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読みたい！ TAC 2015 (Rätsel|東亜) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5974 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes  Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 1 of 91 27 December 2014 at 2:34pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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This is my new log for the 2015 TAC.
The log title is 読みたい！ which is pronounced "yomitai" and means "I want to read!" in casual Japanese, and I think this really sets out the theme for 2015. Note this is a theme, and not a goal. It's not about counting pages, or books, or time. It's not saying I plan to be reading at a C2 level by the end of the year (as awesome as that would be). But I want to read more, and I want to read better, in Japanese, German, French and also my native English. Despite my years of high school French initially convincing me of the opposite, I actually prefer listening and speaking over reading and writing. I find it a genuine pleasure to listen to the sounds of a language I am studying, even if my comprehension is poor. Although speaking a foreign language used to be quite terrifying for me, I now find it rather thrilling to be able to successfully communicate with another person in their native tongue. But I also have to admit that there is an element of laziness which influences my preference. Listening and speaking requires a smaller range of vocabulary than reading. It also requires less grammatical precision to communicate successfully when speaking. The whole exchange is pretty instantaneous, so any minor errors of comprehension and grammar can be quickly glossed over, as long as you (or the person you are speaking to) understands the gist. To read well and write well, you need a much deeper and precise knowledge of the language, which is something I need to cultivate if I ever wish to level up my Japanese and my French. Although I am still at a stage with German where I am learning basics of the language which are essential to speak and listen, as well as read and write, I want to be less lazy about literacy all around, so German is included too. And I have also included my native English, which has been somewhat neglected over the last few years. I do finally feel the need to reconnect a little with my own culture. To give some kind of summary of where I am at now: Japanese Overall my strongest language. I started studying it in 2008 and, to my surprise, passed JLPT N2 in 2012. Since then I have more or less maintained, rather than improved, my Japanese. I can comfortably watch most TV dramas, but my reading is not great, mainly because reading Japanese is difficult. French I studied it until the age of 18 at high school, took an evening class in 2005/6 and had another stab at an evening class in 2012 before withdrawing after a few weeks. I pretty much neglected it for the years inbetween, until having another more serious go in 2013 and early 2014. My reading level is not bad, actually better than my Japanese thanks to the grammar overview I got at high school and the transparency with English. Thinking about it, I have actually read 7 French novels since 2013. However, my grammatical precision and range of active vocabulary is pretty weak. German I started studying German in 2012, a few weeks before I visited Berlin. I fell in love with Berlin enough to keep studying the language after coming back from holiday and have been studying it on and off ever since. I am taking an A2 evening class at the moment and it seems to be a good fit. I'm getting good grades in the class, but learning loads of new stuff at the same time. I have signed up for the East Asian and German TAC teams this year, but shall be logging about exploits in any language which I think are interesting enough to log about! Books of 2015 Der Kleine Prinz - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (DE) 宇宙人のしゅくだい - 小松左京 (JA) Tuer le père - Amélie Nothomb (FR) Capitalist Realism - Mark Fisher (EN) Der Vorleser - Bernhard Schlink (DE) Edited by g-bod on 19 April 2015 at 11:31am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Woodsei Bilingual Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Woodsei Joined 4789 days ago 614 posts - 782 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Egyptian)* Studies: Russian, Japanese, Hungarian | Message 2 of 91 27 December 2014 at 8:03pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Wonderful introduction to your goals, g-bod, and I love the theme that you chose. So
concise, but very meaningful. I wish you the best of luck this coming year, and hope to follow your progress! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5974 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 3 of 91 29 December 2014 at 10:53pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Thanks Woodsei, likewise I look forward to seeing how you progress in the coming year!
So I had a little bit of a dilemma. I wrapped up my old log a week ago, but I now feel the urge to make another posting, even though we haven't hit the new year yet. I somehow feel it fits a little better here than on my old log, so I'll just carry on here. I was rather surprised to receive a Kindle for Christmas. I never would have bought one for myself, due to the region locking making most Japanese content inaccessible. However, now I actually have one in my own hands, I really rather like it. I never would have believed it, but the actual design of the thing makes it more comfortable to read than a real book. I'm currently hooked on The Woman in White, so am at least starting in the right direction when it comes to reading more English stuff. As far as foreign languages on the Kindle go, basically the only mainstream Japanese books available are the Harry Potter series, thanks to Pottermore. I downloaded 賢者の石 just to see how well it worked. The text display is beautiful and the pop up J/E dictionary works really well. It's just a shame that I am so bored of Harry Potter already. French and German are much better provided for, and seem to have improved since last time I looked. I'll have to stick to paper editions for the time being for Fred Vargas, but I should be able to work through most of Amélie Nothomb's back catalogue on Kindle and have started with Tuer le Père, which feels embarassingly effortless with the assistance of the F/E pop up dictionary. I've also noted that a number of foreign language newspapers are available. Nothing in Japanese of course, but I was able to buy myself editions of Le Monde and Die Zeit and have been playing around with both of those, again with the assistance of the relevant pop up dictionaries. I've decided not to renew my subscription to Le Monde again this year, and will instead see how I get on with occasional purchases of the electronic version. As for Die Zeit, although I was able to understand more than I expected from some of the articles I looked at, I think at my current level I would be better off working with some more of the DW Top Thema articles. Yesterday I also finally started actually doing some proper study again, with textbooks and stuff. I'd taken quite a substantial break over the Christmas period, which was much needed, although I did keep on top of Anki in that time. I've now cracked open A Grammatik and Sage und Schreibe for German, and it feels good to be back in business! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4657 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 4 of 91 30 December 2014 at 9:38pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Good luck for 2015.
