sage74 Groupie United States Joined 5439 days ago 40 posts - 52 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean
| Message 1 of 20 01 January 2011 at 8:20pm | IP Logged |
A New Year, a new challenge! This year I have a lot of ambitious plans, which includes
furthering my studies in Japanese and starting to learn Korean and Mandarin. I want to
be able to open up myself to more knowledge and communicate with more people of
different backgrounds. I started a journal a year ago with Japanese, and finally was
able to focus on furthering my kanji study using the Hesig Method. My grammar,
speaking, and listening knowledge is poor, which is something I want to focus on
immediately.
My reading ability in Japanese is my strong point, however I still need to learn many
new Kanji readings.
My main goal in Japanese is to become fluent and this year I'll try my hardest to
become upper intermediate in Reading, Speaking, Listening, and to become a better at
writing. Japanese is the main focus for this year, as its the language that I've put
the most in during the past few years.
However I also want to start learning Korean and Chinese as well, and even though I'm a
total beginner in those languages, I hope to be able to learn fast. Getting towards
intermediate would be a good goal to strive for both of these languages.
I'm excited to learn, がんばれ!
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snovymgodom Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5726 days ago 136 posts - 149 votes Speaks: English*, Russian
| Message 2 of 20 01 January 2011 at 8:33pm | IP Logged |
Best of luck, man! You should talk about some of the resources you use as you go along.
がんばれ!
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Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5536 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese
| Message 3 of 20 02 January 2011 at 9:27pm | IP Logged |
Good luck with your studies. Korean is fun and much of the grammatical behavior (and even some loan words that both inherited from Chinese) from Japanese will transfer over when you start learning Korean. (In fact, Japanese is on my hit list for the future and I'm hoping to reap the same benefits in the opposite direction.)
화이팅!
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sage74 Groupie United States Joined 5439 days ago 40 posts - 52 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean
| Message 4 of 20 03 January 2011 at 9:48pm | IP Logged |
Thanks guys! So far in the New Year I’ve been focusing on Japanese Vocab and reading up on Korean Hangul. Hangul is an interesting script and I’m still trying to understand it.
My Resources for Japanese are pretty numerous:
Remembering the Kanji Part 1: I finished this up last month, but I am still reviewing from it.
Remembering the Kanji Part 2 &3: These two books go into the readings and more advanced kanji. I’ll start them up soon.
Manga + Games: I have a lot of resources to utilize from here. I have a lot of material in Japanese over the years to use.
Understanding Basic Japanese Grammar: This book is going to be KEY. I suck at grammar now, so I really need to step it up. I used to be better in this area so I need to strengthen it up.
Korean:
Right now I’m using Online resources to learn Hangul, its going somewhat slow though.
Mandarin:
Remembering the simplified Hanzi Part 1: This is just like remembering the Kanji, but using simplified Chinese characters. This is pretty good, but studying it now is confusing because I’m still studying Japanese kanji and I tend to mix them up.
Right now the focus is Hangul and strengthening Japanese grammar and speech.
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The Real CZ Senior Member United States Joined 5650 days ago 1069 posts - 1495 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean
| Message 5 of 20 03 January 2011 at 10:09pm | IP Logged |
Make sure you have a good grasp on Japanese grammar before you start diving into Korean grammar. It'll really reduce the time you'll need to spend on Korean. So far in my studies, they're essentially the same, but Korean has one more tense, so there's more grammar forms and rules compared to Japanese.
Kanji should transfer for the most part, but Korean uses traditional ones, so obviously there'll be some differences.
But have fun! I'm also playing my first game in Japanese, and I'm amazed at how much I understand.
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jimbo Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6295 days ago 469 posts - 642 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Japanese, Latin
| Message 6 of 20 04 January 2011 at 2:08am | IP Logged |
A while back I ran across:
"Korean Essential Vocabulary 6000". ISBN 89-5518-489-1
Published by LanguagePLUS
www.langpl.com
Seems worthwhile. Less than ten bucks US. Has the Chinese characters in brackets following the vocabulary entry if the word is of Chinese origin. Nice feature. It also has a handy pronunciation guide in hangul so you can see the sound changes
(e.g. 숫자 (數字) [수짜] number)
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The Real CZ Senior Member United States Joined 5650 days ago 1069 posts - 1495 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean
| Message 7 of 20 04 January 2011 at 5:28am | IP Logged |
Don't get it. I bought it. There's only 4500 words or so. They'll put the same word twice, have the same definition, but they have a different grammatical function. And some of the translations are just odd and awkward, and I had to look them up in an online dictionary.
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sage74 Groupie United States Joined 5439 days ago 40 posts - 52 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean
| Message 8 of 20 04 January 2011 at 6:03pm | IP Logged |
Good Input guys! But before tackling any Korean words, I need to get a handle on Hangul. Any ideas on where to start? I've looked around a bit and found a few youtube sources, but I'm not sure if that is the right direction to go in.
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