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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 105 of 142 23 September 2014 at 9:14am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I don't have too much trouble understanding dramas and some variety shows. Comedy shows are
harder and news is still impossible. I think Japanese news could be considered a language in its own right! I'm looking forward to trying out some documentaries though, as this is one type of programme I haven't had a source for until now. 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 106 of 142 23 September 2014 at 1:12pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Ah - HotBird 13E - exactly the satellite my dish is pointed towards. Sadly I don't think my current decoder has a CI interface, so it's probably no good for me anyway. still good to know that it's an option for the future. 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 107 of 142 25 September 2014 at 12:03am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Well, if you don't mind signing up for 12 months in one go, apparently they'll send you a set top box for free!
I'm just sticking to the web streaming option and so far it's working well enough. It would be nice if it was slightly higher quality video (given the subscription fee), but on the other hand my bandwidth might have an issue with that and at least the stream is mostly reliable as it is. I was really surprised to see quite how prevalent subtitles are on regular TV shows, but it's really good kanji practice and something you don't get from just watching films/dramas/anime. Being able to keep the TV running in the background while I'm doing other stuff is absolutely fantastic practice. Although I was surprised to find myself recognising some of the actors in a drama last night from their voices alone... In other news, I'm still working on refreshing my Japanese studies. I've started working with the 新完全マスターN2 vocab book. I think one of the symptoms of being at the intermediate level is that I have started to collect a few more obscure words in my active vocabulary, simply through serendipitous exposure, but then I find weird gaps with words that are actually quite common and useful. I could just wait until such gaps embarass me in public (at which point they would likely be filled forever), but I figured it would be more productive and less painful to try and take a more proactive approach. The kind of vocab covered in this book seems to fit the right kind of range. Plus it's actually a nice book to use when I'm no longer constrained by the pressure of just passing an exam! Edited by g-bod on 25 September 2014 at 12:07am 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 108 of 142 25 September 2014 at 1:09am | IP Logged | ||||||||
IIRC £60 will get you the box they recommend through any number of retailers on the web.
I found it quite interesting working through the 新完全マスター N3 聴解, mining all the vocabulary. Obviously I had to know all the words in the spoken examples on the CD, but I also mined all the explanations too. At this point I'd learned reasonably well all the vocab on the N3 lists in memrise and in a few anki decks and yet there was still a surprising amount of new stuff. I mean I realise that ~3000 words is not a huge vocabulary and so there'll be lots of very common vocab that's missing, but these are textbooks that are supposed to be targetting that specific exam. I need to sit down and properly mine vocab from the N3 and N2 grammar books I have to try and fill those gaps too. So many words, so little time :-) 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 109 of 142 29 September 2014 at 11:03pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I've signed up to a German class, so if all goes well I will end the year without totally letting the Team Spaß side down. First impressions are very good. It is at a post-beginners level (I guess something like A2-1) which is just right, as it means I am not struggling and can afford to be a little bit lazy, but not too lazy. The tutor is one of the best teachers I have had in a language class so far, and the other students seem to be a good bunch of people. It's hard not to default to English with them, but the tutor does a very good job of telling students off if they don't use German!
To think that by the end of the course (which lasts one academic year) I will have covered just halfway to A2 would have at one time been quite a depressing thought, however I've come to the conclusion that it's ok to revise my expectations down. If I manage to make any progress in German while also continuing to advance my Japanese (and, dare I say it, French too), it will be an achievement.
