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VonPeterhof’s log - 旅立ち’14, Yürükler’15+ | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4554 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes  Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 137 of 158 23 March 2015 at 8:51pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Thanks! It helps a bit that my term of employment at my current place of work has been extended by one more month, but here's hoping for a favourable change of scenery in the future.
Edited by vonPeterhof on 08 April 2015 at 10:06pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Ezy Ryder Diglot Senior Member Poland youtube.com/user/Kat Joined 4131 days ago 284 posts - 387 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 138 of 158 29 March 2015 at 8:48pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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片輪少女日本語版の刊行日付がせっかく知れ ましたらしい。 でも四月一日だって……奇妙な気がしますｗ
1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4554 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 139 of 158 30 March 2015 at 9:06pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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ww まあ、 翻訳チームのツイートには 「日付が日付ですが、 エイプリルフールではなく本当です。」 と書いてあるので、 信じていいのかもしれませんね。 Mais je n'ai pas encore complété la version française... Edited by vonPeterhof on 30 March 2015 at 9:08pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| yuhakko Tetraglot Senior Member FranceRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4414 days ago 414 posts - 582 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishB2, EnglishC2, Spanish, Japanese Studies: Korean, Norwegian, Mandarin | Message 140 of 158 08 April 2015 at 3:18pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Good luck for the job in Japan! (Although it's probably happened already I guess).
And concerning Ainu, I've looked for different level textbooks but nothing seems to be for upper-level. Then again, I haven't looked so much from Japanese... The STV classes start every april (every sunday for a year) so the first lesson of this year was last sunday. I guess you can reach a 日常会話レベル if you follow along the whole year but from that point onwards, I'm not so sure. Every year the teacher is different and they teach some variations of Ainu based on their hometown if I understood well. Anyway, good to see someone else here interested in Ainu! And good luck again for the job! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4554 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 141 of 158 08 April 2015 at 10:11pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Thanks, yuhakko! It hasn't happened yet, in fact I only got my interview appointment yesterday. It's scheduled for next Wednesday, so I've got a week to prepare, and then I'll probably have to wait two more weeks for the results.
Also thanks for the heads-up about the Ainu classes. I see they even have the new textbook uploaded to the website. I guess I'll start following along this course as well. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Woodsei Bilingual Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Woodsei Joined 4579 days ago 614 posts - 782 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Egyptian)* Studies: Russian, Japanese, Hungarian | Message 142 of 158 11 May 2015 at 6:09pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Congratulations! First, I see yuhakko's announcement, and now yours. I'm jealous,
everyone's moving to Japan :) How did it go with your interviews? I'm hoping it's all good. I'm currently busy with studying for my steps, but after I'm done...I can't help but feel like looking into Ainu. You and yuhakko got me infected with the Ainu bug :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4554 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 143 of 158 12 May 2015 at 10:20am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Thanks, Woodsei! Although there isn't much to congratulate me for yet. The results are supposed to be announced some time in May, and I don't feel like writing a detailed report of my interview until then. I'll definitely do it once I hear from the embassy.
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| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4554 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 144 of 158 19 June 2015 at 7:28pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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After another month-long pause I guess it's time for an update. To get the biggest question out of the way - no, I didn't get the JET position. I was informed about it two weeks ago, but I didn't report that fact here right away, because I immediately initiated my plan B. The result is that I may still go to Japan for three months starting in July. More about this later, because first I'd like to talk about the interview.
My interview took place in the Japanese consulate in Saint Petersburg on the morning of April 15. While the email inviting me there stated that the interview would be conducted in Russian, English and Japanese, after I entered the room and greeted the interviewers one of them looked at my file and said "Since it says here that you have an N1 certificate, if you don't mind we shall conduct the whole interview in Japanese". It didn't take long for me to see how unprepared I was for this possibility - when answering the very first standard ice-breaker question of "did you get here alright?" I screwed up by repeating the interviewer's honorific verb for "get here" (いらっしゃいました) and applying it to myself. I immediately realized my mistake and corrected myself, but by their faces I think I could tell that the first impression was already ruined. I decided to steer clear from 尊敬語 and 謙譲語 from then on. The good thing is that I understood and answered all the questions to the best of my ability, but I struggled to recall words on more than one occasion (including something as basic as 手伝う - I never recalled it and instead went for アシストする :D) and probably got a couple of Sinitic compound words wrong. Worst of all, sticking to the words and patterns I'm more or less comfortable with likely made some of my answers sound tangential at best and elusive at worst. Thanks to such answers I may have given the impression that my English is worse than I indicated in my forms (since no questions were asked in English I didn't get the