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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4837 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 281 of 706 02 August 2013 at 1:08am | IP Logged |
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Japanese
- Read through the 今日は何の日？ for August 1st at hukumusume.com. Hukumusume is awesome! I found out yesterday that when reading 今日は何の日？, on the left side of the page are links to six different "stories of the day" - a Japanese fairy tale, an international fairy tale, Japanese folklore, an Aesop tale, a Japanese tale from the Edo period (roughly the 1600s to the 1800s), and a Japanese ghost story! The Japanese fairy tale for August 1st was Momotaro, which I already know very well in English. The international one was Pinocchio. I saved both of those to PDF for viewing in my Android Walkman on the train. That's when I noticed that the Pinocchio page includes an audio mp3! So I downloaded that as well. Now I can do some L-R - not in the HTLAL sense but in the basic sense: listening to the audio while reading the text. I also grabbed the ghost story, called Asagao, which is the name for the Japanese morning glory (the flower, that is), and that story had both an audio mp3 and some pictures! I don't read much fiction now, but Hukumusume is a treasure trove of native Japanese text (and audio) that is somewhat accessible at my level, and I would be a fool not to take advantage of it. - Did Anki reviews. I won't list this every time, but I wanted to point out that I've gotten back into Anki on a regular basis. I'm trying some things out, and if they work, I'll talk more about it later. Portuguese - I found out yesterday that I can download children's stories at a website called Dominio Publico (www.dominiopublico.gov.br). (I can't type accents right now, but there should be one over the first "i" in Dominio and the "u" in Publico.) I'm really happy about this, because I've been looking for easier native Portuguese materials for some time now. Anyway, I downloaded two short stories, one of which is called "A Borboleta Azul." I read through it on the train ride home yesterday. I understood perhaps 5% of the words in the 17-page story, but the pictures helped me to understand what was going on. I just concentrated on following the flow of Portuguese and getting exposure to the words, even though I didn't know what most of them meant. Afterwards, I wrote down repeated words and other words that "jumped out" at me, and looked them up when I got home last night. Sometime later I'll read through the story again to see how much I can understand. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4837 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 282 of 706 03 August 2013 at 5:14am | IP Logged |
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I took a day off yesterday (Friday). I thought, "Oh, I have all day to study." As with past experiences, when I have a whole day to study, I usually don't study that much. I did a lot of house chores, cooking, etc., but I probably could have studied more than I did. Anyway, this is what I did.
Japanese - During the day, I turned on the TV to NHK's educational channel. They had some sort of Sesame Street-type children's show on, with the hosts dancing around with some little preschool children and their mothers. There were some very short songs, skits and animations. It took a lot of patience, but I sat through 20 minutes of the show. I could understand perhaps 80-85% of the show. There were some words and sentence endings that confused me, though - maybe "kiddie language." I suppose that if I watch it more often, I would be able to figure it out. - I tried to read a baseball article at sports.yahoo.co.jp. News articles are straightforward, but baseball articles seem to be written with code, or just a lot of idioms and expressions unique to Japanese sports. The kanji 死, which means death, was used several times in the article I tried to read. What does death have to do with base hits, or pitches? American sports articles can be written with a lot of idioms as well, so it's probably just a matter of the article being way above my level. - Other than those things, just did Anki reviews. Portuguese - I read a children's story called O leião e o rato. I just read it once; I didn't look up any interesting words, but I plan on going through it again later. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4837 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 283 of 706 06 August 2013 at 2:37am | IP Logged |
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Japanese
Since the last update, I was working with the folk tale 桃太郎 (Momotaro) that I got from Hukumusume. I read it a few times until I understood it 100%, and now I'm done with it. Maybe time to work on Pinocchio. On Monday during my train ride, I reviewed the first two dialogs of IAIJ Chapter 12, and started on the third. I'm trying to do a DLI-type drill with the dialogs. I'll do one of the roles. I'll play the audio and listen, and when my turn comes, I pause the audio, murmur the lines (I can't talk out loud on the train; I don't want to look crazy), then unpause and see how I did. After I do one role, I'll go through it again with another role. What I would like to do is go further and memorize the dialogs. This is something outcast talked about doing in his/her own log. However, I wonder if it would be of any benefit to me. Many of the dialogs in IAIJ are not that interesting. They talk about homestay life, university life, etc. A few could be useful. There is a dialog in Chapter 12 where a student goes to see the doctor because he feels sick. There is some useful language in that