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Kuji’s Krazy Log II | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5254 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 657 of 706 02 February 2015 at 1:02pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Parabéns, pela milésima postagem, Kuji!!! You're sticking with it and 1,000 posts shows it. I know the task seems ceaseless and daunting, but look where you were at post no. 1 and where you are now. So much of language learning is about momentum- building it and keeping it going.
Good to see you're continuing with Futebol em África, muito mais do que um jogo. If you can get through all 10 episodes, even on the train, I think you will notice a difference after you finish. Then if, you start a next radionovela series and finish it too... that's building momentum. The more you build, the more you build upon what you've already done. Be "too lazy to quit". Edited by iguanamon on 04 February 2015 at 5:55pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4839 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 658 of 706 05 February 2015 at 4:20am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I'm surprised to hear that fans of those sort of anime are low in the hierarchy. I must be surrounded by 90% of them. :) Danchi Tomoo should be more appreciated, I agree. It's not even appreciated that much within Japan. My wife cannot figure out why I like the show so much; she said it's not as good as other shows like Sazae-san or Chibi Maruko-chan (which I also like).
Hehe... yeah, that was a nice quote. I guess that describes my Portuguese learning. There were a few times when I thought about quitting, but I haven't been able to do it! I really hope those radionovelas make a difference. I downloaded a few other ones from the Deutsche Welle website before the end of last year, just going by my interest in the titles (I'm not really sure which ones are the most interesting), so just what I have from DW should keep me busy for a while - especially at this rate! :) Even though it's African Portuguese, I'm hoping that it will help my listening for my planned trip to Portugal in December. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4839 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 659 of 706 05 February 2015 at 4:20am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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WEEKLY UPDATE
One of my biggest problems when it comes to learning languages is that I'm not very organized with my time. I have a lot of different activities that I want to do, but when it's time to do something, it can be hard for me to think about what I've been doing and what I need to do next. To help solve that problem, on Wednesday I got an app for my Android device called Todoist. It's a to-do list/task manager. It's simple but versatile. I put in what I need to do for the next several days, and every day I check it and it shows me what I need to do. Simple, huh? I found that it also keeps a record of what I have done. I really hope that using an app like this will help me to more efficiently manage everything I have to do, reduce stress, and use time wisely. OK, now the weekly update. JAPANESE More of the same: You're In Love, Charlie Brown video, Danchi Tomoo on TV, radio/podcast listenings, other TV shows, and Anki reviews. About the Charlie Brown video... I've been able to extract some new words from the video, so that was helpful. But halfway through watching it intensively, and I'm getting tired of doing intensive work on it. I'm thinking about giving up on the intensive work and move on to something else. I suppose there's a limit to how much I can do an activity. I think from now on, I'm going to use this rule: I'll work on something for a week, and even if I'm not finished by then, I'll move on to something else. I can always come back to the activity later on. PORTUGUESE I listened to Part 3 of the Deutsche Welle "Futebol: Mais do que um jogo" radionovela, and now I'm going through the text and making sure I understand it all. Other than that, just some listening - mostly passive and mostly podcasts. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| osoymar Tetraglot Pro Member United States Joined 4728 days ago 190 posts - 344 votes Speaks: English*, German, Portuguese, Japanese Studies: Spanish, French Personal Language Map | Message 660 of 706 05 February 2015 at 7:57pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Do you use Todoist primarily for language tasks? That's interesting, I've been using it
for a couple months but only for the really mundane tasks- I track my major projects with other tools. I love how easy to use it is, though. For my (limited) language study, recently I've been using TimeEdition- it's designed as a time tracker for freelancers, so you input the tasks ahead of time and just time how long you spend on each of them. So I set up "Portuguese" as a client, "anki" as a project, and "input into anki" as a task. Then I select that task and start the timer. It's probably not a good idea to fool around with too many tools like this, but if after trying todoist for a few weeks you find it lacking, give timeedition a shot. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4839 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 661 of 706 06 February 2015 at 2:14am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Thanks for the tip, osoymar! Right now, I'm primarily using Todoist for language tasks, but I have used it for a few non-language-related errands. True, it's not a good idea - especially for me! - to fool around with a lot of tools, but I will look into TimeEdition. At this stage, I'm not sure if I need a time tracker. I'm working on getting organized first, but once I get that straight, I'm thinking about doing some time tracking, so it might be useful to me in the future. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4839 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 662 of 706 19 February 2015 at 6:10am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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WEEKLY UPDATE
