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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| NuclearGorilla Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6788 days ago 166 posts - 195 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Japanese, French | Message 26 of 102 02 October 2009 at 12:38pm | IP Logged | ||
So you can! I could swear I tried this a while back to no result, but alas, here I am. Thank you. I've experiment a bit more with the playback speed. All speeds up to 1.5x are strangely listenable--I had somewhat assumed that the higher end on that was too fast to be reasonable. I've only gone through anything at 1.1x since my last post, but I'm going to consider trying 1.2x in the future. I still question the utility of going too fast, although the utility of going a bit faster than normal is obvious. At 1.1x, a 45 minute show is only 40.5 minutes! That's a notable savings. Over ten episodes, that's the length of a whole show at regular speed. I'm nearly through my second series I've watched, this one having been watched entirely without subs. (The first I watched with subs the first time, and "watched passively" (had playing while I was doing other things) without subs at least a couple times.) I sort of understand what's going on sometimes. Still, I don't know what very much means, though. I can mostly figure out what's being said, at least, phonetically. It's only tricky when it's a Japanese woman speaking quickly, or when a Japanese man's growls his Japanese. Although the tough to understand growling might be better to understand if I turned down the bass (it's not high, but the growls are low enough to be amplified considerably by it). I've noted that seemingly everything I write is quite long. I want to work a bit more on terseness, I think, since there's definite value in being concise. But here I've kind of attached myself to my longposting identity. Oh, habit! how thou bindest me! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| NuclearGorilla Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6788 days ago 166 posts - 195 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Japanese, French | Message 27 of 102 07 October 2009 at 6:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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I learned a few hiragana, with a modicum of effort. I don't think it should take all that long to learn all of them, especially if supplemented with some Japanese text/audio combo. (Like audiobook and text.)
I've only viewed nine hours of unsubtitled Japanese media since I started counting. It's not very much. But I just don't like watching videos all that much. I think that the method which I have decided to try here isn't all that suitable for me--I would rather be reading things than listening to them, for the most part. I've spent a huge amount of time, even, on the writing system (well over ten times that I've spent on the video). Which is interesting--I was able to get myself to work on those kanji, which is ostensibly more worklike than watching TV, but cannot get myself to do this media watching. Perhaps this is a result of having a concrete goal. I haven't set myself any goal as far as media watching, whereas there was a definite goal with the kanji. In any case, I'm not sure that, even I can stay with a path of 'natural acquisition' that I would like to. If I learned the kana, then in principle I could read as well roughly as well as I can watch things (given proper material); that is to say, I would understand very little. This makes it quite a bit less useful, I think; or at the least, less bearable. In light of this, I'm considering consulting some sort of structured instruction in order to speed things up a bit. There's Tae Kim, which people seem to find helpful, or I can try Assimil (for which I have the French version, which would definitely be interesting). Another possibility would be this fangled listen-reading which I've wanted to try in the past. I'm actually leaning strongly towards the idea of Assimil once I've picked up the kana (the hiragana, at least). As an aside (although what do I write here that isn't?), I had a notion that I would systematically go through and try one method each with a language. I had this worked out a bit; Japanese would be an AJATT methodology (this switched to a 'natural acquisition' methodology and now, to whatever I like); Swedish was to be listen-reading, as I figured it would be a good choice due to its (limited) similarity to German; Spanish, I would use the FSI, as the good Administrator mentioned. I may still go through with this--I do, after all, enjoy language learning--although I cannot give up Japanese now. I have undertaken its study, and I cannot stop until it has revealed at least some of its secrets to me. So here I stand, a choice in hand; let nature flow 'til fruit falls of its own accord, or be less slow and to make a book my learning lord. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| NuclearGorilla Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6788 days ago 166 posts - 195 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Japanese, French | Message 28 of 102 10 October 2009 at 9:02pm | IP Logged | ||
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For the sake of learning and for reliving my childhood, I've begun to watch the Pokemon series (in Japanese, of course). This is probably better viewing material for me at this point than the shows I was watching. To enumerate: the episodes are short (~23 minutes instead of ~45 at normal speed), which means my attention's less likely to wander (indeed, I would usually take a break halfway through the longer programs to prevent that); the plot is formulaic and easily decipherable; the visual nature provides further cues as to meaning; and I've already seen them, which helps as well. As to how enjoyable it is to watch...I suppose I hadn't yet reflected on that; it's pretty mundane, I would describe my reaction as "meh": it's something to watch.
