Wednesday, November 27, 2013
Website experiment finished
Just a really brief post to announce the end of my brief experimemt with Google Ads. I can tell they'll never generate much revenue but they makethe site permamemtly ugly, so they're getting the chop. Been busy but more proper updates soon, I promise, including some news about my French!
Saturday, November 16, 2013
To Esperanto or Not Esperanto? And a look at memory techniques for learning vocabulary
I had a funny idea recently. And I mean funny as in "komisch", not funny as in "lustig". Since I'm still quite busy in my very limited spare time developing an app, I wondered if there's anything I could do with the rest of the year to satisfy my yearning for language learning but without adding too much work to my workload.
I got an idea after I released my Anki list, as I was looking through the lists of available Anki lists. Anki is a great tool with a great community around it releasing wordlists on all kinds of topics. I personally used it extensively in passing the Goethe Zertifikat B2. I happened across a wordlist for German speakers wanting to learn Esperanto and checked it out. And while looking through the list I had a crazy idea - it seemed pretty easy to learn the words in the list I tried out, so what if I try to learn some basic level of Esperanto for the rest of the year, through German as much as possible. That way I could use my German a little and satisfy that urge to learn languages.
Sure, I'm aware of the arguments against Esperanto. Some of the most obvious ones are discussed in the Justin Rye's ageless Ranto. He actually describes lots of the posited benefits of the language too, but I'll link to one alternative point of view anyway. I'd looked at learning it before and hit some annoyances. Back in those days I wasn't used to pushing through the many weirdnesses of natural languages, so I didn't progress past a certain point. I thought I could give it a good crack this time. I found that, with my French and German knowledge, I could pick up on a lot of the basic words pretty easily.
So, I downloaded a few lists and started giving it a crack. I also read some web descriptions (including the Ranto above!) to give me an overview again of the word-building and grammar. I found that I could learn all the words from 3 lists (2 of basic vocab -1 German, 1 English - and a German based one for the book "Gerda Malaperis") and review them every day at a pace of 20 new words each. In addition, I did a list of Esperanto affixes. This was all pretty easy to do every day and didn't take too long. I didn't do any special visualisation techniques on these lists and it was still pretty easy and reliable most of the time.
How long did I last doing this?
Just a few days!
Look, I'm used to ignoring the differences between other natural languages and my own now. I've done it with German and French, but when it's a constructed language that is supposed to be an alternative to natural languages, maybe I just had a lower threshold. The end really came for me today when I started paying attention to the example sentences in one of the decks and I just despaired. I had already looked past "infanajxo" being, apparently, the "concrete manifestation of the abstract idea of infano" and therefore meaning "childhood", and the nonsense of malvarmumi meaning "to catch a cold" (seriously - "opposite-of-warm-indefinite-verb" Why semi-copy such an idiomatic expression involving being "cold" anyway?), and the idiomatic way of expressing "I like" being something like "it is pleasing to me", but when I saw yet another pointless use of the indefinite preposition "je" I decided I was truly wasting my time. Probably looking up the website of the Sydney Esperanto Association didn't help. So, that was the last straw.
It may be easier to learn than other languages (I definitely feel I know the basics reasonably well for such a short exposure), but it still requires some effort - acquiring a few thousand words, acquiring a few hundred common constructs and practicing speaking to some reasonable level of fluency. I just cannot justify the effort for a constructed language that probably has fewer fluent speakers in Australia than Swahili or even Bininj Gunwok.
