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Japanese from scratch TAC 2015 東亜 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5181 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 1673 of 1702 04 September 2015 at 4:08pm | IP Logged |
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Packing day. I leave for Japan for 3 weeks tomorrow.
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| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5181 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 1674 of 1702 11 September 2015 at 7:48pm | IP Logged |
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I've been in Japan since Monday. It's really been a great experience and I would love to stay for longer than
the 3 weeks I was able to plan out this time around. One big downer is that I believe I left my iPad on the plane and it's not looking like I'm going to get it back. I'm still amazed at how polite everyone is. The store people are amazing. I can't say that everyone is helpful and likes foreigners (I had a less than helpful experience by an 駅員 in 新宿 station but overall people have been amazing. Heck, even this guy pimp guy who approached me to offer some less than illegal whatever was really really polite (I declined and got away as quickly as I could hehe). He had more manners than most store employees in the states. Really sad when you think about it. I'm staying in a share house which is like a college dormitory for adults. Well also students a bit too but mostly adults. People of all ages live in this building and for better or for worse it's an English speaking location in that the reason everyone lives here is to practice English. Mostly with each other. It's a little funny but I also think it's great. My Japanese is quite good compared to my German when I visited Germany and I was proud of my German then too. I have no problem asking anyone for directions or well about anything and understanding the response. I still struggle to keep up with natives talking with each other however. I remember the last time I tried to do that in German was a German Stammtisch in Phoenix maybe 5 or 6 years ago and I somehow managed to do it but really had a genuine headache afterwards. I think I'm about the same with Japanese now but I'm not pushing it to try join in with the natives just at the moment. The school is pretty good although they messed up my schedule twice. Except for today, I've pretty much been in a bad mood every time I got to school due to getting lost in 新宿 station and not having time to get breakfast or coffee before class. A messed up schedule didn't help things. But I'm getting more comfortable with the train station and finding my way through Tokyo in general so things are getting better. I haven't done much tourist stuff. I will do some but just doing regular stuff in Tokyo is really fine by me. I try to go jogging as much as I can etc. Class is ok. They placed me into a 中級 level although I think I could get by in the advanced level ok. Contrary to what I expected, I think my kanji ability is my strongest point relative to other people whom I'm grouped with. The grammar we're studying is N2 level so I can't complain. It should help me with the N2 and that's good. It does kind of blow my mind that I'm in a class with a couple of students who claim they started studying Japanese about 10 months ago however. I'm not positive that they just didn't count the time they spent before they got to Japan however. Obviously it counts. I have been studying 4 years and if I didn't count that then I would be a prodigy haha. Another impression of the Japanese people is that yes, they are indeed all thin and therefore good looking. Good looking Japanese girls/women everywhere =). Life is good. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5181 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 1675 of 1702 17 September 2015 at 2:09pm | IP Logged |
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Well I'm coming up to the last week of my vacation and I think I'm going to want to come back which means
quoting my job and being an English teacher or something If you come to Japan I recommend looking for share house of some to live in. People are really friendly and there's probably other locations where people enjoy practicing English. They're perfectly happy switching back and forth between Japanese and English which is good for me too. I will admit to being intimidated but tonight was better than most nights - I guess the longer I stay here the less shy people are of me and me of them which helps. And I have an iWatch which a lot of people are curious about. I should be posting here more but I'm busy I guess just staring at everything around me. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5181 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 1676 of 1702 28 September 2015 at 2:39am | IP Logged |
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I'm back from my trip and I had a great time. I am thinking about how I can best go about moving to Japan
