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日本語 and me the next round TAC 2012 Team い | ||
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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 321 of 333 20 December 2012 at 11:02pm | IP Logged |
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I much prefer DVD to TV too. If I'm in the mood for a particular show, I'll generally be in the mood to sit down and watch several episodes in one go (although not as extreme as a friend of mine who marathoned the whole first series of 24).
As for the bad hairstyles, I tried to link to the page about the drama on drama wiki but for some reason it didn't work (the forum software changed a capital letter to lower case and it all fell apart from there...) but at least now you know where to look if you're curious. All the boys I had a crush on when I was at school had hair like the lead character in this show. Obviously I found it attractive then, but I'm not so keen now! My box of books arrived from Amazon today! Yay! I was surprised because the despatch notification suggested a delivery date on 25th December. Since that's not a working day in the UK, I wasn't expecting to get my books until after Christmas... Well, I won't start reading them until the new year anyway, but I'm still excited! Books are beautiful. Japanese books even more so. I'm slowly chipping away at my mini-goals. I've read a couple of the stories in ドラえもん and completed the first chapter in KIC Part 3 according to my new regime (more about that in a later post). I also practiced the ～ば～ほど pattern in 文化中級日本語I. I'm going to go and read some 伝記 now... 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 322 of 333 21 December 2012 at 9:59pm | IP Logged |
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I have finished the second chapter in KIC Part 3 (20th chapter overall) and have therefore technically completed the kanji minigoal. Yay, go me! I've basically decided I'm going to stop drilling handwriting of kanji in Anki. It was effective, but it's just too time consuming. Handwriting is important to me, but reading is more important, so I'm going to concentrate mainly on recognition for the time being. I start my study of each kanji by sorting out the vocabulary according to on and kun readings and writing them all out in a notebook by hand, so I'm still getting some handwriting action. But I've reduced the review time needed a day from 30+ minutes to 10. And to be honest, after about 10 minutes sat in front of an Anki screen, I get too bored to learn much anyway.
I also watched the second episode of Tokyo Daigaku Monogatari today. Given the title of the thing, I was expecting it to be a university drama, but at least for the first two episodes all the action has been in a high school. But there is nothing about teachers solving their student's problems, so that's ok. I've finished work for the Christmas break now. My husband's family are visiting tomorrow and then my family are visiting over Christmas, so I probably won't find much time to study until after Boxing Day, although I'm hoping to steal some private time with a book. If my mum insists on watching Strictly, I think we could come to an arrangement that pleases us both. 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 323 of 333 27 December 2012 at 6:03pm | IP Logged |
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My parents left early this morning, so now I'm free to potter around and please myself until I go back to work next week. It's so nice to be able to just sit around and recharge a little, although I think I've managed to catch a Christmas cold.
I'm also trying hard to stay focused on my mini goals and not let myself get distracted by TAC 2013 preparation (still too early) or the German textbook that's been speaking to me from my bookshelf all week (still way too early - I'm making do by listening to Die Toten Hosen instead). I finished the second volume of ドラえもん this morning. I also noticed something interesting about the 村上 book. As the glow of the living room lamp reflected on the cover, I noticed a word was etched into the cover, as if somebody had been taking notes on a sheet of paper on top of the book. But it was just one word, in rather large letters. It says "Stress". I wonder if the book's previous owner was another frustrated language student! 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 324 of 333 28 December 2012 at 10:36pm | IP Logged |
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I did some more work with this intermediate textbook (文化 中級 日本語) today. Each chapter takes a different topic as a theme, and I think chapter 1 starts with an interesting topic for the beginning of an intermediate course - どんな 勉強を していますか. I looked at a page of activities towards the end of the first chapter today. There are a few activities which you are supposed to do "in a group", but so far these all seem to ask you to consider questions which you can work with on your own. I've been using them as prompts for self talk or writing sessions. Not that I need much encouragement to start ranting about study methods in Japanese, it's one of the few things I can already reasonably confidently talk about! The activities finished with the following:
これから 本格的な 中級の 勉強が 始まります。 あなたは これから どんな 方法で 勉強する つもり ですか。 (From this point, real intermediate study begins. What kind of study methods do you intend to use from now on?) I thought that was quite nicely motivating, and fits in with a general end of the year kind of mood. All that remains to do for this chapter is a page of conjunctions and another page of adverbs to study, plus a few vocabulary exercises in the workbook. I watched another episode of Tokyo Daigaku Monogatari today. It's so cheesy, I think most of the time I was laughing when it wasn't supposed to be funny. It somehow feels quite nostalgic to watch though. 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 325 of 333 30 December 2012 at 12:49am | IP Logged |
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I finished my 2nd grader book of biographies today. I got to read about the man who invented instant ramen.
