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 1425 of 1702 09 July 2014 at 3:39am | IP Logged |
I'll make a video of the kindle in a bit.. hopefully soon. I was playing around and found a way to export the vocab list including the sentences that go with the words. It's a little tricky and isn't sorted really. Well it seems to be sorted by date - when I looked up a word.
I'm doing SRS again. Just plowing through the old decks I'd been ignoring. I'm not killing myself trying to get caught up. I also changed how I'm testing myself making it a sentence deck - side 1 has a sentence and the target word. I'm sort of making myself read every word in the sentence and deciding if I want to give myself a wrong response for missing a non target word. Since the Core sentences are pretty easy in general, if idiomatic at times, this isn't too hard. I do wish they included definitions for all the words in each sentence however. I'm sort of timing myself on the SRS thing instead of trying to catch up to all my due cards etc. 30 min to an hour each day. Since I can get a lot done on breaks at work this is really easy. Of course, I could be reading on my kindle at these times too. But You kind of want to get into something when you're reading and a few minutes here and there doesn't feel as productive.
I'm pretty glad that I can export the kindle lookups and I likely will make decks out of them down the road. But maybe not. Either way, knowing I can is nice.
I was playing Warcraft again some more today. Although it's pretty dead in general after work (it's like 6 am in Japan or something) I met another Japanese learner in the guild and that was fun. It kind of blows my mind how progressive this person has made in 5 months. Approaching N4 level. I'm not sure but he may be a college or high school kid with way too much free time though. I console myself with that.
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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 1426 of 1702 18 July 2014 at 1:04am | IP Logged |
My weekend started.. lovely. I broke out the booze already to celebrate XD.
And I signed up for Korean 101 at the local community college. I am not totally burned out on Japanese but I do feel like I'm running around in circles a bit with the whole kanji thing. I learn words and I don't constantly read. I am working on reading more but even if I go all out it'll feel like a losing battle I think compared to a language with an alphabet. I just had 封筒 come up on a flashcard. I am messing with my ios app JFLASH and adding random N2 vocab.. and I did not remember this card on first glance. I would understand ふうとう if said to me out lout however. I don't use this word much but I've studied it enough that by the sounds I will remember it. However, when reading the kanji, it didn't click. Probably because the heisig meanings aren't directly related to envelope although they're not completely unrelated either. I'm not so good with the sounds that I could just sound out those kanji either. So it's a basic word that stumped me on first glance. Makes me annoyed.
I guess I want something more exotic than Spanish which is the more practical foreign language to study for me. Korean fits the bill. I'm probably going to study a lot more Japanese between now and the fall semester but I'm signed up. I don't know what'll come of it. I'm looking into getting the text books now (which are really cheap thankfully).
As for Japanese at the moment. I'm probably going to do some reading this weekend since I have a lot of time but I'm back into doing flashcards. I think I get more from flashcards than I was giving myself credit for. However, I do not want to do SRS if I can find something to replace it. I like JFLASH and how it presents vocabulary but the app is unsupported at this time and you can't backup the stats. The authors may magically reappear when the new iPhone and new iOS come out but I can't count on that so I'm looking at other methods. Right now I'm looking at Brainscape and Ankiapp. Yeah, if you haven't heard of it there's a flashcard app called ankiapp. It looks like brainscape and anki combined. It seems to use the brainscape method of selecting a confidence response of 1 to 4 or 5 or something. And it uses web page code to format the cards of the deck like Anki does. I'm trying to see how to import cards into ankiapp right now and if I can make it play friendly with rikai-sama. It claims to import decks from ankiweb but I tried importing the huge Core deck and it choked. This was last night at 11 pm so I had to go to bed without troubleshooting much and I don't know if it'll work yet or not. My peeve with brainscape is the kanji look too small on my iphone and I don't see a way to fix it but I'm gonna try working on that too.
Oh, I did a JLPT N1 Kanji class on JOI. I was a little nervous since I am obviously not reading to be even preparing for N1 but it went fine. I think most of the other students were better than me in general but I had no problems participating and the kanji were more interesting than the N2 kanji class. I'd actually studied half of the vocab already just from anime scripts anyway. I'm planning on continuing the N1 kanji classes and N2 grammar classes.
