|
 |
Japanese Rewrite 東亜 TAC 2015 | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Woodsei Bilingual Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Woodsei Joined 4609 days ago 614 posts - 782 votes  Speaks: English*, Arabic (Egyptian)* Studies: Russian, Japanese, Hungarian | Message 9 of 47 04 January 2015 at 11:06pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Yeah. Extensive reading is super effective, but it takes some work for you to see the benefits. Like, reading 60 pages and expecting magic to happen, that's not very realistic. It's more along the line of 6000 pages. Actually, you CAN have good comprehension along the lines of 60 pages, what I'm referring to is ability to output original sentences. The ones I can write well and say well are the ones I've been repeatedly and extensively exposed to. You'll have gained an amazing grip on the language and will be very advanced. But it takes time. That's what I found from my own experience. The more time I had, the faster my progress was.
You're in finance, right? I know a few people in the field and the hours are pretty heavy, from what I hear. I'm also studying for my license (medical), and there's a masters I want to do too. Not to mention re-certification exams/continuing education regularly. Oh boy. Good luck to you.
You know, that's a pretty interesting way to put it. I did think along these lines vaguely before, of rather than testing myself, I should approach the whole thing as intensive reading. That just gave me an idea. Yomichan works in Anki in a similar way. I think I'll try it out this way and see how that goes. I'm liking the idea of spending time with interesting content with Anki, rather than having separate slots for the two. Good tip. I think LWT (Learning With Texts) also works similarly. All the more for targeted practice with native material, saves a huge amount of time, which I desperately need. Edited by Woodsei on 04 January 2015 at 11:21pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Woodsei Bilingual Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Woodsei Joined 4609 days ago 614 posts - 782 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Egyptian)* Studies: Russian, Japanese, Hungarian | Message 10 of 47 04 January 2015 at 11:20pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
|
@Teango: So glad you dropped by, Teango! Great hearing from you again. How's
everything going in Hawaii, and on the language learning front? I really look forward to reading your log, too. Concerning these graded readers, they go all the way up to level 4, which I think either incorporates, or starts to incorporate, JLPT N2 vocab and kanji. At least from what I've read. And they have very interesting stories and tidbits about Japan, Japanese myths and folktales, modern tales, fantasy, facts, horror (yep, ghosts and such), and adapted stories of well-known Japanese authors, as well as some famous American and foreign ones too. All in all, I liked them a lot. They're so self- explanatory, with pictures and all, furigana over the kanji where you need it, and the audio is professional and always a plus. They're published by proponents of Tadoku (extensive reading) in Japan, so you know they know what they're doing. @Sooniye: Thank you, and good luck with your goals too this year! @druckfehler: I appreciate it, druckfehler, and I also look forward to following your log. It can be very difficult juggling work and personal interests, and I hope that, through my log, I can offer some insight as to how someone can do that. As for Anki, I'll try my best, though I can't be sure, considering my spectacular track record of failing to use it. We'll see. And I couldn't have organized the team without all of your support and advice; really I'm very glad to be working with you all :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Woodsei Bilingual Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Woodsei Joined 4609 days ago 614 posts - 782 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Egyptian)* Studies: Russian, Japanese, Hungarian | Message 11 of 47 05 January 2015 at 12:52am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Wish you good luck with your goals, Captain!! [/QUOTE] Thank you. Much, much appreciated, Nieng Zhonghan :) I'm glad to be on board with all of you. I think Lang-8 might have a lot of Japanese natives giving correct feedback, considering the popularity of the language, but, by the same token, so should English. I'm surprised, honestly. I haven't tried iTalk yet, so I can't vouch for them or anything, but I'm thinking that what the problem really is is that a lot of the time, native speakers are unable to explain why things work in a certain way, they don't know why, they just know that's how you say things. I know that sometimes I'm stumped when it comes to explaining points in either English or Arabic, or not being able to translate something, simply because languages can be that different. There are a lot of subtleties, nuances, and cultural influences that make things untranslatable, even though you perfectly understand what they mean. It's just that you can't verbalize your understanding of it. That said, I'll look into any websites that may offer you a better quality than what you've experienced, although, you still may find good editors over at Lang-8. And if you ever need any advice or have questions regarding English, you can ask me, if that's something you may be interested in. Other members on the forum can be pretty helpful, too. Regarding Memrise, I did check it out previously, and they do have a nice selection of material. My problems with SRS are twofold, though: 1. It's dry and boring. 