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TAC 2010 - Team K: M. Medialis - RU JP FR | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| 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 73 of 115 05 June 2010 at 9:32am | IP Logged | |||||
I find the best approach in this type of situation is to read a bit beforehand, and then spend the next day listening through what you've read so far several few times. After a while, you start to pick out new words and phrases you didn't hear at first. Music is also good because the flow is rhythmical and the content usually rhymes in short colloquial stanzas, and best of all, you can learn to sing along with the choruses after a while (although, you might have to do this quite silently in the factory, and just look a little "strange" for the time being instead). ;) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6437 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 74 of 115 05 June 2010 at 11:55am | IP Logged | |||||
A few links. You may have already seen them all; if not, I recommend sheetz's. There are also some religious texts floating around with Japanese audiobooks. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| M. Medialis Diglot TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Sweden Joined 6355 days ago 397 posts - 508 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Russian, Japanese, French | Message 75 of 115 06 June 2010 at 2:08am | IP Logged | |||||
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Hey Volte! I had seen most of the materials, but had completely missed MarcoDiAngelo's excellent library. It's exactly what I need, so millions of thanks for the links!
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| M. Medialis Diglot TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Sweden Joined 6355 days ago 397 posts - 508 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Russian, Japanese, French | Message 76 of 115 14 June 2010 at 10:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
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TAC Log nr 14
The exams are over and I've been enjoying four days of intense freedom, trying to award myself with that delayed gratification that's been accumulated for more than 2 months. Today, I started to work in the factory. I can honestly say that I felt very bad about my life before I entered the building. But once I got in, I got to see some old friends who lifted my mood. And after I got my Japanese immersion environment running all my enthusiasm returned! -This day marks the glorious beginning of my Grande Language Learning Summer of 2010. Adventures in the Fluency Factory This first day, I've been listening to some Great Japanese Podcasts. I didn't understand anything really because of my limited vocabulary. But this year's LR has given me a good sense of what is happening. All the structures are there, -so I can "see" the meaning of what I hear....it's just that most of the words are still blank. Does this even make sense?.. lol When I got home I finally finished up my formerly huge pile of forgotten kanji cards. And at last, I was able to add 22 new cards!! (Oh how I've been waiting for this day). So now I proudly present some fresh stats: Kanji Count: 1461 Wikipedia coverage: 77.428 % Actions during the past week Started to LR the Japanese version of Alice in Wonderland. What a brilliant little story. Activated a free trial membership at CrunchyRoll which gives access to brand new anime. And boy, am I having fun (in the AJATTest sense of the word)! -So now I'm setting out to prove the following formula: HQ Anime => Intensive Fun => HQ Fluency Current plan Keep the factory immersion fun, and continue to ride on the wave when the work day is over. (this post was probably a bit OTT - but who cares, I'm back in TAC!). ----------------------------------------------------- Team K - M. Medialis Edited by M. Medialis on 14 June 2010 at 10:11pm 1 person has 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 77 of 115 15 June 2010 at 9:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
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"Grande Language Learning Summer of 2010" - I like the sound of this already. Your kanji account is simply awesome, so much so that my own little neglected kanjitos are hopping up and down in fury in my Koohii deck right now asking why they don't have a responsible owner like Medialis.
How much L&R have you managed with Japanese so far, by the way? Those hours of immersion must be starting to pile up, I imagine. I'm also really curious to find out how much knowing almost 80% of the basic kanji helps with aligning the texts and meaning. I know Khatz thoroughly recommends getting the joyo kanji down pat before anything else, whilst atamagaii, as far as I can recall, suggests learning the kanji through L-R (although s/he does later mention reading Len Walsh's introduction to kanji and using a pop-up dictionary too). What's your experience in all this? Oh, and good luck with the job of course. It's cool you've got some mates there already. :) Edited by Teango on 16 June 2010 at 12:08am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| M. Medialis Diglot TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Sweden Joined 6355 days ago 397 posts - 508 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Russian, Japanese, French | Message 78 of 115 17 June 2010 at 9:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
First of all, I feel that my English are becoming sloppy now when I'm doing intense Japanse immersion. I guess that's a good sign, but writing these logs becomes a bit tricky. :)
Regarding the LR hours. It's a frustrating question, since I'm very curious myself, but I never managed to log my time. :) I know that I have done at least 35 official hours of LR - reading books for the first or for the second time. But on top of that I've been "stealing" time almost daily (i.e. LR between lectures, while waiting for or sitting on the train. Then I just picked some random chapter and LR-ed for 15-30 minutes. So you could probably add at least 15 hours to my lower limit.
