Language Learning Forum: VonPeterhof’s log - 旅立ち’14, Yürükler’15+

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VonPeterhof’s log - 旅立ち’14, Yürükler’15+

Printed From: How-to-learn-any-language.com
Forum Name: Language Learning Log
Forum Discription: Your personal language learning logbook: milestones, successes, brick walls & goals great and small. Document your progress and get support, tips and encouragement from other forum members.
URL: http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=37662
Printed Date: 20 May 2021 at 5:49am

Posted By: vonPeterhof
Subject: VonPeterhof’s log - 旅立ち’14, Yürükler’15+
Date Posted: 29 December 2013 at 8:35am

こんにちは! vonPeterhof here, starting my first ever log. In this first post I guess I should talk about my current level in the language I'm studying and my goals for the upcoming year's TAC. I've been studying Japanese on my own since the spring of 2010. I passed JLPT N2 in July 2013 and took the N1 earlier this month. The results aren't available yet, but I'm pretty sure I failed it. I suppose my current level is around B2. My base goal is to pass the JLPT N1 in 2014, the stretch goal being to reach C1 in the active skills as well.

When I have some time off (which will probably only be on New Year's day) I'll write about how I got to my present level and how I'm planning to advance this year. Looking forward to watching everyone else's progress! よろしくお願いします!
___________
For the 2015 Turkic challenge stuff see page 16.

Replies:

すごい。 I wish I were as good at this learning Japanese thing as you. I look forward to reading your log.
kraemder on 29 December 2013

明けましておめでとうございます! Now that the year 2014 has begun and I finally have some time off, might as well try to kick this thing off properly. As promised, here goes the story of my progress so far.

Even though I've been somewhat interested in languages for as long as I can remember, Japanese hasn't really been on my radar before the year 2010. That was when I got into anime (yes, I am one of those people, and I have the http://myanimelist.net/profile/vonPeterhof - MyAnimeList account to prove it). Part of my motivation was to get better access to the material - to no longer have to rely on translators and be able to seek out "hidden gems" and interesting titbits on my own. Another part was that all the translators' notes and cultural commentaries piqued my linguistic appetite. More than a dozen of words for "I" whose usage depends on gender, age, formality and other social factors? Several politeness levels with corresponding honorifics? The concurrent use of three scripts, one of which consists of thousands of characters that can have up to ten various readings? Onomatopoeia for even the most abstract of concepts? It's like they're deliberately challenging me!

While I did start some basic fumbling about that could pass for "learning Japanese" in the spring of 2010, I consider that year's summer to be the start of my "serious" Japanese learning. That was when I, being faced with the daunting task of learning the kanji, discovered James Heisig's Remembering the Kanji book, as well as the website http://kanji.koohii.com/index.php - Reviewing the Kanji and its forum community. I completed the book in about six months, on December 31, 2010. In the last month or so of that process I disobeyed one of Heisig's recommendations and resumed studying Japanese proper on the side through a resource suggested by the RtK forum members, http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar - Tae Kim's grammar guide .

On January 1 of 2011 I started learning vocabulary using the Core 2k and 4k Anki decks. Around that time I also tried to start reading manga in the original. Initially I stuck to manga that I had either read in English previously, or had seen in anime form. The first manga that I read that was neither was ラブひな, which I downloaded from the legal manga hosting website http://www.j-comi.jp/ - Jコミ on the day its service was launched in April 2011. I was pleasantly surprised with how much of the content I managed to understand in the first chapter (around 70%), but after I read the translation I realized that nearly all the verbal humour was in the bits that I failed to understand. However, overall the language in that manga isn't all that hard, so after slogging through about five chapters I no longer felt the need to read the translation after each chapter - just looking up several words per chapter in a dictionary was enough. All the while I kept watching anime and an occasional live-action drama, gradually phasing out the English/Russian subs in favour of Japanese subs or none at all. It was probably only in early 2013 that I completely gave up on non-Japanese subs even for shows with very specialized vocabulary, like fantasy or Sci-fi. That's not to say I don't miss significant amounts of information in certain shows (shows having to do with 陰陽道 seem to be the biggest headache for me right now), but it has become easier to look up words and phrases I don't understand instead of giving in to the temptation of simply switching the English subs on.

