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日本語 and me the next round TAC 2012 Team い | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5974 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes  Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 233 of 333 21 September 2012 at 12:22am | IP Logged |
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It's so hard to just try and keep in mind everything I've learned over the last couple of months about language learning and avoid negative and obstructive thought patterns. It doesn't help that I have inherited from my father a level of single-mindedness and perfectionism which is bordering on OCD at times. It's not always a bad character trait - if my brain wants to throw itself into the right project at the right time it means I can achieve some pretty cool things. But at it's worse I just end up feeling terribly distracted and negative about things.
Now it's finally sunk in that yes, I actually was stupid enough to enter myself for JLPT N2 (and it's too late to back out now) I am starting to feel the same sense of panic that plagued me while I was preparing for N3. At it's worst I feel like I'm worrying so much about having to remember everything that I can focus on nothing. The stupid thing is that I'm wasting all this energy and worry on these grand plans and just end up completely missing the point. And the point is that if I study fairly regularly and consistently and approach the language with a sense of curiosity and joy, over time I will continue to improve, test or no test. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5974 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 234 of 333 21 September 2012 at 8:46pm | IP Logged |
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I'm trying to decide whether or not to sign up for a language class this autumn. If there was a Japanese class available at an appropriate level, I would have jumped at the chance, but unfortunately this is not the case. I could however sign up for a French or German class. But if I did this, I think the main goal would be just to get me out of the house one night a week doing something that is not related to work or retail. Which would actually probably put me in the same position as most of my classmates.
I think in many ways French could be quite interesting. I'm still shocked at how well I'm able to read something like Harry Potter after all these years of neglect. It would also be quite interesting to go back to a French class with a completely different attitude to when I last took formal classes in the language. I'm not sure I'm quite ready to make the most of a German class, I still want to learn to understand a lot more about the language on my own first, before taking it to a class and playing with it in public. Or I could just save my money and try immersing myself in Japanese at home the whole time instead. I wish I didn't have such a hard time making my mind up about these kinds of things. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5974 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 235 of 333 22 September 2012 at 6:11pm | IP Logged |
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Woohoo I've finally done it! I've finished reading a whole book in Japanese! I'm normally terrible for picking something up, reading a few pages and then giving up and trying something else. This time I stuck it out until the end. Yay! Go me! (Shame I'm not still doing the Super Challenge...)
The book in question is 星の王子さま, a Japanese translation of Le Petit Prince. I think judging from the use of furigana, which was omitted for common words but still used more widely than an adult novel, it's probably aimed at a similar reading age group to Harry Potter. It wasn't without its challenges, but it was a fairly straightforward read compared to other books I've tried to have a go at! I've also recently learned something quite important for me when it comes to extensive reading. I need to slow down! A lot of the information I had seen seemed to suggest that the important factor was getting through as much material as possible. This meant I always tried to read through texts quite quickly, not worrying about what I couldn't understand. The problem is I was actually rushing things too much. I really noticed from experimenting with reading Harry Potter in French that if I just slowed down a bit, I could process the language and understand things a lot better. So I'm trying to put my breaks on a bit with extensive reading in Japanese too. I still observe the no dictionary rule, but if I can't understand something perfectly straight away I just slow down a little bit and often I find the meaning starts to become clearer. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5974 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 236 of 333 23 September 2012 at 9:14pm | IP Logged |
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During my weekly language exchange today, my partner pointed out that he was speaking an awful lot of Japanese and I was speaking an awful lot of English. I think the problem is that with his English (around B2/C1) and my Japanese (around B1) we both know we can generally stick to our own native language and be understood. It's far too easy to be lazy, particularly when you are just enjoying the conversation. I think we'll need to try and be strict and have a fixed time period for Japanese and a fixed time period for English. If I can stick to it, it will definitely force me to try harder and should do my Japanese some good.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Takato Tetraglot Senior Member HungaryRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5040 days ago 249 posts - 276 votes Speaks: Hungarian*, EnglishB2, GermanB2, Japanese | Message 237 of 333 24 September 2012 at 2:19pm | IP Logged |
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Why don't you only speak Japanese and she only
speak English? You tried it but it worked less well? You could use English every other day, if you like that. Edited by Takato on 24 September 2012 at 2:21pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5974 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 238 of 333 24 September 2012 at 2:38pm | IP Logged |
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I don't like working with bilingual conversations in that way for one simple reason - I miss out on the chance to have a live role model for language use. I pick up so much useful vocab and expressions from things my practice partner says and I'd hate to miss out on this.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5176 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 239 of 333 24 September 2012 at 10:05pm | IP Logged |
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I've done that with people in German... They spoke German and I spoke English andig worked fine. That only
happened with a few people though. Most people I talked to felt that I must not be understanding their German if I was responding in English. I found that a little funny. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6612 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish | Message 240 of 333 25 September 2012 at 7:46am | IP Logged |
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The best is probably to try to stick to one language at a time. You could decide to use Japanese for half-an-hour and then English for half-an-hour. But I've found that switching in the middle like that feels very strange, so another way is just to alternate each time you meet. So then one time you would speak entirely in Japanese the whole time and the next time entirely in English the whole time. I think you just have to try some different things until you find out what's most comfortable.
1 person has voted this message useful |
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