So, I dropped it. Now that I have I will have a little more time for reading my current book (called "Scheisse" which teaches you how to swear in German) and a lot more headspace for one other Anki list which I downloaded at the same time and I've started working on. This one has all the words from the lessons (or exercises - can't remember which one!) in the well-known Latin textbook "Wheelock's Latin" which I also checked out. I do not own a copy of Wheelock's Latin yet - I'm hoping to find one cheap somewhere. I'm sure I'll be able to pick it up at a second-hand store sometime. While I decided earlier in the year that I didn't have the time or headspace for both Chinese and Latin, I've since been thinking that I could find time for Latin on its own somehow because it should be slightly less demanding as there will be no requirement to speak it, nor any real requirement to understand it when it's spoken. I had to finish a few books first - "Das Todeskreuz" which I've mentioned previously and an interesting new book from Jared Diamond called "The World Until Yesterday". After that I managed to get my app development back on track a bit again, and maybe now I can restart my Latin studies.
I don't have an exact plan really, but I've started by just learning some Latin words for the hell of it. The really interesting thing for me is that I've started trying to use some of those memory techniques you hear people talk about. I've never bothered to read up on them specifically, or practice them properly, so this is all just one large experiment. However, I think it's an incredibly important experiment for my future language learning. You see, I have noticed that, although my recall on my Anki lists was reasonably good while I was actively reviewing it every day, once I stop the recall drops very fast for a lot of the words. Because of that, it's hard to imagine how I can maintain multiple languages at any decent level and add new ones. Of course, I need to read, listen and speak each one as often as possible, but I find that an Anki list provides a density of time that's hard to beat just to keep my level of easily recalled words up.
Well, that's what I thought, anyway. But the burden of doing the lists everyday just proved too much. I should almost certainly reduce the maximum number of reviews each day (currently 100) but it would be even better if I just didn't need to review so many words at all! In particular, there are some words and expressions that I find just don't stick reliably with straight repetition.
So, now I'm experimenting with a new list of words. For each word I try to develop some small mnemonic phrase or visualise some short scene plus dialogue. They are always pretty silly, and I'm still working on it. The particular list I'm looking that only tests recall of the meaning of Latin words, not vice-versa, so it's perhaps a simpler start. I'm still learning via Anki with its implementation of Spaced-Repetition Learning and I think it's a good combination. I'm at a stage where some of my mnemonics don't work very well, or I just don't recall them at all (actually, this has been quite rare so far) so it's good for the mnemonics to be backed up by SRS.
The first day I did it it took me THE ENTIRE DAY (spread over the course of the day, of course) to come up with the memes for my 20 new words and whatever number of reviews I needed (maybe twenty). I was pretty tired at the end of the day, but also pretty satisfied with my efforts. That night was one of extremely interrupted sleep - and the start of one of the longest days of my life - when my daughter woke up at 2:30am vomitting in bed. I didn't get back to sleep myself till 4am and then I was up every 20 mins with my poor daughter retching. Terrible! So, I was kind of on edge and unable to sleep much until she slept for an hour between 6 and 7. At some stage I was lying in bed and the words I had studied were just flying through my head in a very orderly fashion. I found myself doing things like recalling all the verbs that had a final verb form ending in "latum", or trying to recall all the adjectives I had learnt. It was quite an experience - like looking up words in a dictionary! I don't remember it ever having happened before, even with German, so it was quite exciting!
Was it because I had just furnished so much attention on each word as I tried to come up with a mnemonic, or was it the mnemonics themselves? Only more experimenting could tell, which I'm doing now. I need to practice to make the production of mnemonics faster. In addition, I use the SRS and let it go through its early frequencies of "1 minute" and "10 minutes" before decideding that I remember the mnemonic well enough at which stage I decide on a repeat interval of either 1 day or 4 days. I also need to make sure the mnemonic captures enough of the meanings on one side and the forms on the other to be useful, but to make sure that the form I will be given (i.e., the Latin words) comes early in my mnemonic so it can kick off the whole recall. These are all things I need to practice. I think I've got a little faster already. I don't always remember my mnemonic, and if I don't I decide that the original wasn't good enough, come up with something new, and start again.
So far I've been impressed and hope it continues like this. Very early days though, so I'll keep you posted! I hope to learn a lot of Latin vocabulary as a semi-separate task to the grammar because I already know enough of the basic grammar to understand the forms that I'm seeing to some extent, so later I can focus on improving the grammar specifically.
