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Brun_Ugle flies again (TAC 2012 team い) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Woodsei Bilingual Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Woodsei Joined 4608 days ago 614 posts - 782 votes  Speaks: English*, Arabic (Egyptian)* Studies: Russian, Japanese, Hungarian | Message 73 of 276 13 February 2012 at 7:34am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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And that is a very correct hypothesis on price in relation to time :) Great analysis!
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| Kappa Groupie Japan Joined 5331 days ago 99 posts - 172 votes | Message 74 of 276 16 February 2012 at 2:34pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Howdy! It's really interesting to see from the viewpoints of non-natives since native speakers hardly notice such details. Thanks. That was an eye-opener. I would've never noticed myself. By the way, those -kai and -dai endings are basically the same as -ka and -da. The -i at the end is just a little extra. I did my search and these came up. KAI at Tofugu.com KAI at JJLC DAI at Nihongo Den DAI at Japanese 1-2-3
I don't know if there's anything good there but ustream might have something you can watch/listen to. It's a live-streaming website so you won't find no drama and no subtitles. And I don't suppose you find websites like these useful...? Learn Jaanese I & II at veoh.com ECISインターネット放送局 Irasshai NHKデジタル教材
"Liked" in English, here, is interchangeable with "enjoyed" but it's not the same way in Japanese. "好き" refers to rather the sate of being fond of something (I hope this makes some sense to you, it's really hard to explain things and that's why I try not to do that so I won't cause any confusion). I'd interpret "好きでした" as "used to like sth", rather than plain "liked". You can, instead, say "was good; 良かった(です)" in that context. Or "気に入った", "気に入りました" will do it. This word is also used like this; お気に入りのウェブサイト, meaning "(a) favourite website". Some people of the younger generations, from teens to people in their early 20s, tend to shorten it to "お気に" (i.e. "お気にの靴", "(a pair of) favorite shoes"). Also "推薦する" sounds a bit formal here. "お勧(すす)めする (勧める)" という言葉を使うことをお勧めします。 (I recommend using the word "お勧めする (勧める)".) You can use it casually. :) It works like a noun, too. i.e. "この本はお勧めです。", "I recommend this book.", more literally "This book is recommended/(a, my) recommendation."
4000 is about the size of my English vocabulary. I'm sure it's not going to take long for you to acquire a bigger Japanese vocabulary, than mine in English, and I'm looking forward to being a witness to that. On an unrelated note, I sort of like how iKnow sticks to the Japanese currency and doesn't provide any change rate and such even though they'd translate the whole website to English and market for the speakers of the language. I hope I didn't make simple things complicated for you with my poor writing skills and English. And I'm sorry for any incorrect grammar, use of words and punctuations. Best of luck, Kappa Edited by Kappa on 16 February 2012 at 2:37pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6431 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish | Message 75 of 276 16 February 2012 at 6:03pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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Hi Kappa!
Thanks for correcting me. It's nice to have some advice from an expert. I have very little experience speaking or writing Japanese, but I really should start to work on it. Reading is the only skill I feel reasonably good at. I will also try looking at some of those links you gave me, and I'm sure my teammates will find them useful too. Edited by Brun Ugle on 16 February 2012 at 6:05pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Sunja Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5896 days ago 2020 posts - 2295 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, German Studies: French, Mandarin | Message 76 of 276 17 February 2012 at 9:54am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
I know I do! Thanks Kappa! And Brun Ugle please give us updates on iKnow! Which lists have you started with? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6431 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish | Message 77 of 276 19 February 2012 at 8:47am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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Log for 2012.02.05-2012.02.11 inclusive
Reviewing the Kanji: Time = 2:54. New kanji = 35. Read the kanji: Time = 3:15. I’ve now added all the kanji for N3, a little ahead of schedule. Yay! However, I don’t feel very strong on a number of them, so I will review a few more days before adding N2. Then I will add N2, but keep reviewing both for a while. ANKI review: Time = 1:46. This week hasn’t been that great for me, and I pretty much gave up on Anki, so now I’m going to have to get back to it before it gets out of hand. Reading: Time = 12:49. I wanted to get started on my new books, but I had to finish my old book first. So I had a big marathon reading session. Now I’ve finally started one of the new ones, but I haven’t gotten very far yet. I only just started on Friday. iKnow: Time= 4:56. I’ve decided this is quite a lot of fun. Almost like a video