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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 5984 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes  Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 25 of 82 12 March 2011 at 12:50pm | IP Logged |
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I can't believe the awful events in north east Japan this week. My friends and exchange partners in Tokyo and Yokohama are safe but rather unnerved by everything. I had an uncomfortable feeling following things on some Japanese news sites yesterday, having met certain words I have recently learned in my kanji studies in context for the first time. In vocabulary lists they are just sounds and shapes but in context, they really have meaning and in this case, awful meaning.
My kanji pause is over as of yesterday, where I cracked on with another 5 kanji in Kanji in Context. Now up to no.485 and hopefully I will break the 500 barrier in time for next week's update. Still working through the Smart.FM decks and still somewhat challenged by the things that the Core 6000 set are throwing up at me - but having apportioned it into very small chunks, it is both manageable and helpful. I absolutely love my DS kanji dictionary. I discovered it has a bookmark function, which allows you to collect words you look up into a list. So I can read anywhere, collect the new words and review them again at my leisure later. This week I have mostly been reading Paradise Kiss. It's slow progress and at times I have to resist the urge to look up everything just because I can (it's so easy now), however despite it taking me a long time, I am still very much enjoying it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Luai_lashire Diglot Senior Member United States luai-lashire.deviant Joined 5830 days ago 384 posts - 560 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto Studies: Japanese, French | Message 26 of 82 13 March 2011 at 1:56am | IP Logged |
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It's good that your friends are safe. I was so relieved when I finally heard from the last of my friends and
determined everyone I know is safe. But everyone is very worried about the nuclear power plant that was damaged... :( It's very frightening. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5984 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 27 of 82 19 March 2011 at 4:50pm | IP Logged |
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First of all introspection...
This week has seen a lot of introspection and soul searching, at least as far as my Japanese studies are concerned. Japanese is a big language for a native English speaker to take on and over the years that I have been studying it, I often feel frustrated by a sense of being pulled in all directions in terms of what I should be doing and what I want to achieve. I have collected quite a neat little library of Japanese resources and while I am truly grateful to have the resources to do this, I think sometimes it is a bit counterproductive. I get the feeling that I desperately need to take all the information from my books and squeeze it into my head somehow in order to both succeed at Japanese and justify the fact I've spent money on them in the first place. Most of the time I'm not entirely sure even what I mean by succeeding at Japanese, which is where this week's introspection has come in to play. I made a list of all the kind of Japanese-related goals which had formed inside my head, which were all fighting for attention leaving me somewhat exasperated, and came up with the following: Understand all native materials, written and spoken Communicate effectively both speaking and in writing Pass the JLPT or some other examination Get all the information from my bookcase into my head somehow (probably with many, many Anki flashcards) I then started to refine these ideas, both in terms of what is actually realistic and also how they either support or conflict with each other and came up with a much more definite and sensible list of goals I want to aim for: 1. Understand all native materials I am interested in Very straightforward, and not much different from what was originally in my head. I just wanted to be particularly clear that understanding things I have no interest in is not a priority right now. 2. Communicate effectively in situations where I can use Japanese with native speakers Here, I just tried to be a bit more realistic with myself. As it stands my only options for language exchange are still via Skype or IM and the occasional exchange on Facebook, so this is what I will concentrate on. I'm not worrying too much about, for example, writing essays as I do not have the need and cannot really obtain useful feedback anyway. These two goals support each other completely. I would be hard pressed to communicate effectively if I did not understand what my partner was talking about, but in turn communication and feedback should help reinforce my knowledge in order to understand native materials. However, communication relies on the availability of other people and, in the case of Skype, this is further complicated by full time jobs in different time zones! Therefore, understanding is still my priority, but I need to work on communication whenever I have the opportunity to. The rest, I have decided I should completely drop. I have no need for a certificate in Japanese and while my stated goals will go a long way towards preparing for an examination, I would still need to do very targeted practice in practicing exam questions which would not necessarily help towards my other goals. I have packed up a lot of the JLPT books I have collected just so I don't feel like I have to work with them any more. I'm keeping the reading and listening books in the shelves for now though as I think they might still be useful practice for listening and reading if I focus on understanding rather than answering the questions. And as far as getting all the information from my bookcase into my head is concerned...it would be great if things really worked like that, but I have to accept that they don't. Anki is a useful study tool but I really need to stop making it the focus of everything I do - apart from learning kanji, I think it is worth the pain for that! I am going to focus on using a small set of resources in a specific way to meet my stated goals, and try my best to ignore everything else. If I get bored or plateau somewhere, I reserve the option to try something else. But I don't need to try everything at once. And now, what I've done this week With all this introspection going on, I suppose I haven't had so much time for learning Japanese this week. Well, I finally hit kanji number 500 in Kanji in Context. I like the order in which kanji are introduced in the reference book, I think it is very well thought out and everything seems to build on what was taught previously in quite a nice way. I have decided that I don't really like the workbooks though - pages of sentences with no other information or explanation is just not that useful for me right now. So I'm going to drop using them and stick to memorising kanji in the context of single words in the reference book, in readiness for meeting them all in real life! I am still using the Smart.fm decks in Anki but I've really cut back on the number of new cards I'm studying every day as I don't want to spend too much time on it, whilst acknowledging that having the audio is actually really helpful; I listen, repeat, shadow and try to really concentrate on pronunciation and intonation. I have been dipping into Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar/Intermediate Japanese Grammar quite a lot recently. When I first bought them I just found it too detailed and overwhelming but I think I must have levelled up somewhere along the line because now I find it has just the level of detail that I need. After Luai_lashire mentioned podcasts recently, I've got itunes back up and running and have subscribed to a lot of random podcasts which I'm dipping in and out of whenever I feel like it. When I get good enough to understand what they're actually talking about, I'll try and recommend some! I've also started working with the Japanese Graded Readers again. Interestingly, I find that when I listen and read at the same time, I can understand comfortably up to level 3, and I can get most of the gist at level 4, however if I am listening only, I can only comfortably understand level 1, I get the most of the gist at 2, some of the gist at level 3 and level 4 is rather too hard. Guess I know what I need to work on then! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5984 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 28 of 82 26 March 2011 at 5:14pm | IP Logged |
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This week has seen further introspection about what I am doing with Japanese. I was rather interested in Arekkusu's log post about how he thinks he learns languages. One of my friends has been learning Japanese for about as long as me and is much more fluent verbally, but not as good at reading as I am. The information she gives me about the kind of things she does to learn Japanese has many similarities with the information in Arekkusu's post and I wonder if I can learn from this.
