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Takato’s log - TAC 2012 Team い

 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log Post Reply
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Takato
Tetraglot
Senior Member
HungaryRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 5047 days ago

249 posts - 276 votes 
Speaks: Hungarian*, EnglishB2, GermanB2, Japanese

 
 Message 49 of 58
20 August 2012 at 1:24am | IP Logged 
No good! I can't learn Chinese for 10 hours a day! It's so frustrating! I guess I'll just give up and be okay with some learning. So I'll try to change it up a bit and learn each weak languages of mine each day.

It's funny to hear Japanese people pronounce the words imported from Chinese. Similar to English loanwords.

By the way here's how I feel about them now:

Mandarin: It would be cool to know it: easy tones, seemingly easy to learn because there's only one "alphabet" and due to the phonetic part of the characters.


Japanese: It's a bit difficult to concentrate on the subs when you have a somewhat understandable audio in the background so anime would be more enjoyable. Doesn't seem so difficult but I should check it out.


Vietnamese: Spoken Vietnamese sounds so great! It's a must! Word borders are a bit ambiguous due to the eliminating of Chinese characters but the script is phonetic by now at least (probably 90% phonetic). Slow learning is advisable.


Thai: Sounds a bit like Vietnamese. Interesting is that there are five tones which is just in-between in comparison to Mandarin and Vietnamese. Its writing system is said to be difficult but I don't see how it could be any more difficult than the English one. (Actually the FSI course I'm using only starts on Thai script in the second volume.) Further learning is required to determine true state.


Edited by Takato on 20 August 2012 at 2:00am

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Brun Ugle
Diglot
Senior Member
Norway
brunugle.wordpress.c
Joined 6619 days ago

1292 posts - 1766 votes 
Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1
Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish

 
 Message 50 of 58
20 August 2012 at 8:47am | IP Logged 
Takato wrote:
No good! I can't learn Chinese for 10 hours a day! It's so frustrating! I guess I'll just give up and be okay with some learning.


Same here. I never get as much studying done as I would like. I'm way behind where I wanted to be at this time, but I've decided to look at the progress I have made rather than being disappointed about what I haven't got done. Compared to where I was at the beginning of the challenge, I've come really far. So if I look at it like that, I actually feel pretty good. It's almost unbelievable that I can actually sit down and enjoy a book in Japanese without having to look up so many words, even if it is only Harry Potter.
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Takato
Tetraglot
Senior Member
HungaryRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 5047 days ago

249 posts - 276 votes 
Speaks: Hungarian*, EnglishB2, GermanB2, Japanese

 
 Message 51 of 58
22 August 2012 at 12:49am | IP Logged 
Brun Ugle: Congrats! That's impressive!

6 week challenge first half:

Lots of plateaus. 4.95 hours daily on an average (probably like 9 and 1 hours alternating). Trying to solidify my sleeping and learning schedule(?). Trying to find a good way of learning Vietnamese.

Edited by Takato on 22 August 2012 at 12:53am

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Brun Ugle
Diglot
Senior Member
Norway
brunugle.wordpress.c
Joined 6619 days ago

1292 posts - 1766 votes 
Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1
Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish

 
 Message 52 of 58
22 August 2012 at 7:51am | IP Logged 
Takato wrote:
Brun Ugle: Congrats! That's impressive!

6 week challenge first half:

Lots of plateaus. 4.95 hours daily on an average (probably like 9 and 1 hours alternating). Trying to solidify my sleeping and learning schedule(?). Trying to find a good way of learning Vietnamese.


I'm not sure it's so impressive as you think. It still takes me forever and it can be very frustrating to read so slowly. It makes it easy for your mind to wander, especially if you have a mind like mine that always seems to be off on another vacation somewhere.

I'm not sure I can help you with the study schedule since I have trouble with that myself. If you find a good solution for making a schedule and making it stick, I would love to hear about it.

The sleeping thing, on the other hand, I do seem to be having some luck with. I don't know if it's only temporary, but I do seem to be more rested and have more energy now. Before, I would go to bed at a reasonable hour and lie there for hours unable to sleep, even if I was tired. So now, I don't worry about going to bed at all since I really can't control when I fall asleep. I can control when I get up however. So I simply set my alarm-clock for the time I want to get up and when it goes off, I have to get up no matter how tired I am and even if I've only slept a few hours. I'm also not allowed to sleep during the day. It was hard at first. I would be very sleepy and every time I sat down to read, I could feel that I was in danger of falling asleep, so I'd have to get up and do something more active, but it's getting better now. It's important by the way, to always set the alarm for the same time every morning so your body gets used to getting up at that time. I think it was also an advantage that I was on vacation since I didn't have to worry about going to work in a zombie-like condition.
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Takato
Tetraglot
Senior Member
HungaryRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 5047 days ago

249 posts - 276 votes 
Speaks: Hungarian*, EnglishB2, GermanB2, Japanese

 
 Message 53 of 58
28 August 2012 at 2:59am | IP Logged 
Yay! Managed to learn all four Asian languages yesterday!
Listening to the Japanese/Vietnamese stuff is too easy, ah!, even though I didn't listen to them for the last few days...

