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Kuji’s Krazy Log II | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4845 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 377 of 706 06 January 2014 at 2:50am | IP Logged | |||||
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Hmmm... just wondering if I should start a new thread for TAC 2014. This log has detailed my language-learning journey very well, so it could be nice to keep it around. On the other hand, I could always put a link to this log on a new log for easy access.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4845 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 378 of 706 07 January 2014 at 3:48am | IP Logged | |||||
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Nevermind...I'll do what I did last year and just keep the same log.
I'll post a post detailing my goals for TAC 2014 later on. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4845 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 379 of 706 13 January 2014 at 8:55am | IP Logged | |||||
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My TAC 2014 Log begins here!
INTRODUCTION EN - Thank you for checking out my log. I'm kujichagulia. I am a 30-something male American living in Osaka, Japan. I've been here for nearly 11 years, but you wouldn't know it from my Japanese skills. I studied on-and-off for 9 years, mainly due to my laziness and lack of motivation. I changed that in the summer of 2012 by coming to HTLAL and posting my language-learning adventures, which helped me to stay consistent in my studies. Japanese is my main target, but on the side I study Portuguese as well. Japanese is a necessity, but Portuguese is something I actually want to study. I am very interested in the Romance languages, and Portuguese sounds very nice to me (although others like French or Spanish may be more useful). Other useless stuff: My interests include sports (any kind), music (very picky), reading non-fiction (history and biographies), travel, aerobics, and cooking. JP - こんにちは！ 私のログを 読でくれて、ありがとうございます！ 私はkujichaguliaです。 ３０いくつかです。 アメリカ人ですけど、 １１年間ぐらい日本の大阪に住んでいます。 でも、私の日本語はよくない。 本当に下手ですよ！ 日本に着いた後に、9年間 あまり勉強しなかったんですから。 しかし 、 ２０１２年の夏で HTLALの掲示板に参加して、 ここで相談をもらえて、 その時から頑張っています。 日本語の勉強は優先ですけど、 ポルトガル語も勉強しています。 チーム旅立ちのチームメイトへ、 よろしくお願いします！ PT - Bom dia, boa tarde, boa noite! Sou kujichagulia. Sou americano quem está morando em Osaka, Japão. Estou morando aqui há onze anos. Eu principalmente estudo japonês, mais também estudo português. Eu gosto muito de português. JAPANESE (Team 旅立ち/STARt) I would describe myself as a intermediate (B1) Japanese speaker. I’m almost done with textbooks. I have just 1 ½ chapters left on my current textbook, An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese. But I hardly do IAIJ nowadays - perhaps 30 minutes a week - so it will be a while before I finish that. My grand goal in Japanese is to become fluent in all areas - reading, writing, speaking and listening. My goals for TAC 2014… well, the big goal right now is to improve what I think is by far my most weakest skill, that of listening. Being in Japan, I can’t help but to get a lot of passive listening, but I need to do more active listening. So I will dedicate some time everyday for this task. Besides IAIJ, I will use audio from IAIJ and podcasts from JapanesePod101.com as study materials. I’m also going to retry downloading news podcasts and making radio recordings to put on my Walkman, to make sort of an “immersion music player”, if you will - something that I can play to have Japanese in my ears at any time. This is no problem at home - I can just turn on the TV. But it would be nice to have at the office and on the train. Other than that, I’ll try to read more, watch more actively when watching TV, be more vigilant in learning new words I come across, and write more. PORTUGUESE (Team Exploradores) I would describe myself as a beginner (A1). I have no huge goals for Portuguese, other than having fun. I’m only studying Portuguese about an hour every day Monday-Friday, yet I find myself advancing “quickly” - at least quicker than I did in Japanese. It helps that Portuguese is closer to English than Japanese. The core of my Portuguese study is DLI Basic Portuguese (the free version from the link listed below). Other materials I use: PortuguesePod101.com, news and stories or other reading material I can get off of the Internet, and occasionally Duolingo. LANGUAGE STUDY - “Issues” to work on in 2014 NOTE: These points are meant for me and may not necessarily apply to you and your language learning situation. These are things I need to work on, based on my own experiences. - Spend less time reading about learning languages and spend more time in your languages. This has become more and more of a problem as I frequent websites and forums (including this one!) looking for “magic” techniques and materials that will instantaneously