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Hello - An American in Tokyo | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Members profiles |  | |
| Tetsu Triglot Newbie Japan Joined 4042 days ago 9 posts - 22 votes Speaks: Thai, English*, Japanese Studies: Mandarin, Korean | Message 1 of 3 06 November 2013 at 6:24pm | IP Logged |
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Hi There.
My name is Ben, I am an American living and working in Tokyo at a Japanese company in the International Division. I'm 27 years old and been in Japan for almost three years now. I fell in love with the idea of Japan when I was in high school, started to learn Japanese in college and studied abroad in Japan during my third year. That year convinced me to come back and work and so here I am... My work currently makes me use Japanese exclusively in all communication and presentations within the company although I also use Thai, my heritage language, for law, policy and business research and client/external communication. As of late, I have rekindled my interest in learning Korean, a language I set out to learn back in 2008... Thanks to Japanese though, I have managed to pick it up faster than I anticipated. I learned Mandarin Chinese back in 2010 for a year and somehow managed not to forget it. On a recent trip to Taiwan, I bought a few textbooks to help me study Mandarin more seriously. As I have relatives in China, it would be nice to communicate with them without any major gaps in understanding. Anyway, my goal is to have English, Thai, Japanese, Korean and Mandarin become my main five languages that I can speak at least on a basic fluency level - with a focus on business communication and language by the time I'm 35. I don't know if it's possible as I get distracted with other things but it would be nice. At the moment, I am trying to figure out the best way to gain listening comprehension skills in Korean and Mandarin since they just tend to go into one ear and out the other... It's nice meeting everybody on these forums! 6 persons have voted this message useful | |
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4869 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes  Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 2 of 3 05 December 2013 at 4:05pm | IP Logged |
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Hello Tetsu and welcome to the forum!
Good luck with Korean and Mandarin! What would you say is your current level in those languages and how did you study them so far? I've been learning Korean for the past... almost 4 years now, I guess. I think what helped me immensely with listening skills was making a deck with audio recordings of sentences on Anki (a flashcard program). I took them from the Iyagi lessons on the Talk To Me In Korean site, or from other intermediate texts and eventually from newscasts. Repeatedly hearing them boosted my overall listening comprehension a good deal. Aside from that I listened to lots of native material with and without subtitles or transcripts. Maybe that's something worth trying out. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Tetsu Triglot Newbie Japan Joined 4042 days ago 9 posts - 22 votes Speaks: Thai, English*, Japanese Studies: Mandarin, Korean | Message 3 of 3 10 December 2013 at 2:41am | IP Logged |
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Thank you for your reply!
To be honest, it's hard for me to gauge what level I am in Korean and Mandarin but to err on the conservative side I would say that I'm still basic in Mandarin and beginner in Korean. I studied Mandarin via classes during my graduate studies for a year where I learned sounds, basic sentence stucture and quite a few characters. Since then though I have made no concious effort to study the language. Still I have not forgotten the language and my recent Taiwan trip made it apparent that I can still communicate basic needs just fine. As for Korean...this is one of those languages that I have been "toying around" with for quite some time without really getting anywhere unfortunately. During a long winter break back in 2008, I decided randomly to start studying the Korean alphabet and after I mastered the basic sounds and combinations, I just stopped. Since then, I was gathering bits and pieces of the language but without any real effort. Needless to say, in my situation, that didn't take me very far. It was a constant "stop and go" situation where I would study one day but then just get lazy and stop. It wasn't until end of last year where I really picked up and started to serious self-study. Still though, I suffer from droughts of laziness which has impeded my acquisition of the language. Now, I am currently use the Ewha Textbook/Workbook series and finally finished the first one (1-1) yesterday. I read the texts out loud, do the exercises, memorize the vocabulary, listen to the dialogues and write a lot of what I learn in a notebook. Thank you for the suggestion. I have heard of anki and the Talk to me in Korean site but I will check it out as I think I could use a lot more listening practice. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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