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Japanese, Cantonese, etc journal | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| unzum Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom soyouwanttolearnalan Joined 6701 days ago 371 posts - 478 votes  Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Mandarin | Message 17 of 25 26 November 2008 at 10:26pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Obviously this journal has been a bit abandoned for a while, but looking back through the old entries I thought it might be a good idea to revive it. I'm not going to post that regularly, maybe once a week or fortnight should be fine.
I've had a fairly long period of inactivity in the time between May and now, but I've picked up the pace a lot recently. I'm up to chapter 23 of Japanese for Everyone now, only 5 more chapters to go! Very exciting, and I've given myself until Christmas to finish the entire book. Then I will move onto another textbook: An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese, which look fantastic. There's audio to accompany it and no furigana over the kanji. It's been great cementing my knowledge of Japanese grammar, which is kind-of lacking. I've found another Japanese study tool: iKnow!, which is a kind-of interactive spaced repetition vocabulary trainer. There teach about 6,000 words, in courses ranging from beginning to upper-intermediate. It's pretty enjoyable; there's audio, accompanying pictures, dictation, speed quizzes etc. I'd recommend but I think you need to supplement it with another course (teaching grammar), as it only teaches vocabulary, not grammar. But with that said, it's great for picking up useful words that other courses never teach. You can friend me on iKnow! if you decide to join, it's always nice to have other people to study with. I've also upgraded from reading manga and am now reading a children's book. It's a fantastic book, it mixes illustrations, speech bubbles & prose as a kind-of mix between manga & novels. I wrote a review of it on the iKnow! website, I'll reproduce part of it here for anyone interested.
I've also been continuing with the subtitle method I outlined before. I've since watched all of the 野ブタ。をプロデュース (lovely drama about friendship), パッチギ (very difficult to understand accent), キサラギ (funny, mystery film), ボクチョウ (a bit immature but still funny), カタクリ家の幸福 (absolutely crazy, very funny), 花よりだんご (liking it now despite early misgivings), はなきみ (stupid), 生きる (now one of my favourite films), 赤ひげ (fell asleep), Dark Water (fairly scary), 子ぎつねヘレン (fluffy) & くろさぎ (not all that complex crime capers). Unfortunately, have not been watching that much Cantonese stuff. If anyone has any recommendations for films, dramas or TV shows, I'd be glad to hear them. I've been struggling a bit with Cantonese due to lack of native speaker interaction. The Cantonese classes I'd been hoping to go to got cancelled and now I'm in the Mandarin classes. However, there are a lot of Cantonese speakers there wanting to learn Mandarin, as well as other Cantonese people at my uni so I think I just need to make more of an effort to speak. I think one reason behind my reluctance to try speaking Cantonese is my poor skills, and the fact that I really don't know enough of the language to hold a conversation. And so I've been steaming ahead with my FSI study, I'm just trying to get through it as quickly as possible right now, in the hopes it'll equip me better for conversation and also give me a springboard into more advanced courses. I'm up to lesson 14 now, I'm aiming to get to at least lesson 20 before Christmas. Anyway, that's all that's happened since the last entry, see you in another 2 weeks or so. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| unzum Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom soyouwanttolearnalan Joined 6701 days ago 371 posts - 478 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Mandarin | Message 18 of 25 30 November 2008 at 4:32pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
rob kindly pm-ed me a correction of my post in Japanese. I'm going to post it up here so no-one learns from my mistakes.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| nhk9 Senior Member Canada Joined 6591 days ago 290 posts - 319 votes Speaks: English* | Message 19 of 25 18 December 2008 at 4:00am | IP Logged | ||||||||
日本語を上達するために It's more natural to use the causative させる in this case. For the most part, if you want to use 上達する, use it with が. 彼女はピアノが上達している 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| unzum Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom soyouwanttolearnalan Joined 6701 days ago 371 posts - 478 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Mandarin | Message 20 of 25 19 December 2008 at 2:52pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Thanks nhk9 for the correction, much appreciated. I just realised you speak the exact combination of languages I want to master! (Japanese, Cantonese, Korean & Mandarin) Wow. I think you're my new hero. ;)
Anyway, here's another check-up on my progress. Last few weeks I had to abandon language study temporarily to finish off my uni work. Happily now, I've got the whole Xmas hols (practically) free, and so far my pace has been good. I'm up to chapter 25 of JFE and I've finished vol 1 of FSI Cantonese (15 lessons). It doesn't really sound like much, but all of this progress has been in the last 3 days so I'm still holding out for my target of finishing JFE & FSI before the holidays end. Authentic material has been kinda lacking in my study regime, but I really want to finish JFE & FSI first, so that I'm a better position to learn from more advanced material. So not much to report. I'll check in again in a few weeks! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| unzum Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom soyouwanttolearnalan Joined 6701 days ago 371 posts - 478 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Mandarin | Message 21 of 25 24 December 2008 at 4:16pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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This is a bit soon after the last post but there's been a few interesting stuff happening lately.
