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旅立ち/Катюша-Woodsei’s TAC 2014

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Woodsei
Bilingual Diglot
Winner TAC 2012
Senior Member
United States
justpaste.it/Woodsei
Joined 4583 days ago

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

 
 Message 65 of 162
23 April 2012 at 1:42am | IP Logged 
04/22/2012: Log #9

Yes, finally posting on time! :) Just a quick update, since nothing has changed much in
the past few days.

1.日本語

Reviewing the Kanji: Almost done with RTK 3. I went through it once, but I'm
trying to get the reviews to even out so that I can balance them with the RTK 1
reviews. Going pretty well. I like putting in a Japanese keyword for the meaning. It
helps where the English keywords start sounding synonymous with each other. Although
I'm still relying mostly on the English ones for now.

Read the Kanji: Tried it out for the first time yesterday through the trial, and
I must say, I enjoyed it, it's kind of addictive. It's nothing different than the kanji
compound Anki deck I have, but the interface is interesting, and I like that I can see
stats for my progress. I guess you can do that too with Anki. Whether I'll continue
with it, we'll see. I have a boatload of reading and listening to go through, so we'll
see if this will help in any extra way.

Reading/Listening: Just random stuff online. As for listening, I caught up with
the anime episodes I've been missing from the shows I follow, and stumbled across a
drama called "Lucky Seven," which is supposed to be a detective drama, I think. I only
watched half of the first episode, nothing major, so I don't know how good it is. But
the characters seem interesting, so I'll stick around and see how that develops.

One thing to note, I kept away from Japanese for quite some time (7 weeks) and I
thought my listening went rusty. Actually, I felt I was following MUCH better. I can
follow along quite easily with the grammar; it's very predictable now, and I actually
don't think about it. My vocab is definitely lacking, so I'm sure now I was right in
thinking to just read/listen for the most part and focus on word/expression acquisition
until I can understand almost everything. I can follow somewhere around 10% of what I'm
listening to, but I want that to jump to the 90s by the end of the coming 6WC :) I
don't know how realistic that is, but six weeks is a long time, especially if coupled
with some intensive LR and vocab. So whether my bubble will burst or not will be
apparent in 7 weeks :)

Another thing I noted about watching with English subtitles. I read that it's the
absolute best to try and follow without a subtitle crutch, because that forces you to
focus on listening. I couldn't agree more. However, I noticed that as my listening
improved, and since I could follow the word order much better, the English stopped
getting in the way, and I was simulating an LR experience. Like, I would read the
subtitle quickly when it shows on the screen, then focus on what was being said. I was
watching Naruto, for instance, and I could follow along what the character was saying,
about becoming strong, which I understood fully. The next sentence had a word I didn't
know, "revenge," but I was able to pick that out because I already knew the other
words, and because I read the English equivalent beforehand. I decided that, for the
most part, leaving out subtitles is great to improve listening, but it's alright to use
them if I have a basic idea of the grammar, a bunch of useful words, and read the subs
ahead of time before the characters/actors speak in order to focus on the aural
component.

Tangorin and ALC: I was looking up a kanji compound sometime earlier, and got
caught in a 2-hour trance reading example sentences in both dictionaries. Tangorin is
cool, and I like that I can customize the interface to display or hide readings, kana,
translations, etc, and I found myself enjoying the example sentences on the site. A lot
are short and straightforward, so it's no struggle going through them, and it's good
grammar, vocab, and reading practice. And I loved trying out ALC, but it's light years
more challenging, and I couldn't keep my focus for long because of that. So I'll keep
hanging around these two online dictionaries when the mood permits.

So this is basically what I've been doing, not much, but gearing up for the 6WC and
Super. I trying to collect subtitles and scripts for TV/movies/anime, as well as books.
Waiting for my Amazon order to arrive, which should be anytime now, and super-duper
excited, I feel like a little kid with a new toy :) I love books :) I'm collecting
books, too, from any store I see that I suspect sells Japanese material, as well as
downloading the audio material and transcripts listed in Sheetz' log. I think I'm
getting obsessive, haha :) But it's all for 日本語!



2. Russian/русский

Going well. I'm glad I shifted the focus to vocab and random listening. It's much more
stress-free, now. I'm starting a collection of songs, and looking out for interesting
movies, too, as well as online radio. It's just a few minutes-a-day daily exercise, but
it's helping. I know that when I start LR with Russian, all these words I'm casually
reading will pay off in the long run. I do want to know a good online Russian
dictionary with audio. Russian Sputnik, please? And any recommendations for a good
grammar book as a future reference? It's not urgent, but it'll be helpful down the road
to pick apart the grammar when I need to. I guess I should head to the team log and
post that question there.