To wrap-up my other news - I made contact with a couple of local people who want to practice English in exchange for German and French (one of each). The French guy got back to me so I'll meet up with him and we'll see how that goes. I'm hoping to convince one of them to become my running buddy so I can double the usefulness of my very limited time!
I've also read about half of the book "Scheisse" which I mentioned above. It's only very light reading, and I don't spend much time on it in total really. It's just for a laugh, although I must admit that I read the meaning of a couple of words in there which then appeared in "Das Todeskreuz" which was pretty cool :-) So, not totally useless after all!
My last update is site related - since I turned on Google Ads I've got approximately 2/5ths of nothing. I'm not sure I'm supposed to say it exactly, but I think Google estimates that for every 1,000 page visits I will earn a few cents. Since I get about 1,000 per month, I can't see myself continuing with it for very long. At least I've turned off the ads for "dating" sites which are a pretty tacky look on any website. If it doesn't look like it's going to be much use by the end of the year, I'll flick it off again. I got no comments about it and the traffic to the site is fairly unchanged, so I guess most of you out there have "AdBlocker" turned on :-)
Anyone want to share their experiences with using mnemonics for memorising, or even mixed with SRS, please feel free to do so in the comments below. Coming up in my next post, some advice on how to pass the Goethe Zertifikat A1 - Start Deutsch 1 exam as quickly, painlessly and cheaply as possible!
I got an idea after I released my Anki list, as I was looking through the lists of available Anki lists. Anki is a great tool with a great community around it releasing wordlists on all kinds of topics. I personally used it extensively in passing the Goethe Zertifikat B2. I happened across a wordlist for German speakers wanting to learn Esperanto and checked it out. And while looking through the list I had a crazy idea - it seemed pretty easy to learn the words in the list I tried out, so what if I try to learn some basic level of Esperanto for the rest of the year, through German as much as possible. That way I could use my German a little and satisfy that urge to learn languages.
Sure, I'm aware of the arguments against Esperanto. Some of the most obvious ones are discussed in the Justin Rye's ageless Ranto. He actually describes lots of the posited benefits of the language too, but I'll link to one alternative point of view anyway. I'd looked at learning it before and hit some annoyances. Back in those days I wasn't used to pushing through the many weirdnesses of natural languages, so I didn't progress past a certain point. I thought I could give it a good crack this time. I found that, with my French and German knowledge, I could pick up on a lot of the basic words pretty easily.
So, I downloaded a few lists and started giving it a crack. I also read some web descriptions (including the Ranto above!) to give me an overview again of the word-building and grammar. I found that I could learn all the words from 3 lists (2 of basic vocab -1 German, 1 English - and a German based one for the book "Gerda Malaperis") and review them every day at a pace of 20 new words each. In addition, I did a list of Esperanto affixes. This was all pretty easy to do every day and didn't take too long. I didn't do any special visualisation techniques on these lists and it was still pretty easy and reliable most of the time.
How long did I last doing this?
Just a few days!
Look, I'm used to ignoring the differences between other natural languages and my own now. I've done it with German and French, but when it's a constructed language that is supposed to be an alternative to natural languages, maybe I just had a lower threshold. The end really came for me today when I started paying attention to the example sentences in one of the decks and I just despaired. I had already looked past "infanajxo" being, apparently, the "concrete manifestation of the abstract idea of infano" and therefore meaning "childhood", and the nonsense of malvarmumi meaning "to catch a cold" (seriously - "opposite-of-warm-indefinite-verb" Why semi-copy such an idiomatic expression involving being "cold" anyway?), and the idiomatic way of expressing "I like" being something like "it is pleasing to me", but when I saw yet another pointless use of the indefinite preposition "je" I decided I was truly wasting my time. Probably looking up the website of the Sydney Esperanto Association didn't help. So, that was the last straw.