But I can't help but be disturbed by the moral bankruptcy their world faces. Any reasonably humane person in this world would object to the reality of forcing animals to fight one another; dog fighting? Cock fighting? These are terrible. But in the world of Pokemon, this is but a trifle. There are entire stadiums dedicated to the practice; leagues even devoted to this practice of animal abuse. The scale is incomprehensible on which organized animal fighting takes place there. What sort of morality have children learned from this? Perhaps in 20 years, we will see the first sanctioned monkey fighting leagues. After all, people can choose to fight, and monkeys are pretty smart, right? And remember Pokemon, those animals fought all the time and everything was peachy. So let's watch monkeys fight! And from there, it is a slippery, slippery slope, friend. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| NuclearGorilla Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6788 days ago 166 posts - 195 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Japanese, French | Message 29 of 102 14 October 2009 at 6:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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These additional numbers by each post have me curious. How is 'Popularity' calculated? It seems like Views / Posts has something to do with it, but not everything. In any case, the only useful thing they've done is assured me I am neither helpful nor popular.
My kanji reviews haven't been going as well lately; I haven't figured out why exactly. Slower. It might have to do with switching to a notebook from gridded paper, especially in that it's a college-ruled notebook so the lines are too small to accomodate the more interesting kanji with any comfort. I may have to see if I can dig a wide-ruled notebook out of somewhere; haven't used them in years and years. Read through the introductory part of Assimil. I was pleased at how easy it was to understand, and hopefully the French used in the course itself won't provide too many difficulties, if I do end up doing that. (Still haven't finished the kana...it'd probably take about 20 minutes, but I've been too busy hacking on a Gameboy emulator.) Otherwise, I have been taking my 45 minutes of Japanese per day, plus constant audio. I should switch up the audio to be an audio book on occasion, maybe. I get the feeling that reaching the level I reached in French will require at least twice the amount of time. Japanese is not good for efficiency in a (Time spent) / (Languages learned) perspective. At least I have a long enough list of abandoned languages to rattle off. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| NuclearGorilla Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6788 days ago 166 posts - 195 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Japanese, French | Message 30 of 102 21 October 2009 at 12:33am | IP Logged | ||
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I've been taking a little bit of a break from Japanese for the past few days. Not to its exclusion, but to the inclusion of some other languages (French, German, and some English). I now recall that I'm quite fond of both German and French (and English has the benefit of being perfectly understandable). I should probably come up with ways to utilize them more frequently, on some sort of regular basis.
I've been considering the way I've been studying, in terms of long term scheduling. I don't think I've spent enough time with either French or German. I should watch and read more things in German, I think, and French the same applies, but to a much larger degree. Ideally, I would have done this before tackling another language, particularly such a beastly language as Japanese. Now I have to spend some 25 minutes a day on Japanese at least (for the kanji). I don't know how much of whatever familiarity with Japanese I've gained I could stand to lose from an extended break. And aside from that, I certainly would enjoy seeing some fruits of my labor. So, in short, I believe I'm considering taking a break from Japanese (with the exception of RTK reviews) in order to spend more time with German and especially French. French is certainly well justified--if I intend to use a French Assimil course for Japanese, a higher ability in French could only help. But, I'm not sure whether I intend yet to do this or not. I could easily add some French to my day though, if I can improve my time management a hair. I feel the need to set things in order at the moment. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| NuclearGorilla Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6788 days ago 166 posts - 195 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Japanese, French | Message 31 of 102 27 October 2009 at 9:53am | IP Logged | ||
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I am on continued leave from Japanese at the moment. It didn't start quite when the above post was made (despite saying I was taking a break, I was still watching some Japanese). The past couple days I've entirely refrained from any Japanese, devoting myself solely to the furthering of my French. I've watched about 6 hours of programming, played a video in French for a bit over an hour, read a couple chapters of a book (Candide), and listened solely to French language music (well, as of yesterday, I guess that was).
