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TAC 09 - Japanese and now French too! | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5986 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes  Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 9 of 15 28 May 2009 at 7:29pm | IP Logged |
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I have updated the first post of this thread as I now feel ready to begin re-learning French and began a regular study programme in the middle of this month. I am using Anki (so effective yet so boring) for vocabulary, sentences (doing accurate translations French to English *and* English to French) and conjugations. I am listening to one Daily French Pod podcast a day at the moment and am also working through Français Interactif on the grounds that it appears to be a thorough introduction and is free. I also bought myself a book called Easy French Reader which I am currently working through one chapter a day. And all this I am fitting into around 30 minutes every day so far, although I think if I want to commit to getting good at French I will have to push this up to at least an hour eventually. One thing I do find a little sad is that I don't experience the same level of sheer pleasure listening to French or reading French materials as I do with Japanese. I'm not sure how much of this is to do with how I've fallen in love with Japanese and how much is baggage from my school days.
As for Japanese news, I have again edited the first post to my learning log as I am not going to achieve the goals I listed at the beginning of the year, and seeing them each time I log in is both depressing and counterproductive. I will probably set some more realistic intermediate goals at some point but really the only goal is to get good at Japanese, and I don't have a timsecale for that! I finished Basic Kanji Book I in the middle of this month and it felt truly amazing to get to the end of a textbook. Including the ones I've picked up from Genki I now know around 300 of the most common kanji and I keep seeing them everywhere. It is yet another hint that the 2000 you supposedly need to read is not such a clear cut figure. I'm already wondering how I'll manage with 500 and a dictionary...and then of course 1000. I'm on chapter 18 of Genki and I'm utterly fed up with it. It was great for an elementary grammar reference, but now I have better books for that. The dialogues are too few and the voice actors too irritating. The huge vocabulary lists at the start of each chapter are not especially helpful as half of the words given do not appear to even have examples of usage given in that chapter. And the way that kanji are introduced and used in the reading section is somewhat illogical and bemusing (unlike the excellent Basic Kanji Book which seems to take an incredibly well thought out approach) I'm torn as to whether to just drop it completely and work on a different textbook, or whether to fight it out (only another 6 chapters after all). I'm still regularly listening to the JapanesePod101 podcasts, which have gone up in my estimation from "slightly annoying and not very helpful" to "very helpful and quite funny too". So some things are worth sticking with! I'm still not properly studying Russian...but I've ordered the Penguin Russian Course from the library and will use it to at least read about Russian (along with the Princeton Course) before I decide whether to commit. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5986 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 10 of 15 26 June 2009 at 12:47am | IP Logged |
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Well after my brief start to restarting French, I'm back to just Japanese. I simply don't have the time to focus on two languages, and at the moment I'm struggling to find the time to focus on just the one.
I took the big leap and dropped Genki as I was getting so fed up with it. I have looked a bit at Japanese for Everyone but to be honest I'm not getting very excited about textbooks at all at the moment. I seem to have reached a bit of a plateau, not just in terms of my ability but also in terms of my willingness to study. I'm still keeping up with my flashcards and do a small amount of listening/watching TV/reading a week and I think I have to be happy with that for now. It means I'm not getting any better, but I'm not deteriorating either, so I can always push on with it later when I have more time and energy. There have been some things going on in my personal life, which I don't want to log here. Suffice to say that while it is all very positive, it means I do have less time to devote to languages, and that this may well be the case for some time to come. At the same time, learning Japanese has become a part of my life too and I am nowhere near ready to give it up, I just seem to be constantly lowering my expectations - and as this is essentially something I am doing "just for fun" I think that is ok too. I have started watching Densha Otoko (first two eps so far). It is the first Japanese drama I have watched completely without subs. Obviously there is a lot of dialogue I don't get...but I'm still getting enough to make it a thoroughly satisfying experience. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5986 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 11 of 15 30 July 2009 at 8:04pm | IP Logged |
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It's now been a year since I began my Japanese studies, so I am feeling quite reflective at the moment. I would say that I haven't done as well as I'd dreamed, but I'm still pretty pleased with my progress. I am going back to university now in September, to study something that is completely unrelated to language learning but is still very exciting for me - however combining full time work with part time post graduate study probably won't leave me with much time left for Japanese and at the moment I'm not sure whether to aim to learn as efficiently as possible with the time available, or just to have fun with the language when I can. I am seriously veering towards the latter option!
