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Better than Nothing: 日本語/deutsch/español | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5372 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes  Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 17 of 40 18 November 2010 at 4:53pm | IP Logged |
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It's really the simple, enjoyable things that work best.
As I was saying in my (of-late-neglected) log, I've reverted to watching tv shows and movies, taking notes and looking up new words as my main source of learning. And so far, after a few weeks, I'd say it's working great! I'm enjoying it, it's the next best thing to actually having conversations with people, and I let frequency dictate what I learn. Instead of wasting time remembering a word, I let my brain naturally sort out if I come across it often enough to bother. That's how I learned English after all -- no trick, no gimmick, just frequent meaningful exposure. Hope it works for you too! Ganbatte ne! EDIT: Oh, I forgot to ask about intonation (pitch)! Are you making progress? A while back, I was kind of obsessed with pitch and I kept asking around (in person and online) to get a clear explanation of the forces at play. I didn't get all my answers yet, but I did get a good general idea of how it works. I was also told to just listen and copy, which to me was just a cheap (and somewhat insulting) way of saying "I have no idea". But to be fair, I did continue to listen and copy -- while keeping in mind the general rules I'd learned about -- and I have to admit that I now often (usually?) get the right pitch. Of course, this is my own estimate, but when I say things, I listen to the other speaker and they usually use the same pitch, so I must be right. My language partner is also quick to correct me when I get the pitch wrong, so I'm assuming I get it right the rest of the time. In any case, I just wanted to point out that listening (while understanding what's going on) and repeating, does work. Edited by Arekkusu on 18 November 2010 at 5:37pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6133 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 18 of 40 18 November 2010 at 11:59pm | IP Logged |
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I've been studying Persian for about three months now and I've found it to be a really lovely language and surprisingly easy! If you just want to try a nice, slow introduction to it, there's a good 30-lesson Pimsleur course for it. Pimsleur usually drives me crazy, but this time I quite enjoyed it! Good luck with Persian. :)
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6940 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 19 of 40 23 November 2010 at 8:30am | IP Logged |
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@ Arekkusu
Thanks for reminding me that I need to watch more TV. It's hard for me to get into the habit 1) because I generally don't watch TV, or think of it as a good use of my time, and 2) because for some reason I tend to let myself get stuck in 'learner mode' (looking for the next program, or the next book to sentence mine from) when I would really be better off switching to 'native materials mode' to increase my naturalness. Maybe I'm scared to get out of my safe, little pond into the big sea, or maybe I find measurable progress more rewarding than slow-and-steady polishing and refinement, or maybe part of me refuses to believe that I'm at the level where I can just sit back and enjoy things like a native speaker! As for pitch accent, it still remains a concern to me, but I've put the issue aside for now because I'm not sure what to do about it. I live in Shikoku (whose dialect is similar to Kansai, distinguishable mainly by its different pitch accent), and I'm not even sure what kind of pitch accent I'm going for... When I speak with my friends in the local dialect, of course only the dialect's pitch accent would be appropriate, but when I speak with people from other regions, do I need to adopt Tokyo's pitch accent? If not, then how do I even study the regional pitch accent here so that I remain consistent? I guess that there's no way to avoid a mishmash of influences from the Shikoku, Kansai, and Tokyo dialects, so I'll just indiscriminately increase my exposure to all forms of spoken Japanese, and just say what 'feels right' at the moment. Already I feel like I'm able to separate them to some extent: If I make an utterance while imagining how my next door neighbor might say it, and then make the same utterance while imagining how 戸田恵梨香 or the narrator on one of my audiobooks might say it, then the intonation comes out differently without me realizing it. So I've taken that as a good sign and decided to give my brain more credit than I have been :) @ ellasevia Yes, I have my city library's Pimsleur course downloaded and calling out for me to come and play! I'm looking forward to this language so much that I'm considering studying it next, simultaneously with Spanish. I'll let you know if I have any questions about it! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6940 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 20 of 40 21 December 2010 at 3:31am | IP Logged |
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I'm so dismally undisciplined about keeping this log that I wonder whether there's any point in continuing it, but I somehow feel that abandoning it completely would be the greater evil, so I'll try my best to revive it.
