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Japanese Rewrite 東亜 TAC 2015 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Woodsei Bilingual Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Woodsei Joined 4795 days ago 614 posts - 782 votes  Speaks: English*, Arabic (Egyptian)* Studies: Russian, Japanese, Hungarian | Message 1 of 47 04 January 2015 at 2:42am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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明けましておめでとう！
Happy New Year! So I'm starting a new log, and this is my first official TAC 2015 post. I have another log, and I originally was going to keep updating it, but looking back on my progress, which hasn't been much for over two years, and the erratic posting, I thought it better to start over with a clean slate, and one that is entirely dedicated to Japanese, and any other East Asian language, should I decide to take up one at some point. Also, reading my past posts....it's embarrassing what you find there. I feel I have grown, both as a person, and as a language learner, and I want my log to reflect this. If anyone's interested, here it is. I warn you, though, it's cheesy. There. I said it. I started studying Japanese in 2012. Before that, and growing up, really, I watched anime and read manga extensively, of course in English, and in the case of anime, watching Arabic dubs. I'm a native speaker of both languages, but I can't stand the English dubs. Anyway, I started watching anime in the original, and I also started watching Japanese drama, which really fascinated me with the overall culture in general. I started getting attached to the language and anything Japanese, and it bothered me that I had to rely on subs to understand the language (I pulled the plug on any dubs, I just hate those, even though the Arabic was pretty good), and I decided to take the plunge and learn Japanese. During that time I researched online how to self-study Japanese, and came across this website, AJATT, and many other places that really inspired me. I blazed through RTK in a month I think (I binge on Japanese that way) because I was so impatient and I just wanted to start understanding what I was reading. I got Assimil, and while I think it was a wonderful resource, again my impatience got the better of me, and I went through the first book LR-style, a couple of passes at the most. I loved the concept, but I burned out on textbooks, and never got around to doing the second one. But it helped me a lot with making sense of the word order. I discovered along the way that translations confuse me, and that it's better to look up the individual words that I didn't understand as I go along, and try to get used to processing Japanese without translating full sentences back and forth. I also decided I like to take graded approaches to languages, thus relying on understanding the language with having to look up too much. Immersion and native material was what I enjoyed best and learned from. Extensive reading and listening worked for me. So I purchased these graded readers, as well as a bunch of native materials from Amazon Japan. They're very expensive, but my vocabulary and listening comprehension took off because of them. I was able to understand a lot in a very short time. Unfortunately. somewhere through the middle of the year, life happened, and I just started falling behind on my studies. I would come back and read and listen, but these were occasional marathons, and I haven't gotten back on track since then. That was back in 2012. I am a little better than I was then, but had I focused, I think I would have been pretty advanced by now. My listening comprehension far outstrips my oral production, however, so these are pretty much the goals I have for this year: 1. Burn through as much vocabulary as realistically possible (there's still so much that I don't know). 2. Write on Lang-8 regularly, and try to make friends to talk to. Self-talk and shadow a lot more. I want to be able to produce Japanese. 3. RTK. 4. Read, read, read. 5. Listen. I realize these are pretty vague goals, so here's my plan of attack. 1. Vocabulary: Anki. I never stuck with it, although I know it may have its merits. I also know that even though it makes me think I'm just memorizing sentences, what it's actually doing is making me memorize patterns, which goes a long way towards language acquisition. But I just felt that spending the time reading/listening is way more worthwhile, so I kept doing that, and abandoned Anki. However, that was back when I had all the time in the world; now I have a full-time job,and I'm busy studying for my medical board exams, and just don't have that luxury anymore. So here I go again. I still have mixed feelings about it, and I don't know if I'll ever stick to it, but I decided to give it a fair chance. I'll try to input sentences, but I'll keep the entries deliberately small to avoid the huge backlog of reviews that totally kills my motivation to even look at Japanese. Like 5-10/day, which should be manageable. Then I'll scale accordingly, depending on how much time and effort I'm willing to spend on Anki. The goal here is to try to maximize efficiency without taking time from using real native materials. If sentences don't work, I'll just do individual words, and if that doesn't also work, I'll look up things as I read, look at word-lists, whatever, but just do anything to get myself there. I don't know how many words I know, so I'll probably be spending time trying to figure out where I am level-wise in order to avoid repeating words I already know. 2. Production: My listening comprehension far outstrips my output, and I owe that to spending all the time on listening passively, and virtually no active involvement with the language. Even my reading isn't very