I had a bit of an Anki meltdown last night. I think that's a common theme. It reached a point last night when at 10 to midnight I was trying to run through my kanji compound deck and forgetting how to answer things that I should have known anyway and was getting incredibly frustrated. On top of this, I had Skype open and was IMing a Japanese guy I'd never spoken to before. I instinctively felt that my focus should be on getting through the troublesome kanji deck and perhaps I should cut short the conversation. And then I realised how wrong this was. The problem with Anki, or any SRS system, is that once you've bought into it it's very hard to give up as it renders all of your work with the tool so far pretty much pointless. So I'm not ready to give up Anki completely. Yet. But I'm not going to create any more cards in my homemade decks. And I will limit the reviews of my kanji deck to 50 a day, which I can run through in 5 minutes. And even then, I won't sweat it if I can't be bothered for a day or two, which is becoming a much more regular occurence anyway. After reading some posts on here recently about people using the ~Pod101 podcasts more like Assimil, I thought I would start doing some experimentation of my own with this. I edited down the podcast to the dialogue only with Audacity, listened to see what I could pick up, followed with the Japanese transcription a couple of times and finally with the English translation. I made flashcards for new words, but I think from today this is going to stop. Perhaps I should use Arekkusu's approach to try and make them meaningful to me, and if I can't do that I won't worry about them. Anyway, I then listened and repeated/shadowed the dialogue a couple of times. Finally I read through the kanji version of the transcript to see if I could put sounds to the kanji there - which is not difficult when you've just listened to the dialogue half a dozen times. I reviewed the next day and repeated the same process with the next podcast. I've so far worked through 5 podcasts with this method. It's too soon to say whether it is useful, however I am enjoying it so far. I've been getting stuck back into よつばと again this week. It's such a great feeling when you can put all your dictionaries/grammars away and just sit and read and enjoy something in another language - and even get the jokes (which in turn make the language more memorable). 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5383 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 29 of 82 26 March 2011 at 5:33pm | IP Logged |
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You seem to have a long history with anki and lot of accumulated cards. Perhaps you can
take advantage of this AND try to use the strategies I pointed to here. You could make a copy of your deck, and start using the new one. As words come up, ask yourself if they are meaningful to you. If not, delete it. It doesn't matter, it's a copy, so you can't go wrong. If it seems useful, or if you think you'll want to use that word, pause anki and spend some time applying the strategies. Get your mind out of anki for a minute and think about real life situations where you'd use it. Make various sentences with it, and if you can act it out or feel the flow of the words, all the better. I'm not saying that this means you'll remember every word. But little by little, besides the fact that you'll have identified the more useful words out of your cards, they will become natural and you'll be increasingly able to use them in real conversations. Keep us posted! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5984 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 30 of 82 26 March 2011 at 6:00pm | IP Logged |
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An interesting suggestion. However, if I can make the word meaningful to me, I think it has no place in an Anki deck anyway. So I might as well just delete everything and carry on! In some respects this may be the best approach, but for now it's a little too harsh and final. However if I set the stopwatch for 10 minutes and get stuck in with my Anki reviews and get out again, I think this is a reasonable compromise for someone who is not willing to admit that everything she's been doing is wrong! Well, I do think that when I first got stuck into learning kanji, using a structured system for reviewing helped make the overwhelming feel manageable. But I think perhaps I am ready to move on now.
