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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6821 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 73 of 124 17 July 2013 at 7:52am | IP Logged | ||
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JAPANESE
I have now learned all of the hiragana and katakana, although reading real words is still extremely painful and slow. I am doing a lot of sounding out individual letters. It makes me feel like I am in kindergarten all over again. Well, I guess everyone has to start somewhere! I am now up to Newbie Season 1 Lesson 9 and Assimil Japanese Lesson 5. Aside from listening to about 20 episodes of ChinesePod Lower Intermediate a long time ago, I haven’t ever really tried to use podcasts for studying. Generally, I listen to the full audio a few times, and then review the script, add the new vocabulary to my Anki deck, and then listen over and over to the short dialogue-only track. I try to cover 2-3 lessons per day, and then revise lessons from previous days. This approach is a bit similar to how I studied during the passive wave of Assimil French years ago, and I am enjoying it a lot. The first few times I listen to a dialogue, it just goes right over my head. It feels like they are speaking too fast and I can’t even distinguish individual sounds. But after multiple listens, the dialogue becomes more comprehensible. There are 25 lessons in Newbie Season 1, so I hopefully should be able to get through them by the time I leave for the US at the end of the month. CANTONESE Watching television and checking up words has been a fun way to add all sorts of random words to my vocabulary. Just in the past few days, I’ve added words like “jíng sé” (to hint or allude to), “chim gin” (breast augmentation surgery), “am chōng” (pimple), “muhk hōng” (sawdust), “wòh chúng” (rice worm), and “būt jáu” (port wine). However, I think I am now in that seemingly endless stretch of “intermediate” learning where I keep learning and learning, but still feel like I’m not getting anywhere. Looking back to my skills from even just a month ago, I can see a huge improvement. I am using more complex grammatical structures, my classifiers and tones are more accurate, my word choice is more precise, and I can say more than I could before. But I still make a ton of mistakes when I speak, and I hesitate a lot. There is still a lot that I don’t know how to say. “Basic fluency” still feels like it’s a world away. In an effort to try to improve, I am going to try thinking and talking to myself more in Cantonese. Additionally, I’ve been emailing with a potential language partner and have been thinking of going to some Cantonese-English exchange meetups, although with my upcoming travel plans, this might have to wait until September before I get started. Edited by mike245 on 22 August 2013 at 7:47pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6821 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 74 of 124 18 July 2013 at 6:14am | IP Logged | ||
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Years ago, when I was studying for the bar exam, I reached a point where I felt like my brain was full. Every new fact I learned meant that I forgot some other fact. It was as if I only had enough room in my brain for so much information crammed in such a short period of time.
For the past six months or so, I have been cramming in languages. It started when I crammed German for a trip back in February, and then started intense immersion/studying of Cantonese in March, and then crammed French for a trip in April. Most recently, I have started spending hours with Japanese. At some point, one of those languages was bound to suffer. It looks like that language is German. In the past week or so (i.e., when I started learning Japanese), I’ve noticed that I’ve been failing a lot of my German Anki card reviews. It’s not only new words that I am having trouble learning, but some “mature” cards that I am forgetting as well. Unlike with my other decks, my retention of this deck is particularly poor. This ends up creating more work for me, since failed cards mean more reviews for the future. It makes sense that my brain is putting aside German to focus on the other languages. I use Cantonese every day, and Japanese is my next big priority. Additionally, I have an hour of Spanish lessons every week, which keeps that language fresh in my head. And while I don’t use French that much right now, we do travel to Paris pretty often, so I try to stay on top of it. On the other hand, I don’t have any German friends, we don’t have any plans to go back to Germany/Austria any time in the foreseeable future, and I have my hands full of other materials in other languages that I am not consuming a lot of native German materials. At some point, I should devote some time to get my German back up to a strong level. I was watching episodes of Verbotene Liebe a few weeks ago, but that kind of got lost in the shuffle of other languages. I have lots of German learning materials, including Assimil Perfectionnement Allemand, Ultimate German Advanced and Linguaphone German, although I haven’t really used any of them. And I have lots of interesting podcasts I would love to get through. However, I think I’ll hold off and improve my other languages first. My experiences in Germany earlier this year showed me that for better or worst, I can ignore the language for an extended period of time (in that case, about ten years) and then quickly recover most of what I used to know. In fact, that long hiatus in some ways solidified some aspects of my knowledge and cleared up a few problems I used to have when I first studied it. And juggling too many languages simultaneously is time consuming. Maybe in a year or two, once my Cantonese is much better and I have stopped studying Japanese, I’ll make the time to come back to German and make a real effort to learn it well. In the meanwhile, I’ll just continuing plodding through my Anki deck to try to staunch any further losses. Edited by mike245 on 22 August 2013 at 7:48pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6821 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 75 of 124 19 July 2013 at 4:34am | IP Logged | ||
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I have two weeks until my trip to the US. Once I’m back in the States, my study time will be limited so I will try to get as much done as I can before I leave.
