TAC 2012 Team い - My love for Japanese (Language Learning Log) Language Learning Forum

TAC 2012 Team い - My love for Japanese
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25 messages over 4 pages: 1 2 3 4 Next >>

r0pe
Diglot
Newbie
Germany
Joined 4452 days ago
29 posts - 33 votes
Speaks: German*, English
Studies: Japanese

Message 1 of 25

17 February 2012 at 8:17pm | IP Logged

Hi,

I want to use this journal for motivation in learning Japanese. At first I'd like to tell you my journey so far:

2008 I traveled Japan for 1 month from Sapporo to Kumamoto, falling in love with the mixture of traditions and technologies, the beautiful nature and pulsating cities, the readiness to help others. That year 2008 I attended a Japanese language school for 3 1/2 months in Fukuoka, passing JLPT 4 afterwards.
During that school courses I finished the working book Genki I and half of Genki II.

The years after there has been several months without learning one word of Japanese, with phases when I desperately tried to get back in to learning. The problem: I never really knew my level of Japanese, because after the JLPT4 in 2008 where I've been at my highest level I fell down to ... I don't know where.

In some months, I tried to review the already learned chapters of Genki I and Genki II, realizing how much I forgot already. After some other working books that I never finished I stopped learning Japanese for about 2 years. The love for Japanese and Japan never died, with 2-week holidays in Japan once every year.

Sometimes I started learning on websites like readthekanji.com where I learned a lot of new vocabulary. I even paid for subscription because I really love the repetition factor of the new Kanjis presented.

At the end of 2011 I've read the story of AJATT (alljapaneseallthetime) and my desire to restart my studies came back. The immersion recommended by AJATT didn't seem practical in every day life, but I think it has some good approaches.

But somehow I'm to impatient with everything I start.
I bought the book "Le Petite Prince" in Japanese (星の王子さま), starting to read and translate every word I don't know... which is about 2-3 words in each sentence. After the first chapter, the book lies here and it's hard to continue. because after I reached page 3, I can't remember the pronouncation of the words on the first page.

One book I really think helps a lot is "Heisig - Remembering the Kanji". I've learned about 400 Kanji in about 2 month,. The success is a great motivation, when you see a kanji and you know what it means. I know it's only a beginning, because it doesn't teach me the pronouncation or whole words. But I think it's a good start.

One reason for writing this long entry, even without any readers, is that I feared to lose my motivation again, after some busy working weeks, without much learning. With this log I want to set a small goal.

Maybe some of you can tell me about their success with Heisig or the AJATT methods.

Edited by r0pe on 24 February 2012 at 2:03pm
2 persons have voted this message useful

Brun Ugle
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Senior Member
Norway
brunugle.wordpress.c
Joined 6407 days ago
1292 posts - 1766 votes

Speaks: English*, Norwegian^C1
Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish

Message 2 of 25

17 February 2012 at 10:30pm | IP Logged

I've done pretty much the same thing with Japanese: learning and stopping and forgetting, then relearning, over and over.

Heisig is great. I really recommend that you stick with it. After doing Heisig and of course using a textbook, I can read books at a middle school level. I don't bother looking up words I don't know. Often I can figure out the meaning from a combination of context and Heisig. I don't worry about the pronunciation. I figure I will learn in time anyway from other sources like read the kanji. I like that site too. It's great for learning how to pronounce the kanji.

You might also want to try iknow. It's a great site for building vocabulary. Also all the words have an example sentence and both the word and the sentence are read out loud so you can better learn the pronunciation and intonation as well as vocabulary.

I recommend also that you have a look at the logs for us in team い. We are all studying Japanese and we try to help and encourage each other. You might be able to find some useful tips and links there.

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r0pe
Diglot
Newbie
Germany
Joined 4452 days ago
29 posts - 33 votes
Speaks: German*, English
Studies: Japanese

Message 3 of 25

23 February 2012 at 8:31pm | IP Logged

@Brun Ugle

Thank you for your reply. It's great to hear from someone, who used the same method with success.

