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TAC Team あ: Luai’s Climb to Trilingualism | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5382 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes  Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 17 of 68 07 March 2011 at 3:02am | IP Logged | ||
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Between doing 25 and only remembering a fraction of them and doing 5 and remembering most
of them, it probably comes to the same anyway. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Luai_lashire Diglot Senior Member United States luai-lashire.deviant Joined 5829 days ago 384 posts - 560 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto Studies: Japanese, French | Message 18 of 68 07 March 2011 at 5:04am | IP Logged | ||
True enough. And what with not having as big a pile of reviews to do and not getting as frustrated, it's probably actually MORE efficient to do the smaller batches, at least for me. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Luai_lashire Diglot Senior Member United States luai-lashire.deviant Joined 5829 days ago 384 posts - 560 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto Studies: Japanese, French | Message 19 of 68 12 March 2011 at 12:46am | IP Logged | ||
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Slightly early update:
Kanji I've been quite enjoying my japanese studies this week, which is excellent considering how completely I had lost motivation just a short while ago. I find myself longing to do more and more kanji; I haven't let myself, however, because I don't want a huge pile up of reviews. So far the kanji is going very well, I hardly forget any and I haven't missed a single day. I've reached #555. Vocabulary The rest of my studies however, aren't doing so well. I have been devoting a lot of effort to figuring out what I want to do for vocab study. I downloaded anki and a plugin that will allow me to easily suspend all cards that contain kanji I don't already know.... Except that the plugin has not been working properly. Besides this, I also downloaded several pre made decks, all of which had some kind of problem- mostly they were formatted in ways I disliked and could not have easily changed, but one of them actually crashed anki every time I tried to browse the deck! So I really have made no progress on this front except to conclude that I will need to make my own vocab deck if I want to study this way. And despite getting the plugin, I still haven't actually decided whether or not I want to limit my vocab studies to words that contain kanji I know. It seems foolish to study words with unknown kanji at this point since I will have to revisit them later; on the other hand, it seems like too much work to actively avoid them. I also haven't decided where I'm going to get my new words from. I probably won't work this out for a while. >.<; Listening Other than vocab, I have been working on diversifying my studies in other ways. I set up a japanese iTunes account and started downloading free podcasts. One in particular, called "Love Nature Episode", seems like it will be good listening practice. It sadly does not have transcripts, but the narrator has a clear, nice voice and speaks slowly enough to be easily understood without seeming unnatural. The topics are usually cute, touching stories loosely involving nature in some way; for example, a story of how getting a dog and taking him for walks helped a newly retired grandpa feel active and happy again. They're very short- 2 or 3 minutes- which makes them perfect for repeatedly listening to to make sure I've caught everything. My hope is that listening to this and other podcasts will help me further develop my listening skills; I've noticed that TV shows no longer seem to be helping me with this and I suspect it's because I have both visual context and subs to rely on- not to mention there's a lot of brief exclamations and so forth, whereas podcasts and radio tend to be a continuous stream of "lecture style" or storytelling language, instead. So it's a very different situation, and sure enough I can understand a lot less of a radio show than of a TV drama. Hopefully practicing with these podcasts will help me to better understand a wider range of media. I'm also considering using them as the main source for new vocabulary to stick in anki. If anyone's got advice on my vocabulary problem, it would be appreciated. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Luai_lashire Diglot Senior Member United States luai-lashire.deviant Joined 5829 days ago 384 posts - 560 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto Studies: Japanese, French | Message 20 of 68 12 March 2011 at 1:06am | IP Logged | ||
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There are a few things I just realized I had forgotten to mention in my update.
I haven't been mentioning French or Esperanto here at all because I'm not doing anything with them, but I've been itching to study languages more and more lately so I am considering taking the opportunity to begin my French experiment. What I cannot decide on is whether to jump straight into L/R, or to reread my grammar and possibly download and use Assimil beforehand. Besides this quandary, I also have been considering beginning, of all things, Hindi! My boyfriend has long been unable to decide on a religion that suits him, but has recently settled into hinduism.... quite possibly for good. I've never been able to interest him in studying a language before; he would like to know one, but is 100% convinced he cannot possibly ever learn one due to innate inability (even an easy one like Esperanto). Over the years, my insistence that failure in high school classes does not equate to inability to learn has slowly begun to wear down his resistance, and finally, his interest in hinduism has prompted him to cautiously offer to learn Hindi with me. Naturally I'm eager to encourage his interest and take advantage of this opportunity; but it does interrupt my plans and besides which, so far I'm not sure that he will actually do it. I sent him some links to websites where he can learn the script and basic phrases a week ago; he says he hasn't looked at them yet. He is under a lot of stress so I have to be careful not to demand too much of him but I don't know if I can expect anything from him at all. So for the time being I'm going to continue to encourage him but not actually commit to studying it myself yet. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5983 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 21 of 68 12 March 2011 at 12:28pm | IP Logged | ||
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Glad you're back in full swing on the Japanese studies! I think in terms of your vocabulary problem (and I think vocabulary is always a problem with Japanese!) I would say that your decision on kanji should depend on where you are getting the words from. If it is pre-made lists there is probably some sense in sticking to only the kanji you know, however there is a lot of merit in collecting vocabulary from native materials you actually want to read, in which case it is a good idea to expect yourself to get used to reading the kanji for them. I'm assuming you are still working through Remembering the Kanji (please correct me if I'm wrong) so you are attempting to learn around 2000 characters which do not appear in order of frequency and you still probably want to get used to reading really common words even if their kanji are quite far on in the book. Having familiarised yourself with nearly 600 characters already, you shouldn't find it too challenging to break down unfamiliar characters yourself anyway.
