Anki/Chinese update

Been working through some good sites for learning Chinese:

http://www.daydayupchinese.com/
http://www.zhongwengreen.com/
http://www.zhongwenred.com/

The latter two are by the same people but one is a more updated version, not sure which though. They follow the same lessons but have different example sentences. This is good for my anki sentence deck which currently has 244 sentences with the vocabulary I've accumulated from the lessons I've completed. A thing that struck me however was when I was browsing through how-to-learn-any-language's forum and I came across a post which suggests that Khatzumoto's method of learning languages through 10000 sentences was a natural progress in that he didn't copy down 10000 sentences into a notebook but he came to know 10000 sentences through repeated exposure and listening and consciously picking up on sentence structures he'd never came across before. This was significant to me as I realised that in the past, I was quick to acculumate lots of sentences and put them into Anki but I rarely reviewed them more than once or twice. So I'm making the effort to continuously expose myself to the vocabulary, grammar and sentences in Anki rather than just neglecting them after submitting them into the deck.

January progress


Portuguese

20 / 300 words. 7% done!

French

/ 300 words. 0% done!

Japanese

/ 300 words. 0% done!


Mandarin

322 / 300 words. 107% done!


Unfortunately for me, what I achieved in January concerning goals is almost non-existant, with the exception of Mandarin. I would like to be able to blame it on college and homework but I would be fooling myself if I said I'd spent zealous amounts of time studying. Unfortunately, this month I have prelims/mock exams and I will have to study but hopefully this won't result in me neglecting my languages.

End of January Update

My whole '300 new acquired vocabulary' in each language per month' is epically failing. It's currently 30th January and so far I've learned a whooping 20 new words in Portuguese whilst completely ignoring the other languages. However, after finding a good online Chinese course - http://www.daydayupchinese.com/ - I've decided to pick up Chinese again and currently I have a anki-based vocabulary of 263 words and 49 sentences. Considering I haven't looked at a Spanish text in a good 4/5 months, I've decided to postpone my Spanish and focus on Chinese in it's place.

Progress chart

After spending the last two days doing nothing related to languages, I feel as though I might fall into my old habit of ignoring language learning for prolonged periods of time. To combat this, I've came up with goals to achieve. Each month, I have to learn 300 words - roughly 10 per day - of my lingQ flashcards in each language I'm studying.
Graphs signifying progress of my goals can be found at the top of the page.

School Subject vocabulary

I've just finished watching a channel in French called Inraci TV using http://www.101languages.net/watch/. Whilst I couldn't gauge exactly what the program was about, the word 'école' was used repetitively. So I've decided to compose a vocabulary list on school subjects.

Subjects - Matières

• Art - Le dessin

• Biology - La biologie

• Business Studies - Les études de commerce

• Chemistry - La chimie

• Computing Studies - L'informatique
  

• English - L'anglais

• Geography - L'histoire-geo*

• History - L'histoire-geo*

• Maths - Les maths

• Music - La musique

• Physical education - L'éducation physique et sportive **
  

• Physics - La physique

• Politics - Les sciences politiques
  

• Psychology - La psychologie
  

*In French schools, geography and history are combined into one subject - l'histoire-geo.
**L'éducation physique et sportive is commonly abbreviated into l'EPS.

Progress starter

This is simply a list of my current progress as of 1st January 2010.

LingQ words known
Portuguese - 1754
Spanish - 222
French - 1243
Japanese -332

Anki sentences
Portuguese - 0
Spanish - 0
French - 0
Japanese - 0

Anki vocabulary list
Portuguese - 0
Spanish - 0
French - 0
Japanese - 0

For those who don't know, Anki is a SRS [spaced repetition system] program, designed to help people remember content on flashcards.

Anytime I come across a new word I add it to my anki deck in the appropriate language -eg. I'd add 'agora' to the Portuguese deck. Then, after I've finished adding it, I review all the cards on the deck. How well you know a word determines how much time will pass until the card is shown again.




It's a good program and if you're looking for a flashcard program I would recommend it.
You can find out more at: http://ichi2.net/anki/

New Year.

Tomorrow's New Years Day [a new decade too] and since I'm the type of person who likes to start from afresh every once and a while I've decided that I want to change the way I learn languages [the difference between all the other times I've 'started afresh' and now being that I'll actually keep it up this time - I hope].

Due to being a student I often don't have a lot of time to invest into language learning. Advancing in a language revolves around you immersing yourself in the language as much as possible but I've gotten into the habit of intensively learning a language over a short period of time -a week long holiday perhaps - and then completely ignoring it for a month. I've realised that this isn't an ideal way to acquire a language. By studying so much over a short period of time, I soon [temporarily] lose interest in learning the language and it isn't getting me anywhere. Ideally I hope that by studying everyday but only for a short period of time -15 minutes or so - I will see improved results in my skills.

This blog is a way for me to track my progress and hopefully keep me from losing interest. I also hope to contribute to the language community a little by maybe posting interesting grammar tibbits I've come across or posting vocabulary lists.

Anyways, that's all for now.
I hope everyone has a great New Year!