse rather than better. My boyfriend got worried and convinced me to get a good night’s rest and forget about this experiment for the time being. Since I now have lots of work piled up that I couldn’t do while tired, I finally followed his advice. Well, I tried. Apparently, my body right now totally doesn’t like sleep. If at all, I sleep some time between 5am and 9am, but only intermittedly. I still managed to feel fine and get a lot of work done yesterday, but today I’ve felt sluggish all day again. I will play it by ear, sleep when I can and wait for my body to decide when it wants to sleep.

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 I read other logs and apparently it’s common to feel low on energy for the first couple days after being able to REM sleep. The body needs to catch up on sleep. For this purpose, some advocate having additional naps in the middle between two scheduled ones, when tired. I have been doing that to some extend and am gradually starting to feel better. Today for example the fog receded from my brain enough to allow me to study Chinese characters on Anki. Also, yesterday I automatically woke up after 20 minutes of an impromptu additional nap, and that’s encouraging, too.

On the down side, I seriously overslept this morning. After going to bed for my 4am nap, I only woke up at 8:30am!. I blame my alarm clock, because I switched to a different one to prevent my boyfriend from getting sleep-deprived as I do this, and that alarm clock is apparently default set not to operate on Sundays, only work days. So it never went off and I slept all that time. Since normally I would have taken another nap from 8am to 8:30am, I decided not to do anything special but just to go ahead with my naps as before and hope for the best. Just now I was suitably tired for my 12pm nap and woke up from deep sleep before the alarm even went off.

Friday August 14th, 2009

BREAKTHROUGH! I had a dream in today’s 8am nap and then again (a different dream) in the 4pm nap! This means that my body has adapted and is ready to grant me some REM time even if I don’t sleep 90 minutes or more in one go. Its refusal to do so during the initial days is the main reason for being sleep-deprived. Now I am hoping for a swift recovery as I get more and more of the kind of sleep that I need.

Today however I have been feeling tired and out of sorts throughout the day. Not the zombie kind of tired like yesterday, but I also haven’t had any more lucid spells during which I could work or study. The naps leave me almost as tired as I am when starting them, when otherwise most of them would be refreshing. From what I understood, I don’t have another breakthrough target, what’s left to do is simply to let the Überman schedule become an ingrained habit, so I’m a bit worried about this strange state.

Good news and bad news on Thursday August 13th.

These days I have been experimenting with Polyphasic Sleep, a life hack where you take multiple 20-minute naps during the day but don’t need to sleep long at night. Here’s my log, pretty unedited and really mostly for my own sake: Read more