dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4666 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 65 of 91 19 August 2015 at 10:26pm | IP Logged |
Just back from a week's holiday in Austria, Mayrhofen in the Tirol region.
The first thing I learned was how disorientating it is when you cannot speak the local language. It wasn't really much of a problem as most
people spoke at least a little English. However, it did serve to reinforce my decision to start learning German at the end of this year. I'd
already more or less decided to do this as my youngest starts secondary school this September and will be taking German as his foreign
language. This experience just makes me more determined to actually get going with the studying. So come December I'll finally find out what
it is like to study two languages at once.
I took a pair of Japanese books along. うたかた I've read before and, quite pleasingly, more of it made sense this time around. I also took
along さいころ空, as a backup, although I didn't expect to finish うたかた. As it so happens I did, so I had to dive in. It turns out to have
been published in 1959 and I hit a few new (to me!) kanji just on the first page. It also turns out to be "double rowed" (I don't know what
the correct term might be so I'm borrowing the one Serpent used). I'd always wondered
what the justification might be for counting each physical page as two, just because there's an extra blank line, but a simple bit of
counting (once I realised how long each physical page was taking to read) soon convinced me. It is two lots of 26x21 characters, so 1092 per
physical page. うたかた, by comparison, is 13x37, so 481 per physical page. イタリア幻想曲 comes in at 42x18 (756 per page). The next two I
picked up off the shelf came in at around 500 characters per page each. So it seems reasonable to count it in the "tadoku" style.
So the upshot is that I managed to get in about 350 pages of reading. That included a bit of time hanging around waiting in airports and a
few hours of flying plus the usual "down-time" between other activities.
That not only makes a reasonable dent in the amount of reading that I want to get done for the SC, it also shows that I can sit down and read
for long(ish) periods of time. Of course, nothing else has progressed, which leaves me ~500 kanji deck and ~469 sentence deck reviews plus
234 RTK reviews to catch up on, plus a few grammar chapters and some listening work to fit in too!
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dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4666 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 66 of 91 20 August 2015 at 10:00pm | IP Logged |
I'm now up to date RTK, anki is still behind and will be for a few more days.
More importantly, I'm now registered for JPLT N2 on DEC-06 :-)
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dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4666 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 67 of 91 24 August 2015 at 1:35am | IP Logged |
As I've now been through the SC twice for JDrama, I'm going to start watching much more
intensively. I'll re-watch something I've already watched in the past, but this time I'll
pause and rewind as often as I need to in order to understand each scene.
Hopefully if I do this enough between now and December, it should boost my listening
comprehension for the JLPT.
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dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4666 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 68 of 91 27 August 2015 at 10:44pm | IP Logged |
dampingwire wrote:
I'm going to start watching much more
intensively. I'll re-watch something I've already watched in the past, but this time I'll
pause and rewind as often as I need to in order to understand each scene. |
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I've started this, but I suspect that I'm not rewinding enough. I've just "intensively" watched a 45m episode but it only took me
60m (spread over two sessions). Admittedly a fair chunk of any drama contains no speech and a fair few of the sentences are
trivially easy, but I think I'm going to set my "comprehension" threshold higher and insist on being able to "hear" much more than I
think I'm doing at the moment.
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dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4666 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 69 of 91 29 August 2015 at 9:57pm | IP Logged |
Just found this on reddit: NHK Easy News translation.
I think it looks reasonably useful. NHK Easy News doesn't appear every day, so perhaps I could try my hand at it first and then
check out someone else's attempt. In fact, as there seems to be quite a few older ones in there with the original text, perhaps I
can work through a few of them and see how I do?
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dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4666 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 70 of 91 31 August 2015 at 12:26pm | IP Logged |
I deliberately didn't set any goals for August, because with holidays and various family events schedlued,
I didn't know how much time I would have for Japanese.
I did hope to finish 新完全マスター N2 文法, and I did manage to do that.
I've kept the reading going and even managed quite a bit more reading during my holiday than I thought I
would. I've managed to keep that going (albeit not at the same pace) since returning home.
As I've finished the Super Challenge (twice over!) for video, I've now switched (mostly) to watching more
"intensively". So I'm stopping and rewinding to try and catch vocabulary that I've missed. It's too awkward
for me to do that with overlapping windows to block out subtitles (too much switching of focus going on),
so I'm now watching "intensively" with subtitles on. I'm still watching some video without subtitles, all
the way through without rewinding, just not as much as I might have been doing before.
In the next day or two I'll sit down and decide what targets I want to set for September.
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dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4666 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 71 of 91 01 September 2015 at 2:21pm | IP Logged |
I've been doing some intensive listening and I've chosen to use ミス・パイロット as my source
for now.
I started by using one of the streaming sites and just replaying bits I thought I didn't
catch. That was OK but I didn't have any easy way of blocking out the subtitles any more as
my usual method involves leaving the VM and tabbing another carefully pre-positioned window
in the way of the subtitles.
So I looked around and found a set of Japanese subtitles for the show. Now having
downloaded the first episode I find that (on Linux, at least) VLC can't read the subtitles
properly and they display as boxes. I've run through all the encoding settings in VLC and
none of them work. emacs thinks the characters are encoded as unicode (which VLC doesn't
seem to support explicitly) butI couldn't get iconv successfully to convert to UTF-8 (or
anything else that VLC seems to support).
Banshee doesn't seem to do any better, but, luckily, GNOME Player does seem to cope. So now
I should be able to run through the episode with subtitles on a few times to catch every
last word and then try a run through without any subtitles and see how much better things
are. (They should be better any way by then ... I should know the story inside out!)
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dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4666 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 72 of 91 02 September 2015 at 2:09pm | IP Logged |
I think I should set some goals for September.
1. I'm going to aim to read 300 pages for the Super Challenge. I actually hope to exceed this.
2. I'm going to transcribe one JPOD101 Upper Intermediate season 4 lesson each week, so four this month.
3. I'm going to spend at least two hours each week watching drama intensively.
4. Anki: Kanji and Sentence decks: between these two I'm going to activate 200 new entries.
5. RTK: I'll continue to keep this up to date.
6. Continue listening to dialogue tracks.
Optional Goals:
7. I'm going to try to complete two chapters, with exercises of the KZM N2 grammar book each week.
8. I'm going to try to complete 5 pages of the KZM N2 listening book each week.
So my main focus is going to be reading (and transcribing), closely followed by watching: hopefully this will give my
comprehension a boost. I've listed the KZM N2 Listening book as an optional goal, but in practice I'm going to work through
this book thoroughly and I'll spend quite a bit of spare time on it, I expect.
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