dialog. Using it for some chorusing is one thing. But is it worth the time investment to go ahead and memorize the whole thing? I don't know the answer to that. I guess there's only one way to find out. During breaks at work, I've been doing the grammar workbook exercises from IAIJ Chapter 12. With the longer breaks at work during summer holidays, that shouldn't take too long to complete. I once again went to Yahoo! Japan Sports and read another article about the local baseball team, Hanshin Tigers. As I said before, sports articles here are full of idioms and expressions that make no sense unless you've been around Japanese sports for a long time. In other words... not too different from sports articles elsewhere in the world. Anyway, I still didn't understand a lot of what was said in the article - and I didn't bother looking up the idioms - but I could understand a little about what happened in the game. I even tried talking about it with one of the teachers at school who is a big Hanshin fan. Unfortunately, the conversation quickly turned into an English one. We always talk in English, so perhaps talking in Japanese is a bit strange for him. I also started reading one of the only two manga that I own - Crayon Shinchan. I tried reading one of them years ago, and it was just too darn difficult. Now, I've improved so much that I'm going to attempt reading it extensively. Crayon Shinchan has the furigana written above the kanji, so it is easy to look up unknown words... if I feel like it. Other than that, I've been doing... Anki Reviews Lately I've been doing my reviews every day. I review 35 Japanese cards plus do 7 new cards, while for Portuguese I review 25 and do 5 new ones. That is much more manageable than the 100+20 I was doing before for each language. But I am thinking about reducing them even further, especially once the school year resumes in late August. Even with 35+7, my Japanese reviews take about 10-15 minutes. (I'm also doing 20+5 with my Japanese Kanji deck, but that usually takes about 5 minutes.) I've stopped using the Hard button. I think that was one of my problems before. If I press the Again/Soon button (I don't remember which one it is right now) many times on a card, Anki has a mechanism that can suspend a card. So if I have that mechanism set to, say, four, and I fail a card four times, Anki will suspend that card from my deck. This lets me decide later on if I want to delete the card, change it, etc. But if I press the Hard button, not only does the card stay around no matter how many times I press Hard, but it also comes up more frequently, so I have to keep seeing the same miserable card over and over again. So now I either press Good, or if it just takes me too long to recall the meaning of a card, I'll go ahead and fail it. Other than that, I'm deleting cards more frequently. If I get a correct answer, and Anki says I'm going to see that card again 3 months from now, I go ahead and delete it. My reasoning is that if I can remember the card 3 months from now, it's probably entered my long-term memory. If I can't, then I'm probably not seeing that word in my reading or when watching TV, therefore it's probably not a frequently-used word anyway. I've also taken a lazy approach to creating new cards. I enter sentences from my textbooks and the (Language)Pod101.com podcasts. Otherwise, I'm just entering words/collocations. That way, I don't have to waste time hunting down random sentences from the Internet or from a dictionary - sentences that don't resonate with me. Occasionally I will add an "awesome" (Hello, Serpent!) sentence, like ふざけるのはいい加減にしなさい！ from Crayon Shinchan. But basically, if I don't feel like doing it, I don't. I certainly don't add all the new words I come across anymore. All of that is working well for me. Interestingly, Anki has become a "meh" part of my language-learning routine. I don't dislike Anki - at least not like I did a couple of weeks ago - but at the same time it's not that high up on my list of language activities like it used to be. A while back, I used to be excited to do Anki reviews! I would sometimes quit doing a textbook exercise or reading an article in order to just do Anki reviews, because that was more interesting. Now it's the other way around. I recognize the value of reviewing important new words that I come across, and for me Anki does that more efficiently at this time than anything else, so I do it. But I'm trying to keep that to a bare minimum nowadays. Portuguese I haven't done much Portuguese in the past couple of days, aside from Anki reviews. I did do one PortuguesePod101.com podcast, but other than that I listened to some radio from Brazil as well as an NHK Portuguese news podcast and a Radio France International Portuguese news podcast. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6962 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 284 of 706 06 August 2013 at 8:38am | IP Logged |
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I've also started deleting Anki cards, usually when I feel like it's a word that I just
don't care about or an example sentence that I don't think I'll ever use. It was hard to get myself to do this since I have a bit of a hoarder/pack-rat mentality that apparently extends to Anki. However, once I started, it's been quite liberating! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4837 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 285 of 706 16 August 2013 at 8:56am | IP Logged |
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I took the last five or so days off of work. I did a lot with my time off: I cleaned my condominium, went shopping, spent time with my in-laws, relaxed, went around the city and had some fun.