This week I had a lazy time, being tired all the time because of the early working shifts. This weekend I have to work, too, in the evening going to a birthday party. I hope next week there will be more free time for learning Japanese.

I want to list impressions about several learning sources:

Positive:

Genki I + II: I used those books at the language school with great success. In my opinion the balance between new grammatical topics, new vocabulary and excercises is great. All the grammatical lessons are easy to understand.

Kana Pict-o-Graphix: Before visiting the language school, I had to learn reading Kana (Katakana + Hiragana). With this small book, it's quite easy to remember them. It uses small pictures (mnemonics). I recommend learning Japanese with Kana, not with Romaji or English. Most good learning books will stop writing examples in Romaji, therefor Kana is essential.

How to tell the difference between Japanese Particles (Naoko Chino): A quite useful guide for the sometimes difficult use of particles. All particles are grouped together, like "Particles that indicate emphasis", "Particles indicating time", etc. After each group you can test the learned particles in a small test.

J.W. Heisig: Remembering the Kanji, Vol. 1: The latest book I bought, and I'm really amazed. Before I started the Heisig, most of the Kanji seemed to be impossible to remember. But after learning about 500 Kanji, it's really encouraging to recognize many Kanji in Japanese texts. It's only a start, because the book teaches you only the meaning of a single kanji, whereas Japanese words consist mostly of 2 or more combined Kanji. Also the pronouncation needs to be learned separately.

ReadtheKanji.com: Readthekanji has been updated with new tools in the last months. It shows you a Japanese sentence with one Kanji highlighted and you have to type it's pronouncation in Kana. It helps building your vocabulary and pronouncation. It's possible to choose between several JLPT grades. Very useful.

Denshi Jisho (jisho.org): Very useful to find Kanji by it's radicals. If you don't know how to pronounce or write a Kanji in Kana, you can choose it's radicals to find it.

Not sure/Neutral:

Barron's Japanese Grammar: Small Book useful for reference about grammatical topics. For quick reference of already learned stuff, but all examples are very basic and only in Romaji.

Kanji Pict-o-Graphix: Like Pict-o-Graphix for Kana it gives you a mnemonic for over 1000 Kanji (and Kana). At first it seems to be useful, but it's only useful for easy Kanji with few radicals. Therefor it's good for a start, but I would recommend using Heisig's Remembering the Kanji.

日本語総まとめN3 (Nihongo So-matome N3): 文法 (Grammar) I haven't used it a lot by now, but it seems to put a lot of grammar in very basic lessons. The grammar is not really described, but only 2-3 example sentences are used to explain it. To me it's sometimes not comprehensible, therefor I would need another source. Because I haven't used it a lot by now, it's in the "Not sure" catagory. The books are available for all JLPT grades N1-N5, divided into "Grammar", "Kanji", "Vocabulary", "Reading".

All Japanese All The Time (AJATT.com): A blog and guide for total immersion into Japanese. The "Table of Contents" tells you the story of a guy, learning fluent Japanese in 18 months. He got rid of everything in his mother tongue (books, movies, music, etc.) and tried to listen, read, watch Japanese 24/7. For some people it might work, but for me, I'm bored after watching half a movie, understanding like nothing. I also improved my English with reading English books and watching movies in English, but only after reaching an intermediate level. As an absolute beginner, it's too frustrating. The owner of the site copies whole sentence into a SRS system. It's an interesting method, but not realistic to me, because most of the time I'm working in an office group, where it's not possible to immerse into Japanese. The site owner offers a course called "Silverspoon", "feeding" you every day with the right amount of Japanese.

