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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| mayfair Diglot Senior Member Australia theasiaanalyst.wordp Joined 5410 days ago 48 posts - 74 votes  Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Mandarin | Message 9 of 21 15 February 2011 at 6:28am | IP Logged |
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To nobody's surprise, I'm sure, I haven't managed to keep up all four languages, being forced to cull Mandarin. As a result of the shame that comes with that, I've been hesitant to post to this thread. Having finally struck up the courage, here is an update on how each is travelling.
KOREAN: Even though I am in Japan, this is my focus at the moment. By the end of the year, I would like to be able to read newspapers and academic articles with a dictionary. In fact, I'm planning to tell as much to the professor who I'm asking to supervise my thesis next year. This is probably not a wise move (I'm probably upper beginner at best), but I figure that the discount from Japanese and the sheer fear of embarrassment might make my task slightly more feasible. I'm currently working through Fred Lukoff's An Introductory Course in Korean, repeating the sentences aloud and writing them by hand. I also plan to type the reading passages out after I finish the book (which should be in a few weeks) and use them as a somewhat portable reader. JAPANESE: Finished a novel and a political book and planning to read an introduction to post-war history next. JPLT N1 applications start soon, so I will apply for the July test. In two weeks I also have to give a seminar which involves a one-hour presentation on Australia followed by questions. I am, to put it mildly, terrified. FRENCH: Still working through Linguaphone for a lack of other resources, having stopped French for a couple of months. It's still a bit below my level, but I have forgotten some basic things so it comes in handy sometimes. Currently shadowing for half an hour a day and writing out one third of a lesson a day by hand. I've just ordered Assimil's Using French which I will work through once it arrives. Once again I'm falling victim to wanderlust. German and Latin (after hearing about Hans Orberg's Lingua Latina per se illustrada) join Mandarin on my waiting list. However, I've decided to leave any new languages until I pass the JPLT N1 and the C1 test for French (I was probably between B2 and C1 before I let my French rot three years ago). 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| jtdotto Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5220 days ago 73 posts - 172 votes Speaks: English*, Korean Studies: Spanish, Portuguese, German | Message 10 of 21 15 February 2011 at 7:56am | IP Logged |
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Too bad for Mandarin, but keep up the good work!
And careful not to get too eager with time frames and Korean. Newspapers and academic journals has grammar that gets very convoluted very quickly, though your knowledge of Japanese will be of use when it comes to hanja. Newspapers will come when they come - I'm basing this on my experience of 4 hour days at an intensive language institute in Seoul like yourself. By the end of 3 quarters, and 6 months before I left for exchange, newspapers were still just beyond my grasp (though now I can somewhat comfortably digest certain subjects). And if someone had asked me to read an academic article, I would have laughed. Even now. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| mayfair Diglot Senior Member Australia theasiaanalyst.wordp Joined 5410 days ago 48 posts - 74 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Mandarin | Message 11 of 21 15 February 2011 at 10:37am | IP Logged |
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Thank you for your response and for helping me to keep things in perspective. I must admit that I was relying a lot on the help from hanja words in order to read newspapers, but I didn't think too much about the grammar. However, I've read on this forum that certain parts of Korean grammar are more difficult than their Japanese counterparts, so I guess I have some unpleasantness to look forward to.
Rather than laughing when somebody asks me to read an academic article in Japanese, I tend just to seethe in silent anger. Do you have any thoughts on your time at the language institute? Which resources did you use? I've heard that good resources are hard to come by once one gets past the intermediate stage. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| mayfair Diglot Senior Member Australia theasiaanalyst.wordp Joined 5410 days ago 48 posts - 74 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Mandarin | Message 12 of 21 23 February 2011 at 2:33pm | IP Logged |
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This week has been very busy with one 見学旅行 with my class and a 合宿 to Nagano with my volleyball club. A broken iPod has severely hampered my attempts at listening practice, but I took a book along in each of my languages. Considering that I've managed at least half an hour of each per day, I can feel quite pleased with myself.
