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日本語: Beyond JLPT1 - Road to fluency | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| DavidHallgren Triglot Newbie Sweden Joined 5945 days ago 6 posts - 6 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, Japanese Studies: Mandarin | Message 1 of 10 19 June 2008 at 2:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Japanese: Beyond JLPT1 - The road to fluency
Dear all, I have decided to begin actively studying Japanese and Mandarin again after break during about a year and half. I also decided to try writing a logbook to track my progress and hopefully have interesting discussions about these languages and how to study them. I will keep separate logbooks for the two languages and this one will focus on Japanese. First, let me give you some background. I began studying Japanese in 2004 after having read a short introduction to the language. I never enjoyed learning languages in school but immediately felt that I wanted to decipher this language and be able to read those mysterious characters. I used Pimsleur, Genki, a self-developed SRS application and university classes to reach an intermediate level in about a year. I then received a scholarship to go to Tokyo for a year so I took a year off from my Engineering Physics studies to focus only on Japanese for a year during 2005 and 2006. In Japan I tried to immerse myself in the language as much as possible and constantly watched TV, read comics and novels, spoke to friends and studied textbooks. When I returned I could fairly comfortably follow both movies and novels in Japanese so I decided to make an attempt at JLPT level 1 which I passed in December 2006. Having done, so I felt that the lack of a new goal my passion for improving wore off and I focused on instead on my other studies and only kept my Japanese alive through Podcasts, sporadic meetings with exchange students or reading one of the many books I brought back. However, after having graduated from university about a year ago and working intensively as a strategy consultant I have now re-found my love for learning Japanese (and Mandarin which I have been looking at on and off since I started with Japanese). Restarting studies at a fairly advanced level poses an interesting problem and I am not sure on how to proceed but hope I can receive interesting suggestion from all of you other language lovers out there. My main targets are: * Improve my pronunciation which currently is far from perfect * Learn more formal Japanese to prepare me for the fairly likely possibility that I can be staffed at a project in Japan at my company * Learn to write the most common 2000-3000 kanji by hand and start studying calligraphy * Have fun! The methods I have considered are: * Shadowing audio books to perfect my pronunciation * Review all kanji with Heisig’s method using Review the Kanji to learn to write them (I find the stories much more effective for memorizing how to write them rather than simply writing them over and over again even though I already know most of the meanings) * Collect sentences into Anki to keep increasing my vocabulary, grammar and kanji reading * Read books other than novels such as popular science or work related books to learn more formal language Please feel free to ask me questions or come with ideas on what I should focus on to take my Japanese to the next level! Edited by DavidHallgren on 19 June 2008 at 2:53pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| DavidHallgren Triglot Newbie Sweden Joined 5945 days ago 6 posts - 6 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, Japanese Studies: Mandarin | Message 3 of 10 22 June 2008 at 4:37pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Today I read 宴会用の女 by さくらももこ in Read real Japanese and added about 10 sentences to my SRS software with expressions or words I did not knew or felt I would like to be able to use actively. I also did my daily reviews in Anki and Review the Kanji.
In addition I listened to a couple of Englishpod101.com lessons about 和製英語 which I find both quite amusing and informational. Tomorrow I hope I will have time to read a Sherlock Holmes story from sheetz fantastic list and shadow the audio book during my evening walk with my dog. waremchan: Thanks, I hope you found the site useful at some point! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| DavidHallgren Triglot Newbie Sweden Joined 5945 days ago 6 posts - 6 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, Japanese Studies: Mandarin | Message 5 of 10 30 June 2008 at 5:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
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A week since my last update due to the usual burden of work during crunch time before holidays, but I have been doing some progress.
I downloaded ボヘミアンスキャンダル ("A Scandal in Bohemia" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) and listened to the story once before reading it once. While reading it I also marked sentences for storing in my SRS database where I felt there were word or grammatical structures whose meaning I was unsure of. I have since been shadowing it once and hope to do so once or twice more during this week. I also started reading ゴス (Goth) by 乙一 (Otsu ichi), which seems like a really interesting book with a great writing style. Finally I also thought I would share one of the podcasts in Japanese that I frequently listen to: ヴォイニッチの科学書 - Link A weekly show about popular science. Each episode is ~30 min. I definitely recommend it if you are interested in science and would like to learn vocabulary related to that at the same time as you listen to scientific news being explained easily. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| DavidHallgren Triglot Newbie Sweden Joined 5945 days ago 6 posts - 6 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, Japanese Studies: Mandarin | Message 6 of 10 13 July 2008 at 1:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I just began my 3 week summer vacation! I will try to study both Japanese and Chinese frequently during my time of from work.
Since the last update I finished reading the first chapter of ゴス, called リストカット事件, which I really liked. I also read and listened to 注文の多い料理店. As always I try to do my daily Anki and Review the Kanji repetitions. Here is a sample of the type of cards I put into Anki. Front: 針の筵に座らされた思いだったよ Back: 針の筵・はりのむしろ 非常に恐ろしくて、まったく安心できない場 所の例え Front: 惚れてしまえば痘痕も笑窪 Back: 惚れていると相手の欠点も美点に見えるとい うたとえ。 惚れる・ほれる 恋をする 痘痕・あばた 天然痘にかかって治ったあと、顔の皮膚に残 る小さなくぼみ 笑窪・えくぼ 笑うと、頬にできる小さなくぼみ I find using monolingual dictionaries for the backside really effective to keep me focused on only the target language and use it for Chinese as well even though my level can hardly be called intermediate yet. How do you structure your SRS decks? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Rekunoto Senior Member United States Joined 6118 days ago 104 posts - 105 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Mandarin | Message 7 of 10 13 July 2008 at 9:12pm | IP Logged | |||||
I am assuming your question is open to everyone, if not, I am sorry for replying. In any case, since I am still learning kanji via "Remembering the Kanji", I use an SRS for long term memorization. This is how I structure my SRS cards.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| DavidHallgren Triglot Newbie Sweden Joined 5945 days ago 6 posts - 6 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, Japanese Studies: Mandarin | Message 8 of 10 14 July 2008 at 2:25am | IP Logged | |||||
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Absolutely, the question was open for everyone!
I see that you use AJATT's recommendation to put the story on the front, interesting. What is your experience using that? I can not get over the feeling that it would distract me from the main keyword and that I would simply have to remember SICKNESS and DODGY (without stories though), but then forget the actual word since I did not have to focus on going from the keyword to the story. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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