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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 89 of 124 06 August 2013 at 1:58am | IP Logged | |||||
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JAPANESE
I am now up to Assimil Lesson 25 and JapanesePod101 Newbie Season 3 Lesson 2. Although I am slowly plodding along with Assimil, I feel like Japanese hasn’t really “clicked” for me. I am repeating along and for the most part, understanding stuff, but I don’t feel ready to start constructing my own sentences and I’m not comfortable yet with Japanese word order, adjectives, or all of the different particles. It’s been almost a month since I started studying, but given how new and foreign Japanese is to me, I think it’s just going to take more time before it starts to feel familiar. Unfortunately, I find JapanesePod101 Newbie Season 3 to be less fun than Season 2. I think this is largely the replacement of the original host, Peter Galante, with a new Australian hostess, Rebekah. Although Peter was dorky and awkward, he clearly had a lot of energy and enthusiasm. By contrast, Rebekah comes across as dull, lifeless, boring and a bit too polished. This isn’t too much of a problem, since I don’t really spend too much time listening to the audio lesson, but it does make it less interesting. I am going to stick with Newbie Season 3 for now, but if I start getting too bored, I might jump to Beginner Season 1, which I believe has Peter as the English-speaking host. Edited by mike245 on 22 August 2013 at 7:33pm 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 90 of 124 06 August 2013 at 2:46am | IP Logged | |||||
Don't worry. If it makes you feel any better, Japanese hasn't "clicked" for me either <laughs>, and I'm at intermediate level!
That's interesting. I find Peter to be kind of annoying, actually. I like that kind of goofiness from my friends, but I guess when I'm learning a language from a podcast, I want to hurry up and get to the language, and Peter kind of gets in the way sometimes. But to each his own. I suppose that if I had used JapanesePod101 as a beginner, I might feel differently. 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 91 of 124 06 August 2013 at 7:59am | IP Logged | |||||
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@kujichagulia - I think you're giving yourself a lot less credit than you deserve! It sounds like you have come a long way and made a huge amount of progress in Japanese. I think the thing about living in a target language country is that you're surrounded by lots of native speakers and native media (and not necessarily a lot of language learners or dummied down materials). So you end up comparing yourself to the native speakers, and you lose sight of your own progress. At least, that's what I try to tell myself about my Cantonese in Hong Kong. =)
I agree that Peter's personality can be polarizing. I've also noticed on the JapanesePod forums that a lot of people either like or hate him. I'm glad that they have all those different seasons with different hosts and themes to cater to different preferences. Edited by mike245 on 22 August 2013 at 7:34pm 2 persons have 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 92 of 124 09 August 2013 at 12:47am | IP Logged | |||||
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JAPANESE
I am now up to Assimil Lesson 26 and JapanesePod101 Newbie Season 3 Lesson 7. I have been having a rough time with Assimil. My brain and my ears are still struggling to capture all of the new sounds and process them as words with meaning. Usually, I have no problem with short sentences that don't use that many particles. But the longer sentences with all sorts of conjunctions, particles, and vocabulary words are still flying past me, even with repeated listens. I don't think I had nearly as many problems with the last two languages I started. French is similar enough to Spanish and Portuguese that I didn't have to deal with completely foreign structure or vocabulary, and I am already used to languages that have verb conjugations. As for Cantonese, its grammar is straightforward, and I have been hearing Cantonese for so many years that native-speed speech and the tones aren't really that problematic for me. Japanese however feels like a completely different beast. I have been spending a lot of time each day trying to get used to the rhythm of the language, the vocabulary, and all of those crazy particles and sentence structures. There are still approximately three months left before my trip. Hopefully, some of this starts to make sense by the time I leave! CANTONESE My only activities in Cantonese at the moment are Anki reviews and occasionally chatting with Chinese immigrants in the community. This has been the longest stretch of time that I've not been immersed in Cantonese since my trip to Paris back in April. But I am glad for the hiatus. I think that I'll return to Hong Kong in September newly energized for additional intense studying. I've made a lot of progress in the past five months, which included increasing my vocabulary by more than 