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VonPeterhof’s log - 旅立ち’14, Yürükler’15+ | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5186 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 113 of 158 07 October 2014 at 8:50am | IP Logged | |||||
I just started this deck after seeing this post. It's fantastic. I love the native audio and the grammar explanations. Sure I'd like some pictures thrown in but it I'm not feeling the lack at all yet. The grammar explanations are fantastic. I'm slightly concerned that studying passively hurt me. Am I paranoid? Did I mention I liked the grammar explanations？ ^_^ 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4774 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 114 of 158 19 October 2014 at 8:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
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It's been a pretty busy two weeks, and not just with the anime. Although that did contribute - I still haven't written the reviews for the last three shows I watched, since I got so burned out by all the writing. I ended up picking up 15 new shows, bringing the total number of shows I'm currently watching to 19 - can't say I succeeded in cutting down on it.
Anyway, another reason I've been busy is that I took part in the Manga Translation Battle. It's a contest where you have to translate an excerpt from one of four manga series from Japanese into English. Prizes include tablet computers, a trip to Japan and a job offer to translate the manga. As a non-native English speaker I'm obviously not hoping for much, but it's still an interesting exercise. The title I chose to translate is the shoujo manga いばらの冠, mostly because I didn't immediately run into something really tricky to translate on the first page, unlike two of the other manga. The biggest dilemma I ran into here is how to translate the word 悪魔. The Devil? A devil? A demon? As I read through the chapter I've switched between all of these options several times, and was still debating whether or not I'd made the right call as I was clicking the "submit" button. Other than that the dialogue and narration were mostly straightforward with no puns, not much culture-specific knowledge and few unfamiliar idioms (the only one I recall as having given me some trouble was ハイ、そうですかって言えるか, which could have been clearer with different punctuation), so most of the challenge was in re-writing it in English as naturally as possible. I had almost forgotten how much I actually enjoy translating stuff. Now I want to do more of this. I just wish there was a contest like this in Japanese-to-Russian translations... Most of my other activities continued as usual, with some pauses due to watching and writing about lots of anime last week. After I tried rewatching the first few episodes of Fate/zero I found that my comprehension improved, and the episodes following them became more less exposition-heavy and more action-driven, making them easier to follow. So I decided to shelve the novel for now. As for Korean, I haven't listened to new TTMIK lessons in the past two weeks, since I've been working on Anki decks - eliminating the overlap between my own deck and Evita's shared deck, suspending stuff I haven't covered yet, etc. My daily reviews for Korean are now in the forties, but I do feel that many of the grammar points have stuck better now. Oh, almost forgot to talk about the MSU meetup. This time I didn't just get to chat in Japanese, but even got to say one sentence in Korean! There was a group from Waseda University visiting Moscow that day, and one of them was a Korean girl who graduated from high school in Japan. I managed to say 저는 한국어 공부했어요 clearly enough for her to at least identify it as Korean before proceeding to explain in Japanese that I had only just started (only the day after did I realize that I meant to say 공부하고 있어요, not 공부했어요). Other highlights of the evening included me explaining to the aforementioned Waseda students what sambuca and absinthe were (kinda tricky to do when you don't know the Japanese for "anise"), discussing current trends in manga and anime, catching up with one of the guys from the teaching lectures back in spring, and a game of 神経衰弱 (concentration) where the matching cards had antonyms on them. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4774 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 115 of 158 26 October 2014 at 10:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Not much to report in Japanese and Korean, other than that I finally managed to fit it all my regularly scheduled activities into the week, and that my N1 certificate has arrived. Other than that, wanderlust has hit me hard again. Well, probably not exactly "wanderlust", but more of a peculiar form of "homesickness". This was provoked by some of the events of the past week: getting an invitation to attend a wedding in Almaty (which I'll most likely have to decline), reading a large article dealing in part with the language situation in Kazakhstan, as well as getting my Japanese certificate. While I was pleased with the latter, in light of the other two events a sardonic thought crossed my mind: "Here's your official proof that you understand the language of a country you've never been to better than the language of the country you grew up in!" It also doesn't help that often when I try to read news articles in Kazakh I run into not just words, but grammatical structures that I have no memory of having covered at school.
