#study activity

[rigelmejo]

I may do this strategy with Le Francais par le Methode Nature eventually. Or with Inner French podcast... mm

[rigelmejo]

Some ideas of possible beginner study activity/goals:

Beginner?

Study the alphabet of the language you are learning for a week, then for the rest of the month practice reading words in the alphabet (or practice trying to read then having an audio tool like an audio example or a dictionary-translate tool with audio-pronunciation and hear the real pronunciation after you try to read). The goal here is to get a basic grasp of the alphabet in a month. Example: Read through an explanation article, or textbook guide, or pronunciation webpage, on the Cyrillic alphabet and write down (or screenshot) a copy of the alphabet to practice reading. Then after the first week, practice reading words written in Cyrillic and use something like Google Translate to Text-To-Speech pronounce the words. (Or if you can find it, use some site with Cyrillic words already provided with audio, or some community anki deck with text and audio, or some youtube video lessons and mute them then listen to the audio after).

Find a pronunciation guide online, and go through it for a week (or find one in a textbook with audio files, or on youtube in lessons). For the rest of the month, practice by listening to audio and seeing if you can write down the words (or if they're words you know in text - see if you can recognize them only by hearing them). The goal here is to get a basic grasp of recognizing pronunciation of the language, so you can look up words easier, and speak in a way that is at least marginally understandable. Example: Go through a pronunciation guide for Chinese pinyin (I went through dongchinese's Pinyin Guide), then afterward practice a tone-pair quiz and single-tone quiz online to see if you can recognize which tone and syllable you're hearing. You can also practice by watching a chinese show (with English subs etc is fine) and practice typing the chinese words you hear in pinyin into a translator app (like Google Translate or Pleco), to see if you're hearing the word correctly. Bonus: if the show is showing Chinese subtitles (hanzi), then you can see if the pinyin you typed into a dictionary-translate app is suggesting the correct hanzi. You may have to write the hanzi you see in subtitles, into an app, to find it's pinyin and compare. Note: dictionary-translate apps may not recognize the pinyin word you type in, even if correct, if it's not the most commonly used word with that pinyin. So writing in hanzi and looking up the pinyin, to compare to what you guessed the pinyin was, may be the way you must search some less common words you hear. Study vocabulary for a week, then practice reading and remembering that vocabulary for the rest of the month. You can practice reading with show subtitles in the language, youtube subtitles in the language, comics, shows, graded readers, webnovels, novels, and news or other articles. Any kind of reading material you find manageable to try reading. If you're an absolute beginner, this reading may just be you watching a show with the language's subtitles (or dual subtitles) and trying to RECOGNIZE when you see a word you've studied, and trying to remember what it meant. This activity can alternatively be done with a focus on listening recognition of new words, just focus on listening to the show you watch to hear words you know, or if you can manage an audio drama or audiobook (even with an english/your native language transcript) then listening for the new words you studied and trying to recognize what they mean. If a word you studied comes up in listening/reading but you can't quite remember what it means, look the meaning up again for a moment. Then carry on. This is a very flexible study activity. You can choose to study 20 words from a wordlist (like a textbook, or graded reader vocabulary list), from a flashcard app (anki, pleco, a million SRS apps that exist with pre-made word decks), from a class, from new words you looked up recently while watching shows or reading. You can study 10-20 words, or 50, or 100, 300, 500, 1000. You can cram study all the new vocabulary in 1 week, or study some new words each week for the month. The main thing is you are focusing on increasing your vocabulary, so ensure you study a decent number of NEW words. As a beginner, common words in the language (such as a frequency list) or words you see often in the language based on what you engage in (such as watching a lot of crime cdramas and seeing 死 a lot, so you pick that word to learn early) are going to cause you to understand more of the language you see QUICKER. If you're reading graded readers already, picking words you don't know in the graded reader may be useful words for you to learn. As you learn more words, picking these new words from frequent words in novels you read and encounter may be a good choice.

This activity can be tailored to whatever study material you're already using and like: a textbook, a podcast, a show you're watching while looking up words, a graded reader, a novel, conversations you're regularly having with people. This is a fairly solid way to increase your passive vocabulary (words you understand the meaning of) by dozens to hundreds of words each month. The main idea is to make sure you pick some new words to learn, and then once you've studied them (even if only a little such as reading their translation you looked up once, or in a word list with translations once or a few times), then practice recognizing them. The practice recognizing them will help you improve your skills of comprehending quickly the words you've studied during real times you're trying to understand them, and remembering the words better.

[rigelmejo]

I forgot to mention it on the last post! This is kind of a niche study activity idea, but I did it a lot the first year I was learning.

Do you read a lot of cnovels that only have machine translations (mtl)? Do you want to practice reading chinese, with english translations as a crutch still? Basically: do you want parallel texts of webnovels?

There's a few options that can provide this. For example, right now I use the app Smart Book by KursX (android), i paid $15 dollars once for the lifetime use functions. I upload a chinese book file into it epub or txt (and you can find MANY cnovels if you just web search their chinese title and "txt" or go to a download books free site and search by their chinese title), the app makes a full parallel text and I can just click a little A~ button on the top right of each paragraph for a mtl version shown beneath it. I can also click each individual word for a word translation (which is useful because when mtl screws up grammar or descriptions, translating word by word can help you figure out the actual meaning of the sentence). I can press a little speaker to hear the sentence read aloud. Its a useful app. I can't recommend it wholeheartedly though, because it's not free anymore (i didnt have to pay for these features until yesterday :/). Also, this app didn't exist when I was a beginner unfortunately.

What existed (and still does)? Mtlnovels.com. Go to the site, make an account (you'll need an account for the parallel text feature). Look up whatever webnovel you were going to read in mtl (years ago I looked up Silent Reading by priest on here because it wasn't translated back then), go to the novel on the site. At the top of the chapter you're reading, it will give you an option to Show Original Chinese text. Click that. It will now show you english mtl and chinese sentences in parallel text format. You can then use the english mtl to guess the meaning of bits of the chinese sentences, or just highlight-right click (if on a phone then highlight and press on highted text portion) words/phrases and pick "translate" and google translate will translate those parts (this will work in Chrome, Mozilla, Edge on phone or computer). You now have parallel texts of tons of novels! Note: the text is in traditional characters, and was my first exposure to practicing reading traditional characters (since I learned simplifief first). I do think there's probably ways to switch the text to simplified (maybe a web browser extension). But for me, back then knowing around 500 words, it was fine. Except for some particular characters, many hanzi just had the radicals look less simplified. An additional idea: you can also use TTS text to speech (like Microsoft Edge's nice sounding one) to highlight the chinese and listen to it while having the english machine translation right there for reference.

(My point is, while apps are more convienient in some ways, most stuff can also just be done in a web browser. Nowadays I just read in Edge on my phone, highlight words or phrases and use Translate on them, and use Edge TTS when I want to hear pronunciations. I think Pleco app has BETTER translations and as a beginner was better, and Readibu is also better for translations. But now that I can read better, its more important to me to hear the pronunciation of stuff. Pleco can do TTS too, Readibu cant in the free version. And Edge's TTS just sounds so much better than my phone's built in TTS that Pleco uses).

Another free option, though it has way less to read: Duo Reader app has free parallel texts and TTS features for several languages. I've read bits of Alice in Wonderland in Japanese on the app. (But for me personally, KursX Smart Book app or regular internet Edge app suits my needs better).