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Ezy Ryder’s endeavor (TAC’14-15 旅立ち、鵲、東亞)

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Ezy Ryder
Diglot
Senior Member
Poland
youtube.com/user/Kat
Joined 4348 days ago

284 posts - 387 votes 
Speaks: Polish*, English
Studies: Mandarin, Japanese

 
 Message 65 of 144
04 June 2014 at 3:59pm | IP Logged 
Chinese: TOCFL level-1. I thought about starting to learn Chinese again. Kanji usually take me less than half an hour (slightly more now that I started to write them during reviews, but at this moment writing them by hand is still fun). So, I've decided I'll use some of the remaining energy on Chinese. I've decided to start with learning from the TOCFL wordlists, when adding vocab from native content becomes more efficient, I'll switch. But right now it's not so bad; those are mainly useful words (although I'd say some are more "basic", than "common"). I chose the TOCFL for two reasons. 1. I already know probably over 2500 Kanji, so traditional characters are easier to learn than Simplified. And 2. while reading Mike Campbell's (Glossika's) entry in "The Polyglot Project", I've read that learning Simplified after Traditional is easier, than going the other way around. The funny thing is that the pronunciations are actually Taiwanese (it's a Taiwanese test, so go figure). That, combined with the fact that most Mandarin media using Traditional are probably going to be Taiwanese, means I'll probably speak with a Taiwanese accent. In my native language (Polish, in case looking to the left of this post is too much to ask :) ), despite living my whole life in Śląsk (where the Śląski dialect is quite common), I speak rather standard Polish (I think I use just two words from the dialect: "zaś" and "wajcha"; my conjugation and declension patterns are also rather standard). In English, I (attempt to ) imitate the Received Pronunciation. I can't say I speak Japanese, but because of little variation in the language (from what I've heard), chances are, getting the standard (for a foreigner, at least) accent won't be that hard (what would be the alternative? 関西弁?). So my Chinese (if I learn it), will be an exception. Anyway, I started four days ago, I've been learning 50 words, and suspending another 47.4 words a day. I suspend words I either remember from my previous attempts to learn the language, or ones I can guess because of Japanese.(like 教室, for example). I wonder for how much longer will this pace of suspending stay this high. Even if I were to learn just those 50 words, without any suspending (and I studied every day), I should get to almost 11,000 words.
Lastly, according to this page TOCFL Level 1 should be close to A1.
PS.: I'll postpone rejoining team 鵲 until I keep studying more or less consistently for a month.

Edited by Ezy Ryder on 04 June 2014 at 4:09pm

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Ezy Ryder
Diglot
Senior Member
Poland
youtube.com/user/Kat
Joined 4348 days ago

284 posts - 387 votes 
Speaks: Polish*, English
Studies: Mandarin, Japanese

 
 Message 66 of 144
10 June 2014 at 7:18pm | IP Logged 
Chinese: TOCFL lvl2. Currently at almost a 1000 words (33 words shy of that milestone, which means I won’t be writing a 1000 words post). 50 new added and ~37 suspended a day. Today I’ve had about 150 reviews, the whole session (reviews+new) took me about half an hour. Learning pronunciations of more characters, I’m able to guess more words, with a little help from my (still limited) Japanese. Examples include: 本來(JP:本来), 星星(星々), 小學(小学), 人口(人口). However, more duplicates started to appear in the deck. I always delete them, so that they don’t affect the vocab count, and if the definition actually differs from the previous deck’s, I edit the already studied card after deleting the duplicate. I also thought about doing some passive listening. It didn’t help much with my listening comprehension in Japanese, but it improved my accent. I’ve noticed the difference between the Polish and Japanese e(え) and o(お) vowels. I hope to be able to reproduce these results with Mandarin tone pairs. I’d expect there to be multiple videos on that on YouTube, but most of the time, such videos focus on single tones, and/or oversimplify them (like trying to compare them to English intonation patterns). I’d presume it’s not only important for the tone, for example, to rise, but also to start at a certain point, and end at a certain point, in relation to your speaking voice range (or are those maybe just certain intervals? The first tone often has a minor seventh sound to it). Also, videos in which people pronounce the tones terribly slowly don’t help much either. The most difficult pair for me to pronounce is 2-3, like 其他 (qítā). So, now I just have to find something to listen to. Apparently the word used in place of “Let’s play” is the same as in Japanese: 實況(JA:実況). But as the traditional characters are used in Cantonese, too, I’m always afraid that I’m actually listening to Cantonese… I mean, they are distinguishable; Cantonese has more flat tones, vowel length distinction, final unreleased stops… And finally – according to the page linked to in the previous post, that should be approximately A2. Though I’ll have to – at the very least – spend more time with the “Chinese Grammar Wiki.”
1 person has voted this message useful



Ezy Ryder
Diglot
Senior Member
Poland
youtube.com/user/Kat
Joined 4348 days ago

284 posts - 387 votes 
Speaks: Polish*, English
Studies: Mandarin, Japanese

 
 Message 67 of 144
16 June 2014 at 1:36pm | IP Logged 
JP:日本語: 第三冊本を読んだ。 いいタイミングだね。 『半分の月がのぼる空3』を読んで、 翌日 (買うからぴったり一月間後) ラノベの五冊が届いた (「ごさつ」を入力して、 第一のおすすめは誤殺だった…)。 ともあれ、 とりあえず、 みじけー。 文庫本で、 平均は200頁。 面白いけど。 生まれて初めて本で笑文字を見た。 チャットの引用じゃなかった…
中国語: TOCFLレベル3。 毎日50語言葉を学んだり、 38語を察て非表示したりする。 今まで簡単だった。 最後のレベルの二つがもっと難しく見える、 が可能そうだ。
語学以外:いい天気ゆえに、 またジョギングしだした。

EN: Japanese: Third book. Good timing, huh? The day after finishing Hantsuki III, the five light novels (I ordered exactly a month before) came. They’re soooo short. Not only are they in A6 format, they’re an average of about 200 pages long. But they’re interesting. It was the first time in my life that I’ve seen an actual emoticon in a book. And it wasn’t even a quote from a chat.
Chinese: TOCFL level 3. Learning 50 words, and guessing and suspending another 38 a day. So far so good. The last two levels seem a bit more difficult, but possible (of course).
Not language-related: The weather’s good, so I picked up jogging again.

