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日本語 and me the next round TAC 2012 Team い | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6612 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes  Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish | Message 185 of 333 20 August 2012 at 9:27am | IP Logged |
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Thanks for the description. The simplest and least detailed explanation is often the best. I'm still not sure if it's for me, but now I at least understand how it works. Though that passive wave sounds pretty active to me. I thought it would probably mean just listening and getting used to the sounds or something.
That's great that you were able to save your data at least. You can always get a new computer, but data that isn't backed up, just disappears. I had a catastrophic failure with my work computer once and they couldn't save anything from the harddrive. Even though they supposedly have a backup on the server, there were still a lot of things I didn't get back. Not all of them were entirely work related either, so I was rather upset that some of them disappeared. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5974 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 186 of 333 23 August 2012 at 7:43pm | IP Logged |
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This week I got another lesson in what it is to lose a skill through lack of use. I should be use to this. I've already let my musical ability and French knowledge go to rot. But this time it caught me out of the blue. I was asked if I could solve a problem at work. The skills needed to solve the problem are not necessary for my job, but I had developed some ability in the past for different reasons. However I had not used these specific skills for several years. I could remember enough to solve half the problem but I did not have enough time to refresh my skills sufficiently to solve the other half. A few years ago I probably could have solved the problem without thinking too much about it. But now I find I have lost this ability, without even realising it was disappearing.
As my focus has shifted firmly away from Japanese and onto German (32h German and 3h Japanese so far this 6WC) it left me contemplating once again, what is going to become of my Japanese? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5176 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 187 of 333 24 August 2012 at 4:41am | IP Logged |
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Maybe someone with actual experience can better answer but my guess is that your kanji is going to suffer a
lot but that otherwise it will simply become a passive skill that will come back again if you get back into it. My Spanish and German don't seem to be getting much worse through lack of use. I can still read/understand pretty much the same as always. I think it depends on how much time you spent on something. At one point in my life I spent several years on both languages (especially German). A lot of it is in long term memory for good as far as I can tell. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6612 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish | Message 188 of 333 24 August 2012 at 7:58am | IP Logged |
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I agree that kanji disappear fairly easily, but even so, the ones you you most frequently should come back fairly quickly when you start up again. The other stuff will get rusty as well, but it's surprising how it comes back when you start using it.
Of course, you have to remember that how much and how quickly it comes back is proportional to how much time you spent studying it before leaving it, and inversely proportional to how long you leave it for. If you had only been studying a short time and only had a tenuous grasp on the grammar and a small vocabulary, you would probably lose almost everything. But I think your skills are high enough that these things will stay mostly in your head somewhere, hidden under some boxes and a layer of dust, waiting for you to uncover them. How long you stay away is more of a problem. I suggest that you try to keep doing some small thing in Japanese on a regular basis, if not every week, then at least once a month. You could just watch a movie or read a manga or something. That should be help to keep some of the dust off. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5974 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 189 of 333 25 August 2012 at 3:34pm | IP Logged |
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I think I just need to relax a bit, don't I?
