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Japanese from scratch TAC 2015 東亜

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galindo
Bilingual Triglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 4966 days ago

142 posts - 248 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish*, Japanese
Studies: Korean, Portuguese

 
 Message 49 of 1702
17 June 2011 at 7:53am | IP Logged 
kraemder wrote:
Well I'm thinking of trying the Listening Reading method. I haven't
read up on the details for this in a while (I think it's in wiki?) but I am not sure if
it would be very effective with a language like Japanese where the alphabet isn't
phonetic but rather well.. kanji.. strange mysterious stick figures and random other
lines instead of real letters.


Do you listen to a lot of music in Japanese (you should be!)? You can try listening to
a song you know well while reading the lyrics. Music is an awesome way to make new
things stick in your head. Another fun thing to do is find the audio drama version of a
manga or novel, and read along while you listen. They do change lines in the script and
leave things out to make it shorter, though. Those two things are the closest I came to
doing some sort of L/R method, although I guess you're supposed to use an English
translation as well, and I didn't.

kraemder wrote:
I could of course use a converter to convert all the kanji into
hiragana which might be better for L+R.


That's really not worth it, unless you're talking about adding furigana to the text. If
you actually mean doing it with hiragana alone, you might as well not read anything at
all and just practice listening.

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kraemder
Senior Member
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1497 posts - 1648 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese

 
 Message 50 of 1702
18 June 2011 at 7:25am | IP Logged 
Quote:
Do you listen to a lot of music in Japanese (you should be!)? You can try listening to
a song you know well while reading the lyrics. Music is an awesome way to make new
things stick in your head.


Yeah I try to. I found some Japanese language stations via a nice app on my ipod. I also setup a Ayumi Hamasaki channel on Pandora - she was one of the Japanese artists I found when I tried looking online. I like her music too. I haven't hunted down lyrics yet - but definitely should.

Quote:
That's really not worth it, unless you're talking about adding furigana to the text. If
you actually mean doing it with hiragana alone, you might as well not read anything at
all and just practice listening.


I don't see why it wouldn't be helpful with hiragana. The written phonetic version would help me to comprehend what I'm listening to and dissect it right? The kanji symbols wouldn't be of much help since they're unfamiliar to me and well wouldn't really match up with the sounds of the language anyway.

That said the converter website could just as easily make nice furigana so I I'd definitely use it instead. Furigana rocks.
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kraemder
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1497 posts - 1648 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese

 
 Message 51 of 1702
21 June 2011 at 6:38am | IP Logged 
Updating.... I have spent a lot time watching anime really instead of studying learning material. With he
exception of flashcards and my vocal app. I broke out the Rosetta stone I had neglected. I tried it briefly
without giving it much chance right at the beginning of my studies. I was way too intimidates by it as the
first lesson was starting out with simple sentences already and as you know Japanese has no spaces so in
was looking at a wall of absolute foreigness without anything to grab hold on to help me. I ran. This time
around the lessons were way easier for me and I went thud ugh hem with about the right effort or maybe a
bit on the easy side. Its repetitive with lots of the same vocal being used over and over. However I don't
mind that as the repetition I'm finding is making the sentences stick in my head better. It's nice having
actual sentences stick in my head as that's been a challenge for me. Getting easier gradually.

I was a bit disappointed at I can't use he Rosetta iPad app unless I activate the online subscription which
I'm not going to do until I am ready to schedule a tutor session - it only lasts 3 months. I'm half tempted to
start it anyway just to not be stuck on my desktop all the time. Right now I'm laying in bed with the iPad as
I'm too sleepy to be at the desk but will probably be up another hour.