I forgot to keep track of my hours. Not an issue for me, but it's good for time-
management issues. I'll have to do that anyway for the 6WC, so by my next post,
hopefully I'll have that in as well.

Okey-dokey!

じゃあね!
1 person has voted this message useful



Woodsei
Bilingual Diglot
Winner TAC 2012
Senior Member
United States
justpaste.it/Woodsei
Joined 4583 days ago

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

 
 Message 66 of 162
03 May 2012 at 2:29am | IP Logged 
Thought I'd post my status report posted in the Russian team log here as well, to
summarize things.


Status Report

Japanese: RTK 1+ 3 and a few hundred sentences in, in terms of actual study, but
magnanimous amounts of listening. Vocab definitely lacking, and I haven't tried to
produce anything yet, but that's where the 6WC and Super Challenge come in. Starting
both with a main focus on listening and reading, as well as media. Occasional kanji
reviews to keep them fresh, but I guess reading will help cement that anyway. So,
beginner, with a gist for syntax, but I feel it's starting to snowball now, and will
soon get better.

Russian: Alphabet down, and even though Russian fell through badly at the start
of the year, I've been really working on it for the past ten days. I originally
intended to give major focus starting July, but decided to do small increments right
away. I wasn't able to locate some good resources for Russian as I have with Japanese,
and it's been somewhat holding me back. But I stumbled across online radio, and decided
that and Youtube have ample amounts of material, at least to jump-start things. I
recently ordered a number of audiobooks and graded readers, and have been in the
meantime reading lots of dialogue and listening to radio. I do that throughout the day,
and I find that now it's not so hard to shift between Japanese and Russian. So far
haven't been able to join Skype because of piling schoolwork and papers, but summer's
here, so may be I can adjust my schedule a bit more.
I didn't include Russian in the Super Challenge because I wasn't sure if I'll do it
well alongside Japanese, but now I notice that the time I'm spending with Russian is
either reading or listening, so I'm really hard-pressed to just register it, since I'm
working with the rules anyway. I don't have a chance, probably, at the 100 or
even 50 goal, but I'll play around with the idea over the next two weeks, since the
Super started, and I can better gauge if I can read both Russian and Japanese well.

Plans

Will join Tadoku on June 1st with both Russian and Japanese. The next 6WC in August
will most probably go to Russian as the focus language. It's getting easier to switch
between both languages and working with them in tandem.

1 person has voted this message useful



Woodsei
Bilingual Diglot
Winner TAC 2012
Senior Member
United States
justpaste.it/Woodsei
Joined 4583 days ago

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

 
 Message 67 of 162
03 May 2012 at 3:04am | IP Logged 
05/02/20122 : Log #10 and Week 1 for 6WC and Super Challenge

So this will be a brief update, and it will mark the start of the both the 6WC and the
Super Challenge, which both have Japanese as my focus language. The Super has you
reading 100 books and watching 100 movies in 20 months, starting May 1st and ending
December 31st, 2013. I added to the requirements 100 Lang8 entries and 100
conversations, 30 minutes each for a total of 50 hours, because I really want to push
myself for total fluency in Japanese. This is my ultimate goal, and I love both the
spoken and written language so much, it's going to be a blast :)

So, started yesterday, and now my study is going to be mostly listenig a nd reading
(LR), as well as AJATT-style reading (reading random pages in a book, not necessarily
in order, and I noticed I could focus more like that when it starts becoming monotonous
with normal reading). I'll also be reviewing the kanji on Anki, but I won't visit the
deck everyday, since I'll be seeing lots of kanji doing LR anyway. Reading, and tons of
input through films, anime, jdorama, music, podcasts, etc. Any subs I could locate for
media I will definitely use, both as LR-style, or srs, depending on my mood. Of course,
I won't be limiting myself to that, so, whenever I feel like it, doing vocab or
sentences, random online reading, etc. will be included too. I just want to focus now
on input in large amounts,because do want to understand most of what I'm listening to
in order to be able to write and speak well.
I'll be doing the same for Russian, but in smaller amounts, so it'll be slower.
My progress will be posted here in my log, and I'm setting up a list which will include
the books, movies, Lang8 entries, and conversation hours for the Super challenge. I'll
post the link as soon as its ready. I was debating starting a new log or blog, but
then, in between, logging, blogging, and twittering, I wonder when I'll be spending
time on languages. It's such a neat idea to have a blog, I'm very tempted, really, but
it could just be overkill. So, for now, I'll just discuss my progress, material I've
covered and my thoughts on them, as well as other activities in target languages here,
and a list of titles on justpaste.it which I'll post a link to in a few minutes.
Hopefully, I'll be able to tell in a couple of weeks whether I can add a second
language, Russian, to the Super challenge, or not, since I'll be reading and
listening/watching anyway. I love challenges :) They motivate me :)