CANTONESE I have temporarily paused my book learning to catch up with my Anki reviews. I still have 125 new cards in my Interesting Cantonese deck, 62 new cards in my Living Cantonese deck and 300+ new cards in my Routledge Cantonese deck to go through. I learn 5 new cards from each deck every day, so it will take a while. I will however take some time early next week to add more cards to my Interesting Cantonese deck and Living Cantonese decks to tide me over during my month-long trip. As I have written elsewhere, I am a big fan of using SRS to cram in a lot of vocabulary in a short period of time. Interesting Cantonese is my primary vocabulary resource; it contains approximately 4,500 vocabulary words split between two volumes. I have approximately 300 words left before I finish the second book. Interesting Cantonese has definitely helped round out my vocabulary, but some of the terms in the advanced volume are a bit obscure, such as “thyroid” or “chowchow dog.” Nevertheless, even those could come in handy in the future, especially if we end up spending a lot of time here in Hong Kong. Unfortunately, I don’t think there is anything more comprehensive for Cantonese, such as a 10,000 or 15,000 word frequency dictionary, so once I finish Interesting Cantonese in a few months, I will have to rely on my other study books and native sources for new words, which will be a lot slower. I’ve also started thinking/talking to myself in Cantonese while doing household chores and running errands, rather than using English. Some of this has been stuff like, “should I buy this brand or that brand,” or “when I finish vacuuming, I’ll take out the trash,” etc. But I have also been trying to force myself to tell stories, summarize points, and do other B1-level speaking tasks. It turns out that I can do these things in Cantonese. It’s just that I do so with much less accuracy, variety, style and economy of words as in English. For instance, I can tell a story roughly with this level of language: “There was a girl. The girl usually wears red. One day, she visits her grandmother. Um, well, the girl did not know, but a wolf came to the house and this wolf ate the grandmother. The wolf is now wearing the grandmother’s clothes. When the little girl arrives at the grandmother's house, the wolf is pretending to be the grandmother. Because the little girl is not very sharp, she believes incorrectly that the wolf is her grandmother.” It’s not an elegant or articulate narration, but the story of Little Red Riding Hood comes across nonetheless. Does this level make me conversational? I can and do have conversations all the time in Cantonese. I can definitely get my point across about lots of subjects. And sometimes I do so with ease. But on the other hand, I tend to stumble and ramble if I say more than a few sentences in a row, either because I get lost in my own words or the strain of thinking in extended stretches in Cantonese gets exhausting. I think I need to build up my mental endurance. JAPANESE I am now up to Lesson 12 of Newbie Season 1, and Lesson 6 of Assimil Japanese. I have learned the Japanese numbers (up to 100), and am slowly getting more comfortable with the kana. Although much of Japanese is extremely new and very difficult for me, I do feel like there is a *slight* discount from my previous study of Chinese. First, there are some cognates shared between the languages. For instance, question is “mahn tàih” in Cantonese and “mondai” in Japanese. Second, there are some similarities in the structure, such as the construction of numbers. Third, I know approximately 500 - 750 Chinese hanzi, which makes it much easier to learn the most basic kanji. For a lot of the kanji I am encountering so far, I just need to learn a new pronunciation. Just how much can I learn in the four months before my trip? Within a similar time frame, I was able to get through most of Assimil NFWE, roughly reaching a high A2 level, and then have a successful two week trip to Paris where I spoke with locals almost entirely in French. But Japanese is quite a different beast. I think if I can learn 1,000 words, be able to read street signs, and engage in Tarzan-speak when I'm there, that'd already be awesome. But who knows? I'll revise these goals in a month as I get a better feel for how my studies are progressing. Edited by mike245 on 22 August 2013 at 7:49pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6821 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 76 of 124 21 July 2013 at 5:29am | IP Logged | ||
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My language learning log has come full circle. Back when I first started this log in March 2010, I had just started my previous attempt to learn Japanese, and was also studying Cantonese, with a class that was ostensibly at the “intermediate” level. Then, things came up and I ended up abandoning both languages. Now, it’s back to these two languages.
