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5 years of 日本語 TAC 13 桜/Schnitzel | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4848 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 409 of 436 19 November 2013 at 3:22am | IP Logged | ||
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It's okay. Just watch Japanese TV, or do anything that is fun in Japanese. You say that you don't really need to study Japanese. So, no pressure, then. Take it easy for a while.
And get well soon! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| 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 410 of 436 22 November 2013 at 12:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks Kuji! I'm feeling a lot better now.
I've had this week off work on holiday. It's the first time I've been off work without going away somewhere for a long time, which has meant I spent more time in Ikea than is healthy and have been trying to sort out the mess that is my house. I've got a couple of extra bookshelves, so after allocating a couple of boxes of books for charity shops I finally have room for everything. In fact I've got a whole six inches to spare alongside French fiction to accommodate any expansion! Putting together flat packed furniture has also provided me with plenty of time to think. I've decided I'm going to let my Japanese go. It's been a really tough decision, but I have come to accept that it will be of more value for me both personally and professionally to focus on French and German. Learning Japanese has brought a lot of positive things to my life, but it's a really demanding language. I was never under any illusions about how difficult a language it is for a typical monolingual Brit (as I was in 2008) to learn. The thing that has really caught me out is how difficult it is to maintain. After I switched my focus back to Japanese from French this autumn, I didn't touch French for a few weeks. This week I switched on French radio and was able to warm up to the same comprehension level I had by the end of my trip to France in less than a minute. After a break of a few weeks it takes a lot more time and effort to bring my Japanese back. In contrast, I don't think my French ever went away since I brought it back this summer. If I want to maintain my Japanese I have to use it pretty much every day. It's a big commitment, and since any contact I have with the language is basically something I control myself (I have to proactively seek opportunities to practice) I am starting to resent the burden. So maintenance of Japanese requires daily practice. If I don't maintain, the cost is more effort to revive the language should I want/need to use it in the future. I know how to revive a language now. Most importantly I know it doesn't require starting again from the beginning. In the time I need to spend maintaining Japanese, I could work on my German and maintain my French. Losing Japanese as an immediately available language is a price worth paying. When I was at high school I learned to play flute and piano. I always preferred flute. I worked hard and achieved a good enough level at flute to study it at university (biggest mistake of my life, but that's another story). Over time I lost interest in flute and stopped practicing every day. Days became weeks and one day I unpacked my flute and discovered I could no longer play it well. The tone was awful and I was exhausted after a few minutes. No matter how good you get at flute, your lip muscles get out of condition really quickly. If you want to play flute, even as an amateur, you have no choice but to practice every day. In contrast, I have never been very skilled at the piano. I am perfectly content destroying my favourite piano pieces when it suits me, and I can neglect the piano for weeks at a time with no penalty. That's why I still play the piano and not the flute. Edited by g-bod on 22 November 2013 at 8:15pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sunja Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6086 days ago 2020 posts - 2295 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, German Studies: French, Mandarin | Message 411 of 436 22 November 2013 at 7:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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I like your anecdote there about playing the flute. What a great analogy!
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Roycet Newbie United States one1ups.blogspoRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4543 days ago 17 posts - 20 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean, Spanish | Message 412 of 436 22 November 2013 at 10:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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Do anybody have any advice on improving listening skills in Japanese. I have the jlpt
coming up and I have my own ways of listening practice, but I want to know what ways other people have in improving listening skills. Additionally what do you do to keep your listening material from getting low? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| 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 413 of 436 22 November 2013 at 11:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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To get my listening skills from N3 to N2 level, I watched a lot of TV drama. Up to N3 I found working with textbook dialogues and JapanesePod101 dialogues to be quite helpful. Best advice I can give on ensuring a supply of listening material is to not worry about it. I worried about it too much and ended up going on crazy shopping or downloading sprees and ended up with more material than I can ever get through.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| 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 414 of 436 23 November 2013 at 1:08am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm taking some online classes similar to Skype and
I they don't speak any English. My japanese listening seems to have gotten a lot better since u took the classes and I'm pretty sure that's why. I'd say speaking to people who won't use English and won't let you use English is a great way to improve. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4666 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 415 of 436 23 November 2013 at 7:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm sorry to hear that your going to let Japanese lie fallow for a while, but I can
completely understand. If I had to spend time on French and/or German for work (or pleasure) then I think I'd have to let Japanese go to. It's worrying to hear you say that Japanese requires quite a lot of maintenance, but I guess that's just the way it is. Anyway, well done for reaching N2 and all the best with French and German. (Maybe I'll see you on the German TAC in a few years ...) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| 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 416 of 436 23 November 2013 at 9:59pm | IP Logged | ||
I'm a bit worried I may have scared all my TAC team mates on the maintenance thing. Regardless of the relative difficulties of French/Japanese/German for English speakers, I spent 7 years studying French in high school, which may have some impact on my ability to retain enough elements of the language for it to continue to make sense to me. I've probably had a little compartment for French in my brain ever since my teens. I don't know how it will be with German. At my current level I don't have much language to lose in the first place. This year I just seem to have flip flopped between studying French, German or Japanese. When Japanese is on the table, it has a way of squeezing out time for any other language. But the truth is I've made slight gains in German, bigger gains in French, but minimal to no gains in Japanese. I wouldn't be confident I could pass N2 if I sat it this December (to be fair, I wasn't confident last year either). I'm hoping that over the coming months I will be able to hold on to the gains I've made in French, and maintain enough momentum with German to make some serious gains there. If I manage that, it will be worth any possible losses to my Japanese. If I carry on as I have done, I think I'll just keep flip flopping and won't progress much with anything. I still intend to continue my weekly Japanese language exchange, I just know from previous experience that this won't be enough. The difference is that this time, once I start struggling, I'm not going to drop everything else in a panic. It should be good for my practice partner's English anyway! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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