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Fernando - TAC ’13 - Sakura桜/Romulan/ASL | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Jaseur Groupie United Kingdom Joined 6076 days ago 50 posts - 51 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 17 of 25 18 January 2013 at 1:45am | IP Logged | |||||
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Hi,
Fellow member of Team Sakura here. Some thoughts on learning kana. Some points may be obvious to you but hopefully one or two will be of use. I would learn hiragana first although it is not too important as you will need them both. You will probably forget how to write odd ones here and there for some time. Katakana are simpler and you will immediately be able to use them to read English loan words, which is nice. However, they are nowhere near as useful overall as hiragana. Also, not all loan words are from English. The bulk of the Japanese in your textbooks will be made up of hiragana. Knowing hiragana will allow you to read/write real Japanese (with the aid of a computer to help with kanji). While you can write entirely in hiragana and not use kanji, it would be considered somewhat childish. You should definitely try to use mnemonics. There are no doubt lots of books and websites out there with suggestions. For this reason, I would suggest not learning the kana through a textbook. Your textbook will likely not have good mnemonics. Get some mnemonics and learn any many as possible as fast as possible. I recommend learning them in rows of 5 (a, i, u, e, o, etc.). Copy them, cover them up, write them again. The reason I say go as fast as possible is because the sooner you are away from romaji the better. Knowing the kana will make the sounds and grammar of Japanese make a lot more sense. Try using an SRS program such as Anki or memosyne with a kana deck. There should also be several kana flashcard/game websites out there. Once you've got the individual kana down, move on to reading simple words. Stroke order is essential. You must know the stroke order to write the kana properly. Don't make it up or guess. Once you get the hang of it, stroke order is fairly logical and regular. Got some free time during the day? Write out the kana using your index finger on your other palm or your leg. Obviously a pen and paper would be better but you can do this almost anywhere and it's super useful. Make sure you get the stroke order right. Kana may seem hard at first, don't worry, it will just take a little time (however, kanji are genuinely hard). Hope this helps somewhat. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| fmmarianicolon Diglot Newbie United States Joined 4343 days ago 28 posts - 30 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Sign Language Studies: Japanese | Message 18 of 25 18 January 2013 at 5:25am | IP Logged | |||||
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Log for January 10 - 17
The week was almost completely a wash. Unfortunately, I suffered a big setback in my surgery recovery. I vomited a large quantity of blood (collecting in my stomach from the tonsillectomy scabs falling off) which led to me being very weak the first half of the week. The good news is that I'm well enough to go back to work (albeit four days late), so I can get back on the horse for studying languages. The catch now is finding time to study now that I'm not at home recovering. American Sign Language Today was my first day back at work. Half of our staff are Deaf, which allowed me to get back in the groove of communicating with ASL. It's not interpreting, but it's better than no communication at all. Spanish I wrote a Lang-8 entry on Jan. 11 (before the setback), but haven't practiced since. Japanese I practiced with Memrise before the setback, but have not used it since. My husband and I watched "My Neighbor Tototo" with the Japanese dialogue and the English subtitles. I think I heard a few of the phrases I have learned in Memrise (such as "konnichiwa" and "yoroshiku onegaishimasu") which was exciting. Only two or three words, but it's more than zero! I do not know the Japanese grammar yet, but I tried to listen for repeating parts of words and wondered what might help identify verbs or articles. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| fmmarianicolon Diglot Newbie United States Joined 4343 days ago 28 posts - 30 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Sign Language Studies: Japanese | Message 19 of 25 18 January 2013 at 5:27am | IP Logged | |||||
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Thanks for the advice, Jasper! I definitely think the mnemonics will help me remember
the hirigana. I haven't used Anki or AnkiDroid yet, but I hear that the AnkiDroid version 2 may be released soon so I am waiting to start with that. Have you tried AnkiDroid? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4662 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 20 of 25 18 January 2013 at 12:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
I guess it depends on how you learn, but I'd definitely try multiple things at once. I'd definitely put some time into learning the kana: start with hiragana. You'll see hiragana all the time so there should be no problem with reinforcing them once you have learnt them. Katakana are simialr but they are used less so I find them easier to forget. Memrise has some great courses and is a fantastic way of learning vocabulary. I started with the N5 vocab course (this is geared towards the simplest of the JLPT exams) and now I'm working through N4. Each of these is ~700-800 basic words. It's suprisingly easy to retain these (as long as you do, say, 2 10m sessions each day. You can stop any time you like and resume when you have time, so it's quite convenient that way. I've not used Genki, so I don't know exactly what it's like, but working through that at the same time as memrise or Anki hasn't hurt me at all (so far as I know :-)).
You should download everything you can (giving priority to the Absolute Beginner/Newbie lessons I guess). However, even after your trial ends, you can still get the 10 most recent lessons for free (or so I thought?). I must admit that when I started listening to this stuff, I found the presenter's incessant "positivity" jarring, but I've got used to that now. Plenty of the later lessons are much better from that point of view. JPOD101 is a tremendous resource that will keep you going for years: it's a shame that they keep sending spammy emails. (I have a premium subscription that my company paid for and I signed up to the Italian version to see whether I should recommend it to my daughter for her studies: I get exactly the same level of spam for each!) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4662 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 21 of 25 18 January 2013 at 12:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
Articles? If you mean "the" or "a" they're easy to recognise as they don't exist :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6617 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish | Message 22 of 25 18 January 2013 at 5:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
Particles, I think. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Jaseur Groupie United Kingdom Joined 6076 days ago 50 posts - 51 votes Speaks: English* | Message 23 of 25 19 January 2013 at 11:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
I'm still getting used to Anki (I used to use Mnemosyne a lot). AnkiDroid sounds good though. SRSs are brilliant for language learning. I had to learn kanji with a huge pile of paper flashcards... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5979 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 24 of 25 20 January 2013 at 12:18am | IP Logged | |||||
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Ankidroid is great, especially when I'm away from home/the computer for any length of time. The only thing is, android phones outside of Japan have a tendency to use Chinese fonts as a default. You can override this by using a custom font within Ankidroid, which is well worth the effort while you are still getting used to kanji.
1 person has voted this message useful |
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