game. Actually they do have a game on there too. I’ve only tried it twice. I got 13 the first time, but I did pretty well the second time and got 56, I think. Textbook/grammar: Time = 0:17. As I said, it’s been a bad week. Total for period: 25 hr, 58 min Total since start of TAC 2012: 181 hr, 40 min Total since I started keeping track (2011.11.06): 376 hr, 2 min I decided to make custom decks on iKnow for the words I don’t know from Core 1000, 2000, and 3000. Well, 1000 and 2000 weren’t too bad, but when I got to 3000, I found there were tons of words I didn’t know. So I decided to do those decks as well. I plan to finish the two I’ve started in Core 4000 then do those I don’t know from Core 1000 and 2000. Then I will start on 3000 and work my way up from there. It’s possible before starting a deck, or anytime new words come up, to deselect those words you already know. So I will do it that way. Anyway, it turns out I was right and iKnow was wrong. I really do know somewhere between 2000 and 3000 words, just like I’d estimated myself. I suppose, I might know over 3000, but then many of them are not high frequency words. I guess that’s what you get from reading Star Trek and articles on autism and bipolar disorder. I know how to say things like photon torpedo, Asperger syndrome, and hypomania, but I don’t know how to say comb, toy, or paint. I almost forgot to mention that my therapist (I feel that's not quite the right word, but I don't know what to call her in English) wanted to see my Japanese books. I don't know if she really wanted to see them, or if she's just humoring me. She knows people with Asperger's like to talk endlessly about our interests and there aren't many who want to listen to us (except here, what a great site), so she could be humoring me, but if so, she does a great job of seeming enthusiastic. She always tells me how very impressed she is that I study Japanese. I keep saying that it isn't all that impressive. It's almost a little embarrassing to only know two languages when there are people like Iversen here who know over ten and study a dozen more. She really wished she could read some of the books herself, especially a comic book on Asperger's syndrome and an advice book on the same subject written by someone who has it and is very successful in life. I told her she just has to learn Japanese and then she could read them. I would even lend them to her. Edited by Brun Ugle on 19 February 2012 at 8:53am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Kappa Groupie Japan Joined 5331 days ago 99 posts - 172 votes | Message 78 of 276 19 February 2012 at 4:31pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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I wasn't going to write anythiing unless there's something I can help with and I'm confident that I can offer something useful, but I just wanted to get something straight. I'm most certainly NOT an expert on anything. You probably used the word casually but still, I am smart enough to know being a native speaker doesn't, by any means, make me one. Also I just proved myself that I don't even know much about my own native language by that statement, "it (the word 勧める) works like a noun, too." To make it a bit clearer, when I said a "noun", I meant an adjectival (or whatever it's called). Almost everything I write, tend to be rather unclear, not to the point and confusing, for which I'm sorry, and this is the very reason why I hardly ever participate in the forum (at least not anymore. I've wrote here a few times, only to have come to the conclusion that my language skills aren't up to the levels to involve in discussions and to make myself understood clearly, ergo no participation. Also I have nothing valuable to offer, at all, whatever the topic is, as I'm not experienced in language learning.) but just lurk around. Good thing is, though, reading through variety of the topics discussed here makes me feel like I'm smart or something even if I don't understand much of what's being said. :) The bad thing is feeling good about myself like this doesn't help me in any way to study. As a matter of fact, the example and explanation I gave, on the word usage of "like" were poor at best. It wasn't just the choice of words, but tense and aspect.
As you figured out so long ago, verbs don't work the same way in Japanese as in English. In this case, the reason why "好きでした" cannot be the exact equivalent to "liked" is because while "liked", in that context, refers to "event", "好きでした" rather indicates "state". My point is, the Japanese verb "好き" is a "state" verb, thus cannot be used to express a simple past action, "event". And I found an old thread on tense and aspect on WordReference for future reference (and there's a familiar name), here (It may be too much though). Well, there are people on the forum who are fluent in the language, enough to be considered "experts", you can always make a thread to ask questions and they can explain things much much better than I could ever do. You studied 26 hours last week and you call it a bad week! That's almost 4 hours a day. You should give yourself some credit. :)
Funny you should mention that. I don't know how to say everyday easy stuff, not to mention more advanced intellectual things. Looking at the description of CEFR A2, I can see my English apparently doesn't meet the requirements for A2.