2. Premade decks can be fantastic and useful, and you can almost treat them like a textbook. But they don't resonate with me on a personal level. At least what I learn best is what I find myself, and look up myself. Which means I have to spend time mining stuff and inputting, time I can spend reading even more, and listening even more. I'm not trying to be lazy here, and targeted practice is always beneficial, it's just that...I don't know. I guess that special phrase stops being special as soon as it's in Anki, you know? I know that repetition aids learning so....I'll try my best with Anki. Then again, like you said, maybe reading a lot is more efficient for me at this stage. I'll play around with it and see. 進撃の巨人 is pretty dark. It's about all of humanity bunched within walls because the world has been taken over by man-eating giants/titans. I'm still trying to figure out if the setting is in the future, or in the past, or in an alternate dimension, there still is a lot to be revealed. It does have some pretty amazing plot twists, and really, I haven't read a story or watched something as original as that, although the main idea itself isn't so new (i.e. the world fighting back a common evil, and I don't like mecha anime, or aliens and what not). This may partly be why it's so appealing to me, but tbh I'm just immensely enjoying it. It's theme is depressing though, and the mangaka isn't afraid of making pretty gut-wrenching decisions concerning the characters. I won't say more because I don't want to spoil it for you. I liked the anime art more than the manga art, too. It may be that Isayama-san's is a little amateurish, or he may have intentionally rendered the art this way to make for the fearful theme of the story, and it does sort of bring a little originality to it. But I like the manga anyway, so that's okay. I like well-drawn manga, but the story is more important to me, therefore all the art in the world won't make me like something if it isn't well-written. I liked Gokusen a lot, and I was able to eventually get past the art because the story was so funny, even if somewhat controversial. So there. The death scenes, though, they're not aimless gore as something like Battle Royale (which I hated with a passion, I didn't even finish it), but they are pretty shocking. So be warned, not an easy watch. I still love the story. I usually prefer reading books first over watching their adaptations, since the books have better stories (movies/shows cut out a lot of really important stuff), but this particular anime was really well executed, and relies on surprise elements, so I don't want that spoiled for me until season 2 is released, which I hear is in the works. So I'll just keep reading up to where the anime stopped, even though I'm dying to know how it all unfolds. The manga isn't over yet. I'll keep you posted. Edited by Woodsei on 05 January 2015 at 12:59am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| TimmyTurner93 Groupie United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 3479 days ago 45 posts - 58 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Portuguese, Japanese | Message 12 of 47 05 January 2015 at 5:09pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Whatever you decide on I'll be following you closely. Wishing you loads of luck. OH Captain, My Captain!! 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Woodsei Bilingual Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Woodsei Joined 4609 days ago 614 posts - 782 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Egyptian)* Studies: Russian, Japanese, Hungarian | Message 13 of 47 06 January 2015 at 2:17am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
|
Thanks for the vote of confidence, TimmyTurner93. Glad you dropped by. Although when
you put it that way, it feels like I'm captaining a sinking ship, lol. Well, so much for a first day of serious studying. I have even less time than I thought I would, and that was me being generous. That said, I did manage to read some pages of なぜ？どうして？かがくのはなし, but nowhere near as efficient as I wanted it to be. I'll try to bump up my reading count tonight. I'm watching Tokyo Bandwagon, which is a slice of life drama about a family. Not so much there, but it's got 亀梨和也 Kaminashi Kazuya, which is always a plus. And it's a heartwarming story. I find I zero in on the speech better when I isten to the dialogue without watching the episode, so I'm keeping it on loop while I do other things like study for my boards and whatnot. It helps that I watched the episode so I know what's going on. I also threw in there a bunch of dialogue-only tracks from the upper beginner and lower intermediate seasons of Jpod. Nothing new there, all very easy, but the repetitive practice is always good. I can a hear a lot of snippets of dialogue from Jpod and Tokyo Bandwagon floating around in my head during