kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5182 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese
| Message 521 of 1702 05 September 2012 at 4:44am | IP Logged |
I had another tutoring session today. It's the free class tutor that comes with the college course. It's a great
deal really. Anyway. I didn't speak a lot of Japanese. Part of that is that I wasn't alone with him this time and
the other is that I really didn't have the energy. More sleep would be better. I got about 5 last night.
So it recently came to my attention that 一緒にwhich means together, if you look at the meaning of the kanji it
means one thong. Weird that they have a kanji for thong, nevermind that they use it in words like together.
But I was the weird one for noticing /sigh. I sometimes wonder if other people even learn the meanings of
kanji or care.
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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 522 of 1702 05 September 2012 at 6:54am | IP Logged |
Yes, some of those kanji combinations seem pretty silly, but it makes them easier to remember.
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kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5182 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese
| Message 523 of 1702 05 September 2012 at 7:28pm | IP Logged |
Yeah, that's what I thought. I don't think the japanese tutor even knew what a thong was. I think he thought I
was saying song. I should have showed him the wiki picture of a girl on the beach and her thong bikini.
I'm so in the mood to skip class today. Again, the drawback to having friends in the class is that they'll all be
like where is he?? He was at tutoring yesterday... He's healthy... Bah.
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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 524 of 1702 05 September 2012 at 7:59pm | IP Logged |
Don't skip class! You paid your money, now you've got to do the time. Plus grammar is good for you! :)
Also, I think the meaning of "thong" in the case of 緒 is a little bit more general than skimpy underwear! It just means a cord or a thread, for example へその緒 is an umbilical cord.
One of my Australian friends, when asked by her new British mother in law what she wanted for Christmas, asked for some thongs, which led to some rather embarassing confusion. Turns out in Australia, thongs are what us Brits call flip flops...
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kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5182 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese
| Message 525 of 1702 05 September 2012 at 10:15pm | IP Logged |
g-bod wrote:
Don't skip class! You paid your money, now you've got to do the time. Plus grammar is
good for you! :)
Also, I think the meaning of "thong" in the case of 緒 is a little bit more general than skimpy underwear! It just
means a cord or a thread, for example へその緒 is an umbilical cord.
One of my Australian friends, when asked by her new British mother in law what she wanted for Christmas,
asked for some thongs, which led to some rather embarassing confusion. Turns out in Australia, thongs are
what us Brits call flip flops... |
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Lol. My dad calls them that too. Didn't find out that he called them thongs until a few years ago though...
Was a little confusing for me too. I think what I really want to skip is work. I can't skip work so skipping class
is the next best thing? Don't worry I'm going. I'd feel too guilty about facing my classmates. It's awful.
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kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5182 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese
| Message 526 of 1702 07 September 2012 at 6:46pm | IP Logged |
We got the handout for the worksheet for chapter 1. It's due October 10th. I finished it yesterday (the
following day). It was really good practice and I feel better for doing it but no more worksheets for a while
heh. We're going to get the "kanji packet" on Monday that will have all the kanji exercises for the semester. I
wonder how fast I'll go through that. This kanji packet is basically translation exercises using the grammar for
all the lessons as we do them. It goes out of the way to use the kanji we're supposed to learn in several ways
so that we see their pronunciations and meanings. It's pretty good. But again, the course isn't too
aggressive with learning kanji so there aren't that many kanji by RTK standards in the packet at all.
I haven't done the exercises in the textbook yet so there's still work to do if I want to. We don't pass the
textbook exercises in but we do them in class. Most of us just do it with the class when we go over it but
obviously you can prepare the exercises ahead of time and look smarter.
I'll probably do the textbook ahead of time to look smarter. Also it looks like I'm going to have some free time
on my hands to work on other Japanese resources since the class material isn't bogging me down the way it
did last semester. I was thinking about checking out JapanesePod101. I was kind of turned off by their
offering before because of the way they promote it - ie they try to pressure you to buy now and buy the long
term membership. And they advertise constantly if you get any of their products for ipad/ipod/iphone.
