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| Biene Diglot Groupie Germany Joined 6223 days ago 71 posts - 73 votes  2 sounds Speaks: German*, English Studies: Dutch, Japanese | Message 17 of 39 28 April 2008 at 5:15am | IP Logged |
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Procrastination is an evil bitch...
French Haven't done any new Assimil lessons in the past two weeks, but once in a while listened to the old ones. I've also finished listening to HP-1 once. Now I need to listen to the audio again while reading along in the French text. Japanese Didn't do too well with the Kanji, but haven't given up yet. In frame 1586 now and an extended weekend is coming up, when (or is it where?) I intend to struggle through as many new kanji as I can before my brain shuts off. The aim is to get to or near frame 1700 on Wednesday and then finish the book in the following 5 days, but I'm most likely procrastinating again since the last kanji are said to be quite hard to learn. It's just that I want to finish the book since it's dragging on and on and I'm more and more often on the verge of quitting. I'm now 7 months at this and started out with the aim to finish in 3-4 months and then later in 6 months... 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Biene Diglot Groupie Germany Joined 6223 days ago 71 posts - 73 votes 2 sounds Speaks: German*, English Studies: Dutch, Japanese | Message 18 of 39 05 May 2008 at 5:26pm | IP Logged |
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Ok, so as I said in the TAC2-thread, I'm going to participate with Japanese. It's amazing how many people are participating and how many are learning Japanese. I'm looking forward to read the new log-entries, but not today... too tired.
Japanese (TAC2) Learning materials: Remembering the Kanji 1 (German version) Remembering the Kanji 2 (German version) Assimil - Japanisch ohne Mühe 1 japanesepod101 Tae Kim's Japanses guide to Japanese grammar (A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar) (Assimil - Japanisch ohne Mühe 2) (some good paper Kanji-Dictionary) Just finished frame 2025 of RTK1. I decided that I'll take my time with the remaining 17 Kanji, since they are there to teach you how to learn newly encountered Kanji. There still is RTK3 when I feel like learning more Kanji, but I guess it might be helpful to really try to learn those 17 on my one. Reviewing the Kanji has been more than a *little* bit helpful in going through RTK1, but it also invites to be lazy... Oh, I have no illusion, as soon as I come up with good stories for the remaining Kanji and comparing them with the stories there I'll end up picking one of those shared-stories. Never, never again over 400 Kanji in a 5-day-marathon!! It takes all the fun out of learning... especially if the weather outside is great and you are glued to the computer! But it's a good feeling to have almost finished, even though there are still some missing. This week will in addition be dedicated only to reviewing the Kanji, editing the first parts of the Assimil-audio, getting an idea how RTK2 actually works, and all in all forming a plan how I want to learn and what my (realistic) goals for TAC2 are. French Didn't really do anything this past week. Will pick up the pieces this week. Edited by Biene on 12 May 2008 at 12:50pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Biene Diglot Groupie Germany Joined 6223 days ago 71 posts - 73 votes 2 sounds Speaks: German*, English Studies: Dutch, Japanese | Message 19 of 39 12 May 2008 at 12:49pm | IP Logged |
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Japanese
I've finished RTK1 and read the introduction of RTK2 twice and understand now better how that book is supposed to be used. After the fist read I was utterly shocked and felt quite lost. Funny that they tell you you should finish RTK1 and possible RTK2 before really learning Japanese and then they assume in RTK2 (chapter 6, 8 and 9) that you have learned most of those compounds there through your Japanese studies. What Japanese studies? They also never say that you now should learn the Kana before proceeding. It's obvious that I should know the Kana before I can learn the On- and Kun-yomi, but hey... one sentence would have been nice! So RTK2 will be quite difficult, since I don't really know much vocabulary that I could build up on. The first 10 capters seem to be rote-memorization, though organized rote-memorization. The kun-reading chapter seems to work with mnemonics, but I haven't read that chapter yet. If you have some tips or advice for RTK2 please feel free to post. :) I edited the first 20 audios of the Assimil course, and listened to the first 3 lectures. The audios were quite horrible in the beginning, since they read the text twice in the first 6 lessons. So the first time you hear "は..