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Japanese from scratch TAC 2015 東亜 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Woodsei Bilingual Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Woodsei Joined 4789 days ago 614 posts - 782 votes  Speaks: English*, Arabic (Egyptian)* Studies: Russian, Japanese, Hungarian | Message 233 of 1702 30 January 2012 at 8:53am | IP Logged | |||||
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Japanese names bite. Easy ones like Yamaguchi are obviously self-explanatory, but
imagine characters that have the same reading but different meanings?! They always have puns on names in manga, anime, and drama. I was watching a historical drama where Sakamoto Ryoma was asked how his name was written. Was it the kanji for book or something else?! Lol. I guess it's an issue for the Japanese themselves, so you can feel good about yourself, since even native speakers do stumble on that one. And you can even use puns too, like they do! Like g-bod said, dramas and credits are a great way to practice Japanese name reading. I didn't think about it consciously, but now I'll definitely try to do so. RevTK site sure has some racy stories. You're right, Brun_Ugle, I feel shocked when even the most innocent kanji get stories like these. I try so hard to skip those, but they hit me in the face, literally, because they pop out unpredictably. And sadly, sometimes they stick and I never forget the kanji again, even though I try to write my own story. Oh well. I guess nothing comes without sacrifice, huh? Good luck in your class! I think you're doing pretty great, and remember, the forum's cheering you on! Gambare! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| 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 234 of 1702 03 February 2012 at 3:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Heh yeah I really don't mind the racy stories - I write some of them heh and might even go check that website
out just to see some. It's just the showing your study material to girls that are also studying Japanese... not going to happen lol. Well the past week I more or less did mimimum studying. I was tired and just didn't feel the motivation. I made flashcards from the class book for half the lessons we were doing this week. I also did the take home quiz (yeah I love this teacher for doing a take home). I knew most of the kanji from heisig already (I think I know 85% of the kanji for the whole course already) but I got stuck on 台所. I was looking at it and thinking pedestal - place (next to... it's not next to but my story for it gave me that context oops). Anyway, pedestal - place.... kitchen? That was one kanji that I couldn't get from heisig and I don't remember it being taught to us although I might have been spacing. So I looked it up in the dictionary. A bit of a pain but doable. I tried drawing the kanji into midori an ipad app dictionary and that really got no where. I don't know if my fingerwriting is bad or what but unfortunately that method of looking up kanji seems to fail for me. Ended up doing the radical thing and getting it. I think the more kanjis I look up that way the faster it will get. Right now I don't really have any idea how they group/order the radicals but at least the primitive/radicals jump out at me when I look at a kanji so it's doable. So I went to class of course. That took a bit of effort lol. I didn't feel motivated and I hadn't studied and with all the class participation the teacher does it kind of stinks when you're called on and have to wrack your brain to come up with something. Going to class is way more harder and demanding than doing that take home quiz let me tell you. I did do my spaced repitition vocab. I'm basically doing my deck from jpod101 dot com and the deck I make for this course. The jpod deck seems to have a lot of vocab I'm not really going to need/see since I'm not living in Japan. Obviously any vocab is good to know and if it's on their list it can't be useless but it's not sticking very well and that's a bit frustrating. Unfortunately I didn't do any heisig this week. So it's my weekend and I'm hoping to make more progress. Stupid alarm went off at 4:50 AM again ugh. I can't believe I forgot to turn it off. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6612 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish | Message 235 of 1702 04 February 2012 at 9:25am | IP Logged | |||||
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Sometimes the combinations seems very strange if you relate them to the keywords from Heisig. Of course Heisig just picks one keyword for each kanji, but the kanji can have several meanings. Sometimes the weird combinations can be easier to remember than the more obvious ones. You can make stories out of them, just like when you learned the kanji.
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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 236 of 1702 10 February 2012 at 5:02pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Another weekend, another update. I missed my Japanese class yesterday. I feel a little bad about playing
hooky. But that's not to say I slack in studying. It's pretty much all I do in my freetime. I had been thinking of just putting the jpod2000 essential deck I made aside until the end of the course but I'm not going to. Watching anime I picked up on some new words from that list. I love it when I pick out new words I just learned watching anime. I'm also (big shocker) picking out tons of the grammar we're learning in class. Declining adjectives and past tense for verbs is huge obviously but comparatives is helping some too. Even though I haven't mastered these (to the point where I'm fluent), I'm really tempted to skip ahead and study up on more grammar topics in the book. I'm a little afraid that would spread me too thin though and I'd regret it when I got to class and got grilled on the grammar we are focusing on. I'm already spread pretty thin trying to do extra vocab and kanji than what's required for the course. The past week we focused on the TE form. It's extremely useful and flexible and I need to review it more. What I missed when I didn't go to class was doing probabilities using でしょう and かもしれません. I'll be doing some review of that this weekend obviously. Next week we're doing interrogative + か / も + affirmative/negative / でも some / incliusion / exclusion of everything / - ever... and then describing abilities and nominalizers. I have to pretty much prepare for the next week the weekend before or I won't get to it. I'm always really tired after work. I also signed up for a rosetta stone session. It should be some good speaking practice. I'm curious to see if I'll find rosetta stone easier since the last time. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| 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 237 of 1702 18 February 2012 at 6:39am | IP Logged | |||||
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I guess it's been about a week. It's looking like I'm going to get a b- in my class. At least based on the grades I've been getting - solid 80's across the board. Would be nice to get an A. Oh well.
