Learning Chinese – One Year In

 

When I started memorizing my Spanish phrasebook, I picked an arbitrary number of phrases to learn each day – 10.  This seemed achievable to me, with the added benefit of being able to quickly calculate and track my progress.

This seemed to work well for me for the first three months, then I took a month or so off, then learnt 50-100 words per day for two weeks, before spending a week and a half revising my deck without learning any new words.

The problem with learning a lot of words or phrases quickly with Anki is that the number of cards to review also adds up very quickly, and before you know it you have to revise two or three hundred cards per day, with occasional spikes of five hundred cards in one day.  I call this problem The Wrath of Anki, and I’ve posted about it before here and here.

In his book Fast, Easy Way to Learn a Language Bill Handley states that in his opinion it is more effective to learn lots of words quickly and poorly rather a small amount of words slowly but surely.

I thought I’d try the Quickly and Poorly method with Chinese.  So I’d learn 100 new phrases in one session, then revise and revise until I had the number of cards I had to review down to a manageable level, then learn 100 more.

Belated 1st anniversary post

I started this post on 18 June, a year to the day since I started this blog.  The period since then has been incredibly busy for me, so only now am I able to finish it.

In the year 18 June 2014 to 18 June 2015…

• I started this blog.
• I conducted an experiment to see if it is possible to learn a language (Spanish) by memorising a phrasebook. (It is!)
• I sat a Spanish exam.
• I completed 18 units of the FSI Spanish Programmatic Course, and committed them to memory using Anki.
• I started memorising a Chinese phrasebook.
• I listened to all 12 eps of the Serial podcast.
• I stopped adding cards to my Spanish Anki deck in February.  By June, it was only taking me five minutes or so per day to review my flashcards.
• As of today, I’ve almost memorised my entire Chinese phrasebook.  It is taking longer than Spanish – I’ll explain why in another post.

All the best, wherever you may be,

Ziggy

Dream the impossible dream – take a nap to improve your memory

From the Huffington Post…

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/23/naps-boost-memory-_n_6922788.html

For what it’s worth, I find that I can remember my Anki flash cards much better first thing in the morning – just after I’ve woken up and before breakfast.

I think the chances of my boss letting me take a one-hour nap at work are pretty low, though.

How to Set Up Your Anki Deck

1. Copy the audio files from your phrasebook to your computer’s hard drive.  For this tutorial, I am using McGraw-Hill’s French All in One.
2. Download Anki.
3. Open Anki.
4. Your screen should look like this. Click on Add.

Mission Complete!

I sat the A2 DELE exam on Saturday which was the final stage of my experiment to see if I could learn a language by memorising a phrasebook.  This is the phrasebook I used.

Hard Data

I just realised I have been learning Spanish for exactly five months today.

I started on 18 June, 2014.  You can read my first post here.

One of the things I like about Anki is that it is good at collecting data.

I’ve been learning for 22 weeks (154 days)

I’ve learnt 1628 phrases/words, which works out at 11 phrases/words per day.

I studied 127 days out of 154 (82%)

On average, I studied for 32.1 minutes per day

If I had studied every day, it would have been 26 minutes per day.

I sit my exam on Saturday!

I did it!

I’m happy to say that today I learnt the last of 1500 phrases in my phrasebook.

I can think and speak in Spanish, but I’m still not fluent.  I still have to mentally search for the right word, so I speak quite slowly.

I have ten days until my DELE exam.  There are four tests – listening, speaking, reading and writing.

Can’t talk, must study.

Wish me luck!

How will I know (if I can speak Spanish)?

Yo hipsters,

I mentioned last week that I consider Toxic by Britney Spears to be a perfect pop song.

I’m currently working on an eight-hour bio-pic of Whitney Houston called I Will Always Love You but I Wanna Dance with Somebody Who Loves Me and I was amazed to discover that the original lyrics to How Will I Know? were;

How will I know if I can speak Spanish?

I talk to strangers but no one understands me.

They look at me just like I’m a freak.

How could I know the “h”s are silent?

No wonder Janet Jackson passed on that song.

But it occurred to me that in order to see if my experiment of learning Spanish by using Anki to memorize a phrasebook is successful, I need some form of external, unbiased, standardized testing.

And there are such tests.  They’re called the Diplomas de Español como Lengua Extranjera (DELE – Diplomas of Spanish as foreign language).

It turns out that there will be an exam on November 22, about a week after I’m due to finish memorizing my phrasebook.

At this stage, I’m considering sitting for the B1-level diploma.

The B1-level test accredits language users’ capacity to:^[9]

• Understand the main ideas of clear texts, in standard language, if they involve well-known topics related to work, studies or leisure.
• Handle most of the situations in a trip
• Produce simple texts about common topics or interested subject matters.
• Describe experiences, events, wishes and hopes, as well as briefly justify opinions or explain plans.

I will reassess whether this is an achievable goal closer to the exam date.

Progress Report

I successfully learned another 70 phrases this week, which brings my total to 280.

I didn’t learn any on Sunday, but made up for it by learning 20 phrases on Monday.

As a reward for reading this post all the way to the end, why not treat yourself to Whitney’s perfect pop song (with the revised lyrics)?

Why use a phrasebook?

(Español)

1. The language and vocabulary are extremely practical, so there is a chance that I will actually use the stuff I memorise.

2. There is a lot of vocabulary. A problem faced by all language learners is that you need a lot of vocabulary to participate in basic conversations. Many language courses only use 400 words or so.

My Phrasebook

I’m using the McGraw-Hill Spanish All-in-One kit ( ISBN-10: 0071627669 , ISBN-13: 978-0071627665).

It has 300 basic phrases, the conjugations for 30 verbs and around 900 different words to learn.

It has audio recordings by a native speaker of all the phrases.

This is very important because I do not want to memorize the phrases perfectly only to pronounce them incorrectly.

I especially like it because the individual phrases are recorded as separate mp3 files, which makes adding the phrases to my Anki cards easy.

I don’t have any affiliation with McGraw-Hill or anyone involved with this book.  I was going to use McGraw-Hill’s iSpeak Spanish, but it seems to be out of print.  The Spanish All-in-One kit seems to be an updated version of iSpeak Spanish.

Progress Report
I successfully memorised 70 phrases this week . I didn’t get time to memorise 10 on Saturday, so I made up for it by memorising 20 on Sunday.

Entiendo un poco de español (I understand a little Spanish).

The phrases I will learn today are…