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rewire’s 日本語 (& miscellany) adventures | ||
Tags: Intermediate | Japanese | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4986 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 65 of 81 23 August 2013 at 1:32am | IP Logged |
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I'm curious how you looks the tutor sessions with the online tutor. I'm just starting mine and they seem really
nice but it's still new to me. It's easy to get burned out on something. I know they use みんなの日本語 and I've found it online but haven't read t much yet. I'm at about step 7 on the core 3000. Which makes me think I'm ahead of the game.. Maybe. Lol. Anyway it's nice to read your log. Good luck. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| rewire Groupie United States learninglane.tumblr.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4349 days ago 82 posts - 90 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Mandarin | Message 66 of 81 23 August 2013 at 2:25am | IP Logged |
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@g-bod Admittedly, I am still a bit skeptical because I feel like I have too often
thought I was 'close to N3' and then tried some test questions and felt like they were lightyears beyond me. But I haven't tried any test questions in a while, so I'll definitely at least try some of the N3 practice questions to see how that goes, since maybe you're right, and I'm closer than I think, heh. @kraemder I'm confused about what you're asking me-- how do I like my tutor or how did I book it or something else? I think when I was doing group lessons in JOI those were based off みんなの日本語, but I haven't done group lessons in a while. Right now I'm actually doing 中級へ行こう with my online tutor, though for a while we were working through 耳から覚える. I do tend to go slowly partly to avoid burn out, heh. I'd like to learn vocab faster, since not even being at 3000 yet seems a little sad, but eh. My pace works for me right now, and I know I'll just get overwhelmed if I tried to go any faster. That's awesome you've almost finished 3000, though. Good luck to you, too. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| rewire Groupie United States learninglane.tumblr.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4349 days ago 82 posts - 90 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Mandarin | Message 67 of 81 26 August 2013 at 7:59am | IP Logged |
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Ahaha. Today I had my first session with my online tutor since I got back from my
vacation. My homework had been to write a 作文 on what happened during the vacation, which was, as I keep saying in English when people ask, "eventful." I tried to just keep it shorter as a summary, but not only did it end up around 900字, but I left out a bunch of the worst bits because I thought I was getting too long, so then I ended up having to explain it when we were going over it in the lesson. It took up the whole lesson and we didn't entirely finish it, so we'll finish it up next time. But on the other hand, it was really nice to have a session where I felt like I was communicating decently again. I tried to talk about my vacation with my in-person tutor and kept coming up blank on what to say. Not sure if it's that I've been watching a lot of raw Digimon and reading a lot this weekend and that's just kind of reactivated the speaking part of my brain that made it easier, or if it's just that writing it down first helped me start framing it already so I didn't have the usual blanking that I do when speaking anyway (I'm often not good at speaking in English either for that reason). 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| rewire Groupie United States learninglane.tumblr.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4349 days ago 82 posts - 90 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Mandarin | Message 68 of 81 04 September 2013 at 10:55am | IP Logged |
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Sometimes it kind of annoys me that the languages I have interest or investment in outside of Japanese are also, relatively
speaking as a native-English speaker, hard. For instance, if only I actually enjoyed Spanish, I'd have an immediately useful language fallback that is generally easy for English-speakers to pick up with a wealth of materials and resources available locally that would be a good 'just a hobby' distraction. I really wish I liked Spanish, but I don't, so it's kind of moot. Instead the next two on my list are Mandarin (which is sadly non-negotiable) and Russian. At least my Russian goal is mainly "read books" so maybe I can be more lenient on myself for conversation. All this to say, I've been stressed out by other things, and when I get stressed out, I often start picking up 'new' hobbies (that don't last very long, so I don't expect this to become serious) as stress relief. Thus leading to poking at Russian again via Memrise. There was a "Learn Basic Russian" course that starts you off with the Cyrillic alphabet and reading simple names, and I'm liking it more than the Japanese courses I attempted on Memrise a while ago. Plus there's a phone app now, which makes it more useful to me. In hindsight my biggest hurdle with Japanese seemed to be that it took me so long to feel comfortable in straight-up reading hiragana and katakana (as opposed to simply recognizing them individually but having to sound out words each time and getting frustrated with how slow that process was). I knew reading would be a huge asset to me in learning the language, but it was so painful to do for so long, I kept stagnating in everything I tried, until I finally got to a point where reading hiragana, at least, was more fun than awful. So I figure if I kind of off-and-on poke at the Cyrillic alphabet now, by the time I'm ready to seriously start Russian, I'll be able to phonetically read words with relative ease and can then simply focus on acquiring vocab and grammar. It's a decent stress-relief tool, since it's such a low bar. I am an absolute beginner and no hard deadlines to meet for class or family, so there are no expectations of where I should be already. I am where I should be: knowing pretty much nothing, and I can go as slow as I want to. And that makes it easier to make it fun to just see if I can 'read' a word, even if I have no idea what it means. I'm not even going to try to look anything up right now because it doesn't matter-- the goal is to 'read' it, and that's it. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4986 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 69 of 81 04 September 2013 at 11:30am | IP Logged |
