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Japanese from scratch TAC 2015 東亜 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5176 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 577 of 1702 27 October 2012 at 7:36am | IP Logged |
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Well. I feel like I'm not updating this log the way that I used to. I guess I was struggling more before but now
I'm sort of just cruising. In a way I'm not as driven as before. I've been struggling with this language for a while now and I guess I know what to expect going forward whereas before I really didn't know what it was like and kept thinking that maybe if I did something differently... Well I still think that but I think I know what to expect now. I think that kanji is going to be annoying for years to come even if I did go through Heisig and study a ton of meanings and learn to draw a lot. That just made it a bit less painful. The big problem is that there's too many sounds for so many kanji and even if you learn the chinese sounds you're still left in the dark for so many other words that use Japanese sounds. Some sounds which you won't even find in a dictionary. Crazy. I was watching an anime and the lyrics for the theme song were both in Romaji and had English translations. My initial reaction was ugh.. romaji. Some anime like Naruto is a pleasure to watch the theme song because it gives full kanji with furigana and spaces between the words. Obviously their targeted audience is younger Japanese kids with that but it works well for me. But I was looking at the romaji. The words look a little funny at first because studying Japanese you get so used to the Japanese writing system. But it doesn't take very long for the brain to adjust. The romaji was so easy to follow. /sigh. It got me back to wondering what possesses them to persist with using such an obviously difficult writing system. One could see it as an art form but it's used day to day for well everything. Tradition I suppose. Oh well. So I'm persisting with the language. You could say I've taken a break the past week. I even missed a class. I haven't stopped Japanese by any means. I'm still as addicted to anime as ever. Although finding really good titles that feel original enough to hold your interest can be a challenge. A lot of the anime seems to have no plot and just rips off plot lines and characters from previous anime and they try to compensate by making the girls as pretty and provocative as possible which really don't improve the anime at all unfortunately. But there's still lots of good ones out there. I love the genre. So I'm never going to give up on this language. And I still get a kick out of hearing a word I've recently learned or recoginizing a grammar pattern that I hadn't before. It's great and keeps me going. I do wonder how literate I'll ever be with this language though. How literate do most foreigners get with this language I wonder. I suppose the Japanese don't really care if the rest of the world can understand them or not. To an extent foreigners really never learn a 2nd language the way a native learner will anyway. But an actual alphabet would improve the chances of successful literacy for many language learners. 1 person has 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 578 of 1702 27 October 2012 at 10:41am | IP Logged |
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Aw I think a lot of Team い is having some down time recently. That's ok though. We're not meant to be productive language studying machines the whole time.
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| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5176 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 579 of 1702 27 October 2012 at 8:33pm | IP Logged |
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yeah I think I ended up going on a rant sorta about kanji because I was in a frustrated mood which didn't necessarily have anything to do with Japanese. I ended up not getting much studying done the last week maybe a little due to lack of interest but just more due to other (frustrating) things going on in my life.
Actually I think kanji isn't all that bad. well I have faith that it isn't heh. I guess it would be fun to read someone else's Japanese from scratch journal on how they went from nothing to being literate. Even my European languages it was several years before I could read stuff without a dictionary. Just using the dictionary in the first place was way easier. But it stands to reason that if you learn the kanji for a word as you learn the word then you'll know it and if you know enough words then you can get by wthout a dictionary and will be literate... if this makes sense. I think one frustration is that I'm really tied to reading stuff on a computer because of the nightmare of looking up words without cut and paste or rikai. oh well. my goal for this week is simply to sleep regularly lol. that didn't happen last week and more than anything it made studying hard. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5176 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 580 of 1702 03 November 2012 at 1:38am | IP Logged |
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I'm sort of taking it easy still. I've been doing the homework assignments for class but otherwise not a lot of
studying. Watching anime and I've gotten into a jdrama 結婚できな男 (man who can't marry). Got it on dvd last night. The English sub streaming sites are awful. I tried torrents and the description says English subs but there's no subs on any of the dramas I've gotten from a torrent. Maybe there's something I'm not doing but I played with it a bit and no subs. Yeah it's good to practice listening w/o subs but after a bit you get involved in the story and don't want to miss stuff. I found a site with French subs and nice quality.. but I'm not really interested in practicing my French at the moment. I was pleasantly surprised to see I could understand almost all of the French subs though. But still it's a bit more focus on the subs and less attention on the Japanese. I'd really like to get caught up on my SRS vocab decks. I'm quite a bit behind on those and haven't added new vocab in a while. Also I found out I was confusing 屋 with 室 recently... which shows me that I've been letting my kanji slide. Ouch. Been having a small pest problem in the apartment which is a big distraction =(. I can't wait to have that resolved. It'll be a lot easier to focus then. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5176 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 581 of 1702 10 November 2012 at 5:48pm | IP Logged |
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Still taking it easy. I used to feel pressured to get through all my SRS cards and add more vocabulary and learn a new grammar thing too if possible. Every day. Not right now. If I do the flashcards, cool, if I don't get to them, also ok. I'm in slacker mode you could say. I also watched a couple American movies in English for the 1st time in ages. I'm still studying but it's very relaxed and includes entire days off here and there if there's nothing for class and I'm not in the mood.
