100 novels in 2022

[Johnny-5]

On 2/4/2023 at 9:22 PM, Moshen said:

Average speaking speed in English is around 180 words/minute.  Does that mesh?  180 English words equivalent to about 250 Chinese characters?

One of these popsci guys (Steven Pinker maybe?) observed that UN documents when translated to Chinese were 75% of the size (in bytes) and thought he had discovered something amazing and revolutionary about language.

 

In fact he'd just discovered something about computer science, ie if we assume that Chinese and english have a one to one correspondence in syllables, then a syllable in English will usually take 3 or more characters, which are 8 bits long and 3*8=24 . Chinese syllables are typically represented with a single 16 bit character. So we can see that every syllable should be 8 bits larger in English. Very simple, very easy  It may not be 100% accurate, but you can understand why the documents would have to end up larger in English.

[Jan Finster]

On 2/6/2023 at 5:44 AM, Johnny-5 said:

This whole thing was motivated by the realization that time was the crucial variable I was missing in my Chinese learning. As I recall from Steven Kaufmann he studied Chinese for six months 8 hours a day as a full time job, and wouldn't you know but 25*40=1,000 hours. I also saw an interview with that youtuber who goes around NYC impressing people with his "perfect Chinese", and what did he say? He said he spent 2-3 years learning Chinese for an hour or more each day.

 

So while I had been learning Chinese for many years, it was sporadic at best and certainly didn't add up to 1,000 hours. I can't really estimate, but maybe 200-400 hours, which is well short of the time you need to be profficient (If you take the FSI at their word that should be 1,200 hours for Chinese). At the beginning I calculated that I could probably put in about 400 hours if I used most of my free time for reading, and as I see from the 383 hours calculation, that's not far off (it was probably more hours because I was going slower in the beginning)

 

Now, for more numbers.... I recall reading somewhere that some method was averaging about 12-15 words learned per hour, so if we use the high end of that then in 383 hours I should have learned 5,745 words. That corresponds with what CTA says about me having learned 10,000-15,000 words. Because I probably starte with 5,000 and added somewhere in the neighborhod of 6,000 words. 

 

I think you have a lot of things mixed up here.

 

First, FSI estimated you need 2200 class hours /hours of instruction (!) (this is not all, since it does not include home work and self-study) to reach “Professional Working Proficiency” (https://www.fsi-language-courses.org/blog/fsi-language-difficulty/)

 

Xiaomanyc (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLNoXf8gq6vhwsrYp-l0J-Q) can do small talk and chit chat in Mandarin, but I would not take him as the pinnacle of language learning. I am dead sure he cannot read 10 million characters in 380 hours. The same applies to Steve Kaufman: he learned Mandarin back then and claimed to have studied for 8 months and passed an exam. I believe this is remarkable, but his current level of Chinese is more a reflection of his life-time study of Chinese rather than those 8 months.  I am also dead sure he cannot read 10 million characters in 380 hours.

 

If you say you studied 400 hours of Mandarin in your life and then you got to read 10 million characters in 380 hours, then you do not even realise what kind of an outlier you are. There are plenty of people on this forum, who have clocked way, way more hours and still hover at 70-150 words per minute....

[realmayo]

On 2/6/2023 at 7:54 AM, Jan Finster said:

but I would not take him as the pinnacle of language learning

one of my great fears in life is that I might sometimes speak Mandarin like he does.

[Johnny-5]

On 2/6/2023 at 3:54 PM, Jan Finster said:

I think you have a lot of things mixed up here.

Lol, you got me there.

I was throwing together a good number of half remembered things, the main point remains that I wanted to spend more time to improve my Chinese.

On 2/6/2023 at 3:54 PM, Jan Finster said:

If you say you studied 400 hours of Mandarin in your life and then you got to read 10 million characters in 380 hours, then you do not even realise what kind of an outlier you are. There are plenty of people on this forum, who have clocked way, way more hours and still hover at 70-150 words per minute....

You're probably right, I don't actually know.... I may be sandbagging my own estimates of the time I've spent. Honestly now that I think about it, we're probably looking at way more than 400 hours 

 

I guess it really depends on what you classify as time spent learning, if you include time spent half paying attention to chinesepod dialogues or audiobooks, or vaguely understanding Detective Conan episodes, well then I spent a lot of hours... if you classify it only as time spent sitting down and cracking your Anki deck, well I spent... maybe a few minutes because I find Anki intolerable.

 

Regardless of where I was at the start in terms of progress and time spent, and these guys talking (and BSing or not) encouraged me to spend some more time on it, so I went and did that in the most enjoyable form I could think of, reading mystery novels (cuz I ran out of Detective Conan episodes.... which at like 1,100 some episodes and 20 minutes per, is by itself about 366 hours  )

[Johnny-5]

On 2/6/2023 at 5:36 PM, realmayo said:

one of my great fears in life is that I might sometimes speak Mandarin like he does.