JAPANESE After a second trial period, I finally decided to purchase a two-year premium membership with JapanesePod101. I know this might be overkill given my current plans, but even if I abandon the language after my trip in November, this premium membership would be very useful for my partner, who has again gotten serious about learning Japanese. With the VIP65 coupon, it was quite a good deal – slightly less than what I paid for the Genki 1 textbook and workbook from Amazon. Newbie Season 1, however, has started to become tough. People have complained that Season 1 doesn’t follow a linear structure and that it can be difficult for a pure newbie. JapanesePod101 itself, I believe, recommends that absolute beginners start with Newbie Seasons 2 and 3, before moving on to Beginner Seasons 4-6. The reason I started with Season 1 was that I tried listening to Newbie Season 2 many years ago, when I signed up for my first trial membership. At the time, I hated it. I didn't care for the Style You them, and I didn’t see the reason why I needed to learn words like “hair dresser,” “graduate student,” or “fashion coordinator” in the first lesson, when I could be learning more useful stuff like “eat” and “drink.” But now that I have four months to learn Japanese and want to be a bit more methodical about it, I’ve decided to give Season 2 another shot. Season 1 feels haphazard. Some lessons are good, but some, like Lesson 15, feel impossible. The actors speak so fast, there is a lot of vocabulary tossed in, some of which is not explained, and the grammar points aren’t presented linearly. I listened to the first two lessons of Season 2 yesterday, and it seems much better for my level, random fashion words aside. The actors speak slower, although not at that agonizingly slow speed of the Assimil recordings. And there seems to be much more emphasis on basics, especially pitch accent. I think there is enough overlap between Seasons 1 and 2 that the first few lessons should be pretty easy, but I expect it to get harder soon. CANTONESE Not much to report here. I am just keeping up with my Anki reviews, watching Cantonese television, and using it casually on a daily basis. Even though I am not actively studying any textbooks at this moment, my Anki reviews are really helping me solidify my active knowledge of the knowledge. For years, I’ve heard Cantonese spoken around me, and I passively understand a lot of grammatical structures and sentence patterns that I cannot comfortably and easily produce myself. Thanks to the Routledge Grammars and Living Cantonese, I have been culling a lot of these sentence patterns and adding them to Anki, so that I can memorize them. When they come up in my reviews, I don’t just quickly define the card and then move on. Instead, I repeat these sentence patterns multiple times, recite them from memory without looking at my smartphone, substitute different subjects, verbs and/or objects, etc. This gets me much more comfortable with the sentence pattern, its flow, and how to use it. Similar to an Assimil approach, the repetition of these sentence patterns over time helps automate them and embed them in my muscle memory. That way, when I need to express an idea, it is much more likely that I know instinctively how to structure it, rather than having to try to figure out how to apply grammar rules to format the sentence. Edited by mike245 on 22 August 2013 at 7:50pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6821 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 77 of 124 23 July 2013 at 4:21am | IP Logged | ||
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JAPANESE
So far, I am really happy with my plan to use Assimil and JapanesePod101 simultaneously. Assimil seems to be well-paced, denser course that follows a structured format. However, the dialogues can get a little dry and the audio recordings are slow. By contrast, JapanesePod101 seems to be lighter on the grammar and vocabulary, but the audio is outstanding. The dialogues are fun and fast paced, and the website has audio for virtually every sentence pattern and vocabulary word introduced. I am currently on Assimil Lesson 10 and Newbie Season 2 Lesson 8. The pace of Assimil is starting to pick up, which is good. I have read that Assimil Japanese only teaches 2,000 words (compared to the average of 3,000 for the European languages), but that’s already far more than I was planning to learn for my upcoming trip. I know that 4 months isn’t long enough to get through the entire Assimil book using their method (I would need 5-6 months), but it is enough to get through a large chunk of the lessons. Since I rebooted my JapanesePod101 learning, I’m still on the super basic stuff. However, I am appreciating the thoroughness of this approach. And now that I’m past those annoying first two lessons of Season 2, the StyleYou theme doesn’t seem so bad after all. KHMER My Khmer learning has pretty much completely been supplanted by Japanese. I have been having so much fun (and difficulty) dealing with the newness and complexities of Japanese that I have been spending most of