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Going back to Europe TAC 2014 DE|FR|日本語 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5980 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes  Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 89 of 142 04 June 2014 at 9:05am | IP Logged | |||||
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Do you have the new edition? I don't recall reading about a three stage process.
For a chapter I do the following: Read through all the items in the workbook to see how much I already understand. Read through the kanji entries in the reference book Make flashcards from the entries in the workbook Since I'd already over studied the earlier chapters I skipped the first 18 (parts 1&2) and then for the next few chapters only made flashcards for items I didn't recognise. Now I'm a bit further in I add everything. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4663 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 90 of 142 05 June 2014 at 3:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yes. Revised Edition (c) 2013. They describe it on p32
That seems more like what I was planning to do, i.e. a single pass through the whole content of each chapter, including the workbooks. Thanks Edited by dampingwire on 05 June 2014 at 3:19pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5980 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 91 of 142 16 June 2014 at 11:00pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I took a trip to London at the weekend, including some time spent at Foyles bookshop on Charing Cross Road. They've just moved into a new premises and I'm not sure if it's just the new layout, but they seemed to have more stuff in stock than I remembered from my last visit.
I picked up a couple of books for the French and German SC. I had gone with the intention of looking for some graded readers for adult learners of German, but as I should have expected, the stuff available is really not value for money. I already have a couple of Lernkrimis published by Cornelsen and a couple of Felix & Theo stories, which are all good fun but you basically pay the price of a typical mass market paperback but get only around 20-30 pages of real German reading in return. However, I also took the opportunity for some browsing in the German children's literature section and came across Gregs Tagebuch (German translation of Diary of a Wimpy Kid) and after flicking through just a few pages I realised that it was just at my level! I polished off Amélie Nothomb's Ni d'Ève ni d'Adam over the course of the weekend and this evening (spending five hours on a train helped). I'm going to sound like Kraemder now, but it was so much more of a pleasure to read about Japan in French than it is to try and struggle through another Japanese children's book. I'm not sure if I'm hitting another wall with reading Japanese or if it's just the same wall I keep hitting again and again. Maybe I just hit it, stagger backwards, take a break to recover, try again, but am so disoriented from the previous experience I don't realise I'm running head first again into the same problem...and at the moment I don't have much will to deal with it. Work is really challenging at the moment. Some of it is good challenging, some of it is bad challenging. I'm dealing with the bad challenges by filling my life with enough good stuff that I don't have to think about it too much. But when it comes to the good challenges, I often come home from work with my head full of new ideas to digest and problems to solve and it's really exciting but doesn't leave me with much mental capacity for learning languages, not least a language so exquisitely disorienting as Japanese. So for the moment I think I'll just leave that wall standing and stick to maintaining what I've got by doing things I can already do. Although I'm quite looking forward to trying out Gregs Tagebuch. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5980 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 92 of 142 24 June 2014 at 11:59pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Just when I thought I'd had enough of Japanese, I had a great session with my tutor. And I realised that it's about time I upgraded my Japanese status on here to "speaks", as in the basic fluency category, since having re-read the basic fluency definition on the language profiles, I realised that I meet this, and probably actually met this criteria some time ago.
I'm no closer to reaching the advanced fluency category for now (and to be honest, I'm not even motivated to challenge myself to get there). But I think I was actually holding out for advanced fluency before I thought I could tell the world I "speak" Japanese. Now I realise that's not the case. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5980 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 93 of 142 08 July 2014 at 10:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm back from my trip to Spain and I come back with two regrets. Firstly, that I didn't travel to Spain sooner, and secondly that I couldn't stay there for longer. It exceeded my expectations in so many ways and I can't wait to go back. The UK feels so grey, cold, quiet and miserable in comparison.
Do I have regrets about not making more of an effort with the language first? Not really. Since I already have three foreign languages at various stages of development, I didn't feel too ashamed about relying on English most of the time. On the odd occasion, a couple of Spanish words and some gestures was also good enough. On the other hand, my French came in very useful on a couple of occasions when travelling back through France on the TGV. I have no immediate plans to start studying Spanish properly, however it has gone from being a language that I wasn't really that interested in to having pride of place at the top of my wish list! I really think I ought to get my active skills in French a bit more secure before I start doing some serious work with Spanish. Never mind getting my German to a more useful level and improving my reading in Japanese... 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Stelle Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Canada tobefluent.com Joined 4142 days ago 949 posts - 1686 votes Speaks: French*, English*, Spanish Studies: Tagalog | Message 94 of 142 09 July 2014 at 12:17am | IP Logged | |||||
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Ah, Spain…what an amazing country! I'm glad you enjoyed your trip!