Lol, I try to avoid all of the "amazing foreigners speaking Chinese" content so I've never had the "pleasure" of listening to him speak Chinese, but I'm sure it's abominable... which is why I avoid such content.

 

I prefer the China youtubers who don't even pretend to speak Chinese well and so (if you listen to the opinion of former China youtubers like serpentza and his friend...) get used by the governmnent for propaganda. I just love China youtuber drama, it's so silly and unimportant 

[Jan Finster]

On 2/6/2023 at 1:36 PM, Johnny-5 said:

we're probably looking at way more than 400 hours

 

On 2/6/2023 at 1:36 PM, Johnny-5 said:

(cuz I ran out of Detective Conan episodes.... which at like 1,100 some episodes and 20 minutes per, is by itself about 366 hours  )

 

It sounds like a lot more... ?

 

How about you tell us how long you lived in China, when you first started studying Chinese (even if it is just the pinyin table) and how many books or words you read prior to 2022....? ?

[Johnny-5]

On 2/6/2023 at 11:25 PM, Jan Finster said:

It sounds like a lot more... ?

 

How about you tell us how long you lived in China, when you first started studying Chinese (even if it is just the pinyin table) and how many books or words you read prior to 2022....? ?

I did a little bit of thinking/remembering.... and we're looking at a lot more than 400 hours in 2022 alone 

 

I actually tracked my reading in a journal from March 1st, and from the end of March until the middle of July I tracked it in a chart and got 220 hours of reading in that time.

I put the reading into a spreadsheet and made this nice graph of hours per day.

I read 220 hours in 108 days, averaging 2:02 per day. I stopped tracking when I was no longer reading on my phone and so didn't have a convenient way to track my time. I also tracked listening time for the first two weeks, but that was bothersome so I didn't keep it up. I was averaging 3-4 hours of listening over that time.

 

This really blows apart the 10 million characters in 400 hours calculation I did before because we can assume if I was listening for twice the time I was reading that in those 108 days I potentially did 400 hours of listening.

If we then assume I continued at the same rate for the rest of the year which I will say is 150 days (to make things simple) we'll say I spent 600 hours for the 100 days March to July and then assume for 150 days I spent 900 more hours and we get to 1,500 hours for reading/listening to 10 million characters.

 

I wouldn't claim that number with any certainty, it is edging closer to "accurate" though, because I started off at 0.5x speed and only really started working up to faster speeds later. I recall practicing with speeding up to 2.25x in September or October before settling back to more comfortable speeds. So probably the last 2-3 months of 2022 I was at 1.5x-1.75x speeds.

 

So, if I wanted to I could make another ten million characters in 2023, but I'd only need to spend about 400 hours on it.

 

It seems the first ten million are the hardest 

[phills]

You've inspired me to try to reconstruct my reading hours in 2021, when I read 5.5 million chars. 

 

https://www.chinese-forums.com/forums/topic/60492-extensive-reading-and-reading-speed/?do=findComment&comment=483913

 

I estimate that it took ~700 hours, not counting random wasted hours/puttering around.  I expect my progression to have gone something like along these lines:

 

	chars	cpm	hours
Start 2021	200k	45	74.07
	700k	85	137.25
	1300k	135	160.49
	3300k	185	297.30
Total	5500k	137	669.12

 

I remember jumping to 100cpm somewhere between 500k-1m, and starting to feel much more comfortable a bit after 2 million chars. 

 

I ended up at a max of 250cpm, average around 200cpm, but most of my time that year was spent reading at a much slower rate.  If I read all 5.5m chars at my final average speed of 200cpm, it would have only taken 450 hours.

 

Like you, I also started from an existing base.  At the beginning of 2021, I already knew 2400+ characters, could watch basic Chinese TV programs with subtitles, and could read short written pieces, although primarily by deciphering-one-character-at-a-time. 

 

Most of my reading was done in the second half of the year once I got better, and reading became more enjoyable. I ended up reading ~2-3hrs a day in the second half of the year, but it felt less strenuous than the ~1 hr a day I spent at the beginning of the year.

 

It's hard to maintain that level of motivation though.  In 2022, I tried to replicate the experience with listening to audio books, and I only listened to about 250 hours of audio over the whole year.  About a third of the effort I put in for 2021.