I've finished chapter 25 of JFE, so 2 more chapters to go. I've also been reading Nihongo Notes 2, which is really cool for understanding Japanese culture and underlying implications behind certain words. I haven't been speaking that much Japanese, due to feeling embarassed over my ability (when they ask how long I've been studying Japanese & I say 3 years, I feel embarassed I'm not fluent already!). I've always found politeness levels a bit difficult so I've decided to only use polite language when speaking to Japanese people, THEN progress onto casual language if I become good friends with them. I'm now doing lesson 17 of FSI Cantonese, and it's getting really interesting now! In volume 1 it seemed to be teaching you a lot of 'functional' language, i.e. what to say in an exchange bureau, the grocer's, a clothes shop etc; but nothing that would be useful for having a conversation. That seems to have changed now in Vol 2, and I'm now learning how to say 'Have you been to see any films lately?', 'When do you go to America?' etc. It's a lot more useful for when I'm talking with friends, so I'm happy we're finally getting to the real meat of the language. :D A few days ago, I went to visit my Cantonese friend at her restaurant. This is kind-of the real reason why I've been studying loads. Last time I saw here I could barely say anything in Cantonese, and I didn't want to say anything either because I was embarassed by my poor ability. So I went to see her and tried out a few phrases on her. My friend brought her mum over & the other waitress (who only speaks Mandarin) and I tried talking a bit. It was quite cool because both me & the waitress were studying Cantonese, it was a bit like camaraderie ;). Anyway, talking with them was pretty difficult and I often couldn't recognise Cantonese I'd studied until they said it in English, but still, I'm happy with my progress. It's a hell of a lot better than last time, and now I have some ideas of where to go next with my study: I need to finish FSI Cantonese to get a good base Then TY Cantonese for extra vocab Cantonese sheik for useful phrases And above all, I need to reinforce what I'm learning with listening practice and speaking practice with Cantonese people. Also, the Cantonese lessons that I'd been hoping to go to this September were cancelled. They offered Mandarin lessons instead and because I wanted to get to know the Chinese community in that area, I signed up. The teacher is nice but she doesn't have a very good teaching style. It basically consisted of us saying 'mou1 a1 ma1, mou1 a1 ma1' and repeating with every single other word (fuo1 o2 fo2 etc etc). As you can imagine, I'm not learning that much, although maybe I'll have fantastic pronunciation when I come out, who knows. As a kinda fun, extra thing to do, I've asked for Michel Thomas Mandarin this Christmas and will be receiving both the foundation & advanced course. Yay! Hopefully doing this will give me enough language to chat to my teacher, but not so much that it distracts from my main targets, Japanese & Cantonese. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| unzum Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom soyouwanttolearnalan Joined 6701 days ago 371 posts - 478 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Mandarin | Message 22 of 25 21 March 2009 at 4:42am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Quick update.