good, as I have been spending too much time in my comfort zone, and not trying to challenge myself with more difficult material. As a result, I can comprehend perfectly well things at my level, whatever that may be, but clearly not enough to understand more complex language in order to able to output anything. For instance, I can understand most manga/anime, but I still have difficulty with Jdoramas, variety shows, news, what have you. And I haven't studied any formal grammar. I hate exercises, I really do. And they do nothing for me unless I encounter them multiple times out there in the wild. I also don't like to be sensitized to grammar rules because when I do, I find myself looking out for them when reading/listening, and tuning out everything else. Like I understand the structure, but not the whole sentence. It just impedes me. But I know it's necessary to know more patterns. So I think I'll crack open those grammar books, and read as many example sentences for each point as I can. I may even make TTs-audio files for them and listen to them as I drive to work or something, just to hammer those patterns in my head. Or put them in Anki, I don't know. More importantly, though, as soon as I feel I have a feel for such structures, I'll use them in writing on Lang-8 or something. Do more shadowing and self-talk. Read aloud. Just be more actively involved. 3. RTK: Haven't touched that since 2012. I find that retaining words and remembering the readings works great if I remember the meaning of the kanji/recognize it, so I plan to review RTK again. It was one of those rare instances when I actually have stuck with SRS. 4. Reading: As much as time and energy allow me. The biggest gains in my own experience have come when I read a lot. I'm into extensive reading, and haven't been doing intensive reading, but I know it's useful, and I'm planning to do more of it. I am following several bots on Twitter, so I'll be intensively working on those tweets with Rikaisama/Rikaikun. Articles, and comments on blogs, and such, and I'll be using those with Anki, if I stick to it. Books, LNs, manga. I have more material than I know what to do with, so that should help. I'm currently obsessing over 進撃の巨人。I think it's a great manga with a very deep story-line, and the anime was amazing! I think it's on my favorite manga/anime list of all time. 5. Listening: I plan on listening to more podcasts, and variety shows, as well as youtube and nico nico. But of course dramas, movies, and anime will be on my list. I subscribed to several podcasts on iTunes, and found a bunch on youtube, so I'll be sharing those as I go along. Not to rub in my obsession with 進撃の巨人 or anything, but I found a radio show that the seiyuus are hosting on youtube, and I'm enjoying it so far. They talk about the show and characters, obviously, which makes it a lot easier to understand than your average radio podcast since it talks about something that I know well, but they also laugh a lot, and they're just hilarious and fun to listen too. I love their voices too! Quantifying my goals would probably be a good measure, but when I put numerical goals, I never stick to them. However, I signed up for the January Tadoku challenge, and I participated in the Super Challenge, so the goals for the year at least will be to: #Read 100 books #Watch/listen to 100 hours of TV/radio. and add to that: #write 100 posts on lang-8. If I can find a conversation partner, that would be great. That said, at the end of the day, my goals are to just be able to function comfortably in the language by the end of this year. These are big goals up there, and with a full schedule, I don't know if I will be able to meet them. But I will try my darndest (?) to do so. I am very interested in Korean, too, at the moment, but I'm not sure how realistic that is with everything I have on my plate. I tried studying Russian together with Japanese, and while I didn't confuse the two or anything, it just stopped me from making noticeable progress in either. I want to do Russian, but if I have more time, I'll do so. Same with Korean, which I'm growing more and more interested in everyday. But I want this year to be all about Japanese. So that's basically the plan, and we'll see how things work out. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Woodsei Bilingual Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Woodsei Joined 4795 days ago 614 posts - 782 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Egyptian)* Studies: Russian, Japanese, Hungarian | Message 2 of 47 04 January 2015 at 2:56am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Placeholder for resources I use.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Woodsei Bilingual Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Woodsei Joined 4795 days ago 614 posts - 782 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Egyptian)* Studies: Russian, Japanese, Hungarian | Message 3 of 47 04 January 2015 at 3:10am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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自己紹介