By the autumn of 2011 I felt like I might pull off JLPT N3, but with my university graduation on the horizon this would have conflicted with my schoolwork too much, so I put it off until one year later. By then I was fairly confident with N3 material and passed with flying colours. While the N2 in July 2013 went http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?pid=207096#p207096 - unexpectedly well , my performance on December's N1 was http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?pid=211989#p211989 - more than a bit disappointing . So here I am, waiting to see how poorly I did and already preparing to retake the test this coming July.

By now some of you might have noticed that I didn't bring up how I worked on my active skills. In a word, poorly. I do have a http://lang-8.com/253934 - lang-8 account , but, as you can see, in the almost three years that I've had it I've only written four entries in Japanese. the last one having been written last February. I am planning to resume writing there with at least some regularity (in fact I do have an idea for an entry that I will try to put into practice in the next few days). As for speaking practice, it's pretty much limited to a handful of short conversations I've had with Japanese people I ran into at different stages of my language learning. I could blame it on the difficulty of finding Japanese language exchange partners, but that would imply that I've actually tried to find one. The truth is, I am extremely shy and my conversations with strangers often resemble http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rYwTfsexYI - these even in my first language. While I can think and talk to myself in Japanese with some fluency, I'm afraid that doesn't translate very well into interactions with actual Japanese people, especially with all the rules of politeness, etiquette and social distance we have to keep in mind. My spoken Japanese is probably on the lower boundary of B2, if not lower.

Edit: Oh, and kraemder, thanks for the compliments! Not sure if my accomplishments are still impressive now that I've gone into greater detail..
vonPeterhof on 01 January 2014

Mmmmm. When I finally get to studying Japanese ( in a few years) I will so come back to this post. Great
introduction :-)
Solfrid Cristin on 01 January 2014

Intresting read. I'm still impressed since you passed N2 so quickly without living in Japan. That speaks for itself. But your hesitancy to speak to people in Japanese is more normal heh. I totally get it. Anyway, it sounds like most of your japanese learning was from reading manga and you also mention anki and the core decks. Going forward what tools are you using?
kraemder on 02 January 2014

Very interesting to read your story with Japanese! I guess I'll be crashing aroung here a lot, since I'll be doing Japanese now too! Well done anyway!
fabriciocarraro on 02 January 2014

I like how you talked about your "linguistic appetite" with the translator notes. Very interesting! Your log
has given me a good idea of where I should head next after I complete RTK! The video was really funny
and super relatable. Gotta trudge through to active that passive knowledge.. *sigh* Good luck with your
preparation!
greatdaytonihon on 02 January 2014

Thanks for the responses, everyone! Now I believe I should go into more detail about how I am studying now. My present studying process can be subdivided into three parts: Anki, reading and listening.

Anki: These days I review between 100 and 150 cards per day, of which about 80% belong to my Japanese decks. These are the Core 2000 and 6000 vocabulary decks, an RTK deck that includes kanji from both RTK 1 and 3, a Tae Kim deck and my personal deck. The latter deck used to be a lot bigger and consisted of sentences I would discover "in the wild". I've given up on that since I've started trying to make my learning process less "Anki-centric". Right now the only sentences I add to my personal deck are those that help illustrate advanced grammar points I learn from Kanzen Master 1kyuu Grammar and A Dictionary of Advanced Japanese grammar. As for the kanji deck, I no longer review all the kanji, just the ones that are missing from the other decks (or those one or more of whose common readings aren't used in any of the other decks). Basically, the only reason why I even bother with those five decks at this point is the JLPT. The only uses I see for Anki are a) building up core vocabulary, b) memorizing information for formal tests and c) retaining vocabulary in languages that I'm too busy to study actively at the moment. Once I know that I've passed N1 I'll propably suspend all those decks and drop the Anki component of my Japanese learning entirely, at least until I decide whether it's worth it or not to take the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Japanese_Proficiency_ Test - BJT or maybe even the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji_kentei - Kanken .

Reading: Here I'll probably have to discuss the various forms of media separately.