I missed last week's update because last week Wednesday I bought an iPad mini, and a lot of my time was used to get used to using it and finding out what kind of apps would benefit me. My Android Walkman served me well for a couple of years, but - unusually for a Sony product - it has started to slow down and malfunction. In addition, the older version of Android was increasingly starting to become incompatible with app updates and newer apps. At first I had a bit of buyer's remorse about the iPad mini because it was bigger than I'm used to. I could stuff my Walkman into any pocket, for example, and I could operate it with one hand while standing on a crowded train, holding a handle with my other hand. I could also connect my Walkman to any PC anywhere, and load and unload files to and from my Walkman. I can't do those things with an iPad mini, but I think in the end the benefits outweight the disadvantages. For starters, the screen is just beautiful. I use a lot of PDFs and applications like Pocket to read things, and it looks amazing on an iPad. If I adjust the brightness, it looks like I'm reading an actual book! The bigger screen is very useful for reading parallel texts, too; I don't have to shift back and forth between columns like I did on my Walkman. For some reason, the iPad mini makes me want to read the PDFs I have; it felt almost like a hassle on my Walkman. The battery life is great; battery life was one of my big problems with my Walkman. I found some nice apps, too, such as imiwa, which is a Japanese dictionary app. The cool feature of that app is that, while reading something in Japanese, I can copy an unknown word, switch over to imiwa, and it immediately looks up whatever was copied onto the clipboard (even conjugated verbs). It's nearly as fast as a pop-up dictionary... which the iPad also has built-in, by the way! I can get a Japanese, Japanese-English, and Portuguese dictionary from the Apple servers, select words while reading, use the "Define" function, and a pop-up window shows the definition. Very handy, although the Japanese-English dictionary is a bit "dumb" (it doesn't recognize conjugated verbs, so imiwa is better for my purposes). But it's cool that Apple thought of that feature. As I said before, I can't load files onto my iPad mini anywhere. I can only do that from my home computer via iTunes or load them onto Dropbox, but my iPad is only connected to WiFi at home or if I happen to be somewhere with free WiFi, which is not that often. But that's a minor sacrifice. I just have to plan ahead. If I make a parallel text, edit some audio, or download an article at work, I can upload it to Dropbox from a work computer. Then when I'm home, I need to make sure that Dropbox syncs to my iPad. Anyway, enough of that. On to the update... * * * * * JAPANESE Because of my iPad mini, TV time was down the past week or so, but I expect that to pick up again from now. I'm still watching the news, but it's a bit hard to understand some of the stories nowadays. I'm also watching Maru Maru Tsuma (○○妻) every week. For some reason, that drama is so interesting to me. I'm also reading an article at Lifehacker.jp about how to deal with talkative people. Lifehacker is nice because the articles are about everyday life, situations, and some tech news - compared with the hard news at most news websites. The article by itself is very interesting, but I found at the bottom of the article a link to the original English article from which it was translated. Yeah, baby! I wasted no time in whipping up a parallel text PDF for my commute. PORTUGUESE I've been doing more writing than reading in Portuguese for the past few days. I put a few entries up on Lang-8 and had them corrected. It was enjoyable to do some writing because I don't get to use my Portuguese often. I put the DW Futebol radionovela on hold for a while, but starting tomorrow or over the weekend I'll start back with that. Edited by kujichagulia on 19 February 2015 at 6:12am 2 persons have 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 663 of 706 19 February 2015 at 7:40am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I hope you like the iPad mini, I like my iPad plus tons and also my iPad retina. You should check out the app
Wakaru for reading text files and PDFs. It's like rikaisama but on iOS. Really nice. I also really like the dictionary app Japanese for iOS. It uses the same dictionary that all the apps use but the interface is just so nice. And it has a really sweet srs flashcard feature built in. Adding new vocabulary for studying has never been easier. You can literally copy and paste lists from Wakaru or anywhere into Japanese for iOS and it's as easy as that. If you are studying flashcards and want to make a card for a kanji - no problem. I don't have an iPad mini but you may want to check out the bunker ring or one of the clones. It makes one handing my iPhone six plus super easy. The iPad mini may be too big even with the ring but maybe not. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4839 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 664 of 706 20 February 2015 at 1:13am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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@kraemder - Thank you for the tips! Wakaru and Japanese for iOS both look very interesting. I'm now thinking about getting both of those. The bunker ring is a good idea. I was looking for some kind of handle case at the electronics shop where I bought the iPad, but they didn't have any. I'm going to shop around online when I get some time.
1 person has voted this message useful |
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