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Japanese and an Assimil Experiment | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| sabotai Senior Member United States Joined 5886 days ago 391 posts - 489 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Japanese, Korean, French | Message 1 of 55 04 December 2009 at 6:33am | IP Logged |
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Current Levels
Japanese: This is the language I am focusing of most since it's the language I want to learn the most. I am an absolute beginner. Current resources are Japanesepod101.com, Remembering the Kanji 1, and Japanese in Mangaland. German: Reading is Intermediate, speaking and listening are still pretty much beginner. Spanish: Very little. Did Assimil for awhile, did the passive phase for the first third of it, but then stopped. Also tried to do shadowing with this. Spent weeks trying to do it, but I did not like it. French: None. Italian: None. Current System for Japanese 1) I do 5 Japanesepod101.com lessons a day. Currently doing 2 Survival Phrases (aimed mostly at tourists), 2 Newbie and 1 Beginner lesson a day. There are far fewer Survival Phrases and Newbie lessons than there are Beginner lessons, so as I finish them, I'll add to how many Beginner lessons I do. I intend to review the podcasts by editing the audio files down to the most relevant examples and grammar points of each lesson, and listening to them as a review. There is a lot of crossover with the Newbie and Beginner series, so there is some review there as well. 2) I do 50 Kanji from Remembering the Kanji every 3 days. Now, I know the system is supposed to work so that you only need to do it once and then start reviewing them. But that doesn't work so well for me, so what I do is do the same batch of 50 Kanji 3 straight days, and begin reviewing on the second day using Anki. This gives me a nice steady pace, I don't feel like I am rushing through them, and learning/reviewing the stories 3 straight days really cements them for me. I also give all new Kanji a failing score the first time I do them to ensure that I see them again the next day. Maybe you can argue by doing it this way it becomes more of a rote memorization exercise rather then Heisig 's method....but it seems to be working really well for me and that's the most important thing. 3) Japanese in Mangaland. I like these books. They are simple, very newbie, but as starter "structure" books, they give a nice "top-down" overview of the language without getting bogged down in details. I read a chapter most nights. I have finished chapter 11 of the first book. (read a chapter 2 out of every 3 nights) At the pace I am going, I will be done with these three sometime in March. It was looking like the end of February, but a missed day due to not feeling well/going out/etc. pushes it back a day here and there, so realistically I should be done with all of the Beginner podcasts, Remembering the Kanji 1 and the 3 Japanese in Mangaland books in March, all around the same time. This system currently takes me a total of around 3 hours a day. I started nearly 2 weeks ago. I'll then move on to the Intermediate podcasts, perhaps work in Assimil Japanese somehow and find a third resource. I have several books that are more detailed on grammatical topics like sentence structures and particles. I will probably start reading through them. But I haven't decided on anything concrete yet. Current German System Don't really have one. Up until today, I was SRSing sentences to gain vocab, but I've been learning the vocab really well lately. I decided I am going to stop SRSing German (getting kinda sick of it and don't want to burn out due to SRSing stuff in other languages.) I am going to start reading Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen, and do my best to stick with using a monolingual dictionary. At some point, I'm also going to start doing LR with some audiobooks and paraellel texts, but German has been pushed down my priority list so my German studies will probably not be every single day. More like every two or three days I will pick up Harry Potter and try to read a some. We'll see how that goes. Assimil Experiment: French, Spanish and Italian I am going to attempt to use 3 Assimil courses in 2010: French With Ease, Spanish With Ease and Italian With Ease. Prior to 2010: Import the audio for the three courses and begin creating audio files for each line in the lessons. The plan is to SRS the sentences from the Assimil lessons, and I want to have the audio with the text when I am SRSing. So, I will start doing that this month so that when I start, I will have a lot of audio files ready to go and I won't have to take any more time out of every day to create them. When it comes time to do the "active phase", I intend to copy the Anki deck and reverse the front and back and do it that way, if I end up doing the "active phase" that is. Jan. 1st: Begin French With Ease and do 1 lesson a day. Input the sentences into Anki and begin reviewing the next day. If I keep pace, I should finish French With Ease sometime in April. 