Manga: While manga has been an important tool in my Japanese learning, I am more of an anime fan than a manga fan and there are a lot of manga series that I kinda want to get into but just don't find the time to read. Right now I'm following along two ongoing series as new chapters come out - よつばと! (a series that I, along with many others, consider the perfect manga for beginning learners) and ヴィンランド・サガ (I wrote a brief review of it from the perspective of a Japanese learner http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?pid=203846#p203846 - here ; check out the rest of that thread for more recommendations). Also, while watching currently airing anime I'll usually choose one of the series that were adapted from a manga and "follow along" (that is, watch an episode, then read the corresponding chapters of the manga). The manga that I was reading throughout the Winter 2013 season that just ended was コッペリオン, which features mostly straightforward action dialogue, but often interlaced with specialized terminology connected to nuclear disasters. The manga moves at a much slower pace than the anime, so I'm a bit behind. I'll try to finish this while the new season isn't in full swing yet (which means I have less than two weeks).

Novels: I've had a more difficult time with novels than with manga for some reason. The first one I tried to read was 涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱, on which an anime series that enjoyed a brief period of extreme popularity was based. While the dialogue is mostly fairly simple, the language of the narration was so difficult I decided to shelve it. After asking around for a simpler novel for beginners' reading I got ゼロの使い魔. I only managed to read bits of the first chapter before getting so swamped with schoolwork I could barely make the time to do Anki reviews. I'm a bit hesitant to resume reading it, now that its author has tragically passed away without having finished the series. Now I'm making my way through another novel, 時をかける少女. I watched and really enjoyed the 2006 anime movie of the same name. When I found out that it's not really an adaptation, but more of a sequel/remake of the original story, I decided to check out the book as well. If I can keep up my current pace I should finish my first novel in Japanese by the end of this month. After that I thought I'd try out some advanced reading with some books by 夏目漱石 and 芥川龍之介 that I downloaded from http://www.aozora.gr.jp/ - Aozora Bunko (a collection of Japanese e-books whose copyright has expired) via its iPhone app.

Articles: I try to keep up with what goes on in Japan using the 日本のNews app and the http://www.japancrush.com/ - japanCRUSH website. As has been pointed out http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?pid=212046#p212046 - in a thread I linked to above , the kind of reading that seems to prepare one the best for N1 reading sections are essays and editorials, so last month I've tried to start reading more of those. I found an iPhone app called たて書きコラム. Basically it takes a whole bunch of most recent editions of freely available columns from the websites of newspapers (ranging from such giants as Asahi, Nikkei and Sankei to regional papers from all over Japan, from Hokkaido to Yaeyama) and converts them into vertical writing. It was most likely originally designed to accommodate people who are used to reading their papers vertically and don't like the fact that web editions are horizontal, but for a learner like me its greatest benefit is the advanced reading practice - more than 50 latest columns and opinion pieces all in one place! For the past couple of weeks I've been trying to read at least the columns of the three nationals every day.

Listening: Most of this practice comes from anime. Also I listen mostly to Japanese music, and I often watch news clips online. Recently I've also started listening to a lot of audio dramas based on anime series. These are great for pure listening practice, since you get neither the transcript of the text, nor visual cues to what's going on.

A couple of months ago I also started to learn spoken business Japanese by getting a textbook with a CD (I'm away for the holidays and didn't take the book with me, so I can't tell y'all the title right now). However, after my experience at the N1 I've been making major adjustments to my learning process and haven't yet been able to reincorporate that textbook into it. I suppose that now that the time I dedicate to Anki reviews has gone down I should be able to do that once I get back.

I guess that's about it. Now I gotta get back to doing my reviews while watching anime :)
vonPeterhof on 02 January 2014

vonPeterhof wrote:

or maybe even the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji_kentei - Kanken .

Wow. I was impressed with you getting to N2 in ~3 years and being willing to tackle N1 too. But the Kanken is
tough for native speakers (or at least the higher levels are - they do love their tests over there don't they!).

Anyway, it'll be interesting to follow your progress this year.

dampingwire on 03 January 2014

dampingwire wrote:

vonPeterhof wrote:

or maybe even the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji_kentei - Kanken .

Hehe, well, it's but a pipe dream for me at this stage, but one is allowed to dream, right? :)

The BJT sounds both more realistic and practical, but with their limited number of test sites it would probably only make sense to take it if I were already living in Japan. Sure I could try to take it in a country that we don't need a visa to travel to, but the airfare to Thailand and Vietnam would still be unreasonable if I were to travel there just for the test.