My reading is not too bad, passable at A2 perhaps, although I'm a pretty slow reader (at about 160 wpm). I'm particulary bad at output skills. It takes me forever to write anything and these posts are no exception. I don't do writing well either in Japanese, which is my native language. Maybe I'm lousy at "thinking." I have so many things to work on, and at times (or most of the time) it seems so overwhelming and demanding I want to throw away everything and just give up. Then I realise, room for improvement means possibility, I can get better than I am now. That's kind of my hope. I'm extremely lazy and often forget about learning but because of that, I have'nt given up and intend to keep going. My progress will most likely be terribly slow but so long as I am advancing towards the goals, I think it means something. Who knows how many years it's going to take, and who cares.
It's not "false friends", but I got something here, only for entertainment purposes, although not very entertaining. 1, 一 = itch 2, 二 = knee 3, 三 = sun 4, 四 = she (I'm aware that English sh and Japanese sh are slightly different) 5, 五 = go 6, 六 = rock 7, 七 = none of (Try saying it very very very quickly) 8, 八 = hatch 9, 九 = cue 10, 十 = Jew (no offence meant) Edit: I'm sorry for rambling on about nothing here and there, I didn't realise it was getting that long and off topic like that. Should I delete this? Edited by Kappa on 19 February 2012 at 4:48pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6431 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish | Message 79 of 276 19 February 2012 at 6:13pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Yes, I was using the word casually, but a native speaker is certainly more expert than any of us, so it’s great to have advice. I understood everything you wrote perfectly clearly. Actually, I was aware of the phrase 気に入る. I must have read it a few hundred times by now, yet it never occurred to me to use it myself. I guess there is a big gap between my passive understanding and my active use. Anyway, you shouldn’t really worry about what is a verb or adjective or whatever. Japanese is so different from English, that it is kind of hard to use the same terms to explain them. For example you have adjectives that are almost like verbs, and others that are almost like nouns. That’s quite different from the way we use them in English. Anyway, the only thing you really have to do, is to tell us when we are using the wrong word, what would be correct. And when we say something unnatural or odd, tell us a better way to say it. That would be a huge help.
I wasn’t really referring to the number of hours, but more to the fact that I hardly even touched my grammar book or my textbook. It’s hard to count reading novels as “real” studying. It’s too much fun.
To that, I must say, “nonsense.” I don’t know anything about your speaking and listening skills, but if you are able to read the stuff on this forum, even slowly, you are definitely in the B range in reading, probably B2. And I think your writing is also B2 judging by the topics you are able to write about and the way you express yourself. Of course, you make some mistakes in grammar and sometimes express something in a slightly awkward fashion, but even after many years speaking Norwegian, I still do that occasionally.
It takes many years to be able to write quickly, especially in languages so very different as English and Japanese. When I write in Japanese, I have to look up almost every single word and check my grammar book to see how to use the different constructions. As far as giving up goes, you have no idea how many times I have started and given up on Japanese. I started it when I had a Japanese boyfriend, but at that time I had no idea how to learn a language. I gave up and restarted it probably six or seven times since then. This time I’m determined to make it though. It wasn’t until I learned Norwegian that I got a feel for how to learn a language. Norwegian is an incredibly easy language for an English speaker to learn, but it gave me the feeling that it is at least possible for me to learn another language. Before that, it always seemed like magic, and those who’d managed to learn another language must be some kind of geniuses. I think you should start a log too. It’s very motivating to get help and encouragement from others. In fact, I think I can speak for everyone and say that you could join our team. (Please do.) At the moment our team consists only of people learning Japanese, but an ideal team has people learning each other’s languages. As many of us are native speakers of English, I’m sure we could give you plenty of help and encouragement.
Ha ha! That’s very funny. Of course, I am beyond learning the numbers (though the big ones give me trouble), but I think that might actually be useful to a beginner to help remember them. Your comment about 10, made me laugh too. I used to have a cat named Sanjuuro (from the movie). We usually called him Sanjuu. He was originally my boyfriend’s cat, but when my boyfriend had to return very suddenly to Japan, I kept the cat. Anyway, one day my oldest sister came over. She’s Jewish (we are a mixture of races and religions in my family), and she easily takes offence. When she heard the cat’s name, she immediately said, “Is that something against Jews?!” Of course, we had never imagined such a thing and had to explain the name to her.