[imron]

On 2/6/2023 at 3:20 PM, Johnny-5 said:

Chinese syllables are typically represented with a single 16 bit character

Depends on the encoding. More and more things are utf8 these days, in which case it would be 3 bytes per character for most characters, and 4 bytes per character for rarer characters outside the BMP

[Johnny-5]

On 2/9/2023 at 7:39 PM, imron said:

Depends on the encoding. More and more things are utf8 these days, in which case it would be 3 bytes per character for most characters, and 4 bytes per character for rarer characters outside the BMP

I really have no idea, my recollection was that it was 10-15 years ago, so who knows. I didn't realize they used 3-4 bytes, I may have just looked at 2^16 and said "yup that should be enough for Chinese characters" and not given it any more thought.

 

But what I have given more thought to is how I can use the lists that CTA produces!

 

So I've taken the books I've read and put them in a single, very large, text file. Using CTA I arbitrarily decided that any word that had occurred more than 42 times should be "known". Then I had CTA export a few thousand words that had occurred less than 42 times into a list with the word, pinyin, and english translation. 

 

I first tried importing the list into Anki... But I don't really like Anki. I don't want to deal with reviewing, I've got a list of 6,000 words and I don't plan on spending a year trying to memorize everything on the list.

I just want to look through the list and see what I know the meaning of, or maybe some words that I thought I knew the meaning of, etc. and I want to be able to look through my list at times when it's not convenient to read a book.

 

So I went real quick and threw together an Android app for my e-ink notebook (with a little space to practice writing the characters if I feel like it).

I'll see what I can get out of reviewing the list of words, but there you go, another fine way to put the Chinese Text Analyser to good use 

[Johnny-5]

On 2/7/2023 at 2:41 PM, phills said:

It's hard to maintain that level of motivation though. 

I'm finding my motivation coming from the content more than the motivation to "learn Chinese". For instance I've tried listening to some podcasts and since I didn't really like them I couldn't find the motivation to listen to each new episode.

 

I got the COVID at the end of December (when all of China was getting it) and I was reading a very interesting book about a man whose daughter was in a coma and he was using fancy medical technology from his company to let her function independently of the machines. Well, I was coughing and feverish, I felt terrible and my mind was too foggy to do much, but I really wanted to know what happened next in the story so I kept going in spite of the covid.

 

Something else that I've noticed is that by learning that learning a language actually takes a lot more time than the con-men who say "i learned French in a fortnight" on Youtube might make you think, I feel more motivated to spend that time.

Also noticing improvements is great, I was skimming through this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbQerKaxs9s about fake Youtube polyglots and about 6:30 she's giving an example of a sort of "hard" topic that one might expect to talk about at university and fake polyglots wouldn't be able to handle, and listening to her I found her "hard" example to be easy and in fact simplistic like you'd expect from a middle school report on 9/11. A year or six months ago I probably would have understood her fine, but probably wouldn't have noticed the simplicity of what she was saying .

 

Feeling like "I've been learning Chinese for so many years, yet I'm not very good" makes me feel demotivated and like I don't know how to improve, but realizing that it takes a lot more time than I had thought makes me more willing to stick with doing what I'm doing.

[phills]

Yea I feel the same way.  The content is what keeps you motivated, as well as observing your own improvements. 

 

The hard part for me is keeping consistency over periods of months.  E.g. Last year, I took 3 long breaks, each around 2 months each, so I spent only about half the year in "active learning".

 

That could be just me -- I get excited by hobbies, do them a lot for a short while, and then get distracted by something else that I happen to get excited about.  Having some kind of brainless routine (go to the gym every Saturday), or long term project (read x million chars a year) is the only way I can get around this.

 

I haven't settled on a good brainless routine or long term project for language learning yet for this year.  So I'm sort of in maintenance mode, trying to keep up skills amorphously -- a sort of "paddling".

[Johnny-5]

On 2/12/2023 at 3:00 PM, phills said:

I haven't settled on a good brainless routine or long term project for language learning yet for this year. 

I find it interesting how "small" things can really effect whether or not I do some reading or listening. If  I try to read on my phone it is so easy to think "ah,  I'll just  listen to a  podcast for a second" or "...did that youtube channel post a new video?".

I usually use my Kindles for reading because they are only good for that purpose, and it was working well but I've recently been fighting with technical difficulties with them and so I went back to using my phone for a while. As a result my Chinese time plummetted and my podcast and youtube time skyrocketted (though I did find some interesting Chinese videos like the author of 三体 being interviewed by a lady... and I found his interview way more interesting than his book  )

Anyhow, after figuring out the technical issues I'm back to spending a good amount of time on Chinese every day, and with the help of a friendly guy in the DMs I found some more excellent book resources.

 

I've stopped keeping track of how many books I've read, So I'm not sure how far I've gotten in 2023. The technical issues slowed me down in January and Feb. vs. what I wanted to accomplish, but I'm making solid progress. my goals are to work my way through the few Agatha Christie novels I haven't read, read all of the Keigo Higashino books I haven't read. He's really prolific so that'll take some time (I've read maybe 10-25 of his books). There's another writer I just started reading called Shimada Sōji. He isn't that prolific so I'll probably read through his books by the end of March or April. 

