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The 1-year challenge: Japanese | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5709 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 9 of 38 26 January 2014 at 12:40pm | IP Logged | ||
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Dampingwire: Mostly Japanese with an English summary sounds like a good thing :-) When I get there of course... Can't wait to be able to understand Japanese explained in Japanese!
----- Just finished my 200th lesson at JapanesePod101 :-) This is the point where I start feeling confused by some of the sentences in the lessons though. I feel like I'm behind and sometimes I don't understand even half the words in the sentence. I'm a messy learner and they're not overly fond of repetition of the same vocabulary, so I end up not remembering things that have only been used once or twice. I've considered using their flashcards function, it seems ok but would probably work better if I'd been using it from the start. I've used flashcards a lot for university and it's much more useful if there's no long queue of overdue cards so that the waiting time for each card makes some sort of sense. I also tend to trail off a bit and read emails or the news or something while I'm listening to a lesson, which is probably not the best idea. But I'm ok with it :-) On a positive note they've cut down on all-Japanese tangents I didn't understand and you can tell they're making an effort to translate their random comments more often. I'm sure asides in natural language will be useful and interesting later once I can figure out what they're saying, but up to this point they've mostly been tangents I couldn't understand unless they translated for me. Their current approach seems better. I'm still almost completely illiterate in Japanese and that's starting to become a problem at this point. It was much easier for me to get exposure to written text in Italian than it is in Japanese. I know lots of people have negative feelings about romaji but honestly I still use it shamelessly and if it was more available I would probably be able to learn the language faster. It's better to be illiterate and able to speak, than illiterate and not able to speak... Studying random texts in Italian was so useful for me and really helped me learn vocabulary and grammar, but I can't do that with Japanese texts... Too bad. It makes the overall learning process slower. Liz 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5709 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 10 of 38 08 February 2014 at 12:52am | IP Logged | ||
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Just had one of those moments where I could suddenly understand a string of words from a song :-) I'm hoping those moments will become more frequent soon... I love it when that starts to happen and things that were a mystery before become kinda obvious. Good times ahead!
Liz 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5709 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 11 of 38 09 February 2014 at 3:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've started listening to podcasts with a bit more consistency - seems like a good idea at this point. I've been listening to some books on Librivox too, when I feel like it. I definitely need more natural audio input... It's not exactly comprehensible input at this point, but I'll get there eventually :-)
I found a list of podcasts by genre on the Koohii forum with links to lots of podcasts. So far I'm focusing on Hotcast, because they speak clearly and their voices are pleasant enough. (I wish I could get rid of the drums in the background though.) I'll probably play through all of them once or twice and then more on to another one I like. Liz 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4984 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 12 of 38 09 February 2014 at 7:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm sure a lot of us would use romaji more if there were texts available in it but aside from textbooks there's
nothing. So force yourself to use hiragana / katakana / furigana as much as possible. I personally have done most of my Japanese learning with my SRS (anki) program. I don't know how good the flashcards are on japanesepod101 but I'm thinking anki has some better decks available. Are you doing RTK at all? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5709 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 13 of 38 09 February 2014 at 9:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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@kraemder, thanks for your post. Yeah I imagine I'm not alone in how I feel about access to romaji material - I know romaji is a crutch at best, but right now it's a crutch I wish I could use because it would help me learn faster. I tried studying the phonetic scripts on their own in the beginning but found it kinda demotivating so I ended up giving myself a bit more time to remember them from deliberate exposure - but I definitely need to keep at it. I got a pretty good anki deck that helps, unfortunately it tends to have kanji on the first side of the card, so I might look into ones that are specifically tailored to help us learn the scripts kanji-free.
It's only been a month since I started studying again so I'm allowing myself to take a break from RTK for now - not for long though... I have 15 days left of the Beginner 1 series of JP101, so I'll decide what to do next after I finish with that :-) It might be time to start using RTK again soon. And I'll need to review the ones I've already gone through (around 350) because I didn't do it well enough the first time. About the flashcard system at JP101 - I probably won't be using it because I don't particularly like their system, but I'll consider exporting the vocabulary, just so I can have a deck with just words that have been covered already in the course material I've used. ----- I finished JP101's Lower Beginner earlier today - I ended up doing more lessons than planned just to finish that course. It's been my least favourite course so far, but the little stickler that lives in my brain insisted I finish it. It had some useful information I guess... Like how to schedule things over the phone and what to do if something breaks in your apartment, and some interesting cultural info, but the whole thing felt overly rehearsed and almost robotic at times. It started to grate on my nerves well before the midway point. If I'd known that I think I would've just read the PDFs and moved on... But useful review, I guess. Liz Edited by Lizzern on 09 February 2014 at 9:51pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4465 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 14 of 38 10 February 2014 at 1:11am | IP Logged | ||
FWIW the flashcard part of the site didn't add any value for me. memrise and anki win here. (IMHO). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5709 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 15 of 38 15 February 2014 at 11:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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@dampingwire - I'm inclined to agree with you about their flashcards function. I'd rather use a premade deck in Anki - I've found one that seems good with 6000 sentences in somewhat reasonable order (relatively easy stuff first). I also have my own that I compiled from random sources that had sentences in kana and a translation, or a word from JP101's word of the day with the translation (and the sample sentences).
At some point I might consider exporting a deck from JP101 but probably won't end up doing it. They do cover a fair bit of vocabulary though - I've added the cards for all the lessons I've gone through so far and in the Beginner deck I have just over 1400 cards (including possible duplicates). Not bad for a Lower Beginner + Beginner 1 class. If I had all those words down (which I don't) that would be a good start. ----- I'm 9 days away from finishing Beginner 1 so I'm going to be adding some new forms of study after I'm done. I'll still keep reviewing and adding new courses at JP101 but I need to start doing the other things I want to do, and am used to doing, soon. I more or less planned to wait until I'd finished that class because I wanted a decent basis for the rest of it. Now I'm at least sort of ready ;-) I've installed Rikaichan, which shows me what kanji and kana mean, and it seems brilliant. I also want to start trying some listening-reading or shadowing, and I've picked a few people whose voices I'm comfortable with, so I'll be gathering as much audio as I can. I'd like to look more closely at song lyrics for songs I've been listening to for a while, so that's a possibility. And I've re-installed the Anki deck with 6000 sentences, so I might experiment with that for a bit to see how I want to use it. These are all just ideas for now, and I'm not sure which I'll do first. Probably something audio based, because that's what I'm feeling inspired to do right now :-) It would be nice to understand more of what I'm hearing. I'll probably start reviewing RTK after I'm done as well. Since I'm doing this as a 1-year thing I'll probably calculate how much time I have, taking exam time into account of course, and find the average I should be doing every day and aim for that or more. I managed to do 11 a day for a while, but my goal this time will probably be less than that. Liz Edited by Lizzern on 16 February 2014 at 12:09am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5709 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 16 of 38 17 February 2014 at 11:43pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think I just found my new favourite Youtube channel :-) I definitely need more audio to listen to, so I picked the only Japanese actress I can name and searched for her name in kanji, and found this video. She has a very pleasant way of speaking - I would love to sound like that and I could listen to her all day, so I'm definitely going to be looking for more video of her speaking Japanese. Anyway it's an entertainment channel that seems to focus on movies (possibly dramas as well? I don't know) with lots of interviews. Perfect :-) I don't know who the vast majority of them are, but hey... they're speaking Japanese clearly and at this point that's all I need.
Liz Edited by Lizzern on 17 February 2014 at 11:45pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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