dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4657 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 9 of 256 07 May 2012 at 5:49pm | IP Logged |
genini1 wrote:
If you're looking for a good website for vocabulary
http://iknow.jp/content/japanese is extremely useful. They have the top 6k words sorted
by frequency and even have each word recorded with a sample sentence as well.
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It looks as though there's a free trial and then it's a pay-service. There's a Core6K
deck for Anki. Does iKnow get me much more than Anki for my £6/month?
Actually it seems that a few services used to be free and are now behind a paywall. I'm
not sure if iKnow is one of them but smart.fm (?) apparently went that way. Hopefully
memrise and RTK won't succumb too soon ...
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dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4657 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 10 of 256 07 May 2012 at 5:56pm | IP Logged |
atama warui wrote:
I tried learning Kanji via Heisig 2 times. It felt really bad to
remember them with English vocabulary words (even if it enabled me to "read" them
fluently). Kind of detached the Kanji from the language I was learning. |
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I see Spanish and Italian stories on RTK, although I admit I've stuck to English for
simplicity so far. I have made up some Italian mems on Memrise, some of them have even
helped :-)
I'm finding that I'm working through the "beginner's japanese script" (with readings)
much more easily than my last attempt a few months ago. So for me, even though RTK
doesn't teach readings themselves, it seems to have helped a lot. Then again, I'm only
just over 10% of the way through the kanji!
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dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4657 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 11 of 256 08 May 2012 at 9:30pm | IP Logged |
I was wondering today what I'd do when I run out of audio lessons (which will happen
relatively soon).
I'd already seen http://www.forvo.com/, which is quite useful for single words. Today,
though, I came across http://rhinospike.com. It's not new but it seems to have a
reasonable community and (certainly for Japanese) a rich source of native readings of
transcripts. That means that, with a little work, I can learn a transcript and then
listen to the audio. I've not tried this yet so I've no idea if it will work, but at
least it will mean I'm listening to text I (allegedly) understand. (The problem with
loading up on Japanese podcasts is that I don't currently understand them :-().
1 person has voted this message useful
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genini1 Senior Member United States Joined 5460 days ago 114 posts - 161 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Mandarin, Japanese
| Message 12 of 256 09 May 2012 at 3:43am | IP Logged |
dampingwire wrote:
genini1 wrote:
If you're looking for a good website for vocabulary
http://iknow.jp/content/japanese is extremely useful. They have the top 6k words sorted
by frequency and even have each word recorded with a sample sentence as well.
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It looks as though there's a free trial and then it's a pay-service. There's a Core6K
deck for Anki. Does iKnow get me much more than Anki for my £6/month?
Actually it seems that a few services used to be free and are now behind a paywall. I'm
not sure if iKnow is one of them but smart.fm (?) apparently went that way. Hopefully
memrise and RTK won't succumb too soon ...
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I hadn't realized iKnow turned into a pay site. I personally used Core and looked for a similar version since smart went down. The core6k for anki is an amazing resource though.
1 person has voted this message useful
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atama warui Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 4693 days ago 594 posts - 985 votes Speaks: German*, English, Japanese
| Message 13 of 256 09 May 2012 at 7:15am | IP Logged |
memrise is the one I'm using now. Yeah, it's a shame what happened to smart.fm but it can't be helped.
As for audio lessons, might wanna check out JapanesePOD101.
I also heard from a friend of a friend whose mother had a client whose cousin downloaded an 21gig pack of audio lessons and PDFs off Pirate Bay. Amazing story.
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dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4657 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 14 of 256 14 May 2012 at 12:38am | IP Logged |
22h11m this week, which isn't bad considering the amount of DIY that had to get done.
I didn't get much further with Kanji (323 seen so far).
So far as Memrise goes I've kept it ticking over but I've not turned Kanji back on and
I've not started on any new gardens.
I've got as far as the plain past tense in Tae Kim, and that's forced me to sit down
and look at the TE form, but I'm not managing a lesson a day.
I did find L-Lingo and I've been through the first four of the five free lessons. It
looks to be a well done site (105 lessons in all I think). I think I'd describe it as
Rosetta Stone but with a proper teacher. $9.99/month ... if I had enough spare time I'm
sure I could rattle through 105 lessons in one month. No idea what level it would take
you to though.
Still working through Pimsleur audio. I've decided that I'll work through the 50 NHK
audio lessons too (10 mins each, so I can try a couple each lunchtime at work).
Overall not a bad week. I don't feel as though I've done much but I've kept things
ticking along.
This coming week I'm going to try to force myself to prioritise grammar via Tae Kim.
1 person has voted this message useful
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dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4657 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 15 of 256 21 May 2012 at 11:13am | IP Logged |
Managed just over 28h this week: I had two (long) journeys on public transport!
I did manage to get more Tae Kim done: I've now finished Basic Grammar and have moved
on to Essential Grammar. "Finished" means I've been through it and understood it at the
time, but I'll definitely be revisiting all of the material again I think. That did eat
into my "Japanese screen time" so the Kanji are just ticking over (395) and Memrise
I've just kept minimally watered.
I'm coming to the end of Pimsleur: I'll probably finish it by the weekend. No doubt
I'll go back and review it.
I've only one chapter of "beginner's japanese script" to go. A brief peek last night
convinced me that the katakana haven't stuck and I need to put more effort into these
soon.
Two new developments.
Firstly on Wednesday I'll be having a meeting with a Japanese tutor to discuss the
possibility of a weekly lesson. I'm hoping that will at least get me to start talking a
bit. In addition it'll provide someone who can answer my somewhat basic questions.
Secondly, work have offered to pay for me to get a one year (premium) subscription to
JapanesePOD101. Reviews mostly seem good (although there are some negative ones too).
It sounds as though it will be audio-based but (unlike Pimsleur) it does have grammar.
I'm expecting to be able to download the audio and stick it on an MP3 player so I can
go over it during my commute. I'm also expecting transcripts (as PDFs). If either of
these is (or is not!) true, would someone please let me know :-)
1 person has voted this message useful
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dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4657 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 16 of 256 28 May 2012 at 11:40pm | IP Logged |
25h+ this week.
I'm almost through Tae Kim's Essential Grammar. I definitely need to go over all of
this again, but at least now I know where to look for (many) specific issues.
Kanji are still ticking over (405 now) and I'm just watering Memrise every other day at
the moment.
I've started to review Pimsleur. I'm half way through Japanese I and so far I'm
managing to spit out the replies for each lesson before the native speaker starts.
(well, almost always). So I must be making some progress even if it doesn't always feel
like it :-)
I'm also working through the online NHK lessons (10 minutes each, but packed with juicy
goodness). I'm up to lesson 14 so far.
Not done anything with JapanesePOD101 yet. I've found busuu.com and I'm playing with it
on the free trial right now. I think I'll still go with JPOD but busuu does look to be
useful: quite how useful it is once the free trial ends I'll find out very soon!
I met with my tutor for a chat and she's agreed to take me on. I now have a copy of
Minna no Nihongo, which is what she uses. My first real lesson is on Wednesday. So now
I need to sit down and think of a bunch of conversation topics. All those years of
helping my daughter through GCSE and A-Level with "Oh come on. Just how hard can it be
to come up with some simple sentences" now comes back and bites me.
I found the first episode of "Nihonjin no Shiranai Nihongo" and (once I'd also found a
set of subtitles :-)) had an enjoyable 30 minutes of viewing. I expect that I'll get to
know that episode really well as I try to get to the point where I can understand some
of it without subtitles.
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