It may be easier to learn than other languages (I definitely feel I know the basics reasonably well for such a short exposure), but it still requires some effort - acquiring a few thousand words, acquiring a few hundred common constructs and practicing speaking to some reasonable level of fluency. I just cannot justify the effort for a constructed language that probably has fewer fluent speakers in Australia than Swahili or even Bininj Gunwok.
So, I dropped it. Now that I have I will have a little more time for reading my current book (called "Scheisse" which teaches you how to swear in German) and a lot more headspace for one other Anki list which I downloaded at the same time and I've started working on. This one has all the words from the lessons (or exercises - can't remember which one!) in the well-known Latin textbook "Wheelock's Latin" which I also checked out. I do not own a copy of Wheelock's Latin yet - I'm hoping to find one cheap somewhere. I'm sure I'll be able to pick it up at a second-hand store sometime. While I decided earlier in the year that I didn't have the time or headspace for both Chinese and Latin, I've since been thinking that I could find time for Latin on its own somehow because it should be slightly less demanding as there will be no requirement to speak it, nor any real requirement to understand it when it's spoken. I had to finish a few books first - "Das Todeskreuz" which I've mentioned previously and an interesting new book from Jared Diamond called "The World Until Yesterday". After that I managed to get my app development back on track a bit again, and maybe now I can restart my Latin studies.
I don't have an exact plan really, but I've started by just learning some Latin words for the hell of it. The really interesting thing for me is that I've started trying to use some of those memory techniques you hear people talk about. I've never bothered to read up on them specifically, or practice them properly, so this is all just one large experiment. However, I think it's an incredibly important experiment for my future language learning. You see, I have noticed that, although my recall on my Anki lists was reasonably good while I was actively reviewing it every day, once I stop the recall drops very fast for a lot of the words. Because of that, it's hard to imagine how I can maintain multiple languages at any decent level and add new ones. Of course, I need to read, listen and speak each one as often as possible, but I find that an Anki list provides a density of time that's hard to beat just to keep my level of easily recalled words up.
Well, that's what I thought, anyway. But the burden of doing the lists everyday just proved too much. I should almost certainly reduce the maximum number of reviews each day (currently 100) but it would be even better if I just didn't need to review so many words at all! In particular, there are some words and expressions that I find just don't stick reliably with straight repetition.
So, now I'm experimenting with a new list of words. For each word I try to develop some small mnemonic phrase or visualise some short scene plus dialogue. They are always pretty silly, and I'm still working on it. The particular list I'm looking that only tests recall of the meaning of Latin words, not vice-versa, so it's perhaps a simpler start. I'm still learning via Anki with its implementation of Spaced-Repetition Learning and I think it's a good combination. I'm at a stage where some of my mnemonics don't work very well, or I just don't recall them at all (actually, this has been quite rare so far) so it's good for the mnemonics to be backed up by SRS.
The first day I did it it took me THE ENTIRE DAY (spread over the course of the day, of course) to come up with the memes for my 20 new words and whatever number of reviews I needed (maybe twenty). I was pretty tired at the end of the day, but also pretty satisfied with my efforts. That night was one of extremely interrupted sleep - and the start of one of the longest days of my life - when my daughter woke up at 2:30am vomitting in bed. I didn't get back to sleep myself till 4am and then I was up every 20 mins with my poor daughter retching. Terrible! So, I was kind of on edge and unable to sleep much until she slept for an hour between 6 and 7. At some stage I was lying in bed and the words I had studied were just flying through my head in a very orderly fashion. I found myself doing things like recalling all the verbs that had a final verb form ending in "latum", or trying to recall all the adjectives I had learnt. It was quite an experience - like looking up words in a dictionary! I don't remember it ever having happened before, even with German, so it was quite exciting!