3,500 words, studying virtually all of Cantonese grammar, and learning to use hundreds of new sentence patterns. My speaking is now much more fluid and accurate, I can use basic structures and vocabulary with automaticity, and I understand a lot more than I used to. Importantly, I am making a lot fewer mistakes than I did before. If I can have another stretch of 4-6 months with similar progress, I think I can reach oral fluency. KHMER Unfortunately, I have been largely ignoring Khmer, since Japanese is taking up almost all of my attention right now. Being with family, I am speaking and hearing Khmer more every day, so my speaking is coming back. However, I have not made any progress with learning the script. It'll be interesting to see how I can apply the lessons learned from my Cantonese studies to Khmer. I approached Cantonese as a pseudo-heritage speaker, after having passively absorbed the language for years. I didn't have to work on listening comprehension, so I was able to accelerate my studies by focusing primarily on active production, grammar and fairly intense vocabulary acquisition. So far, this approach has worked pretty well. I think I can use a similar method when I start Khmer later. Hopefully, Assimil will finally release Le Khmer sans Peine by that time. Edited by mike245 on 22 August 2013 at 7:36pm 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 93 of 124 12 August 2013 at 9:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
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JAPANESE
I am now up to Assimil Japanese Lesson 28. My progess has been slow because it takes me several days to feel comfortable with each lesson. Saturday night felt like a little bit of a breakthrough though, since for the first time, I could understand 100% of the recordings for Lessons 22-25 without having to pause. Previously, my brain got so scrambled up with all of the new words and sentence structures that I had to pause after each sentence, repeat the sentence to myself, and then move on to the next. I’ve also noticed other posters commenting on how there are a lot of Japanese words that sound the same. I agree. I think it’s because Japanese has a fairly limited range of sounds, and a lot of their words are either homynyms or just sound very similar. My brain hasn’t yet learned to comfortably distinguish between these sounds, which leads to some confusion over similar vocabulary. But I have hope! At this point in my study, there are lots of Chinese words that sound nothing alike to me, even though they only differ in tones, such as “yìh gā” (now) and “yī gá” (hanger), “syū gá” (bookcase) and “syú ga” (summer vacation), or “jūng jí” (middle finger), “júng jī” (in brief) and “júng jí” (seed). My brain learned how to distinguish these differences automatically. So distinguishing Japanese sounds will just take some time as well. I haven’t made any new progress with JapanesePod101. I still hope to finish Newbie Season 3 by the end of the month, so there are 18 more lessons to go. I like to keep Assimil as the core of my studies, since it has great pacing and structure. Nevertheless, I enjoy the synergy of using two different methods. Words that show up in Assimil get reinforced when they reappear in a JapanesePod101 lesson, and vice versa. CANTONESE There isn’t much to report here. I spent a little bit of time over the weekend listening to the Living Cantonese dialogues. My listening comprehension of the dialogues is fine, but the speed at which they talk is too fast to chorus or emulate. I still speak Cantonese pretty slowly, and certainly not up to the accelerated pace of most Hong Kong people. Edited by mike245 on 22 August 2013 at 7:37pm 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 94 of 124 15 August 2013 at 8:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
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JAPANESE
I am now up to Assimil Lesson 30 and JapanesePod101 Newbie Season 3 Lesson 8. When I started studying Japanese five weeks ago, I was hoping that I would be able to get through the entire passive wave of Assimil and most of the active wave before my trip. But now, I am revising my goal downwards. I just want to get through as much Assimil as I can before my trip. There is a lot of information packed into each lesson. And I don’t want to feel so rushed that I don’t spend enough time learning each lesson. I feel like it would be better to learn, say, 70 or 80 lessons of Assimil well, rather than get through the entire book without mastering it. I’ve spent a lot of time focusing on Assimil Japanese, and much less time with JapanesePod101, hence, the lack of progress. I do love the JapanesePod101 website, especially since it breaks down the vocabulary at both regular and slow speeds. I think this has been the tool that has been helping me the most with learning pitch accent and sentence prosody. Assimil is also good for this, but I think that the recordings on JapanesePod101 make it easier to isolate and repeat words/sentences. CANTONESE Both Steve Kaufmann and Wannabefreak claim that you need a vocabulary