They're pretty good products but the advertising is a bit annoying. Anyway, they have material for
intermediate learners and even people trying to break into intermediate per se. They have a ton of stuff. If I
do it I think I'd get their cheapest basic option and sign up for a year. I think that comes to $5 a month. For
free you get the audio portion of the lessons but I'd like the lesson notes for studying and making flashcards.
The other features on the site don't really look as impressive to me - flashcards, list of 2000 basic vocab,
dictionary, and a few other gimmicky things that while interesting don't seem worth paying for.
Before I do that I'll want to finish Rosetta Stone though. I am a little over halfway through all their Japanese
lessons. So far I've seen all the grammar already so it's pretty easy. A big criticism of Rosetta (well one of
them) is that they don't use a lot of vocabulary. Interestingly, I usually learn a few new words per lesson
when I do it. And because they're using complete sentences to teach I get to learn how to properly use the
words without sounding like an idiot. If I learn it correctly anyway.
I think I could blow through Rosetta pretty quickly if I put my mind to it since the grammar seems to be all
review. JapanesePod looks to have a lot more material if I want to keep going with lessons per se instead of
jumping back into native material. So that's where I'm at right now. Oh I'm still doing vocabulary flashcards.
I'm working on the N3 vocab - I'm about halfway through it but slowing down a bit. I don't add new words
every day. I think that adding 20 new words every day is too much for a part time learner unless you make
vocabulary your priority over all else.
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kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5182 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese
| Message 527 of 1702 14 September 2012 at 9:59pm | IP Logged |
I made doubly sure it's too late to drop Japanese History last night. I skipped last week to study Japanese and didn't go to the class... because it was more fun and interesting for me to study Japanese language instead. Well it's too late. So I can withdraw and have a W on the transcript (which isn't the end of the world for me at all) but I have a lot more time to do that and don't have to do it now. So I woke up this morning and crammed and went to class. It's really a pretty easy course all things considered but with work and Japanese 201 and watching anime I've got a pretty full schedule. But it was pretty fun and I'm glad I didn't just withdraw from it.
I was typing notes on my iPad in class. Would have been neat to have one of those things when I was a college student for real. I'm not sure if we had laptops back then or not heh. People didn't have cell phones then even. Well unless you had a lot of money or something. Anyway so I was typing notes and it was kind of fun. I hated taking notes by hand in the past because I couldn't really write fast enough to get my thoughts down and write everything the teacher said etc. and had to summarize it and frankly it was such a pain I was just better off putting the pen down and concentrating my best and then referring to the book / handouts instead. But with something you can type on you can actually keep up with the teacher's dialogue (if you want) and write you own comments too. It's neat. That said I wasn't using a keyboard, just typing on the ipad so I am gonna bring a keyboard to class next time.
Now I'm killing time before my Rosetta Stone tutor lesson. I'm not as nervous as I used to be since my Japanese is good enough to wing it so to speak now. But I did the lesson like 2 months ago and haven't looked at it since. I'm sure there's some specific vocab I haven't reused since then and wont' recall. These exercises they do with you are all about your producing the Japanese. There isn't any oh listen to me 1st to warm up and then you do it, or multiple choice (which is what the course is based on). No, they basically point at a picture and you have to start talking about it. It can be frustrating when that word you know they want to hear just won't come to mind.
watching anime last night I think I noticed my Japanese has gotten better. That self evaluation of myself goes up and down it seems but it was up last night. I was watching Gilgamesh (or something) on Crunchyroll and I'm really enjoying the series. It's funny and has some good action and I'm a little curious about the character development. I'm a little frustrated with the latest Crunchyroll app for iOS. It's so buggy I can't use it. I use a desktop streaming app to watch it on my iPad via my Windows computer. A little annoying.
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kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5182 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese
| Message 528 of 1702 15 September 2012 at 5:12am | IP Logged |
Well I got an email from Rosetta Stone informing me that I'm under investigation for offensive language in their new chat area. I have no idea what they're talking about. I had a conversation with some other people about anime. Maybe they felt this was off-topic I don't know but their email said vulgar and offensive. I have a feeling I will be cancelling my account soon. I don't think anyone appreciates receiving email saying that they are offensive. (No I didn't swear or insult anyone and everyone I talked to wanted to add me to their friend's list)
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