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It Begins - Intensive Japanese | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| ryuukohito Bilingual Diglot Groupie Malaysia Joined 6234 days ago 89 posts - 98 votes  Speaks: EnglishC2*, Malay* Studies: French, Japanese | Message 9 of 65 15 November 2007 at 9:11am | IP Logged | |||||
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I was hoping for a bit of an explanation on the nuances of よ and ね in the 頑張って context, but you had already put out the answer before I managed to lay down the question, :)
ありがとう、からしーせんぱい！ Either way, after 6 hours (with about an hour of break in-between) I have finally managed to extract all words that had been used in Japanese in Mangaland 1. Realistically speaking, the amount of words I know by now is roughly the number in that collection; which puts me at about 1000 words or so after about two months of moderate studying, so it's not bad. (I began my Japanese studies about 6 months ago, but I studied the language very sparsely for 2 or 3 months out of that time span as I had much work to attend to; I regret the time lost, so now that I have about a month's worth of free time I am doing all I can to catch up on what I've missed.) I'm off to read one chapter of Tae Kim's guide, as I promised to myself. I intend to practice my vocabulary list starting tomorrow. Plans for the next week or so: I'm going to revise at least 200 kanji a day. (Those kanji that I fail will not be counted as being part of that 200.) As vocabulary is much simpler and less tiring, I will tackle them not according to a set amount, but rather, per session. (I will devote 1-hour to each vocabulary session; and maybe 2 vocabulary sessions per day.) And lastly, 2-3 hours of grammatical studies per day. (Tomorrow I will revise Japanese in Mangaland 1 entirely, and only the day after shall I move on to Part 2.) Also, I will read at least 1-2 chapters of Tae Kim per day, and peruse whatever time I have remaining watching/reading Japanese-related entertainment :P My aim as of now: To attain and possess a very good understanding of Japanese by the end of 30 days of intense study. Let me clarify this again (just in case some people may attack me for not using the correct word): I wish to attain understanding, not fluency. (Yet.) I know I will not become fluent until at least a year's worth of study. I just want to be able to understand the language better at this point. I know I will still be extremely lacking in vocabulary at the end of 30 days, but I want my comprehension of Japanese (grammatical forms, idiomatic expressions, kanji forms beyond RTK 1, and such) to have shot through the roof by then. This would make the study of Japanese easier for me, because I only need to keep on reviewing by then, by re-reading Japanese-language reference materials and using sentences as my main form of study. I can also keep learning new words and adding them to my vocabulary without being encumbered by the task of learning (too many) new kanji forms and/or deciphering new grammatical structures. がんばります! Edited by ryuukohito on 15 November 2007 at 9:44am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ryuukohito Bilingual Diglot Groupie Malaysia Joined 6234 days ago 89 posts - 98 votes Speaks: EnglishC2*, Malay* Studies: French, Japanese | Message 10 of 65 16 November 2007 at 5:15am | IP Logged | |||||
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I had gone through about 100 or so words, then revised 200 or so kanji, before I moved on to sentences.
And I'm a bit excited today. Because I may have stumbled upon that language 'click' every one's talking about. (Maybe!) I'll elaborate. Before this I had to look through each noun and analyze its related particles, for a couple of seconds at least, to see what happened to them ("oh, it's an を, which means some verb's about to come" or "is this に a 'to' or 'for'?"). But today, as I was going through the sentences, for some reason they started making sense, without even needing me to consider the particles involved. ... I really don't know how to describe it. I don't know if this is a real language 'click' or not, but if it is, yes, and if it isn't, it still is a good feeling :) I would appreciate it if anyone else out there studying Japanese (or had studied Japanese) who has come across this circumstance could share me with your experience! (This is a significant experience for me as the subject-object-verb order has a rather difficult ordeal for me to tackle before this.) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| karashi Tetraglot Groupie Japan Joined 6575 days ago 81 posts - 81 votes Speaks: French*, English, Japanese, German Studies: Russian | Message 11 of 65 16 November 2007 at 5:26am | IP Logged | |||||
That's great ! Sorry I don't remember how it was for me, but don't worry after some time the particles will become so natural that you won't notice them. It becomes really nice when you don't look at the details of the sentence anymore and get directly to the meaning of the sentences without giving it a second thought :). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ryuukohito Bilingual Diglot Groupie Malaysia Joined 6234 days ago 89 posts - 98 votes Speaks: EnglishC2*, Malay* Studies: French, Japanese | Message 12 of 65 16 November 2007 at 2:37pm | IP Logged | |||||
Indeed, I hope so too, Karashi! Today I had fired up some J-dramas, and it was rather interesting how I suddenly didn't have to mentally translate some of the phrases. It felt rather unusual. (The more difficult/long-ish phrases, I still had to translate though, haha.) I must also heftily command Tae Kim's guide. I think the explanations on his site have single-handedly destroyed most, if not all, problems that have cropped up as regards the Japanese language. His explanations are vivid and very encompassing. And in that rare case when he doesn't elaborate on a certain grammatical point in depth (or he misses it) there would always be an explanation available on his site's forums instead. (In fact, I made his site into a Firefox bookmark that has been mapped onto to a keyword, 'dk', for quick access.) His site is an amazing resource. For example, I'm going through learning materials I had previously finished, and it's just amazing how they all make more sense now. In any case, I managed about 4 hours of pure-sentence training just now, and I'm happy. More Japanese practice coming tomorrow as well! がんばります！ 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ryuukohito Bilingual Diglot Groupie Malaysia Joined 6234 days ago 89 posts - 98 votes Speaks: EnglishC2*, Malay* Studies: French, Japanese | Message 13 of 65 18 November 2007 at 11:07am | IP Logged | |||||
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I am unhappy that today I managed to study very little Japanese. My computer was a bit ill, so to say, and it kept crashing (does anyone know why a computer's CPU usage may reach up to 100%, when I have no viruses in my computer, and very few program processes run in the background?) which truly prevented me from getting to my study files.
