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旅立ち/Катюша-Woodsei’s TAC 2014

 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log Post Reply
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Solfrid Cristin
Heptaglot
Winner TAC 2011 & 2012
Senior Member
Norway
Joined 5094 days ago

4143 posts - 8864 votes 
Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian
Studies: Russian

 
 Message 113 of 162
03 January 2013 at 9:30pm | IP Logged 
Good to see you back, Woodsei, I was starting to wonder whether we had lost you in outer space, and am relieved to see that you are back at the space ship!

I look forward to another active year, and to your always interesting posts!
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aloysius
Triglot
Winner TAC 2010 & 2012
Senior Member
SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name
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226 posts - 291 votes 
Speaks: Swedish*, English, German
Studies: French, Greek, Italian, Russian

 
 Message 114 of 162
03 January 2013 at 10:56pm | IP Logged 
Woodsei wrote:
I missed the forum. I’ve been down with the flu, then numerous other issues got in the
way of me updating and following my fellow samurai warriors’ and Russian cosmonauts’
logs. Nonetheless, I’ve been spending the past few weeks boning up on my language
studies and polishing them for the final weeks before the end of the 2012 TAC.

/.../



What a wonderful post that was, Woodsei! You've been such a fantastic asset on Sputnik and I'm so glad you're with
us this year as well on Mir. I'm sure you'll lead the way when we take on new 6wc's. If I could manage just a fraction
of your work capacity I'd be more than happy.

Well done in 2012 and good luck in 2013!

//aloysius
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Woodsei
Bilingual Diglot
Winner TAC 2012
Senior Member
United States
justpaste.it/Woodsei
Joined 4557 days ago

614 posts - 782 votes 
Speaks: English*, Arabic (Egyptian)*
Studies: Russian, Japanese, Hungarian

 
 Message 115 of 162
03 January 2013 at 11:25pm | IP Logged 
@SolfridChristin: Yes, I was lost in outer space, until I heard my fellow MIR cosmonauts
calling me in for another inspiring and exciting TAC. I missed the forum so much, and it
hit me, you guys are an awesome source of motivation! I tend to really sleep on things
and visiting HTLAL is like an adrenaline rush. Thank you so much for your post, I'm so
looking forward to being with all my fellow Mir teammates :)

@Aloysius: Thank you! It's so great to be with everone on the team again this year, too,
and I'm really looking forward to following everyone's progress. I think you are doing
great, too, in fact, my inspiration to joining HTLAL was reading your past logs along
with several other veterans, Christina included :) So keep inspiring :)

Edited by Woodsei on 03 January 2013 at 11:26pm

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Woodsei
Bilingual Diglot
Winner TAC 2012
Senior Member
United States
justpaste.it/Woodsei
Joined 4557 days ago

614 posts - 782 votes 
Speaks: English*, Arabic (Egyptian)*
Studies: Russian, Japanese, Hungarian

 
 Message 116 of 162
06 January 2013 at 3:49am | IP Logged 
あけおめ、皆!

Happy New Year!

I can't believe it's already been a year since my first TAC. I learned a lot, not just
language-wise, and made a lot of friends. I'm really grateful for the community here at
the forum, because the support and the motivation have played a huge part in my
language learning process. I wish everyone a great new year, and hope we are all able
to more or less achieve our goals for this coming year.

So, since I'm using the same log I had for the 2012 TAC, I'll skip a lengthy
introduction for myself, which you'll find in the first post of this log, and just go
on and lay out my plan for this upcoming year. If you don't feel like reading the log
from the start, here's a summary: I live in the States, I'm a graduate student, and I'm
passionate about everything and anything that has to do with languages, culture,
travel, history and geography, etc. I also love outdoor sports (and indoor ones, too :)   
), photography, education, reading, psychology, and arts (animations, etc).

I started learning languages on my own for the first time ever this past year, and
committed myself to it by joining the TAC. Nothing like a little accountability to get
up and running, ね? :D Anyway, I'll try in my coming posts to rite a little about
what I did, but you can read it in the previous posts here.

