This is day 11 of the French Revolution, one man's quest to learn as much French as possible in a few hours a day for 30 days. I'm doing this using some language techniques I picked up from studying Japanese; the point of the Revolution is to see how well those techniques apply to languages in general.
EXPANDING REALITY
Earlier today, I was thinking about how, this 30 day French quest has been expanding my reality a lot more than a French class in college or high school would. By that, I mean that I've been made aware of a lot of interesting things, like radio stations, pronunciation software, hackers who translate old video games, singers, and so on. Studying on my own, with no pre-fixed lesson plan, has really forced me to "go outside the textbook". In some sense, I'm changing the "lens" through which I see reality; for more clarification on that, read my article, Subjective Reality.
My reality was similarly expanded by studying Japanese, but it was done so more gradually, over a much longer period of time, since I was never doing a specific time challenge.
TIMEBOXING IN GENERAL
One of the things people have been talking about lately in the Japanese language study community, is the idea of timeboxing. Basically, you constrain your study with artificial, arbitrary time limits, and then somehow, that actually makes you more efficient. Having the artificial, self-imposed time-limit, does something psychologically to inspire you to do more study. For example, giving yourself exactly half an hour and seeing how many flashcards you can go through.
A 30-day language blitz like the one I'm doing right now, could be thought of as sort of timeboxing on the macro scale.
FOUNDATION OR CONVERSATION?
In this article, Alyks, creator of the Movie Method for learning to read kanji, talks about how he would go about a 30-day language challenge if he were to do one. He points out an interesting distinction: you can either go for foundations, trying to set foundations to understand the language at a deep level; or go for conversation, say, if you had to actually go to France and survive there at the end of the 30 days.
Me, I have no plans of going to France any time soon, and I'm not even all that interested in French for its own sake. I'm more interested in learning about languages in general. So, I'm definitely doing the more foundational approach. Which approach would you take? Foundation or Conversation?
MINING, THEN REVIEWING
Today, I'm gonna do some mining first, because yesterday I didn't mine any new audio pronunciation cards and today Anki only has 4 old audio pronunciation cards up for review. (If you're coming late to the Revolution, Anki is a flashcard program I use, it lets me rate my flashcards for difficulty as I review them, then uses my ratings to super-optimize the whole flashcard process)
I radically changed up how I was mining audio cards. It was taking way too long to mine the audio files from Tex's French Grammar. First, I had to carefully look to actually find a suitable file, one which wasn't too big (most the audio files are for, like, a minute or more worth of dialog!) The smaller, the better, generally. Then, I had to download the entire mp3 pack for the whole section, since that's the only way to directly download mp3s from Tex's French Grammar. Then, I had to expand the zipfile of mp3's. Then, I had to recode the mp3's, because for some reason the way they were coded was making Anki freeze. Recoding involved running a very shady CD ripping program, because that's the only free recoding program I could find that wasn't crippleware. The decoding process took longer than necessary, in part because the program was very badly designed.
Instead, now I'm mining the about.com French pronunciation section. I'm mining individual words from the individual pages; today I mined all the example words in "Beginning French Pronunciation", which covered examples of the whole alphabet.
To make the mining process run quickly, I used an awesome feature of Anki. When you click the Add Audio button while making an Anki flashcard (or, even faster, push F4, if you're a PC user), it looks like you must choose a file from your computer, but you don't actually have to do that. Instead, you can copy the URL for a file on the internet. That makes the whole process very quick. I resized the Firefox window so I could click between it and the Anki window without hiding either. Then, it was a matter of right-clicking an audio link, choosing "Copy Link Location", switching into Anki, typing the word on the question side, tabbing into the answer side, pressing F4, and copying the URL. The way Anki handles this is it automatically downloads the audio file into its own temporary folder. Basically taking all the annoying paperwork out of your hands and automating it. YES!
In 15 minutes, I mined 83 audio pronunciation cards. That's about 5 and a half cards a minute. For audio flashcards, that's INCREDIBLY efficient!
