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Japanese from scratch TAC 2015 東亜

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mrwarper
Diglot
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Spain
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 Message 1225 of 1702
28 December 2013 at 11:01am | IP Logged 
kraemder wrote:
Yeah I wonder if Japanese people ever write out kanji in the air to clarify what they're saying. Never heard of them doing it so I'm sure it's rare.

Happened here all the time. I'm not sure it might have been because of having us Spaniards around, though -- since we were already struggling with the language, they might have thought going for synonyms, etc. could likely get us further lost.
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kraemder
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 Message 1226 of 1702
28 December 2013 at 8:22pm | IP Logged 
@mrwarper Interesting. I've only seen them reference kanji to clarify what they're saying when referencing names.. like in yuhakko's example where someone would say their name and then the kanji for how it's spelled. In like every anime I've watched, there's always a transfer student who's new and this person writes their name on the board too pretty much for the same reason.

I got my Window's tablet. It's a

Dell Venue 8 Pro 32 gb from Amazon. It's only 250$ and that seemed cheap enough to justify getting on top of an ipad and nexus 7... Anyway. I really like it a lot. I also love my iPad which has tons of apps available but this thing does the two things I wanted it to do. I can watch Crunchyroll on it without subs and I can read the internet using Rikaisama. The latter is really sweet. I set it to play the audio on hover and I have a bluetooth keyboard next to me to hit the shift button so I can get kanji info or name info if I need it. Yeah, I know people have had laptops that they could do this in bed already but for me the tablet is just a lot nicer and enjoyable. I like it so much I kind of wonder if I shouldn't have gotten a more expensive tablet instead. I'm behind on my SRS reviews (and I'd been so good..) and this thing isn't going to help that. I don't know how bad that is. I think reading and watching lots of anime w/o subs could be a good thing.
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kraemder
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 Message 1227 of 1702
28 December 2013 at 9:55pm | IP Logged 
TAC 2013 CHALLENGE, THIS YEAR'S SUMMARY:

Overall I'm happy with the year. I've pointed this out to others as well because it's true - I've stuck with studying this language through the year consistently and therefore I've made progress and this is a great thing. Foreign languages are hard and being consistent is most important. I give myself top marks for that.

However, there's also more to reflect on (if we're looking at a contest where there's a winner especially). Being most efficient and achieving the best results that you're capable of is of high consideration. I had a goal of achieving N3 (and looking back at my early posts, I wasn't ruling out N2 even lol). To pass a standardized test, there's certain things that you can do to improve your chances of success and I didn't do this very much. Basically, using textbooks and study materials aimed at the test. It takes a lot of effort just to stay focused on a foreign language and even more effort to do it in a disciplined manner involving learning materials like N3 books. Which are dry and well less fun and interesting than anime and manga. I didn't even get very far into the practice tests I did. However, thankfully, I did sign up for courses at the JOI (Japanese Online Institute). They call it an institute and it's very well run but it's also pretty small I think. Anyway, they do offer courses designed to hep students pass the N3 and focus on stuff that students hate studying. It can really help to sign up for these courses and then all you need to do is show up and once there you have someone pushing you forward, in a sense making you do the work. To really succeed you still need to do follow up on your own but just doing these courses helps and I'm glad I signed up for that.

I don't know if it'll be enough to get me past N3 though. The N3 test takes place on the 1st Sunday of December and you get the results back end of February. While taking the test I was both impressed with my ability to understand the Japanese in the test and yet, at the same time, I knew that I might be falling for the traps that they set to separate the people who kind of understand from those that really have a strong grasp.

Putting the N3 aside again though, I think I've made the best progress with my conversational ability since starting the language. This is thanks to the JOI classes I've been doing. They have a system that's similar to skype sort of. A lot like the Rosetta Stone tutoring really. You have a small class of 1-6 people (not sure of the upper limit, it's rare to have more than 3 people) and the Japanese tutor/teacher (some of them are really knowledgeable like a college professor even) only speaks Japanese. They use English though to teach, they just don't speak it at all - mostly because they can't. I don't get the impression that they do it because they have a rule forcing them to like Rosetta Stone does for their tutors. (they mostly copy and paste the English explanation or definition of a word if needed). Anyway, the students and teachers only speak Japanese.

It was a big step for me and got great results. I visited my native Japanese tutor at the community college and had a conversation in all Japanese with her without too much effort. I didn't mind making mistakes of course. We only switched to English when other students came. I think they could understand but it just feels weird when they're not saying anything at all and you want them to talk too.

My goal when I started studying this language was to be able to watch anime without English subtitles (and understand). I'm really making good progress towards that goal. I've tried forcing myself to turn off the subs but after a day or two I always go back to having the subs because I don't want to miss out on the character development or jokes or plot etc. I've read numerous times that the first step to being able to watch and understand without subs is to turn them off and well.. not understand. About a week ago I finally turned them off by rewatching anime I'd already seen so I knew the characters and overall plot. It worked. I'm now loathe to have the subs on even for the new anime. A week isn't a month but I've got a good feeling this time. I even just got a nice new mobile device that lets me stream new anime from crunchyroll without subs in bed. More motivation to keep those subs off.

