I think we all have different emotional journeys - but there are central points of learning we all have in common (and the idea of ‘learning styles’ has been widely debunked). It’s a little counter-intuitive, I know, but the whole ‘it helps’ thing is slightly complicated…
The fact that you can get any of them is a very encouraging sign, so don’t be too down-hearted! Don’t tell yourself that you’re falling behind - we don’t ‘drop’ ANY of the content, so whatever hasn’t stuck for you yet WILL be revisited…
It’s going to be hugely interesting watching how this works for you over the next 8 challenges. I strongly recommend that you do as Tatjana did and try to give us an idea of roughly what percentage you were nearly right on…
I may be totally off here because it felt like I was wrong/unable to translate nine times out of ten. However, a more realistic guess would be that it was about half the time. This was with generous use of the pause button. I just read your email about not using pause - I’d estimate I’d have gotten at most a quarter nearly right without pausing.
I’ll try to get a better estimate for the next challenge.
Terminally off-topic, but here’s a short explanation of my nick: Eigenvalues and eigenvectors are a staple in the field of machine learning and sometimes the resulting objects are named accordingly. After I found out the existence of Eigenfaces I played around with putting “Eigen” in front of arbitrary words. Eigentime had a nice ring to it.
3 minutes of 100 % all correct! You’re doing well! I am a tyour 6 minutes now and it’s not bad at all. I can say about 80 % of everything you’ve said was correct! And it continues well into 10 mins (I’m writing while listening to your “performance”). You can learn, that’s no doubt! You’ve also spoke a bit louder and with more determination in your voice. I bet you’ve felt better also.
Oh, and something else: You’re talking a lot about translating and how you can’t translate some words/structures. What about concentrating on remembering at first instead of translating? It might help. (just a thought)
Extremely interesting. You’re virtually flawless there - the handful of times you didn’t get it out completely in time, or completely correct, were just about deliberate switches (where we go from ‘dysgu’ several times to ‘siarad’, which helps sensitise you to the switch in meaning).
Now, 90%-100% correct just means that you’re doing a session that’s too easy for you.
I have almost no doubt left that this isn’t a neurological issue, it’s an emotional one. You say that you think without the pause button you’d get about 25% right - and that you guess you’re at round about 50% right with the pause button.
I’ve watched someone spend 4 intensive days getting between 5% and 10% right - and being able to have a (limited, of course) conversation at the end of it.
So I’d stick with my suggestion that you push through the first 10, and then revisit 2 and see how you feel about it. If your natural approach is to be hard on yourself about mistakes, then you may not recognise your learning at an early stage - so doing a longer run and then discovering that 2 became easier without multiple repetitions (or 3, if you’ve already done multiple repetitions on 2) will probably be more help in convincing you that the process is working.
The key here is going to be whether or not you can identify/accept that your recording of the first 10 minutes of Level 1 is, indeed, almost faultless…
Now my progress reports from the point where I started to measure my progress with exact percentage of what’s correct and what not is a must read thing. Not because you should do the same! YOU DEFINATELY SHOULDN’T!!! but because you’ll realize it was for the 2nd time I went through that material and while Course 1 was quite a success (from 95 down to around 60 % (I think)) Course 2 was (from your point of view of things) total disaster (as it was my point of view at the beginning too though). I’ve got average not more then 30-35 % of everything correct most of the time but thre were times there was not more then 5 or 10 % and (if I still remember correctly) once even only 1 %. However I never used pause button no matter how many times I’ve repeated a session.
So, you see, you are learning and progressing but as @aran describes issues you have, I’ve got them more or less totally the same ones - not seing my progress at all! I felt like I’m going backwards rather then forward but thinking back now it wasn’t true at all. I was going forward, just a bit slower and a bit harder then some other people all because of my way of thinking at the time and beating myself with perfection. Maybe @Eigentime should read “Mindset” too, @aran?
Got Challenge 3 in early today. I did it without the pause button today and I kept a tally of my successes and errors.
24 Phrases I got right. These were mostly the ‘trivial’ ones - when a new word or phrase was introduced. Also, a few mildly more complex ones, but I got none of the longer sentences right.
32 Times I made an error or did not finish in time. These don’t worry me at all. I actually have no problem making mistakes as I can expect to get better and faster over time.
54 Times I could not remember how to translate the given phrase. This is the part that is so frustrating. There are some phrases that have not taken root deep enough that I remember them, some of them still from Challenge 1, and none of them has so far perceptively improved.
This is getting ridiculous pretty fast now. I have the feeling that I have not retained a single new word of Challenge 3. I remembered each new word only through its ‘hot’ phase when it was intensly practiced. If it came again a minute later, I drew a blank. This happened every single time in this challenge. I spent the last ten minutes of Challenge 3 trying to hang on to at least one or two of the new phrases but failed miserably.
So your original estimate that you would be at about 25% without the pause button needs some fine-tuning - because you were at about 50%, even without the pause button, if you count not finishing in time/errors/near misses - which I would, always, count.
