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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 17 of 38 22 February 2014 at 1:31pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Just did my 300th lesson at JP101. They talked a bit about the Beginner 1 course and one of the hosts said "someone who went through 165 lessons is no longer a beginner, right?" - can't say I feel like I've gone beyond beginner at all, I'm definitely still a newbie at this, but it was still nice to hear :-) I'll be done with the course in a couple of days. I'll probably start reviewing RTK after that, but I'll still continue using JP101 courses - I tend to like most of them.
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 18 of 38 24 February 2014 at 12:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Just finished Beginner 1 at JP101 :-) Such a relief. I liked the course, but I love checking things off my list, especially big things (like a 170-lesson course!), so this has been a long time coming.
It sounds like it might be possible to go on to Lower Intermediate after this - one of the hosts said we're well prepared for intermediate lessons now. I went back to the forum to try to find the advice I based my original plan on, and have changed it a bit now. I'll probably do Beginner 2 and 3 before moving on to Lower Intermediate, because I'd rather slow down a bit than continue and get confused by things I'm supposed to know. Some things towards the end of Beginner 1 have been a mystery to me. So I'm just going to go on to Beginner 2 and see how it goes. If it seems to be going too slowly I'll skip ahead to Lower Beginner. Liz 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 19 of 38 24 February 2014 at 3:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
Congratulations. That season is a bit of a mammoth.
If you've internalised everything then I think you probably could go on to LI. I think that BG S1 was back when they didn't really have much of a plan so they just started from zero (literally - try listening to the first few lessons again!) and then just kept adding stuff. I don't think they were following any particular syllabus. Certainly there's a great deal of vocabulary and grammar packed into those 170 lessons. But they do have another ~150 or more Beginner lessons too. Some of those recap things you've already covered and some of them introduce yet more sentence patterns. There's no need to go over all of those if you don't feel like it, but equally there's no need to move on to something else. Did you go through the lesson notes for each lesson too? I found that the audio track was very good for dialogue and for explanation of some of the points covered by the dialog. But they seemed to skip over the grammar quite quickly. I was used to going over grammar explanations in my own time from a text book, so I found it quite hard to internalise things based just on their audio lesson. The PDF lesson notes however often offered a slightly different viewpoint to the text books and so was useful in solidifying that info. I did find the Upper Beginner series very enjoyable and useful. They basically take every day announcements and build up a lesson around each. They're a gentle introduction to the sort of everyday language you might expect to hear in train announcements and the like (new grammar and keigo and obviously some useful vocab too). I found UI to be not as much of a jump as LI was. But YMMV. 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 20 of 38 26 February 2014 at 9:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
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@dampingwire, thanks for that explanation - nice to have access to someone who's actually used the material before :-)
Apparently season 2 is all about filling in the gaps from season 1 to give us a stronger foundation before moving ahead - they acknowledged at the start of the course that they raced through season 1 and that it could be kinda overwhelming. I haven't really internalised everything well enough that I can consider myself done with the material. At the end of season 1 I still found myself scratching my head at some of the sentence structures, especially in the last quarter or so of the course - even with the lesson notes, which I've gone through for each lesson. I can't learn the grammar from just listening to the explanation - it's hard to keep an unfamiliar sentence in my head and I won't learn anything if I don't remember the sentence they're referring to, which seemed to happen a lot. Bottom line, I don't want to move ahead too quickly - I would much rather be a solid upper beginner (...soon) than intermediate and shaky on beginner-level stuff. So I'm going to do season 2 and probably season 3 before moving on to Lower Intermediate. I might use the remaining Beginner lessons as review later. ----- Thought this might be a good time to start reviewing RTK, so I went over the first 11 kanji yesterday and plan to keep doing 11 a day for now. I'll focus on review only until I'm caught up. But when I start learning new ones, I'll probably try to run some texts through the Reading tab at Koohii, which highlights the kanji that I already (theoretically) know. Someone posted a thread about making your own corpus of texts, which I might consider doing, and it would probably be useful to search for new kanji in familiar texts to reinforce what I'm learning. Texts with a translation available would probably be the best option for this... So I might use some of the material from JP101 just cause it's convenient. They have some advanced videos with cultural info that have long texts with a translation, so I'll consider using those. I have about a month's worth of review ahead of me first though, so I have plenty of time to find the right place to search for kanji and examples of how they're used :-) Liz Edited by Lizzern on 26 February 2014 at 9:16pm 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 21 of 38 09 March 2014 at 8:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Still doing 3-4 JP101 lessons a day - 2 new ones from the Beginner series and the rest are review. I just finished Newbie 3 yesterday - it's been good to review with, I guess... And the hosts are great, especially Rebekah, with that amazing-as-usual Australian accent... But the content was getting old, which I think the writers realised as well, seeing as they killed off one of the main characters in the last episode. RIP Fabrizio, you will not be missed :-) (I didn't like having a permanent character with a foreign accent on the show. Bad idea. Plus, he was kind of annoying more often than not.)