to teach English next. Japanese women are all beautiful - I like asian features and they're all thin. You notice this right away when you arrive in Japan and again when you get back to the US. We're over weight here and it's a shame. I'm motivated to lose weight now - a Japanese girl at the share house kind of grilled me on my eating habits and when I got into why, her ex boyfriend who was American apparently gained a lot of weight after she started dating him or some such thing. I don't know all the details or why they broke up but clearly his getting heavy didn't help things. At the time I was eating chicken rice with curry and a beer. I had that meal quite often in Japan since it's tasty and I like beer both for the taste and it helps me open up a little with strangers more. Her concern was the calories which is unfortunately true. Despite my terrible eating habits by Japanese standards I lost 3 lbs in Japan - 1 lbs per week. I've lost weight more quickly before but 1 lbs a week is not bad at all haha. If I ate healthier I guess it would be 2 lbs per week. I'm thinking I'm going to apply for the JET program. On one hand I would like to go back to the same share house since I have friends there already but the JET program pays more than any other teaching gig and you're guaranteed not to get slammed with over time. There is a little OT but it's reasonable. The Japanese culture of everyone doing OT is really quite unhealthy I think. 8 hours a day is plenty - you need time with your family and friends and to do chores and stuff. I understand some people want to do OT for the money which is fine but it should be an option and not the norm. It's one of my big concerns about moving to Japan because I would hate to move to another country to experience the culture and meet people only to get worked to death and achieve none of that. I learned a little survival type Japanese like 帰り持ち means to go (for food) and こちらへ and 店内で means 'here' for eating at the restaurant instead of take out. お釣り doesn't just mean fishing (the meaning taught in my vocabulary lists) but also change. The N2 kanji can get you pretty darn far in terms of reading signs and a lot of regular stuff (it's incomplete but not bad). I'm also pretty taken aback at how bad most foreigner's Japanese is if they're westerners. It's totally the opposite of how westerners all speak English rather well but many easterners just don't (although that's not universal some do quite well, but a lot don't). I talked to an American who's been teaching English in Japan for 4 years and I think his Japanese is at about the N5 level or so. I didn't test him. I think he knows a lot of Japanese if it has to do with eating but that's almost like just adding to your English vocabulary - I will admit to not being interested in cooking so I'm pretty weak in that department. I met an American who seemed really really good at Japanese but he told me how he is returning to the US and needs to work hard on his Japanese so he can come back to get a job. Apparently he knows 'street' Japanese only from talking to girls all the time I guess. He's a smooth talker and was dating one of the prettiest girls in the share house. You meet a lot of types. I missed the sign up date for this year's JLPT. I thought I had all of September and a few days into October to sign up. In other words I thought I could put off signing up until after I got back from Japan. I was wrong - the cut off is the 25th. This will be the 1st year in a while that I don't do the JLPT. It kind of takes some pressure off hehe. I was told that if I pass the N2 it really helps the resume to open doors in Japan both if I am teaching English and if I want to try to get a job doing something else. If I have the N2 apparently I'm not limited to teaching English. Since I almost passed the N2 already I would say I'd rather improve my Japanese more before doing a job where I need to use Japanese but I wouldn't be one to tell the Japanese people that their N2 test isn't rigorous enough lol. I played basketball with some Japanese people (and a French guy) and it was a blast. I truly regret letting my basketball skills decay over time - it's been over 20 years since I played regularly. After 8th grade when I stopped playing on teams I think I played a couple times a year until I finished high school and then stopped entirely. I got thrown into a game without the benefit of even shooting the basketball for 10 minutes. I also somehow sprained one of my fingers right away. Being 38 and not having played basketball so long I was tired right away. I go jogging a lot but that's a totally different thing than basketball where you are racing against someone to beat them. And they were all younger than me too. Thankfully they were short as hell or I'd have had nothing going for me. But the point is that if you have a sport that you play, you may want to brush it up before going to Japan so you can use that to meet people. I am brushing up basketball now for that reason - and also because it's fun and I feel like a kid again when I play. The whole taking your shoes off inside is a real pain. I have some pretty good slippers that would have made this much more bearable at the share house except they were on the floor next to where my suit case was instead of IN my suitcase and I had to spend a lot time either barefoot or with socks as a result. It wasn't so comfortable. And I find it annoying that you have to use special slippers for the restroom, especially considering my feet are bigger than most Japanese feet