1. Japanese

This is my first main focus language for this year. I love Japan, it's culture, and of
course, it's beautiful language. I love the importance and respect the Japanese give to
life, and you can see it in various media, such as books, films, even serious shows
discussing such topics. I watched a show once on NHK Education TV where an earthquake
specialist visited a grade and junior high school, and held a very serious and active
discussion on the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan back in March of 2011, and
about how disasters impact family and the importance of preserving one's own life. It
was both eye-opening and heartbreaking. And watching fourth-graders actually discussing
such heavy topics was very impressive. But I digress. I guess that to me, Japan will
always hold a special place in my heart. And I can't get over how beautiful the
language is, both the written and the spoken. And I want to get awesome at Japanese. I
want to be able to speak, read, write, and listen to it as well as English and Arabic,
my native languages.

Anyway, most of my learning has been immersing myself almost all day everyday in native
content. Anime, Jdorama,variety shows, listening and reading, manga and light novels,
songs and lyrics, you name it. I finished Heisig early on. I can understand most of
what I listen to or read, not just the gist, but actual meaning. I haven't done any
active production yet, though, in terms of speaking and writing. And I haven't been
giving much attention to news. Variety shos still go over my head. Well, not as bad as
before.

So, my plans for Japanese this year are pretty simple. Input, input, input! That means
lots of listening and reading, and TV, radio, podcast, news, etc. I'm a big fan of
Krashen, and LR, and natural language acquisition in general, and from my experience
last year, it's been working beautifully, for me at least. This will also work great
for the Super Challenge that I participated in with Japanese, namely reading 100 books
and watching 100 movies by the end of December 2013. 楽しい!I have been keeping a list
of books/manga I read and drama/movies/anime I watch, but have been slacking off on my
Twitter and uper Challenge thread updates, so hopefully I'll get around to updating
more reliably, and keeping all the things I covered in a main place, like a blog, or a
Word file, or something. We'll see. I'm so excited! :) I also have been slacking off
on my kanji reviews, so I want to get back to those, as well as focus on the readings.
I haven't been SRSing any sentences, although I attempted to last year. SRSing
sentences on Anki has been effective, but I kept falling off the wagon, and well, it
got pretty boring and I just wanted to read more, or listen/watch to media. But for the
small amount I did it really pushed my Japanese to the next level. I still remember
those sentences as if I'd just written them out a few minutes ago, and can effortlessly
speak them, even though I haven't looked at them again. I guess focusing on sentences
as part of your immersion does really aid in faster and more efficient language
learning acquisition, but I just hated the time I spent on Anki making cards, even
though the physical act of reading words/sentences and writing them out by hand, saying
them, and SRSing them is really effective. I came to a compromise where I'll write out
some sentences I come across from my reading and listening/TV in a notebook or Word
file if I ever feel like avoiding Anki. A little exercise is better than nothing. But
even then, most of my learning will be through reading and listening/tv/podcasts/etc.

2. Russian

I looked at my goals for Russian last year, and boy, they were embarrassing T_T :)
I started out with Assimil, due to the lack of resources I had, then gradually started
skipping days with no Russian at all. I intend to change that. Russian is my second
focus language for this year, again like Japanese, but I really want to level it up
with where I am in Japanese. I managed to collect several readers, movies, and
audiobooks thankfully, so along with Assimil, I plan on working through them and
simulating what I did for Japanese. I plan on purchasing a grammar reference, just to
look up vague points that I can't infer from context as I go, same as I did with
Japanese. I'm looking forward to sharing thoughts and opinions, and bouncing ideas off
of each other on board the glorious MIR spaceship, and really looking forward to
following my fellow cosmonauts progress :)

3. Hungarian

Hungarian was a relative latecomer last year, and I initially started dabbling in it,
but it quickly became a more serious pursuit and now I want to actively study it. That
said, most of my time will be given to Japanese and Russian, so Hungarian will be kept
to a minimum, as I can't focus on too many languages at the same time. But even if it's
kept to a minimum, it will be constant, so I hope to achive some sort of noticeable
progress by the end of the year. It's heard to gauge, really, given the obscure goal,
but time will tell how it all turns out.