I'm picking up pace in Russian. I don't understand anything yet of what I'm listening
to, but I can follow the speed of the native speakers on radio. I'm guessing this must
be because of all the listening I've been doing in Japanese; it trains the ear. I'm
also reading chldren's books, dialogue, and random things and having fun trying to
guess what they mean without resorting to a translation initially. Wht gave me the idea
was that I have a set of Japanese graded readers I started working on yesterday for the
Super challenge, and they are all in Japanese, with no English. I didn't understand
anything at first, but then I noticed I was picking the meaning through context, voice
actor's tone, and the illustrations. So I decided to experiment with Japanese and
Russian in that way, by starting off with easy material where I could guess meaning,
and build up from there. Jeez. Have I looked deeper in the mountain of resources I had,
being the book and language hoarder that I am :) I wouldn't have resorted earlier on to
Assimil, even though I still think that the 25 lesson dialogues I read through helped
immensely. I don't really regret it, but I'm having so much fun giving my brain a
mental workout and figuring out things by itself. I keep having aha! moments :) Love
the feeling. If this experiment works, I might not even need to use translations for
lR, but it's too early to tell. I started at Level 1 of the readers, and even though
it's fairly easy to go through, I only understood initially 30% of the words. But I
figured out everything halfway through reading the books. I was amazed. I went back to
rereading them, and this time got what I missed initially. Now I'm ready to start at
Level 2, and I'm so excited.

So yeah, I'll be doing that for Japanese and Russian in the coming weeks of the 6WC
mainly, alongside other activities and immersion, as mentioned above.


So I'll post again soon, after some quality intensive, fancy LR time! Stay tuned :)




Edited by Woodsei on 03 May 2012 at 3:05am

1 person has voted this message useful



Woodsei
Bilingual Diglot
Winner TAC 2012
Senior Member
United States
justpaste.it/Woodsei
Joined 4583 days ago

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

 
 Message 68 of 162
03 May 2012 at 3:36am | IP Logged 
@Takato: You asked me before where I find podcasts and TV. Here are some links:

1. Keyhole TV: not the best screen resolution, but local Japanese stations and round-
the-clock content to language and culture. I really really love it.
Here it is.

2. List of podcast sites I found on the reviewing the kanji forum. Since the post there
isn't so recent, some of the links don't work, but most do and are great. There are a
couple of podcasts there, though, that discuss mature content, I think. Don't want to
know, but use your best judgement. Here's the link:
Podcast Thread By Genre

3. I also watch anime and drama/movies at streaming sites as Mysoju, Crunchyroll (paid
site, but great), etc. They just stream shows, and I watch.

4. Japanese Netflix has a nice selection in the hundreds for old and new Japanese
movies. I don't know if it works outside the US, though. You could try.
Link: nextpage=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.netflix.com%2FSubGenreList%2FJapan
ese_Language%2F2563">Netflix


5. Japanese iTunes: Convert your location to Japanese, and you'll find tons of podcasts
there. Link: Japanese iTunes

6. Sheetz' log has links to audio book sites, but they have tons of stuff there that
aren't only audio books, such as talk shows, Drama CD=radio dramas, etc. Really, cool,
so spend some time there on them definitely. Link: http://how-to-learn-any-
language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=6241

7. And of course, the news links such as FNN and TBS news Link: http://www.fnn-
news.com/ and here.

Hope that helps!

Edited by Woodsei on 03 May 2012 at 4:21am

1 person has voted this message useful



Woodsei
Bilingual Diglot
Winner TAC 2012
Senior Member
United States
justpaste.it/Woodsei
Joined 4583 days ago

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

 
 Message 69 of 162
10 May 2012 at 3:19pm | IP Logged 
Following post is my update. I think I made a mistake when posting, and now I can't
delete this.

