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TAC Team あ: Luai’s Climb to Trilingualism | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| 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 57 of 68 03 October 2011 at 5:06pm | IP Logged | ||
Thank you!!! :) The textbook we're using right now is called Tobira: Gateway to Advanced Japanese and has a matching kanji book called Power Up Your Kanji. It's a pretty good book for people who have already reached intermediate, but it's almost 100% Japanese so I wouldn't recommend it to beginners, for sure. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| 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 58 of 68 05 October 2011 at 10:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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So, how did the Japanese interview go?
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| 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 59 of 68 06 October 2011 at 1:03am | IP Logged | ||
Well, I quite enjoyed the practice interview I did with your friend, and I think I learned a lot, but I haven't had the real one yet! That's tomorrow. Tonight I'm going to write a short composition on my thoughts on religion, just to help me figure out how to say some of the things I had trouble expressing yesterday, and refine my interview questions. I'll report back tomorrow afternoon! Also, as long as I'm here I might as well offer a brief update: - I'm still plugging in tons of new vocab all the time, my Anki deck has reached 480 cards, and I started a sentence deck using the example sentences from the grammar section of my textbook. I think it will be a good way to review grammar patterns we don't use much in class. That deck has 31 cards and is growing rapidly (about 15 cards a week and I hope to add a big backlog soon) - I've officially begun my process of applying for study abroad. I'll be going to Nanzan University in Nagoya if all goes well. Now I'm excitedly imagining all the places I want to go and things I want to do and I've started adding animal-related vocabulary to Anki to prepare for all the hikes and tours of natural places and zoos I want to go to! I was thinking about joining a birding club too. XD I'm getting ahead of myself! 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 60 of 68 07 October 2011 at 11:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yesterday I did the interview for my class project. The subject was on the difference between American and
Japanese religion- not just which religions are practiced, but how we think about and define religion. Needless to say it's a tough topic for someone who's not that fluent, but I think I did well. Unfortunately I was running on little sleep and no food (it was kind of a bad day) and it definitely impacted my ability, but the discussion was fascinating, and since we recorded it I can rewatch it and look up all the words my interview-ee used that I didn't understand! Over the course of the interview, we talked some about how well known the concept of shinto is in Japan, compared it to buddhism, and talked about how christians are viewed by the Japanese. Overall, from this and other conversations, it seems that most Japanese people know very little about shinto- they go to festivals and pray at shrines and so forth, but it's more out of cultural obligation or habit and they don't think too much about why. Most people probably don't know the name "shinto" either (especially young people). My interviewee said he thinks it's because after WW2, when the emperor was no longer considered a god or descendent of a god, people stopped talking about shinto and so young people grew up practicing it but not talking about it, so they don't understand it. Buddhism, on the other hand, is well known by name, and he thinks most Japanese people would call themselves buddhists. He thinks buddhism is different because it has more writings, similar to the Bible. About half of the interview was spent answering his questions about religion in America, which was every bit as enlightening because of the kinds of questions he asked. He was very curious about people who convert religions, and was surprised when he heard that quite a few people in America change religions around college age- either converting from one church to another within Christianity, or to a whole different religion. He asked a lot of questions about when and why this happens and how it affects families, and so forth. I really enjoyed the discussion and learned a lot of interesting things from it, but it definitely highlighted some of my weak points- I need to get better at conjugating verbs quickly on the fly (I mainly struggle with ones I don't use often), not switching from long to short form mid-conversation, and aidzuchi; and I need to massively increase my vocabulary to really be able to discuss this kind of topic. Mostly the grammar was pretty understandable though. I've reached a point where there's not a lot of genuinely new grammar to learn, mostly just lots of function words. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Lexii Senior Member United States Joined 5223 days ago 162 posts - 194 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese | Message 61 of 68 08 October 2011 at 3:12am | IP Logged | ||
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Sounds like a wonderful experience, Luai. It sounds like your focus had to shift from "I'm speaking Japanese" to "I'm exchanging ideas and, oh yes, we're using Japanese as the method of that exchange". Well done!
With regard to aizuchi, I had been noticing while watching videos or movies that it seems to be a common occurrence. As a matter of fact, the topic also came up on an episode of Yan I watched a few days ago (although it wasn't specifically named). The commentator said many English speakers might find it distracting or perhaps even slightly rude but it's considered normal among Japanese speakers. My instructor also mentioned it in class yesterday, because she was doing it. How did it affect you and your presentation? 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 62 of 68 08 October 2011 at 10:34am | IP Logged | ||
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I think radioshows or podcasts where there is either a discussion or a one to one interview makes fascinating study material for aizuchi.
Really glad the interview went ok. The problem with any exam or interview is you can never guarantee you'll be in top form on the day but it sounds like you did alright despite the sleep deprivation. So well done! Any ideas for how you are going to work on your conjugations? 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 63 of 68 09 October 2011 at 4:07pm | IP Logged | ||
We've been focussing a lot on aidzuchi lately in my class, and they're definitely very hard to get used to. It's not that we don't do it at all in English, but the timing is different and a lot less frequent than in Japanese. Also I found my tendency was to go for "hai" when I should be saying "sou desu ka" or just "ehhhhh". I think that my interviewee got more nervous and flustered when I wasn't using adzuchi well. The Japanese look for constant confirmation that they're being heard and understood, and when it doesn't come it makes them think maybe they aren't explaining well or their conversation partner isn't interested. Our teacher said that they will say things like "eito..." or "ano..." when they are looking for confirmation that they are understood, so if we hear someone say that we should always use aidzuchi. I didn't pay close enough attention to that this time around (I was a little overwhelmed with everything else) but next time I will definitely try to follow that rule and see if it helps. 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 64 of 68 09 October 2011 at 4:12pm | IP Logged | ||
Yeah, I might look for some interviews on YouTube for adzuchi study material. As for conjugations, I haven't got much in the way of ideas yet.... I'm thinking I might write some charts for verbs I screw up often and just drill them. I'm also going to get tons of example sentences with passive, causative, and passive-causative forms and add them to my sentence deck. Other than that I'm not sure. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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