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 1465 of 1702 31 August 2014 at 10:16am | IP Logged |
I'm currently addicted to memorise. I wandered back to howtostudykorean dot com and I think I
really like the format of the website and the let's hit grammar points hard and fast and not
go really slow. Well he does go slow in a way. Greetings are a few lessons in. Well he made
memrise lists to go with his chapters and they're really good. I was having so much fun I
wondered why I didn't use this with japanese already. So I upload one of my lists to the site
and find out why. Memrise seems like it's totally designed to study languages with an
alphabet. You will not see kanji, kana, and the English as you test yourself. You have to
pick two of the above. So I sent feedback regarding that but I doubt anything will change for
years to come. But it is awesome for studying Korean and I'm even liking the mems that people
write to help remember words. The only problem is that this list has no sentences and I need
to make myself read sentences too.
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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 1466 of 1702 31 August 2014 at 8:06pm | IP Logged |
I got memrise figured out a bit better. It's a lot of fun - and I like seeing what other users put for a mem. It makes learning feel more like I'm part of a group like when I did RTK and read other people's stories for their kanji. So that's really awesome. Of course, I made my own deck because I study my own material and well, I don't think there's going to be too many mems added to my personal decks. I'm looking for a good N2 deck to play with. I still have an iknow subscription so that'll be collecting more dust if I do this. /sigh.
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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 1467 of 1702 31 August 2014 at 9:15pm | IP Logged |
I forget if I mentioned this but I just sold my iPhone on eBay to get ready for the new release in a week or so. I'm using an old Nexus 4 I had broken but managed to fix (I put an empty sim converter card in it for safe keeping not knowing that w/o a sim card it gets stuck.. omg I was so unhappy). Well I rooted my phone but was procrastinating fixing the fonts because it's a hassle so I was just dealing with Chinese fonts or changing the entire phone to Japanese depending. I stumbled on this app:
Kanji Fix
in the Play Store. It fixes the kanji for you so you don't have to know anything or read directions off of a forum etc. It requires root so you do have to do that much yourself but this cuts out at least 50% of the work. For the Nexus there's some tools that pretty much automate the root process for you too.
I was so happy to find this app I had to share. Now I'll be getting back to exploring Memrise. I really like the site but so far all of the N2 vocabulary lists have no audio =/. Thanks to rikai-sama making it so easy to add native audio to my SRS flashcards I've totally gotten spoiled and used to that. You can add your own audio to the decks you make yourself on Memrise but it is rather a hassle. You have to upload each sound file individually. I have no idea why.
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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 1468 of 1702 02 September 2014 at 2:24am | IP Logged |
I signed up for the JLPT N2 in Boston this September. It'll be freezing but that's my hometown so I'll be with family.
I've been sick all weekend and not really feeling better today either. 3 days I've been sick and if it's like last time I suppose I have 3/4 more days. And I'm back to work tomorrow.
Oh well. At least no fever. I've spent most of the weekend doing Korean. I guess it's new and interesting to me but signing up for the JLPT has obviously got me thinking about that. I think I'm going to use the Core 6k after all. I am missing a lot out of there unfortunately. I'll be using Memrise for Korean and I'm putting my custom decks on there too but I won't be using their JLPT N2 community decks.
Wish there were a way to make a cold go away faster. Stupid throat hurts again. Evening is the worst. I had this idea that I had a great immune system and didn't get sick but this is my 2nd cold this year so that's out the window.
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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 1469 of 1702 02 September 2014 at 7:02am | IP Logged |
Heard back from an old classmate (actually he was a year ahead at the community college) who took the N2 this summer. He passed. He said he was about 5k into the core deck as mature and his advice is that I aim for the same. I just can't do anki though. I am going to go nuts with the iknow.jp app instead. I think it's a pretty fun setup as far as vocabulary goes. And I'm going to read from NHK news. I just read an article on peanut allergies. It's so short and sweet it makes me wonder why I didn't just do this before. Who needs actual books? And They have native audio/video right there. I suppose I could save the video if I can figure out how but I haven't so I just recorded the audio and called it a night. I bookmarked an article a couple months ago and it's a dead link now so it's worth it to save it.
Having someone I know pass the N2 just recently makes me want to also pass.
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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 1470 of 1702 08 September 2014 at 3:14am | IP Logged |
I am putting more time into Korean than Japanese but I'm definitely still doing Japanese every day too. It seems like I have a good balance going although I don't know if it'll get me past the JLPT N2. I was trying to do iKnow every day for at least an hour but that's not really happening. I have some Japanese vocab I've uploaded to Memrise and I'm doing that instead and really don't have time for both plus lots of Korean. I'm reading the articles on NHK. I was told to do it without rikaisama but I don't have the patience. I just read along and try to figure a sentence out and then double check with rikai. I could go all the way to end and then go back but I'm not. I'm getting a lot of vocabulary to study out of it though - for better or worse. Would be nice if I knew it all already.
