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TAC 2014, tabidachi 旅立ち - dampingwire | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4676 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes  Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 65 of 118 27 April 2014 at 8:53pm | IP Logged |
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I've signed up for the Super Challenge starting this May, that is next Thursday.
I'm supposed to read 5000 pages of Japanese and watch 150 hours of Japanese (films, J- Drama, anime, it all counts) all within 20 months. Looking at my spreadsheet summary, the watching part will be pretty straightforward. My lowest month for that this year was March, and there I logged just over 14h of video. So even at that rate I should manage to achieve that part of the SC in 10-11 months or so. Throw in the fact that I can also count my audio listening during the commute and, even de-rated by 50%, that's still another 20h counted for my lowest month. The reading OTOH is a different story. If I read every story (front page) on NHK News and TBS that looks like it might count as 10 pages. Doing that consistently 5 times a week should get me maybe 50 pages which would be somewhere near 4000 pages during the SC. At my current reading speed that would take perhaps two hours per day. So I may have to read one or two articles intensively as I do now and then read the rest extensively. That would still leave me 1000 pages to find, but I do have some graded readers, a few novels and a Harry Potter or two. Finding the time to fit all that in may be a challenge. Of course, with that much reading my speed should improve (which is the point of the SC, after all) so this may not be the unattainable target that it seems to be right now. Time will tell. Should be useful and interesting regardless of whether I complete the SC or not. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4676 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 66 of 118 01 May 2014 at 9:51pm | IP Logged |
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The SC standings can be found on the
Super Challenge Twitter/Bot. Less than 24 hours in and already someone's managed at least 4-1/2 hours of film! I'm not sure whether I should tweet daily or less frequently. I'll probably tweet today's results early tomorrow just to check that I'm communicating with the bot properly. After that I suppose I'll tweet less frequently. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4676 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 67 of 118 01 May 2014 at 10:09pm | IP Logged |
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I did the 70m N3 grammar paper from one of the books that my tutor brought back from
Japan. I was fine (I think) until I got to the reading parts (which is the bulk of the test!). I'm fairly sure that I did very badly. That, however, is the point of a mock test: to show you where you need to concentrate. With me it would seem to be reading, reading and perhaps more reading. So now I have the official mock N3 test printed out and ready to go. I've also printed out three or four of the JLPT2 tests; these are above my level but the reading practice is still probably worth doing. For good measure I've copied and pasted all the main articles from NHK News and TBS into a document and printed that out: I think I need to try reading from dead tree so that I don't have the crutch of rikaichan to "help". So that's 17 pages of native text to work through over the next few days. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4676 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 68 of 118 03 May 2014 at 1:12am | IP Logged |
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I had the day off work today and I spent a fair bit of it working on Japanese.
I got one lesson of 新完全マスター N3 文法 done. I'm keeping to no more than one lesson a day as more of it seems to stick this way. I did think that I might do one lesson early in the morning and one late in the afternoon today as I had the time, but in the end reading took over. That's fine: I need the reading more and I certainly have plenty of time left to go over the grammar again (and again). I also managed to fit in two drama episodes. The main thing I did was to go through two of my graded readers, each twice. I did think it would be quite hard when I started but it turned out to be far less of a slog than I thought. It helped that one of the stories had been used as the basis for one of the JPOD101 lessons, and so I knew roughly what was going to happen (and I also knew what a 天狗 was). I'll finish my two other graded readers over the weekend and then I'll decide whether to tackle the printed NHK News articles of the Penguin parallel text book next. Or perhaps even Harry Potter. I've also updated my spreadsheet to allow me to track pages read and videos watched and audio listened to (this last being tracked at 50% of the actual time). So for the rest of this week I'll tweet the bot daily to track progress, but after that I'll probably tweet weekly with totals. Quickly checking the league table I can see that some people are definitely putting a lot of time into this challenge! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4676 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 69 of 118 08 May 2014 at 9:42pm | IP Logged |
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At last night's tutorial I took the other two N3 practice papers (listening and vocab).