Oh well. Either way, I hope to make the best use of tomorrow. Also, soon, I intend to visit a nearby Japanese organization, and register as a member. This will afford me access to their library of materials. I do not know how extensive their library is, but I'm not hoping too much for something that will blow me away. (A friend, who is a member of the organization, told me that the library's not that amazing; however, my friend does not really read or practice Japanese that much anyway, and I doubt that he's ever tried flicking through the library books, so I'm going to doubt his claims and hope for the best.) I do hope that the library stocks a fairly large collection of manga though. I have completed the Essential Grammar portions of Tae Kim's guide and have read (and will continue reading) through the other sections that are of relevance as the grammatical problems come. As of now, I wonder how long it will take me to reach fluency, and that level where I can read most things fluently (ぺらぺら anyone?) without having to translate anything in my head. Edited by ryuukohito on 18 November 2007 at 11:08am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ryuukohito Bilingual Diglot Groupie Malaysia Joined 6234 days ago 89 posts - 98 votes Speaks: EnglishC2*, Malay* Studies: French, Japanese | Message 14 of 65 21 November 2007 at 4:22pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Yesterday I had finally registered at the library, as I intended to do.
The library was located in a building in the heart of the city. It was amazing! The place was spacey, and it had lots of study tables, and more importantly, a ton of books. I found every dictionary and every book on Amazon that I wanted to buy (but could not afford to). They had readers, mangas (sorted according to shelves, and of a variety), literature, encyclopedias, children's books, music CDs, movie DVDs, and a variety of monthly journals and daily newspapers, all in Japanese -- technically, a Japanese language-learner's dream. And what's best, nearly everything could be borrowed! (Only very few, like the thick reference encyclopedias, couldn't be; but really, everything else was fair game.) And I got around to reading, just for fun, a manga called Juseki. (I think it was spelled like that.) It's about an alien species coming to Earth, and one of them managing to take over the arm of a boy. I think the highlight of my day was going through the first 50 or so pages of the manga and understanding at least 70% of what I was reading. (Granted, it was basic conversational words, but it gave me a sense of accomplishment.) I borrowed a book called Japanese Society: An Update. It's interesting, and is a reader with excellent language translations for the many articles contained within, however, it does not provide dictionary definitions of the Japanese words and neither are there furigana over the kanji characters, so I've been slowly figuring my way through even the first article. I intend to do at least one or two articles and see what I may get from there. (I also have Breaking Into Japanese Literature with me now, and so far it's all good fun -- the only problem of course being that it is literature based and the prose may be far too flowery for me to absorb into daily normal conversations.) 頑張ります！ Edited by ryuukohito on 23 November 2007 at 10:36pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ryuukohito Bilingual Diglot Groupie Malaysia Joined 6234 days ago 89 posts - 98 votes Speaks: EnglishC2*, Malay* Studies: French, Japanese | Message 15 of 65 22 November 2007 at 6:28am | IP Logged | |||||
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Early this morning, I finished reading all English versions of the stories in Breaking into Japanese Literature. Now that I have, it'll make the reading of the Japanese versions slightly simpler, as I know the stories and have their 'images' in my head to work with.
But right after I finished with the book, I headed straight to my PC and figured that perhaps I'd want to do a little something else -- so I plucked out the audiobook and transcript for Sherlock Holmes' 'The Adventure of the Dancing Men' and began making a parallel text for it, using OpenOffice's Calc. This task has consumed most of my day today. It is taxing, but quite enjoyable, and better still, I am learning lots and lots of new vocabulary, as well as expressions. There is one thing I must complain about the audio though: its quality is good, however, the speaker seems to project a rather mumbled voice at times, which makes comprehension quite difficult. (And I'm already thinking twice as to whether I should shadow this story or not. Some of the mumbling can be really bad -- for example, 来る is pronounced only as 'kur' without even a silent 'u' following it.) So I'm going to devote my next few days to finish only this story; I want to at least complete the parallel text before doing anything else, and by the end of it, I hope to be able to go through the story a couple of times. I want to make this audiobook my first formal book/story 'accomplishment' in the Japanese language. (The reason being that while the stories in Breaking into Japanese literature are excellent, they are rather fantastical -- Holmes' world on the other hand resides in a Victorian set, which my humble mind can envisage properly since the objects and characters seem more real that way.) 頑張りますよ！ Edited by ryuukohito on 22 November 2007 at 6:31am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| sheetz Senior Member United States Joined 6375 days ago 270 posts - 356 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, French, Mandarin | Message 16 of 65 22 November 2007 at 6:58am | IP Logged | |||||
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ryuukohito, I noticed that you said you are trying to use the audio for "Adventure of the Dancing Men." If you are using the audiobook I linked to in my language log, I should warn you that I just listened to it and it turns out the last part of the audio is missing.I've just updated the list to reflect that. My apologies.
It's disappointing because it's such an enjoyable story, and I'm hoping that it gets recorded by someone by the other blogger who does the Sherlock Holmes stories. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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