chance to correct that misconception), that I'm less than enthusiastic about working with teenagers, and that I don't have a clue about what I'm going to do with my further career (okay, that last one is sorta true). When I left the interview I was actually feeling good about myself for having endured it almost entirely in Japanese (they did ask me to answer one question in Russian - not sure if this was to test my speaking skills in Russian, or just because they thought that it might be too difficult for me), but the more I analysed what went on there the more I got to thinking that my only hope is for all the other applicants for my position to be even worse. The week of the interview also happened to be my last week at work - I've now been unemployed for more than two months. I wasn't really busying myself with finding a new job, since I had a different plan B in case I fail to get the ALT position - namely to go to Japan to study at a language school. The irony of me having earned the JLPT N1 without having visited Japan or taken classes only to end up taking classes in Japan doesn't elude me, but, as my experience at the interview showed, my ability to actually communicate in Japanese is nowhere near a satisfactory level, let alone a professional one. I had looked into language schools before and knew that there were some where I could attend advanced business Japanese classes at prices affordable to me with my savings. However, I hadn't actually researched this very well before having heard back from the consulate, so when I actually started carefully weighing my options it turned out that I was rather limited in both my choices and the deadlines I'd need to meet. These past two weeks I've been busy assembling various documents, taking tests, writing emails and calculating costs. While I've now done most of what needed to be done on my end, there still remains a possibility that the documents from the school won't arrive in time for me to apply for my visa in order to get it before the start of the term on July 6 (which would be extremely inconvenient, as I've already bought the plane tickets). Anyway, the school that I got accepted into for the 3-month business Japanese course is in Osaka, which probably means that I should kiss my hopes of mastering the Standard Japanese pitch goodbye :) On the plus side, there are plenty of interesting historical places in the Kansai region, and it should also be marginally easier to survive on a limited budget than in Tokyo. So I guess now all I can do is cautiously look forward to it and hope I can get my visa in time. As for my language learning activities, until this week the only language I did every day was Turkmen (I don't think I can honestly consider watching anime every day a Japanese learning activity at this point). Until this week I've alternated between doing GLOSS lessons and reading news articles in it. I've also written a lang-8 entry in Turkmen - in the two weeks it's been up it's been viewed 8 times but still has no corrections, so either the Turkmen community on lang-8 isn't very active, or the entry is just that good ;) My overall impression has been that Turkmen has some interesting deviations from the other two major Oghuz languages in its phonology and morphology, marginally more Russian loanwords than Azerbaijani. Unfortunately, its peculiar orthography combined with Turkmenistan's relative technological isolation makes using it online rather inconvenient. Fortunately the Azerbaijani keyboard's extended character set, at least on a Mac, makes it possible to input all Turkmen chaacters, even if you have to press a sequence of three keys to type ý. Incidentally, the Azerbaijani keyboard is surprisingly versatile - holding down the alt key gives you access to a ridiculous number of diacritics and alternative characters. Out of the Latin script using languages I've dabbled in the only ones that it can't support are Vietnamese (it's possible to input the tone marks and the special diacritics, but not both simultaneously on the same character) and, somewhat ironically, Uzbek. I guess that was an appropriate segue into the news that this week I started exploring Uzbek, the language of the country where the vast majority of my adult relatives either were born or have lived in. After having tried to, and failed to find a phonological description of Uzbek that was neither too dumbed down nor much too technical for me, I decided to start off with a basic grammatical introduction by Ingeborg Baldauf (German reading practice, yay!), and then move on to GLOSS and try to get a grasp of the phonology from listening. So far I've noticed a very familiar face in the negating particle emas, which must be a relative of the Kazakh емес instead of the Oghuz değil/deyil/däl. Another interesting thing is that the Uzbek o seems to correspond very well to the Turkmen long a, both in Perso-Arabic loans and native Turkic words (the only exception I've found so far is the ethnonym "Kazakh", which is gazak with two short a's in Turkmen, but qozoq in Uzbek). As for other languages, the list of languages I'm studying actively at least once a week includes Japanese (through lang-8), Classical Chinese, Classical Japanese, Korean, Kazakh and Ainu. Languages that I'm studying semi-actively (by reading one chapter of an Ilya Frank-style reader per week) - Turkish (the Nasreddin reader) and Norwegian (Knut Hamsun's Pan, including a vocal recording for shadowing). Languages that I'm only supporting passively - Ukrainian (news articles and editorials), Belarusian (same), French (Katawa Shoujo; have now cleared the good and neutral endings of the Hanako route) and German (just for the heck of it, I'm trying to get used to Fraktur by reading through an American "natural method" textbook from 1880). Languages for which I'm not doing anything other than Anki reviews of basic sentences I picked up at some point earlier: BSMS (predominately Croatian), Indonesian, Swahili, Latin, Lithuanian, Romanian, Albanian, Vietnamese, Ancient Greek, Modern Greek, Abkhaz, Eastern Armenian, Yiddish and Arabic. I average just under 100 reviews per day, with the biggest contributors being the Korean and Turkmen decks. Considering that I'm unemployed this is a piece of cake, but I'll probably have to do something to cut that number down when I start looking for a job again. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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