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Kixi TAC ’13 Sakura 桜 Jpn/Esp Log

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kixi
Groupie
United Kingdom
Joined 4140 days ago

40 posts - 40 votes
Studies: Japanese

 
 Message 25 of 41
08 April 2013 at 12:32am | IP Logged 
I obtained a copy of language hacking guide from one of the piratebay mirror sites...
HAHAHA! What a con, the whole thing reads like any other motivational ebook that talks
about the subject (diet/dating/getting things done/etc) but never reveals this amazing
secret it promised.

Now this
is language hacking info!

So as you know, I've already stumbled across frequency and plan to use them for a large
part of my vocab acquisition. I googled around to see the success of such a thing and
found this guy talking about cognates, with a great idea of recording them and
listening to them whenever such as on the bus. Also, now I have several forms of freq
lists, such as the official 'frequency dictionary of Spanish' and
this handy site
with audio

From that site I can just record the audio on my phone and have each days target vocab
to listen to throughout the day after learning them with blocks of 7 method in the
morning. Should work well for recall and save me having to srs them!

-Today I completed the jpn vocab I planned to, then gathered my resources and methods.
I then went through the Spanish alphabet from several videos along with numbers.

-Tomorrow I shall go back over alphabet and numbers, then learn the 'basic phrases'
with special attention to pronunciation.

-The rest of the week I shall cover much content/vocab from surfacelanguages

-Next week I shall continue learning/reviewing vocab while also covering grammar rules.
I don't plan on using workbooks or courses as I feel I'd be happier with just 'boring'
grammar notes and long as heck vocab lists. Although I may do some listen and repeat
type deal.

-For japanese, I'm not sure what my next plan is aside from keep up with rtk and review
learned vocab. I want to do frequency but am reluctant to when I have so much Spanish
planned for the next 2 weeks. I might stick to just grammar, constructing sentences
from the vocab I have. Hopefully this will enable me to use any new vocab hereafter.
It's a bruise to the ego slowing down progress like this :(
1 person has voted this message useful



kixi
Groupie
United Kingdom
Joined 4140 days ago

40 posts - 40 votes
Studies: Japanese

 
 Message 26 of 41
12 April 2013 at 1:14am | IP Logged 
Heya, quick update:

I'm bang on track with my plans in both. I'm 125 words into the Spanish frequency
list, having learnt them spn to eng and then today I flipped them and learnt all 125
eng to spn. Gosh this was quite a feat! In future I shall learn each little block of
vocab both ways before moving onto the next few.

I fully believe in these lists after looking over Spanish resources (song lyrics and
written texts). I could make out all the connecting words since they are everywhere!
From this I was guessing at some of the remaining words and correctly figured out a few
sentences without much effort! Just crikey! Dayum! I am dumbfounded! So yes I plan to
follow this through till the 1000 mark at least, which should get around 75%
comprehension give or take. I look forward to the ability to read in not very long at
all.

As for speaking, I downloaded a few programs, i'm really enjoying the simplicity of
drivetime Spanish, It's teaching me vocab, stuff like the switching of 'o' to 'a' for
adjectives that follow fem words. It also forced me to scramble together sentence
answers to questions in a short time based on what you'd just learnt. It's not taxing
and will do for now but I might move to a more in depth program next week, such as fsi.

Japanese has been vocab reviews of 100 or so per day then 20-40 kanji. I think I might
stop RTK at 1000. My fiance is coming to visit for a couple weeks in may so I wont have
time for new kanji or reviews. If I pause at 1000, I can review the heck out of them to
get rid of the pending reviews each day and also focus my efforts on japanese frequency
lists/sentence construction/workbooks. I can say that I don't find RTK fun, I don't
enjoy the reviews on anki (they kinda make me hate and dread anki to the point i'm not
using it for other things) and feel it doesnt work well for me compared to learning to
write them then learning from context. I'm tempted to forget the reviewing of them all
together. When I resume the other 1k, I might just learn them direct to sentence
method, or better still reading native stuff with raikaikun.

I wish many others, with more vivid imagination, luck with the RTK method. It wasn't a
bad system and by gosh I can draw those things super easy and understand how they work,
the radicals, know they have diff readings and pronunciations. It took away the fear
and some of the biggest hurdles for me considering a couple months ago I didn't
understand how they worked or know anything about them. It's just not a match for my
learning needs and goals.

Countless hours, probably 50+ just doing rtk anki decks and I can't remember a thing. I
think I remember sub 150 kanji, and most of those are just because I learnt the jlpt n5
kanji in context 2 weeks ago. Actually no forget it, right here and now I declare that
I will no longer be doing those darn anki reviews which are not helping! No more RTK
reviews wooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooo!!!!! Now
maybe I can get back to enjoying progress on anki with vocab :D The weight that got
lifted as I wrote that, no wonder so many people give up.



P.s although I slated the language hacking guide, I really enjoy bennys website and
wish he would devise a real language program, including vocab and grammar he considers
needed for fluency in 3 months. One of his followers, will peach, used frequency and
immersion to learn Spanish. He has a website called myspanishadventure, where he
documented his progress with videologs. I found it encouraging. Oh and one of the
members here, iverson, I read through some of his guide (it's quite dense for pre bed
reading) and found that useful/encouraging too. so yeah thanks to them!
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dampingwire
Bilingual Triglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 4460 days ago

1185 posts - 1513 votes 
Speaks: English*, Italian*, French
Studies: Japanese

 
 Message 27 of 41
13 April 2013 at 12:47am | IP Logged 
kixi wrote:
Countless hours, probably 50+ just doing rtk anki decks and I can't
remember a thing.


