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TAC 2011 Team あ g-bod and 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 5981 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes  Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 17 of 82 25 February 2011 at 11:05pm | IP Logged |
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I am doing my update a day early this week due to schoolwork encroaching on my Saturday this week thanks to a compulsory group project. I will be missing out on my Skype language exchanges this weekend for the same reason.
Despite NuclearGorilla's formidable bird (which has taken pride of place on my facebook page this week!) I can't promise a strong finish to February. I think I have experienced a burnout of sorts, although I am usually reluctant to use that phrase. It's not burnout with Japanese, it's just a combination of not enough sleep and too much screen time, for work, university, Japanese and general leisure and time wasting. In the end I actually went offline for a whole day this week. No internet, email, SRS, no glaring white screens, and that night I had the best night's sleep I've had in a long time. Obviously I can't do anything about work and university but I am rather frustrated to realise how reliant I am on being near a computer for my Japanese studies, simply to access an adequately comprehensive Japanese/English dictionary. At least that is an issue I should be able to deal with and I am currently weighing up the options of either getting an android phone, trying to import a dictionary to run on my DS or trying to import an electronic dictionary. I think the DS option is likely to be the cheapest so may run with this. I have also decided I need to put the brake on my kanji cramming. It was a convenient routine to get into and bragging about the numbers going up every week is motivating in a way that saying "I watched Hana Yori Dango again" is not, but drilling flashcards is just one tool of many to learn Japanese and things were getting a bit one sided. I will still aim to cover around 20 kanji a week, which should be more than enough to get me to around 1200 by the end of TAC 2011. I have started keeping a small diary of what I do on Japanese, which should make it easier to report here every week without wasting too much time on logging minute details either. So I have two new items of interest to report. Firstly, after reading about Smart.FM on Luai_lashire's log I found that shared decks were available via Anki for the Core 2000 and Core 6000 series, which I have always felt looked like a useful resource but wasn't sure how to use. I have downloaded the lot and am working my way through Step 1, but focussing mainly on audio recognition and pronunciation, particularly pitch accent which I have neglected far too long. Strangely I find it much easier to work with via Anki than I ever did using the Smart.FM interface, it feels less twinkly and more down to business this way! Second report is that I had a go at doing a couple of short translations from Japanese to English, picking up the easy-level news items on Yahoo Kids News. It's a slightly different way of trying to pick up vocabulary for me I think. Not sure if I will keep it up but I did rather enjoy it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| fortheo Senior Member United States Joined 5035 days ago 187 posts - 222 votes Studies: French | Message 18 of 82 26 February 2011 at 5:22am | IP Logged |
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Glad to see you’re still making progress! Burnout sucks, but I think you handled it well. Sometimes our minds and bodies just need a nice relaxing break from everything. I definitely know what you mean about being reliant on the computer. I opted for a lot of books, and audio courses that I could do away from my computer, because I already spend so much time in front of it throughout the day.
As a fellow member of Team あ your log motivating and interesting to follow. Keep up the good work! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5981 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 19 of 82 04 March 2011 at 11:53pm | IP Logged |
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I feel once again like life is getting in the way. Well, not so much life as just the ever challenging balance of working full time, studying for a masters and trying to learn a language at the same time (and also aiming not to be divorced before I graduate...) I don't expect I'll be making much progress over the next couple of weeks as far as Japanese is concerned.
