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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| snovymgodom Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5723 days ago 136 posts - 149 votes  Speaks: English*, Russian | Message 1 of 14 10 June 2009 at 6:46am | IP Logged | ||
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I've been reading through quite a few of these logs, and they seem very inspirational. Overall, it seems like a great way to test out different methods and share their effectiveness with fellow learners. The languages I am choosing for this log are Russian and Japanese. I will briefly outline my background and goals for these languages:
--- Russian: I'm currently an advanced learner of Russian - I have finished the advanced Russian language level at my university and I spent last summer in Almaty, Kazakhstan, where Russian is widely spoken along with Kazakh. I'm fairly confident in my Russian abilities and was able to function normally in Kazakhstan without big problems (and even studied Kazakh through Russian). However, I'd like to improve my fluency so that I am able to read longer texts such as novels without getting lost in words and phrases that I haven't seen. At the end of August, I will be leaving to study in St. Petersburg, Russia, where I will be until May 2010. I will be studying under the American Councils program, which consists of language instruction, cultural excursions, and other courses on politics, literature, media -- all in the Russian language. This summer I neither have a job nor am I taking classes - therefore I can devote a large amount of time to language study. The only setback is that I will have virtually no contact with native Russian speakers. In contrast to being at my university, where I studied Russian and had friends who spoke Russian, here I live in an isolated area in Florida with my family, and I don't have a car or any form of regular transportation. So here, my meetings with Russians are very spontaneous and spread out. Therefore I am not focusing much on speaking and conversation, since I will have plenty of exposure in Russia. Instead, I am taking time to read. Two semesters ago, I took an introductory Russian literature class (Pushkin, Gogol', Turgenev, Lermontov, Goncharov) with the texts in the English language. The Russian versions of the texts are available online and I've downloaded them to my computer. I'm currently working on reading some short stories by Pushkin. I like short stories, poems, and other types of creative literature because you are more likely to encounter emotive and descriptive prose and the idioms that are typical of everyday Russian speech. I don't read the news as often because it isn't as interesting to me. However, it can be useful for conversation topics and boosting active practical vocabulary, and I hope to use this in Russia. Generally, I am able to read a text without looking at the dictionary and understand the main idea of the text. However, one of my goals is to expand my vocabulary, and I am doing this with an SRS program (Anki). If the word is very easy to figure out from context, or if it is very similar in meaning and spelling to a word I know but only differs by a prefix, I ignore the word. If it is a word I am shaky on or completely do not know, I make an Anki card for it. Along with the word, I copy part of the sentence in the story that uses the word. I find that it helps me remember the word in the context of the story, which allows me to see the word in use rather than just an isolated form. But I haven't used SRS much in my studies, so this process is experimental and likely to change. And naturally, once I am in Russia my study habits will probably change by leaps and bounds. If anyone's wondering, I'm currently working on Pushkin's short story Метель. I've already read it in Russian, but I am in the process of going through the rest of the new vocabulary and expressions - there are some very striking ones in this story! So, that is what I have to say on Russian. Japanese: In this language I am a true beginner. What I know is a smattering of basic words and expressions that I may or may not know how to write correctly. Specifically, I can read hiragana slowly, but I can recognize all of the letters. Writing it is a little more difficult, but doable. As for katakana, on the other hand, my knowledge is very poor. I know only a few letters. As for kanji, I'd say that I can write out maybe 15-20. My only real Japanese resource in a hard copy form is called Basic Kanji Book Vol 1, by Bonjinsha co. Ltd. It goes through 500 Kanji, and I've done the first two units. But I should probably inform you all of why I am interested in Japanese. I've studied a number of languages, but I haven't seriously studied any East Asian languages. The reason I picked Japanese is as follows: a) I am interested in the Altaic theory that links Japanese with Turkic languages and Mongolian (Korean is also a candidate) b) I am interested in understanding how kanji work (in the context of the Japanese language, as well as Chinese characters in general sense) c) I find Japanese easier to learn to pronounce than Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese, etc.) or Korean d) I know many others who study the language and am in contact with native speakers, also there is a plethora of resources on the Internet and places where I am submit compositions to be corrected quickly... From that description it probably seems that I am more interested in learning "about" the language than actually trying to learn the language. That is partially true, but I would also like to be able to read some of the Japanese that exists in Japan-only video games, for example. Or when it comes to any Japanese text, news article, etc., I would like to see the page as something more than a mess of characters where I had no idea what was going on. I am not looking for the same level of fluency as I seek in Russian (though if I get more serious about Japanese, it may change). That said, I still don't know very much about Japanese culture. But I generally look at the language first and through my studies try to understand the nuances of the culture. Also, I am not going to Japan any time soon, and the hundreds of kanji I have not learned will be more than enough to keep me occupied, I feel. If I am still keeping this up by the time I am in Russia, I will probably purchase some Japanese learning materials in Russian. Also, I've heard of the Heisig method and it sounds interesting, but I am not going to buy the book just yet. Unless there is a free version out there. --- So right now my goals for these languages are kind of vague, and that is intentional. I am new to doing the language log and I will not set any restrictions just yet. I want to see how things go, and observe the kind of progress I make. I hope to keep you all updated! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| snovymgodom Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5723 days ago 136 posts - 149 votes Speaks: English*, Russian | Message 2 of 14 11 June 2009 at 4:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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June 10 2009
