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TAC 2011, Team KEN: M. Medialis - RU JP | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 2478 days ago 2210 posts - 1565 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 9 of 113 12 January 2011 at 7:00pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Sounds like you're warming up your Japanese nicely! And although I don't plan to learn it full-on right now, I can't help but find myself once again bedazzled by Atamagaii's numerous Japanese links and resources. The amount of work that most have gone into both collecting and aligning the materials is incredible. Unfortunately I'm using mobile broadband at the moment (an expensive pay-as-you-go usb key), so I'll have to wait until I get hooked up to the internet properly in a month or so to start checking it all out. Something to look forward to... :) Edited by Teango on 12 January 2011 at 7:01pm | ||||||
| M. Medialis Diglot TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Sweden Joined 3279 days ago 397 posts - 131 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Russian, Japanese, French | Message 10 of 113 17 January 2011 at 11:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Team Tac 2011 - Team KEN - Log #2
Phew. Last week was crazy. Working full time at the factory daytime and then spending the evenings trying to complete the hardest course assignemnt I've ever had. At 02.30 am on Friday night, I sent in my solution - hope parts of it are at least approximately correct. lol. ;) ;) Anyways. While working on the assignment, I was visited by my old friend: Little Miss Procrastination. You know, the little sweet fairy that gives so much happiness by making those 'small things in life' irresistibly enjoyable. (Oh, and she usually manages to destroy language learning projects and exam results at the same time ;). Well, a few month ago, after having had a casual chat with her, I managed to show her how attractive and fun the Japanese language is. So when she re-entered my life last Thursday, she made me procrastrinate from finishing my course work by surfing Japanese websites. Now, that's certainly a great sign! :D Japanese casual reading I'm so excited about this! Last Thursday, I realized that manga and Japanese blogs don't look intimidating anymore. When starting out with Japanese, the Japanese script looks about as inviting as decrypting a QR-code by pure sight-reading: 
;) My casual reading skill must have been unlocked quite recently - suddenly I can browse through blogs and mangas just for pure enjoyment. They look inviting instead of scary. I still get stuck on all kanji-based words since I still don't know their meanings and readings well enough. But I am happy that I still have parts of Japanese left to learn, since it's so fun! :D Rediscovering LR And at last I can use my newly attained freedom to dive into all my LR materials. -Discovering the stories of Kenji Miyazawa and O. Henry (among many others). LR could as well be an abbreviation of "Literature Reading" or "Love to Read": Good native actors, a good translation and the thrill of a great story => language learning euphoria! A new favourite is Miyazawa's story "The Acorns and the Wildcat", together with the fantastic dramatization at fantajikan: Pure happiness: Fantajikan - The Acorns and the Wildcat Current plan This week, I plan on making a major Scriptorium run and LR Japanese every day. My 2011 TAC formally starts today! ----------------------------------------- Team KEN - M. Medialis Edited by M. Medialis on 17 January 2011 at 11:11pm | ||||||
| M. Medialis Diglot TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Sweden Joined 3279 days ago 397 posts - 131 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Russian, Japanese, French | Message 11 of 113 27 January 2011 at 9:58am | IP Logged | |||||
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Team Tac 2011 - Team KEN - Log #3
I've had a very productive and exciting week language-wise, and I'm really happy about it. :D I've done a lot of LR, and since I love it so much when other people share their subjective LR experiences, I think I will continue to try to put mine into words as well: LR Adventures I had a thrilling experience a few days ago, while I was LRing the short stories that I got from Atamagaii. After about 1.5 hours of LR, all the individual words of the text "disappeared". That's quite a strange description..what I'm trying to say is that suddenly I wasn't looking at letters and words anymore. I just understood them naturally. It's SOO cool!! :D It's like reading beyond the text or something. My head is spinning when I'm thinking about what would happen if I made an 8 hour LR pass. Who knows, maybe one day, but I don't want to rush great literature on the other hand. My pop-up dictionary Actually, now when I LR, I use a modified version of Rikaichan to look up the readings of words that I find interesting. This pop-up dictionary shows all