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It Begins - Intensive Japanese | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6766 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes  Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 57 of 65 18 April 2008 at 4:05am | IP Logged | ||
After about six months after moving to Japan and beginning intensive study, I made a breakthrough where I became able to converse (in broken fashion) without having to concentrate on the basic grammar and vocabulary I knew. It's only in the last little while, though (after maybe 1.5 years of study) that I've been able to comfortably read novels and magazine articles, and "feel" the meaning without having to concentrate on grammar or specific words. That doesn't mean, of course, that I don't get tripped up on some sentences; and I encounter plenty of words I have to look up. It was only the other day, for the first time, that I found I could speed-read a few pages at a time without missing any significant content or meaning. The author I like reading has a straightforward writing style, mind you. You appear to spend more time on Japanese study than I do, so you might progress more quickly. Edited by Captain Haddock on 18 April 2008 at 4:07am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Alkeides Senior Member Bhutan Joined 6146 days ago 636 posts - 644 votes | Message 58 of 65 19 April 2008 at 11:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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You seem very motivated. I believe you'll certainly attain fluency within the timeframe you've set, if not full active fluency, certainly passive fluency.
After a while, kanji readings should just osmose naturally into your brain I think, like an exponential curve. Especially since you've completed Heisig, you already know the meanings of most kanji, with more exposure, you'll see the patterns in pronunciation for each radical. Khatzumoto from AJATT says that there are too many exceptions, well, that's not exactly true, especially for the less commonly used latter 800+ of the 常用漢字. I think you'll be ready for the JLPT 1 at the end of the year; if you ever want a Japanese job, that's very helpful. 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 59 of 65 20 April 2008 at 9:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thank you for the explanation, Captain Haddock, and thank you for the encouraging support, amphises!
Unfortunately, as much as I would love to dream of being fluent in Japanese, I would rather not put too much hope into that for the moment, as I am still having much trouble with spontaneous speech or reproduction. (It is a very disappointing feeling at times too. Still, as regards reading, I am quite ahead, as kanji, unless it's beyond the 2000 jouyou count, doesn't trouble me as much. But I still have a lot of problems with sentence comprehension, especially if it's a long-winded sentence that I have to tackle.) It must be mentioned that at this point, I don't have to actively make mnemonics for all kanji anymore -- like you said, it seems that you 'get the picture' far more quickly and easily once you're used to them, and if you are exposed to them more often. ---------------------------------- I borrowed 5 books from the library two days ago, and I'm going through them as voraciously as I can. I continuously rotate between them to maintain interest. (I work my way per chapter, switching as soon as I finish one.) The books I borrowed were: How to Sound Intelligent In Japanese, Japanese Word Power, Japanese Core Words And Phrases (Things That You Can't Find In The Dictionary), Handbook of Japanese Verbs, and A Student's Guide to Japanese Grammar. In particular, I find the latter two IMMENSELY useful. Some quick thoughts: Handbook of Japanese Verbs: Though I'm familiar with Japanese word conjugations, seeing them all laid down and organized neatly in tables, with brief explanations on usage and practice exercises (with answers at the back!), really does help. I've a bit of a spreadsheet-based mind myself, so this helps me give a bird's eye view of things. Drilling is much easier this way too. A Student's Guide to Japanese Grammar: This book only deals with grammar choices, and compares between proper and substandard grammar. E.g. 'aida ni' versus 'uchi ni', 'te iru/te ita' vs 'ru/ta', 'noni vs keredo', 'tame ni' vs 'you ni', etc. In simple language as well, with many examples. It helps give me an understanding as to which is more proper for which context, and the subtle differences they make; an analogy which comes to mind for English speakers like us, for example, is saying "it is possible" versus "it is probable", which non-native speakers (and even some native speakers) might have problems discerning. Japanese Core Words And Phrases: Teaches the exact use of the 'ko so a do' words; e.g. 'korede', 'sorekara', etc; also teaches idiomatic expressions. Very, very helpful. Japanese Word Power: Teaches the usage of prefixes and suffixes that 'change' a word into another. E.g. attaching 'teki' to 'chi' makes it 'intellectual' as opposed to intellect/knowledge. This is much like the way one can attach '-ledge/ism' to English words to change them into something else. E.g. nation -> national, nationality, nationalism, etc. How to Sound Intelligent In Japanese: This is one book I'm devoting the least time reading at the moment. It's great, but the vocabulary words are so high (and abstract in concept) they aren't of particular use to me at the moment. But I know they will be useful in the future, so for the moment I'm just reading through the book and copying the sentences. ------- So at the moment I've gone through a couple of chapters from each book; and I hope to have completed them all by one month's time. After that I hope to do much extensive reading. (And to the person who created Rikaichan, THANK YOU VERY MUCH!) Edited by ryuukohito on 20 April 2008 at 9:24pm 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 60 of 65 10 May 2008 at 7:09am | IP Logged | ||
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I've been away for a bit. Haven't had an Internet connection for quite some time; it's down at my place, so I'm writing from a friend's.
