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TAC 2010 - Team K: M. Medialis - RU JP FR | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| M. Medialis Diglot TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Sweden Joined 6358 days ago 397 posts - 508 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Russian, Japanese, French | Message 81 of 115 28 June 2010 at 9:22pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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TAC Log nr 16
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Hahahah. Always strange to realize that the stereotype is actually the real thing!
Ahh, that last little wisdom gem stuck in my mind in a very pleasant way. :) ----------------------------------------------------- Right now I'm in a philosophizing mood, so I thought I could share my latest language learning findings: Adventures in the Fluency Factory Total hours of Active Listening: 72 Immersion and dictionaries Doing the Silent Shadowing thing has become an automated habit. Having an endless stream of Japanese does indeed improve my ability to recognize words I know, and also to pick up new words: "Now they said that word again! What does it mean?". I've read Khatz's advices over and over again: "listen even if you don't understand!", but it required my own experimentation until I understood why. Following the advice from Prof. Arguelles, I still try to refrain from using dictionaries. Instead, I've just discovered that I can look up words in my LR-materials. Tons of neatly arranged parallel texts gives plenty of example sentences and translations, and since I'm already familiar with the texts I can often almost hear the actor reading out the sentence for me. Win! Podcasts I'd like to add a little point that I got to think about today. I'm still convinced that the audiobook is the single best tool that can ever be used to learn a language (through LR). However, in order to become a native of the language (yet another AJATT term) I'd say that Podcasts are unbeatable! Immersing yourself listening to natives who are just chatting around, making jokes, laughing and having a good time is so exciting and effective that I can't describe it. Now when I think about it, I can't understand why I almost exclusively have been listening to audiobooks before. Audiobooks are great in the sense that you get the language in a controlled environment, together with transcriptions and translations, -but it simply can't emulate the spontaneity and genuineness of real people. BTW. Not speaking about infants - isn't listening to real people chatting the real way kids learn languages? What happens when a 4-year old goes from beginner fluency to advanced fluency (which takes some years)? Some Results My own Japanese voice has changed significantly during the last weeks. Every now and then I just try to speak some Japanese words and phrases (or made up-words) in order to act as if I already knew the language. Now, all of a sudden, I automatically speak with another rhytm, intonation and voice level. It probably still sounds ridiculous, but I think it's so cool when input-only methods produce new output. Kanji Count: 1730 Wikipedia coverage: 87.8 % I think I reached some critical mass a couple of days ago. Written Japanese are beginning to make more and more sense. It's hard to explain, but seeing all those familiar characters everywhere does something with the overall understanding. A note about LR: Having gotten a few more hours of experience, I've had some further use of my kanji knowledge when LR-ing. Since the word order of Japanese is hard to predict, they do give very useful clues on what order the words will come in. Between having heard the Japanese audio, when I'm just about to switch to the next English part of the text (a split of a second), I can sometimes look back at the Japanese text and recognize some characters I didn't catch at the first go. At that moment, I still have most of the audio in my short-term memory (which will evaporate in the next second), and my brain can do some additional linking and sorting. That was hard to explain. It's like this: Read English translation -> Listen to JP audio and read JP text -> A last glimpse of the JP text again -> "Hey, I actually knew that kanji, it's 生! And I remember that the actor just said うまれ, which means that.." -> The brain shuffles, and sorts in the new information -> Go on to read the English translation -> Laugh because the story is so fun and exciting. Actions during the past week More LR of Alice in Wonderland - Isn't Alice the most lovely little girl! ----------------------------------------------------- Team K - M. Medialis 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| M. Medialis Diglot TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Sweden Joined 6358 days ago 397 posts - 508 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Russian, Japanese, French | Message 82 of 115 07 July 2010 at 6:45pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Well. I'm going off for a 2 week trip to Nepal (which will include visiting rural areas of the country)!