Never! Don’t delete anything! I love your rambling. There is nothing off topic on my log, so write about whatever you want. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Kappa Groupie Japan Joined 5331 days ago 99 posts - 172 votes | Message 80 of 276 21 February 2012 at 3:12pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Well, but a native often doesn't know so much "about" his/her own language, let alone how it works unless they deliberately study it. Doesn't that make me less "qualified"? And as you actually have been studying the language, you are more knowledgable than us, at least me. And I'm glad you were able to decipher the codes. I sometimes find it a little hard to read my own writings. Maybe because of all the incorrect grammar, usage and such but I still don't know how to make it sound right no matter how many times I try to read and rewrite, so I usually don't bother to try to sound natural. That kind of works out okay for me.
That happnes to me all the time. I can watch an ordinary American sitcom (like How I Met Your Mother) and understand 70-90% of it. I still have difficulty listening though and understanding some jokes, but it never stopped me from enjoying them. I like the show House and there's TONS of words I've never heard of in my life, mostly medical terms, of course, but I wouldn't understand them in Japanese, either, so it's not much of a problem. I focus on the story plot and ignore what I can't understand. When I try to write, however, it's like the brain part that handles speech has left me in the dark. Nothing comes to my mind and I have to think real hard searching for words and expressions. I don't even know what to write/say, even though there's a topic to talk about. The same thing happens in Japanese, too, so it may be a different problem but at any rate I really do have to work on my speaking and writing as I make no effort whatsoever to actually practice speaking. Never have. Some people would tell me I should practice speaking no matter what level my English is on, but the thing is, how am I suppose to make conversation and even keep up when I can't write fast enough? I do know I've got to practice to improve. But I suppose I speak even slower than I write, which means it'd take me like an hour to make up a one-minute talk. For measure, it took an hour to write the previous post. I'd say that's about 400 words, which leads me to the conclusion I write 7 wpm. Wow. I'm shocked myself. A regular English speaker would finish it in a minute or two, I suppose. On the positive side, I can read about 23 times as fast as I write! :) (Please don't ruin my mood by mentioning my reading speed, thanks! :) )
Yeah, I noticed but sometimes it's not easy to avoid them. I leave those grammartical stuff to those who studied the language to proficiency/fluency and I do what I can do. You should do your part, too. You need to write something in Japanese to get feedback.
You can still count it as reading exercise. I know I would. I'm not an avid reader but I know it's fun. I used read books in class back in elementary. It started from 4th grade or something and they were never manga. I didn't have books at home so I'd go to the school library and stay there until the teacher tell me to go home. When I graduated from elementary, there was some change in living situations, so I sort of changed, I guess. I wasn't as passionate about reading as before. Now as an adult, I own a few books and enjoy reading at times but still do not spend much time in that. You'd probably say 1-4 books a month (it really varies) is nothing. My most recent read is "The Forgotten Garden" by Kate Morton and I give it 7.5 on the 1 to 10 scale. Lots of unknown words I skipped, lots of times I flipped the pages back and forth... It took me four days to finish. And I'm soon going to be reading "Blood Brother" by J. A. Kerley, my first crime novel in English. I remember reading novels by Patricia Cornwell in Japanese back in middle school. I may check out her more recent works in English.
As much as I'm flattered to hear that, I can't help it but notice that there's a hole in what you said. You are assuming that I actually understand most of what's being said on this forum... which I certainly do not. It does depend on the topic, but those involving linguistics and science, I often fail to understand. Secondly, as I said above, I write even much more slowly. If you take that much time, you can refer to your grammar book and look up every single word that comes to your mind and still have much time left to check if there's mistakes. Also, I don't know how to say, for example, things around the house. I don't know how to ask direction. Things like that and that's why I made that my-English-not-on-the-A2-level statement. It's not the mistakes I made. I make mistakes in my native language and I'll never be done with them. I don't expect to be mistake-free, never and it doesn't bother me much that I make them. It used to. I went through the phase where I have to perfect about everything, but I got over it. I don't really believe in mastery. Fluent is another thing and it would be nice to someday achieve that level. Nice but not necessary to me, my goal is to be able to understand other people and to make myself understood clearly. I do look up some words when I write, too. I don't when I watch/listen to something though (because of my laziness). Mostly owing to my poor listening skill though. The other day, I was watching House and then there comes up this word "paraneoplastic syndrome", which happens to catch my attention, but I didn't hear it right. It sounded like, to me, "para kneal plastic syndrome" (para... Spanish? thought to myself) and I came to know what the word was with googling. Now I don't have the slightest idea why an "o" sounded like an "l", but it proves