One thing I didn't do, though, was any formal language study. After harping about consistency for the past year, I decided, "I'm going to take a break", and I did. Although I felt somewhat guilty, it was oddly refreshing to take a break from studying languages. I wasn't completely away from my languages, though; obviously, I can't get away from Japanese since I live in Japan. And for Portuguese, I occasionally turned on Internet radio from Brazil. I also did Anki reviews three of those five days. But that was it. And even though I didn't do anything for nearly a week, I feel invigorated and ready for some more language study. There is no danger of me not studying for months at a time, like I did before. This has given me the confidence that I can take a few days off when things become difficult or stressful, clear my mind, and promptly come back to my language studies. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4837 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 286 of 706 23 August 2013 at 9:41am | IP Logged |
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Ugh.
I've been participating in this thread over the past day or two. I think it was a bad idea to get involved, because now I'm frustrated. I've been made to feel guilty for studying both Japanese and Portuguese at the same time, before I've reached conversational fluency in Japanese. I certainly do not want to study more than two languages at once, but I have not found it to be a problem to study two languages at once, especially since I am progressing in both languages, and Portuguese is much easier than Japanese. I've talked at length in this log about why I do two languages instead of focusing on Japanese. Again, the point is that I study Japanese now more than ever, and I think it has something to do with my studying Portuguese as well. Ideally, yes, if I could study "All Japanese, All The Time", I would do it. But when I tried it before, it didn't work, for whatever reason. This system works. So I should just stick with it until it doesn't. This has made me wonder if I should stop coming to HTLAL. The frustration I get from some of these discussions is probably not worth it, especially when it makes me not want to study Japanese or Portuguese, as it did today. Of course HTLAL is as much of a blessing as it is a curse. HTLAL is as responsible as anything else for my progress in Japanese (and Portuguese). Without the encouragement and suggestions that you all have provided me, I might have still been stuck in my pre-2012 state. So I really do not want to give up my daily visits here. But I do think that I should just stick to my log (and other peoples') and do my best to avoid all the other areas of HTLAL - just to stay sane and keep on track. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5252 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 287 of 706 23 August 2013 at 1:22pm | IP Logged |
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Anyone who has followed your progress since you joined the forum can see how learning both Japanese and Portuguese have benefited your Japanese. You were at the point of giving up entirely before you did so. You, and Serpent changed my way of thinking entirely as regards learning more than one language at the same time. Since you added Portuguese you have supercharged your learning from where you were before. Don't let someone or a group of someones get you down because they disagree with your methods.
The "We who manage to focus on ONE language" thread started off as unnecessarily confrontational, with an almost evangelical zeal. I felt it necessary to add my two cents as one who does focus on one language but understands why others can't and don't. I thought the thread had potential to develop into an "us vs them" argument and was pleasantly surprised to see that most of the simultaneous learners didn't rise to the bait. It's an easy thing to do, to rise to the bait when you feel that what you do is being attacked. I've done it myself. What I've found is that it's important on a thread like that to show that there are different points of view and that they are just as valid, but what you can't do is change anyone's mind by continuing to argue the point. So, add your opinion and let it stand on its own merit. Your example is a good one to show the benefits of what learning more than one language can do for someone facing similar circumstances. It stands on its own merit and there is no need for a defense. What's important is that it works for you. Stick with your log. It's a great way to get help, input and talk things out. Who am I, or anyone else to tell you that you are wrong? You haven't reached your destinations yet but you've come quite a long way. Be proud of the progress you've made as you look into the rear view mirror. Keep on keepin' on, irmão! Edited by iguanamon on 23 August 2013 at 2:17pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5972 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 288 of 706 23 August 2013 at 2:16pm | IP Logged |
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Allow me to invoke Duty Calls. I have it pinned to the wall
above my desk to provide a healthy dose of perspective when needed! Nobody knows your life as well as you do, kuji. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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