There are probably many more sources I tried before, but those are the most important for now.
1 person has voted this message useful

Brun Ugle
Diglot
Senior Member
Norway
brunugle.wordpress.c
Joined 6407 days ago
1292 posts - 1766 votes

Speaks: English*, Norwegian^C1
Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish

Message 4 of 25

24 February 2012 at 8:07am | IP Logged

I'm sure it will be great to have you on our team. You should edit the name of your log to include the team name (team い) in order to make it easy to find. To edit the title, you just edit the first post in your log.

Here's a book I highly recommend for grammar:
A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar by Seiichi Makino and Michio Tsutsui.
There is also an intermediate and advanced dictionary, which I am about to buy as soon as I can convince my lazy self to do it.

This isn't a textbook with exercises and such. It is a grammar dictionary. It's nice to just read through it and discover subtleties you never knew about. It's main function though, it to be used as a dictionary where you can look up any grammar point when you're wondering, "How do I use that again?"

That particle book you mentioned looks interesting too.

1 person has voted this message useful

r0pe
Diglot
Newbie
Germany
Joined 4452 days ago
29 posts - 33 votes
Speaks: German*, English
Studies: Japanese

Message 5 of 25

24 February 2012 at 2:07pm | IP Logged

Thank you for the advise Brun Ugle. I'm going to look into the Grammar Book.

Yesterday after a long working day (getting up at 4am), I used readthekanji.com, with a success rate of 49%... what a shame ^^

I hope for a better result in the next days.
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r0pe
Diglot
Newbie
Germany
Joined 4452 days ago
29 posts - 33 votes
Speaks: German*, English
Studies: Japanese

Message 6 of 25

27 February 2012 at 8:49am | IP Logged

Some months ago I bought the Japanese book of "Le Petit Prince", 星の王子さま.
I've started a text-file with the story on the right side and all unknown vocabulary on the left.

Yesterday I discovered lwt and transfered the text into the new program. After working on the text, adding new vocabulary, this morning I made a test for 16 minutes, with the result of 68 = 0 + 29 + 39

I'm going to add more chapters of the book today.

Does anyone know a source for audiofiles, especially for "Le Petit Prince" in Japanese? The audiobook posting in this forum has a link that is dead.
1 person has voted this message useful

r0pe
Diglot
Newbie
Germany
Joined 4452 days ago
29 posts - 33 votes
Speaks: German*, English
Studies: Japanese

Message 7 of 25

27 February 2012 at 10:42pm | IP Logged

Today I've been working late shift... it's not better than early shift for my motivation to study Japanese. Sleeping long, and coming home late... :/

At least this evening I've finished writing Chapter 1 of 星の王子さま into lwt.

My favourite Japanese word for today: 昔話　むかしばなし　folklore, legend (German: Märchen)

I'm using the app "Kotoba!" a lot, I really love it. My list of favorite words there:
紅葉狩り　(もみじがり)　autumn-leave viewing
月見　(つきみ)　viewing the moon (German: Mondschau)
一所懸命　(いっしょけんめい)　very hard, with utmost effort
一石二鳥　(いっせきにちょう)　killing two birds with one stone (German: Zwei Fliegen mit einer Klappe schlagen)
朝飯前　(あさめしまえ)　it's a piece of cake
相変わらず　(あいかわらず)　as ever, as usual
雨声　(うせい)　sound of rain
最重要　(さいじゅうよう)　most important
危ない橋を渡る　(あぶないはしをわたる)　t o tread on thin ice (lit: to cross a dangerous bridge)
お持て成し　(おもてなし)　hospitality

Edit: I just listened to: Coppu - あなたでした。
My new favourite word of the day:
世界観　（せかいかん）　world view, outlook on the world (German: Weltanschauung) :D

Edited by r0pe on 28 February 2012 at 12:14am
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Sunja
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Germany
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Message 8 of 25

28 February 2012 at 2:40pm | IP Logged

That's for that post! Those words are pretty useful

r0pe wrote:

朝飯前　(あさめしまえ)　it's a piece of cake

Funny how "before breakfast" means the same thing as "it's a piece of cake". I wonder if that means it's easy to have cake for breakfast (lol)

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