That’s actually a perfectly normal rate of progress!
Which means the issue here is how you feel about not remembering the new stuff.
At the moment, you’re clearly responding very emotionally - ‘getting ridiculous’, ‘failed miserably’ - based largely on the perception that you’ve either ‘retained’ or ‘not retained’ the new material. But retained/not retained isn’t a binary state - each time you’re exposed to any given piece, it moves a step towards being an accessible long term memory.
Now, if you can suspend your disbelief so that you go through the sessions without blaming yourself so much for the ones you don’t remember (try blaming me instead!) - you’ll find it easier to run the experiment of going through to 10 without any repetitions - and then we’ll see what stats you produce when you revisit 3. That’s what will show you, one way or another, whether the approach is working for you.
So please don’t revisit 3 until you’ve had one go each, ideally with stats in here, at 4 to 10…
Well, it sure doesn’t feel like anything moving towards anywhere. But I will carry on - powered by sheer bloody mindedness.
One question though: What is the best way to deal with a situation like the following: I am asked to translate a phrase like ‘I still try to practice Welsh’. I can not remember the ‘I still’ part, but the rest I may be able to piece together. Should I
translate the part I know and ignore the part I don’t know?
try to remember the new part?
wait for the solution and do something (what?) mentally with the part I did not know?
I know how that feels, only too well! However, I did find that if I thought, “Oh, too hell with it, I’m not proud of how well I’m doing so I won’t even try to remember what ‘proud’ is!”
I remembered the rest better
Eventually, I had a strong notion that ‘proud’ began with 'b; and the ‘feel’ of the word! (It’s ‘balch’).
I’ve been all through the new course (so far) and run out of new things to do, so I’ve started doing some of the old course as well, as it’s slightly different. But because I haven’t gone right back to the beginning, there are chunks of vocabulary that have obviously been introduced elsewhere that just come out of the blue as far as I’m concerned. And when I get words I simply don’t know, my tendency is to freeze and not say anything, which is daft when I know damn’ well how to say the rest of the thing…
So if I’m given “He was scratching his ear” and I’ve only just come across ‘scratch’ or ‘ear’ once or twice before (if at all) and can’t bloomin’ remember the word, but I do know I’ve done the rest, I’m trying (mostly failing, but trying – this is a “do as I say, not as I do” comment) to inculcate the habit of saying “Oedd o’n scratch ei glust” (or whatever) rather than allowing myself to be completely paralysed for want of a single word.
From what @aran said, I guess “I still trio ymarfer Cymraeg” might be the approved way forward
I try not to worry about how much you remember straight after a lesson either.
I’ve lost count of how many times my wife and I have done separate lessons (she does them in her downstairs office, i do mine in my upstairs office) and we have lunch and the conversation goes usually like this
me: “what lesson did you do today?”
her: “old course 2, lesson 24”
me: “i think i remember that one. that was just after mutations wasn’t it? what did you do?”
her: “um… can’t remember. What did you do today?”
me: “ahh, well i’m back on new course 1, lesson 20”
her: “i roughly remember around there. what did you do?”
me: “um… can’t really remember”
2 or 3 days later, we’re using the patterns/vocab that we learned in those lessons without even thinking about it.
The way the course has been designed, I’m convinced that there is an element of “stuff going in without you consciously knowing about it”.
Try not to worry too much, from the sound of the clip (sorry I couldn’t resist listening) you are doing great. It does and will get easier.
Now I’m redoing the course all over again, I’m listening to some parts and wondering “How did I ever struggle with that phrase?”
I understand this in general, and I normally do what I’m told – especially if I’m walking, or driving, or washing up at the same time However I do find it hard sometimes to hear the difference between -dd- and -f- on the audio: right near the beginning of Level 1 I spent a whole Challenge saying “bo’ ddi” when it was first introduced. And then, after I’d allowed myself to look at the vocabulary at the end, I spent most of the next one muttering “bo’ ddi - NO! - bo’ fi - dammit…” and running out of time. Grrr…
Yeah, it turns out those sounds are really hard to distinguish - which is a large part of why we ended up adding the vocab lists to the lessons - so a quick scan of the vocab lists to double-check tricky consonants is a fair call. Ideally (ie maybe at some point in the future!) we’d figure out a way to flag up uncertainties like this in the audio file itself…
You are me! Exactly what I thought and tried to convince @aran about that so darn hardly! No success! (thankfully) so you rather give up with this atempt!
Wrong. You’re not asked to translate a phrase, you’re asked to say in Welsh what you hear in English. I’d say try to throw that “translate” off and take that “say” on … If you don’t remember everything, you’ll remember next time some and the next tiem more and the next more again …
I know it’s hard not to think about the whole thing as about translating but it saves some energy and spares you from some anger upon yourself…
It’s like a pair of golden handcuffs! I was highly delighted when I was given it, but this soon turned to dismay when I realised they could now get hold of my, “Anytime, Any place, Anywhere”…
