dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4663 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 97 of 156 03 February 2013 at 11:49pm | IP Logged |
Brun Ugle wrote:
You can be up to lower intermediate which is why I want to do Japanese now before I get too good at it. |
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OK, so I have a while before I become ineligible for the 6WC then ...
Brun Ugle wrote:
I'm currently beating Cristina by 1 minute in the 6WC. She's amazing. Even with a full-time job she's beating me over-all and my 1 minute lead probably won't last the night, but I'm too tired to study anymore so I'm going to bed. Maybe I can get up early and get a head start on her tomorrow. |
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... and I think I can do without the extra pressure right now :-)
BTW - that's an excellent use of colour for the monthly goals summary, I'll try to remember that for the end of February.
Edited by dampingwire on 03 February 2013 at 11:50pm
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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 98 of 156 04 February 2013 at 7:25am | IP Logged |
g-bod wrote:
Wow, I had no idea how tough it was to be an American! |
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I forgot to mention that if you don't file your taxes you can get a BIG whomping fine and even jail. Not knowing the law is, of course, no excuse for not obeying it. So even if you have never been to the US and don't even realize that you are an American citizen* you can get a big fine for not properly filing your taxes.
* Having a parent who is an American citizen makes you one too. Even if they died or disappeared when you were a baby and you have no memory of them. (And it has happened that people first found out that they were American citizens when they received a nasty letter demanding $100 000 for never having filed their taxes.)
g-bod wrote:
I look forward to seeing how your Japanese progresses through the 6WC. I think the listening goal is a very good one - even if you only manage half the number of hours you are aiming at, I think you will feel progress. |
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Me too. I've been studying 7+ hours a day so far and after only 3 days, I'm already noticing a difference. Maybe this will push me over the edge to where I can actually understand stuff. Or maybe I'm just imagining things. I do have times when I think I understand very well, and then suddenly, I'm back to understanding nothing.
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mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5224 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese
| Message 99 of 156 04 February 2013 at 9:51am | IP Logged |
Wow, and I thought taxes here were bad (well, they are anyway, but now I have a wider perspective) ;)
Makes you really wonder what citizenship to take on, kind of like that Depardieu guy. A Russian friend of mine has been living here long enough that he has the option to become a naturalized citizen, but he was hesitating because maybe he'd have to give up his Russian citizenship, which is always tough*. A shame, because he's one of the very few people I'd like to share nationality with, were I given the opportunity to choose :)
OTOH I also have a Japanese neighbor and friend who is stuck being Spanish and has all kinds of problems in Japan every time -- which is why he hasn't dodged the crisis fleeing there yet. Could be worse, though -- at least he has one nationality.
On a general note I find it a bit sad that we still seem to need states and such. For truly civilized people it's only a royal PITA.
Brun Ugle wrote:
[...] I do have times when I think I understand very well, and then suddenly, I'm back to understanding nothing. |
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Don't worry. See my English C2 badge? Even after years of teaching and whatnot, I still have days like that.
*I mean in general, not my friend's case -- just how much must your country piss you off to make you send them all to hell, officially and all?
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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 100 of 156 08 February 2013 at 3:47pm | IP Logged |
Once again, my computer is encouraging me to learn Japanese. It already decided about six months or so ago to open pages in Japanese whenever there exists a Japanese page. So it changed Google, Youtube and a bunch of other things to Japanese. It’s not so bad for those kinds of things, but it’s really annoying when I try to open a help page that I’d barely understand in English, and it decides to open it in Japanese. In addition the button for changing the language on those pages is usually very hard to find.
Anyway, now it’s decided that I no longer need a J-E dictionary. So it changed Rikaisama to a Japanese-Japanese dictionary. I checked, and I don’t even have a J-J dictionary installed! I have, J-E, kanji and names. So where is it getting these definitions from, and why is it doing this to me?! I checked some words, and it was the usual J-E definition. Then I went to check some more and suddenly all the definitions were in Japanese.
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dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4663 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 101 of 156 08 February 2013 at 10:09pm | IP Logged |
Brun Ugle wrote:
Once again, my computer is encouraging me to learn Japanese. It
already decided about six months or so ago to open pages in Japanese whenever there
exists a Japanese page. |
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Chrome decided a little while ago that it would really like to speak to me in Italian.
I wasn't sure what might have prompted such a decision, other than my spurning its
generous offers to translate for me whenever I wandered over to the Corriere della Sera
website. Since then I've refused its repeated offers to translate English pages into
Italian, but that's not (yet) confused it enough to convince it that I'm happy with
English. Instead, it is now offering to translate into Japanese. I'm sure there's a
reset button under that spanner icon somewhere, but I'd rather see how this artificial
stupidity experiment develops in the future ...
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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 102 of 156 08 February 2013 at 10:15pm | IP Logged |
Oh wow, and I thought that all the Japanese translations showing up in my Chrome were just because I'd messed around with the settings at some point in the past. My Twitter is now permanently set to Japanese because one day it asked me if I wanted to switch and I thought "yeah, why not?"
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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 103 of 156 09 February 2013 at 7:53am | IP Logged |
I use Firefox and I don't know why it changed things either. I certainly didn't tell it to. I figured it was because I kept googling things in Japanese, but I google at least as much in English and Norwegian and it has never switched me either back to English or over to Norwegian.
Rikaisama is behaving again this morning fortunately. I like using a monolingual dictionary when I can, but if there is a word in the definition I don't understand, I need to look it up. If Rikaisama is giving me Japanese and I don't understand the definition, I can't use Rikaisama to look up those words since it is a hover-over type of dictionary. And having to look them up in a regular dictionary defeats the entire purpose of having Rikaisama in the first place. Anyway, everything's good now. Maybe it just needed a night off, or a restart.
My new-found ability to understand spoken Japanese has disappeared again. I’m still watching dramas, but I don’t seem to catch much anymore. Maybe there were a few episodes with easy dialogue and that fooled me into thinking I was getting somewhere. Anyway, I’ll keep going. It’s amazing how with movies and TV, you can often understand what’s going on without actually understanding the words. Once in a while though, I get hold of the wrong end of the stick and when I watch the show with subtitles afterward, I find out that the story is something entirely different than what I thought. I’m also using Iversen’s bloodhound method on audiobooks, but I haven’t noticed any magical changes in my abilities yet.
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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 104 of 156 12 February 2013 at 9:24am | IP Logged |
Who is this BabyThylakoid and what is he trying to do to me? How can he study so much? Does he live in a country where one of his languages is spoken? Is he studying it full time in school? I'm getting a bit obsessed about beating him in the 6WC. I don't want to just win on target language. I want a real win -- across the board.
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