However, I am going to change my approach to any new vocabulary I now meet along the way - asking myself if I can make it meaningful and if not, I won't worry about it unless it becomes one of those words that seem to follow you, which should make it easier to absorb anyway. Fundamentally I am going to change my focus from merely learning to understand (which has reached a point now where it should be self-reinforcing anyway), to learning to use. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5984 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 31 of 82 02 April 2011 at 9:53pm | IP Logged |
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Well, it's been an interesting week in languages. I think I've reached a turning point with Anki. I took a copy of my compound deck and took out all the cards which were testing the reading and from now on will test writing only. I still think I need some kind of structure to help learning kanji in order to be prepared for meeting them in the wild but I've just cut my workload by 50% so will see how it goes. I've retired step 1 of the Smart.FM Core 2000 deck because after one night off I was left with 100 reviews and as it is all material I know anyway, catching up is just not a good use of my time. I shall continue with the step 2 deck, which I'm taking at a much slower pace, and the Core 6000 deck which I'm actually learning some neat advanced vocabulary from, again at a very slow pace.
I covered a total of 4 JapanesePod101 dialogues this week. I've started following the Beginner Season 1 and Season 5 in tandem now, as the style is quite different I think between older and newer podcasts and this is working quite nicely for me at the moment. I have a couple of notebooks on the go now, a small one for vocabulary and a large one for grammar (less portable, but easier for writing out sentences in). As either come up I just make a note so I can review at my leisure and try and make it meaningful. It's a less OCD approach than putting everything in Anki. I acquired the Japanese version of Harry Potter as an audiobook. I'm not used to more literary, descriptive language (even of the kind aimed at 8 year olds) and there is not much time to stop and look things up. I experimented with listening and reading along with the English text, which made some things a little clearer but was not a huge help. I think I need to get hold of the Japanese text but unfortunately I only recently did a big order from Amazon Japan so I can't justify doing another one for a couple of months. I've only listened to the first two chapters so I will continue to just listen to the rest. I've now finished reading vol.5 of よつばと. I'm moving through at a quicker pace and I'm getting most of the jokes, which is rather exciting! I loaded up the audio to all my textbooks and readers, including ones I haven't used yet, to my phone/mp3 player and have been dipping into things in the evenings when I haven't felt like listening to podcasts. Listening to the audio to both Japanese for Busy People and マンガで学ぶ, which I haven't really worked through but both felt quite challenging 12-18 months ago, I realised how much I could actually understand now. It was a nice confidence boost. This week I started another completely ridiculous project. I thought it might be a good idea to learn some Russian. I feel a little bad for being unfaithful, but Japanese is still my first love and my most important. But one of my tutors this semester is Russian and I have to say I was seduced (by the language, that is). So at the moment I am trying to learn the Russian alphabet and reliving the thrill of watching a script slowly start making sense. I'm not sure how seriously I will take it yet but for now my only demands are that I only do it when I feel like it, I don't let it detract from my Japanese, and I don't take it anywhere near Anki. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5984 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 32 of 82 08 April 2011 at 9:43pm | IP Logged |
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Now that we have some stunning sunny spring weather...I have the pleasure of a weekend of studying to look forward to. A deadline I thought was three weeks away turns out to be next week so I'm going to be glued to the computer doing planning stuff rather than enjoying the sunshine and learning Japanese. Do I sound a bit bitter about it? At least I found out about my deadline mix up this week and not next week though.
It's been quite a nice week for Japanese. I read some more of my Japanese Graded Reader. At Level 3 it can definitely be more challenging in places. Although I was so taken by the story 注文の多い料理店 that I decided my husband had to hear it, which meant me translating it on the fly and reading out loud in English. An interesting challenge...especially when I couldn't work out how to translate 入れ物 - "a thing that you put things in?" "a pot then" "yes, that's it". I've got back into reading the Yahoo Kids News as well. I have a little routine with it. I read through once without dictionary assistance, to see how much I can catch the gist of it. I then switch on rikaichan to check readings of kanji and meanings of words if necessary. I don't do anything else with it but being the news, similar vocabulary tends to pop up over a period of time, as you get articles that keep coming back on similar themes. It's a nice way to practice, doesn't take too long as the articles are so short and over time becomes easier. I only look at the stuff written in basic Japanese, rather than the longer newspaper-style articles - but the plan is to switch when the basic stuff gets too easy! I also thought I deserved a new ridiculous challenge (like the coursework deadline mixup isn't ridiculous enough) and decided to have a go at reading a novel. I decided to go with NHKにようこそ as I've already watched the anime version so at least I have some idea of the basic plot. I can only get through about a page a day so far, but I am hoping it will get easier. I've been making lots of use of my DS dictionary and I love the bookmarking function as it means I can review the words I had to look up a little bit later, which helps them stay in my head when I tackle another page the next day. And I think I am learning things. 魅力 and 魅了 have stuck in my head because the kanji 魅 is a little unusual, I think. And I have learned how to use the on and kun of 汚 through words such as 汚い、汚染 and 汚点. And the whole thing is much more fun than drilling in Anki! I finally got my kanji compound deck backlog cleared completely. Today I have a mere 26 cards to review. Yay. The deal is that I practice writing only with Anki, but have to make up for it by reading Japanese in books and things. I think that means a win all round. I also got my delivery from amazon.co.jp this week, but it's a little too early to write about all the goodies I received, having only just got the parcel. I'm sure I'll be spilling over with excitement about it next week, however. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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