 

ooh, I also picked up some nice noise cancelling earbuds, and they make it much easier to concentrate and listen to my book instead of getting distracted by some other noise or conversation.

[PerpetualChange]

The idea of time to result is an interesting one. Seems like a fairly crude way to predict progress on something, especially if there's no linear path to "fluency". 

When I was more into habit tracking than I am now, I logged every minute of Chinese practice over the year. Every book read, every minute with a tutor, every second spent watching a TV show without English subs on, all counted the same. When I totaled up the year, I came away with 460 hours of practice. But I had no measurements of where I was when I started, nor did I take any measurements at the end of the year. 

 

Reading a Chinese novel might not even count as Chinese Study, in the end. I think a lot of it depends on how one is going about the reading. If we are talking about breaking down unknown grammar and vocabulary, really internalizing it, and making it part of a greater study program, I could see it being highly beneficial. If we are just "riding the dictionary", as I tend to do, we are probably making marginal inroads but at least not getting worse. If we are talking about just letting our eyes glaze over pages of characters with minimal comprehension until we get to the end, the benefit could be close to 0. 

 

Tracking hobbies and habits is a totally unique undertaking. If I cared enough about my Chinese ability to measure the time I was spending on it, I'd also be working to make sure that time was spent in a way that makes maximum use of it, and seeing what kind of metrics I could determine to measure my progress.

[Woodford]

My Chinese study (not including listening practice, which I do casually throughout the day) has averaged about 2-3 hours a day for the past 5.5 years, so I've likely invested around 5,000 hours, with maybe around 3,000 hours consisting of reading books. I was curious about what my numbers look like now, so I timed myself reading a newspaper article with 1,416 characters in it (not including punctuation, numerals, English words rendered with English letters, etc.). While trying to be efficient and focused, and not rushing too much, I took almost 9 minutes. 159 CPM. I think a year or so ago, I was getting numbers closer to 125 CPM, so that's a nice improvement. Reading the same article in English took me about 3.5 minutes (the equivalent of what 408 CPM would be in Chinese, or around 250 WPM), and I'm not even a very fast reader.

My Chinese reading is about 2.5 times slower than my English reading speed, and I may never break the 200 CPM mark in Chinese reading. We'll see! Could I try to read at 200 CPM right now? Sure, but my reading comprehension/quality might suffer.

I do resonate with what @PerpetualChange said, about there being "no linear path to fluency." I once thought, "How do I reach the height of awesomeness in Chinese reading? Well, I just read tons and tons! What about listening? Well, I should just listen to stuff all day long! Just do what I already do, but more and more, tons and tons!" Etc., etc. However, without adopting creative strategies, stepping out of my comfort zone, and finding new ways to train myself (traditionally, this would be accomplished by moving to China), my progress will just hit a wall before too long.

Nevertheless, I *am* encouraged by the fact that I'm still improving (albeit, more slowly than in the beginning). And I'm inspired by the examples of other people who have gotten themselves to a half-decent mastery of a foreign language without yet visiting that country. It's possible, but it just takes time.

 

[Johnny-5]

On 3/16/2023 at 1:36 AM, PerpetualChange said:

The idea of time to result is an interesting one. Seems like a fairly crude way to predict progress on something, especially if there's no linear path to "fluency". 

I think the most important part is understanding that it is a very long proccess, personally I see the number of hours as a way to understand that I shouldn't expect to become fluent overnight and that all of these claims of someone doing so are BS... As for tracking the time, I only see the benefit of that if you have tools that automatically track so you're not wasting time on it, but you can look back and see "ah yes I didn't consistently keep up with my Chinese over the last year, so the lack of improvement is no surprise" or whatever.

I feel like tracking is a good thing when you're seeking to change or fix some habit, but probably not that valuable in the long run if it takes much time.

 

On 3/16/2023 at 1:36 AM, PerpetualChange said:

If we are just "riding the dictionary", as I tend to do, we are probably making marginal inroads but at least not getting worse. If we are talking about just letting our eyes glaze over pages of characters with minimal comprehension until we get to the end, the benefit could be close to 0. 

Glazing  over a page of characters sounds roughly analogous to having Chinese audio on in the background that you're not paying attention to or don't understand...

I was read/listening the other day and came across a word I didn't know, and my first impulse was to check the dictionary, but since the TTS was continuing on I was getting more context and before I could stop it and use the Kindle's dictionary my brain had processed the context and I figured out the meaning. (If you're curious the word was "wax figure" 蜡像,  like Madame Tussauds.)