113 lessons - 16 grammar reviews (which I'll read at times but I will go on to the next 'real' leasson) = 97 lessons. Given that I will probably miss a day here and there, that puts me finishing it probably in the middle of April. I will continue to do my SRS reps for French for the rest of the year. May 1st, 2010: Begin Spanish With Ease. Do the same with Spanish as I will do with French. September 1st, 2010: Begin Italian With Ease. Do the same with Italian as I will do for French and Spanish. I anticipate this taking about an hour each day. 15-30 minutes per lesson, about the same time to do the SRS reps once they start to build up, and then time needed to input the sentences into Anki. Some days maybe less than an hour, some days more. The goal of this is to see what my results are if I just use Assimil plus Anki SRS (w/ audio). Assimil is a product I push when people ask me about language learning, but it's not a product I've actually used from beginning to end. I used it to help my German a bit, and I used it the first time I began Spanish, but I never finished. So this is a test to see if Assimil really is as good as I think it. My expectations is to be able to say that I am a very solid Beginner in these languages by the end of 2010, well on my way to Intermediate. If I can say I am Intermediate in any of the languages (in any aspect), I will very happy with the results. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Shadow1984 Groupie United States Joined 5493 days ago 53 posts - 57 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 2 of 55 04 December 2009 at 11:30am | IP Logged |
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Sabotai,
It sounds like you have been doing a lot of thinking on how you are going to go about learning the languages that you want to learn. I will also be picking up Japanese as a language on January first and will be using two of the resources that you will be using as well. I will be reviewing you process. Have fun! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| sabotai Senior Member United States Joined 5886 days ago 391 posts - 489 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Japanese, Korean, French | Message 3 of 55 06 December 2009 at 10:05am | IP Logged |
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Vielen dank!
Friday December 4th, 2009 Fridays have a way of messing with my schedule. Not only because it's the day I go food shopping, bank, etc. that takes time away, but it's the end of the week and I am usually exhausted. Ended up falling asleep before I could get to doing the next batch of Kanji. 1) Kanji SRS - 30 minutes 2) Japanese101.com lessons: 75 minutes Total time: 105 minutes Saturday December 5th, 2009 Back on track, but a change in my Japanesepod101.com usage. The lessons all started out around 10 minutes, maybe a few minute longer. Now, some of them are getting close to 20 minutes and taking too much time. As a result, I'm only doing 1 Survival Phrase lesson a day instead of two, for a total of 4 podcast a day (rather than 5). One podcast I listened to today took 23 minutes. I decided on 5 based on it taking about 60 minutes. Today got me well beyond the 60 minute mark. Besides, the Survival Phrases are mainly aimed at tourists. They're a nice, change of pace addition, but by far the least important of the three series I am listening through. 1) Kanji SRS - 30 minutes 2) Japanesepod101.com lessons - 80 minutes (did 5 today, will be 4 from now on) 3) Remembering the Kanji, Kanji #613-#674 - 75 minutes (72 Kanji - a little over 1 minute per Kanji) Jpod101 finished Survival Phrases: finished to S1-Episode #27 - skipped the World Cup lesson. Was just a bunch of soccer vocab. Not a fan of soccer, and even if I were, soccer vocabulary can wait. #26 and #27 were about riding the rails (the next three will be as well) Newbie: finished to S1-Episode #29 - Only 1 episode left until I move on to Season 2 lessons. Beginner: finished to S1-Episode #13 Total time: 195 minutes 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| sabotai Senior Member United States Joined 5886 days ago 391 posts - 489 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Japanese, Korean, French | Message 4 of 55 07 December 2009 at 7:39am | IP Logged |
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Sunday December 6th, 2009