Was it because I had just furnished so much attention on each word as I tried to come up with a mnemonic, or was it the mnemonics themselves? Only more experimenting could tell, which I'm doing now. I need to practice to make the production of mnemonics faster. In addition, I use the SRS and let it go through its early frequencies of "1 minute" and "10 minutes" before decideding that I remember the mnemonic well enough at which stage I decide on a repeat interval of either 1 day or 4 days. I also need to make sure the mnemonic captures enough of the meanings on one side and the forms on the other to be useful, but to make sure that the form I will be given (i.e., the Latin words) comes early in my mnemonic so it can kick off the whole recall. These are all things I need to practice. I think I've got a little faster already. I don't always remember my mnemonic, and if I don't I decide that the original wasn't good enough, come up with something new, and start again.
So far I've been impressed and hope it continues like this. Very early days though, so I'll keep you posted! I hope to learn a lot of Latin vocabulary as a semi-separate task to the grammar because I already know enough of the basic grammar to understand the forms that I'm seeing to some extent, so later I can focus on improving the grammar specifically.
To wrap-up my other news - I made contact with a couple of local people who want to practice English in exchange for German and French (one of each). The French guy got back to me so I'll meet up with him and we'll see how that goes. I'm hoping to convince one of them to become my running buddy so I can double the usefulness of my very limited time!
I've also read about half of the book "Scheisse" which I mentioned above. It's only very light reading, and I don't spend much time on it in total really. It's just for a laugh, although I must admit that I read the meaning of a couple of words in there which then appeared in "Das Todeskreuz" which was pretty cool :-) So, not totally useless after all!
My last update is site related - since I turned on Google Ads I've got approximately 2/5ths of nothing. I'm not sure I'm supposed to say it exactly, but I think Google estimates that for every 1,000 page visits I will earn a few cents. Since I get about 1,000 per month, I can't see myself continuing with it for very long. At least I've turned off the ads for "dating" sites which are a pretty tacky look on any website. If it doesn't look like it's going to be much use by the end of the year, I'll flick it off again. I got no comments about it and the traffic to the site is fairly unchanged, so I guess most of you out there have "AdBlocker" turned on :-)
Anyone want to share their experiences with using mnemonics for memorising, or even mixed with SRS, please feel free to do so in the comments below. Coming up in my next post, some advice on how to pass the Goethe Zertifikat A1 - Start Deutsch 1 exam as quickly, painlessly and cheaply as possible!
Wednesday, November 6, 2013
Website experiment
I've decided to do a little experiment with the website and turn on Google AdSense for a while. I don't expect it to really make much money, but it might help me buy a book here or there for my language studies. I don't plan on letting it affect what I blog about or how often I blog :-)
If people get too turned off by the ads, or I decide they're just too ugly and distracting, I'll give them the chop. Let's see how it goes, and feel free to give me any feedback on them.
If people get too turned off by the ads, or I decide they're just too ugly and distracting, I'll give them the chop. Let's see how it goes, and feel free to give me any feedback on them.
Tuesday, November 5, 2013
My Anki list
[EDIT: A kind reader (shout out to Keita!) let me know that there's an issue with getting the reversals to show up when you first open the deck (though I'm sure I have the reversals!). Open Anki and select "Browse". The select the deck "Lesetraining B2 Wortschatz" and hit the "Cards..." button below the list of words (about halfway down). For me, that shows the front and reverse templates but from what Keita said, if the reversals are missing, there will be an option to create one here. I hope that works for everyone. Let me know in the comments below if not. Don't forget to give it a rating too!]
