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Maria’s Japanese Learning Log (旅立ち) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Hasi Diglot Senior Member Austria Joined 6119 days ago 120 posts - 133 votes  Speaks: German*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 9 of 101 25 February 2013 at 6:38pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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@kujichagulia: She is actually one of the really unpopular ones that you probably haven't heard of. Her name is
Nonaka Misato. She hardly ever appears on TV at all, but I started looking at her blog when it became public and sort of grew to love her. I have since kind of moved on from AKB as a whole but I still enjoy occasionally reading about them. Which reminds me that I could do a bit of digging and watch some of their variety shows to see if my listening skills have improved at all over the past few months. So far I have been able to reach my daily goals everyday. I am really happy about that because it also doesn't really take that long so I think that I should be able to keep it up even once classes start again next week. Today I have reached frame 586 which means that I am more than 1/4th through the book. :) I cannot believe it. I do notice that things have started to become a bit tougher because there are no longer stories provided for you, but RevTK really helps with that. I have decided to study a bit differently today by first doing all my reviews and then studying new words. I notice that I am a lot faster in doing so, but I am wondering if I am "cheating" by studying kanji I have input only a few minutes ago. I am at a point where I start to recognize more and more kanji. However, I can certainly tell that I am using the lazy kanji method rather than the regular route because sometimes I fail to recognize a kanji a have studied when I encounter it in the wild. However, seeing as I actually enjoy doing reviews, (I'm odd, I know.) I can see it getting back over time. Unlike suggest, I also write out the kanji during the review. I know it takes longer but ever since I started doing that, about 3 days ago, I have noticed that the kanji seem to stick better. I also need to work on my Japanese handwriting because my kanji still look awful. I really want to get started with reading all the Japanese books I own, but I think that I should hold off until after I am done with RTK so as to not confuse myself with the keywords. (seeing as the keywords and the meanings tend to be rather different.) I am reading blogs and the Japanesepod101 transcript to so how many reading I actually still remember. After all, I once knew about 250 kanji. xD 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4668 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 10 of 101 25 February 2013 at 8:34pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Well you're already cheating by not doing 10 years of drills in school like they do in Japan :-) Seriously, you can certainly learn kanji in batches any way that takes your fancy and probably easily "learn" 50 or 100 in a few sessions in one day. Of course, tomorrow you're going to have to remember all of them (and the day after, and the day after that). So there's no cheating going on. You started with maybe 250 kanji and now you are somewhere near 600. If you retention rate is maybe 80% then previously you knew 250 and now you know maybe 480. You nearly doubled the number of kanji you knew in just a short period of time.
I can usually tell whether a kanji I see is one that I've seen or not, even if I don't recall exactly what it is. That's pretty useful when you sit the JLPT and one of the possible answers is a kanji you know they've made up. (For example, I've seen 所 but with the two radicals swapped round).
I started by drawing kanji in the air with my finger or mentally picturing them but then I found it too tempting to cheat :-) I now write them out every time, which keeps me much more honest. Some people think that the "muscle memory" helps with learning too. My kanji handwriting sucks, but that's OK, my normal handwriting sucks too. I doubt that I'll ever need to handwrite much in Japanese (unless I suddenly decide to live and work there and suddenly need to produce a CV ...). I don't often write anything much more than a shopping list anyway: my communications and notes these days are almost always in electronic form. That said, if calligraphy interests you, then go for it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Hasi Diglot Senior Member Austria Joined 6119 days ago 120 posts - 133 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 11 of 101 26 February 2013 at 5:18pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I know how you feel about drawing kanji in the air rather than actually writing it out. I used to just write the kanji on
the palm of my hand but I think actually SEEING it on the page when writing it helps me to make it stick more. As far as handwriting itself is concerned, I just want to be able to at least have the option of maybe sending a handwriting Japanese letter one day without it looking like it was written by a 4-year-old, as far as "beauty" is concerned. xD By the 250 kanji I mean kanji I can actually read as well. However, a lot of those I would be able to recognize but not be able to actually write. Thanks to RTK I know how to write them as well and it certainly makes the ones I know stick more. I furthermore noticed that failing actually helps. If I see a kanji I should already know but cannot recall the keyword "in the wild" I look it up and spend a bit of extra time remembering, therefore making it easier for me to make it stick. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Hasi Diglot Senior Member Austria Joined 6119 days ago 120 posts - 133 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 12 of 101 26 February 2013 at 5:29pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Recently I have been watching quite a bit of Japanese TV thanks to this
