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Kuji’s Krazy Log I

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atama warui
Triglot
Senior Member
Japan
Joined 4698 days ago

594 posts - 985 votes 
Speaks: German*, English, Japanese

 
 Message 65 of 76
27 July 2012 at 5:28am | IP Logged 
If internet is unstable for you, that's indeed a problem. They have mobile apps tho. Everything has its ups and downs I guess.

There are plenty thematic lists on memrise with not too much stuff. I'm building my own content, however. I found personalized lists with the words I want to learn are better for my motivation. Generic lists like the Core might be nice, but those tend to have tons of terms I already know (and thus have to ignore on memrise, to not pile up the reviews). Frequency lists are also made of newspaper articles, so the vocab learned contains a lot of である style stuff as well. I once decided to not need 20 different terms for "to produce" and started my own decks ;)
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kujichagulia
Senior Member
Japan
Joined 4844 days ago

1031 posts - 1571 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Japanese, Portuguese

 
 Message 66 of 76
30 July 2012 at 3:03am | IP Logged 
KUJI'S WEEK IN REVIEW: 22-28 July 2012

JAPANESE


This past week I...
*Read a few pages of おじいさんの大切な一日 before giving up due to extreme lack of vocabulary. Found an easier book to read, and to date I have gone through about 7 pages. I also employed a new strategy: look up only the words I need to understand the story.
*Listened to a new JapanesePod101 podcast. Also reviewed another one.
*Practiced writing kanji from a new chapter of An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese. (Haven't yet put them into Mnemosyne, though. Maybe I'll have some time today.)
*(actively) watched roughly five hours of TV. Mainly news shows, but a couple of my wife's dramas, my weekly viewing of two "easy" anime: Sazae-san and Chibi Maruko, and some of the Olympic coverage.
*did my Mnemosyne reviews everyday.
*looked up some words I didn't know from a Core 6000 list I found on the internet, and imported them into Mnemosyne

ESPERANTO

This past week I...
*did two lessons from the Ana Pana course in the Libera Esperanto-Libro, a book put together by the people behind Lernu.net. (You can get it for free at http://www.ikso.net/en/libera/. )
*also did one Ana Pana lesson online at Lernu.net. The lesson was the same as one of the book lessons I did, but since the online course provides tutors that check your answers to the lesson questions, I posted those there, and I got a 100%!
*listened to a variety of Esperanto podcasts.
*skimmed through a few Esperanto Wikipedia articles
*did my Mnemosyne reviews
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kujichagulia
Senior Member
Japan
Joined 4844 days ago

1031 posts - 1571 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Japanese, Portuguese

 
 Message 67 of 76
09 August 2012 at 5:56am | IP Logged 
As I wrote in a thread in the General Discussion area, I'm now wondering whether or not
to give up Esperanto. Having an extra language for me to tinker with has helped my
Japanese studies tremendously, because it helps prevent Japanese burnout. But should
Esperanto be that language? It's fun and cool, but I'm not going to go to any Esperanto
congresses or club meetings any time soon. Don't feel like making the effort. Any
Esperanto conversation I make is via the Internet (message boards, mainly).   Is that
worth it?

On the other hand, if I replace Esperanto with, say, French (the next language on my
list), would that be too much to take on with only a little time every day? Would that
take away from my Japanese studies?
1 person has voted this message useful



kujichagulia
Senior Member
Japan
Joined 4844 days ago

1031 posts - 1571 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Japanese, Portuguese

 
 Message 68 of 76
15 August 2012 at 5:22am | IP Logged 
This might make some people disappointed, but ...

After flirting with Portuguese as my side project the last few days, I've decided to
just continue my Esperanto studies. Portuguese is tempting... maybe too tempting. I'm
not yet disciplined enough to keep it to a limited time period a day. Just testing out
resources like DLI and FSI, scouring the Internet for resources, etc., over the last
few days interrupted my Japanese studies.

Meanwhile, Esperanto fits nicely as a side project. For me, it doesn't require that
much time to be fun, and free learning resources are easy to find. Besides, I've come
this far with it, and I want to see where it takes me.

I do plan on going back to Portuguese when I am done with Esperanto, maybe sometime in
2013. Hopefully when I do go back to Portuguese, I will have reached a high level of
Japanese, so I don't have to worry about any time conflicts.
1 person has voted this message useful



kujichagulia
Senior Member
Japan
Joined 4844 days ago

1031 posts - 1571 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Japanese, Portuguese

 
 Message 69 of 76
15 August 2012 at 5:25am | IP Logged 
As I stated in the last post, I've done little with my Japanese studies the past few days
aside from watching TV and doing SRS reviews. I really need to get back on track, as it
has been a lazy August. 困ったね。 But now that my side project "problem" has been solved,
it's time to move on. 進め!

In other news, I found out how to use Anki 2.0 on a USB stick and have it save all the
files on the USB stick. Anki has a lot of cool features, like Japanese support and the
ability to record sound on the spot and put it into a card, so I'm excited to be (back)
in the Anki fold (sorry, atama warui).
1 person has voted this message useful



kujichagulia
Senior Member
Japan
Joined 4844 days ago

1031 posts - 1571 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Japanese, Portuguese

 
 Message 70 of 76
16 August 2012 at 5:06am | IP Logged 
One thing you will learn about me is that I am quite indecisive, and I take a long time
to make even the simplest of decisions. If you want to go out with me to a restaurant,
you better ask me days in advance, so I can decide if I want Italian, Japanese, or
Chinese food.

With that in mind, Portuguese is now my side project! Why the change from
yesterday? I tried doing an Esperanto lesson yesterday, and for the first time, it
wasn't fun. Did Esperanto already serve its purpose? Or has my flirting with
Portuguese the past few days led to a man-crush that I can't shake yet?

I guess time will tell, but I'm determined to stick with this decision. The challenge
will be to keep Portuguese "contained" as I concentrate mainly on Japanese. Secondary
challenges: pronunciation and verb conjugation (both of which are more difficult than
in Japanese). Verb conjugation is probably not that much of a challenge, but
pronunciation... my goodness, when I listen to radio from Brazil, the words just run
together. It will be hard to pick out words from a radio broadcast.

But I'm getting too far ahead of myself. This will only work if I take it slowly,
leisurely, enjoying myself while I do it. I said before that I felt too undisciplined
to do this. Well, now is the time to prove that I can be disciplined.
1 person has voted this message useful



rewire
Groupie
United States
learninglane.tumblr.Registered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 4544 days ago

82 posts - 90 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Japanese, Mandarin

 
 Message 71 of 76
16 August 2012 at 6:17am | IP Logged 
Good luck! I think sometimes it's hard to tell what will work until you just kind of try
it, heh. I was going to try to do a side project, but when I started it I found it was
way too exciting for me and pulled me away from Japanese more than was useful, so I've
gone back to just Japanese (for now). Portuguese was kind of on my "someday-maybe" list,
though, so I'll definitely be interested to see what you think of it as you get further
in.
2 persons have voted this message useful



kujichagulia
Senior Member
Japan
Joined 4844 days ago

1031 posts - 1571 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Japanese, Portuguese

 
 Message 72 of 76
16 August 2012 at 6:42am | IP Logged 
Thank you, rewire.

What you experienced is my big fear, that Portuguese will be so exciting that it pulls me away from Japanese. There's not that much to study with Esperanto grammar, pronunciation, irregularities, etc., so it never pulled me away.

Anyway, we'll see how this goes.


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