I'll probably do some Nepali LR experiments, but I've decided to focus my time on enjoying the actual trip and not the language aspect (I admit it's very very tempting to choose the latter ;). So now I'm all excited and I barely know anything about the country. -I'm prepared for everything. :D See you all, I'll be back! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| M. Medialis Diglot TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Sweden Joined 6358 days ago 397 posts - 508 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Russian, Japanese, French | Message 83 of 115 02 August 2010 at 5:18pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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TAC Log nr 17
----------------------------------------------------- And I'm back, full of inspiration to travel more (and tons of wanderlust...gaah). Actually, I did never really fall in love with the Nepali country and language. But I happened to meet a whole bunchload of cool people from different East Asian countries (Taiwan, Korea, Malaysia etc.). Now I suddenly have friends from all over the world - and there's where my newly found wanderlust comes in: I want to conquer the CJK. (it's so scary I barely dare writing it out..). I haven't devised any strategies for approaching the new languages yet, but I have the advantage that I can mess around as much as I want Chinese and Korean (which I can't do with Japanese as I have a strong desire to keep it 'pure' for some reason). So who knows, I may even try a word list method or something for Korean and reserve the LR and AJATT techniques for Japanese. I still have some planning to do before I start anything. Right now, I think I want to spend some time with Russian. The Russian lure came back to me the other day, so I may start LR Crime and Punishment soon. L1 Wanderlust I haven't been doing any constructive language learning the last month. But an interesting thing happened when I returned to Sweden some days ago. After having spoken English for three weeks, I disovered the beauty of my own language ! It has never happened before; When I heard people speaking Swedish at the airport, it sounded as vibrant and refreshing as Japanese often does to me (with the little difference that I actually understood every word). So I simply had to wander away in L1 by reading a short story by the Swedish author August Strindberg and read Swedish websites just for the pleasure of it. Now, talk about strange feeling. Current plan Sort out which languages I want to learn, and in what order. Begin some Russian LR and immersion. Get back on track with RTK. Seriously, I had 800 expired cards when I came back, which of course results in an exploding number of 'forgotten cards'. With other words: Time to have some serious fun in the kanji land. ----------------------------------------------------- Team K - M. Medialis Edited by M. Medialis on 02 August 2010 at 5:19pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5557 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 84 of 115 09 August 2010 at 12:04pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Welcome back from the mysterious misty peaks of Nepal to the more prevalent peaks of kanji land! How did you find the country and the people, did it live up to your expectations?
I think it's cool that you've rediscovered the vibrancy and beauty of Swedish, and totally agree with keeping up with native languages too. I've been guilty of wandering away from English myself lately as well, and haven't read a good novel in ages unless it's part of listening and reading. I think I'll join you in this rediscovery and dive into some English literature before bedtime from now on. And you WILL conquer the CJK, I just know it - get yourself some crampons, ropes and supplies, and let the climb begin! :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| M. Medialis Diglot TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Sweden Joined 6358 days ago 397 posts - 508 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Russian, Japanese, French | Message 85 of 115 11 August 2010 at 9:54pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Well, to be honest, I was quite shocked when I saw how dirty the country was. Trash on the streets and on the mountains, and really polluted air in Kathmandu. You know..I'm one of those clean guys who likes to wash his hands all the time. ;) On the other hand, the Himalayas was stunning of course. Got tons of great photos. The people were extremely nice and friendly. When we went out for a little mountain trek, we just slept in the houses of random people. So, it was a nice trip, and I got to see many things. But I realized that I feel more comfortable with people from East Asia than people from Nepal. I think it's their 'hyperactivity' that activates the best parts of me. Lol.
