kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5176 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese
| Message 1297 of 1702 22 February 2014 at 8:43pm | IP Logged |
g-bod wrote:
kraemder wrote:
I would have tried harder in the class. |
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Surely the effort you make shouldn't depend on the identity of the other students...and ok, so now I know what your Japanese sounds like, but that just means you're not allowed to be shy about it any more. You've also heard mine, warts and all, so it works both ways!
I did wonder if we'd ever end up in the same class, due to the combination of our work schedules and the time difference. The class yesterday was at 9pm in the UK, which is just perfect for me after work, so I tend to do the mid week classes at this time. |
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The other students in the class can definitely have an impact on how much I try. Sure, I *try* to try all the time but well. I have a friend from my class at school and when she was in my class with me it was a lot more fun. Actually if I knew it was you I might have just shut up and saved my mistakes for later =p.
I thought you only did the private lessons. Well, if you sign up for an N2 level class on Friday again shoot me a message and I'll be sure to sign up. Or maybe we'll just happen to be in the same class again. It's funny how I was listening to you thinking.. wow.. she's just like g-bod.. she's from England and she went to Germany and she got interested in studying German *and* studies Japanese.. 偶然ですね!
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g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5974 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German
| Message 1298 of 1702 22 February 2014 at 9:17pm | IP Logged |
No I haven't done the private JOI lessons since I was preparing for the N3 exam. The thing I like about the group classes is the fact that I can just roll up without having to do any preparation, but I come away having learned something. With my work schedule and motivation as variable as it is right now, this is just perfect for me.
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kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5176 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese
| Message 1299 of 1702 28 February 2014 at 6:43am | IP Logged |
I've made a little progress into the 読解 book without the JOI tutor helping as I went. The book seems very
good. It's not fun like a novel but the writing is interesting enough and I find it interesting how the book seems
to try to teach basic critical reading skills and how to pick out topic sentences etc. I find it interesting how the
topic sentence, at least for the reading I did today, had the topic sentence at the very end of the reading.
That's the complete opposite of how they made me write it in English class. I used to want to out it at the end
because I wants to build up to it etc, but that was considered illogical and uneducated. But it's great if you're
writing in Japanese.
And this has nothing to do with Japanese but my laptop just failed to install a windows update and is
'reverting' itself to the previous version. I've never seen this before and I have updated windows a million
times. Probably not good.
Anyway. I also decided to try to work in a kanji writing SRS deck using kanji in context. Basically the red
words for each kanji that the book considers basic and wants you to do first anyway. I'll make this deck
secondary to my core 6k deck that is a kanji reading deck.
And I'm really annoyed at my laptop. I wanted to use it to watch crunchyroll in bed.
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kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5176 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese
| Message 1300 of 1702 28 February 2014 at 11:28pm | IP Logged |
Had another lesson on JOI and G-bod was there. She speaks beautiful Japanese and me, not so much. Even when I'm 'trying'. It was fun though.
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kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5176 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese
| Message 1301 of 1702 01 March 2014 at 5:59am | IP Logged |
I'm just thinking about the JOI lessons I take. I like them and recommend them but the teachers don't really correct you all the time. If they can understand you they just go with it. Although they might write a correct response in the text chat if it's for an exercise. Some teachers correct you more than others do.. anyway.. I feel like I'm getting lazy. If it's good enough for them to understand me then it's good enough for me. I need to stop being lazy.
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g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5974 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German
| Message 1302 of 1702 01 March 2014 at 6:39pm | IP Logged |
That's really sweet kraemder, but there is really nothing beautiful about my Japanese!
I know what you mean about corrections, but I think for the group lessons the teacher has to
find a balance between making corrections, covering the lesson plan and making sure to give
equal attention to all the students in the group, which means there isn't enough time to
clear up every aspect of your Japanese in one go. Although if you don't think you're getting
enough feedback in your one to one lessons you can always ask your teacher to be stricter!
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kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5176 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese
| Message 1303 of 1702 01 March 2014 at 10:19pm | IP Logged |
darn my post got eaten. Yeah I get that you can't expect them to correct everything that comes out of your mouth but I think I'm getting less strict with myself as a result and I need to change that at least some. The teacher was very impressed with you compared to the rest of us, I could tell ;)
Anyway, to rehash what I already wrote.. my Japanese goals right now.
-Read Harry Potter and the Prisoner from Azkaban
I just started this today and I'm 10 pages in. I'm reading the real print copy not a PDF on my computer. I'm keeping a list of words I might want to learn on my dictionary app on my phone and it has flashcards built into it so I'll study those some. The vocab itself isn't high priority but I don't want to totally waste the opportunity to enlarge my vocab from reading the book. I never finished the 1st book and I read it in its PDF form on my computer and it took years and years. This one I wanted to go faster.. I figured how about a month (31 days) and that comes to 17 pages per day. Very doable.
-JOI Lessons
I'm doing several of these a week. They're really good to give me speaking practice and learn new grammar structures. I can't believe how many new grammar structures there are to learn in this language. The list is crazy long.
-新完全 読解
I'm doing this with a JOI tutor and she's really helping me. I'm not so good about sitting down and doing textbooks despite being able to do tons of flashcards reps or watch lots of anime or maybe challenge myself to read something. I'm hoping to do some on my own but I may end up just doing it with her for my lessons. Good thing I've got our lessons as a backup.
-Core 6k
I'm coming along pretty well with this. I started it over from scratch and switched to reading kanji from writing kanji. I'm about 1600 cards in. It's a heck of a lot of material to absorb. I wanted to do it within 6 months so I did the math and that was about 27 new cards per day. I'm doing 30-35. So far it's going well since a lot is review or katakana. It'll get harder as I go and I may dip below the 27 but at least I'm starting out strong. I seem to spend about 90 minutes a day on this. My iPhone is always with me so I get a lot done on my breaks at work etc.
-Review old grammar structures from my Japanese classes
This one is pretty easy to follow through with. I just have to show up to class and I love getting to hang out with other Japanese language nerds so I have to be really under the weather to miss a class. We're doing 敬語 next class. I am pretty ok at understanding it passively but not so much actively. It would be nice to be able to actually use Japanese at work if I get the opportunity so I'm really going to try to get the most from this. At JOI I don't seem to get many opportunities to use this. I used 敬語 in a dialogue the other day and was corrected because in the context it was overly polite. It's hard to practice. I hear that Japanese like to use it but not so much with foreigners from what I can tell.
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rewire Groupie United States learninglane.tumblr.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4539 days ago 82 posts - 90 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Mandarin
| Message 1304 of 1702 03 March 2014 at 7:11am | IP Logged |
I miss the JOI lessons for speaking practice. I have my offline tutor, and we usually do a bit of
Japanese in the beginning, but since a lot of it is him answering my complicated grammar questions
we end up in English more to make sure I understand. At least when I was doing both, I'd get in
more speaking practice out of necessity since my private lessons on JOI were Japanese-only. I've
been thinking about at least doing group lessons again, but I'm afraid I'll overbook myself if I do, so I
haven't signed up yet.
Do you just use paper to practice writing when doing iKnow or mentally draw characters or
something? I find iKnow hard to use unless I can be assured I'm not going to get distracted by
someone for the whole session and have headphones in, so I can't do that as much at work. But I got
Skritter, which I do sometimes while waiting around places/on breaks, since it can be set to silent
and still useful.
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