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Japanese from scratch TAC 2015 東亜

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vonPeterhof
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Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish

 
 Message 1521 of 1702
18 November 2014 at 6:25am | IP Logged 
dampingwire wrote:

I'm seriously tempted to add Korean to my language-learning plan. No tones, reasonable
writing system - is that correct?
Sort of. While the traditional pronunciation of standard Korean makes no tonal distinctions, they seem to have started emerging in young people's speech (and as far as I'm concerned, that's actually easier than distinguishing the three kinds of initial consonants).

As for the writing system, I guess it's reasonable in that the rules for reading are pretty consistent, but it's not exactly 1 letter=1 sound. For example, the letters ᄃ, ᄐ, ᄉ, ᄊ, ᄌ and ᄎ are all pronounced as a weak "t" when appearing at the end of a syllable (most often you'll see ᄉ in that position, even though its default pronunciation is an aspirated "s"). It also doesn't help spelling out words you hear that the blocks of characters are morpho-syllabic rather than just syllabic. Hearing the word for "length", giri, you might think it's spelled 기리, but it's actually 길이. Out of the languages I've studied it's most similar to modern Greek, in that you can always read things out correctly (if you remember all the small rules, like that the ᄉ is pronounced "sh" in 맛있다, but "d" in 맛없다 because of the vowel qualities), but you can't always guess the correct spelling from just hearing the word.

Edited by vonPeterhof on 18 November 2014 at 6:28am

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dampingwire
Bilingual Triglot
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United Kingdom
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Speaks: English*, Italian*, French
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 Message 1522 of 1702
18 November 2014 at 11:23pm | IP Logged 
kraemder wrote:
I'll take a look and see what I downloaded. The thing is that I
downloaded episodes ages ago when I was at
a different Japanese level than I am now. I never figured out iTunes so I was
downloading off the website
directly.


Their iTunes download was, iirc, pretty disorganised. It all just downloaded with no
structure. I then organised it all into a nice directory tree and so on.

Downloading off the website must have been painful. I did that for Englishpod101 because
I only had a free subscription.
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g-bod
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 Message 1523 of 1702
18 November 2014 at 11:26pm | IP Logged 
If you have premium JPod101 membership you can use the Premium Feed feature to set up any number of iTunes feeds for different types of content. So if, for example, you just wanted to download the dialogue tracks for one specific season, you could set up a feed in iTunes to do just that. It helps with keeping things a little more organised!
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dampingwire
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 Message 1524 of 1702
18 November 2014 at 11:27pm | IP Logged 
vonPeterhof wrote:
As for the writing system, I guess it's reasonable in that the
rules for reading are pretty consistent, but it's not exactly 1 letter=1 sound. For
example, the letters ᄃ, ᄐ, ᄉ, ᄊ, ᄌ and ᄎ are all pronounced as a weak "t" when appearing
at the end of a syllable (most often you'll see ᄉ in that position, even though its
default pronunciation is an aspirated "s").


So much easier than kanji overall? I know nothing about the writing system, other
than the fact that I like the look of it.

BTW I must be missing a font or two in Chrome as "the letters ... are all pronounced"
just has boxes for the "weak t" characters, although some of the later ones come out OK.

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dampingwire
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 Message 1525 of 1702
19 November 2014 at 12:07am | IP Logged 
g-bod wrote:
If you have premium JPod101 membership you can use the Premium Feed
feature to set up any number of iTunes feeds for different types of content. So if, for
example, you just wanted to download the dialogue tracks for one specific season, you
could set up a feed in iTunes to do just that. It helps with keeping things a little more
organised!


I think they added that feature after my three-day download. TBH I would have just
grabbed everything in one go anyway, as I already knew I didn't like their filenaming
conventions.

But, yes, it is easier now, especially if you only want some of it.

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vonPeterhof
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Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German
Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish

 
 Message 1526 of 1702
19 November 2014 at 6:29am | IP Logged 
dampingwire wrote:
So much easier than kanji overall?
Well, when you put it that way... :)
dampingwire wrote:
I know nothing about the writing system, other than the fact that I like the look of it.
It's basically an alphabetic system, meaning it has separate vowel and consonant letters. The major difference from writing systems based on the Latin alphabet is that the letters aren't written one after another in a straight line, but are instead grouped into square morpho-syllabic blocks. The Chinese characters do get used, but very sporadically.

dampingwire wrote:
BTW I must be missing a font or two in Chrome as "the letters ... are all pronounced" just has boxes for the "weak t" characters, although some of the later ones come out OK.
Yeah, looks like the default font can't handle separate letters, which is admittedly a somewhat unnatural way of writing Korean. If I had used the traditional names for the letters it would look like 디귿, 티읕, 시옷, 쌍시옷, 지읒 and 치읓 (except for the doubled letter 쌍시옷, in all of the names the letter in question is on the left of the fist block and the bottom of the second one).
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kraemder
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 Message 1527 of 1702
22 November 2014 at 7:58pm | IP Logged 
I'm personally terrible at writing stuff in hangul. It's like vonPeterhof says.. in terms of the reading the alphabet is very consistent and you should do just fine after getting familiar with the rules and patterns. But writing stuff from memory is a bit different. There's multiple ways to write the same sound - unlike hiragana/katakana in Japanese. It's definitely possible to learn however. The kid next to me in my class does it very well (he's the exception however). But I'm just not that interested. A lot of the people in the class want to go to Korea to live for an extended period of time (more than a year etc.) including him so I think they're more motivated to learn to do stuff correctly. I am more than happy just being able to read stuff - that in itself is a struggle with kanji. And I don't really care to go to Korea for more than a visit.

I don't consistently study Korean every day but I'm getting an A in the class. Classes are so much easier than generic standardized tests like the JLPT. They tell you what to study and make sure it's reasonable given the amount of time you have available.

As for Japanese I'm just doing my regular thing and I'll take the JLPT N2 test when it comes. Obviously, I had wanted to use it as a catalyst to improve my Japanese and pass it but that didn't happen, mostly thanks to Korean. However, next week I did sign up for a bunch of JOI (online classes). I have a lot I need to use anyway. I'm currently reviewing vocabulary using Anki and the Core 6k.. as well as regular vocabulary using Japanese (for iOS) for regular vocab I find while reading/watching anime. I'm a bit annoyed at myself for getting stuck on kanji whose readings I haven't studied in a while so in Japanese for iOS I'm adding isolated kanji to the vocab lists too. I don't know how much that'll help.

I'm strongly considering doing Spanish in earnest next year so that I can show off at work. Japanese isn't a language I can use very much. It only happened once when a customer sent in a Japanese rental agreement (who does that in the US? Apparently certain bodyshops in Los Angeles). It was embarrassing how my supervisor's eyes popped out of his head as I translated it for him. But that sort of thing probably happens every few years. Spanish I could use almost everyday if I were good enough to get Spanish speaking customer claims transferred to me.   
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kraemder
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 Message 1528 of 1702
22 November 2014 at 11:39pm | IP Logged 
I'm listening to kpop/jpop as I workout and I can pick out some of the words in the kpop songs and that's really cool. I don't know if I want to just stop studying Korean.


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