Japanespod101.com - Completed Survival Phrase S1-E28, Newbie S1-E30, S2-E1. Meant to do Beginner S1-E14, but ate dinner and then....forgot. 60 minutes. Kanji: SRS took 45 minutes (new batch of Kanji added) and reviewed #613-#674 - 45 minutes. Having a hard time with this batch. Japanese in Mangaland: Chapters 13 and 14 covered the -i and -ne adjectives. 30 minutes. Total Time: 180 minutes - 3 hours 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| sabotai Senior Member United States Joined 5886 days ago 391 posts - 489 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Japanese, Korean, French | Message 5 of 55 08 December 2009 at 6:58am | IP Logged |
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Monday, December 7th, 2009
Kanji SRS - 45 minutes. This batch is giving me a hard time, so I may extend this group another day or two. The thing is, I know the method is working for me. When I read Japanese, the Kanji I have done through RtK pop out to me. Sometimes I don't recall their meaning/keyword, but I instantly recognize the Kanji, know how it's drawn, and it doesn't look like a bunch of random lines and squiggles like the Kanji that I don't know. It's recognizable, and that, to me, is the main popint of doing it. But going from keyword->Kanji in the reviews like you are supposed to (according to Heisig), man, that's a little rough on me. Not gonna mess with it though. It's working as intended and I'm going to push through it. Anyway, that's it. Didn't do anything else active. Total Time: 45 minutes I guess I can chalk this up as a "research" day. I spent a lot of time watching videos put up by polyglots and other language learners on YouTube. One video I watched was a video by Moses McCormick. He described how he creates exercises for himself from the Teach Yourself books. Here's a link to the video I'm talking about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-RRj0FNoHg (Laoshu's boot camped exercises) In the video, he talks about learning new constructions and using vocab words to practice the constructions as well as learn the vocabulary. He gives a few examples of it. It reminded me of a Japanese book I have that I was planing on getting to soon. It's called Japanese Sentence Patterns for Effective Communication. Each chapter is broken up into types of patterns. For instance the first chapter is called "Identifying and Describing People and Things". Chapter 2 is "Describing the Existance of Animate and Inanimate Objects", Chapter 3 is "Making Comparisons", etc. Each chapter has about a dozen to two dozen 'patterns'. In Chapter one, it starts off with "I am John Harris." and gives two patterns, watashi wa and watashi ga and explains the difference. Gives a few more examples, gives you several new words and then you are given a few sentences to translate into Japanese. Then it goes to the next pattern. "Mr. Oda is a teacher of Japanese.". Gives more examples of professions, gives a few more vocab words, a few more exercises with the new words, on to the next pattern. "This is my dictionary.", "This dictionary is mine." Using kore (sore, etc.) and kono (sono, etc.). More examples, words, exercises, and so on. Chapter 2 starts with "There is a TV set." "There are boys." and then builds on that. Chapter 3 starts with "Today is colder than yesterday", and then goes on from there. You get the idea. So anyway, I went looking through my German books to see if I had anything like this and I don't. I placed an order with Amazon a few days ago. Two of the things I ordered were "Teach Yourself Improve Your German" and "Teach Yourself German Conversation." My plan (yes, yes, I'm changing my German plan for the 3rd time in a week. :) ) is to try to do something similar to what Moses McCormick does. I'm going to use the patterns in the two Teach Yourself products that I should be getting on Wed. and as I'm working through them, take Vocab from either the Teach Yourself itself or from a book called Mastering German Vocabulary. Another thought I had was taking the sentences from the Japanese book I mentioned and translating them into German as practice, while also using new vocab words. Essentially following the book and using German instead of Japanese. We'll see what happens. So yeah, that's basically what I did today. Spent a lot of time working out this and a few other ideas I had from watching a lot of language YouTube videos. "Research" day. That's my excuse for today. :) Edited by sabotai on 08 December 2009 at 7:02am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| sabotai Senior Member United States Joined 5886 days ago 391 posts - 489 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Japanese, Korean, French | Message 6 of 55 09 December 2009 at 8:13am | IP Logged |
