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Solaren’s 日本語 log | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| solaren Newbie United States Joined 3335 days ago 36 posts - 42 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese | Message 17 of 32 27 September 2015 at 5:41am | IP Logged | |||||
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Wow, it's been 6 months since I last made a log entry for Japanese.
I took a break from Japanese in April to study Spanish. Now I'm putting Spanish on hold and coming back to Japanese as of last week. I'm not sure if Spanish is something I'll go back to any time soon, as I just didn't enjoy the language the way I enjoy Japanese. Coming back in the beginner stage after a 6 month break was actually easier than anticipated. I had to restart RTK from scratch, spend a few hours refreshing my kana, and my listening comprehension had greatly diminished. Fortunately my studying was well-organized when I stopped, so I knew exactly where I had left off and after a week or so of 1-2 hours a day I'm pretty much caught up with where I was when I stopped. I feel like my method for learning Japanese really works for me so I'm excited to keep going. Right now I'm primarily using Japanese Pod 101 lessons and Project LRNJ to study with. I only listen to the dialog portion of the podcasts and I read through all the lesson materials. The main focus is understanding the dialogs Assimil style and picking up any grammar points through the transcript lessons. I found a really great guide on what lesson order to go in from beginner to advanced, actually written by someone who had gone through it all so I'm excited to have a roadmap with Jpod. Jpod is a mixed bag, there is tons of content on that site but it is difficult to know what order to best progress in through the lessons. Some lessons are very high quality and others are not. In practice, I've learned that the Assimil method really worked well for me with Japanese, but I prefer the Jpod audio and transcripts to the Assimil lesson books. My goal is to exhaust Jpod and go straight to native materials without needing anything outside of RTK/Project LRNJ for kanji recognition. At this point I'm fairly confident that should work. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4463 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes  Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 18 of 32 27 September 2015 at 5:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
The Upper Beginner series (of which there was only one when I had a subscription) was really well done, I thought. The lessons were mostly in English (probably necessary at that level) but they did go into the usage of the vocabulary and also the grammar too. The Lower Intermediate levels were pretty good: the later seasons were certainly better than the earlier ones. Again the lessons went into more depth than the transcript but these too included more English than I would like now (although I was fine with it then). The Upper Intermediate lessons are mostly, I think, excellent. The explanations include some English, but there's plenty that is just in Japanese. The Intermediate series (80+ lessons I think) are inconsistent. There's probably some useful vocabulary and grammar to be mined from them, but I've mostly skipped over them so far. Of course, this is all subjective, and if you are going over lessons more than once then you'll be better off making your own mind up about what you need right now.
I listened through every single one once at the start, just to fill the time on the commute. After that I started to concentrate on the seasons that fitted in with where I was at the time and listened repeatedly. After that I switched to just the dialogs. Somewhere in between I mined sentences and new vocabulry out of them for Anki. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| solaren Newbie United States Joined 3335 days ago 36 posts - 42 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese | Message 19 of 32 27 September 2015 at 5:57pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Thanks for the insight dampingwire, it's much appreciated.
I'm out of town at the moment and on my laptop so I don't have my bookmarks with me, or else I'd link the JPod sequence that this person recommended, iirc it's like this: 1. Absolute Beginner (Newbie) 2 and 3. 2. Absolute Beginner (Newbie) 4 as optional since it's a restart of seasons 2 and 3 and teaches largely the same grammar and a lot of the same vocabulary. 3. Absolute Beginner (Newbie) 5 for informal language. 4. Bonus Season: Particles 5. Beginner series 4-6. 6. Upper Beginner series. 7. Lower Intermediate Japanese for Every Day Life. 8. Lower Intermediate 2 - 6 backwards starting with 6. 9. Advanced Audio Blog 1 10. Upper Intermediate series. 11. Additional advanced seasons. I think the order went something like that, I'll try to find the link later as it had reviews on every single season offered up to that point. An additional change worth noting from my previous attempts with Jpod is that I haven't found myself using Romaji anymore. I'm getting much more comfortable with Kanji and have been using the Kanji transcript almost exclusively while using the Kana to check how certain words are pronounced as needed. This wasn't really a conscious choice but I think something that has been a natural byproduct of my time drilling kanji recognition. Edited by solaren on 27 September 2015 at 5:59pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4463 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 20 of 32 28 September 2015 at 2:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
This is a good step forward: I find the pronunciation *so* much easier to understand in kana than in romaji. One other thing is that even in the disorganised clutter that is Intermediate Season 1, there are various lessons that can be very useful for Shadowing and so on: even if the lesson itself is not the best, the dialog and transcript can still be very useful if used in other ways. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| solaren Newbie United States Joined 3335 days ago 36 posts - 42 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese | Message 21 of 32 04 October 2015 at 7:53am | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm still making good progress.
