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Going back to Europe TAC 2014 DE|FR|日本語 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| 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 97 of 142 30 August 2014 at 2:25pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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So in my last log entry I declared that I would stick to posting about what I've actually done (rather than making grand plans for the future) - and it looks like it's taken me a whole month to come up with something to write!
Following Serpent's posts on HTLAL about it, I enrolled on the Learning How to Learn course at Coursera. I wasn't able to make the time to complete the assignments, however over the last three weeks I've watched all of the videos and read some of the supplementary articles. I would suggest that the course should be followed by anyone who has ever tried to learn anything, ever. It's really helped me to start refreshing my approach study and I've been experimenting with a few different things and trying to approach specific problems in different ways. The concept of Einstellung was new to me, and yet I could see straight away instances in my own life where I have created my own blockages through getting stuck in a fixed way of thinking about things. It's still early days, but some things which are looking promising include: Using Anki to schedule tasks rather than just question/answer cards - this still needs a bit more experimentation before I can report about what seems to be working, but at the moment I am trying it out with kanji (writing down on paper as much as I can remember about a given character), grammar (writing down what I can remember about meaning and usage, and also getting creative and writing a couple of example sentences) and even reading comprehension (simply scheduling rereading of passages I have already studied intensively) Interleaving - I guess this is something that megapolyglots have got to a fine art. I'm not ready to try interleaving short study sessions of different languages, but I'm making my study sessions on any one activity deliberately shorter and interleaving with other activities or even breaks, and it seems to be helping Pomodoro - linked with making study sessions shorter, I only invoke the pomodoro if I really feel my mental heels digging in over a task (like doing anything with Kanji in Context) but in these cases it is surprisingly effective. 25 minutes is short enough to feel completely unthreatening but long enough to really get something done. And at the end of it, you deserve a break! Adjusting my expectations - learning takes weeks, not hours. There is only so much information you can cram into your brain in one day, and following that one day of effort you need enough repetition and use of the material to make it, and keep it, a part of you. The course spoke about focusing on PROCESS rather than PRODUCT and this is something I need to keep in mind when I find myself distracted by the urge to pass JLPT N1 now already! Edited by g-bod on 30 August 2014 at 2:26pm 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 98 of 142 01 September 2014 at 12:59am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I should probably check this learning approach out. I bet as you read it you think, hey, this is just common sense! And then think how you're not using common sense in your study routines very much lol. Glad you're still going at it. I don't mind if you post goals or results or whatever.
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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 99 of 142 07 September 2014 at 1:38pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Following on from last week, I think I'm suffering from a surfeit of good ideas at the moment. Using Anki to schedule tasks is a pretty useful approach, but care must be taken not to find yourself overoccupied with revision at the expense of other stuff. Especially since the Anki algorithm doesn't take days off, despite the fact that I do.