や..く..い..き..." and then "はやく.いき...". I edited the slow part out and also the long pauses. A lecture is now between 30 seconds and 1:30 minutes. I still need to order some of the books that I want to work with and I've decided to use Kodanshas Furigana-dictionary for a starter. EDIT: Forgot to post my goals for TAC2... The goals are to finish Assimil 1 and 2, finish RTK2 (not likely but still..), and work on my kanji-handwriting which looks horrible at the moment. French Listened to chapter 8 of HP1 while reading along in the french text. The aim is to do a chapter every two days to finish with that book. Edited by Biene on 12 May 2008 at 1:19pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Biene Diglot Groupie Germany Joined 6223 days ago 71 posts - 73 votes 2 sounds Speaks: German*, English Studies: Dutch, Japanese | Message 20 of 39 25 May 2008 at 5:15am | IP Logged |
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Japanese
With my current studies you could say that I'm treating water and trying to figure out where the solid ground all of a sudden went. Going through RTK1 was a straight forward goal, with the (ideally) daily review of old kanji and learning of new kanji. Nothing more. No vocabulary learning, no grammar, no textbook, nothing distracting from that routine. Now I have so many things I want to do each day that I end up doing almost non of them. If I did everything I planned to do I would daily (in this order of priority): - review the expired kanji - (re)learn the the failed kanji form the day before - learn one Assimil-lesson and add it to Anki - review and then learn 5 - 10 new kun-yomi (e.g. new vokabulary) - review and then learn 5 - 10 new on-yomi (with RTK2) Working with Anki is something I have to get used to. It's also quite time consuming since I have to look up things, then type them by changing between typing Japanese-kana and English/German. I know that there are key-shortcuts but it's still annoying. Learning the on-yomi with RTK2 is quite organized (I finally decided to skip chapter 1), but learning them by learning compounds is quite demanding. Here an example: The kanji 中 can be pronounced ちゅう. And this reading can be the same for other kanji that you learned in RTK1 which have 中 in them: 中国 ちゅうごく China 忠告 ちゅうこく Ermahnung, Warnung 沖天 ちゅうてん in den Himmel aufsteigen 仲介 ちゅうかい Vermittlung I have no problem learning the pronunciation of the first part of these compounds, but the second part is difficult to remember. I guess I'll eventually learn them, but I somehow expected RTK2 to be easier. Also the vocabulary is nothing I'd use in daily conversations. But I shouldn't complain too much, RTK2 at least tries to get some organization into the on-yomi learning. I've been adding kanji and their kun-yomi in random order to Anki (for Assimil, kun-yomi, and on-yomi each in a separate deck - later, much later, the readings will become one deck). I'll try to change that by adding themes, like weather (snow, rain, ice, etc.), animal, plants, etc instead of adding random vocabulary. With Assimil I'm in lesson 8 and I don't think I'll eventually learn a lesson a day, as I originally planned; more like a lesson every two days. French Has finally been put to rest (= studying on and off). I'll resurrect it once in a while and if I'll ever get a routine into my Japanese studies I might take up the Assimil course again; but for now I neither have the time nor the energy to fight with this language, as beautiful as it is. Edited by Biene on 25 May 2008 at 5:18am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| tpiz Diglot Groupie United States cvillepayne.blogspot Joined 6365 days ago 77 posts - 79 votes Studies: Portuguese, English*, French Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 21 of 39 25 May 2008 at 10:19am | IP Logged |
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Yo keep it up I've been procrastinating a lot too haha i've got 900 characters to review, thanks to school and exams. And hey I would love to practice German wit you!