of approximately 10,000 words in order to understand and speak Cantonese, including watching television, with relative fluency and good, almost full comprehension. I don’t have an exact word count for myself, but I roughly estimate that my vocabulary is somewhere around 5,000 words. This number may be slightly higher, since I know a lot of food terms that don’t help me unless I’m in a restaurant. In general daily conversation, I have enough words to express 95% of what I want to say. However, I am still missing random words here and there. And when I watch television, I still notice there are a lot of words that I don’t understand. My vocabulary learning has slowed down considerably since I started studying Japanese. I’m not too concerned because Cantonese is a long-term project for me. Unlike Japanese, I am not operating on a specific deadline. And I want to get much more adept at using the words that I already have learned before I start packing in too many more. In this respect, the sentence patterns that I have been learning have been extremely helpful. But I think that at some point later this year or early next year, I am going to have to do another big vocabulary push (i.e., back to learning 150-200 new words per week) for a few months to get my vocabulary up. Edited by mike245 on 22 August 2013 at 7:38pm 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 95 of 124 19 August 2013 at 4:07am | IP Logged | |||||
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CANTONESE
Now that we’re back home in California, I find myself speaking even more Cantonese than I was in Hong Kong. We have been seeing a lot of my partner’s family, most of whom prefer to speak Cantonese rather than English. I used to speak English with them, but now, it’s great to be able to use Chinese instead. It’s also a reminder of one of my key reasons for learning Cantonese in the first place. Lots of my partner’s relatives have commented on how much my Cantonese has improved since they last saw me back in February. They’ve also commented that I have a great vocabulary, that I know a lot of advanced words and slang, and that I have almost no accent. It’s a big confidence boost! I think two weeks of not speaking Cantonese actually helped my language abilities. Maybe those two weeks gave my brain some time to sort out everything. Now that I’m back to using Cantonese every day, I find that I am speaking with a lot more fluidity than before. I don’t have to think about grammar or vocabulary, and the words are coming more easily. I am beginning to see how reaching a good level in a language will help me maintain it in the future. Now that I can converse fairly well, I find myself more willing to speak Cantonese with people. Watching television shows now feels more like enjoyment than study time. I don’t have to stop and ask people what things mean all the time. I know that I still have a long way to go. But for the first time, I really feel like I can SPEAK Cantonese. Edited by mike245 on 22 August 2013 at 7:37pm 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 96 of 124 21 August 2013 at 3:22am | IP Logged | |||||
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Now that I’m in the US, I’ve been gathering up more language learning materials to bring back to Hong Kong. I have collected a lot of language books and foreign language novels over the years. Additionally, I ordered some new books that are much cheaper here than in Hong Kong. However, I don’t have a lot of luggage space so I have been thinking about what materials I actually will use between now and next year, when I make my next trip back to the US. I would love to bring lots of books for various languages. But since I’ll most likely only be studying Cantonese, Japanese, Spanish and French, those are the books that I’ll be packing.
Unfortunately, I haven’t been doing much Japanese in the past week or so. I’ve been running a lot of errands and seeing people, so I haven’t had a lot of time to sit down with Assimil and JapanesePod101. I now have my Genki and Japanese for Busy People textbooks, though, so I plan to use these when I get back to Hong Kong. I do feel, however, that I’ve had a big breakthrough in my Cantonese. Now, aside from a few sporadic errors and some missing vocabulary here and there, I am able to speak the language well. I don’t have to think about word order or classifiers or final sentence particles in order to use them correctly. And sometime during the two weeks of not studying the language, my brain assimilated the complex sentence patterns that I have been studying with the Routledge grammar books. I can now use these constructions automatically and fluidly. My Cantonese is starting to sound more polished than before. Just two months ago, I felt as if “basic fluency” was still extremely far away. But now, it seems very close. I guess it goes to show that sometimes a break from studying may actually be quite beneficial! Edited by mike245 on 22 August 2013 at 7:35pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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