the readings (in hiragana), but ignores to show their English definitions. The idea is to let the brain infer the meaning from the translated text as much as possible, and to use the pop-up only to solidify the spelling and pronunciation. Watching anime in LR-mode I've also been watching anime almost every day this week and I've noticed an interesting effect: If my mind has been saturated with LR before I start, I get some interesting LR effects even when I watch anime. This is what I do, I read the subtitles in a split of a second, I go into LR-mode, listen to the audio (and try to understand it naturally). Surprisingly often I pick up new words, so I look them up quickly with ZKanji in order to verify that my guess was right. Often I have time to do this without interrupting the pace of the movie. Of course, watching subtitled movies is not even close to the high-density learning you can get from literature. I just thought it was cool that the LR-mode could be carried on to make casual movie watching more rewarding. A weak spot I still have some trouble to consistently distinguish between し, ち and じ in fast speech. The voiced syllables are also often hard to catch (like せ versus ぜ). So I think I'll make a Phonetic Run on those this weekend. In closing Other than that, I've been reading my parallel texts before I fall asleep as usual. This week, I've doubled the dose, reading 2-5 pages instead of one, and those extra pages seem to make a difference in my Japanese level in the following day. I also try to click myself into Japanese websites as often as I can. One day, I'll be able to do it and just read them without looking up a single word. :D ----------------------------------------- Team KEN - M. Medialis Edited by M. Medialis on 27 January 2011 at 1:12pm | ||||||
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 2478 days ago 2210 posts - 1565 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 12 of 113 27 January 2011 at 3:42pm | IP Logged | |||||
Very encouraging progress! That's exactly where I'd like to get to with Russian - just understanding the story without really translating the individual words. I guess I've still got a long way to go (lol)... How many hours of LR do you think you've probably put in altogether so far to reach this excellent stage? | ||||||
| M. Medialis Diglot TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Sweden Joined 3279 days ago 397 posts - 131 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Russian, Japanese, French | Message 14 of 113 06 February 2011 at 11:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
Team Tac 2011 - Team KEN - Log #4
This is a nice metaphor :) I may have left the physical factory to its destiny, but the language learning factory shall follow me wherever I go!
I've been thinking quite a bit on how to answer this. Because the number is probably not so impressive. *suddenly the doors bursts open, and my white-haired sensei steps in* - ' Mediarisu-さん! Let go of your pride! The truth should be told! ' *he disappears in a cloud of wisdom* lol ;) I guess my Japanese LR hour count is somewhere around..I don't know..maybe 68-80 hours? I'd say that most of progress is due to other things I do. But really, every time I do even the smallest bit of LR I get huge boosts in all my Japanese skills. (By the way. I've started to miss "I am a cat" so much (lost the book at the university 6 months ago). I've read it so many times, and it feels empty to not hang around with the poor 主人 and his little cat. :) My SRS Project While surfing the web, I've every now and then put in example sentences into my srs sentence deck (without reviewing them actually..). Now, my sentence deck has finally started to get a decent size (92 cards), and I feel it's time to launch a little SRS mission! :) I confess that my puritan side pops up quite often, telling me to go all-LR instead, (you know, only learning 'the natural way' ;) But I have a list of reasons why I find small scale sentence mining so compelling: * Khatz and the folks at Antimoon claim to pass as natives, and they used SRS. * I have noticed that some tricky words and spellings crystallizes naturally in my mind when I let them go through the SRS. * With my side-bar dictionary I get excellent example sentences in no-time. * I also get a chance to spot unexpected features of words. For instance, the SRS made me realize that there is a difference in nuance between 美味 and 美味しい, but that their readings are completely different (びみ and おいしい). Quite a surprise! EDIT: And now I found their friend: 美味い which is read as: うまい. ;D * BTW, the more Japanese I learn, the more I realize how many peculiarities there are in the language. ->Tons of homonyms: Completely different words sound exactly the same. ->Tons of irregular readings: The same word can have completely different readings. It's a wonder that anyone can make sense out of it. It's so beautiful, I love Japanese! :D And a couple of points: * As it is now, SRS