This week I've been suffering from an inability to get enough sleep. I don't know why, it's been a long time since I've suffered insomnia for no reason at all. Maybe it's just the weird British weather. The difference in my performance is massive though. Work has been difficult this week and needless to say, I don't think I've really learned much by way of languages. Lack of sleep just does nasty things to your memory. I skipped my German Assimil on Thursday in the hope that an early night would sort me out. It didn't. So last night I went back to Assimil but I only really half did the lesson because I was just too tired. I think I'll review it again today and move onto the next lesson if I have time. They are getting more challenging now, much longer and more detailed. And, for someone like me with no background in German grammar, you really have to pay attention to the notes if you're not clever enough to figure things out for yourself. All the information you need is there, but tucking it into brief notes means I have to make the effort to engage with it. I've started taking some notes of my own and spending a little time thinking about things. It might not be pure assimilation this way, but it helps (at least if I've had enough sleep...) Something weird is going on in my head. I don't think I'm one of these people who can naturally compartmentalise languages and maybe I'll need to learn how to become multilingual. When I started learning Japanese and couldn't say very much, if I couldn't instantly think of how to say a phrase or sentence, very often the appropriate French words would rush to mind if I could still remember them. From reading about similar experiences on HTLAL, I think I can assume this is quite normal. Over the years I have ignored French and worked almost exclusively on Japanese, therefore suppressing the French. I still assumed I had only had made space in my brain for one language, so when I started with German, I expected Japanese would keep popping up to fill in the gaps, at least to start with. The weird thing is, I'm getting it with both Japanese and French. And French is also popping up now when I'm trying to think about Japanese (admittedly an activity I'm not doing very much at the moment). And sometimes German also pops up when I'm trying to think about Japanese, which is even weirder because I don't have much German in my head to start with. I'm not upset by this development. In fact I was quite pleasantly surprised when French popped up to say hello, because it means it's still there somewhere! And there are times when thinking about comparisons between the languages really helps to clarify concepts or make words stick. But as the languages keep popping up quite involuntarily, I can find it quite distracting, particularly if I'm trying to use some active skills. I think I have two choices to deal with it. I could take the same approach I had when learning Japanese, focus exclusively on German and suppress the rest. This would probably help me see some quicker results in German, but I would only be putting off the problem until I pick up another language or decide to return to Japanese or French. So instead, I think perhaps I should continue to focus on bringing my German up to a usable level, but instead of surpressing French and Japanese, maybe I should just relax and start messing around with these languages too. It will probably make for an interesting couple of months with very little progress, but at least that way I hope the three of them will eventually learn how to get along together. I would really like to make a proper go of doing Assimil's New French With Ease. If it is anything like the German one, I think that after the first couple of weeks it will be an excellent way to revise all the important grammatical concepts I really should know already. I think it perhaps might be sensible to wait until I hit the active wave with German though, as I'm not sure how much extra work this is going to be. In the mean time, I think there's no harm in cracking open my Astérix for a bit of light entertainment. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Takato Tetraglot Senior Member HungaryRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5040 days ago 249 posts - 276 votes Speaks: Hungarian*, EnglishB2, GermanB2, Japanese | Message 190 of 333 26 August 2012 at 3:27pm | IP Logged |
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I English each day much (just easy stuff, really, no reading of Shakespeare/philosopher's stuff/cooking). Spanish weekly some days in the last 400 days. When learned as much Chinese as I could, it didn't worsen my Spanish one bit (I expose myself to some Spanish in those weeks, just as well). German got rusty. German firstly was difficult (Spanish words popping up) due to only maybe one hour German monthly on the last 400 days but it got much better because these last weeks I Germaned on some days of the week, so I think it be good. Just need to expose myself to such an amount of German like that of Spanish, I guess. (Or such frequency, rather.)
I don't make a system for learning Spanish. I just use it (be it passive or active) when I happen to, so it's maybe weekly one or two hours at least, but my knowledge of it doesn't seem to worsen one bit, so I think you need to use/expose yourself to Japanese and French each week some days. Edit: You probably want to learn German with French or Japanese stuff. Learning Chinese with a Chinese-English dictionary is a good thing at least. 可恶 means repulsive, vile, hateful, abominable. I only knew what hateful means but I liked the word abominable so I learned it (but I don't think I'd ever learn vile... not too appealing...). When there are only rarely used words as a definition (or something I don't know, really...) then I more or less have to learn one of them, not just what the Chinese means. I particularly think learning Chinese through Japanese would've been an easier/better choice because of 都 and も and what not matching each other, but it would've required me to know Japanese. And I don't learn too much grammar anyway so it's probably not much of a wasted time. By the way I found many Chinese people learn Japanese. Maybe it's obvious, though... Edited by Takato on 26 August 2012 at 4:12pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5974 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 191 of 333 27 August 2012 at 9:20pm | IP Logged |
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Bank Holiday here in the UK, so I had the day off work today. I've generally spent the weekend catching up on sleep, going out on my bike, enjoying a few hours in the park when it was actually sunny and getting the relaxation I needed. I've also managed to log some 9 hours of language work on the 6WC Twitterbot, including a few hours of Japanese. I think a bit of the spark has come back to me for Japanese over the past couple of days. I think I'm starting to change my attitude towards my Japanese project. Picking up a new language from scratch has helped me to review my attitude and approach to Japanese. Whether this will translate to better results remains to be seen.