I think I'm just going to keep going with my current JP101 plan - 2 new, 1+ review - until I start Lower Intermediate about a month from now. I'd rather spend any extra time on material from other sources, like RTK (new + review), the audio I've been using, and working on kanji that I've already studied when they show up in texts. Right now I think my next step is to prepare some suitable audio that I can put on my ipod and have on in the background when I'm home. Immersion environment and all that... And I should probably try to get hooked on a j-drama or something, but it seems like everyone is getting those illegally, which I don't want to do... So I'll have to see if I can find anything legally. Or order some DVDs from Japan or something. I know that several of the shows I like have Japanese dubbed versions... It might be weird though, I'm still not sure how I feel about dubbed material. Liz Edited by Lizzern on 09 March 2014 at 8:40pm 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 22 of 38 17 March 2014 at 8:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Did my 400th lesson at JP101 today... Yikes. That sounds like a lot. But at least half of it is review - which has been useful, but not that interesting really. Many of the characters and storylines under the Absolute Beginner heading (including the Newbie seasons) have something annoying about them. But I'll be done reviewing with those soon. Unfortunately I have this thing about finishing things once I've decided to do them... But Eric the American co-host of Newbie 4 helps make it fun overall.
I've noticed that I'm getting to the point where things start to flow a bit more easily. I often repeat things after the review tracks and such - and it's starting to sound noticeably more accurate than it used to, it feels more natural to say those things, I get what they mean and it wouldn't be weird or difficult to say them in a real scenario if I needed them. I'll keep going the way I've been doing things for a little while longer and then eventually focus more on producing things I'd want to say in a real conversation. Realistically, a lot of the stuff that's been covered so far is relatively basic - I am still far from making the kinds of sentences I use when having natural conversations in Norwegian or English. That's one of the reasons I'm kind of skeptical about speaking from day 1 - good for pronunciation practice I guess, but it's hard to say something worthwhile when you don't know any of the words (saying where you're from, what you're studying, and what hobbies you have, that stuff barely counts as conversation to me because there needs to be more going on to make a connection with another person). Eventually I'm going to need to start trying to translate real sentences into Japanese, both out loud and in writing, to learn how to say meaningful things... Liz Edited by Lizzern on 17 March 2014 at 8:13pm 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 23 of 38 25 March 2014 at 12:56am | IP Logged | |||||
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Last lesson of Beginner 2 at JP101 today... I'm going to stick to my current plan and finish Beginner 3 before moving on to Lower Intermediate, so I have about two weeks left of Beginner lessons for now.
Still reviewing 11 kanji a day, but haven't quite decided how I want to go about learning the next steps after learning the kanji itself - the readings and whatnot. This is more complicated than I thought when I started... Liz Edited by Lizzern on 25 March 2014 at 12:56am 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 24 of 38 25 March 2014 at 11:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
The Upper Beginner season (only 25 lessons) is really well done (IMO): it covers the sorts of public announcements that will probably be useful if you go to Japan. It's about the same level as the easier LI lessons but it breaks down the 敬語 quite nicely.
There seem to be lots of different ways. I've just gone for "learn the kanji in various words", so I didn't bother with memorising the readings, I just went for learning chosen words. When I was working towards the N5 exam I just learnt the few words that seemed to be necessary. Then when I was working on N4 I picked up a vocabulary list from somewhere on the net and wrote some code to look through KANJIDIC (a kanji database) and produced a list of all the N5+N4 vocab broken down into words with kanji that should be known at this stage. I think that "should be known" here meant the ~300 or so kanji that were believed to be necessary for that test. At the time I thought that helped by breaking the mass of vocabulary down into digestible chunks (i.e. I could prioitise those that I would probably see on the test). Now that I'm working towards N3, I've gone for the simpler approach of simply trying to learn all the N3 vocabulary in kanji form, regardless of whether that kanji is supposedly "too advanced" for the test or not. So if you have a specific goal (e.g. "I want to read NHK News") then you might want to use that as your vocabulary source and learn those kanji vocabs that keep cropping up. OTOH if you want to be able to work through graded readers, then use those as your source. I think, for me at least, the key was to get to the point where I knew ~500 words reasonably well, and then building up new ones became somewhat easier, as there were often similarities and the possible readings began to stick. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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