awesome website that offers JTV live streams. Initially I started doing this in order to immerse more. After all, I learned most of my English thanks to watching American TV shows so I figured the same could be true with Japanese. However, rather than having them play in the background I noticed that more often than not I actively start watching the shows. The website provides you with a thumbnail for each TV channel so if I SEE something that might interest me, I just take a look. That way I spend about 2 hours a day, if not more, actively listening to Japanese when I initially only intended to leave it running in the background. I noticed that despite the fact that I don't understand everything that is going on, I usually get a good gist of what is being talked about even if it is a variety show with people talking rather fast. If the topic is interesting to me I am just somehow glued the screen and cannot seem to do anything else. I remember when I was in Japan things where a little bit different because I could hardly find shows I was interested in/got bored because I couldn't understand enough. I wonder what happened since then. I have only actively gotten back into studying Japanese about a month ago, and I don't think that shows changed that much over time. Maybe it is because I have given up on understanding everything. I am ok with enjoying a show even if I only get half, or sometimes a lot lower of what they are saying. The same thing doesn't seem to be true for jdramas though, because there I still get frustrated if I can't figure out what they are trying to say but have to guess based on visual clues and intonation. Maybe it is because I never actively intend to "watch and understand" the programs I watch at the link above. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Hasi Diglot Senior Member Austria Joined 6119 days ago 120 posts - 133 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 13 of 101 27 February 2013 at 8:13pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I think I have found a new item that I would like to add to my daily list: reading manga :)
In particular, reading Yotsuba&! I assume most Japanese learners are familiar with the manga already. It is about a 5-year-old girl who recently move to a new place with her father. She is a bit wacky and the people around her try to explain the world to her. I remember I downloaded the manga about a 1 1/2 years ago because everyone was talking about how it is THE manga to read when you start getting into native material. Well, at the time it was kind of impossible for me to do so. I remember just reading the hiragana and deciphering the furigana took FOREVER, despite the fact that I had taken Japanese classes for two years. Well, turns out now I am have gotten a lot faster. I finished reading the first two chapters and what feels like a few minutes, I doubt that's true though, and I even understood the jokes. I really like the sense of humor which is odd, because I hardly ever find anything super funny. I can certainly see myself continuing to read all the available volumes (12 , as far as I know) and doing a bit of intensive reading. Through reading I also discovered that my lazy kanji method might not be working as well as it should. Or rather, as I had hoped for. I still have difficulties recalling keywords when I see kanji in the wild, but it might be because for the lazy kanji method it is the reviews that make the kanji stick. Once I am done with RTK I will certainly add another card going from kanji to keyword. After all, I will mostly be READING rather than writing so I think it would be more important to know the meaning of the kanji when I see it in a text. I cannot see myself doing the "normal" RTK because I have tried it before and either it was way to slow for my taste or I would burn out, with nothing in between. For me, adding the stories and making the cards is actually more tiring then simply doing my review. I have also looked into KanjiBox and I think about using it once I am done with Heisig. I am at 650 kanji so I still have quite a bit ahead of me, but I DO see progress and I DO feel like some kanji are sticking really well, whereas other are just...meh. I hope through reading more and getting the exposure I will eventually get more kanji to stick. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6623 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish | Message 14 of 101 28 February 2013 at 7:27am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I've never made cards to review kanji --> keyword. I also had trouble at first when I was reading because I couldn't remember the meanings for the kanji even though I could write them from the keywords. However, I was too lazy to make cards and I found out fairly quickly that it wasn't really necessary. At first it is difficult, but gradually you will recognize the kanji when you see them and remember the keyword or at least the general meaning of it when you read, even if you never actually drill them that way. It just takes time for all that information to come together in your head.
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| Hasi Diglot Senior Member Austria Joined 6119 days ago 120 posts - 133 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 15 of 101 28 February 2013 at 8:59am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I see, thank you so much for your input. :) I guess I am just a bit worried that all the work I have put into RTK will go
to waste if I cannot even recognize the kanji afterwards. One of the things that confuses me as well is that there are kanji out there that are consist of primitives I have already studied so I THINK that I should know the kanji even though it is still another 300 kanji away before I really learn it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Hasi Diglot Senior Member Austria Joined 6119 days ago 120 posts - 133 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 16 of 101 28 February 2013 at 4:46pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I found a great youtube channel today.
It is a channel that is made for Japanese learners of English and Chaka, the "bilingual girl" who uploads the videos explains useful English phrases in Japanese. While I might not be the target audience, I think she has a very relaxing voice that is great to listen to. In addition to that I think that knowing how to explain the differences in Japanese will be useful for correcting entries on lang-8. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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