The whole Kanji in Context thing is currently on hold. I must say I'm enjoying the break, but I hope I can pick it up again once my next assignment (due in two weeks) is completed. Working through the Smart.FM Core 2000 and Core 6000 series via Anki has been interesting. I started doing around 80 new cards a day from Core 2000 step 1 although now I've switched back to review only, again likely for a couple of weeks. The material is pretty easy but I am finding it excellent in helping me focus on pronunciaton. In fact, I found it so easy I thought I might as well make a start on Core 6000 as well and the difference in material is stark. Every single new card on Core 6000 so far has taught me something new, so I'm currently working on adding a mere 4 new cards a day. Again, having the audio is a huge help - it's simply something I do not have the time or resources to create when I do my own flashcards. I have read a bit more よつばと but it doesn't really feel like study as I usually just flick through a story before I go to sleep. It's this kind of casual reading that I want to be able to do with everything in Japanese! This week I have started to alternate よつばと with Paradise Kiss, which I had put off reading because of the lack of furigana, however after flicking idly through it the other night I realised I could still understand rather a lot of it - at least enough to get enjoyment from it without resorting to the dictionary. Yet again more evidence to support my conviction that the problem is not so much kanji as it is vocabulary. The only downside is that using a dictionary when you don't know how to sound out a kanji word is that little bit more time consuming. Speaking of dictionaries, I have ordered the Kanji Sonomama Rakubiki Jiten for my DS in the hope of making me a bit less reliant on my PC for Japanese study, although it is likely to take a couple of weeks to get here. I started trying to translate an article for one of the news magazines I ordered from the Japan Centre in London. I'm doing it a paragraph at a time so I think it's going to take me a while and, well, translation from Japanese to English is really hard! I'm not aiming for a perfect translation but it's really helped me to see where there are huge gaps in my current understanding. The following sentence has given me particular trouble: 寒々しい空が気持ちまで頑なにしたのかと思 うほど、商社勤務の中国人男性は口が重かっ た。 口が重い was a new idiom for me but I quite like this idea that if you are uncommunicative you have a heavy mouth. However, the whole structure of the sentence is quite hard for me to work out what is going on. It doesn't help that I still haven't really got the hang of ほど, plus the useage of まで here was also new to me. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5981 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 20 of 82 08 March 2011 at 10:16pm | IP Logged |
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I'm going to break the pattern and post mid-week today because when I got home from work today I discovered the postman had delivered a little present for me, in the form of a 漢字そのまま楽引辞典 for my DS! I had a pressing deadline to meet for my course tonight so I forced myself to finish off my assignment before opening my new toy and giving it a test run...However, having had a play with it now, I have to say that it feels like exactly the kind of thing I was looking for. Obviously it is aimed at native Japanese speakers, but when I turned it on it ran through a quick tutorial, in Japanese, and when I realised that I could understand all the instructions in the tutorial I almost cried with joy! It includes both a Japanese-English and a Japanese-Japanese dictionary and you can look up Japanese words by either spelling out the pronunciation with kana, or writing the kanji in using the stylus. So now I no longer need to be bugged by unknown words when I'm reading manga in bed! For the investment of a mere £32, it feels like a win.
Oh, I also just noticed I seem to have graduated to Senior Member, which feels pretty good too. (I won't mention my total failure to review any flashcards over the last 48 hours...) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Luai_lashire Diglot Senior Member United States luai-lashire.deviant Joined 5827 days ago 384 posts - 560 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto Studies: Japanese, French | Message 21 of 82 08 March 2011 at 11:35pm | IP Logged |
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That sounds great, g-bod! I'm envious- I don't own a DS, so all these cool games and dictionaries and so forth are
inaccessible to me. It sounds like it will be really helpful though! Don't feel so bad about the flashcards- I'm sure you'll catch up on them soon enough. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5981 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 22 of 82 09 March 2011 at 12:00am | IP Logged |
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I just did 609 reviews in 1.25 hours. It was painful, but I guess that makes me caught up. Going to head to bed with Paradise Kiss and my new dictionary, it really feels like I deserve some fun now! Edited by g-bod on 09 March 2011 at 12:01am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5380 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 23 of 82 09 March 2011 at 5:45pm | IP Logged |
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Don't you sometimes feel that you are just catching up to catch up, rather than having a sheer desire to learn and use those words? That's certainly one of the things I don't like with SRS.
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| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5981 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 24 of 82 09 March 2011 at 8:00pm | IP Logged |
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To be honest, my aim of using SRS is not to learn the words to use, but rather to learn them to understand, generally in a written context and primarily because of the whole orthography thing. I just find it harder to remember words spelled in kanji when they pop up in my reading without a little assistance, and flashcards seem to work for me there. I understand that your main priority with learning a language is to communicate with other people and certainly to achieve that I think SRS is completely the wrong tool for the job.
The just catching up to catch up is a valid point and the one problem with opting into a SRS system is that if you do not review every day, they do pile up and it very quickly renders the whole exercise quite futile - it's my own fault for having a sulk over coursework demands this weekend and abandoning my Anki decks for a whole two nights. If I sulked like that on a regular basis, I might as well give up on SRS! On the other hand, when everything was going wrong in the middle of last year and I did not have the time or energy to do much with Japanese, the two things that I made sure to keep doing were SRS reviews (but never adding new cards) and listening to the audio blogs on JapanesePod101, which are only a couple of minutes long each. In total I spent no more than 10-15 minutes a day on these activities but once things settled down I could jump back into Japanese without feeling like I was having to take a big step back. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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