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 ;-)

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.

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.

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.

Animosophy wrote:

In his defense, he did say:

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.

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.

Last edited by kame3 (2013 June 26, 3:21 pm)