Welcome, revolutionary fighter, to Day 22 of the French Revolution. The French Revolution is my quest to teach myself as much French as I can in an hour or two a day for 30 days, and this is the 22nd day.
NEW YEARS RESOLUTIONS
If you've been thinking about doing your own 30 day language challenge, this is a great time of year to start, since you can count it as one of your New Years Resolutions. In case you come from a very different culture than me, here in the U.S. we have things called New Years Resolutions, it basically means on the 1st of the year you resolve to make some change. Many people make New Years Resolutions and follow through with them for maybe a week, or a month at the most. The problem is people don't realize how atrophied their self-discipline is, because they don't even realize self-discipline is a muscle to grow or atrophy in the first place. Earlier today I slammed out a really killer article about keeping New Years Resolutions: How To Keep A New Years Resolution. Of course, to be truthful, the advice applies all throughout the year and it doesn't really matter whether you're reading this at New Years or not.
PREDICTIONS ABOUT LANGUAGE LEARNING IN 2009
There's a very interesting thread over at the Reviewing The Kanji forums right now: 2009 predictions. Basically, in the world, a small proportion of people are actively trying to learn more languages. Among that mini-population, a small proportion of that consists of people who know about all the cutting edge technology of today, like Spaced Repetition Systems, Imaginative Memory, Sentence Mining, and so on. As time goes on, will all this language-learning technology go mainstream? And what effect will that have on culture, if literally anyone can learn a language to impressively good levels in under a year?
PRACTICING FRENCH PRONUNCIATION
Today, my pronunciation deck should be much harder than before, since I just mined a bunch of full sentence audio files. When I opened the pronunciation deck, there were 121 scheduled items: 100 old, and 21 new. With the deck being such a mix of short 1-word cards and longer sentence cards, Anki's "ETA" estimation feature-- an attempt to predict how long the review will take-- was going crazy, swinging back and forth throughout most of the review. I stopped the review after 37 minutes, when I passed the last non-sentence card. 13 sentence cards remained unpassed.
All the sentence cards which were passed, were passed with a "hard" rating, and since they'd never been passed before, that'll ensure they'll all show up in tomorrow's review. The amount of space assigned to a card by rating it "hard" in Anki depends on the card's entire history. If you keep rating the same card "hard" every time it shows up, it'll gradually get spaced out more and more, just not nearly as fast as if you were occasionally rating it "good" or "easy".
I feel like my pronunciation is making leaps and bounds of improvement, but at the same time it feels like I still have such a long way to go.
THE CORE OF THE STUDY-- SENTENCE REVIEWS
I'm using the cutting edge technique of Sentence Mining as the foundation of my French studies. That means I expose myself to lots of example sentences and let me subconscious mind figure out the underlying patterns, rather than try to consciously grapple with complex grammar rules and conjugation charts. This method is very similar to how a baby learns, through exposure, exposure, exposure. But it's more optimized, because I'm using an advanced flashcard program, Anki, to optimize the whole flashcard process.
There were 274 sentence cards scheduled for review, 190 old, 84 new. It took 58 minutes to go through them.
Partway through the review, I turned on some music. I immediately could just feel my productivity and efficiency fall like a rock. I turned the music right back off. I guess the drastic drop was because it was some very catchy Depeche Mode, rather than something ambient. Either way though, even with ambient music, I definitely notice my efficiency with flashcard reviewing goes up when I'm not listening to music.
MINING MORE SENTENCES
I continued sentence mining Tex's French Grammar, up to and including the "passé antérieur" section of the "Tense and Mood" chapter. Looking at the table of contents for that chapter, it looks like that's the last of the past tense sections, and after that, they go into future tenses. With Japanese I'm pretty spoiled, I guess, since Japanese doesn't really have a separate future tense, at least not one that requires extra conjugations.
Previous Day in the French Revolution: Day 21
Next Day in the French Revolution: Day 23
You can also go to the French Revolution Table Of Contents...
...or to the French Revolution Introduction.
Here are some other articles I wrote:
Will The Languages Of The World Ever Merge?
