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 257 of 1702 11 March 2012 at 11:19am | IP Logged |
Thanks again for the reply Kappa. I changed my translation to "It rained at the party so he didn't come." I
guess I don't really see why 3rd person would be more acceptable here but I'll just go with it.
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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 258 of 1702 11 March 2012 at 11:32am | IP Logged |
When we get back from break for the course there will be a listening quiz. I'd really like to ace it. I don't
watch as much anime these days since I have to study vocab/grammar etc. but I think at least for the next
week I -will- do it all without subs. I've said that in the past and gone nowhere with it but I'm convinced it will
help my listening skills (even if I won't pickup new vocabulary). So until the quiz it's no subs.
I've gone through several more kanji in the heisig series and I was happy to catch up with some kanji I've
used in class but hadn't gotten to yet - stuff like 漢, and the 門 series and some others I can't think off the top
of my head. Potter is good. I haven't increased my vocabulary a whole lot with it yet but it's fun (I haven't put
enough time into it yet). Unfortunately I loaned my favorite grammar book out to another classmate and I'd
really like it back heh. I know I saw something in there regarding the use of the ますstem by itself and I don't
see that in my other reference material.
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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 259 of 1702 16 March 2012 at 3:42pm | IP Logged |
I've almost kept my promise to not do subs. I broke down watching Another and switched to subs. I
wish I hadn't but oh well I love that series. My iPad 3 is supposed to come today =-D. One excuse to buy it
was that Kanji and Furigana would be particularly nicer on a higher resolution retina display. Of course for
the time being I am still pretty much stuck reading Harry Potter on my computer anyway. I've imported it to
my iPad but haven't figured out how to open it with the Rikaichan app yet. Honestly I haven't tried much
since the iOs app version doesn't work nearly as well as the PC one. Unfortunately. I think I left feedback on
the app but I don't know if they'll change it anytime soon. It might be a major pain to do I guess. Basically
with the PC you can just hover the mouse over a word and Rikai automatically and instantly looks it up - or
you can shift hover to just look up the particular Kanji and it's awesome. With the app you have to hover or
press on the word and wait for iOs to realise that you want it to highlight the word and it's a delay of like 2
seconds and it's annoying and it doesn't seem to parse the text and highlight whole words very well either. It
just does 1 or 2 characters and you have to manually drag the highlight text thing to include more characters.
Anyway I'm still looking forward to the new iPad.
I started doing my Flashcards a little differently a couple days ago. As I may have mentioned my app
includes nice Japanese and English text to speech voices. The interface of the app is very simple - swipe left
to give a correct response, up for a strong response, down for wrong, and right to go back to the previous
card. So you can do it without even looking. I was going through my Potter vocab without looking at the
cards at all and I found it much easier to concentrate. I don't know if it's just that my brain is a bit burned out
and the change in routine or what. Also, with the listening quiz coming this study method appeals to me.
I've got about 1800 cards in the Heisig RTK deck now. There's just 200ish more to go to have the whole
thing. It's really nice in that I recognize tons of kanji now when reading Potter and in class and everything.
Obviously I'd like to finish that off and do the 200 more to go. Although I don't remember every kanji I study I
pretty much do remember every primitive and when I see the kanji used outside the deck it does wonders in
terms of reinforcment of what I studied. I really can't say what percentage of the kanji I've studied in RTK I've
also seen outside of it though.
Edited by kraemder on 16 March 2012 at 8:18pm
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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 260 of 1702 16 March 2012 at 8:17pm | IP Logged |
Well I have the iPad 3. You'll probably won't be able to avoid reading reviews and news about it online. In
brief it's very nice. The higher resolution is fantastic. I don't know what other features it has yet. It has some
dictation thing which has me curious and I tried using it for this post but it wasn't typing while I talked - instead
it did nothing until I pressed a button for it to fill in then a whole bunch of text showed up. Not very good.
Anyway, I had bought a keyboard for the new iPad anyway.
Everything on it looks better. It's sharp - just like the iphone screen. I pulled up some PDFs I have of
Japanese in Manga Land and it looked a lot nicer. I didn't have to zoom in as much to get it so I could
comfortably read the kanji/furigana. This was a PDF was of a scan I did myself at 300 dpi I think.
I'm not sure what the specs are for the iPad 3 to be honest. I read a review that the screen resolution is
better than what people have on their PC's and HD TV. I think they're right. I'd like to upgrade my PC to
have a better resolution since I do a lot of eBook reading on it - IE Harry Potter in Japanese. It's not shabby -
1920 x 1200. I'll wait. I'm thinking the market is going to change a bit to respond to the new iPad and they'll
be making new PC screens that are more up to snuff.
Also the iphone apps I had downloaded look much better on this - I don't know why. I did read that if you
jailbroke your ipad 1/2 you could get an app that would make the iphone apps look normal instead of terrible.
