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TAC 2013, Sakura 桜 - dampingwire | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4657 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes  Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 113 of 137 09 November 2013 at 11:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I've now managed to read Oxford Japanese Grammar & Verbs from cover to cover. I remember
when I first got this book I would dip into it and almost everything was new and strange. The example sentences were too hard and the grammar points seemed very arcane. This time through it seemed much simpler. Looking back, I ordered this book at the end of May 2012, so in about 18 months I've reached the point where I'm comfortable with it. I didn't work through every example sentence - I really only wanted to see if there was any obscure grammar that I hadn't come across - but the ones I did look at seemed mostly quite straightforward. Progress. Hooray :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5974 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 114 of 137 10 November 2013 at 6:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
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That's an impressive number of hours to clock up in just under two years. Even more so considering you have a job and a family to keep up with as well. I can definitely find 20 hours for languages in a "good" week, but most weeks I am probably more in the realm of 6-10 hours.
Anyway, now you've well and truly reached the lower intermediate level in Japanese, do you have any plans to start bringing native materials into your routine? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4657 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 115 of 137 10 November 2013 at 8:56pm | IP Logged | |||||
I'm pleased that I've managed to find some time for studying but it's not quite that impressive. My spreadsheet says 1285 hours up to now for this year, but 612 hours of that is audio. Until the last month or two almost all of that will have been during my commute or when I'm driving somewhere alone or when I' shopping at the supermarket or cycling. In other words it's all time that would otherwise have been "dead". That means I'm managing about 60 hours/month of study time which is about 15 hours per week or 2 hours per day. Mind you, even though I'm dismissing it as just "dead" time, it has, I think, helped quite a lot with solidifying grammar that I've picked up during formal study and it has helped me with listening comprehension. So even though I can't concentrate fully and can't rewind and listen again, it's still been very useful. It beats local radio hands down!
Yes. I'll keep ploughing through vocabulary via SRS and work through the N3 grammar, but I can see that that's not going to take as much time as it has done in the past. I've filled my plate for November, but starting in December I'm going to make NHK EasyNews part of my daily routine. I also have an archive of FNN News stories to try listening to as well. After next week I'm going to work through A Homestay in Japan with my tutor. That's to "native material" what the "Janet and John" stories are to War and Peace, but hopefully it'll get me over a few hurdles. Then I'll try the Penguin parallel stories and the "Read Real Japanese" book. As for visual media, I'll sit down and watch 日本人の知らない日本語 without subtitles and then see what I can find on the jdrama sites. (Any recommendations?). I have tried listening to Japanese radio at work in the background in the past but I've never understood any of it and it didn't feel as though it was helping. If I could find a site that had a podcast and a Japanese transcript that would be great but nothing seems to offer that. (Well FNN-News does, but that's pretty limited in scope). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4657 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 116 of 137 16 November 2013 at 9:12pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Last week I managed to work through 339 new words in Anki. I've just finished getting
through the remainder of the outstanding vocabulary in Anki, another 410 words. So that's one of my November goals met early. Once the reviews settle down, I'll probably use the extra time to SRS more of the Lower Intermediate lessons as I'm finding that the audio during the commute really helps bed in vocabulary that I already know. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4657 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 117 of 137 01 December 2013 at 3:26pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Time to review my November goals.