make me fluent. Two things for me to remember: (1) The best techniques and materials are the ones I will use consistently, and (2) if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. - Find ways to discipline yourself. People say to do fun stuff in your languages, in order to keep your motivation up, so that you can stay consistent. But for me, I’ve found that even fun stuff becomes un-fun when I do it in my L2s. Why read about sports in Japanese when I can do it easily and enjoy it more in English? It is not enough for me to do things that I enjoy… because I’ll end up just doing it in English. The fun stuff does make it easier, but I’ve learned that I need more discipline. There is no way around it. I want to get to the Promised Land, but I don’t want to wander through the Sinai. I need to push myself through the Sinai somehow. And discipline is not something I need only in language learning. There are lots of areas in my life where more discipline would come in handy, so this is a valuable life skill I need to learn. USEFUL JAPANESE LINKS Goo's English-Japanese dictionary ALC - Good for finding English translations of Japanese phrases, and vice versa Weblio's English-Japanese dictionary - Good for translating phrases Tatoeba - Large database of example sentences USEFUL PORTUGUESE LINKS Defense Language Institute Language Courses - Public domain and free of charge. It's where I got DLI Portuguese Basic. A nice alternative to the free FSI courses at fsi-language-courses.org. Tatoeba - Large database of example sentences Linguee.com - Nice dictionary/example sentences database HTLAL thread about where to find Brazilian TV Rashomon in Japanese with Portuguese subtitles - English subtitles - Portuguese subtitles User Expugnator explains about Brazilian music: a must-read! Also, some suggestions for Brazilian singers/groups are listed here and here. OTHER STUFF Lang-8 - A place to write in your target language and get it corrected by native speakers Italki - Like Lang-8. Fewer users, but some interesting features. Plus, unlike Lang-8, you can write in more than two of your TLs for free. Brun Ugle's suggestion on what to do with Lang-8 corrections GLOSS - A number of language activities TuneIn - Online streaming radio stations from around the world. Edited by kujichagulia on 28 January 2014 at 1:43pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4770 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 380 of 706 13 January 2014 at 6:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I can definitely relate to what you're talking about in the "discipline yourself" bit. In my log I talked about my first experience in reading a manga in Japanese that I hadn't read in English before - the joy of finding out that I could understand 70% of the content, and the disappointment of realizing that all the funny bits were in the 30% I missed. For the longest time I hesitated to read manga or watch anime in Japanese only, because I was thinking that even if I do revisit this particular product later, when I understand Japanese better, it will still not be the same as experiencing it for the first time in a language I fully understand - I'll just know all the punchlines and plot twists in advance. It took some time for me to convince myself that this wouldn't be the end of the world. Thankfully, with ラブひな it didn't take me too long to reach a stage where I no longer needed to "reward myself" by reading the English translation of the chapter I had just finished in Japanese.
Oh, and all those links for Portuguese are really not helping with my wanderlust. I've been tempted to branch out into Brazilian Portuguese for a long time now. It's not that I've developed a strong interest in the culture or the language itself, it's just that for some reason I keep running into Brazilian Portuguese wherever I go online, and it's getting increasingly annoying not being able to at least sound it out in my head. Besides, Portuguese is the first European language Japan came into contact with, and there is a relatively large Brazilian community in the country, so there's that. I'm already spreading myself far too thin for my liking with Latin and Korean, so I'll just have to stuff it for now. Still, boa sorte! よろしくお願いします! 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4845 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 381 of 706 17 January 2014 at 5:20am | IP Logged | |||||
Excellent story. Yes, that sort of thing happens to me all the time! I think that I also hold myself to too high of a standard - if I'm not reading the book like a native Japanese speaker would, or if I'm speaking and it sounds like, well, somebody who is learning Japanese instead of a native, I become really discouraged. I definitely need to work on that - the idea that it's okay that I am not fluent yet. It's okay if I struggle with reading material. Just keep going on, and one day I'll get there.