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Biene Diglot Groupie Germany Joined 6223 days ago 71 posts - 73 votes 2 sounds Speaks: German*, English Studies: Dutch, Japanese | Message 22 of 39 02 June 2008 at 3:41pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks for the encouraging words tpiz, they put me back on track somehow. I can try to help with German, though as a native speaker I often don't understand why people have problems with the grammar etc... it's soooooo simple. ;)
Japanese I learned my first non-RTK1 kanji today: 箸 （はし）- chopsticks. Apparently it appeares in frame 2640 in RTK3, so I might actually start on RTK3 sooner than I planned. Currently though I'll treat new kanji mainly as simple vokabulary and look if they are in the RTK3 section of the koohii-site. Still I ordered RTK3 and it'll arrive sometime this month. When it arrives I don't intent to start to plunge into kanji-learning again, but want to learn 2 or 3 kanji a day. The reviews of RTK1 kanji are back to normal again and I'm also slowly reducing the failed pile. RTK2 on the other hand is still difficult. I have about 30 cards for on-yomi in anki and still can't remember them properly. It might be good to really try and come up with phonetic mnemonics to get the readings to stick, regardsless of them beeing on- or kun-yomi. I have some that made the readings stick, but I haven't come up with a mnemonic for every kanji/compound. Here two examples of what I mean: 雲(くも）sounds a bit like cumulus, so I can remember it as cloud. 政府 (せいふ) sounds a bit like Seife (=soap) which should sometimes be thoroughly used on any government. With Assimil I'm in lesson 14 and I stopped adding sentences to anki. I decided that I'll enter the sentences when I do the active wave and have become more accustomed to the pronunciation and intonation. The audio seemed in the beginning too slow but they sure speed up! They still speak much slower than in a normal conversation, but it's difficult enough to keep up when reading along (I'm a very slow reader). 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Biene Diglot Groupie Germany Joined 6223 days ago 71 posts - 73 votes 2 sounds Speaks: German*, English Studies: Dutch, Japanese | Message 23 of 39 09 June 2008 at 4:07am | IP Logged |
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Japanese
I finished chapter 16 in Assimil but I'm not sure how to go on. The recommendation for Assimil, as I understand it, is to learn min. half an hour a day and not to worry about learning everything by heart. So I'm reading the German translation then try to read silently the Japanese sentences while matching each word to the literal German translation. Then I listen to the dialog while reading along in the Japanese text and then I listen again to the dialog with eyes closed. This reading, listening, reading, etc. is repeated until I feel comfortable with the lesson. But currently I don't feel happy with the method, since I doesn't feel as if anything is sticking in my brain. Ok, a sentence hear and a word there, but when I listen to the old lectures again while walking, quite often I don't understand sentences I understood two or three days ago. I think I'll redo the 16 lessons this week and not worry about learning new ones, though I would love to go faster through Assimil. With Assimil and French it was much easier, since I knew quite a lot already and didn't have to start from zero, as I had with Japanese. So, am I doing something wrong, or am I too impatient? With RTK2 I still have some problems, but there is now a bit of routine and the readings do seem to stick with the help of Anki. Collecting vocabulary next to RTK2 and Assimil seems to help me learning kanji-readings, and it's always nice to learn new words in a foreign language. Some of these words are learned in conversation like 暑い (hot as in air) vs. 熱い (hot/warm as in food), or while listening to music and reading along in the lyrics. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Biene Diglot Groupie Germany Joined 6223 days ago 71 posts - 73 votes 2 sounds Speaks: German*, English Studies: Dutch, Japanese | Message 24 of 39 08 July 2008 at 3:11am | IP Logged |
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Haven't written anything in this log for almost a month now, but currently I'm more or less stuck in my Japanese studies. Motivation to do the daily reviews and other tasks are missing and I've been watching much too much ドラマ. Using them as an excuse to skip other studies, since "they speak Japanese so I'm learning something"... yeah, whatever.
So since yesterday I'm trying to push myself to get some kind of routine back into my language-related activities. A huge chunk of ca. 600 expired cards has accumulated for my RTK1-cards and I'm not going to talk about the 300 failed ones. The goal for this week and the following ones is to get rid of the expired cards and then starting on the failed stack. After getting back some routine with reviewing the cards I'll slowly go through the Assimil-lessons I had done so far. And even later I'll start on my newly created Anki-deck, which contains all the vocabulary I should know by now, including the few RTK2-compounds that I've learned so far. To do something interesting and new every day I'll start listening to a beginner lesson from Jpod101 again. They were a lot of fun, even though I didn't remember enough to actually use it in conversation. So a lot of work and discipline is waiting for me to get out of this bog. I hope I'll make it, since I really want to learn that language. Edited by Biene on 08 July 2008 at 3:13am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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