Most of my Korean has been doing the Memrise vocabulary that is setup to go along with HowtostudyKorean. The website. I'm pretty impressed with it in general and it seems very popular too. There's pretty much a mem for every word already and the leaders board is pretty active. I was 27th place this week. But when you factor in my Japanese I'd be in the top 10. And I was sick all week - although I'm not sure how much that affected my studying. I mean, obviously it didn't help but it also kept me from going out and doing stuff too so I'll have to see how I do on the leader board this week.
I did the workbook for my Korean class on Saturday and it's due a week from tomorrow. It was actually a lot. 37 pages of fun. This chapter included a lot of rote just writing words over and over - probably because it's called the alphabet and you're learning the alphabet and in Asia that means writing it over and over. I've already learned it so that didn't help me much and it was just long and boring.
I'm getting a lot better at the alphabet though. Doing Memrise has helped. If you do Memrise on your phone/tablet you can't type anything, which is good and bad, but you have to on your computer. It's gotten me able to touch type more or less. I make a couple mistakes and don't go fast but I do touch type. I don't look at the keys. Typing stuff is good practice for visualizing the sounds and the alphabet I can tell. After taking a hiatus from Rosetta I'm now back at it with a better vocab and grammar knowledge and the lessons feel more suited to what I need now. I need sentences for sure - I've been doing all vocabulary for a little over a month. The shadowing which is all Rosetta really ever makes you do is helpful but I'm making flashcards using their sentences to test myself actively also. That means typing out the sentences which is something I couldn't do a couple weeks ago.
So that's about it. I'm going to go jogging now. On a side note I got a pair of those minimalist running shoes and tried them on the treadmill last week (even though I was sick) and strained my calf I think. Gonna put those shoes aside and use regular shoes I think. You have to break your way into those and I don't think I have the patience for it. But exercise I think helps your ability to learn right? So gonna keep that up too.
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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 1471 of 1702 22 September 2014 at 1:04am | IP Logged |
I took a practice N2 test. I should have done so a while ago but they're not so easy to come by - I had to order it from Japan. I passed the listening portion but failed the rest. The listening section seemed SO easy I wonder if it was even N2. No I didn't get a perfect score but I was tired etc. It's just compared to the rest of the test it really seemed easier. I haven't done the JOI classes in a while so I'm getting back into those starting tonight. I am also going to actually use the N2 prep books.. including the grammar and reading comprehension for sure. I don't know what I'm going to do about kanji/vocab right now though. I have books for that and could go through them and enter them into "Japanese" and use that flashcard app. I could go hardcore at the 6k in anki. Or I could do the iknow website. I'm leaning to towards the 1st option.
As for Korean I really enjoy the class I'm taking. I also like the How to Study Korean website and am going to make flashcards using the sentence PDF's they have. Since I just took the JLPT practice test today though, I'm still thinking about that.
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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 1472 of 1702 22 September 2014 at 8:03am | IP Logged |
I sat down with a calculator and split the 新完全マスター book up into 11 weeks on each table of contents. I am not going to use the Core 6k or any other online resources - these books will be my Japanese from now until the test. And a couple of anime shows each weak of course but nothing in excess. I'll try to get one JOI course in per week also just because they keep me motivated to learn if nothing else. But I have no idea if I can keep the schedule I set for myself or not. I'm tempted to drop the kanji book from the routine. I think it's just going to duplicate the vocabulary book but I haven't actually done any exercises out of it yet so I will hold off deciding until then. I wrote out a schedule in the table of contents but it might just be something I do when I'm bored - as in a couple of times and that's it. Which is what I plan to do with the 聴解 book since I already passed that section on the practice test. Listening practice is actually more fun than anything else so I do expect I'll use that book even if it's not on the schedule. I've already added well over a hundred words to my SRS and I'm on page 6 or 7 of my vocabulary book. There's some words on there I already know and I'm still putting them since they're a minority and I would kick myself if I got them wrong or something. Maybe they'll make the reviews less painful. I'm using the Japanese dictionary in iOS as my SRS instead of Flashcards Deluxe since it's faster to make the cards and I like how it tests you more than once if you got it wrong to help drill it in. It can test you both production and recognition at the same time but I am going to drop the production - too hard and it will slow me down and I have a ton of ground to cover.
I'm gonna have to work Korean in somewhere too. Poor Korean. Poor me.
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