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旅立ち/Катюша-Woodsei’s TAC 2014 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5115 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 105 of 162 17 November 2012 at 12:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I see how busy you are at the 6wc - best of luck with that again! Do you get to do any Russian at all? I would
love to do a Skype session again soon, and it would be great to include you! We do not speak Russian all the time, and we could easily adapt to your level. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Woodsei Bilingual Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Woodsei Joined 4578 days ago 614 posts - 782 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Egyptian)* Studies: Russian, Japanese, Hungarian | Message 106 of 162 19 November 2012 at 4:16am | IP Logged | |||||
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@SolfridChristin: Thank you! Would love to do a Skype session, too! I'm spending most of
the time I give to Russian with vocab and some listening, about an hour a day, although I haven't been doing Russian or Hungarian since the start of the 6 week. I should, though, I can't afford to get rusty. If you do plan a time on our team thread I'll update you on my ability to join you. Thank you for motivating me again :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Woodsei Bilingual Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Woodsei Joined 4578 days ago 614 posts - 782 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Egyptian)* Studies: Russian, Japanese, Hungarian | Message 107 of 162 19 November 2012 at 4:37am | IP Logged | |||||
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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. Monolingual dictionaries are really fun, and not as intimidating as I thought they’d be. I use Sanseido online dictionary currently, because it employs short definitions, and you don’t get lost. I also learned the word for opposite or antonym, 対, reads たい :) For instance, 上げる means 高くする。Or よくする, depending on context. And we all know what 高いmeans. It’s a positive word that means generally to elevate or make better, both literally and contextually. And the opposite is下げる(さげる)to hang lower, or to move back。Cool, ね。:) Monolingual dictionaries increase your vocab. I gave myself a mental kick in the head for not doing it sooner. Input. What I found was awesome about it, is the more I listen, the faster I speak. I was worried that because I haven’t been speaking much, that part of the language would be my weakest point. But when I bombard my brain with comprehensible input, not just any input, and repeatedly for hours on end, the sentences, even paragraphs float around in my head and I find myself saying them effortlessly. Comprehensible and fun, repetitive, and tons and tons of listening. So I loop the audio and let it run in the background all day, even when I’m reading. I also sometimes trim the files to extract the things I know I would like to say, and then put them all in one audio file and listen to it all day long. Or use a TTS voice to generate audio for these written texts, which is faster, and great, but of course not like the native speaker audio. I visited a friend who is married to a Japanese person, and they had a little boy around 4 and a half years old. After spending some time with them, my thoughts were like this. I realized that spending time with native speakers of a language is infinitely vital with getting you on your feet and forces you to lock on the sounds, focus, and thus speak and acquire meanings at the same time, in a very fast and efficient manner, so it’s very important not to put off speaking for too long. That was my first impression. However, after the initial shock, I did notice something else. These native speakers were speaking at rocket speed, in low voices, mumbling, actually, with a lot of background noise, and I was comprehending almost everything they had to say, in a snap. I wasn’t translating in my head, I wasn’t straining to hear, I wasn’t panicking at all. I found that after a few minutes of listening to them speak together, I could actually muster the courage to talk to the little boy. At first he wouldn’t talk to me because he thought I didn’t understand him, but when I started speaking a few words with him, he opened up and started talking. I could still follow him easily and boy was the kid a talker! Yes, I still slipped up here and there in terms of following his speech, but for the most part I was always on track. And when I spoke, it came easily. I found that the pauses I had were not of thinking about how to say something, it’s of thinking about what to say. Like, what should I say to the kid to make him open up to me so that we can play together? Should I ask him to play, or paint a picture? When I knew what I wanted to say, the phrases floated in naturally. That reinforced my belief that input is king :) And my time with them was more fun and less stressful, and more importantly, more effective than if I had been with them and not understand anything and try to force myself to create constructions in order to talk. If I were meet a Hungarian or Russian person now and listen to them converse, I would be more lost than I am in Japanese. So what does this say? Put off speaking, or not? I don’t know. I guess that what I can glean from the whole experience is that it’s important to spend time with native speakers at any stage, because ultimately, speaking the language reinforces language acquisition profoundly, at it is a very important part, in fact a main part, of any serious language learners journey. But not at the expense of speaking naturally and fluidly, like a native. Struggling to comprehend and put together words in an unnatural but correct grammatical way, to me, does not count as speaking the language. But doing so easily and fluidly does. And because I could understand almost everything, I can still remember, literally word for word, the whole two visits I had with the family. And I can say a lot of what I heard then. I guess what I’m trying t say is, spending time with native speakers at this stage was probably more effective. However what helped me get there was that I was spending time with native content from day one, and that I was also shadowing or reciting on my own, and trying to think in the language disconnectedly throughout the day. So in a way, I was actually producing for some time without necessarily having to speak to people, in terms of thinking Japanese thoughts ( e.g. いったい何を考えているんだ？！