皆さん今晩は。そしてあけましておめでとう ございます。 私は、3年前に、日本語を習い始めたけど, 二年間は, 大好きな日本語の勉強をやめている。 本 を読んだり、 テレビを見たりしましたが、 実際に勉強し ま せんでした。 私は今年は、 それを変更し たい と考え ています。 日本の文化や人々は私の心の中で特別な場所 を占めている。彼らの文化や考え方をもっと 学びたい。 日本の漫画、 アニメ、演劇（ドラマ）の 大ファンで、 日本のラジオショーを聞いて い る。 私は日本語をもっと勉強して、 日本人と自 然 に会話できるまでになりたい。 日本の新聞を 読み 、 TVニユース等 を聞いて 自然に 理解できるようになりたい。 それゆえ、 今年、 私は上記５つのことに 専念 したい。 Self Introduction Hello, good evening everyone, and Happy New Year! I started learning Japanese 3 years ago, but for the past two years, haven't been doing any studying. I read books and watched TV, but haven't done any actual studying. I want to change that this year. The Japanese culture and its people hold a special place in my heart. I want to learn more about their culture and ways. I'm also a big fan of manga, anime, Jdrama, and listening to Japanese radio shows. I want to advance in Japanese to the point where I can speak naturally to native speakers, and be able to read and listen to any form of Japanese media with natural comprehension. Therefore I intend to dedicate this year to doing just that. Edited by Woodsei on 04 January 2015 at 4:27am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| The Real CZ Senior Member United States Joined 5647 days ago 1069 posts - 1495 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 4 of 47 04 January 2015 at 5:09am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I feel the same way about Anki. I made most of my gains during 2011 in Korean when I had
a lot of free time and read about 15 Korean novels and lots and lots of content online, just looking up a lot of words. However, like you stated, you have to keep that up until you get to an advanced level before you can cool off. I'm in the same situation you are (not medicine, thank God), but in the sense that I'll also be working and having to study for exams to get licensed. Then there's a masters program I want to do, plus the continuing education that I'll have to do every year. That is why I'm using Anki for MCDs, but instead of actually testing myself, I'm using it as a tool for intensive reading. This allows me to read interesting content and see the translation of the clozed word as if I was using a pop-up dictionary. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5554 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 5 of 47 04 January 2015 at 7:33am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Best of luck with the Japanese in 2015, Woodsei! Be it a sprint, a marathon, or hearing about your journey whilst sojourning under the shade of a sakura, I'll be following your posts with great interest. I'm also very tempted to order some of those beginner Japanese readers for later on. ;)
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| Sooniye Diglot Groupie Sweden Joined 3895 days ago 44 posts - 52 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Spanish, Danish, Turkish, Japanese, Croatian, Hindi, Hungarian, Albanian | Message 6 of 47 04 January 2015 at 10:49am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I wish you best of luck this year with Japanese! Looking forward to read your new log.
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| Nieng Zhonghan Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Antarctica Joined 3669 days ago 108 posts - 315 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Japanese*, Spanish, Galician Studies: Finnish, Icelandic, Armenian, Mongolian Studies: Old English, Russian, English, German, Korean, Mandarin | Message 7 of 47 04 January 2015 at 11:51am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I have written once a text in Japanese with one full word document page length in lang-8 (in Japanese). I wanted to check the quality of my corrections changing some small things (nuances, best word usage, "particles", idioms) just to know if the person would give me a good feedback. I didn't made an obvious mistake out of blue in order to not make it so obvious. I guess thee or four people corrected me and two of them pointed out exactly the mistakes I made on purpose. So, I guess lang-8 might be a good resource for Japanese, though I have seen so many texts in English that has never been corrected. You haven't mentioned here, but I also doubt the quality of texts corrections I have seen on Italki so far. I asked well educated native speakers) and they have pointed out mistakes in the supposedly other native speakers' corrections. So, what is the point to use a website where even native speakers or those claiming advanced fluency makes mistakes even I, as a low English level can find out? In case you know any website where native speakers correct texts in English, let me know.
You described exactly what I felt using SRS (Anki) so far. Have you tried Memrise before? I mean, if you think that you are not going to stick with Anki (as I doubt I will stuck with my decks this year...), then Memrise would be an option since there are already many courses available for Japanese. Some of them contain audio, so, it is quite handy. Once you get tired of it, you can simply not log in into that website. The thing is I also feel that I am memorizing sentences (I am using for German right now). So, my plan is to take the most 1000 words and start memorizing the vocabulary and those that I tend to forget or don't remember during my reviews, I am planning to add some few sentences with a context. I think Anki is good for beginners, but at your level, you may go directly into reading as you stated as one of your main goals for 2015.
I am considering reading or watching進撃の巨人 this year. I am looking forward to your review! :D [/QUOTE] Wish you good luck with your goals, Captain!! 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4866 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 8 of 47 04 January 2015 at 4:45pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I'm looking forward to reading your log, Woodsei! I recognised myself in a quite a few of the things you wrote. My Korean journey also started with TV-watching and like is the case so many of us my active skills are lagging behind. I also have a complicated relationship with Anki - used to do my reviews religiously, now kind of find it annoying, but still return to it... And I still need to find out how best to juggle full-time work, language study and studying for further education.
Good luck with your goals! Also, thanks for organising the East Asian Team this year! 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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