And last night I decided to take a peek at learning Korean. A friend in class is a total kdrama addict (I don't know why she chose Japanese over Korean to study - maybe the Korean class just didn't fit her schedule). Anyway, she talks about the kdrama quite a bit. I've said over and over that I won't watch it because it will distract me from Japanese and I might even want to try to learn it. Well I gave in and watched a kdrama and well I'm gonna make a mild attempt at learning it. Japanese is still the focus. I haven't reached my language goals with Japanese yet. I don't know what it will develop into if anything. I've read that Japanese is its own language family but then I've also read that if you know Japanese you can take an accelerated course in Korean instead of the regular one so that implies a lot in common. Looking for resources I quickly found that Japanese has a lot more. And I thought Japanese resources were skimpier than what was available for European languages. (part of that was just that I didn't know where to look at first). I had thought I'd take a look at Assmil for Korean. Well they only have a course for their French customers at the moment. That really caught me off guard and tipped me off that Korean stuff might be harder to get than Japanese. But all you really need is one textbook or whatever that is pretty good and you're set so I'm sure it will workout. I found a free textbook online from another language log (love these logs!) called My Korean 1 and 2. It's free and has lots of audio and I can stick their PDF book on my iPad really easily. Looks like a win. I'm just starting in on Chapter 1. I read something about there being 600 possible verb endings. YIKES. It also seems that politeness plays a big part in their grammar just like Japanese. That last bit alone makes me think the two languages are related as I haven't heard of any other languages that incorporate levels of politeness into their grammar. Northern Korean (which I don't anticipate studying) doesn't use Chinese characters at all and Southern Korean uses about 1000 (maybe upwards of 2000 if you're ambitious) and it seems students can actually get away with not studying them at all if they don't want to read challenging print material. That's pretty neat - obviously I've studied a lot of Kanji though so I would find it interesting to see which they use and how. So I'm glad I can play with kanji a little with Korean but its super difficulty shouldn't hold me back either since its use is limited a lot. I might start posting more often I think with Korean. It's just more interesting studying a new language whereas with Japanese it's just more of the same routine over and over for the past couple months. When the course ends during the break I'll be doing my own thing and will probably post more then about Japanese I think. 1 person has 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 582 of 1702 10 November 2012 at 5:58pm | IP Logged |
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Wow, I can't believe you caved and started playing with Korean! I get the impression that Korean has all the same stuff that makes Japanese difficult, plus an awful lot more craziness that us Japanese students get to avoid completely.
Seriously though, after my experiments with German this summer, I think if things are getting a bit stale with your main language, it can be a refreshing break to mess around with another language for a bit. So good luck and, most importantly, have fun! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5176 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 583 of 1702 10 November 2012 at 6:49pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks G-bod. I'm half expecting the nay-sayers to gang up on me and make me defend myself. We'll see how it goes...
Just started studying. I'm really happy to see a DA at the end of a lot of the beginner phrase sentences XD. I have no idea yet if it's really related to the Japanese copula or what but still nice to see it there. IE: I'm pleased to meet you - cheo-eum boep-get-seum-ni-DA I am Robert. ; Robert-im-ni-DA There's more but you can see the pattern... 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6544 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 584 of 1702 10 November 2012 at 6:55pm | IP Logged |
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Good luck with Korean! I'm looking forward to reading about your progress. Japanese and Korean share indeed quite many common features - the word order, politeness levels, particles, and so on, so you will definitely have an advantage over those who haven't studied Japanese before jumping into Korean. Just out of curiosity - which was the Korean drama that you watched?
As for torrents, I use them to download dramas and they usually have the subtitle file (*.srt) separately from the video file so maybe you just didn't add the subtitles when you tried watching the video? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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