Been doing very intensive Japanese work since I ended my attachment this week. About 50 new kanji a day, picking them up as I go along reading text, with 1 to 1.5 hours a day assigned for review. 3 hours for reading text and digesting them. (I've discovered that it's surprising how quickly I can remember and retain words, at least passively, when I already recognize the kanji.) Besides that, I do another 2 to 4 hours a day of grammar reading, and retyping of material (as in, with the authentic Japanese by my side, which I constantly check against). As far as grammar goes, I've seen most of everything. However, when I write, though I know all of the words which I want to say in the native Japanese, reproducing sentences still takes up a lot of time; the reason being that I'm taking into account proper grammatical structure, et cetera. Also, for entertainment I've been going through the Detective Conan series. I'm a long time fan of the manga (ever since I was small) but then I had read the English translation of it. Some notes: Now that I'm reading it back in the original Japanese version I've noticed a a lot of subtle nuances that were lost in translation. Also, all kanji have furigana over them. This is both a blessing and a curse -- it makes it easy for me to learn new kanji and check for them in my dictionary, but oftentimes, like subtitles in TV shows, you tend to rely on them too much, mostly unconsciously. ---------------- On kanji: Previously, making mnemonics for kanji always felt like a bit of a chore for me. These days, it's actually quite enjoyable. I don't know why. The sheer volume of mnemonics I'm making daily has made me 'immune' to them, perhaps? I'm going through a book called Basic Connections: Making Your Japanese Flow. It's really good! 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 61 of 65 17 June 2008 at 5:05am | IP Logged | ||
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Good evening! I haven't written in this logbook for some time, opting to devote that precious resource to polish up my command of Japanese instead.
Thanks to the guidance of many helpful people around the web, I finished properly at least one of the Sherlock Holmes stories (as posted on sheetz's extremely useful thread) and have understood its grammar points very thoroughly. To my surprise, as the story itself contained many difficult grammar points, by the time I was finished I seemed to have covered most of the grammar points that one would need in spoken and written Japanese. I rarely encounter new grammar points now; but of course, I still come across new idiomatic phrases and dialectal usages very often and am constantly confused by them. By a rough count, I've managed to acquire a vocabulary, a passive one at least, of 4,000-5,000 new words and plus or minus 1000 new kanji (active, because I use Heisig). I would have loved to be able to acquire a greater vocabulary of both, but, considering the fact that I review everything at the same time and all the time (Thank you Anki!) and that I was also working very hard on reading and grammar, I don't think this is too bad. (Keeping up with sentence reviews however is very tiring. All of this consumes most of my day.) As for kanji, though I recognize many of them (and this is IMMENSELY helpful as compared to not knowing anything at all) I do not know many of their readings, for I have yet to encounter them in writing. (But I consider this perfectly fine, however, since I believe in the Heisig method.) However, to be fair, all of this acquisition has been done at the expense of my listening and speaking skills. Of the latter I am not too concerned, because being able to speak is not important to me at this point. But I do wish to be able to understand spoken speech perfectly. To remedy this, I've been using the Japanese Podcast 101 series. I think it is an excellent resource for learning Japanese, because the dialogs (many of them, at least) are witty and full of content, and spoken at native speaker speed (not counting the Newbie levels, of course). However, I am a bit unhappy that I am unable to understand spoken speech very well. The common advice is to 'listen a lot', and that is what I have done, but I would be glad to receive more specific instructions as to what I should listen and pay attention to. What would be proper? The keywords, intonation, conjugations, or particles? Speed is quite an issue for me, but I don't think it's as big as the issue of understanding complex/abstract words. For example, in one of the Podcast 101 Audio Blogs, I could perfectly understand the whole speech about watching comets, but in another podcast that was discussing about the 'approval criteria of damages for work-related deaths', though I had listened to the same speech many, many times I am still unable to catch what they are trying to say as they say it. As I have only some 20 days left to go until the end of my holidays, I would appreciate any advice or help out there that would help me with my listening skills. Edited by ryuukohito on 17 June 2008 at 5:08am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Alkeides Senior Member Bhutan Joined 6146 days ago 636 posts - 644 votes | Message 62 of 65 18 June 2008 at 1:39am | IP Logged | ||
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Perhaps one of the reasons you have difficulty comprehending speech is that what you've been using so far is more on the literary side. Speech is actually much simpler than the literary language, though maybe you cannot get some of the contractions? ない＞ねえ、ければ＞きゃ
Listen to a wide variety of anime and doramas. I almost didn't understand anything from Tiger & Dragon when I went through it the first time, but after watching once over with subtitles; going through it multiple times without the subs made it quite transparent. You might also want to get a manga series and the corresponding anime; the Death Note manga and anime dialogue correspond very closely, though some of the events are reordered. You could read through one book of the manga, and then go through the anime up till where the manga stops, and repeat. Also, learning to use Japanese p2p (perfect dark & Share) is a good tool to obtain Japanese dubs of Western movies. I have 300 and Shrek in Japanese. Edited by amphises on 18 June 2008 at 1:41am 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 63 of 65 20 June 2008 at 1:44pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thank you for the suggestions, amphises. I'm quite used to colloquial contractions, thanks to some manga exposure and available guides around the Internet on them. (I'm particularly indebted to Tae Kim and JapanesePod101 for this.) It's just that when I'm listening everything seems to fly past me so quickly; like I said it's the abstract words which usually trouble me. (E.g. My current problem: when I hear 猫 in a sentence I can easily picture a cat, but if someone says 'fiscal investments and loans', my brain will still be manually translating the meaning of the whole abstract phrase/word such that I'd immediately lose track of the sentence that's being spoken out.)
Spekaing of Tiger & Dragon (and for the record, I love that show, and it's the reason behind why this username I chose for myself) I'll try going through the show over again. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sei Diglot Senior Member Portugal Joined 5939 days ago 178 posts - 191 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English Studies: German, Japanese | Message 64 of 65 15 September 2008 at 4:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have been reading through your log throughout the day and I greatly admire your motivation and how far you were able to go!
But I do have a question. When you started the log, what knowledge did you already have? What books had you already gone through and so? Since you mention in the beginning that you were going through Japanese in Mangaland 1, I found it really odd/amazing that in a few weeks you were at intermediate stage already! (You should update your profile by the way, you're definitely not beginner anymore ^^) So if you can give some insight in this I'd greatly appreciate! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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