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rewire’s 日本語 (& miscellany) adventures | ||
Tags: Intermediate | Japanese | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| rewire Groupie United States learninglane.tumblr.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4337 days ago 82 posts - 90 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Mandarin | Message 1 of 81 18 June 2012 at 8:02am | IP Logged | ||
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I really liked the idea of having a language log, since most of my friends are not
learning languages or particularly interested in hearing about my progress, but I'd like to keep track of it somewhere for my own use. :) My current Japanese level is kind of hard to quantify, since my grammar understanding is reasonably good, while my vocabulary and my output are much lower, and I've been having a hard time finding materials to help me improve that are neither too "below" me as to be uninteresting and dull nor too "above" me to be just too difficult that I lose interest. I'm somewhere in the "intermediate" category, I think. I've been learning Japanese for... a long time, actually, since I first started when I was 7 or so, but didn't really progress much until I started taking it in college about seven years ago. But I had a bunch of other things going on at the same time then, so to be honest, even then I was struggling a lot with vocabulary and felt quite intimidated by attempting to read my textbooks. It's only since about January this year that I've really only started focusing on Japanese. In January I started doing weekly lessons with the Japanese Online Institute and using ReadTheKanji.com to practice reading/increase vocabulary, and occasionally using iKnow.jp for similar reasons, though I find I prefer Read the Kanji since I can just open the site and do it while watching TV or chatting. Since last month I've added Pimsleur to my daily commute routine, so I'm listening to about an hour's worth of lessons every weekday (sometimes I repeat lessons, so I'm not really going through 2 lessons a day). Both Pimsleur and JOI are doing a lot to improve my speaking ability and solidify my grammatical output, since it's largely going over grammar and vocab I learned in college, but practicing it enough that it's becoming just ingrained responses to me, which is very helpful. ReadTheKanji is probably my favorite online app discovery, because I love the way I can do it sort of passively, but since I usually read through the entire sentence when I do practices, it's speeding up my reading enormously, and also adds more than just the tested kanji word whenever I run through it. Since it's endless practice with no timers, I can start or stop whenever I feel like, unlike iKnow, which I have to set aside set amounts of time to do, so sometimes I can just do a sentence or a hundred, depending on what else I'm doing. The only thing I wish is that it was better suited to mobile browsing, since I'd love to be able to log on for a minute on my phone sometimes. My reading improvement has gone from my college up-until January level of pretty much being unable to read my textbooks or even simple manga without it taking a very long time and being pretty intimidating and making little sense without relying on a dictionary, to tonight I flipped through some of my old textbooks and finding it slow but doable, and basically putting me about at where I ought to have been in college when I was using it. And I've also noticed that some Japanese-language games I tried to buy to use for practice, that I was unable to make heads or tails of without the dictionary, I'm able to kind of pull the gist of enough that I was able to start to play. The sort of vague goals that I have are to try to reach N3 level reading vocabulary- wise by the end of the year, which should also mean I will be able to switch mostly to reading Japanese-language fiction/essays/websites and listening to Japanese-only audio to keep increasing my vocabulary. I'm not sure how often updating the log will be useful at the moment, but I may try for every week to see if that works. But I'm not very organized with my language-learning, in general; I find that it's actually counter- productive of me to set hard goals of X-of-this-per-week, so basically I will just try to check in with what I've been doing lately and what's working and what's not. (Theoretically other posts will be shorter than this one, ahah.) どうぞよろしくお願いします！ Edited by rewire on 10 August 2012 at 6:27pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| rewire Groupie United States learninglane.tumblr.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4337 days ago 82 posts - 90 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Mandarin | Message 2 of 81 23 June 2012 at 7:53am | IP Logged | ||
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So I've started on Pimsleur's series 2 to listen to on my commute, which seems more challenging than the first set,
or else I've just been way too tired while listening to them, because I keep having to repeat lessons, and I'm still sort of only about ~70-75% correct on lesson 4, but I've been bouncing between repeating 4 and 5 because it's just too boring to re-listen to the same lesson too many times in a row. Got through all 482 words on readthekanji.com's N5 set with about 85% accuracy for first time viewing, which isn't bad, but I'm still reviewing those too, so hopefully that will improve. Started on N4, and I seem to average a 60% accuracy on N4 words, though. Started reading through Card Captor Sakura again, so I'm on volume 2. Last time I tried it, I was able to "read aloud" fast enough to flip pages in reasonable time, but I was finding I still was getting only maybe 25% of the meaning, so it was hard to stay interested. This time I'm still not getting the full meaning, but between knowing the story and knowing enough of the words, I'm probably around 50% full-understanding, and I'm actually picking up on the meanings of some words while reading, so that's pretty exciting to me. It's kind of hard to read Touya's and Kero's lines sometimes because they both use different sorts of slang to Sakura or Tomoyo, who speaks pretty formally. I like having the contrast, though. I felt like I noticed a slight improvement in my speaking when I had my private lesson on Monday, too, which is probably due to Pimsleur. I'm thinking of trying to add a bit of textbook study to my routines, but haven't worked out what can really fit with my schedule right now. I have a couple of old 3級 JLPT prep courses (Complete Masters and another one) though also was considering just reworking through my old 日本語中級J301 book. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| rewire Groupie United States learninglane.tumblr.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4337 days ago 82 posts - 90 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Mandarin | Message 3 of 81 10 July 2012 at 4:34am | IP Logged | ||
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Whoops, haven't updated in a while.