I'm not sure if I can express my feelings about it particularly well, but I will give it a go. Please excuse any massive generalisations, I think maybe my own problem may have its roots in my own misinterpretation of information anyway. In general, I get the impression that amongst Japanese learners there seems to be a bit of an obsession with numbers. Maybe this is fuelled by the combination of the specification of the old JLPT syllabus and the kanji problem. Whether this is a truly accurate representation or not, I don't know, however it seems to be possible to distill from blogs, articles, logs, JLPT prep books etc a message that learning Japanese is all about somehow internalising a combination of: 2000 kanji 10000 words (or 10000 sentences) 500 sentence patterns And so on Even at times when my common sense has told me otherwise, and I'm sure I've spoken about this before on my log, I still seemed to hold on to the unconscious belief that the best, or most efficient, or maybe even the only way to get my Japanese up to a higher level (e.g. fit to sit the N2 exam) would be churning through wordlists and the like, with the assistance of SRS. Such a method is simple and easily quantifiable. If the old JLPT syllabus says you need 6000 words for ２級, it seems a reasonable goal to aim to collect 6000 words in your SRS deck. And SRS in itself seems a reasonable solution to the problem of making sure you can actually remember them all come the day of the exam. If all the JLPT blogs I've seen out there are anything to go by, it seems to be quite a common approach. I must admit I was very attracted to the Anki concept in the beginning. I had bad memories of coming back from my French A Level classes when I was at high school with pages full of scribbled vocabulary lists from the lessons that I had no idea what to do with. They got filed away and forgotten about and my French never really progressed. SRS seemed the perfect solution to this problem, and in many ways it is. If I needed to memorise a few hundred facts for an important exam, I'd probably go with SRS as the safest bet (and then drop the deck as soon as I was confident of a pass). However now I'm beginning to wonder if the real issue is, when it comes to learning a language (rather than just pleasing a teacher), I was trying to solve the wrong problem. There is something of a sickly perfectionism that seems to sit behind the Anki system. Maybe I'm being unfair and maybe the problem really is that I have a tendency towards perfectionism which pushes my own compulsion of "I must learn ALL the words!" against the Anki philosophy of "you're brain NEVER STOPS forgetting!" and creates for me what you might call a sub-optimum learning environment. So, on to the epiphany. Overall with German so far I have avoided Anki. After my first session with tutor, I came away with yet another mammoth list of words. I put around 100 nouns into Anki and drilled them all week, just so I could turn up to the next lesson, prove that I'd memorised them with the gender and move onto something more interesting. Yes, I successfully memorised them with gender. I can recite certain words like a dictionary. But I still can't use them in proper grown-up sentences yet. In the mean time I've been using a few other useful resources and in particular I seem to have fallen for the Assimil method. Once I got the hang of the layout of the book and the best way for me personally to approach it, it has turned into my principle text. I'm using the free materials on the DW website as a thorough and useful supplement and occasionally dip into my grammar book if I want to work on something I'm not quite comfortable with through Assimil alone. I am no longer really doing any specific vocabulary work and what I have noticed is that with the right methods and materials (for me), I can trust my brain to remember things. Now I have seen posts from other learners who, like me, either did not enjoy or slowly got bored with SRS. However, against the backdrop of the general number-crunching approach towards Japanese learning elsewhere, I never quite believed them. I often felt a sense of feeble desperation thinking about this massive and apparently unattainable sum of vocabulary I'm supposed to accumulate. Each time I tried cracking open kanji or vocabulary books and churning away at word lists to solve the problem of 6000 words/1000 kanji which I apparently need for N2 level. No wonder I reached a point this summer where I just thought to myself "what is the point of this?" So I think I've come to the conclusion that actually, I was trying to solve the wrong problem. I need to forget about 1000s of kanji and forget about 1000s of words. The real problem is finding good quality resources and methods so that I can get on with just studying the language in manageable chunks and trusting my brain to remember things. I watched Prof. Arguelles' video today about moving from intermediate to advanced, which seems to have cropped up on a couple of threads here again recently. The video is here and I'd recommend it to anyone who feels they have hit an intermediate plateau as there are plenty of suggestions for different activities to try. The one which really stuck out to me is using a primer or graded reader (that is, a book which contains excerpts from real native materials but with detailed notes and/or a dictionary for language learners). The suggestion was to take a photocopy of the native text and use it to take notes of any words