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Kuji’s Krazy Log II | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4845 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 617 of 706 27 November 2014 at 6:14am | IP Logged | ||
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WEEKLY UPDATE
JAPANESE LISTENING: 705 minutes TV (news, variety shows): 165 minutes Intensive Listening (Charlie Brown video): 40 minutes Talking with wife and mother in Japanese: 480 minutes Chatting with students in Japanese: 10 minutes Listening review: 10 minutes SPEAKING: 510 minutes Anki: 20 minutes Talking with wife and mother in Japanese: 480 minutes Chatting with students in Japanese: 10 minutes READING: 25 minutes Anki: 20 minutes News reading: 5 minutes (I could probably add TV here, since I'm often reading the subtitles and other text that pops up on the screen.) WRITING: 5 minutes Anki kanji review: 2 minutes E-mail to a car rental company: 3 minutes Don't pay too much attention to the time logs here; I'm certainly not. I'm still not completely sure why I started logging my time. I have no time goals or anything like that, and I'm not keeping any totals in a spreadsheet or document. That's too much stress for me. But I think that logging my study time occasionally will help me to see if I'm doing well, or if there is something I need to change about my language routine. I think I learned a lot from logging my time this week. Those listening and speaking totals will not always be that high. I had a four-day weekend this past week (I took Friday off of work, and Monday was a holiday), and two of those days were spent on short driving trips with my wife and her mother. So it was almost all Japanese. This is why keeping more detailed time logs, totalling my times and setting time goals, etc., is stressful for me - the amount of time I spend doing activities every week will fluctuate wildly. As you can see, I count some activities more than once. I counted the time I spent with my family, for example, for both listening and speaking. I probably listened a lot more than I spoke, but I'm too lazy to try and determine how much I spoke and how much I listened. But it was an activity in which I had chances to both listen and speak, so that's good enough for me. That's the idea behind this: to put myself in positions to work on all of my language skills. Even with the four-day weekend, that writing total is too low. I'd like to write more. Even 20 minutes a week would be nice, but not 5 minutes. The problem with writing is that I make a mission to write something everyday, but that is not always possible, and in the end I don't write at all. It's probably best to set a goal to write something every week. I should do something easy like that and become consistent with that, then look to increase it later on. Wednesday morning was Japanese time, but I had a splitting headache for some reason. Even something passive like listening to my review playlist was too much. The only thing I could do was listen to music - unfortunately, no Japanese music. The only Japanese music on my Walkman is a rap album, and that was too loud. (I have an FM radio app, but the radio was too noisy as well.) I really need to get some "easygoing" Japanese music. PORTUGUESE LISTENING: 125 minutes DLI (Unit 4 Lesson 36): 80 minutes RTP Jornal da Tarde video podcasts: 30 minutes (extensive) Listening review: 15 minutes SPEAKING: 90 minutes DLI (Unit 4 Lesson 36): 80 minutes Anki: 10 minutes READING: 90 minutes DLI (Unit 4 Lesson 36): 80 minutes Anki: 10 minutes WRITING: 0 minutes Again... need to write more! Other than that, I'm happy with this - even though I missed a lot of Portuguese time because of the long holidays. This shows something I already knew: DLI is basically a well-balanced resource. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5164 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 618 of 706 02 December 2014 at 3:07pm | IP Logged | ||
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An article on intensive X extensive reading. You can practice your Portuguese and read someone's opinion on that:
Leitura: abrir o dicionário ou deduzir pelo contexto? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4845 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 619 of 706 03 December 2014 at 6:18am | IP Logged | ||
Excellent, thank you very much! This what I like - Portuguese content in subjects I like. :) I'm still trying to balance my intensive and extensive reading, so I think it will help to hear the opinion in this article. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4845 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 620 of 706 11 December 2014 at 7:32am | IP Logged | ||
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I missed last week's weekly update... sorry about that. But I'm here this week! That counts for something... right? And you missed me... right?