I finished putting in the new vocabulary from Метель, I have around 175 words in Anki. I also read and finished Pushkin's Станционный смотритель (which I had read in English when I was taking the class) and collected all of the words I was unsure of, but I haven't yet put them into Anki. I began reading Арап Петра Великого, collecting words on the way. I'm just going to note some interesting things that I've found while reading Pushkin. First, the forms это, этого, are not used all that much in his writing. Rather, the form I see most often is сей, сего, сему, etc. Also, as is common in literature, I see the instrumental forms ending in -ою rather than -ой, and also some words use -ию instead of -ью in the instrumental. I've also learned some new adverbs from seeing them over and over again, such as поминутно (this is a VERY frequent word in Метель, and it means "constantly", literally "by the minute"). Then there's рассеянно, "absentmindedly, thoughtlessly". I'm also interested in the idiomatic nature of Russian, and I found the phrase "броситься к ногам (кого-то)", which means "to throw oneself at the mercy (of someone). It literally implies throwing oneself at someone's feet, so you can visualize it. I didn't spend any time going over Japanese.
Thanks for the response! I would say that some of the main challenges in Russian are understanding all of the nuances of the verbs of motion, along with understanding the nuances of many other verbs that have prefixes. Russian is an inflecting language and uses endings for noun and adjective declension along with verb conjugation, but since I've had those things memorized for a few years already, it's not an issue. When looking at sentences and paragraphs in Russian, compared to a language like Kazakh, the structure is fairly close to English. English-like SVO sentences are permissible, but you can also find SOV often. The main thing is that the cases are all correct - the variations in word order serve to put emphasis on different parts of the sentence. I'd say one of the weirder things in Russian grammar that you don't see in English is when you have complex adjectives that contain a prepositional phrase. These are often used in place of the relative clauses. Example: "приготовленная для него кровать". Literally, it reads "prepared for him bed". When you read it, you are supposed to see the first three words as an adjective, describing the bed. So you would translate it as "the bed that was prepared for him". 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| KiwiKiwi Tetraglot Groupie Belgium Joined 5694 days ago 50 posts - 50 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, German, French Studies: Italian, Russian | Message 3 of 14 11 June 2009 at 6:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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Good luck with your goals, very interesting languages!
Do you want to practice both languages each day or rather alternate between days? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| snovymgodom Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5723 days ago 136 posts - 149 votes Speaks: English*, Russian | Message 4 of 14 11 June 2009 at 6:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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Right now I'm not confining myself to any particular schedule. But I do plan to study SOMETHING every day. But the amount of time I spend on Russian will be proportionally higher than Japanese. Right now I don't plan on spending more than an hour or two each day on Japanese. Russian is the language that is very important to me, and when I am in Russia it will definitely be my language of focus, but I plan to look at Japanese at times when looking at Cyrillic for hours tires my brain. Even though I love Russian and it is a very beautiful and rich language, looking at it for too long can be a little tiresome and it is refreshing sometimes to delve into the world of kanji and look at things I am much less familiar with. Edited by snovymgodom on 11 June 2009 at 6:22pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| snovymgodom Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5723 days ago 136 posts - 149 votes Speaks: English*, Russian | Message 5 of 14 12 June 2009 at 5:31am | IP Logged | ||
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June 11 2009
Russian: I finished reading Арап Петра Великого, gathering a very large amount of words along the way. I think that in the future, when I am reading longer texts that are divided into sections or chapters, I will put the words into Anki after each chapter, rather than doing it all at once at the end. This is also because certain words repeat themselves and are probably important to understand the story. However, I have read this particular story in English so it is familiar to me. I noticed that a fair amount of the unknown words here are about clothing. That is because I know only the bare-bones vocabulary of Russian clothing, and since this story was written in 1837 it makes sense that Russian fashion has changed quite a bit. The question is whether I should memorize these words or not. Since I'll be reading more Pushkin, it won't kill me to memorize them, but when I move on to other things I won't kill myself if some of those words slip out of my memory. Tomorrow I'm going to catch up on my vocabulary, inputting the new words from Арап Петра Великого and