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Good luck with the Chinese. I'm sure it'll be interesting but I'm afraid of going there myself since it'll be really
hard. Yikes. Russian probably wouldn't be so bad. Sure you'd have issues with the alphabet but you'll get used to it and there's no kanji. Woot! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| rewire Groupie United States learninglane.tumblr.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4349 days ago 82 posts - 90 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Mandarin | Message 70 of 81 04 September 2013 at 7:49pm | IP Logged |
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Eh, Mandarin grammar is simpler than Japanese or Russian (or English, really), so the
hard parts are really tones (hearing and producing them) and reading does require much more hanzi than Japanese does kanji. I'm honestly more terrified of Russian grammar (gendered words, consonant mutation that affects spelling, a looser sentence structure that can be either SVO or SOV, more fun with polite/familiar language, etc.) than I am of anything in Mandarin, which I see as annoying more for being time consuming than anything else, ahah. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| rewire Groupie United States learninglane.tumblr.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4349 days ago 82 posts - 90 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Mandarin | Message 71 of 81 07 September 2013 at 6:27am | IP Logged |
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Reading up on Gold List method made me half want to try it... but I think it's too much effort, ahah. For Japanese, at least. I have no
real desire to mess with the method(s) I'm currently employing, and GL for Japanese sounds far too complicated in comparison with languages with simpler writing systems. I think if I was really focusing on Russian, it might be interesting to try it for that. And I am so tempted to, you have no idea. But if I'm going to get serious about any L3, it should be Mandarin. So I might see if I can convince myself that trying it for Mandarin would be fun. Perhaps even just trying to do "Remembering the Hanzi" with it would be an interesting project. I couldn't get through Remembering the Kanji when I tried before, but possibly not trying to use the RTK website or Anki would be better. Or at least wouldn't hurt to try, I suppose. I'm not sure, but I'm thinking about it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| rewire Groupie United States learninglane.tumblr.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4349 days ago 82 posts - 90 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Mandarin | Message 72 of 81 24 February 2014 at 7:30am | IP Logged |
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... well then. I basically stopped posting here since I got a new job back in October last year, and the transition was
really stressful for a while so my studies dropped off immensely-- didn't quite quit entirely, but I ended up with a couple months where all I could manage was listening to podcasts and logging couple hours on iKnow, and it's only in the last month or so that I've been starting to wade back in seriously. So I don't think I even made it to 10 books on the Super Challenge. I'll probably sign up for it again in May, but even if I don't officially sign up, I plan to keep my own record and continue focusing on reading. Last session with my tutor, he ended up having me go through some N3 practice questions, and I definitely would not have been ready for the N3 last year; I very much failed the practice questions (~40% correct). He wanted to be more optimistic than I was and kept trying to count questions as correct if I managed to figure it out on the second or third try. But I marked myself wrong if I didn't get it on the first attempt, since it's not like the actual test would give me a chance to revise failed answers. Though I did feel less like I was completely flailing at it blindly than the first time he tried to go through the questions with me over a year ago, so that was nice at least. I think even though I don't get active practice out of them, the Japanesepod101 podcasts have actually been improving my grammar understanding, so I'm glad that I've been listening to those. I also just finally bought and have started using the first Shadowing book. It's not been very long, and I started at the beginning with Unit 1, which I did already have some familiarity with, so I haven't noticed much improvement yet. I've been trying to say the phrases in synchronicity with the audio while reading it from the book even though the instructions said to repeat shortly after. Mostly with the easy phrases, I've been focusing on intonation and speed, so trying to say it at exactly the same time gives me a sense of how fast I really 'should' be talking versus how fast I will tend to talk otherwise (which is slower, closer to American English speed). Trying to finish up some of the books I have been 'currently reading' for a while, though I also restarted CCS just to kind of gauge progress/read something easy just for fun. Re-reading vol. 1 is great, because I remember how much of a struggle it was to get through, and still only understanding maybe half of it. I still feel a little slow at reading, but not painfully so, and I get closer to 90% understanding in CCS now. So that's pretty cool. I started Trigun, also, but that and FMA I'm closer to 60-75% comprehension on right now, depending on the conversation-- sometimes there's so much series-specific jargon or slang that I'm not sure what's going on. Anyway, I've been doing a lot of art lately and have to put more effort into programming outside of work to try to catch up, which cuts into my language time also, so I'm not sure if I'll really even make it back to the pace I was at before. (Which seems a little sad, I wasn't doing that much to begin with, but oh well.) I definitely stopped studying Chinese and Russian for the time being and have gone back to solely focusing on Japanese. I think I'm really just a one-at-time person. Or at least, my other 'at-the-same-time' learning slots are being occupied by other things, so I don't have room for more languages. Edited by rewire on 24 February 2014 at 7:51am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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