dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4676 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 33 of 118 28 January 2014 at 11:32pm | IP Logged |
I went looking for Japanese films on youtube the other day and there seems to be a whole swathe of them.
These mostly seem to be full-length ones, sometimes with and sometimes without subtitles.
I'm tracking the ones I've watched here. I'm open to
suggestions, if anyone thinks there is anything in particular I should be on the lookout for. This applies
particularly to series, as there seem to be plenty of them mentioned on the j-drama sites, but it's difficult
to tell from the brief summaries whether they'll be worth watching.
Edited by dampingwire on 28 January 2014 at 11:33pm
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dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4676 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 34 of 118 31 January 2014 at 2:26pm | IP Logged |
I've worked through 日本語総まとめ N3 文法 now. I've skipped the 7th day of each week, which
is a few pages of exercises, but I have done the all the daily exercises. I'm leaving the
7th-day exercises to use for review in a month or two.
Overall I think I'd seen most of the grammar points before. There are 36 lessons overall
with (usually) 4 grammar points per lesson, so maybe about 140 grammar points. The amount
of work required for each point various quite considerably, as does the level of
explanation afforded. Luckily I have plenty of other resources to use to shore up the
gaps.
I'm going to start on 完全マスター文法N3 tonight and see how that compares.
I've also worked through all of 完全マスター聴解N3, apart from the final mock test (which,
again, I'm deliberately leaving for later on). I'm going to work through the book again
from the start, but this time I'll work through the explanations in Japanese, read
through the transcripts and not move on until I understand every word in every track.
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dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4676 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 35 of 118 01 February 2014 at 12:23pm | IP Logged |
A review of my January goals.
1. Continue listening to dialogue tracks.
Done.
2. RTK: I'll continue to keep this up to date and occasionally add new kanji as I come
across them. Since I should pick up about 100 new kanji each month to meet my TAC goal,
I'll try to add 100 this month.
I've kept RTK going quite consistently. Although I've added new kanji,
I've not activated them yet. I just don't come across them enough to need them so I've
just not felt the need to learn more. I think I can easily add 1000 kanji in the 6
months after the N3 exam in the summer, so I'd rather do that.
3. I will shadow lessons from the JPOD101 Lower Intermediate Season 4. I've already
worked through the first half sentence and vocabulary mining. So I'll complete that
process and then get to work on listening intensively.
. Done. I've moved on from intensively listening to JPOD101 lessons and
instead I'm now working through 日本語総まとめN3聴解.
4. I'm going to make up for missing half a goal in December by watching all of 日本人の知
らない日本語 without subtitles.
Done. I've also watched a few films and started to watch TV series. I'm
tracking that here.
5. I'm going to work through at least one EasyNHK News article each day. I'll also try
to occasionally read an NHK News article instead. For this month I'll leave my goal as
NHK EasyNews and just try to judge how much harder the full "adult" articles are.
Overall I read 6 NHK EasyNews articles and 17 full NHK News ones. Having
tried the full ones, the Easy ones just didn't grab me any more. The full ones, however,
take quite a long time to work through. This probably contributed to my lack of
consistency. I'll have to find a better approach (or set a more realistic target).
6. Anki: Kanji. I have about 1400 kanji words to learn to complete the N3 vocabulary. I
want to sit JLPT N3 in the summer so I need to learn about 300/month. I'll set this
month's target as 300 and see how it goes.
I managed 75. After messing up with the vocabulary deck I left Anki to
settle down for the rest of the month. 300 is a reasonable monthly target though, so I
will do something about this in February.
7. Anki: Vocabulary. I'm going to use memrise for N3 vocabulary (but not yet), so I'll
use Anki to start on the N2 vocabulary. There are about 3600 new items in the deck. I
don't expect to get through all of those before the summer and I don't want to set too
high a bar for my first month of TAC. I think 300 new words will do here too.
I met this target but because my vocabulary deck settings were incorrect,
it lead to a large backlog and recovering from that took a few weeks. I don't
need to learn much N2 vocabulary for the N3 test, so I think I'll probably set
the deck to give me a few new words each day and leave it at that for the time being.
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dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4676 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 36 of 118 03 February 2014 at 12:05am | IP Logged |
Time to set some goals for February.
This time I'll split the list into two. The first set will be those things I really want to do.
The second set is those things I'd like to do if I have the time. In addition, I'm only going
to allow for 5 days/week in my plans; that way I can leave the weekends free for whatever I
feel like doing at the time.
Main Goals:
1. Continue listening to dialogue tracks.
2. RTK: I'll continue to keep this up to date.
3. Anki: Kanji. I still have about 1300 kanji words to learn to complete the N3 vocabulary. I
want to sit JLPT N3 in the summer so I still need to learn about 300/month. I'll set this
month's target as 400 as it's a nice round number of 100/week and see how it goes. I'll try
adding new kanji at 20/day or so and slow down when the reviews start to take more than about
20 mins per day.