So, I've finally got round to sharing my Anki list. The content is mainly from the oft-mentioned Lesetraining B2 book, but also from Das Todeskreuz and numerous articles which I read, some of which ended up on this blog as parallel translations (see here and here for just a few examples). In short, it has more words than I needed to read the texts from the Goethe Zertifikat B2 exam, and the reading section needs the most vocabulary, so if you're looking to pass the B2 (or earlier) or build up for the C1 or C2, this is a good place to start:
https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/3142086355
If you find it useful, please rate it and share it around. A good Anki list is a big investment of time (hence why, in the future, I'm thinking of just using stock Anki lists for most initial vocabulary) so I would feel happier if I knew that my effort was making other people's lives easier, just as the other pre-prepared Anki lists have made my life easier :-)
So, I've finally got round to sharing my Anki list. The content is mainly from the oft-mentioned Lesetraining B2 book, but also from Das Todeskreuz and numerous articles which I read, some of which ended up on this blog as parallel translations (see here and here for just a few examples). In short, it has more words than I needed to read the texts from the Goethe Zertifikat B2 exam, and the reading section needs the most vocabulary, so if you're looking to pass the B2 (or earlier) or build up for the C1 or C2, this is a good place to start:
https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/3142086355
If you find it useful, please rate it and share it around. A good Anki list is a big investment of time (hence why, in the future, I'm thinking of just using stock Anki lists for most initial vocabulary) so I would feel happier if I knew that my effort was making other people's lives easier, just as the other pre-prepared Anki lists have made my life easier :-)
Quick comparison of TestDaF against the CEFR (Common European Framework for Reference of Languages)
Just a really quick post for anyone looking to enter a German institute of higher education and wondering what level they require and how that matches up with the system that's often quoted elsewhere of the CEFR (with levels A1, A2, B1, B2, C1 & C2 being the most advanced).
First of all, the TestDaF is a test like the English language tests IELTS, TOEFL, etc, in that you get a score and your entry requirement is usually some minimum score. To keep this brief, I'll skip the foreplay and get straight to it. The comparison between TestDaF results and the CEFR scale can be found here:
http://www.testdaf.de/teilnehmer/tn-info_nivea_stufen.php
with some detail about the abilities required at each level here:
http://www.testdaf.de/teilnehmer/tn-info_nivea.php
There is some overlap between the categories which can be summarised as follows:
TDN 3 = B2.1 - B2.2 (i.e., a high score on the B2 exam)
TDN 4 = B2.2 - C1.1
TDN 5 = C1.1 - C1.2
In short, if the entrance requirement for your target university (or school) in German is TDN 3, then you should ensure you're a solid B2. If it's TDN 4 or above, make sure you're a solid C1. And don't aim low! Better to overshoot and find the exam easy than to risk failing the exam. It might seem like a waste of time to do the extra preparation, but an EVEN BIGGER WASTE OF TIME is to fail the exam!
The great part of learning a language is that study can come in many forms - sure, sometimes that's reading grammars and trying to memorise words, but it's also often listening (with focus!) to something you enjoy, watching movies and trying to understand them, and, best of all, making new friends and speaking to their hearts in their own language, instead of just their heads.
First of all, the TestDaF is a test like the English language tests IELTS, TOEFL, etc, in that you get a score and your entry requirement is usually some minimum score. To keep this brief, I'll skip the foreplay and get straight to it. The comparison between TestDaF results and the CEFR scale can be found here:
http://www.testdaf.de/teilnehmer/tn-info_nivea_stufen.php
with some detail about the abilities required at each level here:
http://www.testdaf.de/teilnehmer/tn-info_nivea.php
There is some overlap between the categories which can be summarised as follows:
TDN 3 = B2.1 - B2.2 (i.e., a high score on the B2 exam)
TDN 4 = B2.2 - C1.1
TDN 5 = C1.1 - C1.2
In short, if the entrance requirement for your target university (or school) in German is TDN 3, then you should ensure you're a solid B2. If it's TDN 4 or above, make sure you're a solid C1. And don't aim low! Better to overshoot and find the exam easy than to risk failing the exam. It might seem like a waste of time to do the extra preparation, but an EVEN BIGGER WASTE OF TIME is to fail the exam!
The great part of learning a language is that study can come in many forms - sure, sometimes that's reading grammars and trying to memorise words, but it's also often listening (with focus!) to something you enjoy, watching movies and trying to understand them, and, best of all, making new friends and speaking to their hearts in their own language, instead of just their heads.
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