I've never been a very organized person, and every time I've tried to keep to a schedule or do something regular and regimented like that, it's fallen apart within days. I usually rather do what I like as the inclination hits, but lately with my busy schedule (it's 忘年会 season, and on top of that we've just begun our kids' program at our English school and are recieving a flood of requests for trial lessons), I've really been feeling the need to be more productive and keep track of where my time is going throughout the day. I've tried daily schedules time and time again ('8:00 jogging, 9:00 read German', that sort of thing) but it often happens that I get absorbed in what I'm doing, or that something unexpected comes up that needs attention, and my whole schedule for the day is ruined and I feel so disappointed. I'm sure I've never been able to keep up a schedule like that for a single day in my life. So what kind of time management tools can you recommend for someone like me - a scatterbrain who loses all awareness of her surroundings and the passage of time once she's engaged in a single task? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6940 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 21 of 40 07 March 2011 at 10:17am | IP Logged |
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After a bit of a rut during December and January, I'm happy to report that my language
learning routine and my time management skills in general have improved greatly! Time Management I'm not very good at planning my day ahead of time or sticking to the schedules I make, so I've given up trying to micro-manage at what time I perform each task and for how long. Instead, I have a list of tasks that I can perform at any time and for any length of time, which I encourage myself to adhere to with a calendar-based reward system. This reward system is basically a more complex version of the "stick a gold star on the calendar if you've done your homework today" system we're all familiar with from elementary school. Instead of a gold star, I have "lucky charms" (a favorite motif of mine when I was a kid, based on a horrible sugary, artifically-colored breakfast cereal). The tasks I'm supposed to complete each day each earn me a lucky charm, thus: If I've exercised - pink heart If I've drunk plenty of water throughout the day - blue moon If I've listened to language-related materials throughout the day at every available chance - green clover If I've practiced the violin - gold star As for the tasks which are specified only for a certain day (e.g. email so-and-so, write out this certain lesson plan), I award myself a single lucky charm for having completed all of them (the shape is yet to be decided. I've only been using a black checkmark so far.) I keep track of these daily tasks using Google Calendar, and limit myself to the few most important ones so that that last lucky charm doesn't become such an insurmountable task. It's ridiculous how motivated and productive I've become with this silly system. One reason is because having everything listed out helps me realize how much I actually have to do, in case I'm ever tempted to think I have some free time to check Facebook or browse English-language blogs. Another reason is because these are all concrete tasks that can be easily accomplished in one day, unlike the vague goals I used to have like "do some reading in L2" (or, on the other hand, the over-demanding motivation- killers like "do 1 hour of Harry Potter reading in L2"). I'm not planning things for my day assuming I'll have free time; instead, I'm assuming a few tiny gaps in my busy schedule and rewarding myself for filling them productively. What I've been doing Lately I've been progressing in German Assimil at a rate of almost 1 lesson/day, and am currently on lesson 73. I've also made my first entry at Lang-8, and entered the corrected sentences into Anki. I've been making tons of Anki cards, which are all fun to review, using Khatzumoto's MCD (multiple cloze deletion) format. Basically, with this format you take a piece of text (say, a paragraph from a book) with multiple unknowns and make a separate cloze deletion card for each unknown. They're really quick to make (it's a lot of copy and paste because you'll have multiple cards for a single paragraph), and they test your ability to produce vocab, idioms, tricky prepositions, etc. based on the surrounding context. The cards taken from the same text also reinforce each other. I've never had a problem motivating myself to make or study Anki cards (they're like an addictive video game to me), but upgrading my normal "image or definition + cloze deleted sentence" cards to MCDs has given me a lot more cards that are a lot more interesting, a lot more easy to go through, and a lot more beneficial in terms of helping me think and speak like a native. My plans for German 1. finishing Assimil within the next month or so, 2. submitting entries to Lang-8 regularly, 3. MCD-mining Harry Potter. 4. I'll also have to find some German music and online communities that I like, because I enjoy studying from these kind of sources more than from literature. My plans for Japanese I'm not so worried about my Japanese because besides the fact that I use it at home and work everyday, I've also gotten into good habits of checking blogs, tweets, and webpages/articles linked therin (what started with a single Japanese-only twitter account as my only exposure to the Japanese 'net has snowballed from there!) I've also been challenging myself quite a bit with translating and with the self-education I've taken on in connection with that. If I wanted to step up my active study in a few areas, they would be: 1. learn song lyrics 2. get back into video games. My plans for Persian Persian has been temporarily put on hold until I'm at a satisfactory level with my German. When I start again, I'll be using Pimsleur, perhaps in conjunction with the course I'm considering ordering from www.spiderfarsi.com. Edited by Lucky Charms on 07 March 2011 at 10:30am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6940 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 22 of 40 21 March 2011 at 11:31am | IP Logged |
