Third Week of Chinese LL Challenge - Stability and Consistency in my Language Learning

汉语词汇学习第三周

Hey everyone! Welcome to the [Third Week] of my Chinese Language Learning Challenge!

As you are aware by now, this weeks focus is on stability. I've now completed two weeks of this challenge and I documented in the last blog in regards to the activities I am doing and whether or not I'll get tired of them.

"Does it really matter if I get sick of it 

if I'm getting good results?" 

I'll have to see the results of this weeks post-test in comparison to the pre-test to answer that question, but this will be the focus of this week's blog. 

Quizlet & Pleco

So I've mostly highlighted already in the previous weeks what I do with Quizlet, I'm running out of new things to try within this application, however, I don't see why I shouldn't do the same things repeatedly if I might get the same perfect scores and results. So that's why I won't be repeating what I said the last blog, I'm just going to do the same activities, same learning strategies and see how that affects my scores at the post-test.

Same goes towards Pleco, this application is rather simple, if I need more information on a particular word, I can obtain it in order to learn that word more efficiently and better. It hasn't failed me yet either, it doesn't really have any fun activities that separates it from any other dictionary, but it's the convenience; from learning one character, I'm exposed to many more characters with the same conjunctions etc. 

PRE-TEST Results Unit 8


As you can see from the pre-test on the left, I made five mistakes - the most I've gotten wrong in a pre-test so far. This week's unit was pretty hard due to the amount of words that I
haven't seen being pretty high.

I've spent a lot of time on each week's units so I can't blame the amount of time I spent to be the reason for these errors; I'm very sure that I spent the same amount of time, therefore, I believe it's just the difficulty of the units getting harder as it gets towards the end of the textbook.

These two combinations - difficulty getting harder, and the high quantity of words I've never seen before - are the reason I believe I didn't do that well in this week's unit.

I think it's a good chance to see if the methods and learning styles I've been using will be consistent; if I'm able to ace the post-test, it will prove that the methods I've been using are useful and effective for my learning goal - memorising and retaining the set amount of words.

Which will most likely answer the question for this week,

"Does it really matter if I get sick of it if I'm getting good results?". 

I'll have to see at the end of this week after the post-test then.

[Throughout the Week]

The study methods remain constant to the last two weeks to test out the efficacy of my methods along with the technologies being used. 

There is a sharp distinction between the hard and easy characters shown by the number of strokes in the Chinese words. I chose to only write down the 'harder' words so I'm not wasting time on the easier ones. 

[a few days later...]

POST-TEST Results Unit 8
Throughout the week whilst studying these characters with Quizlet and Pleco, I could feel the confidence in acing the test uprising correspondingly to the amount of time I spent on the task. It's to no surprise actually, in Chapelle's (2017) research clarifies that the time on the task is one of the main factors of effective language acquisition. 

  

Whilst doing the post-test, I could feel the confidence I had built throughout studying with Quizlet  and Pleco, and as expected, I scored 100%!!!

Thoughts:

I'm not going to lie, the games I played on Quizlet were getting so tiresome. I knew in the back of my head that if I 'just did it' (✓),  I wouldn't regret it when it's time to see the results. Perhaps I should look for another platform/application similar to Quizlet, but the conclusion will most likely be the same - me getting sick of playing the same games over and over again for the final goal: to memorise and retain the knowledge. So, do I just

[keep doing the same thing?].

Maybe. 

I'm not going to lie (again), it's not going to be fun for you guys who are viewing my blog since I'm constantly using the same methods, but maybe you (the viewers) will enjoy the journey of me scoring 100% on my post-tests and then seeing the REAL result at the end of Week 6 of the LL Challenge - where I do the big test, covering all the units I covered in this blog to see if I've retained the knowledge attained through studying with Quizlet and Pleco.

Anyway, it's my journey that I'm sharing. Maybe you'd have invested enough time to care about my final results or not, but I have, so I need to see the end of it.

Till Next Time!

再见!

References

Chapelle, C. (2017), The Handbook of Technology and Second Language Teaching and Learning, From Past to Present: A Hundred Years of Technology for L2 Learning. pp(10-25).