Edited by Woodsei on 10 May 2012 at 3:38pm

1 person has voted this message useful



Woodsei
Bilingual Diglot
Winner TAC 2012
Senior Member
United States
justpaste.it/Woodsei
Joined 4583 days ago

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

 
 Message 70 of 162
10 May 2012 at 3:33pm | IP Logged 
05/10/2012: Log #11

The past week has been pretty okay, although I didn't put in as much time as I hoped
for studying. Here's a round up of what I've been doing.

Japanese/日本語

1. Graded Readers: I love my graded readers! What can I say? :) They
build up from basically scratch (yes, there's actually a level 0) and progress at a
considerable rate. I originally had the levels 1 and 2, but I caved in and decided to
order the rest of the levels, 3 and 4, and the 0 one as well. It's expensive, and I had
to put a lot of though into it, but they have really been helping my Japanese, since
they have no English at all, lots of repetition to drill the words and grammar, and
beautiful pictures to link it all together. Not to mention the great cultural insights
they offer on Japan and the Japanese mind. I have always been looking for something
that would be relatively simple to begin with, but uses no translation, so that I would
be able to acquire the language without this upsetting translation phase my brain goes
through every time I listen to the language. Yes, I know even with the graded readers,
there will be some unconscious translation involved in the beginning stages, but now I
don't rely on that because the English is absent, and my brain is picking apart the
language at tremendous speed. I'm getting the gist of things even when I don't know the
vocab or the kanji, and I'm able to decipher them from context. Also, since I'm reading
along with the audio, I'm forcing myself to comprehend at the speed of the narrators,
who are fantastic, by the way, and that helps me understand the sentence as one unit
rather than break it into chunks. I think I gushed about them in previous post, but
they're tremendously helping me.

I'm kind of surprised at myself for not having noticed the concept of graded readers
before. When I though of learning materials, I always thought along the lines of either
textbooks/grammar guides or native content. I find readers provide a great intermediary
between the two, since I have immediate access to native material through them, but in
a sort of training environment. Well, I'm glad I did, because I'll definitely be on the
lookout for them to start with on my future languages :)

2. LR: I've started out by LRing LePetit Prince. I found out that in my previous
LR attempts, I haven't been really doing it correctly, since I stopped and repeated
lots of sections before moving on, and not really spending all that much time with it.
Not to say I didn't learn, I did, but when I sat dowm and listened and read to the
story in one go, I've been assimilating much faster. I'm humbed by how little I know of
the language, but that would hopefully all change with some fantastic LR time :) I now
read and listen to the Japanese in one go, sometimes twice, not so much for the speed
and parsing, since I can follow well, but to cement the kanji and their readings, and
then I switch to listening to the audio and reading the English, in one shot as well,
and repeat multiple times. I've learned so much in such a short time! It's very
intensive, and my brain feels fried after a session, but it has an amazing effect.
Phrases are popping up and floating around in my head all day. I find myself thinking
something in Japanese, and wonder how I did so. I've only been doing LR for two days,
with many breaks in between, so I'm really excited at the prospect of speeding up my
comprehension so that I can have free rein with production! I also want to scale down
those breaks, too, because I find I'm wasting tremendous amounts of time.

I have a note, though, on LR. Since I've also been working on the readers intensively,
I find that, on the one hand, I'm enjoying only functioning in Japanese wthout English
translations, but, on the other hand, English provides ideas about subtelties in the
nuances. For instance, so far in Le Petit Prince, I found that planets and stars in
Japanese have only one word/kanji for them。I may be wrong, since my Japanese is still
so rudimentary, but that's what I've come across so far. In retrospect, planets are
stars and vice versa, so may be that's why. I initially bawk at the idea of using
English translations, because I want to snuff out that English voice in my head :), but
there may be a benefit to them. I don't know. I'll keep experimenting and see. I
calculated the count the readers will give me in terms of vocab, and by level four,
which is unofficially equivalent to JLPT level N2, there should be upwards of 3000
words. I think that's pretty decent, and may be by the time I'm done with them and Le
Petit Prince, which should definitely be at most this week, I may not need to rely on
English anymore. But I do admit that English speeds things up. Benefits and drawbacks.
Oh well, I'm learning anyway, so it's all good!