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kujichagulia
Senior Member
Japan
Joined 4846 days ago

1031 posts - 1571 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Japanese, Portuguese

 
 Message 68 of 144
17 June 2014 at 8:06am | IP Logged 
よかったら、その五冊の小説は何というです か。
What are the five light novels that you ordered?
1 person has voted this message useful



Ezy Ryder
Diglot
Senior Member
Poland
youtube.com/user/Kat
Joined 4348 days ago

284 posts - 387 votes 
Speaks: Polish*, English
Studies: Mandarin, Japanese

 
 Message 69 of 144
17 June 2014 at 12:16pm | IP Logged 
JP: ちょっと恥ずかしいな。 『らき☆すた』のラノベんです。 アニメがおかしくて好きでし
たし、 たぶん小説もと思って買いました (幾分安い-総数44.95ドル)。
EN: It's a little embarrassing. It's the "Lucky star" light novels. I liked the Anime, so I bought the
light novels, thinking that maybe they'll be funny, too (and quite cheap - $44.95 in total).
2 persons have voted this message useful



kujichagulia
Senior Member
Japan
Joined 4846 days ago

1031 posts - 1571 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Japanese, Portuguese

 
 Message 70 of 144
18 June 2014 at 2:48am | IP Logged 
JP: 『らき☆すた』か。それは初耳だけど、面白 そうだ。それは恥ずかしくないことだと思う 。日本語を勉強になれたら、いいだと思う。 返事して、ありがとう。
EN: "Lucky Star", huh? I've never heard of it before, but it sounds interesting. I don't think that is embarrassing at all! If it helps you to learn Japanese, I think it's okay. Thank you for answering my question!
1 person has voted this message useful



Ezy Ryder
Diglot
Senior Member
Poland
youtube.com/user/Kat
Joined 4348 days ago

284 posts - 387 votes 
Speaks: Polish*, English
Studies: Mandarin, Japanese

 
 Message 71 of 144
29 June 2014 at 10:34pm | IP Logged 
About a week ago I’ve decided (yet again) to drop Chinese, because I wasn’t reading in Japanese enough. But for two reasons, I’ve chosen (yet again) to try one more time. 1. I haven’t read much more in that week, so, why not just study Chinese anyway? 2. My Chinese penpal asked me about my reading speed in Chinese. At first, I wanted to just say that I don’t understand enough, for reading to be possible. But then, after actually attempting to read a passage from the Chinese Wikipedia (just 74 words), I realized, that perhaps it’s not nearly as bad as I thought. Knowing (or being able to guess) what some of the words meant without having studied them before (so, also not knowing how to pronounce them) was kinda funny. I think I didn’t understand only 4-5. Anyway, the reading speed was ~45WPM. Here’s my approximate reading speed in various languages (comprehension is a whole other matter):
English-220WPM
Polish-180WPM
Japanese-60WPM
Chinese-45WPM (if the text is comprehensible…)
Russian-25WPM (I’ve learnt the Cyrillic alphabet a while ago, and can guess some words thanks to Polish)
So, I actually read faster in Chinese, than Russian… So I guess experience is more important than simplicity of the script.

Another thing I wanted to write about, was the Anki back-log I’ve developed in that week. 765 reviews. The only time I’ve had more, was last year with Japanese, about 900 then. But this time, I managed to do them in just one day (1h22 not counting breaks). At 1147 cards seen, this gives the pace of ~4.28s/card. I really love the “show the answer after x seconds” plug-in. Without it, it would take me about 6h18 (not counting breaks). I’ll take a break now, and if I’ll feel like it, I might even study some 50 new words later today.
1 person has voted this message useful



Ezy Ryder
Diglot
Senior Member
Poland
youtube.com/user/Kat
Joined 4348 days ago

284 posts - 387 votes 
Speaks: Polish*, English
Studies: Mandarin, Japanese

 
 Message 72 of 144
05 July 2014 at 7:14pm | IP Logged 
Chinese: 2,000 words. 1248 in “young” and “mature,” and another 789 in suspended (for either knowing or being able to guess them). A few more recent examples of free words thanks to Japanese (Japanese in the bracket): 理由(理由) 速度(速度) 萬一(万が一) 通信(通信) and a couple words I could guess the meaning of, but not the reading: 性格(性格) 哲學(哲学) 中途(usually 途中, but can be written the same too) 忍耐(忍耐). Generally, I can’t complain, it’s not that hard. I tried to read the Witcher, and I recognized which scene it was, and a bit of what was going on (things like “he pulled his sword out of the sheath,” or “the blade was shining in the light of the oil lamp”). But it’ll probably be a while till I can read it and understand enough for USSR purposes (uninterrupted sustained silent reading :) ).
Also, my Chinese penpal said she wouldn't mind practicing some Mandarin with me over Skype. Currently I don’t really feel ready for this, but maybe in 2-3 months, when (if) I get to 5,000 or so words…

As for Japanese, I'm not sure how should I tackle listening. Should I listen passively as much as I can? Should I reserve some time just for listening, and actually focus? Should I listen to stuff with transcripts/captions available? Or will it just come after enough reading? Wish I remembered how I've learnt English...


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