Since I had some time left over after completing my Japanese and Korean activities today, I thought I'd indulge myself by doing one lesson of Kazakh from my self-study book. I did one thing differently from when I last studied from that book - whenever I added the example sentences I first converted them into the Kazakh Arabic script using a handy online converter (the Arabic letters come out disjointed, but when I copy and paste them into Anki they show up properly; the only problem is that full stops and exclamation marks end up at the beginning of the sentences). I'm at a point where I know the Cyrillic-Arabic correspondences perfectly, but my reading speed in Arabic script texts is still extremely slow, so I thought that it might be a good idea to increase my exposure to it. After completing the lesson I went ahead and converted the entire deck into the Arabic script. While I doing all that I remembered that Chung had a Turkic languages challenge planned for next year. I was planning on doing Turkish Pimsleur before joining it, since Chung wasn't going to include Turkish in the challenge, so I guess it made sense to me to start doing it right after the impromptu Kazakh lesson. My first impression was that the mutual intelligibility between Kazakh and Turkish probably isn't very high. While I could recognize the person suffixes and the root of the verb "to know", most of the other suffixes were either entirely unfamiliar to me or were combined in weird ways. I guess I can continue doing the Turkish lessons during some of my commutes, but I'm not sure If I'll be able to keep fitting in the Kazakh lessons in every week. Either way, it was a bit refreshing to get back into Turkic languages seriously, so now I'm really looking forward to the challenge. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7158 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 116 of 158 27 October 2014 at 9:05pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Your comment about Turkish has made me consider adding it to the challenge even though it didn't enter my mind initially because I've been studying it for a while already (and intend to continue it).
The biggest problem is that I can't find any useful and free primer of Turkish along the lines of this for Azeri or even this for Kyrgyz which we can all use for free as common course. FSI Turkish Basic Course doesn't seem ideal even though it is free. Something like TY Beginner's Turkish would be nice though since it doesn't go into depth and can be finished in about 3 months. Yet I'm not comfortable making it the common course since all participants would have to shell out a bit of a money if they don't already have the course (I want to keep things on the level; no illegal downloading of copyrighted courses). 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4774 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 117 of 158 28 October 2014 at 6:23am | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't think adding Turkish is necessary, since I'm probably the odd one out as someone with an interest in Turkic languages who hasn't tried studying Turkish, but if it doesn't screw with the scheduling too hard I guess it would make sense to add it.
What's wrong with FSI Turkish Basic Course? Is it outdated? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7158 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 118 of 158 28 October 2014 at 3:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
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It seems a little too intense for the purpose of dabbling or short-term studying. After having used FSI Hungarian Basic, Czech FAST, Polish FAST and Conversational Finnish, I've concluded that the old FSI courses are better as supplements than the main resource when you're learning alone.
2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4774 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 119 of 158 16 November 2014 at 9:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
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It's been a while since I've written an update here, and I'm not really sure why. Might have to do with my daily Anki reviews for Korean reaching the seventies, bringing the total daily reviews well over a hundred. But I haven't stopped doing things in Japanese, Kazakh or Turkish either. I've been using Google Translate for Turkish so much lately I've started getting ads in Turkish on YouTube, as well as Russian and English ads about travel and real estate in Turkey (the former is kinda understandable, since YouTube is owned by Google, but the latter is a bit unnerving..)
Anyway, I've finished the しごとの日本語 telephone conversations book, so now I'm concentrating on the e-mail writing one, a lesson a day. Apparently after the explanatory lessons there is a practice writing section - looks like I'll have something to put on lang-8 pretty soon. As for the speaking practice, there's been another meetup at the MSU ln Friday night. This time most of it was taken up by a game of bingo, with Japanese vocabulary from several categories (food, means of transportation, animals, etc.) instead of numbers. I didn't win any prizes, but it was kinda fun. After the game was over we had some time left over to talk, and I ended up talking quite a bit about economics: Russia's and Japan's current economic situations, our changing relations with the West and China, the differences between Russia's regions, etc. This was a huge strain on my vocabulary, and not just when it came to economic terminology - I think I stalled the longest when I tried to talk about the fact that many if not most cars in Vladivostok are right-hand drive, but then realized that I not only didn't know how to say "right-hand drive" in Japanese, I didn't even have a clue about what the word for "steering wheel" was. I guess that's another good thing about this conversation practice thing - identifying gaps in vocabulary. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4774 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 120 of 158 23 November 2014 at 9:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Last night I tried writing the first practice business e-mail on lang-8 - a brief message asking a person from another company to send detailed information about a particular product. I got a number of corrections and comment noting that what I wrote was basically fine as is, but there are places where it was possible to make the phrasing more polite, if one feels the need to err on the side of caution. Most of those improvements actually involved stock phrases that were suggested for use in this particular task by the book itself: things like お手数ですが (->お手数をおかけしますが) and お忙しいところ恐縮ですが (->お忙しいところ(誠に/大変)恐縮ですが). Some even suggested changing よろしくお願いいたします by either adding どうぞ in the beginning or by spicing it up with kanji (宜しくお願い致します). One person also suggested replacing 御社, the word used in the majority of the example e-mails in the book, with 貴社, quoting a website where an expert suggested that the former is more appropriate for the spoken language and the latter for the written. The reasoning behind that seems to be that 貴社 is used in more stock letter/e-mail phrases (e.g. 貴社ますますご清栄のこととお喜び申し上げ ます), while 御社 is less confusing in speech, since 貴社 is homophonous with 帰社 and a few other words. Looks like writing longer e-mails is gonna be challenging, but also quite informative.
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