The Four Conditionals In Japanese
Training Self-Discipline
Examples Of Japanese Onomatopoeia
Running On The Treadmill
NEW YEARS RESOLUTIONS
If you've been thinking about doing your own 30 day language challenge, this is a great time of year to start, since you can count it as one of your New Years Resolutions. In case you come from a very different culture than me, here in the U.S. we have things called New Years Resolutions, it basically means on the 1st of the year you resolve to make some change. Many people make New Years Resolutions and follow through with them for maybe a week, or a month at the most. The problem is people don't realize how atrophied their self-discipline is, because they don't even realize self-discipline is a muscle to grow or atrophy in the first place. Earlier today I slammed out a really killer article about keeping New Years Resolutions: How To Keep A New Years Resolution. Of course, to be truthful, the advice applies all throughout the year and it doesn't really matter whether you're reading this at New Years or not.
PREDICTIONS ABOUT LANGUAGE LEARNING IN 2009
There's a very interesting thread over at the Reviewing The Kanji forums right now: 2009 predictions. Basically, in the world, a small proportion of people are actively trying to learn more languages. Among that mini-population, a small proportion of that consists of people who know about all the cutting edge technology of today, like Spaced Repetition Systems, Imaginative Memory, Sentence Mining, and so on. As time goes on, will all this language-learning technology go mainstream? And what effect will that have on culture, if literally anyone can learn a language to impressively good levels in under a year?
PRACTICING FRENCH PRONUNCIATION
Today, my pronunciation deck should be much harder than before, since I just mined a bunch of full sentence audio files. When I opened the pronunciation deck, there were 121 scheduled items: 100 old, and 21 new. With the deck being such a mix of short 1-word cards and longer sentence cards, Anki's "ETA" estimation feature-- an attempt to predict how long the review will take-- was going crazy, swinging back and forth throughout most of the review. I stopped the review after 37 minutes, when I passed the last non-sentence card. 13 sentence cards remained unpassed.
All the sentence cards which were passed, were passed with a "hard" rating, and since they'd never been passed before, that'll ensure they'll all show up in tomorrow's review. The amount of space assigned to a card by rating it "hard" in Anki depends on the card's entire history. If you keep rating the same card "hard" every time it shows up, it'll gradually get spaced out more and more, just not nearly as fast as if you were occasionally rating it "good" or "easy".
I feel like my pronunciation is making leaps and bounds of improvement, but at the same time it feels like I still have such a long way to go.
THE CORE OF THE STUDY-- SENTENCE REVIEWS
I'm using the cutting edge technique of Sentence Mining as the foundation of my French studies. That means I expose myself to lots of example sentences and let me subconscious mind figure out the underlying patterns, rather than try to consciously grapple with complex grammar rules and conjugation charts. This method is very similar to how a baby learns, through exposure, exposure, exposure. But it's more optimized, because I'm using an advanced flashcard program, Anki, to optimize the whole flashcard process.
There were 274 sentence cards scheduled for review, 190 old, 84 new. It took 58 minutes to go through them.
Partway through the review, I turned on some music. I immediately could just feel my productivity and efficiency fall like a rock. I turned the music right back off. I guess the drastic drop was because it was some very catchy Depeche Mode, rather than something ambient. Either way though, even with ambient music, I definitely notice my efficiency with flashcard reviewing goes up when I'm not listening to music.
MINING MORE SENTENCES
I continued sentence mining Tex's French Grammar, up to and including the "passé antérieur" section of the "Tense and Mood" chapter. Looking at the table of contents for that chapter, it looks like that's the last of the past tense sections, and after that, they go into future tenses. With Japanese I'm pretty spoiled, I guess, since Japanese doesn't really have a separate future tense, at least not one that requires extra conjugations.
Previous Day in the French Revolution: Day 21
Next Day in the French Revolution: Day 23
You can also go to the French Revolution Table Of Contents...
...or to the French Revolution Introduction.
Here are some other articles I wrote:
Will The Languages Of The World Ever Merge?
The Four Conditionals In Japanese
Training Self-Discipline
Examples Of Japanese Onomatopoeia
Running On The Treadmill
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