Yeah, I've been torn apart for a while trying to figure out whose advice I want to follow. Really, it's the only stressful element in this otherwise wonderful language learning quest- trying to find the method that will give me the 'purest' Japanese in the most efficient way (gaah, I'm freaking out when I'm thinking about it - does bilingual dictionary look-ups contaminate my native Japanese seeds?? and what about artifical mnemonics?). One of my kanji learning experiences is that it's dead easy to Heisig-learn a kanji that's been previously picked up from LR. So I'm not completely sure that Heisig is a waste of time if you're not doing it instead of LR. It's also encouraging to know that SRS guarantees a 99 % coverage of every kanji you ever need to know. Always hard to resist fail-safe learning methods. ;D One thing about Atamagaii's advice is that she also has stated that she is not interested in writing out kanji by hand (as she always type with a computer). She claims that if she wanted to, she could quickly learn to write out the kanji as well (and I believe her). However, thanks to Heisig, I can confidently say that I right now am able to visualize and write out almost each and every one of the 1500 kanjis I know perfectly (no magic here, just lots of repetitions). Since I started to write out every forgotten card by hand, I've gotten a daily writing practice that's proven to be very fruitful (especially for the memory!). So, how does it feel to LR Japanese when the kanjis are already in my head? First of all, I've noticed that it's very important not to bring up the English keywords when seeing the characters. Doing so always ends in disaster, since the keywords don't match the meanings of the words sufficiently well. That's actually the genius of Heisig,- that you're practicing keyword->kanji instead of kanji->keyword. So when I see a character, I bring up abstract word-less concepts which are valuable hints when I switch to the Japanese part of the text. However, I must admit that I'm still new to LR-ing parallel texts. I've done most of my LR using Swedish-only translations of the books. I promise to get back and give updated impressions as soon as I feel that I can draw better conclusions. Another thing I've noticed is the skill of "instant recognition" that Heisig gives you. When I look at a page with Japanese text, it takes a split of a second before the intimidating wall of characters breaks down into friendly familiar components. This has an interesting effect when doing LR - enabling me to enter a "filling the buckets" mode, that is, seeing a familiar kanji, wait until the actor pronounces it, and quickly try to store the pronunciatinon in the 'empty' kanji box. Since it draws attention from the story, I've tried to refrain from doing it. But I'll soon try to do an LR experiment focusing on attaining kanji readings in this way. Note that unknown kanjis don't have this peculiar property. Having the kanji together with the all the associations stored at a steady place in my memory simply makes them stand out in the texts. Heisig has also given me the ability to read parallel texts without background audio (and I'm going to write some cool stuff about this in my next log - stay tuned!). So, with regards to my circumstances this spring, with no time to do high-intensive LR, I'd definitely say that Heisig+SRS has been a good investment. It also decreases the difficulty of the LR as there are less information that needs to be processed simultaneously. Right, just some thoughts. Can't wait till I've gained more experience. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| M. Medialis Diglot TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Sweden Joined 6355 days ago 397 posts - 508 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Russian, Japanese, French | Message 79 of 115 23 June 2010 at 8:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
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TAC Log nr 15
First of all, I'd like to say that I've absolutely not given up on LR. This post is about me trying to squeeze in as much Japanese as possible in an environment where LR is impossible. I will start to LR again this weekend. I've also temporarily dropped Russian again. I simply can't resist going all-Japanese right now. Adventures in the Fluency Factory Hours of Active Listening: 60 Yep, I've spent ~8 hours every day listening as intensive and active as I possibly can. The factory work is so monotone that I can spend all my brain power on Japanese - and it's so awesome! I actually think I've discovered the Dao of Khatuzmoto these weeks (beginning the day with full immersion really makes it easy to continue to study when I get home. -And now it actually feels