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Bite-sized study-TAC13-MIR-Sakura桜 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Rhadryn Triglot Groupie United States Joined 5178 days ago 53 posts - 60 votes  Speaks: English*, Japanese, French Studies: Spanish, Russian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin, Latin, German | Message 17 of 42 08 January 2013 at 7:05pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Update 1 (1/1-7/1)
It's the first week and I've already made changes to my goals. That won't be a recurring thing though I hope--I really should have tested out this schedule before the new year began. Changes:
And now for the thoughts on my language studies this week: I'm tired of Harry Potter. It doesn't help that I've read this book (the Prisoner of Azkaban) at least five times in English as well as in French and Spanish. I'm not as familiar with the next book, but it's taking me so long to get through this one that I'm keeping my eyes open for other options. I'm still reading at least half an hour a day though, so Japanese is going pretty well. At a loss for the first two days, I found learnrussian.rt on the third day and I've really enjoyed it. It's quite fulfilling, although it's also frustrating because it doesn't provide answers to the exercises unless I get them all right. The dialogues are hilarious though, even better than Assimil German. I'm still doing word declining and conjugating exercises for 10 minutes a day as well as keeping up with 400 words I learned last year. This year I'm hoping to cram a ton of vocabulary in, so I'm going to start doing word lists every day. Ideally I will blow my vocab goal out of the water, so that by the time I finish learnrussian.rt, I'll have a much more expansive vocabulary and I can breeze through textbooks, or maybe even start trying to read. Now on Assimil lesson 93, so just one week left! I need to figure out what I'm going to do after I finish. I feel pretty stupid for missing a goal in the first week. I read some short stories on the Cervantes website (see resources), and then yesterday I found out that my favorite fantasy book is available in Spanish! (El Nombre del Viento) So I bought that and I believe it will keep me busy for the next 6 months. Although I plan to read more short stories from time to time as well. This is going swimmingly. In the textbook I average less than one word per page that I don't know, and considering how many words are on the page of a textbook, that makes me quite happy with my level of reading. From attempting to understand the news, though, I verified that my aural comprehension needs a lot of work, so I'm hoping that regular exposure will help. I only started studying (again) three days ago, but this is a lot of fun. I love writing and being able to read these beautiful and exotic characters. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Rhadryn Triglot Groupie United States Joined 5178 days ago 53 posts - 60 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese, French Studies: Spanish, Russian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin, Latin, German | Message 18 of 42 15 January 2013 at 7:27pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Update 2 (8/1-14/1)
I met all my goals! I studied a total of 40.75 hours this week, which is about right because this is pretty much my full-time job for now. This week I've been watching Nisemonogatari, which is really strange and I can't recommend it, but it does have some hilarious parts. Still plugging away at Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, with just 2.5 chapters left. If I work hard I could finish this week! I've also done some podcast listening and I even wrote an entry on Lang8 last night! I felt like it was poorly written and almost incomprehensible, but the corrections I received seemed to show that although I used odd Japanese a few times, everything was understandable. Motivation boost! I hope I'll be able to start writing regularly! Obviously I went way over my goal this week with Russian. Probably half of that time originates from vocabulary learning. I added 120 words to my vocabulary this week. Learnrussian.rt is still quite fun though I'm still frustrated by the lack of an answer key. And actually I think I found a couple mistakes, which I'll try to remember to post later. Did lesson 100 yesterday! It was quite funny. I'm still reviewing Assimil for most of this week, but I'll also be going through the German course located on this website. It's a pretty short course, so I'll probably have to find something else to do by next week. El Nombre Del Viento is going well and is fun! There are lots of nouns I don't know, but I get the gist and with the help of my memory this is enough to keep me entertained. Chateaubriand uses more words that I'm not familiar with than the other writers I've encountered, but I'm still understanding at least 90% of the text excerpts. I've finished unit 4 (out of 10), thus half the alphabet, and I was doing so well with the exercises (perfect on almost everything) that I was starting to wonder if I didn't have a supernatural gift for Arabic. I even managed to distinguish the first emphatic consonant (ص) without any problem. Then I got to the second (ض) and became quite discouraged. 1/3rd of the time it sounds like its non-emphatic counterpart (د, like "d") and the other 2/3rds it sounds exactly like the "b" sound (ب). I'm going to need a lot more practice to distinguish it. Otherwise, I'm really excited about learning more Arabic and reading the stories that are so much a part of that culture. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4642 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 19 of 42 16 January 2013 at 1:50am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Wow, fantastic graphs there!
I agree that it is more interesting to do multiple languages than to force yourself to do just one. For me, Japanese is a necessity since I live in Japan. But Portuguese is a nice, fun, two-or-three-day-a-week diversion from my Japanese studies. Of course, the more I study Japanese, the more I like it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6415 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish | Message 20 of 42 16 January 2013 at 7:07am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I love the graphs too.