3. Simulated LR Experiment: That's a fancy word.... :) What I'm playing around
with is two things, drama/movies/anime. I get the subs/scripts in question, watch a
movie, 2 dorama episodes, or 5-6 anime episodes, whatever constitutes a 90+ minute-long
run of an entire film, then print out the subs as if they're a book/story, and read and
listen the second time I watch, and do that multiple times, then loop it. So I'm
working by that rate every week. I just started this week. I'm also trying to work on
shadowing after repetitive reading and listening. It'll be interesting to see how that
impacts both my listening comprehension, and reading/pronunciation speed. It also moves
well with the Super Challenge. I find it really helpful for the spoken language too,
and I think that eventually, I might be able to do larger amounts as my vocabulary
increases. I'm having dreams of fluency.

4. Writing: Nothing major, just writing some sentences out to improve my
writing, or song lyrics, which I really enjoy. It also helps things stick.


Russian

I was looking around at a really quaint thrift store here and found a bunch of books,
readers, even audio books! So I bought them :) I was having a hard time locating stuff
for Russian, but now that I have those, I'm extremely tempted to sign up Russian for
the Super Challenge! I don't know what I'll be getting myself into. It's as if an
invisible voice is telling me I have no excuse now. Geez. Life is so unfair.

I've been listening, reading, and working on my pronunciation through dialogues and
Disney songs. Yes, I love Disney, and what gave me the idea originally was when I was
looking around on Youtube for Russian podcasts, and came across Disney songs in Russian
and a bunch of other languages. I had an awesome time listening to Russian and
reminiscing about growing up with Disney :) So I've been working on Russian for 30
minutes to an hour daily, listening and reading to dialogues, working on pronunciation,
and looping those Disney songs. I also found whole TV shows on Youtube, so I'm excited.
I love how gorgeous-sounding Russian is. And I'm having lots of fun as I go. But I find
that, even though I'm spending little time on it, I'm actually internalizing quite a
lot. I haven't gone hardcore on grammar yet, and I hear it's difficult, but we'll see.
And I don't know, but I'm finding the pronunciation, as with Japanese, easy to emulate.
Of course, I'm not firing off longish sentences at native speed, which is the real
challenge, but at least for single words, it's been good. It's very important for me to
have the pronunciation down. That's why I'm taking my time with it. I'm not either with
or against silent periods, I just let it come when it does, but I like to give myself a
chance to get used to the sounds of the language first before I attempt to pronounce
it.

Super Challenge and 6WC

Le Petit Prince is my second "book", so when I do this a few more times I'll post it as
a book. I can't believe I never read the story before. It's ethereally beautiful. I
love the witty dialogue and story line, the cynicism of the narrator, the wisdom of the
little prince, but at times it's also incredibly sad. It has been some time since I
actually cried reading a story. I feel so moved, and it had me reflecting on a lot of
things in life. It's now on my list of favorite stories. And the audio for it in
Japanese was pure delight! I loved the lady's voice acting :) Looking forward for more.
I simply can't get tired of it :)

As for films, I watched only 2 episodes of JIN, which is great, decided I'd like to
focus on LR for this week, and then watch another movie. I will be watching "Spirited
Away" which is a Japanese animated movie that is reported to be very good. And of
course resuming JIN. I think the show is very good! It's about a modern-day physician
who gets thrown back to the late-Tokugawa-early Meiji period. So exciting to see how
that develops!

Songs, which I love. It must me because of my piano history, I don't know. I love
music, and Japanese songs are perfect. I'm getting the lyrics and listening, reading,
and singing along. It's so much fun. And I'm "unconsciously" learning. I'm working on
compiling a Russian song playlist, too. I'm so lucky to be studying Japanese and
Russian!

And of course, keeping up with my kanji reviews, and Anki, which only take a few
minutes of my day. I'm grateful to both Heisig and Anki :) They're so darn effective :)

Plans

1. Finish Le Petit Prince, and my whole set of readers, then move on to LR-ing Alice in
Wonderland. (Japanese)
2. Continue reviewing the kanji, Anki, and maybe playing around with those core
sentences. (Japanese)
3. Work on pronunciation, and some shadowing/short phrases speaking production. I
really want to start looking for native speakers and start talking. (Japanese)
4. Keep working with dialogues and songs. I'm also using Anki a little with them.
(Russian)
5. Lang-8. I'm debating starting this now or waiting after some LR. I'm thinking the
latter. We'll see. (Japanese and Russian)

So, that's all for now, and back to some quality LR heaven!

じゃあ、また!