These seemed to go more smoothly. One thing I noticed is that some of the vocabulary was new but used kanji that I recognised. However, I didn't know which reading to choose. This only happened with a few words, most of them I knew anyway or could home in on the correct answer by eliminating possibilities that I thought could not be right. However, I think it might help if I did try to systematically learn the basic readings for the first ~700 kanji that will be on the N3 test. I won't be doing this from scratch since I do already know about 2000 words in kanji (or at least I know them reasonably well) so quite a few of them I'll just be refreshing. However, what I can't do (quite often) is look at a kanji and know that it has readings A and B and only those. I've looked around at the various kanji decks (including the Kanji in Context ones) but they all seem to just throw vocab at me rather than "here's a kanji, what readings are on the back of this card". I can make my own by working through the first 100 pages of KIC myself, but that looks like it might be more effort than it's worth: we're talking maybe 3 or 4 possible answers in an exam with 33 questions. A ready made deck OTOH might be useful as I try to solidify my knowledge. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4676 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 70 of 118 13 May 2014 at 12:05am | IP Logged |
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I spent some time over the weekend going over the mock JLPT papers that I did with my
tutor. Mostly I was picking out unknown vocabulary and going through the reading passages so that I can prepare some questions in advance for the next tutorial. I've also noticed that, although I'm doing a lot of watching, I'm not doing very much reading, in comparison. So I'm going to see what I can do to correct that. I've managed to work through 7 NHK News articles tonight, but a lot of the news is, unsurprisingly, political, and the associated vocabulary is probably not what I need right now. So I'm going to try to work through the penguin parallel text that I have, starting from tomorrow. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4676 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 71 of 118 16 May 2014 at 1:35am | IP Logged |
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April's long gone, so a goal review is well overdue.
Main Goals: 1. Continue listening to JPOD101 dialogue tracks or lessons during the work commute. Done. 2. RTK: I'll continue to keep this up to date. Done. 3. Anki: Kanji. All the N3 kani words are activated now. I'll maintain this deck for April with a view to re-activating the suspended cards in May. Done. 4. Anki: Vocabulary. I'm going to maintain this deck. I will mine みんなの日本語中級 and activate those words, but only as I feel the need to do so for lessons. So far each new chapter has only led to 10-20 new words. Done. 5. 新完全マスター N3 文法: I've been through this book once and I'm now working through it again, this time doing the exercises. I plan to do four sets of exercises per week. If I keep up that pace I should finish again by the middle of May. That would leave time for revision for the rest of May and all of June. I've been through the bulk of the book, but I didn't keep to the pace I'd specified as other things came up which I felt were more important. I still expect to finish before the end of May. 6. I've managed to find some time for 新完全マスター N3 聴解 lately and I want to keep that going. I need to cover ~40 more pages to get to the end. To finish by the end of the month I need to cover about 2 pages per day. So I should aim for 15 pages per week, split any way that happens to work out. Done. Optional Goals: 7. I'm going to keep watching anime or drama. I aim to average 30 mins each day. That includes both watching (without subtitles) or intensively studying (i.e. working through an episode with Japanese subtitles in order to understand what is being said). Done. In fact I think I exceeded this one by a fair bit. 8. I'm going to work through at least four NHK News articles each week. I've managed to keep this up so far and I think if I get into the habit of working through one article each day at work (on most days ...) then I'll start to see an improvement in my reading speed. I'm assuming that JLPT N3 articles are not going to be as tough as NHK News can be! I exceeded the total target number of articles overall, but in two of the weeks I only read two articles so I didn't really meet the consistency part of the goals. Overall I met most of the goals. I still don't read NHK News as consistently as I feel I should, however I am reading a reasonable number of articles overall and reading is becoming easier. The grammar target was just to make sure that I got through the book again before the JLPT and I think I'm going to meet that goal with plenty of time to spare anyway. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4676 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 72 of 118 16 May 2014 at 1:45am | IP Logged |
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This is the post where I would expect to put my goals for May.
However, with the JLPT looming and the SC under way, I think that, at least for now, I'd prefer to just do whatever I feel I need at the time. I've been going through the results of the mock tests with my tutor last week and will be doing so again this week too. I can go through and look up vocabulary on my own (and have done) but working out the right answer often involves more than vocabulary. In fact I find it really helpful to work through the wrong answers to see why they are wrong. I was already watching J-Drama and anime before the SC began, but now the SC has spurred me on to read much more than I was (which isn't that hard, given how little I was really reading). I'll keep reading NHK News articles, but having started to read the Penguin Parallel Text extensively, I think that's nearer to the kind of text that I'll find in the JLPT. The vocabulary seems less tricky too. It helps that the English translation is right there to give me an idea of what the missing words might mean. It was tough for the first few days to not dive into a dictionary for every unknown word, but I'm beginning to get used to it now. Once I've been through the whole book once, I'll probably go through it again mining vocabulary and reading intensively. But for now I'm just happy that my reading speed seems to be improving. I'm not sure where I am with my listening. The mock test didn't seem as bad as the ones I remember doing for N4 and N5, but we've not been through that yet, and as I don't have the script or the recording, I just can't tell how I did yet. I did do the official mock test from the JLPT website and I managed ~50% on that, which again is better than I recall doing a few months before the other exams. So overall, JLPT preparations are going reasonably well and I still have 6 weeks to improve. More importantly, I think my listening comprehension, based on how much (or perhaps "less little"!) I understand is definitely, albeit slowly, improving. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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