So I have a listening deck for sentences (Chinese) and I've been noticing recently that I have a what I could call 'delayed recognition'. It's like this. I hear a sentence (not a new card), and I have no idea what's being said. Then I think and think and for some reason my memory allows me to slowly decipher the sounds I just heard into words I know and finally a sentence. So I was wondering: am I actually understanding what is being said or do I just know the sentences from my deck too well so that I can reconstruct them? Should I fail them after a certain time limit?

I only noticed this recently, since before I didn't give myself so much time and I had also the sentence sound on the back of the card, and if heard the sentence the second time correct (without looking at the card obviously), I would mark the card as good in Anki. I did this because it was just so insanely hard to get a sentence the first time. Recently I improved somewhat, so I deleted the audio on the back of the card, but now I got the thing above.

kame3 Wrote:So I was wondering: am I actually understanding what is being said or do I just know the sentences from my deck too well so that I can reconstruct them? Should I fail them after a certain time limit?

First question: No, you are not understanding what is being said. See my hint below.

Second question: Yes, you fail the card if you don't recognize it instantly. "Language learning is overlearning": the reason for failing yourself is that you want to train yourself to understand what's being said, so any delay means that your brain has not overlearned the material yet.

Hint: When at the awkward first stages of language learning, there is benefit in restricting your input to short phrases - I mean minimal expressions of 3-5 words, and thus I would guess that the material you are presently using seems a bit too advanced for you. Leave intensive exposition to later, when you have mastered several thousands of minimal collocations.

Of course some people will disagree with this (the L-R folks), so it is for you to decide what works for you, and what doesn't.

In general, the language learning algorithm I am following is:

1) Try something.
2) If something does not work or is impossible to do, try something else.
3) If something becomes boring, try something else.
4) Find a way to deal with forgetting what you learned, which is surely going to happen sooner or later.
5) Do not take advice from Internet forums... First, most people do not know what they are speaking about, and second, they are not **you**.
6) Take your time. Either you will die before mastering Japanese, or you will die after. In any case, the end state is the same ;-)

It sounds like you're remembering the sentence, but that's unavoidable to certain extent so I wouldn't worry about it too much. The best way to fix it is to spend more time deciphering new material, and just use the SRS to build a base understanding, because it's rarely going to be enough to gain fluent, instinctive understanding of a word.

That being said though, it does sound like you're spending too much time on each card. Cutting back on thinking time is much more efficient because it replaces time spent procrastinating with time spent reviewing. You'll find that only giving yourself a moment to answer results in a higher fail rate, but it also means less time spent reviewing over all, more repetitions of difficult cards and being able to recall known answers much quicker.

kame3 Wrote:I hear a sentence (not a new card), and I have no idea what's being said. Then I think and think and for some reason my memory allows me to slowly decipher the sounds I just heard into words I know and finally a sentence.

Happens to me all the time.

I listen to a few sentences and I can understand them, and I'm happy about it, but the moment I lose a shred of focus, like if I see a hangnail, or start pen flicking, or even think about my focusing in between sentences, I'm simply unable to comprehend the next sentence until long after it's played. Does this pattern seem farmiliar?

Sentence 1: understood, get excited or distracted
Sentence 2: didn't get a word of what was said
Sentence 3: ignored completely, replaying sentence 2 in my head from echoic memory
Sentence 4: finally figured out what sentence 2 meant, pause audio and return to sentence 3.

It's unavoidable. Listening is the only way to develop your listening recognition speed so that's what we gotta do. Even if you memorise nothing more than the sound of a sentence at first, it's still valuable information. You'd use it to more easily identify words once you can recognise them.

I don't know if you are just remembering the sentence, or maybe its just because you are slow at it.

There are basically two phases of learning stuff. There is the phase where you have to consciously think about it, and then there is the phase where it is intuitive and instant.
Every word or phrase that you learn eventually goes from phase 1 to phase 2.

I can listen to extremely simple Japanese sentences and understand without thinking about it.
But throw something a little more complex at me, and its all a blur. Let me take it slow, a word at a time, think it through, and I can understand. It's just because I haven't learned all of that material to the instant and intuitive level yet.

If you think about it, you see the exact same thing if you are doing simpler cards, like a single vocabulary word. For words you know really well, you might be able to answer a card the moment you see it. But for a lot of cards, you probably have to sit there and think for a second or two.
If you are listening to a sentence, the problem is amplified because there could be multiple parts that you have to think through.

[RawToast]

Zarxrax Wrote:There are basically two phases of learning stuff. There is the phase where you have to consciously think about it, and then there is the phase where it is intuitive and instant.
Every word or phrase that you learn eventually goes from phase 1 to phase 2.

If you think about it, you see the exact same thing if you are doing simpler cards, like a single vocabulary word. For words you know really well, you might be able to answer a card the moment you see it. But for a lot of cards, you probably have to sit there and think for a second or two.
If you are listening to a sentence, the problem is amplified because there could be multiple parts that you have to think through.