you don't understand, creating your own interlinear text. My Read Real Japanese books seemed to be most appropriate for this activity, so I spent 25 minutes today going through the first page of the first essay in the Essays book. I really enjoyed it and felt that I got a lot more involved with the text than I have done previously. Assimil German is really helping me to approach things I don't understand completely in a much more analytical way, which suits my thinking style much more than a brute force approach. I guess I'm finally starting to learn how to learn. The other thing I've been thinking about is how to deal with kanji. I've had a few failed attempts at getting to grips with the Kanji in Context books but somehow I keep getting drawn back to them...but this time my approach is different. Previously, I worried mainly about the thousands of words, phrases and sentences and kept churning through them in Anki. There was just so much information, I always gave up before getting too far in because the Anki screen time just got ridiculous. However, the one reason why people keep singing the praises of Kanji in Context is the way that the material is carefully selected and ordered throughout the workbooks. You are expected to know a couple of hundred common kanji (and all basic grammar - old 3級 level at the very least) to start with, but it introduces new words with furigana, before they show up again as kanji you should know and the furigana is taken away. There is a lot of built in repetition. I wonder if maybe I can forget about SRS completely, forget about wordlists for kanji completely, and study reading solely from the workbook, trusting my brain to remember things with the support of the repetition that has been designed into the book. I noticed that there are little boxes beside each phrase or sentence in the workbook. I started again with Chapter 1 and read through each phrase and sentence, putting a tick in the box for every one I definitely understood and was confident I could pronounce. I then looked up a couple of things I wasn't sure about, and left it to the next day. I went back to the unticked boxes and ticked them because I was confident I could read the material, and moved on to Chapter 2 to carry out the same process. This approach is very easy and quick for now as it wasn't all that long ago I was drilling this stuff in Anki anyway. But I will stick at it with one chapter a day and see how it starts to feel once I get to chapters I've never covered before. I've put a little challenge for myself onto the Consistency Thread to cover one page a day (gives me some wriggle room if doing a whole chapter gets too hard too quickly) and will see how it goes. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6612 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish | Message 192 of 333 27 August 2012 at 9:50pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks for the link, I'm looking forward to watching the video if my computer ever manages to load it.
I see you've given up the Super Challenge and will read and watch things at your leisure instead. What? Is 100 books and 100 movies in 20 months not leisurely enough for you?! ;) When I studied Norwegian (pre-Anki and with little to no use of computer/internet), I tried all kinds of ways to learn vocabulary -- lists, flashcards, etc. It's all boring and a bored mind doesn't learn anything. I got very frustrated and gave up many times. Finally, I decided to just read whatever seemed like fun. (In the beginning I read a lot of Donald Duck.) I found that I learned not only the meanings of the words, but also how they were used, by seeing them again and again in context. I don't think the process is much different in Japanese. Read and listen and you will absorb all kinds of things. If you're reading and a word looks interesting or crops up so frequently that you want to see a more precise definition, then you can look it up, but you shouldn't look up everything because then it will become a chore. You shouldn't try to memorize vocabulary words because the words will be repeated again and again and you will learn them without any artificial tools and without feeling like you're working at it. The only difference with Japanese is of course that you have to learn the kanji. But doing some kind of exercise with that on the side doesn't have to be too painful. It's only when you start spending all your study time trying to forcefully cram things into your head that studying becomes really painful. The books you have, sound like they are relatively enjoyable, so learning kanji shouldn't be so bad. Of course, as you gain vocabulary, you will eventually need to develop active skills as well, and these will in turn better your passive skills which will better your active skills, ad infinitum. I think in the case of Japanese, writing by hand is also important as it improves knowledge of kanji. When I was still using a textbook, I used to write out answers to the exercises and that really helped my kanji knowledge. Now I write on lang-8, but I always write everything out by hand first. It forces me to really know the kanji as opposed to writing it on the computer and just having to pick the right one from the list. Edit: I hope this makes some kind of sense. It might be too late at night for writing this kind of stuff. Edited by Brun Ugle on 27 August 2012 at 9:51pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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