It would seem that the operating system wasn't doing as good a job as it could and maybe they fixed it for the
new iPad? Anyway - it looks good!
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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 261 of 1702 19 March 2012 at 8:43am | IP Logged |
errmm I can't sleep. So I'm going to study Japanese instead. And a result I'm planning on calling out sick
tomorrow at work. I'm a terrible person. I know. What kind of a person does that?? Oh well.
So I did the homework for this week like two weeks ago. When we reviewed it I couldn't remember why I
chose some of the answers I did and I noticed that I was a bit rusty on the newer grammar we had just
covered and hadn't really sank in for me yet. Which stinks with a quiz coming up for our next class.
Over the break I took a nice bite out of Potter. I'm 3/4 through chapter one heh. I've got nearly 400 words in
my deck. At the moment I just add most of the words to the deck. I know that words that repeat more often
would make much more sense to put in and all but really I can't know for sure which words those are and it
being just Harry Potter book 1 I think most of the words are in fact pretty basic anyway. I know when I started
on German I had lists and lists and lists of words. I think it's inevitable for the 1st book you read. As long as i
enjoy studying the flashcards I make it's all good I think. If I get bogged down or frustrated I'll just erase the
deck and start fresh with new words as I read. That's what I did before.
Middle of the night studying when I am supposed to be sleeping. I'm gonna start in on my RTK deck for a bit.
Oh not sure if I mentioned this. I found out my app has a feature to let you draw a picture on a card before
you flip it over to check yourself. It's pretty basic but works awesome for a kanji deck as you can imagine. I
used to write the kanji with my finger, but now I have an unadultered image of my skills to look at. Picture a
six year old Japanese kid holding his pencil with his fist while he writes. /shudder
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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 262 of 1702 19 March 2012 at 9:32am | IP Logged |
oh and i learned something today that was probably long overdue. The を in 勉強をする for example is
completely arbitrary and can be left out anytime without changing any meaning whatsoever. And this goes for
other する verbs too it seems. So much I don't know argh. I had to find this in google, I couldn't find it in any
of my text books for the life of me.
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Takato Tetraglot Senior Member HungaryRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5040 days ago 249 posts - 276 votes Speaks: Hungarian*, EnglishB2, GermanB2, Japanese
| Message 263 of 1702 20 March 2012 at 7:11pm | IP Logged |
You're doing great! O.O I can hardly wait for your finishing RTK!
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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 264 of 1702 21 March 2012 at 4:12am | IP Logged |
Takato wrote:
You're doing great! O.O I can hardly wait for your finishing RTK! |
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Hell me too lol. But I'm actually not going to be adding more kanji to the deck for a bit. I've added quite a few recently and I want to review for a few weeks at least. With the deck being as big as it is I don't think I review more than 50/day when I'm diligent. I haven't been keeping track though. The ones that I see and use are pretty solid. heh but I wonder how many of the 1800 or so I've studied I'm actually seeing and using. If you look at frequency of the kanji, I'm guessing it's only a few hundred or so really - most of my Japanese is studying a first year Japanese text book afterall. Even if Yookoso is pretty good about using tons of kanji and just putting furigana.
It's weird knowing kanji for vocabulary that I might not learn for another year or so (or longer who knows). But I enjoy studying it and find it interesting and it's a nice change of pace from grammar/vocab. And you never know which kanji will be useful for the next batch of words you study too. PLUS it gives me an excuse to use my new ipad 3 lol.
Today's class definitely could have gone better. Ah well. I haven't had a full night's sleep in a few days, I was starving (my fault buy hey), and I felt sick and had a headache. The listening quiz seemed easy at first then got more difficult for me. It's multiple choice with the last choice always being -none of the above- which can drive one a bit crazy.
Frankly I'm scared to get the quiz back. It's all the more frustrating because my Japanese is better than the last listening test. Before I had to strain to hear all the words and that was much easier - I hear the words much better. But I didn't feel like it clicked for me and the answers and I was so doubting myself and wishing I could make him say it again.
So moving on. My netflix DVD came (woohoo). It's Ghost hound vol 2. It's a two disc set and I watched the first one last week and loved it. So I'm excited. Also last night I got to see Full Metal Alchemist: Conquerer of Shamballa (the movie) on blu-ray. I loved that series and hadn't seen it in about a year. I actually watched it dubbed before I figured out that dubbed stinks (and decided to learn Japanese) lol.. I still think they did a rather good job dubbing that series, but still, dubbed stinks. Anyway, I had subs on (yeah I've gone back). But I understood tons of the Jaapnese they used which was really cool. Without the subs to help me I wouldn't have had the context in my head to make it click I don't think though. Anyway, I wanna watch full metal again in the actual Japanese.
It's getting late already and I haven't started Ghost Hound yet... update more later.
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