Edited by Woodsei on 11 May 2012 at 1:04pm

1 person has voted this message useful



Woodsei
Bilingual Diglot
Winner TAC 2012
Senior Member
United States
justpaste.it/Woodsei
Joined 4583 days ago

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

 
 Message 71 of 162
20 May 2012 at 5:33pm | IP Logged 
05/20/2012: Log #12

Time for another update. Concerning Japanese, I decided to go back to drilling
sentences in Anki in addition to listening and reading. I noticed it was an efficient
way to activate all that passive knowledge I get through reading and listening. I'm
shadowing sentences as I go, and started to write out some sentences by hand
Scriptorium style, because I found it helps a lot. I typed before, and I still do that,
but actually writing is helping more. I'm starting to feel that I want to at least be
able to write out and say at least the basics and see how much I've been able to
assimilate through passive learning. I know nothing really disappears, but I sort of
feel all over the place and am not sure where I am really. I did notice that I know
what I've been exposed to, at least, but writing out the sentences by hand rather than
typing them, as well as translating very basic sentences from English to Japanese helps
bring forward whatever's at the back of my mind.

On a side note, I've noticed that my listening has improved a lot. Until recently, I
have been able to understand short phrases, but completely falling through when a long
phrase/compound sentence is spoken aloud. After doing some listening and reading in
conjunction with SRSing sentences, I'm starting to follow spoken Japanese much better.
I can't really describe it, because I still don't get them most of the time, but I'm
able to get the gist of what they're saying, even when I don't know the vocabulary. I'm
also working on a deck for the Dictionaries of grammar, and was sort of happy to see I
was understanding the sentences well and getting them right, since I haven't read any
of the books yet, except a few pages in the basic book. I guess all that listening and
reading is starting to pay off. But drilling these sentences in Anki is really
consolidating the grammar and bringing it into my active memory, and I think that may
be why my ability to follow spoken speech has improved, since I noticed it at around
the same time I started doing LR and Anki in conjunction with each other.

I started going through RTK 2, but just in the vocab order, and not really by the
book's method. I put the words in the book's order in an Anki deck and drilling them
through three types of cards, kanji to meaning and kana, listening to meaning, kana,
and kanji,and meaning to kana and kanji. I'm getting the audio for the words through
JDICT and Rikaisama, but I feel it's taking me a long time. I'll work some more with it
and see how it goes. I didn't want to use RTK 2 originally, but I'm starting to see the
value in drilling readings. I know they'll come eventually, but it feels better knowing
that I can give them some focus through a book. I know the book has them divided into
groups, but while I'm reading that, I'm not giving them too much importance, since
readings sometimes change depending on the word. I also put in a really short example
sentence to give context for a word that is giving me trouble, but the focus is on the
reading really, not the sentence. I've done close to a 100 words, and so far it's going
pretty well. I hope it works out well in the long run.

For Russian, I haven't covered much the past week, except re-listening to some of the
dialogues and short passages I've gone through before. I'm re-evaluating my goals for
Russian this year, because with the Super Challenge, reading Japanese is taking a huge
chunk of my time. I think if I get to a good lower intermediate level by the end of the
year in Russian, I'll be somewhat content. But I have to keep at it, since there's a
huge possibility of enrolling in either a Russian studies or Asian studies certificate
in my Masters program here school as an additional focus to what I'm studying already,
regardless of my field, which I think is really cool。I have to have at least covered
four semesters worth of either language I'm studying in order to be able to graduate
with that focus on my transcript. I think that's upper intermediate. So yeah, I'm
working on both. I'm actually leaning more towards Japanese, but I don't know. It's
still a bit early to tell.

I feel too lazy to list my hours for the past week, but I've been able to catch up
with my studies a lot better this week, and I'm doing well in the 6WC. I hope I keep it
up. I really want to get somewhere by the end of Tadoku and 6WC. I'll be really happy
if I do.

またね!

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Brun Ugle
Diglot
Senior Member
Norway
brunugle.wordpress.c
Joined 6406 days ago

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

 
 Message 72 of 162
20 May 2012 at 6:00pm | IP Logged 
I really liked your reviews of some dramas in another thread. And I was wondering where you got them. Do you get them on-line? Download them perhaps?

If you download them, how do you do it? How do you watch them? Do you need a special program? Do you have Japanese subs too? I've see that it's possible to download subs, but I don't know how to do it. The subs and dramas seem to be separate, so there must be some kind of program to connect them somehow, I guess. Do you know how to do it?

Forgive all my questions and my technical ineptness.




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