and those slippers are tiny. It rains constantly and so if you come from a dry climate (like me) you won't be used to this and your footwear may not be so well suited. My regular shoes I wear are ok for a bit of rain but BIG puddles that go over the sole leave my feet soaked and uncomfortable for the rest of the day. Not good. And I hate tying my shoes and untying my shoes throughout the day. I just went online to Amazon and bought $35 shoes that are water resistant and slip on. I so wish I had them before this trip but I'll be ready for next time. Strangely, I didn't see too many Japanese with slip on shoes. I would think shoes that you slip on and off without shoe laces would be the norm but they're not. A lot of people seem to squash the backs of the shoes so you can slip them on and off anyway (basically turning them into slippers) but I'd rather not do that to my shoes. I'm motivated to keep learning Japanese of course. I can't say I was really lacking motivation before however so I don't know that it will change much. I bought a lot of manga. I had no idea what to buy so I got whatever looked fun and luckily I liked this title: One punch man. It's very clever and funny and basically makes fun of super hero comics in general but at the same time I'm very interested in the plot and what's going to happen to this super hero guy who always wins with one punch (you would think this would mean a lack of suspense and boredom but it's great). There's an anime based on the manga that just came out this fall season. I watched the 1st show on some stream site but unfortunately I don't see this title on Crunchy roll. I will say it was quite frustrating not being able to watch Crunchyroll in Japan. It's ironic but I can watch tons more anime in the US than in Japan. I happened to catch a couple of old shows of Silverspoon on the TV there but otherwise none at all unless I go looking for illegal streaming websites or something online. My plan for studying right now is to continue through kanji in context doing the workbooks. I don't mind if it takes me a year to finish I just want to make consistent progress with it. I'm going to painfully make my own flashcards in FCD since I don't care for the sets made by other people even if some of them have fancy Japanese audio ripped from the iOS app. In addition I got the grammar まとめ N2 book (Gorilla) in Japan and I want to go through that. I like the English translations - it helps me make sure I understand the sentences they give. I also have some N2 reading comprehension books but I think I'll make those a low priority for now until I finish the grammar books. I now know over half of the N2 grammar more or less so I could jump into them but I'm not doing the N2 this year anyway so no hurry. I've got my manga I bought and I bought the first two light novel books that the anime ゲート is based off of. They're pretty long. I also bought the Hobbit in Japanese. The anime is obviously easier so I'm reading that first. I put the vocabulary into the Japanese for iOS app and study off that which is working pretty well. And finally I'm going through the N2/3/4 kanjis and N2/N3 vocabulary using the sticky study app on my phone. I used to love the system because it's not SRS the way anki does it but now that I've been using it the past few weeks I think anki or FCD is better. So that's where I'm at. I want to go back to Japan mostly for the girls and also because I think teaching English would be more enjoyable than my current job. But going there means I would give up a car/motorcycle and the ability to have a large apartment or house if I chose. You really get small living quarters. However, I think Japan would be worth the inconvenience. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5181 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 1677 of 1702 28 September 2015 at 11:15pm | IP Logged |
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I finally got a 'Japanese' account on amazon.jp so I can get ebooks off of there. It's not hard - you just
update a Japanese address for your 'country' and put your US address or whatever for your credit card. I'm really happy about this because carrying books is a pain and I can use the ocr dictionary KanjiTomo to look stuff up. I was trying the kindle dictionary and it works more or less but it's actually inferior. Ok for when I'm on the go or want to read in bed but I'll do most reading on the computer. I'm thinking of dumping vocab into FCD. FCD has an option to do multiple choice instead of flashcards. Yes it's easier than flashcards are so you may not learn as well - but if you're going to indiscriminately dump all vocab into your SRS then that easiness may be a really good thing. I've purchased all a ton of Baby Steps manga online and 七王国の王座 (JRR Martin Song of Fire and Ice). I haven't read his books in a number of years and I'm probably the only person who hasn't watched the series on HBO. With KanjiTomo reading it is going pretty quickly so I don't get bored. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5181 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 1678 of 1702 02 October 2015 at 5:07am | IP Logged |
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Well if you do the above method to buy ebooks off amazon.jp you'll be a bit frustrated if you try to get
