The Real CZ Senior Member United States Joined 5641 days ago 1069 posts - 1495 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean
| Message 697 of 844 21 September 2013 at 5:55pm | IP Logged |
Really chugging along through all three languages. I'll make a more detailed post about
Korean and Japanese at a later time, but I've been focused on Mandarin since it is a
class I'm taking. I really do dislike language classes, but it is really helpful for
having a Chinese teacher right there to help you with specific problems. The workload is
really light to what I normally do in self studying, so I just spend a fraction of the
time learning the stuff I need for class and then spend the rest on what I want to do.
I'd say I'm doing fairly well among the students who are brand new to the language (well,
to be technical, I started a month before school started...), but there are quite a few
people who have already taken Chinese before and then there are some Chinese students
taking the class for an easy credit.
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The Real CZ Senior Member United States Joined 5641 days ago 1069 posts - 1495 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean
| Message 698 of 844 07 October 2013 at 2:13am | IP Logged |
Chinese: Class is really boring because I've gotten pretty far ahead of the
material already. So, I've been focusing on going through my Teach Yourself book. I'm
learning the words by rote memorization, as I find it essential for me to learn the
first one to two thousand words by wrote. It's not until I reach around two to three
thousand that it becomes comfortable for me to learn words through intensive reading
where I simply look up as many words as possible. I am also reading out loud (or
whispering to myself when I'm around people) all of the sentences in the TY book
several times. I'm doing this so that the patterns become more automatic for me, so
that when I want to speak, sentences will come easier to mind, and when I'm reading
something or watching TV, I can understand things easier. Still looking for a method
for hanzi, as Anki seems too boring for me to even use for Chinese characters. I'll
probably try to learn them through mass exposure to them, writing out the ones that are
hard for me while going over there radicals. Mnemonics help in remembering characters
for me, but they aren't enough. It's as if I still need to see them a lot.
Korean and Japanese: Same stuff as usual. I'm treating these as my passive
languages, just reading and listening a lot, improving my passive skills, vocab and
grammar comprehension while I focus on Chinese as my active language.
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The Real CZ Senior Member United States Joined 5641 days ago 1069 posts - 1495 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean
| Message 699 of 844 15 October 2013 at 4:50pm | IP Logged |
I'm continuing the same thing with Chinese as I described in my last post. I think
active work is really helping me with understanding Mandarin a lot better. I have
watched a lot less Taiwanese TV compared to Japanese anime/TV, but yet it seems like I
am understanding spoken Chinese almost as well as spoken Japanese. I don't create too
many sentences off the top of my head, but it's much easier for me since I have
practiced reading out loud sentences from my Chinese textbooks a lot.
I may have to suspend Japanese again (lol), just because of time constraints. I am
planning on enrolling into graduate school to get a Master's of Science in Statistics.
Seeing as my undergraduate degree is in (Corporate) Finance, I'll need to spend a lot
of time learning lower level mathematics before I enroll in the Master's program, so
I'll need to dedicate a lot of time to calculus and linear algebra (and probably
learning how to do some programming).
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The Real CZ Senior Member United States Joined 5641 days ago 1069 posts - 1495 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean
| Message 700 of 844 02 November 2013 at 3:26pm | IP Logged |
Wow, I didn't realize how infrequently I have been updating my log the past few months.
Right now, 95% of my focus is on Korean. Chinese class is so easy now, so I'm just
cruising through, not doing much. I would be putting more effort into Chinese, but with
the possibility of having to spend so much time learning a lot of math before graduate
school starts, I think I can only handle one language at a time, and I may as well
stick with Korean, since it's the language I'm the most interested in and the furthest
into.
I started intensively reading drama scripts again. This time, I'm going through History
of a Salaryman's scripts, which gives me the excuse of rewatching this drama (it's
definitely one of my favorites). I'm using my usual method for reading the webtoon Dr.
Frost and the novel "빛의 제국 (Empire of Light)", where I write down the common words
that appear and look them up later. I figure that it will take me several attempts to
go through each book, so I may as well just focus on the words that are easier for me
to learn at the moment instead of trying to learn all of them at once. It's easier to
look up all of the words in a drama script just because I'm on a computer, but it's too
much of a hassle with a novel.
I'm not doing much grammar study at the moment (since that was what I spending most of
my Chinese time on), but I'll get back into trying to learn more structures. I've gone
through my grammar several times already, but there are still quite a few structures in
that book that are uncommon, so I probably have to drill them some way to get them to
stick.
Started watching a lot of Korean dramas lately. I started Secret, tvN's Basketball,
Answer Me 1994, Empress Ki, and Medical Top Team, along with rewatching Iris and
History of a Salaryman. I'll most likely hold off on Empress Ki (it's 50 episodes) and
Answer Me 1994 (it's boring compared to AM 1997).
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tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4699 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish
| Message 701 of 844 05 December 2013 at 3:33pm | IP Logged |
Hey there, we`re assembling a Korean team for TAC 2014, and I'd like to invite you to be
a part of it! Wanna join?
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The Real CZ Senior Member United States Joined 5641 days ago 1069 posts - 1495 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean
| Message 702 of 844 08 December 2013 at 6:36am | IP Logged |
I can't make any promises during TAC 2014 since I'm about to graduate from university and
need to focus on finding a job. If I do join, it'll probably be sometime in January.
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The Real CZ Senior Member United States Joined 5641 days ago 1069 posts - 1495 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean
| Message 703 of 844 08 December 2013 at 8:28pm | IP Logged |
I thought about it last night and figured that joining the TAC 2014 will help me keep up
my language studies. I just hope I get a normal finance job instead of one that requires
16 hour days haha.
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druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4860 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian
| Message 704 of 844 09 December 2013 at 2:09pm | IP Logged |
Glad that you're joining! Maybe you can skip lunch and instead study a bit... :D
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