Instead of “what the heck was I thinking?!” sort of way) and doing a few minutes of shadowing or reciting here and there. I wasn’t even following a strict schedule or anything, but I was keeping it short, so that I wouldn’t burn out. For the record, I am aware that there is a softer and more feminine way to put the above idea in speech, but I was just giving an example. That, and vocabulary acquisition are key to getting down fast with the language. It doesn’t matter how one can acquire vocabulary. Whether in context, flashcards, word lists, whatever works for you, but it has to be coupled with a lot of immersion so that the subtleties in meaning and usage can become clear. Grammar has its sticky points, but looking up points that are stumping you, in my experience, is enough. Most is self- explanatory. Again, patience is key, because if you wait and try to listen or read more, things eventually click, but even if you just look up structures, it’s usually enough. I never really felt the need to do exercises, or even read grammar guides from cover to cover. I just pick what I need, and eventually the picture is clear. When I first started out, I was really lost, and so I thought I needed a text. I gave Assimil a go, but what I noticed was that I was reading the sentences and translations (the word for word one) and not really reading the grammar explanations until much, much later, if I even did that. And that’s what helped me understand how Japanese works, and for that very same reason that I told myself to just stick with native materials as I was doing previously, and try to work with it so that it can be comprehensible to my level. That’s where I got the idea of reading children’s/toddler books and watching children’s TV shows. I remember there was a thread somewhere in the forum where the OP was asking which is more important, vocab or grammar. I’d say vocab. If you understand the words you’re listening to or reading, you’ll work out how the language works on your own. Grammar to me is about looking up whatever keeps stumping me, not as formal study. And that’s how I do it with my native languages anyway. That’s what I’m trying to do with Hungarian and Russian currently, but of course to a much lesser extent. I’m looking forward to the next 6 week so that I can choose either Hungarian or Russian as my target language for immersion, just so I can get them up to level with Japanese. I’m in love with my languages :) A question for Hungarian speakers out there. Does anyone know of existing audiobooks for Harry Potter? I got the books, but I’m not sure if there are any audiobooks. If there are, I’m a diehard fan:) So let me know, please! I was able to get audiobooks in Russian for HP, Narnia, and the Lord of the Rings, and I’m super excited! I’m thinking of getting some classics from a link I found on the audiobooks thread here on the forum. I think it’s shop in the United States. And of course, tons of online radio and Youtube For present day spoken speech. On a side note, I liked the dialog tracks for Japanesepod101. I found some intermediate level dialog tracks a few days ago, not the main ones with the explanation, just the dialogs, gave them a go for change’s sake, and I really do like them. They sound a lot like anime or dramaCDs (radio dramas) to me, but shorter :) Does anyone here have any experience with them? Anyway, みんなさん、がんばって！ Good luck and do your best, everyone! またね！ 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5763 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 108 of 162 19 November 2012 at 7:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
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What a lovely positive post, and impressive progress too!
I'm trying to up my input at the moment too. I definitely feel a real boost if I sit down regularly for at least an hour concentrating on a TV drama that is, at least for the most part, within a comprehensible level, so it seems stupid not to do it now! What I'm not so good at is getting some Japanese going on all the time in the background, I think partly because unless I'm really concentrating on something I don't tend to stay in one room for long, and partly because in the past I didn't notice much of a benefit from it, but I think the lack of comprehensible input at my level the last time I tried might have something to do with that. At least for now I've put on a reasonably comprehensible podcast while I write this! As for the JPod dialogue tracks, in combination with some other dialogues from my textbook they really helped to fill the comprehensible input gap when I still wasn't good enough to get much benefit from native audio materials. But now I tend to find the voice acting, particularly on the more recent tracks, a bit too over the top, and after a while it got annoying. But by that time I could switch to watching dramas without subs, so it definitely filled an important gap for me. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Takato Tetraglot Senior Member HungaryRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4829 days ago 249 posts - 276 votes Speaks: Hungarian*, EnglishB2, GermanB2, Japanese | Message 109 of 162 19 November 2012 at 9:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
There are at least for the first 7 HP books.
I second it. Edited by Takato on 20 November 2012 at 7:42am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Woodsei Bilingual Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Woodsei Joined 4578 days ago 614 posts - 782 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Egyptian)* Studies: Russian, Japanese, Hungarian | Message 110 of 162 03 January 2013 at 7:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
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End of the Year Report:
Japanese My understanding of contemporary spoken Japanese like anime and drama is around 95%. Variety shows are lower, due to the speed and overlapping speech between several people. News are still difficult, but mainly due to the fact that I haven't been doing anything with it, which I plan to work on for the new TAC. Speaking, haven't had many chances, but when I do, after a few minutes I start to warm up and phrases/words start coming easily. But I still have a ways to go with speaking, another goal for the 2013 TAC. I'd say in terms of passive understanding, I more or less achieved my goals for Japanese for TAC 2012. Active production will be more obvious as soon as I start conversing and writing. Russian I'd say I'm A1 in Russian, due to the little time I've been spending with it. I plan to work my way through Assimil until I start locating more native resources for the language and really level it up to where I am with Japanese. I have a few audiobooks, and of course Youtube, so I'll try to work my way through those, until I have other resources. Hungarian I had no goals for it, but I added it and now it's right alongside Russian in terms of passive ability, that is, getting the gist of what I'm listening to. I apologize for being late, I was traveling. I'll post this to my log, which will be the same one, with a new name. Thanks, Christina! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6401 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish | Message 111 of 162 03 January 2013 at 7:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Welcome back! I was wondering where you'd got to. It will be nice to have you as a member of our team again this year.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Woodsei Bilingual Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Woodsei Joined 4578 days ago 614 posts - 782 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Egyptian)* Studies: Russian, Japanese, Hungarian | Message 112 of 162 03 January 2013 at 7:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Wow, thanks, Brun! I'm so excited being a member of our Japanese team with the awesome
name of Sakura :) I was traveling, no internet, so I had to post a late report, and I'm not proud of that. Anyway, in a short while I'll have my first ever TAC 2013 post! And I can't wait to see everyone else's logs. So great to be with you on the team again, Brun! 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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