I never mentioned but I want to clarify something: Doing activities like watching anime with Chinese subtitles is not a brute force way of learning Chinese. One probably needs some foundation, like Speak Mandarin in 500 Words (it's free and comes with audio), sure, but series are bound to be using more or less the same words, just think of how the storyline isn't broken from one episode to the other, if you compare two consecutive episodes.

I could compare it to chapters in a language learning book. One series uses as similar vocabulary as a chapter in a language book. Say, one can choose to watch something like Kokoro Connect to acquire vocab related to feelings, or Ro-Kyu-Bu! to get to know to basketball terms.

I wonder what's more like brute force, having to learn a language from a book, with not necessarily personalized content and the probability of having to learn grammar early on, or learning from anime, with no fill-in-the-blanks but only comprehension exercises.

Edited by Takato on 28 August 2012 at 3:42am

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Takato
Tetraglot
Senior Member
HungaryRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 5047 days ago

249 posts - 276 votes 
Speaks: Hungarian*, EnglishB2, GermanB2, Japanese

 
 Message 54 of 58
28 September 2012 at 1:16pm | IP Logged 
One month passed since my last post.

6 week challenge

German: 4 h 13 min
30 min chat
15 min translation
3 h 28 min anime

Vietnamese: 5 h 20 min
30 min audio
2 h 54 min song
19 min anime
1 h 27 min Elementary Vietnamese
10 min anki

Thai: 5 h 41 min
1 h 13 min site lesson
19 min anki
4 h 9 min FSI

Japanese: 7 h 24 min
57 min lang-8
2 h 37 min listening
2 h 22 min anime
6 min anki
9 min katakana
1 h 13 min kanji

Spanish: 11 h 54 min
6 h 12 min anime
1 h 10 min movie
10 min youtube
20 min chat
2 h 40 min listening
1 h 22 min reading

Chinese: 99 h 44 min
53 min song
5 h 45 min handwriting
2 h 1 min listening
38 min reading
25 min movie
2 h 59 min chat
30 min grammar
1 h 17 min pronunciation
1 h 38 min sentences
1 h 14 min serie
27 h 18 min anki
23 min drama
49 h 56 min anime
4 h 47 min cartoon

That's 134 h 16 min in total.
3 h 12 min a day is not that bad, but my learning was uneven so it needs improving, of course.

After the 6 week challenge, I tasted French, Portuguese and Bulgarian a bit. Portuguese seems to be able to be learned in a relaxed way after Spanish, French seems to need real effort. Well, that was probably expected... Bulgarian is said to have simpler grammar than most Slavic languages and the people to have great culture. Also, I like the fact that it's written in Cyrillic and that Bulgaria is part of the EU.

Since at one point of my life I decided to do fansubbing, I must do that, otherwise it's a no-no. I joined another fansub team some days ago. The older one was very slow, it didn't publish my translation made a bit less than two years ago. :| This newer one published it just a few days after I was done, so I think it suits me. :)

So that's for 12.09 - 27.09:

24 min anime
1h 35 min anime
2 h Pimsleur
1h 16 min textbook
1 h 21 min katakana drawings
2 h 59 min textbook
1 h 52 min translating
30 min Elementary Vietnamese
30 min Thai for Beginners

We get 12 h 27 min as a sum for this period.
That's 47 minutes a day, which is much worse, ah!

You may wonder why I put a Hungarian flag for translating (mostly from English and a bit from Japanese). That's because I realized that due to me mostly thinking in English (since I spend most of my time online and when I got an Internet connection 3 years ago or so I used the Internet almost exclusively in English and keep doing so) and talking very little (I think I mostly talk to my brother who understands and speaks English) I'm not too used to producing Hungarian speech/writing (my lectures and practices are all in Hungarian but I don't need to talk too much there). Thus, it happens that the right Hungarian word can't seem to manage to come to my mind. So, translating helps for that.

Edited by Takato on 28 September 2012 at 3:31pm

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Woodsei
Bilingual Diglot
Winner TAC 2012
Senior Member
United States
justpaste.it/Woodsei
Joined 4796 days ago

614 posts - 782 votes 
Speaks: English*, Arabic (Egyptian)*
Studies: Russian, Japanese, Hungarian

 
 Message 55 of 58
02 October 2012 at 10:34am | IP Logged 
Fansubbing sounds so impressive! I never even thought about that one :) I guess at some
point in one's language progress translating really is beneficial, especially for a
language that is almost your first language, because of how much you use it. It'll be
interesting to know how that works out for you. Are you considering doing full-time
subbing for Japanese too eventually? (I don't mean a full-time job, I mean as frequently
as you sub for English)

Good luck with subbing, and your progress with languages is so motivating. Keep it up :D
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kujichagulia
Senior Member
Japan
Joined 4846 days ago

1031 posts - 1571 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Japanese, Portuguese

 
 Message 56 of 58
02 October 2012 at 2:37pm | IP Logged 
I cannot understand how you study over three hours a day. I can't even get close to that, without absolutely giving up all interests other than studying languages.


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