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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 5925 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes  Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 273 of 333 26 October 2012 at 8:47pm | IP Logged |
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I think my motivation reached a kind of low point this week. I felt a little emotional after going back to my hometown to see my brother before he goes off travelling. It's a weird kind of mix of feeling proud of him for actually doing it, a little bit of sisterly concern for his wellbeing and a little bit of jealousy that I'm not dropping everything to do something similar!
On top of that I've been pretty tired and lacking in energy for pretty much anything mentally taxing all week. It doesn't help that I was also struck down with a migraine on Tuesday night. As if the visual disturbances and headaches are not bad enough, they also have the rather unsettling effect of making me more stupid than usual, which writes off most learning activities for around 24 hours. Anyway, I was getting quite cross with myself over the French class and the Japanese exam and the general feeling that I'd taken on too much and the fear that I was setting myself up for failure (I thought I'd gotten over this fear when I succeeded in passing my MSc, but it seems not). But then I realised that there's a lot of stuff going on which is having an effect on my mood. My success (or lack of) in a class or an exam is hardly critical right now - and even if it was, my current attitude would not help anyway. So I decided I should give myself a bit of a break, rather than beat myself up for not being the untroubled success story that I really wish I was! So anyway, I decided that I would go for the Japanese language learning equivalent of comfort food and have spent the last few nights curled up on the sofa watching Kekkon Dekinai Otoko, which is one of my favourite J Dramas and ticks all the right boxes of being funny, having an unchallenging storyline and being just comprehensible enough that I can turn off subtitles even when my motivation has hit rock bottom. And the result is, somehow I am getting my Japanese groove back. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5127 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 274 of 333 27 October 2012 at 6:11am | IP Logged |
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Nice. I'm gonna copy you I think and check out that jdrama.
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| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5127 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 275 of 333 28 October 2012 at 6:38am | IP Logged |
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Well I'm hooked on your jdrama. The cast is awesome! And it's hilarious. Really just what I needed right now.
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| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5925 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 276 of 333 29 October 2012 at 9:31am | IP Logged |
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Glad you are enjoying it!
I've done an awful lot of thinking this weekend and come to a rather disappointing conclusion. I simply can't work on Japanese and French at the time. They are interfering too much! But it's not the kind of interference I thought you would get with multiple languages. I mean, there's no way you could confuse the two languages, they are simply far too different. But basically I am having the following kind of experience: I spend a couple of days working on French, by reading and watching films or listening to the radio. I might even look at a grammar book. After a few hours of intensive but relaxed and enjoyable work, I start to find it quite easy to put my thoughts into French, despite the amount of vocab I've forgotten. I still have latent knowledge from my school days and certain verb forms are burned into my brain. On top of which, from the point of view of a native English speaker, French grammar is very intuitive. But then this sense of intuitive grammar is completely screwing with my Japanese. Because all my hard work in trying to activate my Japanese is then completely ruined once French takes a hold in my brain and I find it so hard to construct even simple sentences. Because Japanese is not so intuitive for me. Well, it's not intuitive at all for an English speaker. That the grammar is logical and regular is a massive blessing because word order is so back to front your brain has to learn to think about things in a different way. Which is great, when you pull it off it fills you with wonder at what the human brain can achieve. The problem is I let French back into my life and it seems my lazy old subconscious brain starts thinking "oh, cool, an intuitive foreign language. That's a much more efficient way of dealing with expressing your ideas with funny vocabulary. f**k you Japanese!" So basically a couple of days of French stuff does wonders for my French, but it then totally screws up my Japanese. So I then stop doing French and spend a few days getting my Japanese back. Then I go to French class and mess myself up all over again. I am ending up treading water in both languages, and the whole experience takes a lot of energy, is tiring and very stressful. And basically, effective learning does not happen when you are tired and stressed. On top of which, languages are just a hobby for me. It's supposed to be escapism from the demands of daily life, and not an additional source of stress! Anyway, I know what the answer is. I have to drop one language until my active skills in the other are much more solid. But if I drop French it means dropping out of a class I've already paid for, and missing out on lessons with a very good teacher. If I drop Japanese it means losing the registration fee for JLPT and a few online lessons I've paid for. Plus, you know, I don't want to choose! Argh! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5925 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 277 of 333 31 October 2012 at 10:03pm | IP Logged |
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Despite my rant on Monday morning, I really didn't intend to skip French class on Monday night. But clearly I left the house in the wrong frame of mind because I managed to skid and fall off my bike on the way to work. I'm ok, just a bit bruised, but the ride home Monday night was slow, painful and a little bit scary. By the time I'd got home and had dinner, I would have been late for class and I really didn't feel like it anyway. It was, however, such a mental relief to just decide to switch off from French for a while.