that I still screw up those basic sounds. And this goes without saying that for a moment I didn't know to decide if it was "para" or "pala". I don't check grammar as I got no grammar reference. That is, except the Internet but I rarely check my grammar anyway. I don't need any sophistication of any sort in my English to express myself, so I stick with simple grammar. I still make plenty of mistakes in easy things though. I tried to pick up another language and "failed", too (Well, you didn't fail, obviously). Studied three hours a day for two weeks and then got burnt out. Amazing how just three hours a day could do that to me. I've forgotten almost everything I learnt. Although the rules of vowel harmony, which is probably the easiest thing of all, kind of stuck as well as some suffixes. I have to start all over, from the jump, again. Which is what I plan to do. I'm pretty certain this is going to keep happening to me, no matter what language I'll be learning. I don't have much of an idea as to how to learn a language but I guess I'll get the hang of it with time and practice. I still think those who've learnt a foreign language to fluency are genius. And there's a lot of people on this forum who speak more than four languages fluently... Just wow. I'd never be like them. I want to remain human, normal, sane! :) You know, Norwegian sounds great. It's not high on my list, but I actually want to some day learn a Scandinavian language, preferably Swedish. It wouldn't be as easy for me since, well, it's a Germanic language after all. I'm already having trouble with one. My first exposure to the language was through a pop song, sung by a Iranian-Swedish singer called Laleh. She mostly sings in English. I usually don't like it when they don't sing in their own language but she's an exception. Also there's some Swedish songs as well as Persian ones (I'm fascinated by both of the languages), which is wonderful and I hope she does more. Her latest album just came out last month. I still haven't got the chance to listen to it. Not much foreign music in Japan except for American and Korean pop. Such a shame. Thank Goodness we got the Internet. You shouldn't reply to everything I write, for your sake and mine as well. A little comment or something when you have updates would be nice, if there's any. I can't NOT write back. I'm sort of obssessed, with replying. I can't let go. And with the speed rate of my writing, it gets very tiring and demanding to do so. That's part of the reasons I'd be better off without my own log. I'd feel obliged to give updates and some sort of useful information so people won't get bored. It'd most likely tire the heck out of me and make me dismiss studies, yet again. I don't even know what to write about anyway... If I were to keep track of my learning, I'd do it privately with just simple figures and graphs or something. Encouragement and help are great but I could get them from somewhere else, I suspect: i.e. other people's logs. Most importantly, since you gave me a go, it's much more fun to hijack logs. I'm just kidding, obviously, I have no intention to do that even though that may seem to be what I'm doing. I'll be careful. but I'm not going delete any part of this post and Jewish foreplay ain't gon' work on me! :) (Okay, yes, I learnt it from House, again. 4 hours of begging. It's just a joke and I mean no offence to Jewish people! I'm actually interested in their culture, religion and language.)
Numbers are tricky for me as well. I can't count in English, as a matter fact. Fifty-one hundred, ninety-nine thousand, then... argh. I myself have never experienced such things but I know there are always some people that easily take offence to just about anything. I'm Japanese. I hardly understand racial/ethnical/religious stuff. And that's why I usually try to make it clear that I'm not trying to mock or offend anybody. It could get out of my hands, I'd better stay away. Now, I want to finish this post with a paragraph from a little book written in Japanese about English, by a native English speaker.
Now, I'm not going to provide any translation because I'm exhausted from all the writing but I think you can make out the general meaning of the paragraph. The book is towards English students in Japan, but you can just replace "英語" with "日本語" in your case. You should already know how to go about studying, so it may not be much useful but just as a reading exercise or something. For me, I was in high school when I first read the book and it was a little, surprising, to say the least, to know that even someone who can publish a book in a foreign language has gone through some sort of nervous breakdown. I don't remember much else about the book but that bit, which is just a part of the preface.
Thank you. And I like pickles. :) At last, I'm sorry, as always, for any incorrect grammar, word usage and punctuations, and again for the rather lengthy post. I don't have any energy left to go through what I wrote so please forgive me for being random at times and rambling-y. And, you should NOT quote & reply to avoid this hijacking. Instead make it a comment or two in your regular updates and that will definitely suffice for both of us. Otherwise I'm forced to do this all over again and that would burn the living heck out of me. Moderate me. Edit: Oh lord. I wrote way too much this time. I can hardly control myself when it comes to replying and eventually I get worn out then take some time off to charge. Okay, I'm not going to write any more about anything. I just wanted to say that I didn't mean to hijack your log, really. I have no intention to cause your eyes to hurt. Anyway, have fun reading, and learning. Edited by Kappa on 21 February 2012 at 3:19pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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