JAPANESE: After my presentation is finished this Saturday, I'm going to make an effort to read a newspaper editorial and watch the news every day. Although I could maintain and improve my Japanese sufficiently just by going to classes and talking with my friends, I feel as though I need to make a special effort towards learning politics-related vocabulary, which is essential to my studies. I've recently ordered a Japanese translation of Kato Lomb's Polyglot. I could happily reread this book a thousand times, so I figure it's better to do so in Japanese. FRENCH: Currently up to lesson 16 of Linguaphone, dividing each lesson into thirds and shadowing 10 (thirds) per day, then reading two aloud and writing one out (following the method laid out in Prof. Arguelles's long shadowing video). Surprisingly, considered I've studied French for three years at university, I'm learning quite a lot. An indictment of the level my university's French classes if ever there was one. As an escape from Linguaphone, I'm reading Marguerite Duras's Hiroshima mon amour freely every now and then, and I plan to put my recently-reignited love for Jacques Brel to good use by translating and memorising some of his songs. 'Amsterdam' will most definitely be first. KOREAN: Working through the Lukoff book at an increasingly slow pace, since the vocabulary is getting harder (and less useful, one could say). I'm also up to chapter six of a book from my university's library, 基礎ハングル読本, the difficulty curve of which is rather steep. I'll see how far I get. For pronunciation practice, I've been working through Miho Choo and William O'Grady's The Sounds of Korean, which is truly excellent. I have finished the first story of Hyunwoo Sun (of Talk to Me in Korean)'s audiobook, and can now read it comfortably without recourse to the English translation. WANDERLUST SECTION: I've been considering buying the '70s Linguaphone Mandarin (on ebay for 70 pounds) to go with the first volume of New Practical Chinese Reader, the dialogues of which I find painfully slow. If anybody has any thoughts on it, please let me know! As much as I want to concentrate on Korean, the attraction to Mandarin is just too strong... 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| mayfair Diglot Senior Member Australia theasiaanalyst.wordp Joined 5410 days ago 48 posts - 74 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Mandarin | Message 13 of 21 27 February 2011 at 11:09pm | IP Logged |
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On Saturday was my seminar about Australia, which went pleasantly well. The most surprising part was that I was able to survive 40 minutes of questions from Osaka pensioners (due to their dialect, notoriously difficult to understand) without having to ask somebody to repeat what they had said. I found that it was possible to zone out for the first minute and listen for "知りたいのは・・・" ("What I want to know is..."). It was also the first time I've been paid for my language skills - pleasing on a more superficial level.
Since then, I've had a lot of time to study, and will for the rest of this week. I've been counting my study hours for each language and activity since yesterday, and will continue to do so for the rest of the week until I post it on Sunday. Hopefully this will become a weekly habit. I imagine I'll be quite pleased with the numbers, but given the amount of free time I have at the moment, they will be numbers that I can't hope to be able to replicate during 'normal time'. In other news, I had a dream last night in which I met my high school German teacher, who was always disappointed that I dropped German before my last year of high school despite being near the top of the class. I told him that I was going to learn German next, but I included Mandarin in the list of languages that I was already learning. I guess some things decide themselves. Edited by mayfair on 27 February 2011 at 11:12pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| mayfair Diglot Senior Member Australia theasiaanalyst.wordp Joined 5410 days ago 48 posts - 74 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Mandarin | Message 14 of 21 02 March 2011 at 12:26pm | IP Logged |
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I've found it amazing how much my motivation has been boosted by keeping a log of my study hours. My somewhat competitive nature has been helpful in ensuring that each day is a new challenge, where the target is the previous day's study time. I wouldn't tell anybody this without the anonymity of an internet forum!
I have a whole month of holidays from classes in March, so I've formulated some goals: one hour of Japanese, two hours of Korean and half an hour of French per day. While these might not be feasible when classes start, I should be able to achieve them for the time being. In bad news for my focus and my bank balance, I ended up buying Linguaphone Mandarin (50 pounds plus 35 pounds [!] postage). I guess the name of this thread will regain its accuracy. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| mayfair Diglot Senior Member Australia theasiaanalyst.wordp Joined 5410 days ago 48 posts - 74 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Mandarin | Message 15 of 21 05 March 2011 at 1:27am | IP Logged |
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I'm about to go away for a week, so I'll do my weekly update now despite only counting my study time for six days.