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Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6550 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish
| Message 1427 of 1702 18 July 2014 at 3:43pm | IP Logged |
I'm always happy to read about more people studying Korean, yay! Good luck. I wonder how it will seem to you. Learning a new alphabet sure is easier than learning kanji but still it was more difficult than I had anticipated.
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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 1428 of 1702 18 July 2014 at 7:31pm | IP Logged |
Yeah I don't expect a miracle. Especially since I'm not dropping Japanese.. I suppose it will be like learning hiragana. I didn't learn that in a day like some people say they did.. I didn't even try to though. I crammed the letters with flashcards for a few days and then I just stopped and studied basic vocabulary on my flashcard app. The app did text to speech so I gradually absorbed the letters. And it wasn't until over a year later that I really got comfortable reading the alphabet.. as in I read stuff kind of slow. IE after I finished my first semester of Japanese in a real class. Class rooms can really pressure you to learn. I think college Japanese classes do a great job starting off but then they wimp out regarding kanji and using all Japanese in the classroom. At least mine did. I'm sure it was to keep enrollment above the minimum required by the college so the class wouldn't be cancelled =/.
Oh. I'm not sure if I posted here. I heard that my professor who taught the classes at the community college got a job as a full time position at UNC Greensboro. Lucky UNC students hehe. Stinks for us here in Tucson.
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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 1429 of 1702 18 July 2014 at 7:53pm | IP Logged |
Oh yeah I think it took me a week or two to memorise the character set for hiragana, but I
still remember how much extra mental effort it took to read text written in kana for several
months. It wasn't that I couldn't do it, I would just tire out surprisingly quickly.
Good luck with Korean, I wish I had the time to start messing around with it myself.
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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 1430 of 1702 19 July 2014 at 10:01am | IP Logged |
The textbook jumps right into the alphabet. After going over some general differences between Korean and English (or european languages in general). Yeah, it's just like Japanese but different pronunciations and vocabulary.. but word order and plain form and polite forms are all there.
I had an app on how to learn the alphabet from a couple years ago when I studied this language for a week or something. Probably less. Whatever I learned was long gone. But this time I think I'm more willing to get into a new language. And I just kept picturing myself reading books in Korean without worrying about kanji. The thought really motivated me. I hope I don't forget the alphabet when I wake up. Very sleepy at the moment.
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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 1431 of 1702 20 July 2014 at 5:25am | IP Logged |
I didn't really forget much. I found a pretty good site for making flashcards.. http://www.howtostudykorean.com/. I made cards for lessons one and two. So far the only words in common are the ones that come from English.. and 都市. Initially I was going to make flashcards from my textbook but I looked over the Korean IME for windows and it's not romaji sounds converted to Korean it's an actual Korean layout. The elements that make up their letters are about the same in number as the roman alphabet so it fits well on the keyboard. Yay. Hard. lol. I'll learn it but later. I can just copy and paste from the above website so that's what I'm doing. I'm using zero romaji in studying this language - I did use romaji for Japanese at first. Reading just one word at a time is ok but making myself read actual sentences, even short ones, hurts. I have to sound out all the elements in the letter instead of just looking at the letter so it's quite slow. I haven't gotten too far into the grammar yet but it seems like they have the same は、が thing going on that Japanese has. I don't know if it corresponds exactly or not. I can't say I have mastered は、が in Japanese anyway.
I'm kind of looking forward to watching K-Dramas. I've watched so many cartoons the past few years and j-drama's don't seem to hold my interest very much. Not that I've tried a whole lot either - I don't know of a good site for them like Crunchyroll does for anime.
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Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6550 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish
| Message 1432 of 1702 20 July 2014 at 9:08am | IP Logged |
I've used the http://www.howtostudykorean.com website and while it has a lot of information it's not very good for beginners because it doesn't ease you into the language, it throws the hard stuff at you very quickly. I would recommend the grammar lessons at http://www.talktomeinkorean.com, they move much more slowly and they also have PDFs with lesson notes so you can copy texts into your flash cards.
As for K-Dramas, the biggest website discussing them in English is http://www.dramabeans.com. There's an Open Thread every Friday, it's for people to talk about anything. If you scan through the recent open threads you'll find people discussing the current dramas (of course) but also asking for advice regarding which dramas to watch and where to watch them.
Edited by Evita on 20 July 2014 at 9:12am
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