Thanks! Having support can make even the biggest task seem doable. :D 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| M. Medialis Diglot TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Sweden Joined 6358 days ago 397 posts - 508 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Russian, Japanese, French | Message 86 of 115 11 August 2010 at 9:55pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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TAC Log nr 18
----------------------------------------------------- Adventures in the Fluency Factory Total hours of Active Listening: 154 Well, I did plan to spend some serious time doing Russian immersion and studying, but the power of my Japanese inertia literally crushed all such attempts. This is a nice sign that my immersion environment works -my cell phone is filled with tons of fun Japanese podcasts, and it requires effort not to listen to them. :D And, when I've been listening to Japanese for 8 hours, it's so easy to continue doing Japanese stuff when I get home. Khatz made a nice tweet before that has stuck in my head: Procrastination is for Japanese! Brilliant, isn't it? Level-up Exciting news! I think I actually reached Natural Listening yesterday!! Up until now, I've felt that my Japanese has been thin and fragile and I've barely dared to touch it. Now, it's become a strong framework, and I'm pretty confident that I'm ready to move on to the next phase. The revelation came when I easily caught the name 'Avril Lavigne' in fast speech without any context or preparations. It just was self-evident that 'aburiruravin' was the Japanese way of pronouncing her name. I would never ever have been able to do this 1.5 months ago. I guess I should clarify that my vocabulary is still at a very very basic level. My Japanese powers are in areas that are hard to measure such as following conversations, easily recognizing words in fast speech, parsing words, and naturally understanding very simple sentences without translating in my head. I can also "read" pretty fast now, i.e. I've enhanced the text-to-speech engine in my brain. Another thought that occured to me is why massive active immersion is good before you've become proficient. It's a once-in-a-lifetime chance to get acquainted with the sounds, melodies and voices of the language - without having to be distracted by the meaning of what they are saying. Kanji Count: 1800 Wikipedia coverage: 90.5 % Phew. After having plowed thorugh 400 forgotten cards, I can finally start adding cards again. When I reach 2000, I will officially enter the next stage of my Japanese Adventure: Phase 2 - Time for details Until now, I've deliberately tried to avoid looking at the details of the language. My main methods have been LR, casual reading of parallel texts and different types of shadowing. The approach of starting the language in this way is my interpretation of Prof. Arguelles methods - laying a strong foundation before starting to actively learn words and meanings etc. At last, I will start doing Japanese Scriptorium. I've chosen Alice in Wonderland as my first scriptorium source since I'm in love with the book, and the language is really easy to follow. No wonder I got a headache trying to work with Natsume Soseki's books before - I just realized that the awesome compact language he was using is way beyond my level (it works pretty well for LR though). Current plan Live kanji. Breath kanji. Be kanji. Start to trim my pronunciation by recording myself and make sure that I get all the phonemes right. Print the LR-text of Alice in Wonderland, and start to do scriptorium! ----------------------------------------------------- Team K - M. Medialis Edited by M. Medialis on 11 August 2010 at 9:57pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6440 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 87 of 115 22 August 2010 at 11:20pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
First: congratulations. That is a nice milestone. Second: That's not natural listening. Natural listening is when you can follow the gist of a radio broadcast or children's story, the first time you hear it, with no advance preparation. It definitely comes later. Good luck with your studies! Edited by Volte on 22 August 2010 at 11:20pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| M. Medialis Diglot TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Sweden Joined 6358 days ago 397 posts - 508 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Russian, Japanese, French | Message 88 of 115 25 August 2010 at 4:46pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Volte: Thanks for pointing it out. I'll change the term to a personal made-up term (can't edit old posts though). I don't want to argue about anything, but I could add my latest (very un-scientific) thought: After summing up the advices of Atamagaii and Prof. Arguelles, and adding my own experiences, I've started to believe in the concept of "Minimal Natural Listening". It's a point where you would be able to follow along in fast speech if you just knew "what the words meant". In other words: If you know a word (any word), you're likely to catch it and understand it at any time without preparations. Many language learners (including myself 5 years ago) wait until they've gained strong reading and writing skills before they start to build listening comprehension. -My current approach is the opposite. So basically, my current idea is that listening abilities almost can be separated from vocabulary size. My personal (and unbased) theory: Atamagaii learns vocabulary at such a stunning speed, so when she reaches this level, she already knows enough words to understand radio shows and children's stories. Because of this theory, I just assumed 'Natural Listening' and 'Minimal Natural Listening' were the same thing. I have no idea if I'm right or not. To anyone reading this: I just wanted to share some random philosophizing. I'd like to elaborate on this idea some day, but for now I prefer to spend some quality time with Japanese. :D
Thanks! :D Edited by M. Medialis on 25 August 2010 at 5:22pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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