requires absolutely no effort. It's more like a nice little writing practice that I can do when I have 10 minutes to spare. * I can remember all the things that flashes by when I surf the web. * Sometimes, I just write in simple sentences that I only want to remember. Then, I leave the answer field blank. So you can stop worrying, my SRS project will not contain any brute force. ;) (lol, I plan to show this SRS manifesto to myself when I start to doubt again). A note on Heisig I would have loved to read this two years ago, so I write it in my log: I think that Heisig works exactly as I hoped it would: I barely get any bad inference from the English keywords at all (and the English doesn't pop up whenever I see a kanji - I was worried about this before). I can recognize a character even when the font is too small to reveal the details. And I can also write it out by hand without having to enlarge the font etc. So what have I been doing lately? The last week, I've watched anime almost every day. Made some new rounds of LR. Reading Japanese blogs and playing with my SRS. I've also noticed the ability to form more and more complete thoughts in Japanese. I also use my Japanese sound files to listen to the pronunciation of interesting words that I come across on the web. It's funny, four years ago (before I discovered this forum) I never ever used audio to learn languages. Now it feels awkward to learn a word without having heard someone pronounce it. And I keep reading a page or two of parallel texts before I fall asleep. A few days ago, I managed to correctly infer an unknown grammatical concept on my own. I was just browsing through Tae Kim's grammar guide and realized that the pattern I had noticed had a cool descriptive name: "Causative Verb" (It's perhaps trivial, but I know very little formal grammar). Current plan Activating my Russian again with LR. ----------------------------------------- Team KEN - M. Medialis Edited by M. Medialis on 06 February 2011 at 11:38pm | ||||||
| M. Medialis Diglot TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Sweden Joined 3279 days ago 397 posts - 131 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Russian, Japanese, French | Message 15 of 113 17 February 2011 at 8:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Team Tac 2011 - Team KEN - Log #5
Every day, I take the bus to the university, and that bus happens to pass by the international library of Stockholm. So today, I finally decided to take a look - "perhaps I could find some cool Japanese or Russian literature/materials". Lol. So I went into the Japanese section, and experienced a mild form of the Paris Syndrome. Completely surrounded by all-Japanese books, no translations, no pop-up dictionaries, no furigana.....With trembling hands I reached out to grab a book from the shelf.....I slowly opened it.......and GAAHHHHH.......there I was in the library screaming in agony (lol, no I wasn't..), - realizing that all the Japanese books are read vertically (top-to-bottom, right-to-left) !!!! What a shock. Standing there in an ocean of kanji and kana -It was like that machine in the Hitch-hiker's guide to the galaxy, which first shows you how endlessly enormous the whole universe is, and then shows how little you are in comparison. Lol. I find my reaction so hilarious!! I seriously need to get more used to monolingual materials. ;D ;D ;D A short update So the last week, I've activated my Russian again. It took a couple of days and then it said 'click' and my Russian voice was back in my head. I'm still LRing Crime and Punishment, and I'll probably have a look at the Strugatsky Brothers after I've finished it. The Japanese SRS project proceeds quite smoothly. I review for about 10 minutes when I feel like it. It's good to have the ability to progress even when I'm not in the mood for media. And when I'm in the mood for media, I'm watching anime. But I'll soon start another round of Japanese LR again. ----------------------------------------- Team KEN - M. Medialis | ||||||
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 2478 days ago 2210 posts - 1565 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 16 of 113 17 February 2011 at 10:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Stockholm and Paris, great cities, yet so many syndromes (lol)! I hope you're feeling less dizzy after your trip to the Japanese section of the library, and I imagine you're probably looking at the world from a whole new perspective too. I picture this whole event going down like something out of The Matrix, with you as the recently unplugged Neo, and all these rivers of kanji code just trickling down around you. @.@
And it's great to read you've got back into Russian too. I'm still hammering away at Zamyatin for the moment, but one day...one fine day in the cloud-curtained future...Crime and Punishment will be mine! :P Edited by Teango on 17 February 2011 at 10:53pm |
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