So I've been playing around more positively with Japanese again. I'm starting to feel like it's not the activity that I do which matters, so much as my attitude towards it. I've also noticed that with study-type activities, trying to do the same kind of activity every day doesn't actually seem to work for me - it starts to become routine, mundane, and my memory and/or performance becomes less effective. So, for example, if I try doing intensive reading of an article every day, after a few days I find it harder to learn new words and expressions from the method. But if I do intensive reading of an article only once or twice a week, my recall of the words and expressions I study is much better and I find it effective and enjoyable. Another example is over the past few days I've been practicing 敬語 with a book which has some audio drills and some model conversations good for shadowing. The first couple of days I did it, I found it really helpful, but by the third day in a row I wasn't engaging with the drills and was getting persistently tongue tied when trying to do shadowing. So I'm going to put it down for a couple of days and come back to it, and I bet I'll find it more effective again that way. I think this is why Anki is no longer doing it for me either. I can get quite into it for two or three days, but then I just switch off and want to do something different. I don't seem to have such an issue with extensive activities, as long as I regard them as entertainment first and language practice second. Actually, I've watched at least one episode of TV drama a day for the last 6 days in a row, and I really noticed a sudden improvement in listening comprehension over that time. I expect the shadowing and audio drills I've been doing probably helped. But still, it's a nice feeling. I've also started taking my graded readers (the ones for elementary school kids) to work with me to read in my lunch break. I prefer to take a walk at lunch time really, the air in my office is so bad, but considering I've been a bit sore from the bike incident and the weather has been so bad this week anyway, I didn't mind staying inside and reading. And I'm learning useful words like 酸性雨 and 水蒸気, purely from the context of the articles in the book, no dictionary or flashcards required, which is just wonderful! I did some writing practice this evening and managed to rattle off a short article in under half an hour. A month or so ago, an article of similar length would have taken me an hour, or maybe more. So I guess if I stay positive, maybe more amazing things will happen. My aim for Japanese in November is to listen more, read more, write more, speak as much as possible and keep my study activities interesting and varied. If I do all that, I can't help but improve, right? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5925 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 278 of 333 02 November 2012 at 7:59pm | IP Logged |
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Woohoo it's the weekend!
My plan for tonight is: 1. Order takeaway from Japanese restaurant 2. Buy beer 3. Stuff face in front of several episodes of Japanese TV drama Can't think of a better way to "study" on a Friday night. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5925 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 279 of 333 05 November 2012 at 10:34pm | IP Logged |
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I have never been so happy about sucking in a language class as I was tonight. Since my Japanese-French meltdown the other weekend, I hadn't touched French at all and had instead focussed my study time on large amounts of Japanese exposure and smaller amounts of Japanese study/production. It really paid off, over the space of just a week I started to feel myself levelling up all over again. It's a nice feeling.
But tonight I decided that seeing as I've already paid the class fee, and seeing as it's only two hours of French, and seeing as prior to aforementioned meltdown I somehow managed to register French with the 6WCBot, perhaps I should just show up to class and see what happens. And the strangest most beautiful thing happened. I started trying to make French sentences in a Japanese kind of word order (trying to ask "what is the difference between X and Y" was a right laugh). Which basically meant I failed rather a lot at saying anything worthwhile in French. But it's an indicator that Japanese is back as my brain's number one favourite foreign language. It also suggests that with both French and Japanese, I'm at a level where if I really need to sharpen either up, I just need to expose myself to enough of the language over the course of a week or so to start to activate it. I just can't keep both sharp at the same time. Yet. The other thing that became very clear to me today was that my Japanese now is without a doubt better than my French has ever been. There were things I wanted to say in French class that I wouldn't have had trouble expressing in Japanese, but I don't think I would ever have known how to say in French. Taking into account the 40% discount or so you get on French as a native English speaker, that makes me feel pretty happy about my Japanese. The plan now is to get straight back into Japanese mode and see what (if any) impact two hours of French class has had on it. I suspect very little. I'm one happy language geek tonight! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5925 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 280 of 333 10 November 2012 at 6:11pm | IP Logged |
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Despite the fact that French isn't really happening for me at the moment (and I can't really let it happen until after JLPT day), I am still logging my hours on the 6WCBot. I was really surprised to find myself spending just over 20 hours on languages in the first week of November.
That was pretty cool, except by the time I got to Thursday I was feeling quite tired and grumpy and not very receptive to languages at all. I think this probably has less to do with "burnout" and more to do with the fact that I hadn't slept well all week and had caught a mild winter cold. It's not a big deal, but it was a disappointing end to what had been a productive week. Yesterday I had a day off foreign languages completely, although I did get to enjoy my native tongue somewhat as I went to the theatre last night for the first time in a long time and saw The Importance of Being Earnest, which I really enjoyed. After the theatre we decided to go for a quick drink, which somehow turned into a night of clubbing and not getting home until 3am. Well, that's not happened for a very, very long time either. In fact, I thought I was too old for that kind of nonsense, and judging by how fragile I feel today, I probably am! I'm not planning on doing any serious study today - but I'll make up for that tomorrow. I spent the afternoon lazing around and listening to German music and I think I'll probably spend the evening with a few episodes of a JDrama. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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