Working on an easy language makes a language like Japanese much less appealing in a sense--there are quite a few more easy languages I could learn instead of Japanese, in a lesser amount of time. I could probably get three or four languages to some set level before getting Japanese there; more if well picked. I made the "mistake" of listening to some Swedish music the other day. Combined with the above sentiments, it has me considering putting Japanese on hiatus to pursue Swedish, a language which would be considerably easier and which has at least equal draw, if not equally easily available materials. Breaking off Japanese is possible because I haven't set any real goals for it. The only real goal I've set has been to finish RTK, which I did accomplish. This could well have been all I wanted to get out of the language, but I don't think it is. It definitely was something I wanted to do--as a "big project", as a memory exercise, as an exercise in learning a complex writing system--but I'm not certain the extent to which I really want to learn the language. No doubt there's some neat stuff in it, but the main things that would pull me would have been rather more interesting when I was younger (I'm not nearly as interested in video games as I once was, and that's the only reason I can come up with). As a linguistic curiosity, Japanese is just too much work to even be worthwhile as such. I've studied oddball languages for that purpose, and it rarely is worth that effort, as it's quicker to read a grammar (granted, one such language I studied did not have a grammar written for it yet). By that token, I won't be gaining all that much by continued study of Japanese, even relative to study of some other language that I lack concrete reason to study. I have a certain feeling, though, that I should at least continue study to a point of reading something (anything) in Japanese; I haven't done a single Assimil lesson even. It's really kind of funny in a way. If I had chosen Swedish instead, I would have begun with novels right away, most likely. With Japanese, I've spent well over 150 hours on it and even approaching a novel seems infeasible. I might do well to consider trying it anyway (accompanied by an audiobook, since I know maybe five kanji readings), for fun's sake. So, as is the usual format of these rants, I've output a bunch of thoughts, and have come to no certain conclusion. I suppose what I'm going to do is to continue French until the end of the month, and then rebegin with Japanese at the next month, using Assimil and perhaps some sort-of-reading. If I don't like where either of those activities seems to be going, I will be okay to set it aside, to spend my time on either a new or existing language. The option of abandoning language study seems quite ludicrous, as it should; but I note this because it's probably an oddity at large. In addition, I think I should like to implement a policy to read in my languages each day, setting a very low minimum--a page per day. (Taken from an article on extensive reading I saw posted that I'm sure I'd read before.) It would eliminate any excuse, and as well, a page is better than nothing. I don't know when I'll implement this; there's no good reason not to implement it immediately, but having no good reason has never stopped me before. In conclusion, penguins are well-adapted to the cold and are unlikely to migrate to warmer areas. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| NuclearGorilla Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6788 days ago 166 posts - 195 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Japanese, French | Message 32 of 102 20 November 2009 at 8:56am | IP Logged | ||
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I had what I planned, and did what I did. Which is, that I indeed continued with French until the end of the month, eventually dropping off toward doing "nothing", which isn't all that grand of a situation. Not entirely nothing, but not much of substance. I was interested in doing some reading of German during the interval, but found I had very little of interest (this is what happens when you collection of literature in a language consists solely of books you've already read or that you've picked out of a dumpster). I guess I heard some German watching some History Channel on Hitler and the Berlin Wall.
I did not resume (or really start, I guess,) any form of Japanese beyond my continuing reviews. I was quite considering quitting it and beginning Swedish. I was however capable enough of plugging my ears with wax such that the seductive siren song of Swedish did not lure me into the rocks, and I am coming to the point of attempting to study Japanese. I'll probably poke through Tae Kim a bit to see how well that appeals to me, potentially using that for study. Otherwise, I'll go with Assimil. Maybe I'll try to do both. It was in a way relaxing, though, to withdraw entirely from foreign languages. I even listened to music that wasn't in a target language, which I mostly prohibit (which is a bit sad, since I do enjoy instrumental music). But while perhaps relaxing it wasn't nearly as interesting and considerably less rewarding/fulfilling. Onward, language soldiers! Entirely unrelatedly, somewhere around month's start I stopped trimming my nails, to satisfy some sort of curiosity, I guess. My fingernails appear to grow quicker than my fingernails (beyond me simply being more aware of my fingernails), and it's satisfying to clack them against hard surfaces and to pick out the crud which lodges beneath them. Normally I would, on occasion, idly pick at my nails (with my other nails) or trim them with scissors (I think it's been years since I've used actually nail clippers). I am satisfied that this is not a crippling affliction, since I have not felt at all compelled to do either of these things since I made my decision. This decision complements my decision to no longer cut my hair, which is something I haven't done since the beginning of November last year. I feel that points made in the paragraph above have a deep root in my interest in language learning, making this less of a non sequitur and more of a portrait of my inner struggle to capture my passion and its origins. Because I really needed to legitimize, somehow, why I chose to share my grooming habits over the internet on a language learning forum. Words of the day: epigram, rêve, Staatssicherheit, käpp, 人, Mediolanum 1 person has voted this message useful |
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