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Tuesday December 8, 2009
Japanesepod101.com - Completed Survival Phrases E1-29, Newbie S2-E2, S2-E3, Beginner S1-E14. (~60 minutes) Japanese in Mangaland - Chapter 15, about honorific titles. Easy since I know all about them already. (~15 minutes) Kanji SRS - 30 minutes Kanji Review - #613-#674. 30 minutes Japanese Sentence Patterns - Decided that there is no time like the present to start reading and studying this book. What I did was write out all of the sentences and do the exercises for the first 2 patterns of chapter 1. Took a while since I'm not used to writing Japanese yet and some of the kanji were new. 60 minutes Total Time: 195 minutes (3 hours 15 minutes) Should be getting my new German products tomorrow and getting back into doing some German every day. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| sabotai Senior Member United States Joined 5886 days ago 391 posts - 489 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Japanese, Korean, French | Message 7 of 55 10 December 2009 at 7:49am | IP Logged |
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Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Japanesepod101.com - Completed Survival Phrases S1-E30, Newbie S2-E4 and 5, Beginner S1-E15. This is going to be the last Survival Phrase I do and am going to add another Newbie lesson. Reason being, I'm kinda tired of hearing them say "That is beyond the scope of this lesson, just remember to say....". It'll probably sit better with me after I do all of the Newbie and Beginner lessons. I'm not going to Japan anytime soon, so it's not like I need them. - 60 minutes Kanji SRS - 30 minutes Japanese Sentence Patterns - Did Patterns 3-6, looked over the first two again. Started out slow again, but starting to get the flow of using this book. - 90 minutes Total Time: 3 hours No German today, but I did get my Amazon order. Here's the bag of goodies I got. Teach Yourself German Conversation - Listened to the CDs a bit and this is definitely for beginners. Since peaking is what I need a lot of help on, I'll probably use these here and there, but will take a backseat to Imporve Your German. These do seem like a great suppliment to the regular Teach Yourself German Course, so if I use Teach Yourself for learning a language, I'll probably get this product for the language as well. Teach Yourself Improve Your German - Looked through the book some and listened to a bit of the CDs. I like what I see and hear and I hope to dive into this tomorrow. Teach Yourself Russian - I don't have any plans to learn Russian anytime soon, but I wanted to see what a normal Teach Yourself course was like so I ordered the Russian version since I don't have anything for Russian yet. It's on my shortlist for 2011, but we'll see how French, Spanish and Italian go. I might not get to it until the later half of 2011. But no time like the present to at least get used to the sound of the language and the alphabet, right? I really like what I see and hear so far. It really isn't that far off from Assimil, IMO. More grammar explanation, maybe a little less vocab and no direct translations, but from the appearance of the book and CDs, I can see myself using this product in the same way I plan to use Assimil. Seven Samurai DVD - Finally got around to buying this. One of my favorite movies. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| sabotai Senior Member United States Joined 5886 days ago 391 posts - 489 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Japanese, Korean, French | Message 8 of 55 11 December 2009 at 6:02am | IP Logged |
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Thursday, December 10, 2009
It's December 10th already? .... Japanesepod101.com - Newbie S2-E6,7 and 8, Beginner S1-E16 - 60 minutes Kanji SRS - 20 minutes Japanese in Mangaland - Champer 16 - Particles. Gave a brief overview of some of the more common particles. 30 minutes Wasn't up to doing the next batch of Kanji tonight. I'll do them tomorrow. Japanese: 110 minutes TY Improve Your German - Started working on this. Listened to the first dialog 3 times, then 3 times while following the text, 1 without text again and then once with it. Then I looked over the dialog, looked for patterns and common expressions. For example, I saw "...macht mir sehr viel Spaß." twice. Sprachen lernen macht mir sehr viel Spaß. = I have a lot of fun learning languages. (More literally: Language learning gives (makes) me a lot of fun) German: 30 minutes Total Time: 140 minutes 1 person has voted this message useful |
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