Anki
Reading L’Étranger by Albert Camus
Listening to Inner French podcast.
Sounds like you’ve got this week covered! I’ve only read L’Étranger in English, but I’m trying out “The Little Prince” in German. Don’t think I could even attempt to read any of Camus’ literature in German yet.
It is going to take me a while to complete that book since I am reading it intensively looking up everything I don’t understand. L’Étranger doesn’t use the passé simple tense so I went with it after trying several other books. Passé simple only seems to be used in books but not used in spoken French.
I also read graded readers like those from CLE to have something easier to read with hardly any lookups. InnerFrench podcast transcript are also good for easy read.
Ohh, interesting reason for going with that book, seems like you’ve read into the topic!
I gave up on reading once I realized I’m going to look up every third word even with the most simple books - so taking a break from that (except little prince) until I manage better. Even graded books for my level seemed too hard. But I’ll try again after taking my next course!
That happened to me too, when I first started reading a book/graded reader. I think one of the reason was due to lack of vocab and lack of knowledge of commonly used tenses and grammar.
My research lead to this wiki article. It gave me an idea how many high freq words I need to know to read books.
The effects of vocabulary size on language comprehension The knowledge of the 3000 most frequent English word families or the 5000 most frequent words provides 95% vocabulary coverage of spoken discourse.[21] For minimal reading comprehension a threshold of 3,000 word families (5,000 lexical items) was suggested[22][23] and for reading for pleasure 5,000 word families (8,000 lexical items) are required.[24] An “optimal” threshold of 8,000 word families yields the coverage of 98% (including proper nouns).[23]
I wonder if those 5k Anki premade deck on ankiweb are based on those numbers. Anyway, I completed a 1k deck a while back. Now, I am going through a 5k deck to test myself and also see new words. But I mostly do sentence mining from books and games. I use Anki addons AnkiMorphs and FrequencyMan to keep track of how many words I’ve seen or know. It is mostly an experimental for me, not sure if it is good or bad.
Hey that is actually really interesting! You could even make this its own post in this community!
That makes a lot of sense and actually motivates me to give up grammar for awhile and learn enough words to understand a bit of context while reading. And I think I need to give anki another chance - I felt like it’s a bit of a drag but I should try to push myself through and form a habit.
Holy shit, thanks for the motivational boost! Also definitely consider making a post about this. I’m certain some people who are not viewing the community from other than their feeds would be interested as well!
Great. I will look into that. I was planning to share how to sentence mine from games someday.
I used the refold French deck for my first 1k words. As I was looking into the German version FAQ, I noticed they included the show which they used to extracts the high frequency words from (french FAQ doesn’t have this info :( ). That information might be useful for content to consume while doing the 1k deck.
That sounds like a good post idea, looking forward to it if you decide to share!
And that’s pretty neat, means I could try watching the show after learning. Great tip, and yeah I have to get back into Anki since it really does seem to be a great way to learn based on your experience.
I think going good. Mostly listening podcast in other language and repeating them to get use to the language. I am planing to learn all Latin language (from Spanish to Romanian). Let’s see how good I will be as a polyglot in one year. Don’t really plan to learn latin, or maybe just for the fun who knows.
Interesting idea with the romance languages! I’m learning two, Latin and Esperanto. Though other romaece languages have always interested me
That’s a pretty cool and ambitious goal to keep yourself occupied!
Are you just listening to random podcasts or have you picked some specific ones that e.g. use easier language? I tried coffeebreakgerman podcast awhile ago and it was nice to actually somewhat keep up with the discussion and it was nice, but didn’t feel like natural talking.
Well, one of the Vorteile, in der EU zu leben ist, ce qu’on sait parler plusieurs de langues. Een ik spreek ook en beetje Nederlands.
Currently I’m trying to improve my french again.
Nochmal bitte! lol. Nice selection of languages you’ve got. I wish you good times with French. I tried French but
failed miserablygave up quite early on.I learned it for 6 years in school. I had been to France quite often, but then life changed. Now I haven’t really used/needed it for ages, so I’m a quite rusty. But im getting better again.
Thankfully learned language comes back faster than learning from scratch. Hope you get to visit France again soon.
I’m an asshole. I take a live lesson every week for an hour and that’s it. I don’t practice.
Ask your teacher to give you homework.
You are right.
That’s not being an asshole - that’s still studying once a week for an hour! Which means you’ve got a routine, which in turn means you are doing really good. Don’t downplay yourself TacoButtPlug!
Somewhere around day 440 of daily Anki reviews for Japanese. My daily study time has halved recently since I cut my oldest deck out of my routine, currently building up my sentence mined deck so that hopefully it’ll grow to fill the time soon. Took a brief detour for Toki Pona in January but back on track now.
Woah that’s dedication, nice! Did you use some pre-made anki decks or did you make your own? I guess making your own forces you to study more as well.
Pre-made decks at first, now I’m onto ones that I’ve compiled myself from television I’ve been watching.
That’s a cool idea. Memorizing when you have an experience behind words is really powerful!
Recently bought a ebook reader which has a dictionary functionality and this week I got myself “The Little Prince” in German.
Looking up words and meanings directly in the ebook reader has been useful!
What reader is it? Like a Kindle or something?
How many words do you need to look up?
I got myself a Tolino from a local retailer, so yeah a bit like Kindle. I wrote a bit more about my purchase here in case you want to hear why I went with Tolino. So far I’m happy with it!