You might be concerned that these cards just have a single word, and not a context-filled dialog. But that's okay for a pronunciation deck. I'll be getting all my context from the sentence deck. Of course, sometimes the pronunciation changes depending on the context-- I can only assume the audio files will handle that appropriately once I get to those sections in the about.com page. As the Japanese say, omakase shimasu.
Next came the task of actually reviewing these new audio cards. Combined with the already scheduled ones, there were a total of 87 cards to review (after going into the preferences and changing Anki's annoying "20 new cards per day" default to a million new cards per day. Seriously, 20 new cards? I eat 20 cards for breakfast!) It took another 15 minutes to review the cards.
The few scheduled pronunciation rule cards were dispensed with in a couple minutes. Since I'm no longer adding new pronunciation rule cards, the way SRS's work, as I memorize the last few stragglers, this deck will have less and less reviews scheduled per day.
The 183 sentence cards scheduled for review took 37 minutes to review. Then I mined another 80 cards, going as far in Tex's French Grammar as the "subject pronouns" sections of the pronouns chapter.
I think I'm starting to get a little better at pronunciation. The audio flashcards help a lot, and now that I'm making a significant number of them, soon I'll have perfect French ;) Hmm, I wonder whether French people think American English accents are sexy, like American people think French accents are sexy? If so, maybe I should be careful about getting too good at pronunciation ;)
Previous Day in the French Revolution: Day 10
Next Day in the French Revolution: Day 12
You can also go to the French Revolution Table of Contents...
...or the French Revolution Introduction.
Here are some other articles I've written:
Subjective Reality
Models Of Reality
How The Mind Learns
The Joys of Change
Becoming More Photogenic
EXPANDING REALITY
Earlier today, I was thinking about how, this 30 day French quest has been expanding my reality a lot more than a French class in college or high school would. By that, I mean that I've been made aware of a lot of interesting things, like radio stations, pronunciation software, hackers who translate old video games, singers, and so on. Studying on my own, with no pre-fixed lesson plan, has really forced me to "go outside the textbook". In some sense, I'm changing the "lens" through which I see reality; for more clarification on that, read my article, Subjective Reality.
My reality was similarly expanded by studying Japanese, but it was done so more gradually, over a much longer period of time, since I was never doing a specific time challenge.
TIMEBOXING IN GENERAL
One of the things people have been talking about lately in the Japanese language study community, is the idea of timeboxing. Basically, you constrain your study with artificial, arbitrary time limits, and then somehow, that actually makes you more efficient. Having the artificial, self-imposed time-limit, does something psychologically to inspire you to do more study. For example, giving yourself exactly half an hour and seeing how many flashcards you can go through.
A 30-day language blitz like the one I'm doing right now, could be thought of as sort of timeboxing on the macro scale.
FOUNDATION OR CONVERSATION?
In this article, Alyks, creator of the Movie Method for learning to read kanji, talks about how he would go about a 30-day language challenge if he were to do one. He points out an interesting distinction: you can either go for foundations, trying to set foundations to understand the language at a deep level; or go for conversation, say, if you had to actually go to France and survive there at the end of the 30 days.
Me, I have no plans of going to France any time soon, and I'm not even all that interested in French for its own sake. I'm more interested in learning about languages in general. So, I'm definitely doing the more foundational approach. Which approach would you take? Foundation or Conversation?