I've yet to take the plunge with a kindle, but I'll be interested to hear what you think of it for Japanese. (BTW: exactly which if the seemingly infinite variety of Kindle is it?). I've just come across this example sentence, which is what prompted me to post here:
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| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5974 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 5 of 91 30 December 2014 at 10:56pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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It's a Kindle Paperwhite. It would be a brilliant tool for Japanese, were it not for the fact that the Japanese Kindle store is inaccessible through normal means from the UK. Although there is some Japanese language stuff available on the UK Kindle store, I haven't found anything in there which matches up with my long list of Japanese books I one day might like to read. The only mainstream stuff I've unearthed apart from Harry Potter are some out of copyright works by Natsume Souseki, which I'm not desperate to read anyway.
Nice example sentence. I am still trying to bed down in my brain the various uses of こと and もの, which I noticed in your log you are also tackling at the moment. Is this use of ことか the one which basically adds a lot of emphasis to your statement (like a kind of rhetorical question), or am I missing something? (You can see now why I was surprised to pass N2!) Edited by g-bod on 30 December 2014 at 10:58pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4657 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 6 of 91 31 December 2014 at 10:40am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Good to hear that the Japanese dictionary function works well. It's a pity about the dearth of content.
Yes, it's basically an exclamation, and comes only at the end of a sentence. ことに emphasises an emotion and (one use of) ものか is a strong disagreement. I keep messing these up in my head!
Since I'm usually surprised to have passed too, I can't really argue. But as I said recently elsewhere, I'm sure the examiners know what they are doing. There's a ridiculous amount of extra stuff to learn for N2 so they can only test a small proportion of it. I'm sure I won't have a good handle on all of it when I sit N2, but I hope that through reading I'll be able to select the most important points and focus on those. I'm looking forward to following your journey towards N1 next year. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Nieng Zhonghan Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Antarctica Joined 3663 days ago 108 posts - 315 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Japanese*, Spanish, Galician Studies: Finnish, Icelandic, Armenian, Mongolian Studies: Old English, Russian, English, German, Korean, Mandarin | Message 7 of 91 31 December 2014 at 4:20pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I think something is missing in this sentence. I guess 本日語 was a typo, but at the end of the sentence, I think there must be a verb between 勉強 and ことか. Usually we see 「する」as in 勉強する, though it would not be in the plain form. Perhaps a better sentence would be: 日本語がよく読めるようになるために、どれ くぐら勉強すればいいのか。
I have taken a look at my JLPT grammar books and I found out expressions that come with either one or another. Ｎ１ ＋こと ～ことだから ＋もの ～ものとして ～ものを （なんとかなら）ないものか Ｎ２ ＋こと （やめられない）ことはない （あの人の）ことだから ～ということは ＋もの （空を飛びたいだ）もの ～ものだ ～ものがある Ｎ３ ＋こと あなたのこと やってみることだ 話せることは話せますが ＋もの I haven't noticed any. So, one way to understand more the differences between ものｘこと is actually looking at the JLPT topics above as you have already taken N2. I was once told that もの is basically used when you can refer to something that really exists by itself such as objects, knowledge, property and so on. I don’t totally agree with the definition stating it is used for concrete nouns. Concrete or abstract classification is a matter of definition and perhaps perception. For instance, I have seen native speakers using もの referring to the ghosts. On the other hand, こと is more used when you refer to an event, accidents, incidents, phenomenon etc. Examples: U 彼女の元気のなさを見れば、あの出来事が彼 にとってどんなに大変な（もの？こと？）で あったかが分か る。 I 経済の分野で、基礎的な経営知識がどんな大 切な（もの？こと？）であるかよく知ってお くべきだ。 The answer is こと(U) and もの(I). These sentences might be interesting as well. X 平和というもの。 Y 平和だということ。 Both are correct and there is at least one difference in terms of nuance. 「Xは平和を名詞として使い、 持続的に存在するものとして表現しています 。 Yは「平和な」という形容詞を 使っていますので、 「こと」しか使えません。」 . (Taken from notes I have sent to my colleague some time ago.) Let’s see another example: 私にとって、彼女の死がいかに辛い（もの？ こと？）であったかは誰にも想像できるまい 。 Japanese people would choose こと, though もの can be acceptable in literature. Some specialists will argue that in poetry the usage of もの is possible metaphorically speaking. There are many other usages and some of them can be used either by one or another in specific situations such as idiomatic phrases etc. *Another interesting discussion would be perhaps the difference between ことｘの. Edited by Nieng Zhonghan on 31 December 2014 at 4:21pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5974 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 8 of 91 31 December 2014 at 5:53pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Thanks for the detailed run down Nieng Zhonghan. I think you are right, that the best approach is to first focus first on the set expressions as appear in JLPT coursebooks and other intermediate coursebooks. But even then, there is a lot of information to be absorbed, and my brain is taking its time over doing the absorption!
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