The French Revolution is my quest to teach myself as much French as I can in thirty days. At the beginning of Day 1, I knew absolutely nothing about the language. At the beginning of Day 2, I still know approximately nothing, but I have some sentences in my flashcard deck and slightly better bearings on what resources are out there. The purpose of the French Revolution is to test the second language acquisition skills I've developed by studying the much harder language, Japanese.
Before beginning studies for Day 2, I went and did a pretty solid workout, focusing on lower body. It's been a week since I last worked out, because finals week was such a blitz. It feels really good to get back in the gym. Part of having a strong mind, is having a strong body, and anyone who is serious about mental growth (like learning a second language) should definitely have a regular workout schedule.
REVIEWING THE CARDS FROM DAY 1
Part of this challenge is that I'm using a new Spaced Repetition System, Anki. I'm more used to Mnemosyne, which I've been using to study Japanese for a long time. In case you didn't read yesterday's report, a Spaced Repetition System is a computer program that lets you make and review flashcards, and when you review a card, you rate how well you know it. The program uses your ratings to optimize your review schedule. It's flashcards for the 21st century. Here are the websites for Anki and Mnemosyne.
The cards I made yesterday have French sentences as their "question" side and English translations as their "answer". The point is not to memorize the English translations, but rather to comprehend the French sentence naturally, as a natural Francophone would. The only reason to have the translation is to make sure I comprehend the sentence right; when I get more advanced, I'll start turning translations invisible. As I review the cards, I'm also occasionally looking up words in about.com's French Audio Dictionary, so I can work on my pronunciation.
It's very interesting that Anki seems to calculate the interval between card reviews in terms of realtime, instead of in terms of days like Mnemosyne. I also like how, in Anki, the rating buttons also tell you exactly how long until the next review if you pick that rating. For example, for a brand new card I just reviewed, I can pick "1" and it'll come up again in 10 minutes; or I can pick "2" and it'll come up in 8-12 hours; or I can pick "3" and it'll come up in 3-5 days. Of course, those intervals will change as the card matures. Right now it's still a "baby" card.
While reviewing, I'm listening to some French music I found by searching Youtube for "French music" (what an original idea!) This music video is pretty trippy. Makes me wonder, Oh crap what am I getting myself into! ;)
At first, it looks like Anki imposed a hard limit to how many cards it would let me review per day. Of course for the French Revolution, such a limit would be absolutely crippling, and I was afraid I'd have to switch to Mnemosyne. But, digging through the preferences, I found I could change it by going to "edit", "deck properties", "scheduling", and upping "Number of new cards per day" to a million.
I noticed the default font for Anki is Arial, which is sans-serif, which means it's impossible to distinguish a capital I from a lowercase L. That wouldn't be an issue if I were using Anki to study Japanese, as intended, but for French it's an issue. I changed the font to Times New Roman.
When it comes to doing reviews, the big dilemma is how liberal to be with high ratings. Do you rate everything a 2 or 3 if you can basically understand it? Do you rate everything a 1 unless you understand it utterly, including pronunciation? My experience with Japanese SRSing has been that I tend to slowly change my strategy from time to time, but it doesn't really matter. The Golden Rule of Language Learning applies: any strategy works as long as it involves regular exposure to the target language.
FORUMS AND COMMUNITY
I continue to be bemused by the dismal online community of French learners. Maybe they're hiding somewhere? *Glowing Face Man throws on some hip waders and descends into the famous Parisian sewers in search of hidden forums* I got just one reply to my post at the about.com forums, which was an about.com employee advertising the about.com French language section. About.com is a great site, both for quick reference as well as more in-depth study, but its French forum is a long way from being a French language learning community.
It occurred to me that I never used Google directly to find the great Japanese forums, I stumbled upon them more naturally. So, for comparison's sake, I've gone and searched Google for "Japanese language forum". If the results are similarly meager, then that should suggest there ARE some more advanced French language forums out there, they're just not high on Google's list. Sure enough, the first page Google returns is mostly junk. Certainly it doesn't contain any of the extremely active (dozens of posts per day) Japanese forums I read. I guess what I'm seeing is that Google isn't great for sniffing out the best forums... Let's give Google a quick search-optimizing hand: The World's Best Japanese Forums Ever.