Japanese: Finished JFE and now onto chapter 2 of Intermediate Japanese. Also been working through several vocabulary & grammar books: 101 Japanese idioms (great fun), a book on onomatopoeia, Nihongo notes vol 1-5, Basic Connnections & a Japanese particles book. Been discovering a lot of Japanese cinema as well, very enjoyable. Recently watched, Uzumaki, Ju-on (the grudge), Kikujiro, Hana-bi, Zatoichi, Stray Dog and several dramas. Most of the time I've been watching with subs though. Had lots of contact with Japanese people and spoken a bit with them. Also been studying Japanese through uni work, weekly tests and translation exercises. Cantonese: Completely stalled. I just haven't had enough time. Have met a few Cantonese people and spoken a bit with them but didn't really know enough to have a proper conversation. I'm putting this on hold until uni and the exams are over. Mandarin: Had to cut the classes and haven't gone through MT Mandarin much at all. Oh well. I'm just going to put this language on hold until I need, which will probably be at least a year away. On another note, I just bought two phrasebook recently. One is Lonely Planet Small Talk Asia, which has 10 languages (Burmese, Cantonese, Indonesian, Japanese, Khmer, Korean, Lao, Mandarin, Thai and Vietnamese). It's a really tiny book but it's quite interesting to flick through, especially as these are all languages I'm really interested in. It may come in useful for my year abroad in Japan this September, as I plan to do a lot of travelling. The other one is a Lonely Planet phrasebook for India, which has 15 languages and, although still pocket sized, has a bit more meat to it. It includes script, just in case I get sick of LP's romanization, and cute introductions to each language. I bought this mainly because it includes Bengali and also because my dad goes travelling in India quite often, so maybe I can persuade him to take me along at some point. Anyway, Confessions of a Language Addict has blogged quite often about phrasebooks so I thought I'd buy some to see what all the fuss was about. I might flick through them and try analysing the grammar a bit. Edited by unzum on 21 March 2009 at 4:43am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| unzum Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom soyouwanttolearnalan Joined 6701 days ago 371 posts - 478 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Mandarin | Message 23 of 25 13 July 2009 at 6:10pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Another infrequent update. I thought I'd briefly outline my goals and plans for the coming months.
I'll be starting my year abroad in Japan in September, so this summer is being completely devoted to Japanese study, I'm putting everything else on hold. I've got out a lot of Japanese study books from the library which I intend to go over. My goal was to finish all these books before I leave for Japan, but this is fairly unlikely and I think I will be lucky to get through half of them. An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese Instant Vocabulary through prefixes and suffixes Japanese newspaper compounds Body language by J. G. Garrison (idioms involving the body) Strange but true by T. Gally (reader) Love, Hate & Everything inbetween: How to express emotions in Japanese How to sound intelligent in Japanese (higher vocabulary) Japanese for foreigners (keigo) Japanese for foreigners (onomatopoeia) Kanji idioms Basic connections Japanese verbs at a glance Writing letters in Japanese The practical guide to Japanese signs - finished Beyond polite Japanese And various other bilingual books and readers. I'm going to spend a lot of time travelling during the year in Japan, so I also plan to pick up some basics of Russian, Mandarin, Korean, and also revisit Cantonese. I plan to use Teach Yourself Beginner's Russian, Michel Thomas Russian, internet resources for Korean, Michel Thomas Mandarin & FSI Cantonese. I've also been getting increasingly interested in Bengali, which I tried to learn when I was a teenager. When I return for my final year at university I'm going to try studying it again, using Teach Yourself Bengali and Colloquial Bengali. I'll also watch Satyajit Ray films and read Rabindranath Tagore novels & poetry to practise. Summer 2009: intense Japanese study Sep 2009 - Aug 2010: mainly Japanese study, dabbling in survival Russian, Korean, Cantonese & Mandarin Sep 2010 - Aug 2011: Japanese & Bengali study 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Monox D. I-Fly Senior Member Indonesia monoxdifly.iopc.us Joined 4922 days ago 762 posts - 664 votes Speaks: Indonesian* | Message 24 of 25 22 June 2016 at 6:22pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Just want to ask how to read 上達? Is it "ara", "atachi", "jora", "jotachi", "uera", or "uetachi"? And what is the meaning? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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