Hahaha. Anyway, I have to admit that the past two weeks have not been really stellar as far as my language time is concerned. I have a ton of good excuses as to why (a few were necessary to do), but it's not really that important. Life does get in the way sometimes, but I have to do a better job of managing things when that happens. Imagine you have three priorities in life that you dedicate time to: Priority A, Priority B, and Priority C. The priorities are important in that order. Now, imagine that one week, you have a lot to do for Priority A, and you need to make more time for it. The logical thing would be to do what you need to do for Priority A, and if you have any time left, work on Priority B. If there's no time for Priority C, so be it. But what happened with me is that I just didn't do Priority B as much as I could have - even though Priority A was taking more of my time - and I was doing Priority C instead. (In case you haven't figured it out, Priority B is my language time.) Okay, that was quite confusing. Well... it made sense to me at the time. Uh... let's forget that and just go to what I did the past week. Well, not as much as I could have done. For Japanese, I've been still working on the You're In Love, Charlie Brown DVD. I think I'm somewhere near the 6-minute mark, which is 1/4 of the way through the short movie. At this rate, I'll finish it in March. :) As for Portuguese, I finished DLI Lesson 36, and I'm going to get back to doing some of the Deutsche Welle radionovela Futebol: mais do que um jogo. I've done the first two parts (there are 10 total), and it's time to try the third. I'll do that, then go back to DLI and do Lesson 37. My version of multi-tracking at work. * * * * * I need to not only study languages, but also use languages. That's one of my biggest problems, especially with Portuguese, but also with Japanese. Just being in Japan, I have many opportunities to use Japanese, although I could certainly do more. But it's a big problem with Portuguese. Everything I do with Portuguese, I do through a prism of "study". I try including native materials, but those get thrown into the "study basket". Let me try to explain. I go to a Portuguese news site and find an interesting story. But my thought process is this: Hmmm... this story looks interesting. What can I learn from this? What grammar points, vocabulary, etc., can I extract from this interesting story and add to my Portuguese knowledge? But this is the wrong way to do it. Doing it that way, every piece of Portuguese material becomes a textbook instead of a medium for enjoyment. It should be this: Hmmm... this story looks interesting. Let me read it and see what it's about. And if I happen to learn a new word or grammar point, well, that's just icing on the cake. Now, this is not the first time I've come to this epiphany. I can probably go back in this log and find another time I've written something like this. But no matter what I do, I end up falling into that same habit - turning a good article into something to be studied like a scientist with a microscope. I'm really not sure about how to break myself out of this cycle. Knowing what I should do is not enough to make me do it. One of the reasons I fall into that trap is because I can't stand not knowing what every single word, conjugation, and collocation means, and why it was used where and when it was. Let me give you an example of my thought process when I read something in Portuguese. This is a sentence I spent way too much time on, taken from a basketball article I read a couple of weeks ago:
When I first read that, I understood everything except the bolded part. Well, I understood tão and dentro, but not in this context. I was reading the article with a pop-up dictionary in Firefox, so when I came to that sentence, I translated it. "Tão dentro do esperado pela torcida roughly means what the fans expected," I said. All good. But I didn't stop there. "So why is 'tão' there? 'Tão' means 'so', like in a negative sense. And 'dentro' is 'inside'. And 'esperado' looks like it means 'expectations' or 'expecting' or 'hopes' or something, not 'expected'. And... and..." And so forth. You get the point. No wonder it is frustrating sometimes to read stuff in my target languages - even stuff that should be fun for me, like sports. No wonder it is sometimes hard for me to crack open Portuguese-language news sites, even though I have some time to read. And yeah, I know about bilingual, parallel texts. I have a lot of them for Portuguese, such as the Deutsche Welle radionovela I mentioned earlier. It doesn't matter. Even if I know what the story means, I still find myself analyzing the usage of every single word and letter and trying to find out why they were used when they were used. That's not so enjoyable. Ideally - again, taking that basketball article as an example - once I figured out, using the pop-up dictionary, what that sentence meant, I should have just said, "OK, that's cool," and moved on. I shouldn't necessarily read fun material in order to break it down and analyze it and learn grammar and vocabulary - at least, not all the time. I should read fun material because it's fun. This is not to say that I shouldn't use such material for study. It's good to learn grammar and vocabulary from native materials. But when that is all I'm doing with native materials, then I have a problem, and I do. I don't read English-language articles to break down the grammar and learn vocabulary. I read them for pleasure. And you know what, I still learn a word or two every now and then - even without looking it up online or in a dictionary. Of course, I can't do that now with Portuguese, but you get the point. The point is to read for pleasure. But how do I put all of that into action? I have some ideas... but I'm not going to get into it right now because I'm out of HTLAL time for now. <TV voice> Will Kuji finally figure out how to enjoy a news article? Or will the Grammar Demon strike twice? Tune in next time to find out, as The Adventures of Kuji's Krazy Language Learning continues. This program has been brought to you by... </TV voice> 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6595 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 621 of 706 11 December 2014 at 10:45am | IP Logged | ||
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I missed you :)))
tbh I can't quite work out the logistics of that expression either. Fortunately I'm satisfied that it makes sense intuitively. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4845 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 622 of 706 11 December 2014 at 11:19am | IP Logged | ||
Wow, I'm glad somebody missed me! :) I suppose that if you didn't quite work out the logistics, then I shouldn't feel so bad about it. But that underlines my point that I need to let it go and move on. I just remembered that Tae Kim, of the popular Tae Kim Japanese Grammar Guide and Blog, does something like that. He took his computer and web browser with a pop-up dictionary (Rikaichan, maybe?), and just read lots and lots of Japanese text. He said he would read it with the help of the pop-up addon, then go back and read it again and try to remember what it meant. That, and the fact that he was reading LOTS AND LOTS and getting exposure, helped him learn Japanese more than anything. And it doesn't sound like he was analyzing various grammar points and looking for example sentences for vocabulary and making Anki cards. He just read, quickly looked up unknown phrases with the pop-up dictionary, and moved on, and the words stuck somehow. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Tupiniquim Senior Member Brazil Joined 6081 days ago 184 posts - 217 votes Speaks: Portuguese* Studies: English, Russian | Message 623 of 706 11 December 2014 at 11:35am | IP Logged | ||
Hi kujichagulia. "Tão" in that sentence means "as much". I realize it might confuse non-native speakers, because usually either you conform to expectations, or you don't. I don't follow basketball, so I'm not acquainted with the full context, but if I were to guess, I'd say that, by returning, LeBron is conforming to some of the fans expectations, but not to their full extent (não tão dentro do esperado / not as much as one would have expected), maybe due to his performance? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4845 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 624 of 706 11 December 2014 at 3:01pm | IP Logged | ||
Ah... muito obrigado, Tupiniquim! Entendi. Yes, I should have put the full context, but yes, LeBron James was not playing that well at the time of the article. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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