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dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4654 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 321 of 706 20 November 2013 at 12:34am | IP Logged |
kujichagulia wrote:
Now, if my Japanese wife has that kind of trouble with that
podcast, then why in the world am I listening to it? So I'm podcast-hunting. I'll
probably go back to NHK News or something like that. Yeah, news vocabulary is more
difficult and probably more boring. But at least it is clearly pronounced. |
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I'm almost certain that the NHK Easy News audio is computer-generated: any ideas? Not
that it really matters as it does sound very clear and not "mechanical", but I'm just
curious.
1 person has voted this message useful
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4836 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese
| Message 322 of 706 20 November 2013 at 3:25am | IP Logged |
dampingwire wrote:
I'm almost certain that the NHK Easy News audio is computer-generated: any ideas? Not
that it really matters as it does sound very clear and not "mechanical", but I'm just
curious.
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Yeah, the NHK Easy News audio is definitely computer-generated. I listened to it a few times a while back, when they had a real human being reading the news. The difference is quite striking. That said, they use really good text-to-speech software, better than the one at Google Translate. It does sound almost natural.
Actually, I was thinking more about the regular NHK News podcasts - the ones meant for native speakers. You can find the RSS feed here. The only problem is that they put out five or six news podcasts a day, so if you can't listen to all of them, or don't want to, you have to do a lot of deleting.
Those podcasts might be far over my current level, but it could be good listening practice on the go. The NHK Easy News audio is probably good, too, although they don't provide it as a podcast.
1 person has voted this message useful
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6586 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish
| Message 323 of 706 20 November 2013 at 2:22pm | IP Logged |
kujichagulia wrote:
I'm finding that part of language learning, at least for me, is psychological. I made it a goal to fight through the distractions and study 30 minutes a night at home. But it was really hard for me to even begin studying - perhaps because I feared I wouldn't be able to do 30 minutes? So I reduced that to 15 minutes. Now I open my book and get 15 minutes done quickly. Last night, I even did 20 minutes. It seems quick and easy. Maybe 15-20 minutes is my "sweet spot" for book study at home. |
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Pssst. When you're comfortable with your current system, you can look at having multiple 15-minute sessions per day. Look at timeboxing and the pomodoro technique too.
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| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4836 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese
| Message 324 of 706 24 November 2013 at 1:29pm | IP Logged |
Serpent wrote:
Pssst. When you're comfortable with your current system, you can look at having multiple 15-minute sessions per day. Look at timeboxing and the pomodoro technique too. |
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Multiple 15-minute sessions per day are fine. The problem is that I'm leaving my big Japanese textbook at home so I don't have to carry it with me through the day, so I only study that at home. But when I do my 15-20 minutes and I do something else, I'm unlikely to return to it that same night. However, I could do 15 minutes of something else in Japanese, so you make a good point.
By the way, what in the world is a pomodoro technique?
1 person has voted this message useful
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6586 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish
| Message 325 of 706 24 November 2013 at 4:31pm | IP Logged |
http://pomodorotechnique.com/ :)
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| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4836 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese
| Message 326 of 706 26 November 2013 at 1:19pm | IP Logged |
Serpent wrote:
http://pomodorotechnique.com/ :) |
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Wow, that seems fantastic! I'm not quite ready to carry around a red tomato timer, but the principles seem sound. I'll give it a try. That might help me at home, with all the distractions.
1 person has voted this message useful
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4836 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese
| Message 327 of 706 28 November 2013 at 7:48am | IP Logged |
UPDATE
Japanese
I'm still in the middle of Chapter 13 of An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese. The past few days, I hardly did any work in IAIJ, being too tired from work. Instead, I took the easier, more passive option: jumping in front of the computer and reading some Japanese with the help of a pop-up dictionary. I still did something in Japanese, but that is not going to work if I want to finish IAIJ quickly. Anyway, I'm almost done with the grammar exercises, then I'll do the reading, listening, and review exercises, then start Chapter 14.
On the train, I've been reading short news articles that I printed off the Internet. It's so much easier working through an article printed on real paper. I can easily highlight the words I don't know, make notes at the bottom and in the margins, etc. I can't do that on my Android Walkman... at least not as easily. Maybe if I had a tablet...
Portuguese
I finished DLI Unit 3 Lesson 28 this morning, and will begin Lesson 29 tomorrow morning.
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| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5173 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese
| Message 328 of 706 28 November 2013 at 8:10am | IP Logged |
On a tablet you might get a few more options for making notes and looking up words. I
was thinking that if you had an electronic version you could just look it up like the stuff you
were reading on the computer. But paper seems to have a certain tactile something that a
lot of people like. I'm pretty happy with myself when I read stuff using a pop up dictionary.
It makes me feel like a slacker that you don't think it cuts it. I'll keep that I mind. Now
watching anime with subs.. that is slacking. It's also what I'm doing at the moment.
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