In light of this, I decided to delve deeper into the "French language forum" google search. Eventually I found the WordReference Forums, which include some French forums that appear to be pretty active. I made a first post. Tomorrow I'll see whether it succeeds. I'm a little worried that the Forum Rules on these forums look like something out of a Soviet era prison camp. Or a Napoleonic prison camp... if Napoleon had prison camps...
TEX'S FRENCH GRAMMAR
I sentence-mined about half the "determiners" chapter from Tex's French Grammar, which chapter is considerably longer than the "nouns" chapter. At first, I had reservations about this site, because it's officially associated with a university course, and university courses are usually pretty inefficient. But, from what I've seen so far, I rather like this guide. It's full of good sentences with English translations, and very lively sentences at that.
I just wish the sound files were in MP3 or WAV format or something that didn't require Apple Quicktime. Why do webmasters use Quicktime? If it's about saving a few megabytes, the webmaster might have a problem with not appreciating the value of his or her own work. I know if I recorded a bunch of language files, I'd want them to be available as easily as possible to as big an audience as possible, so I'd use as common and easily playable a file format as possible.
And I'm a private outside party; I hate to think that French students at UT Austin are being compelled by some professor to install Apple's crapware on their systems just to do their course. I'm sure the professor isn't doing that intentionally!
PRONUNCIATION
I decided I'm going to make a 2nd Anki deck for pronunciation facts. For now, I'll be taking pronunciation facts from this LanguageGuide page (which very conveniently has audio files in MP3 format)
Here's an example of what a card looks like...
Question: ê, è and e
Answer: "e" of "pet"
This is probably not the best way to do it, but with only 30 days, I can't afford perfectionism. I can always change things later.
For today, I made cards for all the rules about Vowels ("Vowel Sounds I" and "Vowel Sounds II").
THE RECKLESS PACE OF SPACED REPETITION
The great thing about using a spaced repetition system is that I don't have to carefully contemplate each thing I read. If I think it's important enough, I can put it in my card deck, and then it'll be taken care of in my daily language review session, which by now is so deeply entrenched in habit that there's no danger of forgetting.
This is good for, eg, French pronunciation rules. There are so many of them, it would take too long to carefully ruminate over each and every one. I could squint and bunch up my forehead and try thinking really hard about them, but it wouldn't really put them any more firmly in my memory. I guess I could devise some Heisig-style visualizations, but it would be hard since there is so little structure involved (as opposed to Chinese characters which are flush with structure).
A real Frenchman doesn't learn pronunciation rules by carefully deliberating over them. He learns them by repetition, endless ceaseless mind-numbing repetition. That's what the SRS is for, except the SRS even streamlines the process. Basically, the subconscious mind is far, far better at finding patterns than the conscious mind is. See my article: How The Mind Learns.
BUGS IN ANKI
I found my first bug in the Anki SRS. If the "question" side of a card starts with a quotation mark, the card might appear blank in the "Edit Items..." menu, until you click it. It seems like it might also require that you had to scroll to get to the card.
CARDS ADDED TODAY
Today I added 78 cards to the main sentence deck, all of them sentences from Tex's French Grammar. And I added 27 pronunciation fact cards to the new pronunciation deck, all from the LanguageGuide page. Now that I'm switching between two decks, I noticed that Anki for some reason doesn't let you choose what to name your deck. My main deck is named "mydeck2" and the new pronunciation deck is named "mydeck3". I was also never prompted what folder to store them in.
SUBLIMINAL LANGUAGE INPUT DURING SLEEP
Since my girlfriend is in Japan right now (I miss her and love her so much), I'm debating whether to try some French language input on headphones while I sleep. Of course, it'll be impossible to blog about that on the same day, so I'll have to let you know tomorrow whether I end up doing it or not.
Previous Day in the French Revolution: Day 1
Next Day in the French Revolution: Day 3
You can also go to the French Revolution Table of Contents.
Here are some other articles I've written. If you're studying English as a second language, you can sentence-mine these, and soon you'll be speaking like Glowing Face Man.
