fortheo Senior Member United States Joined 5033 days ago 187 posts - 222 votes Studies: French
| Message 217 of 1702 18 January 2012 at 9:23am | IP Logged |
If you want a quick run through on grammar, michel Thomas is very good. However depending on the level of grammar you need to know, perhaps your books are better!!
best of luck, a little challenge never hurt anyone!!
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Sunja Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6082 days ago 2020 posts - 2295 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, German Studies: French, Mandarin
| Message 218 of 1702 18 January 2012 at 11:30am | IP Logged |
Hi kraemder and thank you for the link you posted in Erwin's log(^_^)
Let us know how the class is going! Are students expected to asnwer/ask questions in Japanese the second semester? I'm curious as to how much speaking is required..
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Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6617 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish
| Message 219 of 1702 18 January 2012 at 1:25pm | IP Logged |
I think it's better to take a class that's just a little bit tough and have to work hard, than to go to a beginner's class and be bored by it. And since the teacher seems to think you belong there, you probably do. I'm sure you'll catch up very quickly in your weaker areas, and in some areas, like kanji, you might even be a little stronger than some of the others.
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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 220 of 1702 18 January 2012 at 6:33pm | IP Logged |
We're not required to speak only Japanese - except of course when we're answering questions about Japanese (which is a lot). More Japanese in the class obviously makes the professor happy though. That's one nice thing about a native speaker professor. I've taken French in the past and the professors were American and they spoke mostly English and to be honest it didn't feel like they expected or even cared if students spoke French.
Some students were really making the effort to speak all Japanese but some like me were using English.. I think the ones speaking Japanese had him the previous semester and felt more comfortable in the class.
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g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5979 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German
| Message 221 of 1702 18 January 2012 at 11:11pm | IP Logged |
Well done on getting to the class. You are definitely past the stage of going to an absolute beginners class, and you are probably right in your assessment that it would bore you to tears. I think it takes some guts to get used to the idea of making a fool of yourself in your target language, but I think this is an inevitable part of learning and, in my experience, the one benefit of going to a class is it gives you a safe environment in which you can go ahead and make lots of stupid mistakes (and then learn from them).
To help pick up on your conjugations of verbs and adjectives, the first chapter of Japanese: The Spoken Language has a fairly extensive set of audio drills for both verbs and -i adjectives. A pdf of the first chapter is available on the publisher's website here and the audio is available here. You might find it helps if you run through the drills a few times over the next week as a quick and dirty way to get conjugating some very common verbs and adjectives.
And I think you should totally work on your best Japanese to ask your professor where in Japan he comes from!
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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 222 of 1702 19 January 2012 at 3:29am | IP Logged |
That's a good idea about working on my Japanese to ask him some questions about Japan and where's he's from etc. I'll take a peak at those links. I had planned to use the class book to review (102 uses the same book as 101) but the bookstore was sold out. Instead I went to www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar and copied the exercise drills into my flashcard app. It cut and pasted really nicely into my spreadsheet and into the flash card app. Didn't have to type anything. The text to speech on my app is reading it well too with two minor exceptions where I think it chose a different kanji reading than was intended by the website and there I recorded my own voice over it.
I'm hoping this stuff sticks lol. I hate feeling behind so I'm studying as hard as I can to catch up. I'm stressed a bit at the moment but I'm not sure when I'd get around to really actually studying grammar if I weren't doing this. I tried it before and found to painful and boring heh.
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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 223 of 1702 20 January 2012 at 5:53am | IP Logged |
Had class again. I studied adj declensions, post positions, and past tense a ton yesterday. If the class had
been right after I finished studying I'd have answered questions better but I slept on it and it got a little mixed
up in my head. A little like cramming for a test, taking it, and walking out not knowing anything. Not quite to
that extent though. We did some katakana and most of the class stinks at it lol. That made me feel better. I
had done all the katakana before class so I knew all the answers. We did a kanji exercise and I did quite well
on that too although I wasn't the best in the class (hard to say but maybe 4th best about so I did do well).
There's a wide array of skills in the class. Some either are diligent students so they knew the material from
101 or maybe they had more Japanese background than just 101. But a lot were also pretty clueless. Which
made me feel all the more bad for looking so stupid relatively speaking for the past tense and adj
declensions. It's just I only read it over but never studied it. So now I get to study double hard to catch that
up and learn new grammar at the same time =/.
The kanji exercise was fun in party because I was curious to see how Heisig would help me (a lot). I have a
pretty decent vocab for the amount of time I've spent studying Japanese but up until a month or so ago I
really stank at kanji. So I did -not- learn kanji with the vocab I learned. When you study it with Heisig there is
no Japanese so really I didn't know how well it all matched up when applied to Japanese. Well it matches up
pretty well. As I go over some vocab I notice sometimes the kanji meanings have nothing to do with the
Japanese words but at the same time usually there is a relation if not a direct one. So I was pretty happy to
see I knew most of the kanji for the Japanese he threw at us.
I might do a little more vocab tonight before bed but I'm not looking at grammar anymore w/o sleep. All this
mental straining to learn (please stay in my brain for the love of God!) wears me out heh.
Still no course book in the bookstore. I'm just using online resources for now. It's easy to cut and paste into
flashcards.
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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 224 of 1702 20 January 2012 at 9:02am | IP Logged |
New plan for my Heisig deck. I'm going to change the settings to push cards out to their maximum possible
amount. Doing it normal style i'll never clear out the due cards. Maybe I'll make the settings more normal in
a couple months. With the course I'm taking I'll have to cut back some on heisig although I'll still be doing at
least some every day.
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