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Completing the Triangle: J of CKJ | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Raincrowlee Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 6703 days ago 621 posts - 808 votes  Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Indonesian, Japanese | Message 1 of 10 04 August 2013 at 6:02am | IP Logged | ||
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I am going to try to do one of these logs, but no guarantee. At any rate, I don't expect to update more than once a week.
So, Japanese is lucky winner of the language learning lottery. I'm notorious for wanderlust, though I've been "embracing the grind" in the past few years, especially during the process of learning Korean. Right now, I'm in a situation that's challenging me to improve my Korean, and I've decided to use the momentum from that to improve my Chinese and restart my Japanese. I've played with it before, though for only a semester in college. I also know Mandarin Chinese (low advanced) and Korean (a little lower low advanced), so I'm curious how/if they help my learning process at all. Mandarin didn't really help much with Korean. I'd say it's about the same help as knowing English helps with Russian, where you know a handful of common roots and recognize international words, but not enough to say that it really helped. Despite the fact that I will be working on three languages, I plan on really only talking about Japanese in this log. With Chinese and Korean, I'm going to do intensive reading for the most part, going through articles and mining them for vocab, and then, in the case of Korean, intensively listening to the audio for those articles. I don't expect to see dramatic growth. I also don't feel like I'll have a problem keeping on with the project. s Japanese is different. I studied a bit of Japanese before, but I've always struggled with it. Too many sound-alike words for me, just a numbing repetition of syllables. It's like a meditation chant. Also, despite being the almost perfect audience for anime and manga, I never really got into them. By the time it became easy to access them, I was watching Hong Kong movies and studying Mandarin. I think I had become a snob. At any rate, I'm still pretty much a beginner. But anyway, the materials I am going to use: Japanese for Busy People I Colloquial Japanese Living Language Ultimate Japanese Teach Yourself Japanese Assimil Japanese I have typed out the romaji script for each of these and cut down the audio so there's no English. I'm focusing on listening and speaking at first, since they've always been my weakest aspects, and leaving the reading and kanji for later. Considering my background, I don't think that will be a major issue. I've already gone through and made flashcards for vocab in Japanese for Busy People I and Colloquial Japanese. They're the books I've had the longest, so I want to "graduate" from them. I've been working on listening for about a month, and am trying to build up to shadowing. I'll read the scripts aloud with and without audio to help memorize the script. One of my biggest problems right now is that I've been spending too much time watching movies or TV shows which are above my comprehension level instead of focusing on the +1 basics. I'm trying to resolve that, though my plate is pretty full. At any rate, I want to see where a year with Japanese will get me. If I can get it started the way I want, I may be able to stave off wanderlust for a while. It always strikes when I get too confident or when I hit a plateau in my languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Raincrowlee Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 6703 days ago 621 posts - 808 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Indonesian, Japanese | Message 2 of 10 11 August 2013 at 12:27pm | IP Logged | ||
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So, yes, the weekly update. Hmm. I mentioned the problem with watching media outside my comprehension level, yes? Six episodes of Cowboy Bebop, one each of Gokusen and Trick, along with copious amounts of Korean dramas. Yes, well, yes. I have proven that I can listen to Japanese and understand a few of the words they use. Fun but not really productive.
It wasn't all wasted time. I put about an hour into shadowing Ch1-10 in Japanese for Busy People. I also wrote out the script for the first seven chapters on flashcards so I can review those anytime I want. I think that will work out better than carrying around full scripts. I also reviewed the flashcards for JfBP and Colloquial Japanese. It's been about three weeks since I looked at them, which meant that I had forgotten a lot. I hadn't planned on skipping that much time, but life gets in the way. It was good to review, though that means I have to start working those cards back into my current deck, which I've also been having problems spending enough time with. Time management, you are a thing I have to work on, though this has been a bad month. September will be better. On the plus side from all of this, Japanese is much easier this time around than the last (few) time(s) I've tried to learn it. In watching the anime/dramas, I really have been hearing a lot of words that I recognize, but not enough to really get a grasp of what they're saying. That's a heck of a lot better than I did last time, and it's coming along faster than Korean did when I started studying that. That's enough to boost my confidence, though I hope not too much. The wife and I were also discussing places to go on vacation, and Japan was on the list, though I'd much rather do it next year after I can put about 1/2 year of real studying in. That way I'd be in a much better place to practice. It makes me think I should also try to focus on the material that will help me as a tourist rather than just blindly memorizing everything in my path. Ah, well, we'll see. One week at a time, embrace the grind. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Raincrowlee Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 6703 days ago 621 posts - 808 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Indonesian, Japanese | Message 3 of 10 20 August 2013 at 4:56am | IP Logged | ||
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Real life has crashed into my schedule. Busy week, busy through next week. I've reviewed some, and finished watching the first season of Gokusen.
