Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6621 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish
| Message 9 of 436 05 January 2013 at 3:33pm | IP Logged |
I say - go for it! I'm trying to learn to balance two languages at once too, but I think I'm figuring it out. I'm still concentrating more on Japanese, partly because I really want to get to where I can comfortably use it and I feel like I'm getting close, but also because starting a language requires a good bit of boring stuff in the beginning and I lose my focus rather quickly on that.
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g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5983 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German
| Message 10 of 436 05 January 2013 at 3:54pm | IP Logged |
Yeah I have nothing to lose. Worst case scenario is that I ignore Japanese for a few weeks and have to "warm up" again - but with no real Japanese commitments for a while, that's not going to be a big deal. Ideally I'd like to find a way of keeping both languages "warm", of course!
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g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5983 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German
| Message 11 of 436 05 January 2013 at 5:39pm | IP Logged |
I had a go at listening to the Assimil lessons until I got stuck. I had no problems with understanding the first three weeks, but the fourth week started to get a little tough, mainly because of those nasty separable verbs which I never got round to internalising last time I studied German! So I guess I will restart Assimil from Lesson 22 and see how far I get this time. I think I might make some Anki sentence cards, but only from the Exercises section, and see if this helps internalise things a little better.
I find it interesting how "noch" seems to work in a similar way to まだ - we don't have an equivalent single word in English. It's also quite interesting comparing the German case system to the basic functions of the particles が, を, に and の, although possibly a little more dangerous as they don't always correspond exactly. It at least helped as a mnemonic when I couldn't remember what the words accusative, dative etc meant.
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kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5185 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese
| Message 12 of 436 05 January 2013 at 7:04pm | IP Logged |
Woot got you on my bookmarks this time. Trying to organize my computer and mobile devices a bit to better
to stay on top of things. Yeah I think that German has helped me regarding other foreign languages I've
studied quite a bit. Namely, it's very case dependent and word order isn't as important. As for the Japanese
particles I immediately thought of German and its der den dem etc. and I thought of noch when まだ popped
up. When I'm talking I don't really think in German or anything but when I'm learning new material or
analyzing grammar I did think of it then. I really thought that sticking the verb at the end of the sentence
would be more natural for me thanks to German but it didn't make it any more comfortable and I had to fight
through that just like any other Japanese student unfortunately.
It's fun reading about people doing new thing so I look forward to any logs on German or French since they're
much newer to you than Japanese. That said your progress in Japanese is inspiring too.
And I'm curious... When you make sentence flashcards... What do you put on side 1 and side 2 etc.?
Edited by kraemder on 05 January 2013 at 7:06pm
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Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6621 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish
| Message 13 of 436 05 January 2013 at 7:22pm | IP Logged |
So once I've got Japanese down, along with Norwegian and English, German should be a piece of cake, right? Except I don't really have any plans on learning it, so I guess we'll never know.
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g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5983 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German
| Message 14 of 436 05 January 2013 at 7:32pm | IP Logged |
Yeah I guess I'll reach the point in Japanese where all I have to say is "hey guys, I watched another TV drama today" - and as much fun as it is for me to do, it's probably not so much fun to read about!
For sentence flashcards, the sentence always goes on the front. What goes on the back really depends on the sentence. I always include the sentence with a furigana gloss on the back, but if I understood the meaning of the sentence without having to look anything up, that's the only thing on there. If I need to look stuff up, I'll add a note about that too. I only include a translation of the whole sentence if there is something in there that confuses me about who is doing what to who and I want to make it clear to my future self! I have a slight twist on the cards I add from Kanji in Context - because each sentence in the workbook has words highlighted containing the kanji you are supposed to learn for that chapter. So I put the sentence on the front with these words highlighted, and then I have to type in the reading of these words as the answer.
I think my knowledge of Japanese has helped a lot more with handling word order in German than it might have done the other way round. As far as I can see, German doesn't have anything near the word order craziness you get in Japanese if you try to use a modal verb with a verb that is acting on a noun that is being modified by a subordinate clause! Not to mention the passive and the giving/receiving verbs which can guarantee subject/indirect object confusion. At least it has just freed my brain up to not worry so much about word order any more. Except for those separable verbs...
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g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5983 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German
| Message 15 of 436 06 January 2013 at 12:48am | IP Logged |
My first day of attempting simultaneous study looked a bit like this:
Lots of thinking about learning languages.
Listening to the first 20 or so Assimil German lessons, settling on lesson 22 as a good start point and then studying lesson 22.
Reading the section of a Japanese history book (in English, I'm afraid, I wanted to get the information into my head as quickly as possible) covering Oda Nobunaga, a key character so far in the Taiga drama I'm watching (and a very important character in the history of Japan, it seems).
Watching episode 2 of Gou, really appreciating my newly acquired historical background knowledge in helping make sense of it, and wondering if working on my keigo would help as I'm hearing lots of words like でございます in the dialogue.
Spending a bit too much time on HTLAL.
Catching up with Japanese Anki reviews (I had a three day break thanks to this super winter cold which still hasn't gone away).
Studying the first section in my A1 German book and relearning how to tell people where I come from. Interesting to note that some countries take an article after aus, but most do not.
Appreciating the lack of exceptions and irregularity in Japanese!
Now I've realised it's time I went to bed and I still haven't found time to look at my kanji book or Japanese textbook .
Edited by g-bod on 06 January 2013 at 12:49am
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kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5185 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese
| Message 16 of 436 06 January 2013 at 6:06am | IP Logged |
Fighting my phone and the website to post this grr. I'd forgotten
about the thing about aus. Someone says to me ich komme aus
(insert country that doesn't use aus) and I will happily say ja klar! Ich
komme aus Amerika. But the placement tests will pick right up on
that and I'll do badly. Oh well.
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