All that remains of my reading mini challenge is to finish the Murakami book by the end of the year. There are two stories left to go, plus the あとがき. I read the whole of トニー滝谷 today, which I think is the longest story in the book, so I'm pretty confident I can finish it. I quite like the format of reading a collection of short stories by the same writer - it is less intimidating than a whole novel, you can digest each story more or less in one go and not worry so much about losing the plot (although it turns out this hasn't been much of an issue), with the added benefit of getting used to the author's ideolect over the course of the whole volume. The volume is also proving to be surprisingly readable. I think it must be something about Murakami's style. Even if there are whole clusters of words I can't understand on the page, somehow I am still able to follow the stories with only occasional recourse to a dictionary. But more than that, I actually felt quite moved by them. There is an ongoing theme of 孤独, or loneliness, which seems to thread through each of the stories in different ways. I've been musing a bit myself about loss and loneliness this week due to some family things that have happened recently that I don't really want to discuss in detail here. Suffice to say something about these stories has really struck a chord with me and moved me much beyond the usual excitement of "wow, I can understand something". On a more cheerful note, there are four episodes left to go on Tokyo Daigaku Monogatari. As each episode progresses, more and more complicated situations threaten Murakami-kun and Haruka-chan's love for each other, and the cliffhangers get crazier! It was actually quite hard to tell myself at the end of the most recent episode that I really ought to switch off and save the next episode until tomorrow. I'm sure following a drama series has the same kind of benefits as reading a whole book by the same author, in that the more you watch of a series the easier each episode gets to understand. I guess you get used to the characters and the settings, and knowledge of the context makes things easier to understand, plus you get used to the different character's ways of speaking, common phrases (maybe getting used to the scriptwriter's ideolect?), and a few specialist words depending on the genre of the show. But I noticed this effect with Sailor Fuku to Kikanjuu, and then when I started watching Attention Please soon after, it felt quite a lot tougher to understand to start with, but again got a lot easier, and now the same thing is happening with Tokyo Daigaku Monogatari. I wasn't quite sure what the deal was with the first couple of episodes, but the episode I just watched certainly flew by without me having to make much effort at all (despite me being full of cold and slightly sleep deprived right now). I'm also a couple of pages of vocabulary quiz questions away from finishing the first chapter of my new favourite textbook. I'll save those for tomorrow, to see how much (if anything) I've actually learned! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6622 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish | Message 326 of 333 30 December 2012 at 7:52am | IP Logged |
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You must read really fast. Either that or you sit around reading all day long. I sometimes read only five or six pages in a day. I've started a new book now and I'm really struggling. But I know it will get easier as you said. Once I get proper internet I will be able to start watching dramas again, but I have never noticed that same effect with dramas. I just have to figure everything out visually. But I probably haven't watched enough yet.
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| 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 327 of 333 30 December 2012 at 10:27am | IP Logged |
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Well I am at home, on holiday, the weather is terrible and I'm ill. So right now I don't have much better to do than sitting around reading etc.
I haven't timed it though I'm fairly certain my reading speed is quicker than when I started the book. I suspect you read slower than me because you spend more time concentrating on the details and figuring things out. I don't have the patience to do that with long texts so I only read short articles in that way. So with the book I'm reading now, as long as I can follow the plot, I just keep moving. He seems to have a tendency to make the same point three times before moving on anyway. I think that's why it's so readable. 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 328 of 333 31 December 2012 at 12:38am | IP Logged |
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The vocabulary quiz from the 文化中級 workbook was pretty straightforward to complete, so I've now finished the textbook mini goal.
I had a bit of a drama marathon today and finished Tokyo Daigaku Monogatari. So that's the TV watching mini goal completed. And after 3 hours of being engrossed in comprehensible input, my head has been buzzing with Japanese. Unfortunately my throat is so sore from this stupid cold that I haven't been able to test whether it could have a positive effect on my speaking... I also read all of 七番目の男. I found it a little harder to follow than the other stories I read so far, but part of this may have been because I couldn't be bothered to go upstairs to find my phone for any quick word look ups, so went through most of it without a dictionary. Having said that, I'm now also halfway through the final short story in the book, which seemed a lot easier to follow despite my general feeling of laziness today. I'm now only a few pages away from completing my reading mini goal and, far more importantly, from finishing my first proper grown up book in Japanese... 1 person has voted this message useful |
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