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The 1-year challenge: Japanese | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5902 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 1 of 38 12 January 2014 at 3:20pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Hi everyone!
I was active on this forum a few years ago and started lurking again a while back, and thought I'd start posting a bit :-) I've been studying Japanese on and off since April 2013 and have been having a hard time staying on track. I've been pretty busy in general but have had bursts of working at it consistently for weeks, but then something happens and I lose the good habits I've developed, and then several weeks pass without any activity at all. Rinse and repeat. So I thought a log might help... My goal: A year-ish from now I want to be able to say "I speak Japanese" and not feel like a liar. It doesn't have to be perfect, I just need to be able to speak it reasonably well. I might plan a holiday there for the summer of 2015 but that depends on my money situation... Not very optimistic about that, but hey, at least I'll know Japanese. Why am I learning Japanese? I don't know. It just feels like a good idea. Probably cultural curiosity mostly. Think zen, not anime. My approach as of right now: - Premium membership for JapanesePod101, which is doing a passable job at teaching me the grammar. Currently doing the Beginners course and reviewing basic stuff. - Remembering the Kanji, and Reviewing the Kanji - I'm going to start using a text-based method for learning vocabulary that I used back when I was studying Italian. Will probably use song lyrics and whatever short texts I can find that I like for whatever reason. - I have 2 Anki decks that I kind of hate but might open occasionally - I still have AJATT Plus cause I bought a thing and haven't gotten around to cancelling my subscription yet. Sentence lists basically. - Worry about output later. I'll try to update this regularly to keep myself going :-) I'll make changes to this post as my approach changes, which I'm sure it will. Anyway I would love to hear from you, whether you're learning Japanese or not, so feel free to post here. Come in and say hi if you remember me. And if anyone has suggestions for texts I can use (especially funny things!) or songs you like, please post :-) Liz Edited by Lizzern on 13 January 2014 at 12:10am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Spanky Senior Member Canada Joined 5949 days ago 1021 posts - 1714 votes Studies: French | Message 2 of 38 12 January 2014 at 7:16pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Good luck with your goal Lizzern, I will be following with interest. I am hoping to tackle Japanese next year in a manner similar to your approach; this year I am only learning the kanji per the same sources you mention: Heisig's Remembering the Kanji and the koohii site Reviewing the Kanji. I would be interested in learning of your experience with those sources. Edited by Spanky on 12 January 2014 at 7:17pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5902 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 3 of 38 16 January 2014 at 4:30pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Thanks for your post Spanky. I'll be posting more about my materials as I go along - I'm sure my opinion will change gradually. I started using Heisig's book last year but eventually took a break from it because I ended up with a pile of kanji that I had gone through but not memorised 100%, and it was uninspiring to learn them on their own. (I am prioritising speaking and understanding above reading and writing for now.) I'm going to start from scratch at some point and prioritise learning each one very, very well before moving on to the next one. It really doesn't seem to work if we move forward without having the building blocks in place. So that was my first mistake... That said, it seems like a good technique if done right :-)
----- I've been doing 3+ lessons a day at JapanesePod101 since my last post, most of them Beginner lessons. I'm just over halfway through the Beginner 1 course, which is 170 lessons long. There isn't much guidance about which lessons we should do and in what order, and the course names are confusing - there's Absolute Beginner, Newbie, Lower Beginner, Beginner... But for now I'm trying to get ahead in the Beginner 1 course, and reviewing with Newbie 1. Guess we'll see what I do after that. Regardless of what I end up doing, just going through the courses is going to take a long time, so I might need other materials to speed things up... The lessons are useful though, so it's not like it's a waste of time or anything. I'm going to try to keep doing 3 lessons a day for a while and see how that goes :-) I'll be working a lot next week but it helps to have a habit in place... At least until I lose it and have to start all over again. Liz Edited by Lizzern on 20 January 2014 at 10:22pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5902 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 4 of 38 17 January 2014 at 12:14am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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So... Inspired by this thread about how chaotic learners keep track of their progress, I decided I should have a measuring stick as well to see how I'm doing with Japanese.
My learning style tends to be fairly chaotic - sure, I might be able to stick to a programme of doing x lessons of a course for a certain amount of time, but I honestly tend to be pretty scattered the rest of the time - music, random things I come across on the internet, that sort of thing... Back when I did Italian I found a video very early on that I didn't understand - nothing more than what I could understand based on Spanish basically. That was my starting point with Italian. I watched that video every once in a while as I kept learning, and it did a decent job of showing my progress. I didn't study the video itself at all. So I'm going to do the same for Japanese, and I've picked my video. It's a behind the scenes video for a music video shoot, and most of it is in Japanese. The song was one of the first I ever listened to in Japanese at the time, and probably my very first Japanese earworm, so I'll use that video to see how things are going. It's the only video that I (inexplicably) still have saved on my computer that I've had since the very beginning, which is the whole point. I'll watch it again in a few months, and see how much of it I can understand. It was SO rewarding to watch that Italian video towards the end and understand everything perfectly, so it would be nice to get the same feeling with Japanese at some point :-) Liz Edited by Lizzern on 17 January 2014 at 11:28am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| shapd Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6142 days ago 126 posts - 208 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Italian, Spanish, Latin, Modern Hebrew, French, Russian | Message 5 of 38 17 January 2014 at 3:03pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Welcome back ,Lizzern. Have you qualified now?