I kept being too tired to really use Pimsleur on my drive for a while... kind of ended up listening to the same couple lessons over and over again, but still feeling like I was missing a lot of it, but I've started doing those again so I'm up to 14 in series 2. Doing a bit of readthekanji, but not as much as I was for a while there, so I'm only through about 1/5th of the N4 words still, but accuracy's closer to 70% now, which is good. And I kind of stopped reading CCS again, but I have been watching a bit more anime. Watched through Kids on the Slope which I liked quite a bit, and now I'm borrowing my roommate's copies of Sailor Moon to finally watch... all of it. I'm in R now, sooo, still a ways to go (I have yet to get to the episodes I didn't see via the dub forever ago). I sort of keep the subtitles on, but don't literally watch it all the time, so it's more of an ear-thing, where I can just check if I think I understood something. It's nice noticing things that transfer from one set of learning tools to another, like. I'd never noticed anyone using あいにく before I heard it in Pimsleur, but it's been used several times in Sailor Moon? Still doing lessons with JOI, too, though I think after I finish up with the soon-to-expire flex lessons (next month?), I'm actually going to drop down to just my weekly private lessons out of lack of time. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6410 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish | Message 4 of 81 10 July 2012 at 8:02am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm also at an intermediate level. I found it very hard to find textbooks at the right level for me. Plus, I was getting so tired of textbooks that I decided to give up and just dive right in. It's been working quite well so far. My reading has improved tremendously, which seems to be helping my writing as well. My listening is still horrible, but I've been mostly ignoring it. I think I need to find a drama I really like and get addicted to it.
I'm using iKnow to improve my vocabulary, so I know what you mean about learning a new word and then suddenly finding it all over. It's fun, and it really enforces what I learn. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4974 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 5 of 81 11 July 2012 at 4:12am | IP Logged | ||
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Good to see another Japanese log. I sometimes think I'm intermediate but then I change my mind and call it
advanced beginner. In terms of reading over your head... Do it on a computer with Rikai-sama and you'll understand enough to stay interested without too much effort. The only problem is accumulating too much vocab if you're the the type to add all new words to your study list. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| rewire Groupie United States learninglane.tumblr.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4337 days ago 82 posts - 90 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Mandarin | Message 6 of 81 15 July 2012 at 8:52pm | IP Logged | ||
Yeah, finding intermediate textbooks is difficult, and for me, I seem to have trouble using textbooks outside of a strict classroom setting, too. Though I do think having gone through the textbooks in classes before makes the practice I'm doing now more useful to me. Kind of the same thing as with the vocab, I guess, and it does make things more fun, when you notice stuff you're retaining. It seems hard to find dramas to watch, which is kind of frustrating. Anime is a bit easier, but I'm not into a lot of the anime I have access to, sadly. I was in Japan for a short while a couple months ago to visit family/friends, and I actually found watching informercials and commercials to be oddly helpful, since they repeat a lot and I could just let the TV run, but I can't as easily just turn on the TV and let whatever station play here as I was doing. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| rewire Groupie United States learninglane.tumblr.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4337 days ago 82 posts - 90 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Mandarin | Message 7 of 81 15 July 2012 at 9:11pm | IP Logged | ||
My tutor classes me as "lower intermediate" right now, which I think is about apt. I have 4+ years worth of college courses lurking in my brain, at least, so it's been more about clarifying points and making stuff stick so I can pull it out at will and gaining the appropriate amount of vocabulary to match my grammar knowledge than actually learning anything new for the most part. I don't really like reading with rikai, though, since I end up relying too much on checking every word when it's so easy to do. It's actually been way more beneficial to me to read manga/kids books offline, when it's written simply enough I can extrapolate stuff I don't know from context since I end up gaining some vocab that way, even if I don't always get 100% comprehension. Whereas if I "read" a sentence with the help of rikai and had to look up everything to make sense of it, I usually don't actually pick up anything new, and sometimes end up doing silly things like looking up words I actually would have known had I not gotten into a mentally-relying-on-rikai mode. I don't really make study lists, though, since I know I won't actually use a separate flashcard program at the moment; I just keep plogging through the set lists on iKnow and Read the Kanji. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6410 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish | Message 8 of 81 15 July 2012 at 9:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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I use Rikai some, but I agree that it makes you lazy. I mostly just read books and absorb things through that. I can often figure things out from context and if I get too lost I look up a few words in the dictionary until I get back on track. I don't make flashcards or anything. It's too tedious. Also, reading gives you the same effect since most authors use the same words over and over.
I find manga often to be more difficult than books. Children's manga is difficult because there is too much hiragana and I am very kanji-dependent. I haven't tried much for adults though. I looked at some a long time ago, but then I was really at such a low level that there was no hope of my understanding them. Maybe if I tried again I would do better, but I think the slang and such might still confuse me. Books are easier that way. You can find some dramas and movies here and here. I've used the first one which is streamed. The quality varies though. I haven't tried the second, but it's well-known and very popular. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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