It may feel like you cannot remember anything and I'm certainly not going to try to
persuade you to place the yoke around your neck anew, but I doubt that you've wasted
those countless hours. If nothing else RTK should have shown you how to build up the
more complicated kanji (like maybe 歳) from simpler parts. I found that even just that
made a huge difference when I came to study kanji in vocabulary: I only had to remember
at most three or four "pieces" rather than 15-20 strokes.

However you learn kanji it's going to take some effort: just be grateful you didn't
grow up going to school in Japan :-)

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kixi
Groupie
United Kingdom
Joined 4140 days ago

40 posts - 40 votes
Studies: Japanese

 
 Message 28 of 41
13 April 2013 at 3:42am | IP Logged 
Yeah as I said, it broke the ice and explained the aspects of kanji. I have the feel for
stroke orders, I can identify elements and even if I don't think I've memorized many from
this process, I do think that it's taken away a lot of the confusion to the point where
memorizing them in future using different methods will be much simpler. To put it in
simple terms I feel comfortable with them instead of looking at mysterious hieroglyph
type things. This was probably worth those hours.


It might be worth mentioning that I had brain trauma affecting recall and memory among
other things, so peoples mileage may hugely vary.
1 person has voted this message useful



g-bod
Diglot
Senior Member
United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 5777 days ago

1485 posts - 2002 votes 
Speaks: English*, Japanese
Studies: French, German

 
 Message 29 of 41
13 April 2013 at 9:44am | IP Logged 
I've wasted countless hours trying out things other people said they found useful. I think that's ok though. It's admittedly frustrating when you don't get the results you hoped for, but if we all knew what we needed to do to learn a language already there would be no need for this forum.

For what it's worth, I couldn't stand RTK!
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kixi
Groupie
United Kingdom
Joined 4140 days ago

40 posts - 40 votes
Studies: Japanese

 
 Message 30 of 41
16 April 2013 at 7:17am | IP Logged 
thanks :)

I haven't been sleeping well (it's 5.50am), so tonight I picked up where I left off and
did another 40 kanji, I'm nearly at 1000. It was actually enjoyable now the pressure is
off, I may occasionally do reviews to keep the 1000 fresh. After my trip i'll finish
rtk off, they might not be sticking but I can spot the ones I've studied before, I like
this familiarity.

Tomorrow I'll have finished the first 500 Spanish freq vocab. I'm going to go over it
for a few days since it is pretty important content. It's about here where I need a
solid learning plan. I have several programs downloaded, unfortunately half of them
don't have matching books to sound files. FSI looks pretty comprehensive, I have
pimsluer too... Opinions welcome!

My needs are listening/speaking based, with a lot of emphasis on sentence construction.
I need to glue these words together and don't have a lot of time to read reviews of the
best program etc before I leave. I want a fast learning program that doesn't just
contain introduction phrases. Oh there's a wonderful program from wordsgalore.com,
totally free, that has 9000 Spanish freq vocab. It has a questionable interface that is
epilepsy inducing and just repeats words at you with translation until they're beaten
into your head. You can download the English sound files for the translations and leave
it playing while you clean and stuff.


From(de) the(el/la) vocab I've(tengo?) learnt(aprendidas?) so(tan) far I can(me puede?)
make(hacer) out half of(de) the(los/las) Spanish(espanol) I see(veo) on(en) websites. I
believe (estoy creo?) that the estimations of coverage are correct, as you can see :D
In time, if you were to learn a few thousand then translate odd unknown words from
native materials, you could easily figure out sentence structures/common
expressions/whatever else without needing to formally study grammar. Except this would
probably take many months even at my current pace, also leaving me unable to listen or
speak. Spanish people speak fast!
1 person has voted this message useful



dampingwire
Bilingual Triglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 4460 days ago

1185 posts - 1513 votes 
Speaks: English*, Italian*, French
Studies: Japanese

 
 Message 31 of 41
16 April 2013 at 9:23pm | IP Logged 
kixi wrote:
Spanish people speak fast!


:-)

I don't speak Spanish, but it's close enough to Italian that I can get the gist. So they
can't really be speaking that quickly.

Japanese people though, now that's a horse of a different colour ...


1 person has voted this message useful



kixi
Groupie
United Kingdom
Joined 4140 days ago

40 posts - 40 votes
Studies: Japanese

 
 Message 32 of 41
18 April 2013 at 3:19am | IP Logged 
Really? It must be a case of unfamiliarity then, when I native songs listen it's a
beautiful seamless mess. Up, Down, a 'll' sound, curled 'r', regular 'r' in quick
succession that make it very hard to pay attention to where the words begin and end. By
the way Italian, french and japanese... I'm very jelly!

Erm so I'm still puzzled over which program, seriously opinions needed! Think I might
have to scour google for reviews. Didn't end up studying much today for a bunch of
reasons but one of them was indecision over study program. I have a bunch of japanese
homework due tomorrow, describing our rooms. It's painful but gives a chance to
construct sentences. Oh and surprise there's another exam! This must be over 10 exams
now, they just dont end. However the class is over in a month or 2. I'm relieved and
look forward to solo progress and 100% focus on my own japanese goals. The class is a
chore, I wish I could just be left alone for several hours a day to focus on these.


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