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CZ’s TAC 15 CHN/JPN/KOR | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| The Real CZ Senior Member United States Joined 5434 days ago 1069 posts - 1495 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 817 of 844 15 December 2014 at 9:10pm | IP Logged |
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TAC 2014 was a disaster for me, mainly because I was so preoccupied with other things
going on in my life. There were periods throughout the year I was able to study well, but for the most part, this was probably my worst year for studying since I started. I signed up for the East Asian team for TAC 2015 in order to keep myself accountable. My main two goals for 2015 are consistency (making studying into a daily routine) and moving away from studying. I want to use the languages more, be it through input or output instead of spending so much time reviewing words. As you guys know, I have a job as a public accountant starting in the summer/fall of 2015, and most of my time will be spent studying for the CPA exam. I want to finish as many of the exams as possible before I start working. We get a $5,000 bonus if we pass all four parts of the exam within one year of our start date. In order to make it much easier for me to use my languages every day, these will be my plans: 1) Reading. I will do a mix of intensive , HAIR (half-assed intensive reading) and extensive reading. Sometimes I'll look up all of the words in an article I'm reading, sometimes just some of the words, and other times I'll just keep reading, just seeing how much I can understand and see if my brain can pick anything up without explicitly looking words up. When I read novels, it will be all extensive. I find intensively reading novels really kills my desire to read. 2) Speaking. Probably do what I was doing earlier in the summer, as in reading out sentences from textbooks and grammar books and thinking of sentences in my head. The old adage of "practice is perfect" is true, and it applies to speaking, so I just need to do it more so that it becomes more natural. 3) Writing. I'll try writing on twitter and my language learning blog regularly, but there's no way I could do it daily. This will also apply to Chinese characters. SRS/flashcards never really helped me that much with the characters. So writing them out and reading them a lot will be my path to learning them. Of course, I'll learn them with mnemonics and related roots instead of going for a frequency list. 4) Listening. This is the easiest one for me to do. I have some podcasts to listen to and dramas to watch. This is what I am least worried about. Over the next coming months, I will be working real hard on squeezing everything I need to do into my schedule, so I'm hoping this focus on time management will be helpful for my language studies. I really have no goals in learning languages any longer due to finally finding a career path. All I can say is that I know it's a lifelong journey in enjoying what I'm doing and getting better every day. I have long since moved on from trying to be a hyper polyglot like a lot of members here are. If these are the only three languages I ever make good progress in, so be it. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4632 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 818 of 844 16 December 2014 at 4:05am | IP Logged |
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I'm interested in what podcasts you are going to do.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4951 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 819 of 844 16 December 2014 at 8:57pm | IP Logged |
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I know the feeling, and once again thank you for managing to take a right path in your career. I'm in a situation in which language learning is a bless and a pastime. I don't have higher expectations in terms of pursuiting a career but financially I do have a consistent career, so I'm sort of stuck at a job that doesn't allow me to learn much but at least allows me to have a nice and healthy job/life approach. That's why languages come to play such an intense role. If I were faced with opportunities like yours, I wouldn't feel sorry for dropping most of my languages and I would embrace it with the same enthousiasm I do about my language learning.
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| The Real CZ Senior Member United States Joined 5434 days ago 1069 posts - 1495 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 820 of 844 17 December 2014 at 12:37am | IP Logged |
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@kuji The podcasts are the same ones I've been listening to all year. The ones in
Japanese are about anime and video games, so I doubt you'd be interested in those. @Expugnator Yeah, I had the translation route as a backup plan just because of the troubles I had landing a job until recently. With the hours in public accounting and the continuing education I have to do, there's no realistic way for me to have huge jumps in levels in languages any longer. It'll purely become a hobby for me, so I'll stop trying to learn certain kinds of words/language just because it may have been helpful for a translating career and just focus on learning what I want to. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| The Real CZ Senior Member United States Joined 5434 days ago 1069 posts - 1495 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 821 of 844 19 December 2014 at 1:56pm | IP Logged |
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I started reading online articles again, and thankfully after a few months of relative
inactivity, my language skills didn't deteriorate as much as I thought they would. I read two articles in each language. For Korean, I understood the majority of the article and only had to look up up 10 words in one article (it was probably around 10 paragraphs) and 1 word in the second article (which was 2 paragraphs). Granted they were in the entertainment section, I find that to be good. For Japanese and Mandarin, my goal for now is to simply read articles while looking up the more common words in the articles instead of every single word. This is to prevent fatigue and frustration. I figure with a lot of reading plus work with characters and grammar books in which I'll pick up a lot of words, reading will becoming easier down the stretch. One of my major goals for the upcoming TAC is to turn my procrastination time on the Internet into reading time in my target languages. I have a lot of work to do from now, but there's always a part of me that just wants to surf the web and realizing two hours later that I wasted two hours. I'd rather waste those two hours reading in my target languages so that I feel less guilty lol. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| The Real CZ Senior Member United States Joined 5434 days ago 1069 posts - 1495 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 822 of 844 23 December 2014 at 4:01pm | IP Logged |
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I'm trying to think up of good ways to improve speaking and writing abilities alone.