I am still using Anki to support my work with Kanji in Context, although I have dropped the deck with single kanji and replaced it with one where I do writing practice for a couple of key words for each kanji I cover in the book. I've started this from the very last chapter I worked on (no 37 I believe) but as a sap to the slightly obsessive perfectionist element of my personality I have set up a separate "revision" deck which I'll use to gradually work back down from chapters 36 to 1, since I've neglected writing for quite some time. I'm also still inclined to keep using Anki for work with my New Kanzen Master N2 grammar book but the way I do this still requires a lot more tweaking to make sure the review stage doesn't lead to review overload. Anyway, my life isn't all Anki. Recently I've been watching a lot of Japanese TV. Mainly variety shows, so I haven't been logging it on my Super Challenge log, partly because I don't want to end up in any protracted debates about what "counts", but mainly because I don't want Twitter to know exactly how much TV I've been watching (a lot). But all this TV watching has definitely had a positive impact on my language skills. I understand better and I can spit out my own vaguely natural utterances a lot better as well. The great thing about variety shows is that a lot of what is said also gets displayed on the screen in brightly coloured subtitles for emphasis, which not only helps looking things up, but also provides unexpected support for kanji reading skills. 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 100 of 142 07 September 2014 at 5:18pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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In my quest to find more stuff to read in Japanese, I've discovered a Live Journal community (and I thought people didn't use that any more...) where some very helpful readers/learners of Japanese have left reviews of what they have been reading, along with difficulty ratings: http://japanesebookrec.livejournal.com/
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| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4666 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 101 of 142 07 September 2014 at 6:01pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I've now been through 日本語総まとめ N2 & N2 文法 books plus the 新完全マスター N3 one. So I've seen maybe 300 additional grammar points. I certainly don't "know" them all but I think I can recognise a fair few of them (in a "Oh, I've seen that, I wish I could remember what it meant" sort of way). Overall I don't think I'm seeing that many of them in the wild. Some of them crop up very regularly, especially on NHK News, where the writing seems to come from a small set of "cookie cutters". But in general I've not seen that many of them crop up. I've yet to work through the 10 or so JLPT 2 (old) past papers that I've gathered up somewhere, so maybe they'll all turn out to be hiding in there. Is this just me? Are you seeing most of this stuff show up?
I've had very little luck with finding Japanese TV. There are some bits on youtube but otherwise finding the stuff on the net is (at least for me) tricky. Are there some useful sites you could divulge? 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 102 of 142 07 September 2014 at 7:52pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I still have that feeling an awful lot, which is why I am trying to get a lot more practical and creative with these expressions.
Yes, maybe, sort of. Expressions like ～際 show up on emails I get from Amazon.co.jp but don't show up in conversation. Other expressions I essentially learned before I even started thinking about JLPT N2, because they were popping up all over the place and I was getting annoyed about not knowing them (like some of the many uses of わけ and 限り). And others, like ～ものの, I had never noticed before I had studied them, but then they seemed to pop up everywhere. On the whole I think N2 level sentence patterns are quite common, but some are only common in certain contexts (like writing to customers, news articles, essays etc). I also think that the revision examples for each chapter in 新完全マスター文法 do a really good job of showing how at this level, most of what you are learning is just different ways of saying things you already know how to say!
There is a surprising amount of stuff available on youtube. If you use the name of a show as a search term it is often quite successful. Some things to try out: 世界の果てまで行ってQ リンカーン ホンマでっか ガキの使い The one thing I've struggled to find is more serious documentary shows. But if you just want to belly laugh at celebrities in compromising situations (I'm a celebrity... is really a poor imitation), the list above should keep you entertained for hours. 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 103 of 142 23 September 2014 at 12:08am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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JSTV is the only provider of Japanese language satellite TV in the UK. If the premium price wasn't off putting enough, the satellite dish requirement made it pretty much impossible for me who is still stuck in rental housing. However, JSTV now offer a TV streaming service running simultaneously with the satellite service. Also, since last time I investigated, they now pretty much run two TV channels (although one channel only broadcasts TV for around 12 hours a day, but that still covers most times I am likely to actually watch TV anyway). And they offer a one month rolling contract with your first month free. So I figured I might as well give it a go. Anyway, the Japanese entertainment industry has done an awful lot to help develop my Japanese skills, so I probably owe them £30 a month already...
So far I've watched the first half of a two part drama which hasn't even made its way onto the D-Addicts wiki, but somehow I managed to figure out what was going on. I also watched the news, complete with subtitles and yet still largely incomprehensible. Followed by an equally incomprehensible interview with the Japanese prime minister, and then I watched a little bit of the sumo which was also incomprehensible but for thoroughly different reasons! 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 104 of 142 23 September 2014 at 5:58am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I think it's funny picturing you really not understanding TV because it doesn't fit my image of you at all. I'll
have to check out some japanese tv and see if I've leveled up. I pay for it but hardly watch. I just watch crunchy roll. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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