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Brun_Ugle flies again (TAC 2012 team い) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6621 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes  Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish | Message 177 of 276 04 September 2012 at 7:07pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Here’s a good word I came across today:
逆恨み：さかうらみ：an unjust grudge from a person against whom one justly has a grudge Isn’t that a lot to pack into three little characters? 2 persons have 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 178 of 276 04 September 2012 at 9:20pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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That's not from HP is it?
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| Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6621 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish | Message 179 of 276 05 September 2012 at 7:11am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
No, but I'm not sure where I got it. I'm trying to read a couple of different things right now. I'm starting to realize that even though it took me 5 minutes per page, HP is easier than almost anything else I have. I was trying to read another book for young people and it was taking me more like 15 minutes per page. I'll keep going though. Maybe as I figure out who the characters are and what's going on, it will get easier. Manga don't seem to be easy either. "Doraemon" and "What's Michael?" weren't too bad, but anything more sophisticated than that and I'm pretty lost. I'm starting to realize how incredibly lacking my vocabulary is. Sometimes I wonder if my time might be better spent improving my vocabulary on iKnow. I think I should keep reading though in addition to iKnow and other stuff. It's bound to get better eventually. This is one of those times when I have to take my own advice and look back on how far I've come instead of looking forward to see how far I still have to go. I'm feeling very frustrated right now. It probably doesn't help that I've halfway got a cold that never turns into a real cold, but never gets better either. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6621 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish | Message 180 of 276 09 September 2012 at 8:35am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Log for 2012.09.02 - 2012.09.09 inclusive I’ve been rather depressed this week which made Japanese seem pointless and reduced my ability to concentrate. So I came a little short of my goals, but it wasn’t as bad as it might have been. RTK: Time = 1:49. Since my goal was 1:45, I met this one easily. My piles of due cards are slowly being reduced, but since it is going so slowly, I thought I should probably consider increasing my goal a little. Reading: Time = 12:44. I’d set myself the very modest (compared to my usual goals) goal of 14 hours and came 1:26 short. I was a little disappointed because 14 hours is really rather little to start with since I will never reach my goal for the Super Challenge doing so little reading. On the other hand, I’ve decided that I can’t let the Challenge take over my life and prevent me from doing other kinds of study, otherwise it will defeat its purpose of improving my skills in Japanese. So I’ve decided not to worry about meeting the original Challenge goals and to just do a sensible amount and see where that gets me. Listening/movies: Time = 5:59. I sort of met my goal of 4:30, but I really wanted that 4:30 to come from watching dramas and anything else to be extra. But dramas only accounted for a little over 3 hours. I’d been planning to watch some on Sunday evening, but my ex called to ask for a favor and we ended up talking for two hours, which was nice, but it ruined my TV-watching for the evening. iKnow: Time = 5:25 . I met my goal of 5 hours with room to spare. Writing: Time= 3:58 hours total with 1:48 on actual writing and 2:11 on going through corrections. I only wrote 134 words so didn’t make my goal of 300 words, but now that I’m caught up on going through corrections, maybe I’ll have more time for actual writing next week. Textbook: Time = 1:48. So I met my goal of 1:45. Total for period: 31 hr, 43 min Total since start of TAC 2012: 908 hr, 10 min Total since I started keeping track (2011.11.06): 1105 hr, 41 min Only 1382 hours, 58 minutes and 9 seconds to go ;-) Goals for Next Week RTK: I’m upping this to 20 minutes per day in order to better reduce my piles of due cards. So 2:20 per week total. Reading: 2 hours per day, totaling 14 hours per week. Same as last week. TV/Movies/audio: 4:45 per week. That’s still 4:45 on drama and anything else is extra. iKNow: 5 hours per week. Same as last week Writing: 300 words per week plus go through corrections. Same as last week. Textbook: I’m increasing this to 20 minutes per day or 2:20 per week. I want to finish reviewing my old book before my new one comes. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6621 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish | Message 181 of 276 11 September 2012 at 11:41am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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TAC is now more than 2/3 over and I’ve been thinking about evaluating my progress. Then I read g-bod’s list over what she’s learned about her own study needs, and I decided copy her.
