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rewire’s 日本語 (& miscellany) adventures | ||
Tags: Intermediate | Japanese | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| atama warui Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 4490 days ago 594 posts - 985 votes  Speaks: German*, English, Japanese | Message 41 of 81 06 September 2012 at 8:44am | IP Logged |
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Huh, why so aggressive?
Sorry for disturbing you. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| rewire Groupie United States learninglane.tumblr.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4336 days ago 82 posts - 90 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Mandarin | Message 42 of 81 23 September 2012 at 10:55am | IP Logged |
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Had an unplanned mini-hiatus/break due to personal life scheduling conflicts, but I'm getting back into the swing of things again. Finished iKnow's Step 5, and I'm in that awkward last "week" of review for 6 and 7, nearing the end with 8 and something like a fifth into 9, so probably won't be able to start 10 until October, but I should be finished with Core 1000 sometime next month, then, finally?
I'd been thinking I need to work on my writing again and ended up taking the kanji placement test in the Intermediate Kanji Book 1, with... amusing results. This was how it turned out after I finished. My writing is terrible! I was realizing while taking it that my method in college for taking tests made it seem like I had a greater kanji writing ability than I actually did. On the one hand I definitely did know more offhand then than I do now, but I supplemented kanji I couldn't remember in their entirety by finding them written in other parts of tests and copying the characters from there, or typing it out on the computer first if I was at home. Which sort of explains why it's deteriorated to almost nothing, since it probably was pretty weak to begin with, even if my understanding/recognition of individual characters and radicals was okay. I may have to step down and start with Basic Kanji 2 for some review first, but I haven't decided what exactly I want to do yet. Some time back, I was nearing the end of CCS and speed-read through most of the last four volumes, ahah. Which I didn't really count pages for the Super Challenge, because there was a lot of skimming and extrapolating based on past knowledge/pictures, so I think my actual reading amounted to much less than usual. Then I kind of stopped entirely and haven't picked up reading at all due to the break. Need to get back into reading, but right now I just haven't been feeling into it. And then yesterday I started a trial account with lingualift to see what they had. I haven't entirely made a decision on which parts of the service is worth the price. I'm finding myself half-tempted if only because there is also access to Russian learning materials, but I'm trying not to get too distracted by the prospect of something new and really weigh whether their Japanese offerings are useful. I am almost certainly going to take advantage of the games, as Frenzy, at least, is kind of a fun way to improve my reading/typing speed in hiragana and katakana (the latter being more my concern). But I'm still evaluating the textbook and vocab/kanji. I have five days before the 6-month free offer expires, at least, so I'm going to try to play with it over this week and see how well it works for me. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| rewire Groupie United States learninglane.tumblr.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4336 days ago 82 posts - 90 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Mandarin | Message 43 of 81 25 September 2012 at 6:58am | IP Logged |
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Still not officially learning Russian. But I've made a set of azbuka flashcards.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| rewire Groupie United States learninglane.tumblr.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4336 days ago 82 posts - 90 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Mandarin | Message 44 of 81 28 September 2012 at 12:41am | IP Logged |
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Website for learning Kansai-ben. The comparison videos on takoyaki make me want to eat it.
Also sort of interesting, apparently there is a stackexchange for Japanese. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6409 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish | Message 45 of 81 28 September 2012 at 8:22am | IP Logged |
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That stackexchange looks pretty good. Thanks for the link.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| rewire Groupie United States learninglane.tumblr.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4336 days ago 82 posts - 90 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Mandarin | Message 46 of 81 01 October 2012 at 7:42pm | IP Logged |
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One of the nice things about using lingualift is that it also tracks minutes spent when doing things like studying vocab. Keeping track of time is not something I'm good at. It's also nice because even though there's overlap on basic terms, they break it up by section, so there's also quite a bit in the "Food and Drink" section that I'm in right now that I'm either fuzzy on or never even heard used before. I'm finding using the kanji and vocab sections is a good way to start working on my basic kanji writing again.
