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Japanese from scratch TAC 2015 東亜 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5182 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 1361 of 1702 03 May 2014 at 10:02pm | IP Logged | ||
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@Stifa: I think it will help. I remember thinking way back as I was reading a book in German that my vocabulary wasn't increasing very quickly anymore from passive reading and I would have to actually *try* if I wanted to learn more vocabulary. By try I mean studying either Flashcards or whatever. Not just reading. Of course I could have been mistaken. But the vocabulary that gives me trouble usually isn't the kind that repeats itself too much. Authors tend to repeat vocabulary throughout a book at least somewhat and if you finish said book in a couple days then you may not see those words again any time soon. -- and you can argue that you don't need to know those words anyway. But if you want to get better, I would say studying them more is the best way.. Or re-reading the book. I rarely did that though.
But it also depends on how many books you've read. Over the years I have read 50+ full length books in German. I don't know the number but it's a lot. If you have only read a couple of books I think that it may not be worth it to ANKI stuff. I had more fun without making it studying. And I think you'll know yourself what's best. I was more than happy with my German if it never got better since I could read so well. Just now I'm feeling motivated to take it to another level. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5182 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 1362 of 1702 03 May 2014 at 10:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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Just thinking about Gbod's post hehe. A little critical but obviously she doesn't want to watch me fail the JLPT. One might think that having the ability to guess the meaning of words through context would transfer from one language to another. Except my experience is that it doesn't. So I have to keep that in mind and make myself read more. But that being said, I still think lots of flashcards are a necessary evil for studying Japanese.
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| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5980 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 1363 of 1702 03 May 2014 at 11:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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Sorry if I came across a little too harsh in my earlier post!
Actually, my concern was not about whether you would pass the N2 or not. I'm sure you can achieve it, you proved your study skills already with N3. I just don't want to see you making yourself miserable by grinding through 100s of SRS reps every day when, since you are already approaching N2, you could be doing so much more with your Japanese already. I agree SRS helps deal with the whole kanji thing, but the impression I get from your log is that you spend a disproportionate amount of your time with flashcard software (and apologies if I'm wrong!) I also have experience of making myself miserable by doing too much SRS, worrying too much about kanji/vocabulary and missing the bigger picture, so maybe I'm just worried you'll make the same mistakes as me. Anyway, as far as breaking into reading goes, there are of course graded readers for adult learners and children's books for native speakers which come with complete furigana. And beyond that, some grown up books are more comprehensible (ie. have more words you already know) than others, so if you get the right book you can just read it and maybe be a little choosy about which words you look up and which words you let slip (as anything important will show up again anyway). Not to mention the fact that there are loads of words in Japanese which are normally written in kana which you don't know yet. Reading will definitely help you pick these up too. It is definitely possible to guess the meaning of words in context in Japanese. It's just that as native English speakers, we get less of a discount with Japanese than we do with German. That's no reason not to read though, especially when you are in the N2 zone! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5182 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 1364 of 1702 06 May 2014 at 7:17am | IP Logged | ||
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I finally had a language exchange on Skype. I met someone through iTalki. She actually teaches Japanese
on iTalki pretty much full time so she's really used to skyping people which made it easier probably. I was pretty nervous since it was my first time taking to someone without paying the so they -had- to talk to me. It was smooth. My Japanese has well enough that I can easily have a conversation win someone it seems. Yeah they can't just talk to me like I'm a native but I don't think they have to try that hard either. I'll have to Skype more people and see how it goes. Finding stuff to talk about is a little interesting so I think I'll have to make an effort to read more current events probably. We spoke all Japanese for several minutes and I got concerned that I was hogging the learning time and switched to English and she kept lapsing back into Japanese. I thought that was odd. Usually when I talk to foreigners they only want to speak English and it's just the other way around. I'm thinking that's different for Japanese because if they haven't spent time here in the states the pronunciation is hard for them and they're self conscious about it. Edited by kraemder on 06 May 2014 at 7:18am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5182 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 1365 of 1702 06 May 2014 at 7:29am | IP Logged | ||
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Oh I was reflecting on the Skype session and wanted to post it but got distracted. I think speaking to people
makes you want to improve your grammar so you can speak without stopping to apologize because you your grammar is off. In my case I couldn't remember the correct way to say twice per week. Counters I think are a big deal when you're talking. Just passively being able to understand isn't going to cut it. And I hated studying them because it's boring and passive understand isn't that hard to achieve. But I hate being really bad at them. I'm gonna get my grammar SRS going again. The active recall one. Edited by kraemder on 06 May 2014 at 7:32am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| stifa Triglot Senior Member Norway lang-8.com/448715 Joined 4871 days ago 629 posts - 813 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, EnglishC2, German Studies: Japanese, Spanish | Message 1366 of 1702 06 May 2014 at 9:58am | IP Logged | ||
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So what kind of flashcard format are you using? Maybe cloze-deletes for verb endings,
articles, etc. might be more useful, as they do urge some thinking, just like Kanji readings. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5182 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 1367 of 1702 07 May 2014 at 5:17pm | IP Logged | ||
I think it's more English translations with some key vocabulary if needed. I might want to adjust it to make it easier so I'm more likely to review. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5182 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 1368 of 1702 09 May 2014 at 3:00am | IP Logged | ||
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I had my first iTalki Japanese lesson. It was pretty fun. We used Skype and I tried out this iDroo Skype app thing - did some kanji drawing. I unfortunately hadn't gotten my windows tablet in the mail so I was using the mouse to draw. Anyway, I can more or less talk in Japanese now although I'm sure I sound funny but still I can talk. I think it's disarming to Japanese people and they can quickly start thinking you know more than you do. But that's not such a bad thing. We were studying kanji including 益 and I popped out with 有意義 which well has a similar meaning but as you can see different kanji. And she commented that 有意義 isn't a word you would see in an anime because it's a formal or I forget why. But I totally got it from 魔法高校劣等性. Which I said. I'm coming to realize that many Japanese really don't pay any attention to the language used in anime and just assume stuff like 敬語 isn't used or needed to understand anime and they always use plain form 100% of the time and they use basic "spoken" vocabulary and no big words etc. It's their language and their culture and they have no idea. Then again, I guess I have no idea when it comes to a lot of American cultural things as well. Anyway, my spoken Japanese is coming along well. Thankfully. I have a German iTalki tutor tomorrow so I'm looking forward to that. Edited by kraemder on 09 May 2014 at 3:01am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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