the day. I also found that while I hate doing Anki while at home, I don't mind it so much during lunch break, so maybe I should look to do reviews at work, and just add some new entries in the evening from my immersion environment, and just forget about them. We'll see. I'm trying so hard to make Anki work without being such a chore. I'm not that happy with what I'm doing generally, though. It feels unfocused, and basically the same old thing. I'm thinking of narrowing down the amount of things I do on the weeknights to get the maximum benefit, like either focus on listening a lot to an entire episode and have it on repeat, while adding some entries to Anki, or just do Tadoku for the whole evening while having some monotonous Japanese play in the background. I'll try out a few different approaches and see what gives me the most benefit in terms of exposure, and I don't want to lose sight of my primary goal, which is to know as many words as possible and fixate those patterns in my head in order to be able to use the language actively. I can go all out on the weekends. It's good to come here and review my progress in order to re-evaluate my priorities. It will be difficult writing a journal entry on Lang-8 every evening after work, so I'll keep that activity reserved for the weekends, when I'm not so much under time constraints. I honestly can't wait for when July rolls in when my exams would be over. It would be a HUGE load lifted off of my shoulders. It's a lot of stress just thinking about them, so I'm just taking it on a day-by-day basis. Edited by Woodsei on 06 January 2015 at 7:59am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4978 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 14 of 47 06 January 2015 at 7:00pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
|
I am also on the non-Anki side of the ship =D And it turns out I have to pay extra attention to what I read, because I won't have Anki ask me about it again.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| yuhakko Tetraglot Senior Member FranceRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4444 days ago 414 posts - 582 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishB2, EnglishC2, Spanish, Japanese Studies: Korean, Norwegian, Mandarin | Message 15 of 47 07 January 2015 at 11:01pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
|
Hi Captain! As Druckfehler, I look forward to seeing how you organize yourself but also
what you read and what you think of it! I remember some Tadokus where you were reading a ton of stuff so I'll try to take you as an example for that this year since it's going to be my focus for this year. 宜しくね！ 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Woodsei Bilingual Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Woodsei Joined 4609 days ago 614 posts - 782 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Egyptian)* Studies: Russian, Japanese, Hungarian | Message 16 of 47 10 January 2015 at 7:08am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
こちらこそよろしくね、yuhakkoーさん！ I read a ton of stuff previously, but within my level. Looking on the brighter side of things, reading within my level made me very good at said level. However, I didn't advance because I wasn't challenging myself. I intend to change that this year. So, I decided to give the Anki thing a rest for now. I'm signed up for both the January Tadoku, and the Super Challenge, so that alone tells me clearly what I need to be working on. I'll focus on reading a lot, both extensive and intensive, as well as listening. Listening is easier to maintain throughout the day because it's independent of location, and I can listen in the car, at home, on lunch break at work, and even while I work on med cases and practice questions, I can have it run in the background. Obviously I'll be dedicating a time for reading, an hour at the most every evening, and trying to read as much and as fast as I can without compromising comprehension, but at the same time without focusing on attaining perfect mastery of whatever I am reading. Say, understanding 80% of what I read is enough to make me move on to other material. The important words and phrases will come up whatever it is I'm reading, so I will not be too hard on myself over getting perfect comprehension. As long as I have an understanding of the words and patterns and being able to get the gist of any given sentence/paragraph, I should be fine. In my experience, when I move on, and later come back to that material, I find my comprehension of it perfect, or almost there, and as such, it is easier to learn from that material when I am able to distinguish the finer nuances of it. Lots of exposure does that to me, I like to believe. So yeah. I'm not a stickler for metrics, personally, but I do definitely see why it might be useful to keep track of that on a language learning forum. Others may be able to see how I progress better that way than rely on vague and anecdotal statements. So I decided to keep track of my reading using book meter. I'll keep track of how many words I read as I go. Whether or not they will be just the new, unkown words, or all of them, I have yet to decide. I think I will do a general word count. It's also motivating to see your word count rack up. It'll be interesting seeing how that goes! So, for numerical goals: 1. At least 100 books this year. I intend to read all 100 come hell or high water. 