dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4664 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 97 of 256 15 January 2013 at 9:11am | IP Logged |
W/E 2013-01-13 27h
Spent all week working from home so there was no commuting. Nevertheless, I managed to
keep up with the audio. I'm still listening to Upper Intermediate seasons and its still
(unsurprisingly) tough.
Thanks to TAC I now have some concrete goals for January, which is making sure I try to
stick to my Anki and Memrise targets. In particular, I'd let memrise languish at the
end of last year, so I'm glad to be back on there and making progress with the N4
course.
I've been through the whole Berlitz book and I'm now working through it for SRS. That's
going well: I'm up to Chapter 24 of 30. I'm finally managing to remember some of the
classes of trains that I first heard in Pimsleur early last year!
The "A Japanese Reader" is going well: I'm up to Lesson 20 and so far I can work out
what's going on. Of course these are still "training exercises" rather than real texts,
so that's perhaps to be expected.
It finally feels like I'm starting to get into gear this year.
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Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6619 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish
| Message 98 of 256 15 January 2013 at 11:27am | IP Logged |
dampingwire wrote:
It finally feels like I'm starting to get into gear this year.
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Congratulations! It's great to feel like you're making a bit of progress, isn't it?
TAC is very good for motivation. I love the encouragement, the advice, and just having someone willing to listen to me about my hobby without their eyes glazing over.
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dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4664 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 99 of 256 15 January 2013 at 11:50pm | IP Logged |
For the record, I've now been through "Berlitz: Japanese in 30 Days" twice, once to see
what was covered and once to SRS any new vocabulary. All in all, it's taken just over
4h30m.
I've yet to listen to the audio, although I will try durng the commute tomorrow, but
it's probably just the conversations in the book, so I expect that there won't be much
new there.
As a course for absolute beginners who are starting from scratch, it's not too bad.
Speaking as someone who's been studying for a year now, it has been a useful revision
aid for vocabulary and grammar. I doubt that I would have been any better off if I'd
started with this and then moved on to other courses. MT and Pimsleur were much more
helpful in getting me to be able to say anything, and the latter seems to cover more
vocabulary than Berlitz. To be fair though, Berlitz is about £10 new from Amazon and
Pimsleur I, II and III is about £80 second hand on eBay!
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dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4664 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 100 of 256 22 January 2013 at 10:11pm | IP Logged |
W/E 2013-01-20 31h46m
Lots of audio this week: I managed to get some listening in over lunchtime on most days
and I also ended up stuck in traffic for an extra 45m one day. It's not so bad when I
know I'm getting some extra listening done!
TAC 2013 has also got me back into vocabulary, managing about an hour of vocabulary
most days (Anki and Memrise combined).
I've also been working on A Japanese Reader and also managed to squeeze in a bit of
Minna No Nihongo II. Rounding that off with finishing the Berlitz book has meant quite
a lot of Japanese this week.
My employer also ordered a few Japanese books, mostly for the two people who will be
heading out to Japan on long term assignment sometime in the summer. Neither of them
need Japanese for Busy People 2 yet, so I've snagged that one to see what it's like.
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dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4664 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 101 of 256 28 January 2013 at 5:58pm | IP Logged |
W/E 2013-01-27 30h19m
I've finished listening to the Upper-Intermediate seasons but I've realised that I
completely forgot about the Intermediate series, so that's what I'm listening to now. I
expect that I'll finish that sometime next week, but I've not yet decided what I'll
listen to after that.
Anki reviews are still being taken care of. Almost all of the rest of my time (apart
from my weekly tuition and preparation for that) has gone into vocabulary (either Anki
or memrise). I'm now at the stage where all of my Anki vocab (an admittedly quite small
~600 words) has been reviewed and I've managed to get the entire memrise JLPT N4 course
planted and watered. My retention rate when watering is ~45%, so there's quite a lot
more effort to be put in here.
