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Helemano’s log (TAC ’13 Team 桜) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Helemano Newbie Japan Joined 4338 days ago 31 posts - 39 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 9 of 22 09 January 2013 at 2:38am | IP Logged | ||
If I could vote for you more than once, stifa, I would. Those Japanese definitions help me more than the English ones. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Helemano Newbie Japan Joined 4338 days ago 31 posts - 39 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 10 of 22 09 January 2013 at 2:39am | IP Logged | ||
iguanamon, thanks for the link! I'm looking for beginner resources to use in addition to DLI, so this might be helpful. And it is good to be back! I thought I was locked out of HTLAL forever. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Helemano Newbie Japan Joined 4338 days ago 31 posts - 39 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 11 of 22 10 January 2013 at 5:21am | IP Logged | ||
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I recommitted myself to consistent Japanese study back in May or June 2012. In August, I was frustrated because it didn't seem like I was improving much. I knew a few more vocabulary words and grammar points, but that didn't seem to manifest itself into better reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills. I told myself: "It's not about what you can do right now, in August. It's about what you will be able to do in January 2013." The message: keep at it, and the results will come.
Well, here it is, January 2013, and I feel like the results haven't come. Sure, my vocabulary has grown a lot, thanks to Anki and a lot of sources I pull new words from. I know more kanji, and I can recognize more words when reading or looking at signs around town. I can recall more words while writing, and I can do the same while speaking, but I'm still as slow as heck. I don't see any improvement in my listening, however. There are times when I'll repeat some audio over and over on my iPod, trying to catch a word that I missed. When I finally get it, I find out that I knew the word all along. So, in a nutshell, my improvement since May 2012: Vocabulary, grammar, kanji - Improved Reading, writing, speaking - Improved very, very little (speed not improved) Listening - Not improved at all There is a side of me that is an optimist, and that side of me says, "Look, Herman, you have improved! Your Japanese is better now than it was in May 2012. Celebrate!" And that is true. But the pessimistic side of me says, "That's it? That's all you've done? My goodness, what a slacker you are! You still can't speak, listen, read, or write. There are people on HTLAL that do TACs, 6WCs, Super Cs, ABCs, 123s, and they go from like B1 to B2 in a few months. But look at you! You're still at B1 level with no hope of going to B2. Idiot." And that is true, too. This is what I struggle with. I do learn, but I learn at an extremely slow pace, compared to other people on these forums. I have two hypotheses as to why that is. ***** 1) I don't have the time that other people have. I read about people reading novels, watching anime while importing stuff into Anki at the same time, doing textbook exercises, language exchanges, Listening and Reading, and Pimsleur exercises... all in the same day. I don't see how those people do anything else with their time. Meanwhile, I work, cook at home, do chores, take care of our rabbit, and go to the gym every day (except when it's closed on Thursday). On average, I have about 30 minutes of home study time a day, plus another 70 minutes on the train. But with no computer on the train, and more often than not with no seat (which prevents me from using textbooks, etc.), I'm kind of limited as to what to do on the train. Anything involving listening to something on an iPod is certainly okay. But there are only 30 minutes a day when I can do any kind of study that I want. That doesn't compete with the hours that some HTLALers have. (Come to think of it, I do have an Android tablet at home that I use with my home wireless network when my wife is on the main computer. I suppose I could find a way to use that on the train, although its use would be limited to offline activities.) 2) Many HTLALers love to read. I do, too, but I'm very picky about what I read. I can't just read anything. I'm extremely picky about fiction. Most of my reading comes from non-fiction like newspapers, magazines, Wikipedia, etc. Those are things that are hard to find audio and exact translations for. And they don't exactly have conversational language. Some manga are okay, but then it becomes time-consuming to look up unknown kanji. Remember, the time that I have access to computers, dictionaries and the like is limited to 30 minutes a day. That brings me to another point: Listening and Reading. I see the benefits of L-R, but everyone always says: "If you don't love literature, L-R is not for you." I don't love literature, so I never do L-R. ***** So there are the hypotheses. But am I wrong here? Should I not compare myself to other HTLALers? I'm a competitive person, and when I hear about somebody going from B1 to B2, or B2 to C1, in a short amount of time, while I'm still stuck at B1, I do get jealous. But it shouldn't be a competition, right? I probably just need to accept the fact that, because of my circumstances, I learn slower than others, and that's not bad. I am learning; I'm not stagnant. I am moving forward. Wait a minute.... did I just solve my own problem? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6618 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes  Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish | Message 12 of 22 10 January 2013 at 9:48am | IP Logged | ||
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I fully understand. I often feel that I'm working and working and not getting anywhere. But occasionally I will make a relatively large leap over night.