Autodidact: Be A Self-Teacher
Irregular Verbs in Japanese
The Evolution Of Handwriting
Researching English On Books.google.com
Studying Foreign Language Proper Nouns
Before beginning studies for Day 2, I went and did a pretty solid workout, focusing on lower body. It's been a week since I last worked out, because finals week was such a blitz. It feels really good to get back in the gym. Part of having a strong mind, is having a strong body, and anyone who is serious about mental growth (like learning a second language) should definitely have a regular workout schedule.
REVIEWING THE CARDS FROM DAY 1
Part of this challenge is that I'm using a new Spaced Repetition System, Anki. I'm more used to Mnemosyne, which I've been using to study Japanese for a long time. In case you didn't read yesterday's report, a Spaced Repetition System is a computer program that lets you make and review flashcards, and when you review a card, you rate how well you know it. The program uses your ratings to optimize your review schedule. It's flashcards for the 21st century. Here are the websites for Anki and Mnemosyne.
The cards I made yesterday have French sentences as their "question" side and English translations as their "answer". The point is not to memorize the English translations, but rather to comprehend the French sentence naturally, as a natural Francophone would. The only reason to have the translation is to make sure I comprehend the sentence right; when I get more advanced, I'll start turning translations invisible. As I review the cards, I'm also occasionally looking up words in about.com's French Audio Dictionary, so I can work on my pronunciation.
It's very interesting that Anki seems to calculate the interval between card reviews in terms of realtime, instead of in terms of days like Mnemosyne. I also like how, in Anki, the rating buttons also tell you exactly how long until the next review if you pick that rating. For example, for a brand new card I just reviewed, I can pick "1" and it'll come up again in 10 minutes; or I can pick "2" and it'll come up in 8-12 hours; or I can pick "3" and it'll come up in 3-5 days. Of course, those intervals will change as the card matures. Right now it's still a "baby" card.
While reviewing, I'm listening to some French music I found by searching Youtube for "French music" (what an original idea!) This music video is pretty trippy. Makes me wonder, Oh crap what am I getting myself into! ;)
At first, it looks like Anki imposed a hard limit to how many cards it would let me review per day. Of course for the French Revolution, such a limit would be absolutely crippling, and I was afraid I'd have to switch to Mnemosyne. But, digging through the preferences, I found I could change it by going to "edit", "deck properties", "scheduling", and upping "Number of new cards per day" to a million.
I noticed the default font for Anki is Arial, which is sans-serif, which means it's impossible to distinguish a capital I from a lowercase L. That wouldn't be an issue if I were using Anki to study Japanese, as intended, but for French it's an issue. I changed the font to Times New Roman.
When it comes to doing reviews, the big dilemma is how liberal to be with high ratings. Do you rate everything a 2 or 3 if you can basically understand it? Do you rate everything a 1 unless you understand it utterly, including pronunciation? My experience with Japanese SRSing has been that I tend to slowly change my strategy from time to time, but it doesn't really matter. The Golden Rule of Language Learning applies: any strategy works as long as it involves regular exposure to the target language.
FORUMS AND COMMUNITY
I continue to be bemused by the dismal online community of French learners. Maybe they're hiding somewhere? *Glowing Face Man throws on some hip waders and descends into the famous Parisian sewers in search of hidden forums* I got just one reply to my post at the about.com forums, which was an about.com employee advertising the about.com French language section. About.com is a great site, both for quick reference as well as more in-depth study, but its French forum is a long way from being a French language learning community.
It occurred to me that I never used Google directly to find the great Japanese forums, I stumbled upon them more naturally. So, for comparison's sake, I've gone and searched Google for "Japanese language forum". If the results are similarly meager, then that should suggest there ARE some more advanced French language forums out there, they're just not high on Google's list. Sure enough, the first page Google returns is mostly junk. Certainly it doesn't contain any of the extremely active (dozens of posts per day) Japanese forums I read. I guess what I'm seeing is that Google isn't great for sniffing out the best forums... Let's give Google a quick search-optimizing hand: The World's Best Japanese Forums Ever.
In light of this, I decided to delve deeper into the "French language forum" google search. Eventually I found the WordReference Forums, which include some French forums that appear to be pretty active. I made a first post. Tomorrow I'll see whether it succeeds. I'm a little worried that the Forum Rules on these forums look like something out of a Soviet era prison camp. Or a Napoleonic prison camp... if Napoleon had prison camps...