I've looked at the first two lessons of Japanese for Busy People II: nothing
particularly new here but it has helped in getting one or two bits of vocab to stick,
so I'll probably carry on with this in spare moments. There's no sign that anyone else
at work is going to need this book in the immediate future.
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dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4664 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 102 of 256 28 January 2013 at 6:51pm | IP Logged |
(Typical - the post that was here a few seconds ago was intended for the TAC log - one of
the dangers of having too many tabs in chrome coupled with a slow website :-().
Edit: having just messed up again with the February review and March goals, I've found
that you can delete the last post of a log. You can then also
delete the new last post (and so on, I assume ...).
Edited by dampingwire on 08 March 2013 at 8:41pm
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dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4664 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 103 of 256 05 February 2013 at 1:04am | IP Logged |
WE 2013-02-03 34h38m
Audio: 19h55m
Vocab: 8h16m
Reading: 2h55m
Grammar: 3h32m
I'm now reaching the end of the audio, as I think the Advanced Audio Blogs will be too
much of a stretch at this stage. I still have a few short series to go (Particles etc.)
but once those are done I'll probably move on to working through lessons I've already
heard but with a view to learning the specific vocabulary and grammar points therein.
Working through A Japanese Reader has become harder for me now so I spent some time
adding the kanji so far to an Anki deck and I'm keeping that reviewed.
I'm keeping the memrise N4 deck watered. There are two N5 decks, the one from the
memrise beta and a new N5 one that splits kanji and kana. So I've started to work on
the new N5 one as I think that'll make it easier for me to ease the kanji in gradually.
That means working through each level all over again to get everything harvested. I've
now got to the "harvesting" stage, which I can probably do in odd moments at work. I've
mostly not counted this in my study log, since it was mostly done in snatched moments
of spare time and tracking it would have been too tedious. Once everything is harvested
and all I'm doing is watering, I'll start tracking this. One useful outcome of this
exercise is that I'm reasonably sure that the N5 vocabulary has stuck. The N4
vocabulary is currently watering at about 50% retention, so that's probably OK too at
this stage.
I'm currently looking at Chapter 29 of Minna No Nihongo II. I know that I still need to
go back over book I and complete the process of adding all the information sections to
my Anki deck. I also need to revise the grammar, but at the moment I'm just going back
over specific points as they crop up and I realise that I've forgotten them.
As I mentioned in my TAC log, I passed the N5. I sat it mostly to see what stage I'd
reached and what I needed to concentrate on, so I'm quite pleased to find that I
managed to pass. Right now I'm thinking I should try for N4 in the July rather than
waiting for December. I still have a few months before I need to decide though.
Finally, I see that my spreadsheet is telling me that I've just crossed the 1000 hours
of studying milepost.
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dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4664 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 104 of 256 12 February 2013 at 8:53pm | IP Logged |
WE 2013-02-10 30h14m
Audio: 13h00m
Vocab: 8h24m
Reading: 1h07m
Grammar: 6h28m
Other: 1h15
I'm managing to keep the N4 and N5 memrise courses watered and I've also kept up with
the various Anki decks I'm using.
I've finished Chapter 30 of Minna No Nihongo II. I've started to go through the grammar
and add it to a new Anki deck. I started with Chapters 25 - 30 of MNN II so that at
least the stuff I'm covering now is in there. Now I'm going back over the first text
book: I'm up to Chapter 16, so almost done there.
I'm still on Lesson 22 of A Japanese Reader: I decided that I'd not understood it well
enough last time so I went over it again after having had a few reviews of the anki
deck I'm using for its kanji. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was much easier to understand
second time around.
I've now listened to almost all of the suitable JPOD101 audio (the advanced course is
too far above my head at the moment). So I'm probably going to listen to repeats of
lessons during the commute and work through some of the lessons intensively (SRS the
vocabulary and grammar and use the line-by-line audio feature on the website). As I
reach the point where I think I fully understand each one, I'll add the relevant dialog
track to a Dialogs playlist on shuffle and see how that goes.
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