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Japanese from scratch TAC 2015 東亜

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g-bod
Diglot
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 Message 1121 of 1702
21 October 2013 at 6:50pm | IP Logged 
It's hard to tell the difference at full speed. But in real life (and even in exam questions)
there's always more context to help you figure things out. If someone says they went to the
hospital for a haircut, you probably misheard!
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kraemder
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 Message 1122 of 1702
21 October 2013 at 9:16pm | IP Logged 
Yeah that's what I tried to explain to her. Her sentence had no context and was designed for me to hear the difference etc. I remember a year ago at my community college, I commented to my professor that I could hardly tell the difference and he was like, I must fix this! They are nothing alike! He proceeded to repeat the two over and over and the class stared at him uncomprehendingly. Nobody could hear it really. Maybe a little.
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dampingwire
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 Message 1123 of 1702
22 October 2013 at 1:20am | IP Logged 
kraemder wrote:
Yeah that's what I tried to explain to her. Her sentence had no
context and was designed for me to hear the difference etc. I remember a year ago at
my community college, I commented to my professor that I could hardly tell the
difference and he was like, I must fix this! They are nothing alike! He proceeded to
repeat the two over and over and the class stared at him uncomprehendingly. Nobody
could hear it really. Maybe a little.


I'd expect there to be context in real life, but I can come up with simple sentences
where there is none:

美容院へ行く.

I'm sure that there's at least one JPOD101 lesson that compares and contrasts these two
words. I think it's in the beginner lessons, which cuts it down to just ~200 or so :-)

I did find these on forvo

http://it.forvo.com/word/%E7%BE%8E%E5%AE%B9%E9%99%A2/#ja

http://it.forvo.com/word/byouin/#ja

but they're pretty artificial (different speakers, just one word).

There are plenty of similar examples that differ only in pitch accent. 買う and 飼う also
differ only in pitch accent.

I expect that with lots of practice you can get past this. (I haven't yet, so I can
only hope that it's possible!).

I remember a Royal Society Christmas Lecture on the TV a few years ago where the
lecturer started out by playing some pairs of words and asking who could hear the
difference. One was a word pair in Hindi and the only audience member who could hear
the difference was a girl who spoke Hindi at home. The sounds were played several times
and I certainly could not hear the difference. Yet it was obviously as clear as day to
this girl.

I do know how your professor felt. I've tried to teach people how to pronounce Italian
words and based on how they stuff up the simplest of vowels I swear they're just trying
to wind me up :-)

I long for the day that someone tells me I'm ready for N3 listening and I can graduate
to not hearing subtle nuances rather than whole sentences :-)

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g-bod
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 Message 1124 of 1702
22 October 2013 at 8:57am | IP Logged 
Japanese seems to be rich with homophones and you can't always count on pitch accent to help
you out. I guess that's why it's also rich with bad puns!

As for minimal pairs, I haven't yet met a Japanese person who can differentiate between l and
r with 100% accuracy either, although I know an advanced speaker who does a pretty good job
of it most of the time.

I think it's more important to practice getting the pronunciation right, or at least
comprehensible, in these cases. Real life always comes with more clues. And even in your
native language you mishear things at times.

Even with the simple sentence example above, the only time I could imagine it causing trouble
is in one of the quick response JLPT listening questions, and even then I doubt it. At least
in the tests I've taken they seemed more preoccupied on grammar and appropriate politeness.


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kraemder
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 Message 1125 of 1702
25 October 2013 at 6:58am | IP Logged 
I'll admit I haven't studied Japanese pitch accents at all. It sounds like you have... is it helpful? Should I be doing it?
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kraemder
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 Message 1126 of 1702
27 October 2013 at 12:21am | IP Logged 
Did some more lessons on JOI and I've determined that I probably should do some preparation if the lesson outline gives pages in Minna no Nihongo. My friend seems like she'll continue with the online lessons so that should be fun. And I'm feeling better regarding my car accident (I was hit while riding my bicycle - nothing broken just really sore)so I'm getting back into studying. I did some RTK review again today. My deck currently consists of the 500-1000 kanji and I'm about 180 kanji into it. It's going way slower than when I did it as a beginner for some reason lol. I think I was really motivated and excited that I was finally making some actual noticeable progress then whereas now, the benefit is still worth it, but the gains are much less than before since I now have a lot of kanji knowledge.. I totally get why people who didn't do RTK at the beginning just can't get into it later on in their studying. It's time consuming and you're questioning if it's even worth it.
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cathrynm
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 Message 1127 of 1702
27 October 2013 at 2:45am | IP Logged 
Yeah, that's me. RTK just seemed not Japanese-language-y enough for my tastes, I couldn't maintain motivation for it. Compared to other issues, I don't think I have such a big problem with Kanji anyway -- I don't think I saw any unknown Kanji last time I failed the N2.


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kraemder
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 Message 1128 of 1702
27 October 2013 at 9:05am | IP Logged 
Did you just skip the N3 or did you pass it before taking on the N2? If I don't pass the N3 this time I don't
know what I'll do... Besides cry lol. I probably will retake the N3.


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