TEX'S FRENCH GRAMMAR
I sentence-mined about half the "determiners" chapter from Tex's French Grammar, which chapter is considerably longer than the "nouns" chapter. At first, I had reservations about this site, because it's officially associated with a university course, and university courses are usually pretty inefficient. But, from what I've seen so far, I rather like this guide. It's full of good sentences with English translations, and very lively sentences at that.
I just wish the sound files were in MP3 or WAV format or something that didn't require Apple Quicktime. Why do webmasters use Quicktime? If it's about saving a few megabytes, the webmaster might have a problem with not appreciating the value of his or her own work. I know if I recorded a bunch of language files, I'd want them to be available as easily as possible to as big an audience as possible, so I'd use as common and easily playable a file format as possible.
And I'm a private outside party; I hate to think that French students at UT Austin are being compelled by some professor to install Apple's crapware on their systems just to do their course. I'm sure the professor isn't doing that intentionally!
PRONUNCIATION
I decided I'm going to make a 2nd Anki deck for pronunciation facts. For now, I'll be taking pronunciation facts from this LanguageGuide page (which very conveniently has audio files in MP3 format)
Here's an example of what a card looks like...
Question: ê, è and e
Answer: "e" of "pet"
This is probably not the best way to do it, but with only 30 days, I can't afford perfectionism. I can always change things later.
For today, I made cards for all the rules about Vowels ("Vowel Sounds I" and "Vowel Sounds II").
THE RECKLESS PACE OF SPACED REPETITION
The great thing about using a spaced repetition system is that I don't have to carefully contemplate each thing I read. If I think it's important enough, I can put it in my card deck, and then it'll be taken care of in my daily language review session, which by now is so deeply entrenched in habit that there's no danger of forgetting.
This is good for, eg, French pronunciation rules. There are so many of them, it would take too long to carefully ruminate over each and every one. I could squint and bunch up my forehead and try thinking really hard about them, but it wouldn't really put them any more firmly in my memory. I guess I could devise some Heisig-style visualizations, but it would be hard since there is so little structure involved (as opposed to Chinese characters which are flush with structure).
A real Frenchman doesn't learn pronunciation rules by carefully deliberating over them. He learns them by repetition, endless ceaseless mind-numbing repetition. That's what the SRS is for, except the SRS even streamlines the process. Basically, the subconscious mind is far, far better at finding patterns than the conscious mind is. See my article: How The Mind Learns.
BUGS IN ANKI
I found my first bug in the Anki SRS. If the "question" side of a card starts with a quotation mark, the card might appear blank in the "Edit Items..." menu, until you click it. It seems like it might also require that you had to scroll to get to the card.
CARDS ADDED TODAY
Today I added 78 cards to the main sentence deck, all of them sentences from Tex's French Grammar. And I added 27 pronunciation fact cards to the new pronunciation deck, all from the LanguageGuide page. Now that I'm switching between two decks, I noticed that Anki for some reason doesn't let you choose what to name your deck. My main deck is named "mydeck2" and the new pronunciation deck is named "mydeck3". I was also never prompted what folder to store them in.
SUBLIMINAL LANGUAGE INPUT DURING SLEEP
Since my girlfriend is in Japan right now (I miss her and love her so much), I'm debating whether to try some French language input on headphones while I sleep. Of course, it'll be impossible to blog about that on the same day, so I'll have to let you know tomorrow whether I end up doing it or not.
Previous Day in the French Revolution: Day 1
Next Day in the French Revolution: Day 3
You can also go to the French Revolution Table of Contents.
Here are some other articles I've written. If you're studying English as a second language, you can sentence-mine these, and soon you'll be speaking like Glowing Face Man.
Autodidact: Be A Self-Teacher
Irregular Verbs in Japanese
The Evolution Of Handwriting
Researching English On Books.google.com
Studying Foreign Language Proper Nouns
Posts
1 comments:
Are you using the latest version of Anki? The number of new cards per day is on the first tab of the deck properties now. If you still have problems with blank questions in the latest version, please report it on the issue tracker and it will get fixed.
Re naming decks, 'save as' lets you call it something else. For some reason many people seem to miss this, so maybe it needs a new approach.
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