I am also dabbling in Japanese. I recommend Tae Kim's Guide to learning Japanese on line for a good clear grammar book with lots of examples of both formal and colloquial language. Particularly useful is the iPhone app which has in-app translation of all the kanji he uses. I suggest you look at www.kanjidamage.com for help with the kanji. Not only does it have a Heisig style mnemonic based guide to all the necessary kanji but also help with the ON readings and a list of common compounds using them, with usage notes. He also ranks them according to usefulness and warns in cases where the readings are anomalous or the commonest uses are nothing to do with the base meaning. Very useful and gives you a lot more hooks to remember the characters. Warning - his mnemonics can be a bit crude. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4658 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 6 of 38 17 January 2014 at 5:30pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I took out the premium membership for a year. Make sure you download everything at the start (about 30GiB). There's a massive amount of stuff, much more than you can reasonably work through in a year. You'll probably want to come back to this again and again.
I've not used the book but I did use the RTK website to learn the kanji early on. Not everyone likes the method, quite often because it's a long road to travel and at the end all you've learned is a bunch of characters and no words. I have found it to be a valuable tool though for learning vocabulary: now when I learn a word in kanji I know what the characters are so I'm just learning to go from kanji-word->pronunciation or kanji-word->meaning or whatever ... I don't have to memorise the "drawings" at the same time.
They certainly could be better organised couldn't they :-) The Newbie stuff really is newbie: you'll probably be past them in the first month or two of starting from scratch. The Absolute Beginner stuff is exactly what you'd expect from the title. The first season of the beginner series is obviously from before they began to organise more systematically. The first ~20 lessons are painfully slow (now, I don't remember what they were like when I first started). Then they speed up quite a bit. Season's 2, 3 etc. are mostly self-contained, so you could jump from where you are now in S1 to the start of S2 and not be out of your depth. You also get to change presenters which I found a bit of a blessing :-) The Upper Beginner season is IMHO very well done. Certainly above the level of the Beginner seasons and it has a coherent thread running through it. The Lower Intermediate seasons are where I'm spending most of my time now (at least with the dialogues). They are mostly quite well done too. The stories can be silly at times but they do cover a good deal of grammar. Intermediate is a bit of a mixed bag too. Again I think it's from before they realised that they should be more organised. I've not worked through Upper Intermediate much but those lessons are definitely more challenging than the Lower Intermediate. The ones I've listened too seem to be pretty good and are mostly in Japanese with just enough English to stop me from drowning. In a year (or two?) they'll be at just the right level for me. I think the Advanced blogs are just native blogs with a script, but I'm not there yet so I don't really know! There are also JLPT lessons and Particle lessons and so on.
Sounds like a good idea. Do you have a link handy? I'm on the look out for suitable viewing material. BTW: if you need motivation, you could join Team 旅立ち for TAC 2014! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5902 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 7 of 38 20 January 2014 at 10:21pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Thanks shapd! 1 year left now :-) Great sites - I'd heard of Tae Kim's guide and have used it a bit, but hadn't heard of kanjidamage. I'll have to look into it in more detail once I start studying kanji seriously again - at this point I can still rationalise staying away for the time being... I don't mind crude mnemonics if it helps get the job done. It's a huge task for anyone to learn so many. A huge task I'm leaving for later...
----- Dampingwire, thanks for all the info! I am still working through the confusion about kanji and how it all fits together into meaningful words and sounds - I'll still end up using RTK for what it's made to do (teach you characters... but no words) and I imagine it's true that the Chinese have a leg up on everyone else because they already know the characters. It's an uninspiring task though. Your comments about JapanesePod101 cleared some things up for me, thanks. Good to know they get a bit more organised as they go along... It still works for me overall though, I'm generally ok with semi-chaotic styles and at this point the only thing that actually bothers me is when they have their own little conversation amongst themselves in Japanese and then they don't explain what they just said. It happens more than it should in a course that aims to teach people Japanese. Anyway I read somewhere on their forum that it might make sense to do Beginner through to the end of season 4, then Intermediate 6, then the rest of the Intermediate seasons. So that's what I'm aiming for, with random review thrown in if I have time. I might try to fit in Upper Beginner somewhere if I can... I'm not in the 'upper' range yet though. Don't have a link for that video unfortunately, I just saved it a while back, and it doesn't seem to be on youtube anymore. There are probably lots of videos like it though, if you know how to look for them in Japanese, which I don't yet :-) ----- Still doing 3 a day at the moment - 2 Beginner lessons and 1 of something else - now I just need to keep that up this week if I can despite having a bit (...waaay) too much work to do, but if I need to take a few days off I guess that's ok... I just know I have a tendency to take a while to start again after a break :-) But I need to make sure I don't burn out overall - that's part of the reason why my long Japanese break last semester started in the first place. I need Japanese to be a low-pressure thing that stays fun. Liz Edited by Lizzern on 20 January 2014 at 10:22pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4658 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 8 of 38 21 January 2014 at 12:50am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
As you get better and better at listening you'll find the little asides quite useful. I found that it makes me listen out for them (and even rewind and listen again) just to try and work out what was being said. There's more of this in Lower Intermediate and by Upper Intermediate it's slanted mostly towards Japanese with an English summary thrown in for the dullards like me to follow.
There's the occasional reference in lessons to grammar that appeared in previous lessons in the level (or sometimes across levels) but it doesn't really matter. I'd certainly follow a season in order (lesson 1, then lesson 2 etc) but it's probably OK to jump around from season to season. I'd say if you find a particular season doesn't work for you at any time don't hesitate to try the next one in the list. I've found all of them useful at various stages. They also have other seasons that don't fit into the Beginner/LI/UI categories. Onomatopoeia, Particles, JLPT, Yojijukugo, Songs, various culture classes. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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