Will be back in September. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5536 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 4 of 10 25 August 2013 at 4:44pm | IP Logged | ||
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Have you considered learning Japanese through one of the other languages? There are a lot of materials for Japanese available in the other two languages in the "triangle". In particular, Korean shares a lot of grammar concepts making it a good launching point for Japanese (since they don't have to re-explain those concepts like English textbooks do). I have a beginner Japanese book written in Korean (일본어 무작정 따라하기) that I was intending to use for my own studies, but lost interest in Japanese before that happened, so I browsed through it but never really started studying with it. My plan was to learn Japanese via both Korean and English in parallel as both would have their advantages and it would give me much of the same beginner information from two very different angles. Plus learning via Korean would help strengthen my Korean vocabulary at the same time. Edited by Warp3 on 26 August 2013 at 4:22am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Raincrowlee Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 6703 days ago 621 posts - 808 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Indonesian, Japanese | Message 5 of 10 26 August 2013 at 1:14am | IP Logged | ||
I'll probably do that for the second phase, when I get more into learning grammar proper. For right now, I'm basically using the books I have a sources of material to shadow. I think grammar makes a heck of a lot more sense if you already have examples in your head rather than try to learn it in the abstract. Although I will say that there are lots of grammar quirks that I recognize from Korean, and I'm curious about seeing how they'd teach Japanese to Korean. I've heard from native Korean speakers that Japanese is a snap for them. My Korean isn't quite that good, but using their resources would help me review both. In addition, the books I have are ones I've bought over the years, so I haven't actually bought anything for Japanese yet. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5536 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 6 of 10 26 August 2013 at 4:22am | IP Logged | ||
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If you are interested, this is the book I have (and the link is also where I bought it):
http://www.hanbooks.com/jaforbeb4au.html Even from the relatively small progress I made in Japanese (mostly just Pimsleur 1-30 with some other study on the side), it was obvious that those two languages share a lot of grammatical similarities. Both have similar (but not exactly alike) particle types (topic, subject, object, location, etc.), both have the "this, that, that over there" and "here, there, over there" style triplets, both have similar word order, both have speech levels (though Korean apparently has more of them), etc. Edited by Warp3 on 26 August 2013 at 4:23am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Raincrowlee Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 6703 days ago 621 posts - 808 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Indonesian, Japanese | Message 7 of 10 07 September 2013 at 1:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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@Warp3, thanks for the link.
I'm back. Most of this week was getting back on track after being shoved off by work-related duties. I reviewed the vocab for Japanese for Busy People and Colloquial Japanese, and recut the audio for Colloquial Japanese to split up the dialogs I'm using from it (not all the dialogs had scripts in romaji). I've been listening to the audio for both books in the car on the way to work, which is unfortunately only about a 10 minute drive. My listening comprehension for the material is advancing quickly, though as I write this log I'm watching Vengeance is Mine (1979) and I have to say most of it is still pretty opaque. Vocab is the main problem, but I think I'm still missing most of the colloquial register. I also had some time at work in the past few days to work on memorizing dialogs. I got up to about unit 7 in Japanese for Busy People, and it felt good to just have the stuff rolling off my tongue. I'm going to try to take some time tomorrow and go for a walk and really start shadowing those units. I'd like to get all the way to unit 10, but we'll see how good I am when I try to do it at language lesson speed. I also plan on reading through the grammar sections in the texts tomorrow. I've already looked through them to get a sense of what the shape of the grammar is, but I want to learn a bit more about what I'm actually hearing, especially in Colloquial Japanese, since it goes deeper. I think that, if I hadn't been carrying around Colloquial Japanese for so long, I wouldn't spend my time on it. Like so many other language books, it covers topics that I'm not sure are relevant (horse racing? really?), though I'm more interested in getting the grammar down than the vocab. I've been writing up flash cards for Ultimate Japanese, and the dialogs there seem much better, though it suffers from not having all the relevant vocabulary listed in the dictionary at the end. It's annoying if you're trying to prepare materials in advance instead of chapter by chapter like I assume the book makers expect readers to do. It's kind of annoying to have no flexibility in the materials. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Raincrowlee Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 6703 days ago 621 posts - 808 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Indonesian, Japanese | Message 8 of 10 16 September 2013 at 11:11am | IP Logged | ||
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I am clearly in the honeymoon phase with Japanese. I was watching a movie yesterday (Ringu: Rasen), and I felt like I was hearing so much more than before. That's not hard considering three months ago I wouldn't have recognized much, but it's always such an exciting feeling, like putting glasses on. I'm able to recognize some words even if I don't know what they mean and look them up later. For example shikyuu means womb, which came up in a dramatic moment of the film.
I am getting the first 7 or 8 units of Japanese for Busy People down pretty well. I've been practicing with a CD while driving, and I got about 40 minutes shadowing on Saturday without interruption. I also listened and reviewed the script up to about unit 15, so hopefully I'll be able to get those on my tongue in the next couple of weeks (provided things don't go sideways again). The audio for Colloquial Japanese is still a bit of a blur, because it jumps pretty quickly into dependent clauses, which my Korean teachers warned me were the hardest part in Korean for English speakers, a piece of advice that seems to still be true with Japanese. I'm trying not to prepare too much material ahead of time now. I find that I waste time setting up material for the "next" step, which might not happen for several months, instead of working on the material I already have. This is especially true since I'm still trying to balance Japanese, Korean and Mandarin in a way to keep improving all of them. Of course, being excited by Japanese makes it that much harder to spend time with the others. Because I don't spend as much time on them, they don't advance as fast, make it hard to get excited about them as well. Vicious cycle. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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