Also, that about people who learn language in a month. I find it very hard not to compare myself to them and feel like an idiot. I've been studying Japanese on and off for 20 years and still haven't gotten anywhere near mastering it. So I advise you to stop comparing yourself to those other people and compare yourself to me instead :) I think there is a news site that has transcripts of the reports. I haven't used it, but I think it might be FNN. I'm not sure though, but someone else probably knows what site it is. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5260 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 13 of 22 10 January 2013 at 1:21pm | IP Logged | ||
I like Barry Farber's (the author of How to Learn Any Language) take on how to "steal" time to learn a language.
That's what I'm doing now that I'm learning Haitian Kreyòl. Farber didn't have a smartphone. Give me five minutes and I can review a conversation lesson twice. Reading on a phone isn't a wonderful experience but, if that's all I've got, I'll take it and make the best of it. I don't really use anki, not my thing, but it is tailor made for smart phones and tablets. Speaking of tablets, I have an HP Touchpad, which was obsolete when it came out a year and a half ago. I bought it because I could get a 32GB tablet for $150 and because I could put pdf's and mp3's on it. That's all I care about for the tablet, really. I almost never even have it online. Almost all my study text is in pdf. The physical books I want to study, I scan one chapter at a time into pdf, and put them on the tablet. Herman, one suggestion for LR, since you are at intermediate level in Japanese and you like sports, could you find a sports news site with text and audio in Japan and L/R an article or two a week? Surely, in a nation of 200 million, there must be something along those lines available. Print the article(s) to pdf. Download the mp3 and you're off and running. Have any Japanese sports legends- baseball players, sumo wrestlers come out with audio books? Sumo sounds intriguing to me. Ok it ain't hoops or football but still it must contain the universal truths of competition, the "thrill of victory and the agony of defeat". Someone once said that to truly understand America, you must understand baseball. I wonder if sumo is the key to understanding Japan, or maybe even baseball, which the Japanese have made their own. Your train commute should be smartphone based when you have to stand, and tablet based when you can find a seat. Is there something like Chinese pod for Japanese? You could put a hell of a lot of podcasts on a smart phone. If you could find a transcript for one and thoroughly know it by listening repeatedly- even better. That's over two hours a day you can steal. It's not ideal but it's what you've got. Remember, you won't always have to do this forever, pick a time limit and say, ok, for this year I'm going do everything I can to get to B2 Japanese- in the immortal words of Malcolm X: "by any means necessary!" Lastly, I would suggest one other way to steal time provided by a man who is probably busier than both of us combined. I find Leo Babauta's Zenhabits blog highly useful. I jump started my language learning by becoming an early riser. Benefits of rising early and how to do it. I guess it boils down to, "how bad do you want it?". You know what they say about continuing to do the same thing expecting a different result. There are many reasons why we can't do things. The key is to find a way you can. Edited by iguanamon on 10 January 2013 at 2:01pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5980 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 14 of 22 10 January 2013 at 1:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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You have focussed most of your study on vocabulary and grammar, and this is where you have seen results. If you want to get good at listening, speaking or reading, you'll need to spend some time focussing on these things instead. Vocabulary and grammar are of course essential foundations of a language, but once you've laid the foundations you still need to build your house on top!
Why not have a go at improving your listening skills over the next few weeks? In your half hour at home you can do detailed study of some audio clips, using a transcript to get the details of anything you either don't know or simply couldn't catch when listening. I found shadowing also really helped for passages where I found it hard to catch the words. Then just listen to them over and over during part of your commute. The repetition is a little boring, but I found it really helped. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Helemano Newbie Japan Joined 4338 days ago 31 posts - 39 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 15 of 22 11 January 2013 at 2:07am | IP Logged | ||
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@Brun Ugle - 20 years? What's wrong with you? Just kidding.