That's basically it. I want to start Korean and Mandarin Chinese, so much, but until my
Japanese and Russian ships firmly anchor in the aforementioned shores, I don't
anticipate working seriously on them this year. But dabbling is always fine, and fun!

That's basically my initial take on things. I write long posts and sleep on them for
weeks, so I'm hoping that this year I start popping in more frequently to post short
updates, and of course visit my team mates logs :)

Oh, over at Team Sakura we agreed to post introductions to ourselves in Japanese with
an accompanying translation on the team thread, so here's my first attempt at writing
posted on my log too! I hope it's okay and understandable :)


みなさん、元気? はじめまして、そして、 あけましておめで とう!TAC   2013と、私の  語学 習 の 日誌へ 
ようこそ!それでは、はじめましょ!
あたしはウヅセイです、日本と日本語が大好 きだから、今、日本語をがり勉している. 早く上手になりたいから。しかも、
時間を掛けずにね!でも、最近、全然勉強が 手 てにつかないだけど、私は、きっとそれを変 えてみせます、きっと!み
んな、楽しみにしておいてね!

And the loose translation:

Everyone, doing well? Greetings, and happy new year! Welcome to the TAC 2013, and my
log. Well then, here I go!
I'm Woodsei, I love Japan and Japanese, so I'm studying like crazy, because I really
want to get awesome at Japanese quickly. Recently, I haven't been studying at all, but
I'll change that, surely! I'm looking forward to it :)

Hope that sounded ok! And, speaking of writing, I plan to seriously head over to Lang-8
and start writing something frequently to work on improving my production. That's
another point I was planning and forgot to mention above. It'll be interesting to see
how it all turns out!

また今度!

Edited by Woodsei on 06 January 2013 at 4:06am

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Woodsei
Bilingual Diglot
Winner TAC 2012
Senior Member
United States
justpaste.it/Woodsei
Joined 4557 days ago

614 posts - 782 votes 
Speaks: English*, Arabic (Egyptian)*
Studies: Russian, Japanese, Hungarian

 
 Message 117 of 162
06 January 2013 at 4:07am | IP Logged 
I hate, hate, HATE the diamonds :( Well, the above word in diamonds is missing a
character. This is it: 語学学習
1 person has voted this message useful



Brun Ugle
Diglot
Senior Member
Norway
brunugle.wordpress.c
Joined 6380 days ago

1292 posts - 1766 votes 
Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1
Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish

 
 Message 118 of 162
06 January 2013 at 8:47am | IP Logged 
See my post about diamonds on the team thread.
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Solfrid Cristin
Heptaglot
Winner TAC 2011 & 2012
Senior Member
Norway
Joined 5094 days ago

4143 posts - 8864 votes 
Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian
Studies: Russian

 
 Message 119 of 162
06 January 2013 at 8:51am | IP Logged 
An impressive post, as always, Woodsei!

You have been a wonderful inspiration with your hard work and discipline. I am amazed at what you have
done with your Japanese, and it will be fantastic seeing you do the same thing with Russian.

Three cheers for a record breaking 2013!

1 person has voted this message useful



Teango
Triglot
Winner TAC 2010 & 2012
Senior Member
United States
teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 5316 days ago

2210 posts - 3734 votes 
Speaks: English*, German, Russian
Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona

 
 Message 120 of 162
06 January 2013 at 10:39am | IP Logged 
You know when a language just clicks, much in the same way as when you first meet a stranger and know you'll become good friends, or live in a new part of the world and have an uncanny feeling that this place will become a life-long "home from home". Japan has always just clicked for me in this way (everything from the language, arts, people and culture just feels exciting and awe-inspiring), and I'm particularly looking forward to sharing a little of that journey in Japanese with you this year (as well as Russian again). If your incredible progress and hard work from last year are anything to go by, you'll be bound to hit light speed in 2013 and bedazzle us all in your wake. I can't wait to read those logs and watch your Japanese migrate from "Studies" to "Speaks"! :)

Edited by Teango on 06 January 2013 at 10:40am



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