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TAC 2008 - Romanian, Japanese, L-R, etc. | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Thuan Triglot Senior Member GermanyRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 3241 days ago 129 posts - 21 votes Speaks: Vietnamese, German*, English Studies: French, Japanese, Romanian, Swedish, Mandarin | Message 9 of 13 30 July 2008 at 11:08am | IP Logged |
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Update. The reason why there hasn't been any update earlier is that I simply didn't study that much. Not until the end of April, beginning of May where I got a motivation boost out of nowhere. I began a new Anki file from scratch, started to listen to Japanese podcasts on my mp3-player, watched dozens of J-Dramas and ripped the audio for my mp3-player,... .
AJATT advises one to use sentences. Excellent idea, but doing sentences didn't give me the satisfaction that I got from reviewing the Heisig kanjis. I could review 100 kanjis in 15 minutes. With difficult sentences, there were times when I just reviewed 10-15 sentences in the same time. That didn't give me the same sense of achievement. Then, you have to consider that I added several sentences for new or difficult words. Which could mean that I spent fifteen minutes reviewing sentences for three different words. This time I took a different approach. To get the same feeling of satisfaction as before, I need short objects to review. There is a list of Japanese keywords for Heisig on the Revtk forum. Perfect for my approach. I review this list from Kana to Kanji. I'd add example sentences for all the unknown/difficult words. I have two models, Recognition (q: sentence with kanji a: Hiragana, English) and Production (q: Hiragana, Image, Sound a: sentence with kanji). Production cards are only for the main sentences. If add another four or five example sentences to illustrate the use or nuances of a verb, I set these cards to Recognition only. This was one of the main reason for the burnout last time. Longer sentences are ruthlessly split into two or parts. I should've considered the i+1 rule. It doesn't make any sense to review a sentence with five or six unknown words. And I had quite a few of these sentences. I added sentences from an article on Naomi Kawase’s “The Mourning Forest”, which was filled with kanji. And I failed the opening sentence a few days in a row. The sources of my sentences or real life sources, books, essays, mangas, whatever I come across. On days where I don't feel like doing much, I just do the reviews. And try to add the names of actors, movie directors or anime characters. This is a lot of fun. It doesn't feel like work to look for images of your favourite actors, movie directors or anime characters. It makes reviewing more fun, and you get to know a lot of non-jouyou kanjis. For example 黒澤明. I also add quite a lot of single vocabulary items. Sentences are great, but there are so many words that just don't need sentences to go along with. I don't need sentences for words like 机 or 窓. And I don't necessarily need sentences for words like 映画監督、芸能界 or 睡眠薬. The first chapter of 世界の中心で、愛を叫ぶ contains the following words: 助手席, 後部座席, 駐車場 and 遺骨. The sentences weren't grammatically challenging, so I just added these words as single vocabulary items. This approach allows me to move along much faster than before. It takes less time to review, and the ambiguous words still get the sentence treatment. According to my Anki stats, there are 1101 unique kanji in my anki collection. 28 of these are non-jouyou kanji (mostly from names). I'm currently watching two J-Dramas raw: Osen and Tomorrow. Strawberry on a short cake with subs. I've also began to read my first novel in Japanese, the before mentioned Sekachuu (how do you write that in Japanese? せかちゅう？世界中？）。I've tried reading Japanese novels before. Two Yoshimoto Banana novels at least. Always half-heartedly. Actually, I just found out that reading a novel in a foreign language isn't that difficult. I've watched the film and the Drama, so the topic and the setting are known to me. I've known this before, but always found a way around reading a complete novel in Japanese. So I have to thank this forum for the link to the Kato Lomb book. Having finished that book, there was no reason left not to read a novel in Japanese. I started last week on Wednesday or Thursday. Today I've reached page 42 of 206. I don't use any dictionaries while reading. It takes me approximately 30 min. for 6 to 7 pages. The first 20-30 pages were horribly slow. The pace has picked up since yesterday. I think my mind is adapting to the fact that I'm reading in Japanese. It helps that the grammar is rather easy. This compensates for my lack of vocabulary (I counted 27 unknown words on the first two pages yesterday, half of these I could have guessed from the context). I hope to finish this novel by the middle of August to start L-R. | |
| Thuan Triglot Senior Member GermanyRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 3241 days ago 129 posts - 21 votes Speaks: Vietnamese, German*, English Studies: French, Japanese, Romanian, Swedish, Mandarin | Message 10 of 13 30 July 2008 at 12:37pm | IP Logged |
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Hm, I'm still trying to figure out how to create parallel texts for L-R. I tried to create one for Kokoro by copy and past, but stopped due to the amount of time it took.