I'm really happy with my progress in Japanese even if I didn't pass the N3. I think I'm following the same road I did with German years and years ago and it ended up with pretty good results. Mostly reading books and listening to online radio and after several years I was pretty comfortable with the language, even if I hadn't spent large amounts of time on grammar and made mistakes especially while speaking fluently off the cuff. I'd say a couple more years of doing what I'm doing and understanding anime will be no problem, or even having a conversation (with mistakes) about any topic at all. Yes, passing a standardized test like the N2 would also be great, and I will probably try the JLPT again next year no matter how disorderly and randomly I study.

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mrwarper
Diglot
Winner TAC 2012
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Spain
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 Message 1228 of 1702
28 December 2013 at 10:12pm | IP Logged 
kraemder wrote:
[...]someone would say their name and then the kanji for how it's spelled.[...]

Names must be very special in that regard. Regular words have meanings, so getting the right Kanji for homophones is relatively easy, since you shouldn't have many to choose from. OTOH most of the time names have no meaning per se so, theoretically at least, you could write a given name with any combination of Kanjis that are read like that way, thus you want to be careful not to associate improper meanings to the name in writing.

I've been told there are ways to Kanjifi 'yoroshiku' so everyone reading it will think you're cracking jokes or in the yakuza.

Edited by mrwarper on 28 December 2013 at 10:14pm

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kraemder
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 Message 1229 of 1702
29 December 2013 at 6:31am | IP Logged 
Now I'm curious how to kanjify よろしく.

As sometimes happens when I get frustrated with my SRS, I've switched up how the decks work. I'm doing just one deck now but it's English side 1 and the pic. I have to write the correct spelling with kanji to get a pass. Funny that I'd come up with this method if I'm behind because this isn't going to make the reviews go faster, it'll slow me down. But it's what I'm doing. I was reading about skritter a bit and I think that affected me. I don't like how skritter doesn't show what you drew instead it does a paint brush stroke of the proper next stroke when it thinks you did it close enough. It's neat but I want to see what I wrote. And I feel like if I write the kanji too quickly it confuses the skritter AI.

I'm going to be behind on my reviews for a while since this method does take longer but I think it'll actually help some words which were just not sticking for me - 関連 didn't want to stick. I don't know why. Thanks to forcing myself to focus on the kanji, I think it's in my head now. That's not normal though. Most of the time I can learn a word no problem and really not worrying too much about the kanji.
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dampingwire
Bilingual Triglot
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United Kingdom
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 Message 1230 of 1702
29 December 2013 at 12:40pm | IP Logged 
mrwarper wrote:
kraemder wrote:
[...]someone would say their name and then the kanji
for how it's spelled.[...]

Names must be very special in that regard.


My tutor's given name is けいこ. I remember looking it up in tangrin.com and finding
many entries (I stopped checking just now when the count reached 125 ...), so I asked
her how she'd explain its correct kanji to someone. She said that she'd either say "the
first kanji is the same as the second kanji in X" and so on or she might draw it in the
air with her finger. It being her name she had two specific words that she tended to
use to explain the kanji. She did say that it was important to avoid "negative" words
for your examples, but I guess that's obvious.

I guess there must be some unfortunates (?) whose names use one or more obscure kanji,
in which case I guess they must resort to drawing or habitually carry a lot of 名刺.


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kraemder
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 Message 1231 of 1702
29 December 2013 at 12:50pm | IP Logged 
Me being the clown that I am I'd go right for the negative examples. It would help make it easier to remember
^_^
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kraemder
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 Message 1232 of 1702
30 December 2013 at 8:35am | IP Logged 
Well I'm forgetting writing kanji out etc. for doing SUBS2SRS decks. subs2srs. I did this a while back. I thought it was really cool but it was also a pain. I think they improved the program to make it easier, or I just got smarter. Probably the former. It handles MKV files no problem's at all and you can grab Japanese subs off of Kitsuneko.net. You get the Jap subs off of kitsuneko and an MKV movie somewhere that has English soft subs then just load it up and go. It's designed with anki in mind but works great with Flashcards Deluxe too with a little tweaking of the output file it generates. You can technically make a ton of cards with great media and photos in a few minutes. Depending on your level of Japanese there's going to be a lot of cards with Japanese you're already familiar with. But since the cards are made for you with minimal effort I don't find it a big deal.

What does take time is using rikai to make definitions of all the words you don't know to include somewhere on your card. But that's something you'd have to do if you were making your own cards no matter what so there's no getting around it. This way you get a Japanese sentence and a decent English translation and cool audio and a pic. I like it.

So I made a deck from Full Metal alchemist last night, brotherhood ep 1 and now I'm making a deck for AccelWorld ep 1. The way I'm doing it is to make myself read and understand the target sentence in its kanji glory. I've played with this style of studying before and found it overwhelming. It seemed like it was too much to test. But my Japanese is a lot higher level than the last time I tried it so it could work better. An alternative if it is too hard is to just have each card test a target word and then have the sentences on a side 3 or something to provide context. It would take longer to make that deck and I think making myself tackle the full sentences will in itself help me improve my Japanese. That's the theory anyway.

I'm thinking of just scrapping my deck from the Core 6k. I could also just redo it into a sentence card deck. It depends how well this goes.

*edit*

I found some example cards here. I think he was selling them at first without examples? I dunno. They look like pretty good cards but I like my SUB2SRS better and well probably anything I make better.

AJATT sentence deck examples

Edited by kraemder on 02 January 2014 at 9:25am



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