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TAC 09 - Japanese and now French too! | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5981 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes  Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 1 of 15 25 November 2008 at 1:15pm | IP Logged |
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Where I am now:
Japanese: I have been studying Japanese since the middle of July 2008. So far I have worked through Pimsleur and Genki I and I have recently started work on Genki II and Basic Kanji Book 1. I know around 150 kanji and my vocabulary is probably around 1000. When reading manga or watching jdrama or anime, I can pick out the odd word or phrase but my comprehension is nowhere near where I'd like it to be. French: Starting from May 2009 I achieved a fairly mediocre C grade at A level some 9 years ago. Attended evening classes about 3 years ago but did not do any work outside of the classes and therefore did not really progress. At the moment I can get the jist of newspaper articles/television news reports without too much difficulty but my active ability is currently very limited. Realistically I'm not going to have more than about 2 hours a day to study. My experiences of learning Japanese have lead me to realise that the reason I didn't progress perhaps as far as I should with French when I was younger is that I confused transparency with talent and was using a very sloppy and "English" French. I now intend to approach French with a new level of humility and respect and hope to one day achieve C2 level. Edited by g-bod on 28 May 2009 at 7:01pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| TheElvenLord Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6079 days ago 915 posts - 927 votes 1 sounds Speaks: Cornish, English* Studies: Spanish, French, German Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 2 of 15 25 November 2008 at 2:58pm | IP Logged |
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For French, I would reccommend starting from the bottom and working your way back up. Yes, for the first few days or weeks or months you will be revising, but you will have a stable knowledge of where you're to and in what stage of the course.
I would reccommend starting with Michel Thomas, and then moving on the Assimil French with ease, and possibly Using French, but I havn't done that, so I have no idea how it is, but it IS the Assimil method, so I plan on getting it. Best of luck to you, I look forward to hearing your first post. TEL 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5981 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 3 of 15 29 November 2008 at 12:14pm | IP Logged |
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I tried to fit a bit of French into my routine over the past few days and at this stage in my language learning I've realised that I simply do not have the time or energy for any useful amount of study in an additional language to Japanese. For now I have edited my goals as I really do want to become proficient in Japanese over this next year before throwing any other challenges down. I may start again on French at some point in the year, but at the moment I am simply not ready to do so.
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| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5981 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 4 of 15 01 January 2009 at 7:22am | IP Logged |
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I'm making a post as it is the first day of the New Year and first official day of my TAC. Being slightly geeky I've put together a tracking spreadsheet to log various things privately, for example how much kanji and vocabulary I have learned in a week and how much time I have spent reviewing my flashcards. In order to reach my goals I basically need to cover 165 new words a week and 34 new kanji, however I don't want to experience the same "flashcard fatigue" I had a couple of months ago, so if my reviewing time edges beyond 30 minutes a day I will take a break from learning new things until it settles back down. I plan on posting a progress update no more than once a week and no less than once a month.
Good luck to everybody else taking part. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5981 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 5 of 15 29 January 2009 at 12:47pm | IP Logged |
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Well I am four weeks in and not really making the impressive progress I was hoping for. I have averaged at learning 69 new words a week and 10 kanji. I am still aiming high, but I think I need to perhaps not be too disappointed if I don't meet my expectations. At the moment if I get to 1000 kanji by the end of the year I will be very pleased (and perhaps I should be).
On the plus side, limiting my reviewing time on Anki has really helped me to feel happier about my studies - it has meant that there are one or two days a week where I avoid studying anything that would lead me to create new flashcards and generally on these days I try listening to some native materials (even though I don't understand very much of them) or reading some manga, focusing on what I do understand rather than what I don't. I've been working on the よつばと series which seems to be about right for my level. Every so often I can read the majority of the text on the page and each time that happens it's quite thrilling. The story tends to be quite obvious from the pictures, which is a huge help too. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5981 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 6 of 15 26 February 2009 at 7:23pm | IP Logged |
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I still haven't made very impressive progress in terms of numbers so I've given up counting! My ultimate goal is of course to be able to understand and use Japanese, and that is pretty difficult to measure (although I was having a look at the European framework the other day and I would judge myself an A2 in terms of comprehension and A1 in production) and I know that simply "knowing" 2000 kanji won't make me literate, although I wonder if things will start getting interesting when I get to around 1000 (or maybe even 500).