Just to let you know: Even I got tired of Harry Potter a few times when reading it in Japanese, but I really learned a lot. Don't you love when you manage to write something that's actually pretty good? My lang-8 entries feel a little inconsistent. Even though they are always readable and understandable, sometimes there are only minor corrections and other times, almost every sentence has mistakes. It's a great learning tool though. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Sunja Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5880 days ago 2020 posts - 2295 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, German Studies: French, Mandarin | Message 21 of 42 16 January 2013 at 9:02pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Rahdryn, hope you don't mind me dropping in... your log title "bite-sized study" caught my eye. I could take a lesson from that. I always bite off more than I can handle.
I agree that lang-8 is an incredible learning tool, but I wish I could get some signal for those that don't get a correction at all. Either my writing is too boring/bad for anyone to bother, or everyone native or otherwise better than me is busy. I don't quite believe it's mistake-free. I guess the idea is to favor quantity and just write no matter what! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6415 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish | Message 22 of 42 16 January 2013 at 9:15pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Are you not getting corrections on Japanese entries?! That's unusual since there are so many Japanese people there. I usually have several corrections within half-an-hour. If it's German you're talking about, then I can understand. The ratio of German learners to German natives is about 4:1, so it's very hard for them to correct everything. There is the same problem for those learning English. There the ratio is over 5:1, so there are a lot of people studying it and not nearly enough natives. We'd have to correct 5 entries for every one we wrote, assuming the average numbers of entries per person over time is the same in both groups. The only solution to the problem, is to get more people to join. There are plenty of Japanese, but we need more people from all the other countries of the world. I always try to encourage people to join. (I encourage them to join HTLAL too.) By-the-way, what exactly do you mean by "bite-sized?" If 40 hours per week is bite-sized, what do you consider a normal portion? I'd be scared to look at the super-value menu! Edited by Brun Ugle on 16 January 2013 at 9:18pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Rhadryn Triglot Groupie United States Joined 5178 days ago 53 posts - 60 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese, French Studies: Spanish, Russian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin, Latin, German | Message 23 of 42 17 January 2013 at 4:11am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I'm still on a lang-8 high three days after! So I think I will try to write another tonight, but for the present I corrected my latest entry and will now post it:
一番好きなところ ２０１１の春、私はバルセロナに行きました 。その時私はフランスで住んでいたから、旅 はバスで五時間しかかかりませんでした。ス ペインの町の中で、バルセ ロナは人口が二番多くて、かなり大きな町で す。東京と比べたらもちろん小さいようだで すが、私にとってバルセロナは完璧な大きさ があります。その上その町の有名な食べ物の 中では世界一番美味しい「フエット」と呼ば れる肉があります。毎日私を夢中にさせる豚 肉を噛みながら、きれいな道を歩き回りま した。いたるところに公園がありそうです。 道は広いし、あまり曲線がないし、いつも迷 子になる私がまったく迷いませんでした。町 の北方に山がおそびえて、 東方にすてきな海岸が広がります。 みなさんの好きなところはどこですか？ Thank you all for dropping in, and for the compliments about the graphs! I just use a spreadsheet in OpenOffice Calc to generate them. They are really motivating because every time I track some time in the spreadsheet, the graph changes! Maybe I'll post a link to the spreadsheet later... I agree that lang-8 is great for learning, but I kind of wish that the graders would provide an idea of how strict they're being. Because when I read the English corrections, I notice that some of them are just fixing style, or they're changing more things than necessary, or sometimes the whole correction is unnecessary. When I get corrections from three different people and they each point out different problem areas, it's confusing. And I agree that Japanese gets a lot of response, but when I wrote in French, half of my entries never got corrections, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't because they were perfect. Hahah, bite-size is more my aim than my present state. I want to do a little bit every day over a long period of time so that I become acclimated to the languages, so that they feel natural. Also, most of my tasks last for 45 minutes or less so that I don't lose focus, and in that way it's sort of bite-sized. My weekly hours goal is actually about 24, but since I have no job at the moment I figure that I should be able to do at least 40. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Jaseur Groupie United Kingdom Joined 5874 days ago 50 posts - 51 votes Speaks: English* | Message 24 of 42 18 January 2013 at 2:18am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Hi, fellow Team Sakura member here.
Not sure what to comment here because you seem to be doing sterling work. I remember reading Cirque du Freak in Japanese about the time I was plowing through Harry Potter in Japanese. I didn't know the story but it was slightly easier than HP. By contrast, The Lies of Locke Lamora, although a brilliant book, was very hard indeed. I also read The Amulet of Samarkand which was a bit more difficult than HP. Redoing HP can get a bit dull but it's encouraging to see your reading speed go up book by book. I was living in Japan at that time so it was quite easy to pick random books up. They have really awesome second hand book stores over there. I can see maybe a couple of things that look slightly fishy to me in your Japanese but what you have written is very impressive. It seems to me you could easily become a J>E translator if you wanted to. I will try and keep an eye on your log, at least the Japanese-related bits. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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