It turned out to be a VERY long list, so don’t feel you have to read it. It’s mostly for my own benefit anyway. • Learning one foreign language does help in learning another, but in the case of Norwegian and Japanese at least, the help comes mostly in the form of knowing it is possible. • What works for learning one language doesn’t necessarily work for another. • Being on a TAC team is great! I love the feeling of togetherness and helping each other toward a common goal. • Listening is difficult for me, but if I can listen without listening (sounds like a Zen thing), I hear more. Don’t try to catch the words. Let them come to you. • Listening while doing something else is useless and only serves to drive me crazy. Autism gives me a need to shut out all other sounds. • I can’t concentrate when there is thumping music. Earplugs are a must. If earplugs aren’t enough, using a noise generator at full volume in addition can sometimes help. • LR is great, but at the level where I started, at least, listening and reading in the same language at the same time is best. • Series are best. I often have trouble getting into a movie or book, but it’s much easier when I feel I know the characters and am interested in them. • The best way for me to watch a drama is to watch without subtitles and then with. If I watch with subtitles first, I won’t pay much attention the second time around. If I don’t use subtitles at all, I will completely get the wrong end of the stick and that will make future episodes even more confusing. • Books for small children are too boring and not necessarily easier. Books for older children or young adults are fine, but they should be the kinds that I liked at that age. It also helps if they have a lot of kanji. • Lang-8 is fantastic. Be a good friend and correct things in an easy to understand manner and with clear explanations and you will end up with friends who do the same (at least some of them). It’s also a good idea to check someone’s correction history and then correct something for them before asking to be their friend. They will be more interested in being your friend and you already know they are good at correcting. • Lang-8 also gives me motivation and a feeling of having friends and working together toward a common goal. • Go through and compare corrections carefully in order to understand them. For me it is best to make a line by line list of corrections to get an overview. • Shorter entries (ca 150 words) are best since it is easier to get an overview of the corrections and the amount of corrections won’t be too overwhelming. Also people prefer to correct things that aren’t too long since it is less work. • Finding things to write about is hard at first, but gets much easier after you’ve done a few entries. • Write things out by hand before typing. This is especially important in a language like Japanese where it is so hard to remember what kanji you need. Depending on spell check or a kanji inserter will only cause your skills to weaken. • Something like iKnow that feeds you vocabulary in a pleasant and easy manner without feeling like work is great. • I still haven’t figured out how to make Anki work for me. • I’m NEVER going to feel confident in a foreign language. I have to accept that. • Shadowing is helpful, but so is listen and repeat. I need to listen and repeat a few times first in order to really hear the sentence. Then I can shadow it. • Reading out loud is also helpful for training my mouth to move in the right way, but my voice is too weak to do more than two pages at a time. • My organization skills are terrible. I still have to learn time management. • Listening to audiobooks is very useful, but I’m not the sit down and listen type. Nor can I listen while doing things like housework. I will only end up blocking things out. Walking in the woods is best for me and there is no point in turning on the MP3 player until I’ve gotten past the areas with traffic and can hear properly. • I need proper audiobooks. Professional readers are best. I understand them much better than amateurs who can’t modulate their voices properly. However, some amateurs aren’t too bad. • It is easy to overestimate your skill level, and I think I did at the beginning of this year. It’s also easy to underestimate the amount of time and effort it will take to reach a level of “basic fluency.” • The hardest and worst stage is the time between beginner and intermediate when you are finished with one textbook and tired of grinding away, but are still not capable of sitting down and enjoying a book or TV show. • Vocabulary is a big problem, but it is possible to read a familiar book like Harry Potter with a fairly limited vocabulary. Romance novels also don’t require a lot of skill to read. So get a Harlequin and hide it behind something more sophisticated like a manga :) • Manga are not necessarily easier to read than novels. • With an easy language like Norwegian, it is possible to read one textbook and then go on to learning purely through reading novels, watching TV and other pleasant activities. With a language like Japanese I can start reading and watching after going through a textbook, but I can’t give up textbooks all together without losing grammar skills. So, what does this mean for my future plans? 1. Get an intermediate textbook and work on it at least a few days every week. 2. Finish HP, then go on to a young adult series of the type I enjoyed at that age. 3. Watch loads of dramas. 4. Try to find more audiobooks to listen to while walking. 5. Always be prepared to switch to a non-listening activity if the neighbors get too loud and I have to put in earplugs. 6. Write a few short entries on lang-8 every week. 7. Figure out a way to manage my time. 8. I should spend less time on this forum and more on studying. (Set a specific time of day to read on the forum and only log on at that time.) And how about my progress so far? It’s both better and worse than I’d hoped. I thought that I’d be able to read reasonably sophisticated novels by the end of the year, but I’m still struggling with young adult novels. On the other hand, it feels wonderful to be able to read at all. I had no expectations of being great at listening, though I’d hoped to get a bit better than I am now. It’s my own fault for not watching more drama from the start. My writing is sometimes much better than I expect, but sometimes it’s just a mess. However, I’m confident that lang-8 will take me far. I’m still not ready to speak, but I think more in Japanese than before, and sometimes have imaginary conversations in my head. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6621 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish | Message 182 of 276 13 September 2012 at 8:43am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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This is turning out to be a bad week (but I'm sure it will get better eventually -- always optimistic), so I'm changing my goals for the week to surviving.
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| Takato Tetraglot Senior Member HungaryRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5049 days ago 249 posts - 276 votes Speaks: Hungarian*, EnglishB2, GermanB2, Japanese | Message 183 of 276 15 September 2012 at 12:56am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Your written stuff is very true! o.o Although I couldn't grasp what you exactly meant by
Why don't you go to a university, library or something similar? There's noise in the university and quiet in the library.
Edited by Takato on 15 September 2012 at 1:02am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6621 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish | Message 184 of 276 15 September 2012 at 9:08am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Not feeling confident is probably a result of autism. My therapist says that autists never feel like they can do anything unless they are one of the best in the world. I'm not sure I would feel confident even then. Usually, when another person will say that they are really good at something, an autist will barely admit to even being able to do it a little. Since this is hard-wired into my brain, I can't do much about it. I just have to accept that I will never feel confident and get on with it. Another thing is that we have a tendency to remember our mistakes and be haunted by them forever. It kind of makes us want to avoid making too many mistakes. I suppose that's why we are such perfectionists. Personally, I am sometimes still haunted by memories of blunders I made when I was only 3 or 4 years old.
I don't fall asleep, I'm just not really good at listening. My mind wanders too easily. But it works better if I'm walking.
I doubt it. It's nothing to do with the quality of the recording but rather the reader's ability to read. A professional has different voices for different characters and such like, but amateurs tend to just read. It's maybe not quite a monotone, but sometimes it's pretty close. A boring voice makes my mind wander even more.
Actually, even libraries (at least in Norway) aren't always that quiet. And I can't really do listen and repeat there either. So for me the best is usually to stick in some earplugs and read instead. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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