audio books on there as well. There are other sites that you can buy ebooks off of but for whatever reason they're stricter - the billing address for your credit card must be in Japan. I bought some audio books a while back from another site and haven't listened to them in a while. I am planning to track them down (I may need to re download them most likely) and then purchase the books for those audio books. I listened to a few German audio books and it may have been very helpful for me. It's hard to say for sure what helped me the most besides extensive reading. Extensive reading might be all that matters. I'm punting on trying to learn lots of vocabulary using SRS and multiple choice. Doing the reviews takes just as long really and yes it's easier but since the reviews take just as long it's like why bother. I'm still doing SRS of course for vocabulary. I'm doing most of it through Japanese for iOS. When I was in Japan the ease of adding new vocabulary on the fly was truly helpful and the learning algorithm seems pretty good. The only problem with it is that it makes you go through all due cards once before reviewing the ones you missed. So if you have a -lot- of due cards.. well.. you're in for a long evening. The work around is to make sure your decks don't get that big. About 100 seems ok. I'm using sticky study japanese. Right before I left for Japan I started using it for N2 and set the due date to learn everything for a little before the test. It seemed ok but at the same time I know a lot of N2 material already. I've since tweaked the default SRS settings some to be a little more aggressive in the beginning. And I figured out how to press the middle star icon when I know something solid so it goes to the known pile and that should make studying a lot more efficient. I'm no longer using it for vocabulary though - just for the JOYO Kanji. I think really getting the kanji down pat is the best thing I can do going forward. So I'm going to cut back on adding new vocabulary to focus on just doing kanji. This is a little against what people generally say about learning kanji in context and in words if not sentences. However, I haven't really tried it this way and I think it will help a lot with the less frequent kanji. I feel I've picked up on the more frequent kanji already and the less frequent kanji I think you kind of have to sweat over a bit. Anyway. The idea in cutting back on the vocabulary in SRS (but not eliminate it) is to open more time for reading. I need to read more. And just not worry too much about saving vocabulary for SRS. Just read. It's hard. There's so many tools to save vocabulary for later studying that it takes will power to resist. But I need to control it. Doing more reading means of course I -will- get kanji and vocabulary in context in addition to the kanji in isolation flashcards I'm doing. A big reason why I think studying kanji in isolation (the 2nd side of the card does give example vocabulary) is that I've found that if I see kanji that I haven't studied in isolation but just in context... it looks familiar if I see it in a different word but it doesn't 'click'. I have to see it in the same word combination that I studied it in originally. Not always but often enough that it's frustrating. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5181 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 1679 of 1702 02 October 2015 at 5:12am | IP Logged |
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Oh. And I'm thinking about how to get back to Japan as soon as possible. I was thinking about just
quitting my job when my apartment lease is up, selling everything, going to Japan and renting a room at the share house I stayed in. I want to spend at least 3 months just studying the language. Basically get the sabbatical I asked from my company but got denied. And then look into getting an English teaching gig. One problem with that is the whole visa thing. Americans get 90 day visas in Japan. I have heard you can leave the country and come back to get another 90 days but can only do this once. It seems stupid that you have to waste money on a plane ticket just for some visa paperwork. And another problem (maybe) is that I just spent 3 weeks in Japan recently so that might be one of my 90 days I get (per year?). So I'm looking into it. I was thinking that studying on my own would be cheaper and probably more effective than going to a school but then I thought that it would also get lonely after a week or so. So I sent an email to genki jacs where I just did classes and asked them if I could come back for 3-6 months and how that would work with the whole visa thing. I'm waiting on a response. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4662 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 1680 of 1702 02 October 2015 at 7:30pm | IP Logged |
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Sounds like you really had a blast!
We had someone denied a sabbatical a few years ago: he left and then, about six months down the line, he ended up coming back (because we needed him and he knew the ropes already). So you never know, you might not be burning the bridges completely. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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