MINING, THEN REVIEWING
Today, I'm gonna do some mining first, because yesterday I didn't mine any new audio pronunciation cards and today Anki only has 4 old audio pronunciation cards up for review. (If you're coming late to the Revolution, Anki is a flashcard program I use, it lets me rate my flashcards for difficulty as I review them, then uses my ratings to super-optimize the whole flashcard process)
I radically changed up how I was mining audio cards. It was taking way too long to mine the audio files from Tex's French Grammar. First, I had to carefully look to actually find a suitable file, one which wasn't too big (most the audio files are for, like, a minute or more worth of dialog!) The smaller, the better, generally. Then, I had to download the entire mp3 pack for the whole section, since that's the only way to directly download mp3s from Tex's French Grammar. Then, I had to expand the zipfile of mp3's. Then, I had to recode the mp3's, because for some reason the way they were coded was making Anki freeze. Recoding involved running a very shady CD ripping program, because that's the only free recoding program I could find that wasn't crippleware. The decoding process took longer than necessary, in part because the program was very badly designed.
Instead, now I'm mining the about.com French pronunciation section. I'm mining individual words from the individual pages; today I mined all the example words in "Beginning French Pronunciation", which covered examples of the whole alphabet.
To make the mining process run quickly, I used an awesome feature of Anki. When you click the Add Audio button while making an Anki flashcard (or, even faster, push F4, if you're a PC user), it looks like you must choose a file from your computer, but you don't actually have to do that. Instead, you can copy the URL for a file on the internet. That makes the whole process very quick. I resized the Firefox window so I could click between it and the Anki window without hiding either. Then, it was a matter of right-clicking an audio link, choosing "Copy Link Location", switching into Anki, typing the word on the question side, tabbing into the answer side, pressing F4, and copying the URL. The way Anki handles this is it automatically downloads the audio file into its own temporary folder. Basically taking all the annoying paperwork out of your hands and automating it. YES!
In 15 minutes, I mined 83 audio pronunciation cards. That's about 5 and a half cards a minute. For audio flashcards, that's INCREDIBLY efficient!
You might be concerned that these cards just have a single word, and not a context-filled dialog. But that's okay for a pronunciation deck. I'll be getting all my context from the sentence deck. Of course, sometimes the pronunciation changes depending on the context-- I can only assume the audio files will handle that appropriately once I get to those sections in the about.com page. As the Japanese say, omakase shimasu.
Next came the task of actually reviewing these new audio cards. Combined with the already scheduled ones, there were a total of 87 cards to review (after going into the preferences and changing Anki's annoying "20 new cards per day" default to a million new cards per day. Seriously, 20 new cards? I eat 20 cards for breakfast!) It took another 15 minutes to review the cards.
The few scheduled pronunciation rule cards were dispensed with in a couple minutes. Since I'm no longer adding new pronunciation rule cards, the way SRS's work, as I memorize the last few stragglers, this deck will have less and less reviews scheduled per day.
The 183 sentence cards scheduled for review took 37 minutes to review. Then I mined another 80 cards, going as far in Tex's French Grammar as the "subject pronouns" sections of the pronouns chapter.
I think I'm starting to get a little better at pronunciation. The audio flashcards help a lot, and now that I'm making a significant number of them, soon I'll have perfect French ;) Hmm, I wonder whether French people think American English accents are sexy, like American people think French accents are sexy? If so, maybe I should be careful about getting too good at pronunciation ;)
Previous Day in the French Revolution: Day 10
Next Day in the French Revolution: Day 12
You can also go to the French Revolution Table of Contents...
...or the French Revolution Introduction.
Here are some other articles I've written:
Subjective Reality
Models Of Reality
How The Mind Learns
The Joys of Change
Becoming More Photogenic
Posts
2 comments:
Seriously, 20 new cards? I eat 20 cards for breakfast!) It took another 15 minutes to review the cards.
Production cards are longer to (re)view than recognition cards (with text only). But indeed, the 20 new cards limit is very low.
Hmm, I wonder whether French people think American English accents are sexy, like American people think French accents are sexy?
For me, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Rumanian or Russian accent (and lots of East Europe accents) are more sexy (sexier?). I'm sorry Glowing.
In Québec Province, Canada, we speak a French with strong variants to France in the same way American English to British... However, once English gets to concise and elaborate it shares some sexy expressions to French of old times. It is also à propos to say latin tongues gets more attention but it remains a matter of personal taste after all.
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