awkward to read Swedish or English websites). So, now to some exciting stuff: After the first three days ( = 22 hours ) of active listening, I actually got a Major Level-Up in my freehand reading ability (i.e. the ability to read Japanese without audio)! Here's what I did that I believe caused the burst of improvement: Silent Shadow in the Factory First some background: A few months ago I realized that I wasn't able to sound Japanese no matter how I formed my mouth. After some thinking and additional listening I came to the conclusion that the Japanese speaks more deeply than Swedes do. I don't know the academic definition of the thing I've observed, but it's like they get their air from a whole different place in the throat when they speak. (if you want to sound native in another language you may want to pay attention to the 'level' of the voice, I know a girl from a former Soviet country who speaks excellent idiomatic and native-like Swedish, with the exception that she she speaks with a very high pitch. -Almost no Swedes speak with that kind of voice, so it all sounds a bit strained. And I've gotten a comment from a Russian girl that I should speak 'harder' when I speak Russian. The point is that it's not enough to get perfect pronunciation, rhythm, tone and vocabulary. Your voice must be Japanized as well. Isn't this parenthesis becoming ridiculously long?). So, this is what I've done at the factory: I've been listening very closely to the Japanese voices, silently trying to repeat what I hear as if it came from my own mouth. This includes having the tongue and the throat relax at a different place in the mouth, and 'visualizing' that I create all the sounds I hear. What I'm trying to achieve is to make it almost impossible to produce Japanese in a non-Japanese way. (The method is nothing more fancy than the good old shadowing method -without actually moving the physical muscles.) I quickly got some clear measurable results. For several months, every night before I fall asleep, I've been reading a page of parallel texts without audio. And now I suddenly could read very smoothly, getting the intonation naturally, and everything makes more sense. Now when I think about it, I think that this must be a demonstration of the "inner voice" that Prof. Arguelles talks about (and which is one of the main arguments why shadowing is worthwhile). I remember when I entered this stage in reading Russian (but I don't know what triggered the level-up back then), and I know there's a couple of level-ups left before I can look at a text and just read it. But getting to this first level was very encouraging and it makes reading so much more enjoyable. Kanji Count: 1580 Wikipedia coverage: 81.715 % Actions during the past week Re-read a number of AJATT and Antimoon articles which have inspired me to use more immersion techniques and possibly even some SRS in the future. (not because they are particularly effective, but because they are the only methods that virtually guarantees native-like expressions). Been listening to Japanese. I especially recommend the show Tokyo Local, which is very fun to listen to even when you can't understand what they're saying. Fiddled around with some monolingual Japansese dictionaries. Current plan Do some serious LR and anime watching. Where Serious=Fun as always. :D I need more grammar understanding and words, which only can be remedied by some LR. ----------------------------------------------------- Team K - M. Medialis Edited by M. Medialis on 23 June 2010 at 9:00pm 2 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 80 of 115 24 June 2010 at 10:26am | IP Logged | |||||
Ditto...I've been told this several times too. I recall being in a Ukrainian restaurant once where I foolhardily tried out some simple Pimsleuresque phrases whilst ordering. But everyone, including the waitress, just laughed and beamed at me like I was a cute Cheburashka who just fell out of a box of oranges. When I asked if I said it all wrong, the reply was that my pronunciation was really good, but that Russians never ask so politely and softly. I was apparently behaving more like Dostoevsky's princely Idiot, and needed to be firm, harsh and direct. So I got annoyed and starting shouting out hors-d'oevres rudely, pretending I was giving a speech like Lenin, and everyone around the table started clapping and said "now, that's perfect...now you've got it!".
This is fantastic - it's like "the art of fighting without fighting"! Kanji is "like a finger pointing to the moon...don't concentrate on the finger, or you'll lose all that heavenly glory...". :) Edited by Teango on 24 June 2010 at 10:30am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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