Last week I apparently studied about 38 minutes in the vocab and 16 minutes of kanji. I've been using a notebook with graph paper and basically just writing out each word one or more times as I learn or review them. I didn't bother with their kanji practice sheets-- they have giant practice boxes, and it seemed like a waste of paper to print out so many, especially when I naturally tend to have small handwriting and already owned a graph notebook. I'm also actually working through chapters in the book, but I'm taking my time with it a bit as I catch up the vocab to the chapter. I'm still Level 1 in vocab, but Level 2 on kanji (as I skipped the first level), and in the book, on chapter 10. I just did the assessments for previous chapters, and then started reading through in more detail on chapter 9 (on adjectives), which I needed the formal review on. Still working through iKnow, too. I'm finishing up 8 and 9, going to start on 10, maybe this week. I've been completely neglecting the Super Challenge, but my thoughts are somewhat that if I do more focus on vocab, it will improve my reading/listening comprehension, so I will be able to read more/faster later and can hopefully catch up. But right now I'm just not able to get excited about it, so I think I'm just taking a break from it. My tutoring has been a bit sporadic, sadly, I missed a week because of awkward budgeting and I couldn't purchase more tickets in time, and then missed scheduling the next lesson because the tickets didn't process in time. But I'm having a lesson today, and hopefully will be back on track again. September was a weird month. I hope October goes a little smoother. I'd been having a ton of trouble with sleep during September, too, but that seems to be evening out a little again. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| rewire Groupie United States learninglane.tumblr.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4336 days ago 82 posts - 90 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Mandarin | Message 47 of 81 01 October 2012 at 7:54pm | IP Logged |
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So also Russian? I'm still not saying I'm officially studying it, but I'm getting better at pronunciation-reading words and know most of the letters-- there's still a couple I mix up either with each other or in a false friends way. I'm learning to write them, too.
Mostly I'm mentally telling myself it's just a fun distraction to learn the Cyrillic alphabet and pronunciation right now, because I'm wary of moving too quickly in the beginning? It seems like my Japanese learning was impacted a lot by my inability to be comfortable with hiragana/katakana, and I do notice I find it far easier to pick up vocabulary when embedded in sentences than otherwise. I want to kind of reach a point where even if I can't understand a text, I can pick up something written in Cyrillic letters and sound it all out and write it down with relative ease, before really delving into a lot of grammar studies, which are liable to distract me from the "boring stuff," so I want to have a good foundation in the boring stuff first. Although also right now it's not actually boring yet. Maybe because I'm just doing brief forays as a hobby between my serious Japanese studies? Either way, I'm just going to keep doing that a little until/unless it does get boring, since it's not costing me anything extra to have access to those materials. Actually I only have gone through the first three chapters in the lingualift text, because it's pretty difficult to work through without a better foundation in pronunciation, so I just flip through the review on writing/pronunciation and simple greetings occasionally. I can't tell if the Russian text is not structured as well as the Japanese one, since I'm at such different levels, but I get the impression lingualift is probably not good for anyone who needs training on writing/pronunciation basics in general. The Japanese section has chapters on the writing systems, but like the Russian text, there aren't any real exercises/drills to help you really get hiragana/katakana and pronunciation down, even though there are audio for most of the words. So you really have to do that as a self-study elsewhere if you're literally a beginner entirely. The creators are really responsive to emails, though. At least in sending you a response. I sort of didn't expect it, but every time I leave a comment, they email me within a couple hours to thank me for the suggestion and/or apologize for inconvenience and explain where they are trying to take the site. So I've been considering asking them about more pronunciation/writing system drills, too. Originally I meant this entry to be a shorter one, but somehow it's gotten away from me into a half-review of the lingualift system... 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| rewire Groupie United States learninglane.tumblr.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4336 days ago 82 posts - 90 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Mandarin | Message 48 of 81 15 October 2012 at 2:09am | IP Logged |
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Hm. I haven't really stopped studying, but I'm definitely sort of lacking in motivation for languages right now and so it's all pretty minimal. Just ~2 hours of iKnow a week, occasionally poking at Lingualift, and my weekly tutoring session, but I haven't been able to bring myself to watch or read things in Japanese lately or even listen to podcasts/Pimsleur in the car (part of that is a current annoyance with my ipod, so I've been listening to NPR). Occasionally I also try to test my memory of the Cyrillic alphabet, too, but those studies haven't gone any further than that.
My tenso package is at my post office, but for some reason every time I get a package shipped from Japan, they supposedly "attempt to deliver" and leave a notice, but I've never gotten a first notice. I always end up with a "final notice" days/weeks later telling me I need to pick it up or they're shipping it back. Which is extremely irritating when I never get the first notice in the first place. But I can see from the tracking number that it's there, so I'm going to try to go in tomorrow to get it? Hopefully they can get it for me on my ID instead of needing a slip or something. Edited by rewire on 15 October 2012 at 2:10am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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