Japanese 8.05 hours (1.34 hours/day average) This is much higher in reality, because I had two hours of aikido training every day, which is all in Japanese, and many conversations with my native-speaker friends. Most of the time I counted was Anki reviews and book reading. I'd fallen way behind on my normal deck and my Remembering the Kanji deck (about 1500 cards combined due at the beginning of the week) and I've managed to get them down to 668. I've also been reading Kato Lomb's わたしの外国語学習方法. That book more than anything makes me enthusiastic about language learning. Every morning I've been watching Fuji News Network online feed and going through a GLOSS article. I strongly recommend the latter to anybody who is lucky enough to be studying one of the 40 languages they have content for. They even have some languages I have to confess to not having heard of. I'm not sure about the forum rules for link-dropping, but the site can be found at gloss.dliflc.edu. Classical Japanese 55 minutes (9 mins/day) A couple of days ago I borrowed Haruo Shirane's Classical Japanese: A Grammar and I've been working through this absolutely beautiful book since. There is a companion reader that the author recommends can be started after chapter 11, when the last of the inflected forms are introduced. Since the grammar is studied by itself before exposure to texts, it's a little bit tedious at the moment, but I'm very much looking forward to the reader. I'm currently on chapter 4 of the grammar. Korean 16.62 hours (2.77 hours/day) An Introductory Course in Korean - chapters 9-12 Speaking Korean hanja book - up to chapter 10, making Anki cards for the sentences with hanja for which I don't already know the readings The Sounds of Korean almost to the end of the consonants: ㅅ and ㅆ are killing me I also did a lot of reading and listening to Hyunwoo Sun's audiobook because it features a lot of vocabulary that I should be able to use in daily conversation. After I've finished it (I'm onto the last story of five), I'll throw myself into their 'Iyagi' podcasts, which was one of the goals from the beginning of my Korean study. French 3.93 hours (39 minutes/day) Now up to lesson 19 of Linguaphone. I'm still learning new things, but I'm certainly eager to finish it. At Kinokuniya (a huge book shop in Osaka) I found a Penguin Parallel Text with eight short stories, a huge biography of Albert Camus and a lovely-looking copy of Jacques Prévert's Paroles. I didn't buy them, but I might eventually be tempted. I'm going to wait until I finish two books my parents, who came to Japan yesterday, brought me over from my collection - Camus's L'Etranger and Simenon's L'Affaire Saint-Fiacre, both of which I read about three years ago. Mandarin 55 minutes (9 minutes/day) Definitely taking a back seat until the Linguaphone course arrives, but I did spend some time reviewing the FSI's Pronunciation and Romanisation modules. And for my March challenge, only including the last four days: Japanese (goal: 1hr/day on top of daily conversations) - 4h 50m Classical Japanese - 55m Korean (goal: 2hr/day) - 10h 13m French (goal: 30m/day) - 2h 30m Mandarin (perhaps my goal should be to resist taking too big a bite from the poisoned apple) - 35m Days goal achieved: 4/4 Edited by mayfair on 05 March 2011 at 1:33am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| mayfair Diglot Senior Member Australia theasiaanalyst.wordp Joined 5410 days ago 48 posts - 74 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Mandarin | Message 16 of 21 11 March 2011 at 3:45pm | IP Logged |
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For a few weeks I've been meaning to start a Korean journal, but it's only tonight that I've finally written something. I get next to no output practice, so I plan to post this on lang-8 later, and possibly to buy a premium membership just as a further incentive not to forget to use it.
Here is my first entry (corrections are welcome and will be much appreciated): 안녕하세요! 벤이라고 합니다. 반갑습니다. 저는 호주 사람인데, 지금 일본에서 교환 학생으로 공부하고 있어요. 어렸을 때부터 일본말을공부하고, 대학교에서도 일본말을 전공하고 있어요. 하지만, 작년 한국말도 공부하기 시작했어요. 왜냐하면, 외국어 공부하기를 정말 좋아하니까요! 그리고, 호주에서 한국 사람 유학생을 많이 만나고, 한국어도 공부하고 싶다는 결정을 내렸어요. 그 때부터 한국말을 혼자 배우려고 했지만, 중단한 일도 있었어요. 지금부터 꾸준히 공부하겠어요! 하지만 혼자 공부하기 때문에, 한국말로 말한 일이 별로 없어요. 한국말로 말할 때에는 언제나 긴장해요! 친구랑 말하는 연습을 해야 한다고 생각해요. Edit: silly spelling mistakes. Edited by mayfair on 12 March 2011 at 4:22am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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