dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4657 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 73 of 118 18 May 2014 at 11:40pm | IP Logged |
I've started to try to do some serious reading most days. So far I've managed two days
in a row :-)
I've been reading the Penguin Parallel Text. I've decided to read extensivley, so Im
not looking anything up. I am, however, using the English on the facing page to check
when I hit something I don't understand (which is quite often at this stage).
Yesterday I managed about 12m per page and today that's down to 10m per page. I expect
that's either measurement error or a change in the style of the stories as the book
progresses.
Once I'm done with this book I'll move on to another one (perhaps my Japanese Reader or
Read Real Japanese). I will come back at some stage and work through at least some of
the stories intensively (looking up unknown vocabulary, working through grammar points
as appropriate etc.).
For now I just happy that "real Japanese", whilst difficult, isn't quite as difficulat
as it seemed a week ago.
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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 74 of 118 20 May 2014 at 11:35pm | IP Logged |
I've been trying out various ways of watching J-Drama, mostly because I don't know what will work
the best (or even at all).
So I watched エジソンの母 all the way through without subs and then I watched it again with subs. さらい屋
五葉 I watched entirely without subs. タイガー&ドラゴン I watched with English subs.
I'm planning to continue this sort of mix, but with a slight variation. I think that sticking
(mostly) to one series at a time, especially if I'm doing an episode with subs followed by the same
episode without subs is a bit tiring: I know what's going to happen next and that makes it a bit of
a struggle to work through a times. (Although it does seem to provide quite a lot of benefit, as I
know what's going on and that obviously helps with following the Japanese when there are no
subtitles).
So my current plan is to interleave things. This is how most TV is presented in real life, so I
think that it should work out OK. I'm not going to draw up a schedule, I'll just have multiple
series on the go at once and I'll just watch whatever I feel like watching on any given day.
Here's what I'm going with for now.
僕だけのマドンナ
For this one I'm going to watch an episode with English subs and then the same episode again (a day
or two later) without subs.
アネゴ
This one I'm going to watch entirely without subs. I might go back and watch a scene or two with
subs if I feel I've completely lost the plot, but only if I feel I really have to, and no more than
once per episode. When watching a series entirely without subs, I may choose to watch the first
episode with subs first just so that I have an idea of how the land lies. With this one I've not
done that.
バンビーノ!
This one I'm going to watch with subs. A small amount of the kitchen talk is in Italian, so there I
get to read the Japanese subtitles (which are presumably part of the original show). This is the
second show I've seen that involves some Italian (i.e. more than just a few words in one or two
episodes). Interesting trend.
牙狼〈GARO〉~闇を照らす者~
This one I'm going to watch without subs. It's a fantasy drama, so whether I stick with it or not is
as yet to be determined. It's just over 23m per episode, so it does have the advantage of filling
small gaps in the schedule!
ドラゴン青年団
This one gets a special mention. The acting makes Coronation St. look polished in comparison. The
plot line was borrowed from a 3 year-old's crayon drawing. I'm surprised that I made it through the
first episode. I mention it only because if I'm beginning to develop the first stirrings of
discernment in my J-viewing habits, then I must be doing something right :-)
凪のあすから
This one is my subs2srs experiment. I've put the first 5 episodes in Anki and I'll be watching these
over and over again as the mood takes me to see whether I get more out of each re-watching.
Obviously I'll need plenty of other content in between to stop things becoming too tedious. I also
have the sound tracks for these 5 episodes on my MP3 player so I might start to listen to these
sometimes during the commute. I'll gradually add further episodes as time passes.
As I finish each series I'll pick something else to replace it. If I find that I need more parallel
strands, then I'll add further series as required. (There seems to be a virtually limitless supply
of such drama on the net, so I'm unlikely to need to repeat viewings unnecessarily).
I would like to consider a series with just J-subs. None of the streams I've found so far offer
this: the J-subs are available for quite a few series, but the streaming sites only offer (seemingly
hard-coded) English subs.
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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 75 of 118 25 May 2014 at 1:22pm | IP Logged |
I've been putting a lot more time into reading and watching video over the last two
weeks.
The reading has been extensive rather than intensive, so I've not been picking up much
in the way of vocabulary, but I am getting used to the idea of sitting down with a book
and working through it. I've finished the Penguin Parallel Text. I'm sure I'll come
back to it again (and again) but now I'm going to move on to A Japanese Reader for
while. This one has no side-by-side translation and no furigana so I expect that I'll
be working through it a bit more slowly. I'll see how it goes.
The drama watching probably isn't doing much for my vocabulary at the moment either,
but it is helping me improve picking out the words I do know and getting me used to the
overall structure of spoken sentences. I am working through one anime with the help of
subs2srs but at the moment I'm concentrating on trying to follow what's going on
without going over episodes again and again. In fact I've been following 僕だけのマドンナ
by watching with English subs and then watching again without subs a day or two later.
The idea was that by the time I watched without subs I'd know what was going on and
that should help with understanding the Japanese. That's probably right, but I'm
finding I don't like to watch again when I know exactly what's going to happen. So I'm
going to things around for the final 3 episodes and watch without subtitles first and
then try again a day later with English subs to clear up exactly why things happened.
I'm going to put a bit more time into grammar again. I've got about two weeks worth of
新完全マスター N3 文法 to go through and then I'll go back and retry the exercises and use
those to brush up on the points I don't remember. I'll also activate vocabulary in Anki
that came from one of the JLPT mock tests I've done.
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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 76 of 118 11 June 2014 at 12:04pm | IP Logged |
The SC has certainly prompted me to read more. I was already watching some drama but
again, the SC has pushed me to do more. However, I think I can afford to put some of that
drama watching time into shadowing instead. So I'll try to make sure that for at least
two days of the week, I'll do some shadowing before watching drama (or instead of drama,
if I run out of time that day). I'll be shadowing the JPOD101 Lower Intermediate series,
as that's the one I'm currently listening to every day during the commute.
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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 77 of 118 16 June 2014 at 11:48pm | IP Logged |
I've just upgraded from Linux Mint 14 ("Nadia" from Nov 2012) to LM 17 ("Qiana").
The Japanese fonts are considerably improved - Anki is now much more legible.
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kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4839 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese
| Message 78 of 118 17 June 2014 at 7:52am | IP Logged |
How is the shadowing going so far?
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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 79 of 118 19 June 2014 at 12:28am | IP Logged |
kujichagulia wrote:
How is the shadowing going so far? |
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So far, despite my best intentions, I've failed to actually start.
Instead I found some sets of N3-type vocabulary, arranged by theme, and I've been
SRSing the bits I don't yet know.
In addition I've been taking N3 mock tests (which is about 2-1/2 hours per test) and
then marking and working through the tests in detail (and this takes much longer).
I suspect that I won't get back to shadowing until the workload drops off a little, and
that's not going to happen until after the first Sunday in july :-)
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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 80 of 118 19 June 2014 at 1:57pm | IP Logged |
I'm working from home today and (too late) I've noticed that Kurosawa's 用心棒 was on Film
4 at 11AM. It seems that next Thursday Film 4 will be showing 椿三十郎 (the sequel to 用心
棒) at 11AM, so maybe there's a whole season of Japanese films. (I'm not sure, because
that's as far as the listing page goes).
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