1. For the audio I'm now listening to just dialogue tracks. I'll probably go back to lessons at some point, but pure dialogues seems to be quite useful at the moment. Done. 2. RTK: I'll keep this up to date. At some point I need to consider working though the last 1000 kanji but at the moment hardly unknown kanji are cropping up. Done. 3. Memrise. I have the whole N3 vocab course planted. I need to get the kanji vocab planted too. I think I'll aim to plant 50/week on average. So the target here will be 200 by the end of November. I have also started the N2 vocabulary course but I'm not going to set any targets here. Mostly done. I've kept the N3 course watered, except for the last foru or five days when the website has been really slow. I start out a sessiona nd mybe 75 words in I find that the things just slows down. So rather than waste time siiting and waiting for it, I've let it slide. I'm about 400 reviews behind but I'll catch up when it recovers. The reason I've marked this task as only partially met though is that I've not planted any of the kanji. What I really want to do is to pause for each word and write it out. All I can do with memrise is to type in the kana and then the kanji is almost automatic after that. I need to find some way to disable the timer or something.. 4. I'll study the notes I've made on the Minna no Nihongo chapters. This will be useful basic revision but I don't want to take too much time over it. There are 50 lessons, the earlier ones obviously being much more basic. I'll aim to have revised everything by the end of November. Done. 5. Every day I'll work on shadowing one JPOD101 Lower Intermediate lesson. I only have about 5 more from season 1 to finish. There are 26 lessons in season 2, so with a bit of effort, I should be able to finish season 2 by the end of November. Done. 6. I'll keep Anki up to date but I'll also aim to cover 600 new vocab words by the end of November. As I'll be continuously adding new vocab each day anyway I'm not sure how to track this. I'll probably set the deck to not present any new vocabulary and then I can use Custom Study to learn a set number each time. I'll track that in my spreadsheet. Done. So I've mostly met my goals. Instead of the 200 memrise N3 kanji, I've entered all the kanji vocabulary from A Homestay in Japan into Anki and I'm reviewing it there. That's proved pretty helpful now that I'm working through the book in my tutorials. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4657 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 118 of 137 01 December 2013 at 9:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Rather than forget (as I've done before!) I'll put together some goals for December
now. As Christmas is looming I'm going to not set targets that push too hard for this month. 1.Continue listening to dialogue tracks. I may throw in some lessons occasionally but for now it's still mostly going to be dialogues. 2. RTK: I'll continue to keep this up to date and not worry about getting through the remaining 1000 or so RTK3 kanji. 3. Memrise. I'll continue to water the N3 course. I'll plant the related N3 kanji so that I see them occasionally but I'm not going to set any targets here. I'm going to make a gentle start on the N2 vocabulary but I'm only going to set a target of 200 words in total. 4. I will shadow lessons from the JPOD101 Lower Intermediate Season 3 but again I'm not going to set any targets for shadowing. I will however, set a target of working through the first 15 lessons, adding vocabulary and sentences to Anki. 5. I'm going to listen to at least 10 episodes of 日本人の知らない日本語 (once with subtitles and once without). 6. I'm going to work through at least one EasyNHK News article each day for the first three weeks. I'll set a concrete target of 21 articles. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4657 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 119 of 137 01 December 2013 at 9:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I've decided that I'm going to plant the kanji in memrise after all. However, since I
think that's not going to be enough, I'm also going to go through the kanji sections of N5, N4 and N3 and add them all to my kanji deck. That'll give me the coverage I need in what I expect will be the most useful direction: I mostly expect to see written Japanese and have to understand it rather than generate my own. Even in the unlikely event that I suddenly am required to write many voluminous emails in Japanese, being able to read back whatever I've just written will be 90% of the battle (the other 90% being working out what I want to say :-)) Adding all that kanji vocabulary is quite a big undertaking. Between the three courses there are as many as 3115 words. In fact it will be somewhat less since some words are not present as kanji and others are usually written as kana, so I'm going to miss them out. I won't try and avoid kanji that aren't required at N3 (or N2): if the word is there then I'll learn the kanji regardless. I've just been through the first three kanji levels of N5: nominally 75 kanji but actually only 43 entries at the end of the day. That took 26 minutes to enter into Anki. Assuming that the rest of the courses levels have the same ratio of "missing" kanji then the 3115 words will take 18 hours to enter. In the worst case it may take as long as 31 hours. So at 30 minutes per day then it should all be entered in two months or so. That'snot too and and I'm already seeing the benefits of improved kanji recognition and the effect that has on reading speed, so it should be a well worthwhile investment in time. We shall see ... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4657 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 120 of 137 03 December 2013 at 12:42am | IP Logged | |||||
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It may not take me quite so long to import the various memrise vocabulary decks into my
Anki kanji deck after all. Someone has written an Anki plug in that imports memrise courses. It's not foolproof but it has at least managed to import the N5, N4 and N3 courses. There are very few options so to get things into the right places I still need to export to a text file and then re-import to the target deck with the right fields going to the right place. One problem is that it doesn't seem to do the right thing withe the kanji parts of the courses: but it does import the rest of the course and the fields that it imports are the kanji and the English translation. My deck has a Kana field too. I could try to automagically fill that in by writing something to go off and look stuff up on tangorin.com, but that seems unlikely to yield satisfactory results and will probably take too much time to do. Instead I'll just start to work through the new kanji and as each one crops up for the first time I'll look it up manually and fill in the kana. That'll give me the chance to wee out kana-only words, which I need to do anyway. So it looks like I'll be able to save myself 20-30 hours of work. OTOH I now have ~3000 new kanji vocabulary terms to work my way through. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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