So I'll probably do flashcards. The iPad does that well.
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kraemder
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Speaks: English*
Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese

 
 Message 52 of 1702
22 June 2011 at 1:25am | IP Logged 
I am checking out the website Japanesepod101. I paid 1 dollar for 1 month trial. I fear that they may have
now emptied my bank account... And I'm a bit scared to check on that. They've got a good list of vocab that
they list as 1st 100 and 2nd 200 to lern etc. I added their list to my app and I like their choice of words
better than any other so far. There are some repeats from stuff I've studied but surprisingly a lot is brand
new even though it's the basic 1st. 100 that I'm learning. Overall I'm not a whole lot impressed with the site
as the forums seem dead and they ask for a lot of money around 30 a month or so and it's not clear what
you get for that. I'll probably cancel soon but the vocab list looks helpful.

In terms of how I'm doing the flash cards, I'm having side 1 blank but it reads the Japanese to me. Then
side 2 shows the English, kana, and kanji. I think I'm going to learn kanji later as I'm not doing formal study
of it. It's just a lot of work and knowing how stuff sounds seems more important.

Edited by kraemder on 24 June 2011 at 5:12am

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irrationale
Tetraglot
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China
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Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog
Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese

 
 Message 53 of 1702
22 June 2011 at 11:01am | IP Logged 
The Real CZ wrote:
Once you get to a lower intermediate level, go read a Japanese book. Japanese without kanji is a nightmare.


I just want to jump in if I may to the kanji debate.

As someone coming from Chinese with a knowledge of 3500+ characters, I can say that reading Japanese with the kanji is much more pleasant on the eyes than the kana. It is a long climb up the mountain, but at least with this language the view at the top is quite nice. I personally hope for as much kanji as possible in the words that I learn, and am dismayed with long strings of kana.
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kraemder
Senior Member
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1497 posts - 1648 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese

 
 Message 54 of 1702
24 June 2011 at 5:10am | IP Logged 
ewww kanji. I hates it! I am sure if I spend years studying and somehow manage to learn a good amount of kanji then I would hardly want my efforts to have gone to waste and will be devastated if the Japanese were to make any language overhauls and stop using it!


Anyway, I signed up for a tutor session on Rosetta. I did this because I can go through the lessons and get almost everything right without much effort. However, after thinking back to my Spanish sessions I remember how a big difference with the learning material and the tutor sessions was how one tested your passive knowledge and the other your active. My active Japanese is non-existent. I am so screwed. damn! damn! argh.

I'm going to keep the appointment for the session regardless and just see what happens.

Also, the Rosetta stone app for the ipad is pretty fun. I probably wouldn't care for it with a European language that used the Roman alphabet but for Japanese it's fun and doesn't get boring. If this language used the roman alphabet I'm sure I'd just be reading texts written for natives already. /sigh

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kraemder
Senior Member
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1497 posts - 1648 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese

 
 Message 55 of 1702
24 June 2011 at 5:15am | IP Logged 
I was just reading someone's language log for French and some posts in French. I haven't studied this language in ages and never spoke it. I can still read it just fine though. When I think about how hard Japanese is, French hardly seems like a foreign language at all.
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kraemder
Senior Member
United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 4943 days ago

1497 posts - 1648 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese

 
 Message 56 of 1702
26 June 2011 at 12:54am | IP Logged 
I had my Rosetta Stone session. I survived. Oh man it was hard. As I said, the tutoring session uses active Japanese skills whereas the lessons are all passive. The lessons help you for the tutoring but you can't just do them and expect to ace the tutoring session because the tutor talks to you and it's not multiple choice.. you have to talk! And it's all Japanese, no English. Even level 1, unit 1.

I was cheating as much as possible having google translate up and typing in vocabulary I couldn't remember etc. Although Google is great I will say that the translation isn't perfect and the grammatical structures it came up with were unfortunately not the same as what's taught in the lessons. So I pretty much could only use it for vocab and even here it was only useful to me 75% of the time. For example, I typed in pants and it gave me back an English loanword pantso or something like that. So I quickly typed in trousers and got the word I was looking for: Zubon.

I did record the session (with video) so I can go back later and see how horrible i was once I've learned more. I don't think I'll use the recording as a studying tool more of a journal tool to look back on later.

I want to start reading so much. It's going to be what breaks down this barrier of feeling helpless to actually learning =/. Kanji = the devil.


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