my free time listening to recordings and podcasts, repeating Japanese words to myself, reviewing Assimil, etc. I think this excitement is going to last for a while–-hopefully until my trip in November. Nevertheless, the fact that Assimil Khmer is coming out soon has gotten me excited. I already have a number of highly recommended Khmer resources, such as Modern Spoken Cambodian and Colloquial Cambodian, but I really love the Assimil method. And I imagine that since it’s a brand new course, the grammar, vocabulary and usage will be very modern compared to the other courses. And if it is anything like the other Assimil courses I’ve used, it will go a lot farther than books like Cambodian for Beginners. The earliest I would go on a family trip to Cambodia would be March or April of next year. If that trip ends up happening, I could conceivably start Assimil Khmer in December, right after my trip to Japan. That would give me 3-4 months to get a good basis. Perhaps not the ideal amount of time, but given my prior background in the language, I think it would be much faster learning that my current Japanese challenge. I’ll wait to see how my travel plans shape up before I make any decisions. Edited by mike245 on 22 August 2013 at 7:51pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4696 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 78 of 124 23 July 2013 at 7:08am | IP Logged | ||
This is what I would like to do with my Anki reviews, but it seems to take a long time. How long does it take you with each card to repeat, repeat from memory, change words and play with the sentence patterns? How many cards do you do every day for your reviews? Do you just do this with Cantonese, or for all of your languages? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6821 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 79 of 124 23 July 2013 at 10:12am | IP Logged | ||
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kujichagulia - I am currently doing 45 new cards per day: 5 cards from each of my 4 Cantonese decks, 5 cards each for Spanish/French, and 15 cards for Japanese. I have temporarily suspended new cards for my German deck. My Spanish and French decks are only single words, so I don't do anything special with them. If I want a challenge though, I'll see if I can define the vocabulary word in Cantonese rather than in English.
Only two of my Cantonese decks have sentence patterns (the other two decks are single vocabulary words), so that's 10 new sentences per day. On a daily basis, I am reviewing approximately 40-50 sentence patterns. It's hard to tell how long it takes me to go through each one, since I am usually walking places, working out, riding the metro, watching television, etc., when I am doing my Anki reviews. In total, I do about 350-450 total card reviews, spending a total of 2-3 hours a day. I would guess that I spend roughly a third of that time with the sentence patterns, so it comes out to around 45 seconds per pattern? I don't mind spending the time on these reviews because it's my only real "studying" of Cantonese right now. Since I finished my grammar book last week, I am not currently doing anything in Cantonese other than watching television, talking to people, and doing these reviews. How is your studying coming along? I know I am only a week into Japanese, but I am finding it to be a very challenging and interesting language to learn. In many ways, it is so different and so much more complex than Cantonese! Edited by mike245 on 22 August 2013 at 7:52pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4696 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 80 of 124 23 July 2013 at 2:14pm | IP Logged | ||
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mike - Yeah, Japanese is wonderfully complex. I have not yet studied any of the Chinese languages (I'm particularly interested in Cantonese in the future; I wonder if it is worth it to study that before Mandarin), but from what I can tell, while tones are quite difficult in Chinese languages, Japanese has more complex things to master. The words and grammar seem to be easy, but when you get to the higher levels and start to do things like express opinions and thoughts, you see that there is just a different way of "thinking" in the Japanese language. Entire phrases change according to the mood, while keeping the same meaning. It's amazing and frustrating at the same time. What did Taylor Swift say in her song "22"? It's "miserable and magical."
My studies are going well, so far, although I have been frustrated with Anki lately. I took a few days away from reviews, thought about what I want out of Anki, then I've started to try some new things out. Wow, 2-3 hours of Anki reviews! I can't do more than 30 minutes, and I'm thinking about reducing that further! But I will try to do things like change around the sentences, work with the word/sentence patterns - something to use the word a little and get it deeper in my head before pressing the button. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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