AMboy's Learning Tagalog Journal - Update - Page 3

@AMBoyYes, TED talks are part of it (although a small part).If you want to have a rough idea of what I do personally, an average day without university now looks like this:30 Minutes Warmup - Combination of Boy Perstaym + Some Easier Textbooks
90 Minutes Formal Tagalog - including Wikipedia, TED Talks, News Editorials, FilipinoPod101 "Advanced" Materials, tagalog.pw contentThen Break #1120 Minutes of Movies - using Netflix on this, and only with Tagalog closed captionsThen Break #260 Minutes of Whatever I Feel Like---I used to spend more time on Tagalog, but I feel something closer to this is better for me. If you're curious about my routine, I'm happy to answer more questions about it.

@Scrover
Nice schedule!
I notice you reach pretty good numbers in the Reader, too. What are you reading there?

@jkosBut, I think we're really (like really) all wondering how jkos actually reached 1,436.5 pages on the reader (or approximately 430K words!).But for me, my 145K words have consisted of:Majority of the news articles you've posted
TED Talks
Half of Bakayson
Six Chapters of Pandemia #1 (thanks for the recommendation!)
Wikipedia Articles on the Philippine History
Other bits and piecesRight now, when it comes to reading I'm focusing mainly on the TED talks and the Wikipedia articles; they're what are taking my interest at the moment. Although the reader is a minority of my study, simply because I prefer listening over reading (I also have too much time on my hands).

@Scrover Nice man, I love the dedication to go hard. I really need to step it up. I'm trying to figure out a schedule that allows me 4 hours of study minimum per day (2hrs being a movie with tag subs, but will have to move on to no subs once those run out, there are only like 25 ish movies with Fil subs) right when I wake up. Since I still need to work and all that haha. It's odd too that like every pinoy movie out there is like 2hrs ish.

@AMBoyThe "dedication to go hard" is more of a "let's just get this learning Tagalog thing done and off my bucket list, would you Scrover?" sort of a thing actually. I really just wanted to do the effort once in one big push, so hence the large levels of content. And I think it did the job.As for the Filipino movies, I've always thought the same thing! "Why are those ABS-CBN movies always 2 hours long?" I watch too much ABS-CBN on Netflix as you can see.

@Scrover
Ah, OK...Wikipedia can be rough, the vocab is wide and varied, covering a huge number of specific word domains...focusing on History like you are might be a little more manageable? I remember bouncing around categories from history, to science, to politics, and getting a little overloaded.Wattpad fiction! ; ) A lot of it is goofy, and you have to sift thru a bunch of their stuff to find something interesting and of decent quality. But I like fiction for the concentration of dialogue, and "emotional" & "thinking" related vocabulary words that you don't find so much of in non-fiction sources.I keep 2-3 novels in the queue at all times so I can shift between stories when I get bored. Seems to be working well. My goal is to read the equivalent of 20 three-hundred-page novels in a 1 year time period...seems do-able. That's a novel every 18 days or so. I'm at 4.8 novels (equivalent) so far. I'm running a bit behind...I need to do an average of 16.5 pages a day to reach the target, and I'm at around 15 a day right now on average.I've always been a big reader, so this is an easy enough way to get in a lot of immersion.

I'm playing with the listening videos on the site here now. I can read the stuff mostly fine but man it's hard to imagine a time where I'm hearing this like I would English. In some movies it feels near that but in many others its just not happening very well, not even a domain issue either, I understand the words. I think its a decoding issue because in a sentences I can look at it, evaluate the markers etc, much harder to do when processing spoken in put.I wonder, is the goal exposure here, or am I really trying to process every single line spoken? @Scrover

@AMBoy
I would say in early stages it’s more about brute exposure.
The thing that helped me the most in the beginning for listening practice was to make it a game of “how many words can I pick out.” That game works well whether you can pick out 1 in ten words or 9 in 10 words. Worked for me at least. How many hours do you think you have under your belt now of audio? I remember hitting a pretty significant breakthrough around the 50-hour mark of listening to audio, where the words I knew from text started clicking a lot better and faster when listening to audio. It’s definitely a real thing where you may know EVERY word’s definition in a sentence but when it’s spoken it still doesn’t make sense at full speed. It just takes time to get your head assembling things quickly. The other limiting factor is vocab...if you don’t know a 3 out of 10 words in a sentence, the whole sentence’s meaning is trashed in a quickly spoken scenario...so some of it just comes down to your raw vocabulary size.