I think I'd be quite happy with a 3000 word vocabulary in French, since there is enough transparency for me to guess rather a lot of the rest. I reckon my Japanese vocabulary falls in the ~4000 range and it is still so far away from being enough! 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 110 of 142 01 October 2014 at 7:45pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Super Challenge - a 5 month update
So now we're 5 months in, or a quarter of a way through the challenge, I thought it was time I made an update, and maybe a confession... So back at the beginning of August I quietly dropped German. I'm still too much of a beginner for books and TV to do my German much good, and I eventually conceded that it would be better (i.e. more efficient) to prioritise other German-related activities, at least until my level improves. Moving onto the end of September, I found myself with approx. 10 "books" completed in both French and Japanese. A quick calculation revealed that in order to finish the challenge in the next 15 months, I would need to read 300 pages a month in each language. Put simply, that is not going to happen. I never even read that much in English, before I started my language learning adventure, except perhaps during the 12 months of my life where I spent 90 minutes a day commuting by rail. So after some thought, I decided that I would drop French. I still get Le Monde Sélection Hebdomadaire pushed through my door every week and usually read a couple of articles in it. Combined with occasionally listening to the radio or a podcast, this is enough to keep maintaining my French, but none of these are activities I could really count for the challenge. And basically, if I read just one French book a year while I'm on holiday, I'm quite happy with that! So that leaves me with Japanese. My first love. The language I've given up on giving up. I recently remembered that back in December 2012, just before sitting the JLPT N2, I sat in a coffee shop in London and started to pick my way through a book of short stories by 村上春樹. I finished the book a few weeks later. It was at times difficult, but with occasional dictionary lookups I could understand enough to keep going and, ultimately, really appreciate the book. This should have been the start of my Japanese reading really opening up, but instead I haven't really progressed beyond that moment, at least as far as reading is concerned. At the moment I'm progressing through a children's book (魔女の宅急便) at the ridiculously slow pace of 1-2 pages a day. Now, Japanese reading has it's own challenges which makes it quite different to reading in, say, French, but I just need to stop making excuses to myself, face it head on, still keep chugging away at vocab, grammar, kanji but also keep reading. Reading 10 pages a day in Japanese is still something I think I can manage (on top of everything else I want/need to do), I just need to make sure I actually do it - which is where logging with the SC Bot comes in. Basically, I think my continued participation in a Japanese SC will still help me move my Japanese forward and achieve the one most important goal I have left standing in this language - that of being able to comfortably read novels. Whereas in the case of French I think continuing the SC is just not necessary, and in the case of German I think it is not the best use of my time for my current level. Edited by g-bod on 01 October 2014 at 7:46pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| yuhakko Tetraglot Senior Member FranceRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4630 days ago 414 posts - 582 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishB2, EnglishC2, Spanish, Japanese Studies: Korean, Norwegian, Mandarin | Message 111 of 142 02 October 2014 at 11:20am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Really interesting update! I can totally relate to that feeling of being overwhelmed
by all those languages for the SC. I feel as well that my Chinese is not enough (like your German), and my Korean needs a lot of work if I want to finish the SC for it as well (kinda like your French). But I can't help but try to continue. I've decided to focus mostly on Japanese and finish it asap and then move on to focus on Korean and then Chinese. For those 2 lasts, I plan on doing only the half challenge in order to make it possible. I guess you could do the same for French if you feel like it ^^ If you want a rather easy but not too much and really interesting novel, try the ツナグ one that I talked about on my log. You can also check the sum up on this website : http://book.akahoshitakuya.com/ I use this website quite often for to find my new books and follow up on everything I've read in Japanese. 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 112 of 142 02 October 2014 at 1:55pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
As you say, French is a different kettle of fish. There are many cognates (and I get even more help from Italian) and the grammar seems to be not so far removed from English. I'm surprised you think you only have a vocabulary of ~4000 words: how have you estimated that? For my own vocab, I'm going by the fact that I've completed the memrise N5+N4+N3 courses, which brings me near to 3000 words and my kanji Anki deck stats showed over 3000 known cards. Yet when I've tried to read the explanations in KZM N2 or picked up an old 2級 paper, I immediately hit lots of unknown vocabulary.
If I read intensively, then I manage about 1 page per hour. Even then, I'm looking up so much stuff that I need to re-read to actually pick up the overall meaning of a paragraph (because I've forgotten the beginning by the time I read the end!). If I read extensively, then I miss a lot of what is going on, but overall it seems to help my reading speed (as measured by going back and re-reading simpler material).
I'm finding the bot very motivating at the moment. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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