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FabricioCarraro - TAC’15 Pushkin, Rätsel | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4657 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes  Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 385 of 439 14 February 2014 at 8:45pm | IP Logged | ||
I've found memrise.com quite good in the early stages (say the first 2000 words or so). That way you have the advantages of word association without the effort of having to come up with all the really good ones yourself. I did find it quite a slog in the beginning because the same utterance can mean multiple entirely unconnected things. Once you start with kanji it will help in this regard, but at the start of the journey I didn't know much vocabulary through kanji. Even simple things like きらい and からい can be quite tricksy. Once you have a reasonable foundation, however, then you'll start to see new words in the context of words you already know and you'll also start to see that this noun and that verb are related and so on. I do like learning words in context but I found it's just not practical when you are trying to build up 3000 - 6000 words in a reasonable length of time. So I'm learning words using traditional SRS (either Anki or memrise.com) and then when I come across them in a lesson or a story or a news report I try to take note of the usage. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| fabriciocarraro Hexaglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Brazil russoparabrasileirosRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4707 days ago 989 posts - 1454 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, EnglishB2, Italian, Spanish, Russian, French Studies: Dutch, German, Japanese | Message 386 of 439 23 February 2014 at 9:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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@dampingwire Indeed! I'll try Memruse then, I've heard it's a great resource!
--- CouchSurfing: I know it must be kind of repetitive to read this, but the CouchSurfing meeting was again awesome =P I guess this is the best time of the year for the meeting (between January and March), because the weather is good and there are usually a lot of foreigners. I could level-up (haha) in Italian, French, English and Russian, with a very nice Ukrainian girl AND some Brazilians who spoke Russian! Later I found out that one of them is the founder of the school where I was having my programming course last month! What are the odds!? He, his brother and his father are all polyglots as well, very interesting family! Japanese - Italki [1]: I had 2 Japanese lessons on Italki since my last post. The first one was with the same teacher as the other time, and she's good, but she insisted in speaking all the time in Japanese (which is good), but she spoke really really fast. I guess my first lesson gave her a 'bad' impression that I spoke Japanese better than I actually do... the lesson should last 1 hour, but after 50 minutes I called it a day, because I really couldn't do it anymore. Japanese - Italki [2]: Then, I hired another Japanese teacher for a trial lesson, and it was truly amazing again!! Again, we spoke most of the time only in Japanese, and she compared me to Benny Lewis hahaha although my Japanese is still nowhere near his. She was in one of Benny's Youtube videos, and she's really a great teacher. On the first lesson she already made me read some material and taught me some things. I decided that for now I'll keep having lessons with her (already scheduled 3 more), and we'll probably follow a textbook like Minna-no-Nihongo, while I keep doing Genki+JapanesePod101. Japanese - Genki + JapanesePod101 I usually listen to at least 2 lessons of JapanesePod101 a day, but sometimes I feel that I don't learn that much from it. It's good to listen to Japanese, but their translations aren't always that useful, since they don't explain the grammar behind it. Also, because there's a lot of new vocabulary, which is impossible to retain. Anyway, I still love it! As for Genki, this week I did less chapters than I should and wanted, but I'll have more time in the next 2 weeks, since my wife is going to Holland for 2 weeks to spend time with her sister and her newborn baby. The good part is that I review all the lessons on the subway while going to work, which helps a lot to retain the content. Japanese - Attack on Titan (anime) I feel like I'm in school again hahaha it'd been about 8 years since my last anime. I had heard about this manga/anime on a podcast to which I often listen, and they said wonderful things about it, so I decided to give it a try. IT'S AWESOME!!! The story is very complex and not for children AT ALL. On the background of the main plot, they discuss about religion, politics, the value of life, suicide, etc., etc. The first 3 or so episodes are kind of slow, since they have to explain the whole story, but then it gets much much better. It has an amazing pace! As for the spoken Japanese, it's still faaar too advanced for me. I watched it with English subtitles, but I could get some phrases here and there. Now I've finished all the 25 episodes released so far, so I'll try to buy the manga's (which are considerably further ahead). For those of you who like anime, I definitely recommend it!! Edited by fabriciocarraro on 23 February 2014 at 11:37pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4764 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 387 of 439 23 February 2014 at 10:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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Certainly seconding the recommendation of AoT. It's made quite the splash last year, and almost certainly will make another one some time in the future. The first opening song was even performed on 紅白歌合戦, NHK's annual New Year singing contest - if that isn't an indication of mainstream popularity in Japan I don't know what is. And yes, the themes the show discusses are pretty heavy for a shonen series, and the story is incredibly engaging.
The way I dealt with the language problem was by reading the corresponding manga chapters as soon as I finished watching an episode. Thankfully the anime follows the manga pretty closely (except for moving the training camp arc into its proper chronological place and putting the "Ilse's Notebook" special chapter into a separate OVA), while the manga dialogue comes with furigana, so looking up unfamiliar words isn't too hard. I actually wanted to wait until the second season rather than just keep reading the manga, since the art in the manga is... really not that great. This is getting harder to do, since it's becoming impossible to avoid spoilers for the manga on the internet. I guess I'll start reading it if the new season doesn't start coming out when I'm done catching up with the WataMote manga. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| fabriciocarraro Hexaglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Brazil russoparabrasileirosRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4707 days ago 989 posts - 1454 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, EnglishB2, Italian, Spanish, Russian, French Studies: Dutch, German, Japanese | Message 388 of 439 27 February 2014 at 6:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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@vonPeterhof That's actually a great idea! Did you find the manga in Japanese online or you bought it somewhere online? Btw, do you know any other anime like this one? I mean, of the "same style", not very childish, etc.?
