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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 25 of 32 28 October 2015 at 8:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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So, I've finished the Particles Bonus Season and I actually think that I'm going to
skip Newbie Season 5. I spent about 20 minutes listening to all of the audio and there really isn't anything there grammatically that I haven't already been exposed to. There is some vocabulary here and there, but even the vocabulary I don't know is pretty sparse at this point. For anyone starting from the newbie series with japanese pod, I'd recommned doing Newbie Season 5 before or right after Newbie Season 2. It's about on that level in terms of difficulty. So, I'm out of the Newbie series now and onto the Beginner Series. As far as I'm concerned, the newbie series was a great first introduction to the language. Seasons 2, 3, 4 and Particles gave me over an hour of conversations to listen to and somewhere between 500-700 words. It also introduced a lot of common kanji. Now I'm going to move through Beginner seasons 4, 5 and 6. I've also added two new additions to my study. I found an ANKI deck for my Japanese Sentence Patterns for Effective Communication text. This saves me a ton of time entering the sentences into ANKI. So now I'm drilling the sentence patterns each night with the help of the book for reference. The second addition I've added is purchasing a weekly session with a Skype tutor. I have my first 30 minute session this Sunday. This is mainly for conversation practice. Right now I don't think I can probably carry on an interesting conversation for more than 30 minutes at a time, so I think I'll try 30 minute sessions once a week and work my way up from there. It's a good opportunity to try using new grammar structures and vocabulary each week to help cement it all and get clarification on points I may not fully grasp. 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 26 of 32 01 November 2015 at 6:35am | IP Logged | ||
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Happy Halloween!
Beginner season 4 is going well so far. I've just finished Lesson 9 out of 50 for this season. I'm trying to not get caught up in remembering everything right away, I do each lesson until I can read through it and listen to it with a high level of comprehension, then I enter all of the sentences into Anki and move on. I review the audio portion of the lessons on a playlist in my car and Anki takes care of the reading and vocabulary. My Jpod Anki deck is up to about 800 sentences currently. I'm also making my way through an RTK deck. I stopped using Project LRNJ after hitting the 500 mark because it was making me review too often and I wasn't getting enough new cards each day. I think you can tune that, but since I'm using Anki for my Jpod lessons it just made sense to start over on Kanji with anki too. In addition to those two decks I started working my way through Japanese Sentence Patterns for Effective Communication. This book is absolutely excellent and I highly recommend it. Unfortunately, right now with JapanesePod101 and RTK, I'm doing about 3 hours a day to keep up with new material and reviews. I can sustain that for now, but adding in another book feels like too much to handle, especially when I have to start reviewing anki cards on it. So I'm going to hold off on this book until I finish RTK at least, which is a shame because I really want to dive into it ASAP. It's really really good. I have my first tutoring session on skype tomorrow night. 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 27 of 32 02 November 2015 at 6:15am | IP Logged | ||
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So the tutoring lesson didn't go super well. I think it was a combination of nervousness, being in the beginning stages of the language, and not having a set lesson plan to work through.
I'm going to stick with it though and schedule some sessions with other tutors as well. I think having goals for each session will help at these early stages. 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 28 of 32 03 November 2015 at 5:13pm | IP Logged | ||
I've always found that my tutorials go much more smoothly and I get much more out of them if I've prepared in advance the material that will be covered. Typically we'll be covering the next bit in みんなの日本語, but I usually take in supplementary bits and pieces - problems I've hit, short questions I have about something I've heard or read, things I've seen in 新完全マスター that I don't fully understand (or understand at all :-)). We don't need to cover it all: I just make sure that there's plenty of additional material to cover in case we run out of stuff from みんなの日本語. I also make sure that I've gone through the next bit of みんなの日本語 so I'm not floundering in class. It's not really a good use of tutorial time for me to be stuck trying to decode a word or passage that I could have managed on my own: there are plenty of things I will get stuck on that I can't easily sort out on my own or that I've inadvertently misunderstood, and that's what I'd rather spend the time on. When I take in supplementary material, I usually make sure I have two printed copies and when it's something like "新完全マスター p 44 #3" I try to provide more detail: i.e. what exactly is it about #3 that is causing me trouble? I'll often make sure that if the vocab isn't firmly in my head then it's printed on the paper, and if my issue is "how can this word possibly fit in there?" then I'll put a comment to that effect. It's more work for me up front but it does mean that I have to think about the problem more thoroughly and it also cuts down on wasted tutorial time. 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 29 of 32 03 November 2015 at 9:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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助言ありがとうございます、dampingwireさん。 はみんなの日本語はありませんが、げんき ありますよ。言語
のチューターとskypeでげんきを読みましょう な。。。 I'm not actively going through Genki, but I;m familiar with a lot of the content and can probably use the workbook and read through that with a tutor each week doing the exercises and getting feedback on pronunciation and mistakes. I have a pdf copy as well as a physical copy so it should be doable over skype. 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 30 of 32 05 November 2015 at 7:03am | IP Logged | ||
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I just finished another 30 minute tutoring session, this time with an accredited Japanese language teacher. She's about twice the price of the other tutor, but you get what you pay for I think. This session was far better than the last, we talked for a full 30 minutes and she never resorted to English. Instead she rephrased her statements in easier to understand language, and adapted the conversation to my level.