Oops... don't want to be the cause of any wanderlust, but I completely understand. I've been interested in Portuguese ever since I bought a box set of Antonio Carlos Jobim songs back in my university days, but aside from a Portuguese class at my university - or rather, something that resembled a class - I didn't start studying it until the fall of 2012. I like the sound of the language, and I like a lot of the culture coming out of the Lusophone world, but, as you said, it helps that there is a large Brazilian community here in Japan, so I have something to aspire to. * * * * * Speaking of which... I'm hoping to speak Portuguese with someone next week! I don't have the time to just go out and search for Portuguese speakers in my city, so I have never spoken Portuguese with anybody face-to-face. But on Thursday a Brazilian will be brought to my workplace, and I don't have to go anywhere! Every year, at the end of the academic year, we bring a number of foreigners to our high school to give our third grade students a chance to use English in a real setting with people other than me. This year, one of those foreigners will be a 50-something-year-old Brazilian man, a Paulista (Paulisto?). I'm not really sure what I would say to him (I have trouble starting conversations with strangers even in my native English), and he is there, after all, to speak English to my students, but I want to be ready just in case I have the opportunity to speak to him in Portuguese. I've tried to get some more listening practice in the past few days. I'm really putting a lot of pressure on myself for some reason - a sure sign of a language nerd. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4288 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 382 of 706 17 January 2014 at 5:25am | IP Logged | |||||
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I know that there are more Brasilian Portuguese speakers, but old Portugal never seems to
be mentioned--how about the very old musical tradition of fado? Also I think that Portuguese Africa speak the Lisbon form, at least in standard speech/writing. I have a family member from Macão who says that she grew up learning Lisboa standard speech as a child. And I tink that some should consider learnign the European version. To be a comparison, in my university, if I had to count, I met two Brazilians total in undergraduate, but approximately 25 Portuguese. Lisboa is one of the most beautiful cities that I ever seen, not only in Europe, but internationally as well. Edited by 1e4e6 on 17 January 2014 at 5:34am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Sizen Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4337 days ago 165 posts - 347 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Catalan, Spanish, Japanese, Ukrainian, German | Message 383 of 706 17 January 2014 at 11:19am | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm flirting with European Portuguese a bit this year, actually. :P I'm using Eurom5 to teach myself to read,
and my family and I are thinking of doing a trip to Portugal and Spain in 5 years or so, if we can make it work. Either way, I'll be interested to read about your progress in Portuguese as well as your Japanese. Also, I thought I'd give you another website that's good for example sentences/uses of words as thanks for the tatoeba website tip! I hadn't ever heard of that website up until now. It's a bit less user friendly as the website is entirely in Japanese (good chance to practice browsing in Japanese!) and there's no furigana or romaji, but here it is. Using a browser plugin like rikai-kun fixes the latter problem, however. This is usually where I go when my J-J and J-E dictionaries fail me. Anyway, good luck this year. Edited by Sizen on 17 January 2014 at 11:21am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4845 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 384 of 706 17 January 2014 at 1:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
Ah, fado! I've been wanting to check fado out; I should probably learn more about music and culture in Portugal. Did you know that it is easier for me to travel from Japan to Portugal than it is to Brazil? Much easier. It took me just 13 hours to get from Madrid back here a few weeks ago, and that was with a connection in Seoul. It would take at least 20 hours to get to Sao Paulo, and longer to go anywhere else in Brazil. So learning European Portuguese would probably benefit me. Besides Portugal, Macau is close by (although I wonder if anyone there uses Portuguese nowadays). And I'm interested in Africa, and they speak European Portuguese in Angola and Mozambique. In addition, I could talk more with Serpent about Portuguese football! :) Plus, RTP television streams are easily available on the Internet, which is not always the case for Brazilian TV such as Globo or Rede Record. All that said, if I ever run into a Portuguese speaker in Japan, the odds are 99% that they will be Brazilian, so it helps to know that variety as well. Thank you for the fado link! Edited by kujichagulia on 17 January 2014 at 1:23pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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