102 is a pain the butt. We're getting hit with lots of new grammar every class. Some are worse than others. Basically I hate conjugating. I hated it for every European language I studied and I Japanese even more so. I'm studying ahead for next week's class and it's regarding the potential form. I'm not 100% on the conjugations for the past tenses for adjectives and verbs yet. I'm getting there. A lot depends on how tired I am. Since I go to class after work I'm generally pretty tired. Seriously - this being my weekend I was flying through exercises early in the day and doing the conjugations etc no problem. I felt great. I went out and did some errands etc and watched some anime and it was late afternoon (which is late for me since I wake up before 6 am due to my work schedule.) And suddenly I was making mistakes on every problem. Pain in the butt. It's not a lost cause just because it's late in the day but I have to vary my activities and well do something to wake my brain up. Maybe I'm old. I worry about that a lot. At the moment I'm drinking a few beers and that sort of wakes me up but obviously sort of makes me distracted at the same time heh. It's near bed time for me though. So we're doing the potential form on Tuesday it looks like. It's a whole new list of conjugation rules to memorize. Ugh. I was thinking they just used できる and that was that. Nope. They got the conjugations too. I wouldn't hate it quite so much except getting called on in class during conversational exercises I need to fluently respond to problems using these new conjugations. So I can't just read it, study it, and give it a month to absorb. This Tuesday 先生 Sugawara is going to be on us to speak this stupid thing and to do it fluently. Oh well. Here goes studying. And I do like the class. I get along pretty well with the other students and it's fun to be with other people who have an interest in learning Japanese. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6612 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish | Message 238 of 1702 18 February 2012 at 8:23am | IP Logged | |||||
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Having to conjugate new forms fast, under pressure and with everyone watching is torture. Eventually, it does get easier though.
I don't know how old you are, but I suspect you are younger than me. Anyway, age doesn't matter in language-learning. I wouldn't suggest just conjugating all day. You're right that you need a break. I have a whole list of different learning activities and I try to rotate them. If I do anything too long, I start to make more and more mistakes. There is no point in that, so then I go on to something else for a while. It's also a good idea to take a break from all Japanese every once in a while and just do something completely different. Especially doing something physical like going for a walk will help to get the blood back into your brain. I think we language learners have a tendency to just sit around studying all day. All our blood ends up in our feet and there's nothing left for our brains. By the way, orange juice will really perk you up. Vitamin C is better than caffeine for waking you up. I used to always take a carton of orange juice to exams. Nothing made me more awake or made my thinking clearer. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| 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 239 of 1702 18 February 2012 at 6:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
YES it is. lol. Eventually, it does get easier though.
I'm 34. I don't think of myself as an old person I guess but for language learning the younger the better. The other people in the class are all teenagers. A few even still in high school. I kinda feel like Drew Berrymore in Never Been Kissed. There was one guy in the class with some grey in his hair and I'm pretty sure older than I. However, he disappeared. I haven't seen him in a while. He did seem to be struggling a bit more than the rest of us. Obviously I was sad to see him go since he was the only other adult (I'm pretty sure) in the class (21+). Regarding the orange juice - funny you say that. I always keep some in the fridge and after my pot of coffee in the morning I turn to it instead of more caffeine. Keep the blood sugar up etc. I definitely exercise. Overall it's very beneficial. However, I'm also pretty exhausted afterwards (full day work plus workout is a lot). I suppose I could reduce the workouts a bit to avoid that but I'm trying to lose weight (to look younger of course lol). I'm trying to think of the fastest way to become comfortable with new conjugations. I'm guessing just doing the exercises in the book over and over. There's no answer key which is obviously annoying but typically I should be able to reference the conjugation charts and double check myself. I hate doing grammar. I'd much prefer to just do vocabulary flashcards all day and watch anime. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| 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 240 of 1702 21 February 2012 at 2:43am | IP Logged | |||||
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Tired. I'm going to type up my homework for tomorrow's class. It's done just needs typing. I was curious how Potter would be after a month of Japanese 102. It's much easier. Much easier. My vocabulary is kinda crap and I'm really dependent on Rikaichan to look stuff up but that's to be expected. I'm not getting hung up on the grammar though. I'm recognizing the grammar well enough that I can read the sentences. Well enough anyway. I only read a couple paragraphs as I'm tired and still need to type this homework up before I fall asleep. I'm definitely going to spend some more time reading though. I'm glad I did the class it's helping. There's more grammar to learn obviously so I look forward to it getting easier.
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