As a language teacher she has her own lessons that she prefers to use, so we'll give those a shot I think starting with her next session. I'm still committed to my own self-study method, but I think I can fit in whatever homework she gives on a weekly schedule, into a bi-weekly tutoring schedule alongside my current studies. I must say, even though I speak at a lower level than I can understand and it was difficult at times, it was gratifying to see how far I've come in a short time. 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 31 of 32 15 November 2015 at 8:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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So the past week I've stopped doing new JPOD lessons temporarily so that my ANKI deck
can catch up. Apparently, I have been entering more sentences than I am able to keep up with in reviews. I think I'm nearly caught up now so hopefully I'll start back on the JPOD lessons this week at some point. Right now my JPOD deck has about 1000 cards, and I'm doing 30 new sentences each day and 100 review sentences. I'm also doing an RTK deck that gives me 10 new kanji each day and 100 reviews. At the moment I think that's about all the ANKI I can maintain, which is a shame because it means I need to slow down how fast I'm going through JPOD at the moment. If I kept up with the pace that I was going, I would have been exponentially delaying my anki reviews for material I had been covering in JPOD. Ideally I want to be reviewing JPOD lessons in ANKI for the first time 1-2 days after completing them. Tutoring is going well, so far I've found two tutors that I like. One of the tutors is targeting specific language needs, for example this next lesson is on utilizing て form more often in my speech, something I'm not comfortable with yet. The other tutor is working through the Genki workbook exercises with me. At some point I REALLY want to get to the Japanese Sentence Structure book / deck that I've got. But as long as I'm doing both JPOD and Heisig decks at the same time, it's just not feasible. I'm already at about 3 hours a day. Edited by solaren on 15 November 2015 at 8:26pm 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 32 of 32 03 December 2015 at 10:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm currently on lesson 34 of Beginner Season 4 for JPOD101. I'm enjoying the steady
progress I'm making with the lessons, but lately I've been wanting to get more into native materials. Lessons are great for learning, but not so great for maintaining the passion for the language. That's not a knock against JPod101, I still think it's the most enjoyable lesson content I've seen by a large margin, but native media is where the real enjoyment is at for me. So, I picked up the first 2 volumes of Yotsuba in Japanese and have started slowly making my way through the first volume. It's my reward for finishing my lessons and ANKI cards each day, it's really slow going so far but it's nice to shake things up. The more heavily I've relied on Anki for my studying, the more I've realized that slow and steady wins the race. If you do too much at once the reviews pile up and take hours to complete. Any time I've missed a day due to work or life obligations (something not uncommon as a married, working adult) I've had to not take on new material those days and just focus on getting two days of review out of the way. I've moved my RTK deck down to 10 new cards per day. I don't enjoy drilling Kanji, so reducing the amount I have to do each day helps me not burn out. My Jpod101 deck is still at about 30 new sentences per day which is about 2 lessons a day at the beginner level. I'm really looking forward to completing beginner in the next couple of months and moving on to lower intermediate. In the meantime I'll be casually working my way through Yotsuba after my lessonwork is done each day. I've never really been into Manga or comics, but just being able to read something - anything - that is native media is a huge confidence and motivation boost. Edited by solaren on 03 December 2015 at 10:18pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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