I have been working on rationalising the way that I use flashcards (Anki) as, quite frankly, I am fed up of them! I have dropped decks for individual kanji, but maintaining a deck for reading and writing kanji as part of words. I have also dropped L2 > L1 vocabulary cards and am considering dropping the whole deck for individual vocabulary words now. I think it was really helpful for the first 1000 - 1500 words, to help keep them in mind until I spotted them "in the wild" - which, with such common words, happens quite regularly - but with a deck of around 2400 facts I have so many cards now for different words for things like "place" or "and then" that I think it's becoming counterproductive. I am considering having a go with Iversen's famous word list method instead. Kanji are proving to be somewhat frustrating. Once my place at university was confirmed I tried to cram in as many new kanji as I could from Kanji in Context (yeah! 2000 in a summer!) thinking if I could get it over with now it would leave me with more time to have fun with the language later. But I found the whole thing boring, time consuming and lost interest after a week and a half. I will go back to working with Basic Kanji Book 2 shortly, but at a more leisurely pace. More importantly, I have reached the point where I really need to read more. I am working through a series called Japanese Graded Readers which are pretty nicely done - the language is pretty simple, especially at Level 1, and the fact that they come with CDs is a really nice touch. It's just a shame I can't find more materials like these. I still really like JapanesePod101 and Tae Kim's Grammar Guide! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5986 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 12 of 15 27 August 2009 at 9:07pm | IP Logged |
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I can't believe it's already been a month since my last post. There is not much to report this time around so I will keep it brief. I am back to working with Basic Kanji Book 2 and on the second chapter so far.
I have finished listening to the most recent Beginner series on JPod101 and am now working through the original Beginner series which is a little different - I think I prefer the more recent series because they have a much better structure, but it is interesting nevertheless. I've started on the Level 2 books from the Japanese Graded Reader series. I think the Level 1 books were perhaps slightly too easy, however these seem to be at just the right level for me now. Finally, reducing my Anki decks turned out to be such a great idea. Unless I have added a load of new kanji words I get through my reviews within 15 minutes and this amount of time seems worth it for the results. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5986 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 13 of 15 24 September 2009 at 9:22pm | IP Logged |
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I've not had much time for language work this month (and I fear this will only get worse from now on as my course has started). I have worked out a "bare minimum" programme for myself which basically consists of doing my flashcards every day (which takes 10-15 minutes) and listening to a JPod101 podcast every day. Anything I can do on top of that (such as reading, watching TV, kanji or grammar study) is a bonus. The result is that I have hit something of a plateau, which is to be expected but at the same time my hope at the moment is that I don't lose what I have achieved these last 12 months.
Realistically, it is not likely that I will go and live in Japan and in my chosen career Japanese is very unlikely to be necessary. I have been studying the language purely for the pleasure of learning it and I certainly find that the more I learn, the more beautiful the language becomes (in a purely abstract sense). But I am beginning to wonder how much I can realistically achieve here and sometimes even consider giving up the venture. I just have to keep reminding my competitive self that it isn't a race and I am only doing it for fun after all! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5986 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 14 of 15 29 October 2009 at 8:04pm | IP Logged |
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Well over this past month I seem to have gone through the wall I had hit some time this summer and actually feel like I have been making progress. I have been watching much more Japanese drama and anime, some with subtitles and some without, and for the easier stuff I feel like I am understanding more and more.
On top of that, I have managed to have a few conversations, in Japanese, with Japanese people via Skype, mostly after meeting them on SharedTalk. Clearly my Japanese is still fairly basic but I surprised myself at how far I could sustain a conversation without getting stuck, although the people I spoke to were generally speaking somewhat slower than they might normally do, and probably choosing their vocabulary carefully! I have started looking at the example sentences in Kanji in Context, having realised that most of them, in the initial chapters anyway, appear to be only slightly too difficult for me to understand straight away. With the help of a dictionary, or failing that by asking one of the native Japanese people I have made contact with online for help, not only am I making sense of them, but I also seem to be able to pick up and remember things which then crop up in the dramas that I watch. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5986 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 15 of 15 31 December 2009 at 7:27pm | IP Logged |
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Well I spent quite a bit of time composing a final post for this log and then something weird happened with my computer and I lost it. On top of which, my post for November also seems to have mysteriously disappeared. I hope it comes back, for posterity if nothing else.
So I will keep this brief. I know more Japanese now than I did 12 months ago. But there is still a long way to go. I can exchange emails and text chat quite comfortably. However speaking and reading (especially things like the news) are still difficult. I am surprised to have discovered that I have "picked up" some kanji - such as お願い and 頑張って because I see them a lot, although I still couldn't handwrite them. So I suddenly find myself unable to say confidently how many kanji I really know (I'd guess somewhere between 350-400 depending on how confident I'm feeling). The more Japanese I learn, the more I realise how much further there is to go. Some days this feels quite depressing. Other days I am ready for the challenge. I have found it hard to write usefully and reflectively about my experiences of learning Japanese, so I will not be continuing with a 2010 log. However, I shall still be continuing learning Japanese! Some vague plans involve watching more ドラマ, doing more voicechat on skype, getting a better handle on the grammar I have already studied, and also learning more cool stuff. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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