I just need to accept the fact that I don't have the right circumstances to learn a language as fast as some other people, and that's okay as long as I am learning. Plus, Japanese is a hard nut to crack. It's deceptively easy in the beginning stages, but when you start trying to become fluent, one quickly realizes how far they must go. I do occasionally look at NHK News Easy (would put a link here, but I can't right now). They have news audio with an exact transcript, written in more intermediate Japanese. I just need to use it more often and more effectively. @iguanamon - As always, you provide something encouraging. Thank you. I really gotta get that Farber book sometime. I do realize that I have tons of time when on the train, standing in line, etc. My problem is that I haven't figured out how to use that time effectively. I think that I am so used to studying with a textbook or some sort of lesson material and a dictionary, that I find it hard to think of more creative ways to use my "dead time". Take my morning commute, for example. That's 35-40 minutes on the train, and that doesn't include the walk from home to the station, and from the other station to school. The train in the morning is quite crowded; not only do I hardly sit down, but when I am standing, I usually have to hold on to something so that I don't fall down when the train goes around a curve. So that means I have one hand free - not enough to hold a book with. No problem, I say. I have an iPod nano, some podcasts, and some audio that came with my textbook. Do some listening. But when I listen, I feel like I'm not getting anything out of it, or I'm doing something wrong. Do I just listen, and that's it? Doesn't seem too active to me. But that's what I see here on the forums: "Get a lot of listening input, and you will see results." But it can't be that simple. I've watched Japanese news on TV every single day for the last ten years, and even now I still don't understand half of what I hear. There must be something that I can do while watching TV, or listening to a podcast, that will help me to become a better listener, but I have yet to find out what that is. As for sports in Japan, sumo may be the traditional national Japanese sport, but baseball is king. I like to say that there are only two groups of people that like sumo in Japan: rich old men and foreigners. Baseball drives the boat here. The top sports news in Osaka this past week was the Hanshin Tigers' first-round draft pick settling into his new dormitory room. They had news cameras filming his bed and his chest of drawers. Are you kidding me?!? So I'm certain that I can find some baseball-related audio for download, but I don't know about any with transcripts. And I'll try convincing my wife to let me take the tablet with me every day (it belongs to her, too). If not... well, I don't have a smartphone, but my phone does have PDF-reading capabilities, so there's that. Also, thanks for the zenhabits links. I'll be sure to take a look at that. I go to bed at 10 PM and wake up at 5:50 AM every day. I don't know if I could get up any earlier than that without irritating my wife, though. She likes her beauty sleep. :) @g-bod - I think you are right. As I was saying to iguanamon, I need to find more effective ways to take audio/podcasts and review them while standing on the train and at other odd times. I can't always sit with a grammar and study. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5260 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 16 of 22 11 January 2013 at 3:37am | IP Logged | ||
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You're welcome, Hermon. How you use that time is important. You need it to be efficient. Wow, I'm kind of glad I decided to go with Haitian Creole instead of Japanese. Y'all have a lot more to overcome than I do- different everything.
As to how to use podcasts efficiently, veteran member Ari explains it better than I can in his thread Ari's Chinesepod Method which got 25 votes, including mine. Ari taught himself both Mandarin and Cantonese. This could be quite helpful to you as a guide when you find the right resource for listening and studying. What helped me a lot when learning Portuguese was listening to podcasts with an accurate transcript to read. This is one way to do L/R in mini bites. They can be difficult to find. Of course, my experience with Portuguese and Haitian Creole isn't at all comparable to Japanese. So I had a think about it, because I want to help if I can. Even though I know jack squat about Japanese, I do know how to search. I found this (short) list of intermediate/advanced Japanese podcasts Intermediate Japanese Podcasts. This looks interesting, it's an old link but the website it refer to is till going nihongo-juku: Description of nihongo-njuku intermediate podcast and this Japanese Listening Advanced with transcripts downloadable audio and transcripts. keep up with the textbook and add some good listening resources and you'll start to see the magic of synergy happen. I'd ask the folks here who have successfully taught themselves Japanese to help with much better recommendations. I'm sure they'd be happy to do so. These days the logs and TAC's are so many that they are simply getting lost in the vastness. There are so many, I can't keep up with them. Try a post in the "specific languages" section and see what comes up. Boa sorte meu amigo! Edited by iguanamon on 11 January 2013 at 3:44am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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