Your post also reminded me I should download a few more podcasts from itunes. I'm getting quite bored with the selection which have been on my mp3 player for months! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Luai_lashire Diglot Senior Member United States luai-lashire.deviant Joined 5829 days ago 384 posts - 560 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto Studies: Japanese, French | Message 22 of 68 13 March 2011 at 2:04am | IP Logged | ||
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Yes, that does make sense. I experimented today with trying to copy down new words by ear from a podcast
episode- it was a little frustrating, as I wasn't sure if the ones I couldn't find in the dictionary were rare words or idioms that weren't included in the dictionary, or if I was spelling/hearing them wrong. I tried googling them to see if they showed up in common usage but that mostly didn't get me anywhere either. :/ That said, I found at least 3/4 of my words with no trouble, so it was really a minor problem. I'd be much happier if I had transcripts though. I haven't put these words in Anki yet, but I probably will. But I don't know how often I will listen to podcasts or otherwise encounter words that I haven't met before, so I suspect my additions to Anki will be rather erratic.... As long as I'm posting this, I might as well mention that I have now reached kanji #565. I'm enjoying making up my own stories now, although I'm heavily relying on the stories of other kanji koohi users as well since I am not very good at stories yet. I make my own about 1/3 of the time. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Luai_lashire Diglot Senior Member United States luai-lashire.deviant Joined 5829 days ago 384 posts - 560 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto Studies: Japanese, French | Message 23 of 68 18 March 2011 at 1:06am | IP Logged | ||
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Just a quick update. Nothing much to report. I reached kanji #610. I'm still not doing anything with vocab. I have
listened to podcasts only a few times and haven't read at all, but I have been watching dramas and anime a bit more. I can tell that my pronunciation is becoming a bit better again now that I have more listening exposure than before; during my lapse in studies, my accent had become very American again, and now it's improving. I just have to not let myself get lazy and rely on familiar English sounds. That's all for this week. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Luai_lashire Diglot Senior Member United States luai-lashire.deviant Joined 5829 days ago 384 posts - 560 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto Studies: Japanese, French | Message 24 of 68 06 April 2011 at 9:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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It's been a while! Shortly after my last update, I had another one of my depressive episodes. It didn't last long,
thankfully, but it lasted long enough to severely throw me off my habitual behavior, and I spent about two weeks working back up to where I was. I have a lot of difficulty with a lot of things in my life, so actually during this time, getting back in the groove with my language studies took a back seat to getting back to exercising, eating well, and sleeping enough, as well as doing the various chores I have to do and controlling my tendency to get absorbed into the internet. This process was also complicated by the fact that as of last Friday I'm staying at my boyfriend's house for a short time while my parents are on vacation. I'll be going home next Sunday. Due to all this, I'm now very behind in my kanji studies, but today I did quite a bit of catch-up and am starting to get back to my every day habitual study plan. Kanji I'm currently at kanji #630, and to meet my first goal for the year, I have to reach #1000 by the end of the month, give or take a few days. This isn't impossible but will require me to do a bit more each day than I had been doing. Of course, lucky me, right now I'm in one of the more difficult chapters, with a lot of very abstract primitives and similar-sounding keywords. I'm failing a lot of kanji on the first review, but I seem to have a very good retention rate the second time I study them, so I'm not stressing about it. However I will wait until I get past this point before I start upping the number of new kanji I add. Vocabulary I finally started adding cards to anki. I have a system now where I take new words from the podcasts I'm listening to and the songs I'm learning and add them to anki in a format that shows me the kanji and the hiragana, so I don't have to recognize the words from just kanji but I do get to see what the kanji look like. After I finish RTK I'll do more kanji-intensive vocab studies, but for now I'm more interested in knowing the pronunciation. I'm taking it slow here; I have 30 cards in the deck right now but am only learning 5 new cards a day. Listening The podcasts are my main source of listening practice right now. My current way of using them is this: I listen two or three times over trying to grasp the meaning. Then I listen again while pausing frequently to help me pick out unknown words, and I copy them down in a google doc. I look up the unknown words (which I have often misspelled or missheard, sometimes to the point of being unfindable; I hope doing this will help me improve my ability to pick out mangled, whispered, or altered syllables) and add them to anki, leaving out any that I'm uncertain about or couldn't find. I look over the list briefly again and then listen to the podcast again while looking at the list, paying close attention to where the new words pop up. Then I listen through a final time with my eyes closed to grasp as much of the meaning as possible. I also plan to go back and listen again to podcasts I haven't studied for a while, after I've worked on other podcasts/reviewed the vocab more extensively, and see if they become easier. I hope that as I add recurrent and common vocab, each subsequent podcast will become easier. So far though there has been a lot of variation in the difficulty level of each episode. Reading No progress to report here. I really have trouble motivating myself to read my graded reader, but hopefully I will get back to doing that soon. I'm also thinking of trying L/R sometime soon. Esperanto I've regained some interest in studying the language recently and am considering adding vocabulary to anki slowly, just like I've begun doing with the Japanese words. I will wait and see how I like the Japanese anki first though. I also want to give a little update on the hindi situation. My bf has changed his mind based on a recommendation from a hindu friend of his, and wants to study sanskrit rather than hindi, starting next semester. I have less interest in sanskrit and so I probably won't do much studying with him, although I might learn some basics. It wouldn't be for a while anyway. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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