g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5981 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German
| Message 9 of 333 24 December 2011 at 11:55am | IP Logged |
I would agree with you, it is far too slow to cover things like kanji and plain forms and I would never recommend it as a beginner text. But I have been using book 2 on my own and book 3 in class and the more advanced stuff is actually pretty good in my opinion. I like the fact that there are loads of recorded example dialogues which I have found to be really good for shadowing, and more helpful than the green shadowing book.
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g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5981 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German
| Message 10 of 333 28 December 2011 at 12:58am | IP Logged |
I have just registered myself for the next tadoku challenge which kicks off on 1st January. I thought it would be a nice way to kick of my 2012 TAC too. The plan is to mainly read graded readers for elementary school kids plus some manga, so it all should be just within my level. I've set a goal of 620 pages, so 20 pages a day. For me that will be a challenge but not an impossible one.
I've ordered the box of books I promised myself for finishing my dissertation, including some more graded readers plus a couple of basic cookery books. I love the idea of trying to learn to cook Japanese food in Japanese!
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g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5981 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German
| Message 11 of 333 31 December 2011 at 11:06pm | IP Logged |
I guess I'm still two hours too early, but I finally managed to put up a new post on Lang-8. I've been working a bit on Basic Kanji Book tonight and one of the questions was to write a little bit about the TV channels and programmes in my country. Armed with this flimsy bit of inspiration, I set about writing a few lines and thought I'd upload to Lang-8 for posterity and, more importantly, corrections. Hopefully there will be more of this in 2012.
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g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5981 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German
| Message 12 of 333 01 January 2012 at 4:13pm | IP Logged |
Given that some of the other team members are either studying or a native speaker of French, I have decided that I will also attempt to get my French back this year. I studied French for about 6 and a half years at high school in the UK and also took an evening class about 6 years ago, as an adult, although I dropped out halfway through because I was frustrated at being unable to communicate as well as anybody else in the class. When I was studying French previously I really had no idea how to take responsibility for learning a language on my own and this showed itself through my mediocre performance. But I think at my "peak" I was probably around a B1 level. I have had a long standing aspiration to get back into French but due to other commitments plus a concern about it interfering with my Japanese interests I have always put it off.
For now I am just going to use Assimil to ease myself back in, partly because the course seems to be well rated by a number of people on this forum and also because I expect it will only take around 20 minutes or so to get through a lesson on the passive wave, which is reasonable enough for me to build it into my daily routine. I just had a go with the first lesson and it was pretty straightforward, but going through the exercises made me realise I have to take a bit of care over the orthography, particularly the use of accents. But that's nothing compared to kanji, I guess!
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Sunja Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6084 days ago 2020 posts - 2295 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, German Studies: French, Mandarin
| Message 13 of 333 01 January 2012 at 8:36pm | IP Logged |
g-bod wrote:
I have to take a bit of care over the orthography, particularly the use of accents. But that's nothing compared to kanji, I guess! |
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After studying Japanese so intensely, you may find that French has gotten easier!
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g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5981 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German
| Message 14 of 333 01 January 2012 at 8:50pm | IP Logged |
Sunja wrote:
g-bod wrote:
I have to take a bit of care over the orthography, particularly the use of accents. But that's nothing compared to kanji, I guess! |
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After studying Japanese so intensely, you may find that French has gotten easier! |
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Yeah...apart from the small matter of gender, adjective agreements, pronouns and the number of irregular verbs...
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Takato Tetraglot Senior Member HungaryRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5047 days ago 249 posts - 276 votes Speaks: Hungarian*, EnglishB2, GermanB2, Japanese
| Message 15 of 333 03 January 2012 at 10:53pm | IP Logged |
In my opinion, learning irregular verbs out of context is kinda waste of time. At least, if you've learned the patterns already. I mean there's a better way. Reading French texts should make the irregular ones stick in your brain. I recommend you UltraLingua if you find hard to find out what the infinite form of the verb you just met is. At least it helped me in studying Spanish.
Edited by Takato on 04 January 2012 at 3:48pm
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Woodsei Bilingual Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Woodsei Joined 4796 days ago 614 posts - 782 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Egyptian)* Studies: Russian, Japanese, Hungarian
| Message 16 of 333 05 January 2012 at 6:41am | IP Logged |
Great plans for the upcoming year! Good luck on your tadoku challenge, it certainly seems interesting to see
your progress in it!
In addition to "self talk" exercises, which I plan to do so myself in the future, you can also try to recite songs
you like. I know your focus is producing original phrases, but I find that if I try to recite long lines of, say,
songs, or dialogues I hear in dramas or anime that I really like and find memorable, it sort of loosens up my
tongue and gets me in the flow of Japanese speech. I'm a beginner and don't know much, but I listened to a
song the other day that I liked a lot so many times I memorized it, because it kept playing itself in my head,
and found I can actually produce the same sounds with the same intonation effortlessly, both for what I
understood of it, and what escaped me. Just my two cents. Hope it helps.
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