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Not much to report from these last two weeks, except that my progress has been smooth
and consistant! There are many days when I'm not able to award myself every "lucky charm" possible (particularly the "practiced my violin" gold star due to time constraints, and the "exercised" pink heart due to illness or bad weather), but I can honestly say I've been giving it my best every day! I think that my biggest problem that was keeping me off track wasn't laziness, but rather forgetfulness and losing track of time. This system has me constantly reminding myself, "Hey! There's a Lucky Charm I could be earning right now! What's something I could be doing?" Apparently that little bell going off in my head every few minutes was just what I needed! What I've been doing for Deutsch * Listening to Assimil almost every day, and finishing each lesson in one or two days! I'm currently on Lektion 83. * Continuing to read Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen and underlining the stuff I don't know. However, I've been focusing more on reading extensively for pleasure, where the reading is an end unto itself with the dictionary lookups/Anki entries as an occasional side effect. It's really stupid, but before I was even limiting myself when I wanted to read further because there was too big a gap between how far I'd gotten in the book and how many of the previous underlined words I had looked up! My new focus on extensive rather than intensive reading came about from a combination of following doviende's blog and reading Kato Lomb's Polyglot: How I Learn Languages. * I rewatched the first episode of "Türkisch für Anfänger", which I had tried watching about three times before I started Assimil. At that time, I really only got the occasional word or phrase, but after around 80 Assimil lessons, I caught much more on the first try... and they were all words and phrases I knew before Assimil! This convinces me that my listening comprehension has improved a bit :D What I've been doing for 日本語 * Got back into Zelda: Twilight Princess, and have been liberally consulting my Japanese-language walkthrough (Hey, it's not cheating if the point of the game is language practice!) * Translations......... well, trial translations. These guys take forever to get back to you, but in the meantime at least I guess it's good practice. * Learned a new song: そばかす by JUDY AND MARY. I should write a post here soon about my Japanese karaoke repertoire! My plans for Deutsch * Stay the course. * Have a concrete plan of action ready for when I finish Assimil Lektion 100 (I won't be doing the Active Wave since I'm using Anki). * I bought a bilingual parallel text (German Short Stories). My plans for 日本語 * Input unknown words/phrases I encounter during translation work into Anki to avoid having to look up the same word over and over again! (流通, anyone?) Edited by Lucky Charms on 21 March 2011 at 11:32am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Élan Senior Member United States Joined 5435 days ago 165 posts - 211 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Persian | Message 23 of 40 23 March 2011 at 3:02am | IP Logged |
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Your log is so inspiring! Sometimes I get caught up feeling like I should be able to study 3 hours per day because I see other people study that much. Then I am too overwhelmed to even start studying! Your log is a great reminder that even 15 minutes of studying should be look at positively.
I am going to be coming to your log regularly to push you with your German studies. I want to see another person studying Persian! It's such a beautiful language. My log was deserted for a bit while I moved back to Malaysia, but I am back to studying now. I write a lot about various Persian textbooks and courses, so you might find it useful. I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have once you get back to Persian. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Rob_Austria Heptaglot Groupie Austria Joined 4993 days ago 84 posts - 293 votes Speaks: German*, Italian, Spanish, French, English, Portuguese, Japanese Studies: Croatian, Mandarin, Russian, Arabic (Written), Turkish | Message 24 of 40 23 March 2011 at 7:36am | IP Logged |
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Hello Lucky Charms,
First of all, let me say that I find your log very interesting and inspiring. Since I'm rather new to this forum, may I ask you a couple of questions? I keep coming across abbreviations I have never heard of before. You use them in your log as well. So, could you help me out and tell me what L-R and L2 stand for? Thanks in advance, and good luck with your German studies. Ich finde auch, dass Fernsehserien eine gute Möglichkeit bieten, sich mit moderner Sprache, so wie sie tatsächlich von den Leuten gesprochen wird, auseinanderzusetzen. Auch das Lesen der Youtube-Kommentare ist sicherlich nützlich, wobei du nicht vergessen solltest, dass Einträge im Internet oft sehr schlampig verfasst werden und zwischendurch viele Fehler (auch Grammatikfehler) enthalten. Dennoch sind sie sicher ein gutes Spiegelbild eines Teils der aktuellen Sprache. Viel Spaß weiterhin beim Deutschlernen. Liebe Grüße Robert 1 person has voted this message useful |
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