I recently purchased the book Shadowing and have been working with it for about three weeks and am finding it incredibly helpful. In fact, it is something I now wish I had tried earlier. Every so often I have a go at watching some anime or drama without the subtitles and I seem to have progressed from being able to catch odd words to being able to catch odd phrases, which means that shows that I am already rather familiar with are beginning to get more satisfying to watch, although I am still pretty lost with completely new material. One thing that I have realised is that I actually really enjoy the sound of Japanese, to the extent that if I am having difficulty sleeping I find sticking an all Japanese podcast on is rather soothing. I wonder if this will change when my comprehension improves. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5981 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 7 of 15 26 March 2009 at 7:06pm | IP Logged |
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March has not been a particularly intensive month in terms of studying. I have been working on the bare minimum of flashcard review every day and a few minutes of the Shadowing book mentioned in my previous post (which I would like to reiterate has been incredibly helpful) on most days. I have started making regular use of the JapanesePod101 podcasts as well as I have found them quite useful for reinforcing material I have already covered.
I have barely touched my main textbooks (Basic Kanji Book/Genki) this month but I'm still doing stuff with Japanese, so I don't really feel like I'm failing. I do hope to use them more next month however! When I first started working on Genki II last November I worked out that I should comfortably have it finished by the end of May, now I think July or maybe even September is more realistic (and in that respect I do feel rather disappointed in myself; I have to keep reminding myself that this isn't a race and finishing a textbook is not enough to make me know the language anyway). I have also booked a tutor for a few sessions as I am well aware that my conversational ability is flagging well behind everything else, on the grounds that beyond talking to myself it is quite difficult to find the opportunity to practice. I had my first lesson this week so no doubt I will post a bit more about this next month. I have been searching for a Skype language exchange partner, but with the huge time difference between the UK and Japan it is hard to find anybody who is regularly available at the same time as me. I'm beginning to understand that I am unlikely to totally annihilate Japanese this year, however on the plus side I don't think Japanese is going to totally annihilate me either! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5981 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 8 of 15 30 April 2009 at 7:11pm | IP Logged |
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This month I managed to rediscover the joys of working with the Basic Kanji Book and have nearly finished it. However, I am two chapters from the end and all of a sudden the grammar/sentence patterns used seems to have gone up a gear, while the grammar I know hasn't really gone anywhere - primarily as I am a bit fed up of Genki and haven't really got much else to work with. It has certainly become very clear to me that my kanji/vocabulary knowledge seems to have outstripped my knowledge of grammar, which has come as something of a surprise. When I learned French at school, my grammar was always way ahead of my vocabulary. I think the difference is primarily due to the way in which I have used Anki - mainly for words "out of context", which does work for me as long as I then encounter these words out in the wild. I did work with a sentence deck loosely based on AJATT but dropped it as the effort/pay-off wasn't balanced enough for me. This still doesn't help me get better with Japanese sentences!
Anyway, I have a few ideas, as follows: I bought Japanese for Everyone a few weeks ago, with the idea of using it for revision once I had completed the Genki series, as it seems to cover similar ground but at a much quicker pace. However I am now contemplating starting with it already and going back to Genki if/when I feel less bored with it or if I simply get stuck in JfE. I have the Unicom JLPT 4 grammar book which I haven't really been using as I'm not that interested in taking the exam and most of the exercises are example exam questions. However, I can at least work through the example sentences to revise the sentence patterns I should really know already. I had a go at using Tae Kim's Guide a little while ago but my approach was a question of skimming the article and then making my AJATT style sentence cards. I plan to go back to reading the guide carefully rather than skimming it, and obviously not doing the flashcards. I think perhaps if I encounter the same grammar point/sentence pattern in enough sources at different times, they should eventually sink in! I've also recently downloaded the Princeton Russian Course. My threat to myself is that if I really feel like I can't deal with Japanese, I can start dealing with Russian instead. It is a language I would like to learn eventually anyway, but at the moment the idea of leaping into it as a complete beginner makes me feel more positive about Japanese. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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