from Станционный смотритель and spending some time reviewing them. If I have time, I want to get a head start on the next two stories, Выстрел and Пиковая дама. I have read the English translations of both of these stories already, and like the other stories, I have the translations with me as reference. I don't look at the translations while I am reading - rather, I use them when I go back over the text for new words and use them (along with the dictionary sometimes) to help acquire definitions. I find it tedious to keep flipping through the dictionary, especially when these are obscure words that don't appear in my pocket Russian dictionary. Japanese: It turns out that my hiragana still needs a little work. I am constantly confusing "sa" and "chi" since they are nearly mirror images of each other. I think one way I can remember it is that the lower part of "sa" has a C-shape in it, and the Russian letter for /s/ looks just like a C. So when I see that C I know to make an /s/ sound. I learned some new kanji today and put the vocabulary from this unit into Anki. Tomorrow I will include in my update that kanji that I have learned. I need to spend more time practicing writing the kanji, though, especially the newer ones. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| snovymgodom Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5723 days ago 136 posts - 149 votes Speaks: English*, Russian | Message 6 of 14 13 June 2009 at 8:28am | IP Logged | ||
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June 12 2009
Russian: I didn't accomplish all that much today. I woke up late and was a bit distracted watching videos and reading forums, among other things. I put a few words into Anki, then I spent some time looking at the first book Таня Гроттер, a Russian spin-off of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. I could understand the main idea of was going on, but there were still a lot of words that I couldn't understand. I'm eventually going to look up those words and see how much clearer I can understand the story (due to legal issues no official English translation has made an appearance.) That said, I don't know if I'll continue reading the novel anyway since it is easier for me to get through shorter texts. I feel like at some point I want to arrange my newly-gathered vocabulary words and organize them by root. Generally when I see a word that I am not sure of, I try to look at the word and see if there is a root that I recognize. Then I look at the word in the context of the sentence and see if I can deduce the meaning of the word. But often enough there are times when the meaning of the word when combined with prefixes and suffixes makes it very hard to deduce the meaning from the root and context alone, and that is when a word really needs to be memorized. I'm fairly familiar with the roots and the consonant mutations in Russia, and I have a book called Roots of the Russian Language by George Z. Patrick. So I'll still use Anki but I also want to have some lists so that I can memorize groups of words that share the same root but that I would otherwise confuse. In the future I will give examples of what I mean. Also, since I am gathering a very large amount of words, I feel like at some point I should go through them all and organize them by categories and importance. As I mentioned earlier, I have many newly acquired words relating to clothes. But in reality, I rarely talk in-depth about clothes, and unless I go clothes shopping in Russia I won't really need the vocabulary (and the relevant vocabulary will probably be different than what I have been reading in Pushkin's literature). So I feel like I should take all the clothes-related stuff out of Anki and just put them in a list for reference. Another example is words relating to speech, how one is speaking, whispering, shouting, muttering, etc. From literature I've found a lot of descriptive vocabulary relating to this, and I want to consolidate it somewhere. Overall, I want all this to help me become more conscious of the nuances that can be seen in the verbs with prefixes. Japanese: I actually spent more time than usual on Japanese today. I learned the next set of kanji, and they all were combinations of simple kanji that I had learned and memorized earlier. So it made learning them a bit easier, as it was basically just writing the kanji I know, but smaller and in different positions. Though it didn't make the phonetic reading of them any easier. That seems to be the hardest part for me, memorizing the phonetic part of it. But right now I've really only been looking at kanji themselves without paying much attention to the grammar/sentence structure of the language. Maybe I should incorporate some Japanese grammar lessons into my studies. I still want to have katakana memorized though. I've also been posting on TheJapanesePage forums, which seems to be a good resource and filled with helpful people. One of them showed me a link to WWWJDIC, a dictionary that will give hiragana readings for words and phrases built of kanji. That's very useful to me, since I've encountered a lot of kanji-only phrases that I have no idea how to pronounce. I'm also becoming more and more conscious of the irregularity of the language. I thought the phrase for "what minute" would be nanbun なんぶん because of the ん in なん nan, but it turns out that it is なんぷん nanpun. But it's still fascinating, and some day I hope to understand this language much better. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| SII Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5790 days ago 184 posts - 194 votes Speaks: Russian* Studies: English | Message 7 of 14 13 June 2009 at 1:02pm | IP Logged | ||
snovymgodom
And, if I don't make a mistake, なんぷん will be read as "nampun": the sound "n" -> "m" before "b" and "p". 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| snovymgodom Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5723 days ago 136 posts - 149 votes Speaks: English*, Russian | Message 8 of 14 13 June 2009 at 8:09pm | IP Logged | ||
You're probably correct. This type of sandhi/assimilation is common in all types of languages, and there are other words in Japanese like "senpai" (which is often pronounced "sempai"). 1 person has voted this message useful |
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