@jkos The vocab part of things is going pretty well, reading most transcripts is fine except for the times when you know all words but you still don't know exactly what it's trying to convey and have to hit the Google Translate button.Please describe exactly how to play and verify the word counting came.Also, when you say 50 hours do you mean of active listening? I'm sure I have maybe 50 hours of trying to watch a show or movie or Gloiska WHILE working , or trying to do other things, things I consider passive. Which in many cases I'm able to follow pretty well. But I think I need some real active watching, trying to push my self right now to actively watch one those 2 hours monstrosities today lol.I'm thinking active listening is really needed going forward, but not too many interruptions only looking up words I truly don't recognize but not getting crazy on every sentence but just making sure to keep focused.

@jkos Definitely Wikipedia and TED Talks can be very rough. The Wikipedia articles and a few of the TED Talks draw from "deep Tagalog" and the reservoirs of Spanish vocabulary so you see a lot of rare words very few people use. I've also seen a few TED Talks translated so literally that the original meaning of the talk gets lost.But I generally just read non-fiction as it keeps my interest up more than most types of fiction, even though I know most of the unknown vocabulary I'm reading comes up in the TLDC Corpus once every 100,000+ words, and is not useful when I communicate with strangers.@AMBoy I'd say both. You want the vocabulary that comes, but you also want to understand the vocabulary.I also went through the stage of "I know all the words but can't piece the meaning together". I had this problem when I first watched Boy Perstaym, when I first read the news, then when I first watched movies, then when I first read literally translated TED Talks.When I started doing "translate from Tagalog to English" sessions with these texts and just replaying all the sentences I didn't get immediately, eventually my brain would just "get it".I personally stop for every word or sentence I don't understand and search up its meaning, but if stopping gets overwhelming for you, maybe it's better to pick an easier text?

The goal is not to understand, rather to listen to the content (without subs) and pick out as many words as possible, as a kind of game. This made it less frustrating to listen to parts of audio content where I knew I was missing big chunks of meaning, since I could focus on the game of picking out words and trying to catch as many as possible. In the beginning, all the words run together (especially when spoken quickly), so just picking them out (identifying them individually) quickly from the onslaught of spoken words, is a mini success. Your brain will also start to do a funny thing where you hear the word, then don’t identify it until a second or two after it’s said...that lag time will get shorter and shorter over time with exposure. Doing that, you’ll get faster and better and the meaning will start to come naturally in time. Listen to a chunk of audio and evaluate “Ok, I think I got 70% or 75% of the words on that one.” Eventually you’ll get to 90% or 95% or 100% in stretches, which is rewarding. When you switch domains (fiction, vloggers, news, medical discussions, etc.) you’ll notice your success rate going up or down depending on your familiarity with that domain, too. Yeah, that would be 50 hrs of active listening. I don’t think Glossika is as valuable...it’s too perfectly pronounced and slow and short. You really want to immerse in the language as it’s spoken by normal people, pick out where people slur their words and smush their words together or draw them out, what filler words people use when they’re stuttering or expressing shock, or joking around...all that stuff that doesn’t make it into the grammar books.

@Scrover Interesting, and good advice!

Have you guys tried Language Learning With Netflix plugin? You can you literally step through each sentence in the movie and display both tag and english at the same time (or not) and can even mark known words and it can google translate auto as well as search TDC (as a custom dictionary, but sadly I wish it was better integrated, too many clicks). It's pretty solid.

@AMBoy Yeah...it’s pretty nice! I have a link in the Resources Master List on here.

@AMBoy thanks for you input as an 50 year old guy you have given me hope for this old dog as I feel time is passing by its hard to learn and pick things up