I've finished Newbie Seasons 2 and 3, and I started 4 earlier this week. I'm already more than 1/3 of the way through season 4. Season 4 contains a lot of repeat concepts from seasons 2 and 3, so I'm making my way through it much more quickly. Nothing new so far in terms of grammar, just new vocabulary mainly. My method is still roughly the same as I outlined in my original language log post. I work on each dialog until I can listen to it without the aid of the transcript. I listen to previous seasons in the car and shadow them. I also try to work on my reading each day and use the dialog transcripts for reading practice. As for my Kanji practice, according to my Project LRNJ save game, I'm up to 310 Kanji. This program basically works like an Anki deck so I only get new kanji when I've finished my review for the day. Lately I've only been getting about 5-10 new kanji per day since I only spend 30 mins each day on the kanji. I may have to start investing more time to get through it all, especially when I start hitting the 1000's. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| solaren Newbie United States Joined 3335 days ago 36 posts - 42 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese | Message 22 of 32 09 October 2015 at 6:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm up to lesson 37 out of 50 in Newbie season 4 now. I'm glad that I'm going through season 4 after seasons 2 and 3 of the newbie series. It's been reinforcing basic grammar concepts for me and I've been picking up a surprising amount of new vocabulary.
I'm also up to about 400 kanji now on Project LRNJ. Out of curiosity I checked out some kanji recognition decks on Anki, and I still prefer using Project LRNJ. I have changed one of my study methods though. I'm entering example sentences from each JapanesePod101 lesson to an Anki deck each day. Some of the sentences I make up on my own using vocabulary from that lesson, and other sentences I pull straight from the text. I'm not a huge fan of flashcards, but the information I'm putting into the deck from my lessons is directly relevant to my progress so I think it's worth the time and effort each day. Most of all though, I'm still having fun. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| solaren Newbie United States Joined 3335 days ago 36 posts - 42 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese | Message 23 of 32 20 October 2015 at 3:03am | IP Logged | |||||
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I've finished Newbie season 4 and instead of moving to Newbie season 5, I'm doing the
bonus particles season instead. The reason being that both are around the same level of grammatical difficulty, but one focuses in-depth on particle usage while the other is casual speech, for now I'd like to solidify my understanding of particles. I'll probably do season 5 next. I've also been taking a few minutes each lesson to input important sentences from each lesson into Anki for review. Interestingly, I've tried putting in a few sentences with new vocabulary that I haven't encountered in the jpod lessons, and I've had poor results. It seems like any vocabulary that I try to learn through Anki instead of review, lacks context and I don't remember it as well. It just doesn't have the same synergy that vocabulary I've listened / read before inputting into anki seems to have. I've also been taking a stab at some simple L2 blogging on Lang-8. The results have been good so far, with a number of people saying that my grammar sounds natural. Unfortunately, my vocabulary is still fairly limited so any additional conversations that get sparked through my blog posts is usually above my level. Regardless though it feels good to get a little bit of output practice. I'm planning a trip to Japan in one year, so it will be interesting to see how far I can get in that time. I certainly have enough Jpod101 content to last well over a year, and if I can jump into native media before then I think the trip could actually go pretty well. We shall see! So far so good! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| solaren Newbie United States Joined 3335 days ago 36 posts - 42 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese | Message 24 of 32 26 October 2015 at 10:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm almost finished with the Particles season. I actually kind of regret doing this
season before the Newbie Season 5. There was a fair amount of informal speech in this season that I would have been more prepared for had I done Newbie Season 5 first. Regardless, I'll be completing it tomorrow hopefully at which point I'll move on to the other season. Entering sentences after each lesson into Anki has really helped me keep moving forward with new material each day. It's definitely reduced the amount of review time I feel I need to do. In addition, the lesson notes for Japanese Pod include some sample sentences in each lesson that are in addition to the dialog, so I enter those too. In addition to JapanesePod101, I've picked up Japanese Sentence Patterns for Effective Communication from Amazon, and I highly recommend this book to anyone in the beginning stages of Japanese study. It's an excellent, to-the-point grammar guide. Unfortunately, the vocabulary used in the examples is somewhat random, early on you are exposed to words like "dietician" which are pretty specialized. What I'm doing in my spare time as I work through the book is entering my own sentences into a spreadsheet with N5 level vocabulary that follow the sentence patterns in the book. When I finish the book, I'll put these sentences into an Anki deck to review. I'll probably share the deck too, but if I do I really hope people still buy the book. Technically, the sentences will be my own, but I would not be able to make them without the aid of the text. In any case, this method is working well for me. My listening and reading is steadily improving. There are a ton of methods online that people swear by for learning Japanese and it's hard not to get lured in by them. Maybe there is a more efficient method out there, but I feel like my progress has been steady so far and I haven't gotten bored yet. So I'm sticking with it as long as this keeps up. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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