--- CouchSurfing: This week was a little less crowded than the last 2 (in which there were around 150 people there, while this one had around 90 I guess). Still, more levelling-up in Italian, French, English, Russian and even some Japanese! The Ukrainian girl was back, along with another Russian girl who's married to a Brazilian. Also, 3 other Brazilians there spoke Russian, so we had a little nice group practice there. Also, I added the Japanese guy on Facebook, so I hope I'll be practicing more with him! Very nice guy btw. Japanese - Italki: Yesterday I had another Japanese lesson with my new teacher. We started off with Minna-no-Nihongo, and we mostly just reviewed stuff. She was just passing through the book and asking me to read some sentences and do some exercises, while learning some new vocabulary (which I have to write down, because I've already forgotten most of it haha). Anyway, right now I need to learn more advanced structures, so I'll just tell her on the next lesson that I can learn vocab myself, so that we can go faster. I really like the teacher's enthusiasm, her accent in Japanese, so I'll keep having lessons with her for now. Japanese - Genki + JapanesePod101 The last JapanesePod101 lessons were very good. I'm around lesson 87 of the Beginner Series Season 1. Also, yesterday night I did one more chapter of Genki. Now I'm exactly in the middle of the book, and this lesson was very good! They finally taught the informal or "short" for of verbs, adjectives and nouns in an official way, both for the affirmative and negative present, and explained their usage. They'll probably do the same for the past in the next lesson, which I'll be doing this week. I reviewed the lesson on my way to work, and so far, so good! Japanese - SharedTalk Now that my wife is away, it's ok for me to have voice conversations after 23h00, and I found out that SharedTalk can be great for this! Until last week, I only used the text chat feature of the website, but this week I had nice conversations, mostly with people from Japan. Since they're learning English, usually their level is not so good (but better than my Japanese) so we usually do a mix of both. The bad thing is that by the time I get home Europeans are already sleeping, so most people online are from the Americas (not interested right now) or East Asia (yay Japan!). Anyway, it's still a good tip for those of you who didn't know about it! =) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Emme Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 5339 days ago 980 posts - 1594 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, German Studies: Russian, Swedish, French | Message 389 of 439 27 February 2014 at 8:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hi Fabricio!
I’ve been catching up with a few logs here and it looks like you’ve had a fantastic February! Your enthusiasm is quite catching: just what I needed to get back into learning after a rather abysmal month. Keep up the great work and keep writing so positively about your progress. Yours is a feel-good log right now! Nice! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5158 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 390 of 439 27 February 2014 at 10:07pm | IP Logged | ||
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Fabricio I need to get down to that CS meeting one day! It's quite different from the one
here. Does it get too desertic in late July? I tried Shredtalk again and my account had been deactivated. Thanks for reminding me about that. I may try the voicechat early in the morning, let's see how it works out. It's a good time for the Asians, I believe. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| nandemonai Diglot Senior Member BelgiumRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4165 days ago 101 posts - 116 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English Studies: Japanese, Mandarin | Message 391 of 439 27 February 2014 at 11:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hey!
I found JapanesePod101 to be very useful for me in the early stages. Sometimes you don't learn that much, but that's because they review a lot of things you've already learned. It's a pretty relaxed way to learn little bits of Japanese at a time. Also don't be wait to go to higher levels when you feel comfortable with the current level, I found that I was ready for the higher levels sooner than I expected. I'm going to look into SharedTalk as I've never heard about it before. Keep it up, you're doing great! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4764 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 392 of 439 01 March 2014 at 9:37am | IP Logged | ||
As for anime similar to AoT, an anime critic I often read and listen to, JesuOtaku, often talks about its similarity to the other works of its director, Tetsuro Araki (荒木哲郎). I've only watched one of his previous works, Death Note, and I think she has a point. I would also recommend to check out the works of the screenwriter Gen Urobuchi (虚淵玄; nickname: 'The Urobutcher'), especially Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Psycho-Pass and Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet (JesuOtaku also praised Fate/Zero a lot, but I've yet to watch that one myself). Gargantia in particular, a series that started airing around the same time as AoT, serves as an interesting companion piece to it, since it explores some of the same themes (militarized society, military necessity, humanity confronted with a seemingly completely inhuman enemy, etc.), but most of it takes place in a world that is almost the exact opposite of AoT's world of constant struggle and despair. Madoka is probably the Urobutcher's most famous work - if AoT was THE anime of 2013, Madoka appears to be the closest thing to such a phenomenon in 2011. While its visual style makes it look like your typical magical girl show, it's way more than that (going into greater detail about it may count as a spoiler). Depending on the regional licensing it might be available to you on Crunchyroll or Daisuki. Just two tips if you decide to watch it: a) avoid any and all spoilers; and b) if you feel bored or underwhelmed in the beginning, just try to keep watching until the end of episode 3. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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