Naturally speaking comes easiest by speaking with others, but the only way I could do that is Skype, but the time zone differences between the US and Korea, Japan, China and Taiwan make it nearly impossible to set up times on my schedule. I get up early to study and then go to school/internship location, which will change to studying early in the morning and going to work. My early morning time period would be the best time for Asians (with the 12-14 hour difference factored in), but doesn't work at all for me. Some of these are taken from others, and I'm trying to add some more ideas. If anyone who frequents my log has any ideas, go ahead and post them! I'm really trying hard to improve my output abilities this upcoming year. 1. Read Aloud Sentences From Textbooks and Grammar Reference Books. I think this is always a good start, as you're using correct model sentences. I think this helps a bit with becoming more automatic with the language. This also gets you to start moving those mouth muscles instead of staying silent all of the time. 2. Mimic Others. There are many names for this (shadowing, chorusing, etc.), but this seems to really help with rhythm. I used to do this a few years ago with Korean and will probably try it again. Matching the rhythm of native speakers is a really helpful tool to try to get your own rhythm down. I used to do one sentence or so at a time from a drama/movie. This works better if you have an actual script in front of you, but that's not always practical. 3. Speeches. I think preparing a speech by writing it out and practicing it orally several times (or more!) will be helpful. I think this will help a) push one to extend their current language abilities by being able to string several sentences together to make a point and b) make one more confident in speaking the language. I haven't tried this, but this will be one of my main projects for 2015. I probably won't record them or speak in front of any kind of audience, but the process of doing this should really help me get used to speaking in general. 4. Drills. I think drills can be helpful. Either pre-made drills in textbooks such as FSI or drills that you make yourself to work on certain grammatical points. I think it's best to drill to a point you're comfortable with the grammar point you're trying to drill instead of mastery. Let everything sink in and maybe a few months later if you're still having some trouble with that grammar point, drill it again. These can be done both speaking and writing. I would say writing would be better for trying to really nail it down while speaking would be better for trying to use it spontaneously without much thought. 5. Dialogues/Conversations. Not with others, but one can come up with situations in which two or more people would be talking to each other. I tried this a little bit with Cantonese during the summer. I think when doing this with newly learned material, it's better to write down these little conversations first and then practice them out loud several times later. 6. Article Summaries/Arguments. I think this is more of a writing activity. I used to do this quite a bit whenever I tried focusing on output. Take an article that you read, summarize it (you can use the words in the article as it would be unreasonable for a learner to summarize articles in their own words) and then give your opinion on it. I find this helps me consolidate the words I had just learned and gives me something to write about. It's hard thinking of a topic to write about out of the blue. 7. Think in your target languages as much as possible. This is where you can get the most practice with using your languages, allowing you to think "How would I say this?" and then try to think of ways to say it. This will also get you used to thinking in the language so that it will become much more easier to talk. Of course one needs to read and listen a lot, along with actually talking with others, but this list is basically "What can I do to improve my speaking/writing skills when I'm by myself?" Conversations should flow naturally unless you're working with a tutor/teacher who is correcting your mistakes as you go. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Woodsei Bilingual Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Woodsei Joined 4582 days ago 614 posts - 782 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Egyptian)* Studies: Russian, Japanese, Hungarian | Message 823 of 844 31 December 2014 at 10:51pm | IP Logged |
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I finally managed to finish reading your log :) I know it's late but, congrats on the
job offer! It was really insightful how you grew into your language learning ways after trying out and experimenting with many things. I too share your sentiments about Anki, with the only exception being that I haven't gone in it as far as you have done (thousands of sentences and such). I just find reading and listening a lot, and looking up words as I go, works. Just being hyper-aware as I read/listen, and having a genuine curiosity about the words/structure is enough to anchor it in my mind, plus of course, lots of exposure to allow for natural repetition. I spent a very long time feeling guilty about not using Anki, because almost everyone was advocating its use, and as a result wasted time forcing myself to accept it, thinking about how to approach it painlessly, rather than actually just doing something. But I'm glad I finally made peace with that and moved on. Do what works for you. Anyway, I enjoyed very much reading your log, and I look forward to seeing how you progress this year. A job does suck out a whole lot of time, just ask me, but I'll second druckfehler's recommendation on reading. Even if it's just a little. I'd also add, listening is easier to do (driving to work, lunch, etc) so that will give you more chances to hear words/structures being repeatedly used in context. If you burn out on Anki again, that is. Ok, now onto Warp3's log, lol :) Edited by Woodsei on 31 December 2014 at 10:53pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| The Real CZ Senior Member United States Joined 5434 days ago 1069 posts - 1495 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 824 of 844 01 January 2015 at 3:20am | IP Logged |
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I can't believe someone would even read 103 pages of someone's log lol.
I have tried many things, and almost everything does work if you continue to use it. For example, I am using Anki to help me with intensive reading this year. Using MCDs for intensive reading helps me a lot as I can focus on just one word per card as if I was just looking up the definition of the word while reading. Anki will allow me to get the repetition that I wouldn't get while doing intensive reading. However, instead of testing myself with Anki, I push "Good" right away to see the definition of the clozed-out word and move on. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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