4. Anki: Vocabulary. I'm merely going to maintain this. I probably don't need N2 vocabulary
this summer and I don't want this deck to interfere with the time I need to spend elsewhere.
5. 新完全マスター N3 文法: I'm going to aim to cover 5 "chapters" per week. If I do a review lesson
I'll count that as a chapter too: basically a chapter (at least at this stage of the book) is
always two pages long.
6. I'm going to watch at least 3 drama episodes or two films per week.
Optional Goals:
7. I've started the 新完全マスター N3 聴解 book again from the start. This time I'm going to work
through every piece of Japanese in there, whether it's instructions explanations or script.
That makes it difficult to track by page or section, since it will vary so much, so I'll set a
target or 2 hours of such work per week.
8. I'm going to work through at least two NHK News articles each week. In addition, I'll go
back to trying one NHK Easy News article each day that I don't read a full article.
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Woodsei Bilingual Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Woodsei Joined 4808 days ago 614 posts - 782 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Egyptian)* Studies: Russian, Japanese, Hungarian
| Message 37 of 118 06 February 2014 at 2:29pm | IP Logged |
Your log is extremely interesting to follow, dampingwire! Great idea splitting goals into
things you want to do and things that should be done. I probably should be more specific
about my goals for every month too.
I'm interested in knowing how your grammar exercise book is helping you in your studies.
Is it specifically for JLPT purposes, or a part of your general learning structure? I
don't worry too much about grammar until I hit a certain point and then use it to
polish/iron out any mistakes I might make in production, because by then I'm pretty
familiar with the patterns from both reading and listening a lot.
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dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4676 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 38 of 118 06 February 2014 at 11:31pm | IP Logged |
Woodsei wrote:
Great idea splitting goals into things you want to do and things that
should be done. |
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Originally I started with monthly goals so I had some targets to aim for. Now I find
that there is so much I want to get done that I need to prioritise. However, by listing
everything I thought I could fit in I found that I sometimes felt under pressure to do X
when I'd rather do Y. So I thought I'd nip that in the bud and give myself some slack.
If I miss an optional goal or two (or all of them) I'll just not worry about it. But if
I do have some otherwise unallocated time, then I've got a ready made list of optional
things to get on with. At least, that's the plan. We'll see how it goes.
Woodsei wrote:
I'm interested in knowing how your grammar exercise book is helping you
in your studies. Is it specifically for JLPT purposes, or a part of your general
learning structure? |
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The first book I bought was Japanese Step by Step, just because it was the only one in
the bookshop that seemed reasonable (and not terribly expensive). Then I found my tutor.
She had used Japanese for Busy People but preferred みんなの日本語 (no surprise there:
she's Japanese and みんなの日本語 has lots of Japanese in it compared to JfBP). So for N5
and N4 I basically worked my way through those.
I've enjoyed working through みんなの日本語初級 and I'm about to start on みんなの日本語中級. I
don't know where along the path towards (or past) N3 the two 中級 books will take me. So
I'm supplementing those with 日本語総まとめ and 新完全マスター N3文法 books. Those are basically
lists of grammar points and are geared specifically for the JLPT exams. They are useful
but you get to do a lot of chasing around and looking things up for yourself. So I guess
that's good, but it does take longer. OTOH they do make a point of putting similar
points together so you can compare and contrast, whereas みんなの日本語 is trying to
"teach" rather than present "things" to be learned and memorised.
I expect that I should be through みんなの日本語 by the end of the year (perhaps earlier:
it depends on how long an average lesson takes to get through). I expect that for N2
I'll rely on 新完全マスター to fill in the holes and add lots of watching (which I've
started) and lots of reading (which I'll start soon) to sort out comprehension and
listening ability.
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dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4676 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 39 of 118 11 February 2014 at 8:51pm | IP Logged |
As I mentioned in my weekly update,
I've
now finished watching 婚カツ!. So that's two complete series I've managed to watch
without it feeling like a chore. For my third one I've picked モンスターペアレント, mostly
because I'd come across this term before in one of the JPOD101 lessons. A high-powered
lawyer is dropped into a school to sort out issues with these overbearing parents.
Hopefully the rest of the series will live up to the expectations set by the first
episode.
So that's over 20 hours now and my listening comprehension isn't yet perfect. Clearly
this is going to take longer than I thought :-)
The only problem so far (apart from understanding stuff!) is that it's really easy to
sit down and just watch an episode. I'm having to remind myself that I should do the
book work or SRS when I'm not tired and keep the episodes for when that is done (or a
good chunk of it is done) or for the end of the day when I'm probably not up to the
more exhausting work.
Edited by dampingwire on 11 February 2014 at 9:00pm
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g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5993 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German
| Message 40 of 118 11 February 2014 at 10:04pm | IP Logged |
Are you watching with or without subtitles?
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