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5980 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 95 of 142 09 July 2014 at 7:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I made the decision not to even think about language study while I was away, but to just pack some books in my target languages. Result is I've almost finished Le tour du monde en 80 jours and have read the first four chapters of 海辺のカフカ which is already a huge achievement since it is a Japanese novel written for adults and I have been able to read it purely extensively so far. I can't wait to get that one logged with the SC bot.
Having the break has also left me feeling like I can restart my studies with something of a blank slate, which is a pretty nice feeling. Somehow in my earlier post about Spain and Spanish I managed to come up with a pretty nice summary about what I really want to achieve with languages at the moment: Japanese: improve my reading My experience so far with 海辺のカフカ has shown that with the right text, I really can read an adult book already, however it has also shown that I still have some significant gaps in basic kanji knowledge (i.e. N2 level stuff) which won't be filled by extensive reading alone. I think my Japanese reading goal is something to be worked on at a low intensity over a longer period of time, as I've already learned the hard lesson that kanji reading knowledge cannot be crammed. The most important thing is to keep up with reading for the SC. The next most important thing is regular, low intensity study of kanji. Maybe I'll try allocating myself 15-20 minutes a day just to work on this. The great thing about this goal is that as it is low intensity and focused on passive knowledge alone, I should have no trouble combining it with work on another language. French: improve my active skills So the deal is, if I can reach a point where I'm more secure in my active abilities with French, I can start messing around with Spanish. Despite the fact that I have had no intentions of becoming a Romanticist, I have fallen in love with Spain...but French first, not least because I've done most of the hard work already, I just need some consolidation, revision and practice. I bought a book called Upgrade Your French by Margaret Jubb several years ago as it was recommended in an evening class I was doing at the time, although I've never actually used it. It's basically split up into 30 days of work, each day focusing on either on grammar, vocab or style and looks like it will be a nice guide for a short term period of work. I'll combine it with some more work on Les 500 exercices de phonétique to help get my pronunciation flowing a little better. I'll also get myself some italki sessions booked and, of course, keep going with the SC. German: all round improvements to reach a more useful level My German is teetering on the edge of becoming something useful. It feels like I almost have enough to start really enjoying TV, to start extensive reading proper books, and for it to start being worth my while to pay for a tutor to help bring along my active skills. I just need a little bit more vocabulary and a little bit more grammar to get there. However, I don't really relish the idea of trying to build a base vocabulary in German at the same time as building an active vocabulary in French, or trying to keep in mind important grammar points in French while keeping the issues distinctly separate in my head from beginner grammar problems in German. Not to mention the fact that I still need to find the time to keep going to work and stuff...so for now I'll hit pause on German (except I'll keep listening to the music) and will pick it up again when I've sorted out my French. That's if Spanish doesn't get me first. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5980 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 96 of 142 29 July 2014 at 12:36am | IP Logged | |||||
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In future, I think I will avoid writing about what I plan to do on this log and will try to stick to updates about what I have actually done - because although I am very good at making plans I am also very bad at following them through. I already have a pretty good idea about what my strengths, weaknesses, wants and needs are with all of the languages on my speaks/studies list so I don't really need to waste time on plan making when it doesn't really do me any good anyway!
I had an iTalki session in French which went really well. Basically, as long as I keep things reasonably simple (e.g. avoid expressions which need the subjunctive), I can maintain the pretence that I can speak French for a good 15-20 minutes or so, which is pretty good fun. As for the studying side of things, well, two days into Upgrade Your French I learned once again why I was such a bad student when I took French at high school. Using the language is really good fun (a lesson I didn't learn until way into adulthood), but studying it is so boring! I know it's still worth dipping into such books from time to time to back up all the things I come across through real life usage, but I really can't motivate myself to do this stuff every day (or even once a week) right now. I was sick for a couple of days towards the end of last week. This clearly affected my geek filter, among other things, because while I was recovering I proceeded to do something incredibly nerdy. I downloaded the XML KanjiDic2 file and imported the bits I was interested in into an Access database and have been querying away ever since. It's quite interesting to compare which kanji show up in which position in the KIC book, the grade school kanji or the old JLPT kanji lists. At least, it's quite interesting now that I can do it with minimal effort! Also, it seems that if you're stuck on an on reading for any given kanji, ショウ or コウ might make a good guess... And speaking of nerdy, it looks like I'm going to have to do some repairs to the PC I have plugged into my TV as not only is the system HD on its last legs, but now the CPU has started overheating. Since my DVD player packed in, this PC is the only way I've got to watch my DVDs on a real TV (not to mention online streaming and all that) so if it blows up before I get round to fixing it I'm going to be very grumpy through lack of native media...especially now I'm hooked on My Boss My Hero (or at least I'm hooked on Nagase Tomoya). 1 person has voted this message useful |
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