I agree and can relate to this as well. I have been working on my listening recently and you do find yourself lagging behind because of the words (or grammar) you don't know, or know less well.

You'll find when you have memorized the sentence you know it as soon as you hear (or read for Subs2SRS) the first word. If you have been on iknow you find you can do this near the end of a 20/50 word review, as the sentence is firmly in your short term memory.

Zarxrax Wrote:I don't know if you are just remembering the sentence, or maybe its just because you are slow at it.

There are basically two phases of learning stuff. There is the phase where you have to consciously think about it, and then there is the phase where it is intuitive and instant.
Every word or phrase that you learn eventually goes from phase 1 to phase 2.

I can listen to extremely simple Japanese sentences and understand without thinking about it.
But throw something a little more complex at me, and its all a blur. Let me take it slow, a word at a time, think it through, and I can understand. It's just because I haven't learned all of that material to the instant and intuitive level yet.

If you think about it, you see the exact same thing if you are doing simpler cards, like a single vocabulary word. For words you know really well, you might be able to answer a card the moment you see it. But for a lot of cards, you probably have to sit there and think for a second or two.
If you are listening to a sentence, the problem is amplified because there could be multiple parts that you have to think through.

... and to me that's the core of learning a foreign language. You can conquer space (10,000 words) but if you haven't conquered time, you are not there yet. You can get there quicker if you prioritise differently space and time (as in, you opt for 3-4,000 words but with quicker response).

... mezbup got it wrong

Inny Jan Wrote:... mezbup got it wrong

Usagi to kame.

Strange, even as a kid, I understood the meaning of the fable: you go fast, you do a sloppy job and you eventually need to re-learn.

You go slow, you build a strong foundation that will allow you to eventually reach your objective faster.

In his defense, he did say:

Quote:The first year I learned Japanese I just focused on grammar and built a small vocabulary of 2,500 words.

One year spent on grammar is an incredibly strong foundation, and nobody actually reads grammar guides like they're in a hurry. Then again, it was kept to a single sentence in the 2nd last paragraph. Perhaps he undermined the importance of that year.

I do think words should be learnt quickly IF grammar is very strong. I gathered from NightSky's post in mezbup's thread that even with a several-thousand-word vocabulary, discovering 30+ new words a day from reading remains a pretty easy task for quite a while. Words aren't very complex, but learning how to use them is a relatively slow process, in that it needs the most time for incubation. IMO.

Animosophy Wrote:In his defense, he did say:

Quote:The first year I learned Japanese I just focused on grammar and built a small vocabulary of 2,500 words.

One year spent on grammar is an incredibly strong foundation, and nobody actually reads grammar guides like they're in a hurry. Then again, it was kept to a single sentence in the 2nd last paragraph. Perhaps he undermined the importance of that year.

That is a very good observation. Actually your learning can accelerate in later stages if you are thorough and careful in laying the foundations.

For example in Japanese, there is a ton of unintuitive sentence patterns you have to understand, as well as the verb forms, which must become second nature.

Once that is internalized, and perhaps after you have learned examples of the on/kun readings of most of the characters, then you **probably** can learn much faster from that point on.

So I plead guilty of having commented about that fellow's methods without knowing all his variables.

That said, there is a general tendency on many language fora to boast about fantastic achievements.

If such statements are left unchallenged, it is easy to imagine that beginners must get unrealistic expectations that can lead to early discouragement, so it is important to restore at least a modicum of sanity and celebrate slow and thorough learning processes.

kame3 Wrote:So I have a listening deck for sentences (Chinese)

@Kame:

By the way, I hope you have thoroughly learned the tones of a basic repertoire of characters and words before you went on to sentences?

In Chinese, you simply cannot skip that step. Maybe your problems come from that.

Yep, I did. At least 1000 words and 1000 sentences, and some help with the pronunciation in a language exchange. Chinese is just f*cking hard imho. It just boggles me how sometimes I cannot even understand the simplest sentences even if I know all the words. It seems to me like this phase was shorter in Japanese, but then again I put a lot more effort into learning Japanese. Also I might be a little impatient, haha, I guess it just takes time. Would be amazing if I ever could be conversational in Chinese though.

@kame:

Well, I did about 1 year of Chinese at the uni and then some by myself and IMHO it was easy - far easier than Japanese. In fact, apart from the horrendous number of characters you need to know, Chinese grammar is about as easy as English grammar, if not easier. I also took 1 year of Japanese and could not say 10% of the things I was able to say in Chinese because of the insane Japanese word order and generally whimsical grammar.

I **definitely** think your problem is that you are trying to go too fast. Try taking a class or go through a text and drill drill drill basic words/sentences again, until it becomes easy.

Words in Chinese are shorter and your ear must be trained to recognize the tones - that may seem harder but it just requires a more careful familiarization. Once you get past that hurdle, the language is open to conquest. All things considered, I think becoming fluent in Chinese is much easier than in Japanese.