2. At least 100 movies/or TV and radio equivalents. This should be very doable this year. I want to breakdown my reading goals into monthly chunks, because they're short enough to be able to gauge without getting lost in a sea of numbers. So, for January, it's to read 2000 pages of books or their equivalent of manga/blog posts/news/etc. I'm also going to be reading the lyrics of 30 songs, and listening to them. So one new song everyday. This is very easy for me to do. I enjoy music, and it's short enough not to detract from my time, while being intensive enough that I actually learn something from it. Also it's easier to memorize lyrics due to the nature of music resonating with me on an emotional level, which in turn helps improve pronunciation and fluidity of speech. I mean here easily and automatically moving my mouth, not necessarily active production. I came to a conclusion that the most important thing for me to do now is to focus on words, words, words, and more words. This is the biggest hurdle I have to overcome. Grammar learns itself through lots of exposure and repetition, regardless of whether I know the rules or not. I'll look up grammar points as I go, if I need them to understand something, but I won't dwell on them. There will be a time for grammar, but not now. I also won't worry too much about whether I should be using bilingual or monolingual dictionaries. Eventually, as my vocab goes up, I will be able to understand definitions in Japanese, it's an inevitable part of the language learning process, so there's no point in trying to torture myself right now. I still hate translating back and forth between Japanese and English, so I'll look up the individual parts and let my brain process the Japanese by itself. Translations have their uses, I'm still trying to figure out how best to use them without affecting my processing of Japanese, but I'll worry about that later. That said, when I do look up words using Tangorin/Denshi Jisho/Rikaisama-kun-chan, I also check them on Sanseido and the Goo dictionaries. It's amazing how effective reading Japanese definitions has on comprehension and language ability. But I won't slave over it. The main goal here, and I want to reiterate and not lose sight of it, is to read as much as I can in the time that I have. I'm telling this to myself, not to you guys, so don't feel put off by whatever aggressive tone I may be using. Take for instance 秘め事 (ひめごと） (a secret pertaining to the person in question, and usually not a small one). The Sanseido definition is 秘密にしていること．Goo gives you longer definitions and actually gives you subtle usages, like when to say the word, and what differentiates it from other synonyms. This is another reason why I want to rev up my vocabulary acquisition. So I can read the definitions in the original Japanese without relying on the English. I'm not putting it off, as you can see, but it's still a dual process looking up words in both English and Japanese. I just want to do Japanese only. So now's the fun part. While we're on the topic of songs, here are the ones I'm currently obsessing over right now: 1. Hello Sleepwalkers:午夜の待ち合わせ Link 2. Ling Tosite Sugire 凛として時雨: Unravel. It's the OP of Tokyo Ghoul. Couldn't find an MV, sorry :s 3. One Ok Rock: じぶんロック Jibun Rock. I love these guys! Another good one for them is 完全感覚 Dreamer. Unfortunately, their newer songs have a ton of English, eating up a huge chunk of the lyrics, but they're still awesome. I'm trying to listen to things that are mostly Japanese right now, God knows I have enough English in my life, but I'll listen to their newer ones during the times where my brain is so tired it can't handle 100% Japanese. By the way, the lead vocalist, Taka, has a younger brother Hiro who's the lead singer for another rock band, My First Story. The few I heard were pretty good, but again, there's a still some English involved. Here's a good one. I'm just listening to big brother Taka's older- and mostly-Japanese songs for now :) I like One Ok Rock's style a little more, too. But My First Story are really, really good. I'm fangirling like crazy over the above four bands. Really wonderful music, in all honesty. The singers voices are exceptionally unique, and the music is catchy as hell. Glad I found them. Spending the last four hours doing nothing but abusing the repeat button isn't a good sign, though. I really should hit the books... As to what I'm reading: 1. ノラガミ manga (I love anything that touches on Japanese culture heavily) 2. 時をかける少女 Light Novel 3. 進撃の巨人 manga 4. なぜ？どうして？かがくのお なし Elementary schoolchildren's science stories, goes all the way up to the sixth grade, six books in total. They have other series that talk about myths, culture, foreign stories, etc. An enjoyable read. Watching nothing at the moment but I'll keep you posted when I do. So I'll keep track of what I read, watch, and listen to, and make sure to meet my numbers. Hopefully I'll be able to share some thoughts on them, in hopes that someone might find them useful or interesting. Edited by Woodsei on 10 January 2015 at 7:14am 3 persons have voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