Yesterday I found a link to atamagaii's description of how to do these. It looks as if there's a way to create parallel texts much faster. If I'd just get the explanations. To get the link, search for rapidshare on the L-R thread (sorry, don't have that link right now). The first step: 1. pre-editing the original texts. only the text should be left: letters, spaces, paragraphs (= enters ¶) ¶ (enters) should be only where necessary – at the end of pragraphs ... All the unnecessary enters should be removed. To do it change the beginning of the paragraphs to some unusual sign, Đ for example: (it's done automatically: toolbar – edit – change (ctrl+H)) ^p (it's for enter¶) change to Đ Okay, I did just that and it worked on the second try (don't know why it took rather long to do that). Next Step: Now remove enters¶, change enter¶ ^p to a space : ?!? I'm not sure of what I'm supposed to do here. I hope that somebody can help me out here. Next Step sounds simple enough to follow: Now changeĐ to enter¶ (^p) Now you've got enters only where they should be. I guess I missed the step to eliminate unnecessary paragraphs (I have three Đs in a row). | |
| Thuan Triglot Senior Member GermanyRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 3241 days ago 129 posts - 21 votes Speaks: Vietnamese, German*, English Studies: French, Japanese, Romanian, Swedish, Mandarin | Message 11 of 13 01 August 2008 at 1:45pm | IP Logged |
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TAC Day 1 - August 1st
Okay, first official TAC entry. Before going to sleep yesterday, I reviewed the first 11 lessons of Assimil Chinese. I work early in the morning and it takes me 15 minutes to get there, and 15 minutes to get back home. Perfect conditions for Assimil. So, by the time I got home this morning I had already done 30 minutes of shadowing to Assimil Chinese. I prepared a can of green tea, sat in front of my computer and studied Japanese for 90 minutes with Anki. I didn't feel a lot of motivation to study Japanese today, so I kept it short (I've spent three hours on Anki the past two weeks). I mainly reviewed my cards, added around 15 new words and a few phrases. And the names of three actors. Enough Japanese for today. After that I made myself a delicious smoothie (rather hot today) and watched lesson 6 of French in Action. I love the French in Action videos, it's a lot of fun to watch these and blindly shadow along. What I plan to do before going to bed: -L-R chapter 2 of Zola's "The Dream" -Read the next three chapters of Assimil Chinese (I have to work tomorrow) -Read a few pages of the Japanese novel Sekachuu (Socrates in love) Tomorrow's saturday and I have no plans or whatever. The ideal situation to get to the next level with L-R. Instead of a single chapter, I'd like to L-R for several hours tomorrow. And if I have time, I'd like to work on a parallel text for Japanese. | |
| Thuan Triglot Senior Member GermanyRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 3241 days ago 129 posts - 21 votes Speaks: Vietnamese, German*, English Studies: French, Japanese, Romanian, Swedish, Mandarin | Message 12 of 13 18 August 2008 at 5:13am | IP Logged |
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Update: Day 18 - August 18th
Things are going a little slow. I thought that I would be able to do more. Japanese: Did my usual routine, adding and reviewing sentences in Anki every day for 1-2 hours. I got stuck for awhile when the reviews became overwhelming. I made the mistake of adding too many difficult words that I got out of context. Not a good idea. I should stick to words that I find in books or films. And ignore unknown words that I find in example sentences. That definitely slowed me down. Anki statistics: 1771 cards containing 1242 unique kanji. 32 non-jouyou kanji. Due to the lack of motivation I hardly continued reading the novel sekachuu. I'm somewhere around page 70. Watching films, animes or dramas doesn't count as learning in my book, so I won't mention it here. Chinese: I did the minimum, shadowing Assimil every morning for around 20-30 minutes on my way to work. I'm on lesson 26. I had a lot of trouble with lesson 23, but then 25 just killed me (the numbers). French: Watched FIA up to video 15. The first 10 videos were rather easy. Video 11 (or 12? the one where the story begins) was the beginning of my problems. I hardly get the dialogues. A lot of concentration is required to make it through the videos. I might edit the story sequences together to watch once or twice a day for review. BTW, I really love the FIA videos. That's what a language course should look like. Now, I'm just about to add another language: Romanian. I met a Romanian friend in front of a bookstore on Saturday. I mentioned that I might study Romanian someday, so she took a look at the Romanian books. Unfortunately, they had only one horrible language course and two phrasebooks. Nevertheless, we practised a few words just for fun and she told me that my pronunciation is good. Motivating enough to get started. I spontaneously decided to do a one week challenge for Romanian. I've already made it through the first five lessons of Pimsleur, but can't figure out how follow up on that one. All I have are phrasebooks. And a survival course that found online (the military one with phrases like "Drop your weapons"). I found the FSI text, but no audio. I've spent an hour looking for Romanian audiobooks, but couldn't find any. The only audiobook I could find, was the bible. If all things fail, I might try L-R with the bible. But then, I've never read the bible (some excerpts, but never a whole book). Fanatic has mentioned that he made some survival courses to learn a language fast. If I can't find any material, I'm going to make a survival course with the phrasebook and the DLI course (which has audio). I'm not sure if I should start a new thread for this challenge or just continue this one. | |
| Thuan Triglot Senior Member GermanyRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 3241 days ago 129 posts - 21 votes Speaks: Vietnamese, German*, English Studies: French, Japanese, Romanian, Swedish, Mandarin | Message 13 of 13 20 August 2008 at 7:38am | IP Logged |
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Harry Potter's just saved my life. At least that of my one week challenge. There's an Romanian audiobook for Harry Potter and an ebook version. All I need to do L-R with Romanian. Sounds like much more fun wrestling around with phrasebooks.
Okay, I'm spending so much time on Romanian these days that it deserves its own thread. Besides, Romanian is going to serve as my playground for my first steps into L-R, so I'll post about this experience in the new thread. |
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