Speaking of visas, now that South Korea has just eliminated the visa requirement for Russian tourists I've once again given in to wanderlust and added Korean to my "Studies" list. 申し訳ございません m(_ _)m. It's always been on my hitlist, being one of my heritage languages, and I can already read Hangul, so now I feel like it would be a sin not to learn it. Japanese is still my top priority though, so for now my Korean learning will be limited to 10-20 minutes a day on http://www.talktomeinkorean.com/category/lessons/level- 1/page/3/ - talktomeinkorean.com .
vonPeterhof on 03 January 2014

A quick update before I have to run to the cinema to watch The Hobbit: I've just posted an entry on lang-8 - http://lang-8.com/253934/journals/11578428329240163199496514 1693825397452 - My Top 10 Anime list of 2013, part 1 (10-8) . Let's see if my writing got any better in the last 11 months or so...
vonPeterhof on 03 January 2014

Posted the next part: http://lang-8.com/253934/journals/29119969630677898300271943 9055177552252 - My Top 10 Anime list of 2013, part 2 (7-4) . Meanwhile the first part got corrected by one person. There apparently weren't many serious errors, but I did forget to use the polite forms at the ends of first clauses of complex sentences twice. I guess that's one of the risks of studying the plain form as the default.
vonPeterhof on 04 January 2014

On Saturday night I went to the cinema for a Miyazaki all-nighter. They showed もののけ姫, 天空の城ラピュタ and となりのトトロ. Unfortunately the second movie was dubbed and they didn't show the last 30 or so minutes of the third one because they started late and went overtime, but it was still pretty fun. Then I spent most of Sunday sleeping, visiting relatives and catching up on 咲-Saki- 阿知賀編 before the start of the new season, 咲-Saki- 全国編. Have been trying to write the final part of my Top 10 list since I got up this morning, but I ran into a bit of writer's block. Tried to get out of it by watching a few scenes from 進撃の巨人, ended up wasting an hour on it (totally worth it though). I will do the team challenge after I'm done with the list, I promise.
vonPeterhof on 06 January 2014

Finally posted the final part: http://lang-8.com/253934/journals/25427129987676939535594220 260740237408 - My Top 10 Anime list of 2013, part 3 (3-1) . I hope no one gets too mad at me for only giving 進撃の巨人 the third place :) I'm afraid this exercise has exhausted me, so I'll have to leave the 自己紹介 until a bit later. I'll try to do it tomorrow, before our obscenely long winter break ends and I have to go back to work.

In other news, I've finally caught up with コッペリオン, which means I'll be putting it on hold either until they make a second season of the anime (which I don't find very likely) or until I'm up to date with all the other manga on my list. For now I'll resume reading 私がモテないのはどう考えてもお前らが悪い !, or ワタモテ for short. I've also started checking out the shows of the new anime season. Aside from 咲-Saki- 全国編 everything seems a bit underwhelming so far. Okay, となりの関くん is pretty funny (not to mention the fact that 90% of the lines in it are said by my favourite voice actress), but the episodes are only seven minutes long. There also aren't many shows with readily available Japanese subs - the only ones up on kitsunekko right now seem to be for フューチャーカードバディファイト, in which I'm not interested. At least we still have ログ・ホライズン, ダイヤのA and サムライフラメンコ.
vonPeterhof on 07 January 2014

vonPeterhof wrote:

I've also started checking out the shows of the new anime season. Aside from
咲-Saki- 全国編 everything seems a bit underwhelming so far. Okay, となりの関くん is pretty funny (not
to mention the fact that 90% of the lines in it are said by my favourite voice actress), but the episodes
are only seven minutes long. There also aren't many shows with readily available Japanese subs - the
only ones up on kitsunekko right now seem to be for フューチャーカードバディファイト, in which I'm not
interested. At least we still have ログ・ホライズン, ダイヤのA and サムライフラメンコ.

Don't forget about Season 2 of 銀の匙, I saw in your summary of 2013 that you liked the first season.
Not sure if it will have Japanese subs though. It has them for season 1, so there's hope.
nandemonai on 08 January 2014

Oh, I'm definitely looking forward to that one! And yes, since it's a noitaminA show chances are that the second season will also have J-subs.
vonPeterhof on 08 January 2014

Okay, here goes my belated self-introduction:

皆さん、はじめまして。ヴァディム(Вадим/Vadim)と申します。ネットで「vonPeterhof」というハンドルを使います。 24歳のロシア人です。実家はサンクトペテルブルクですが、モスクワに住んでいます。ロシアで生まれて、カザフスタンで育ちました。イギリス、アメリカとノルウェーにも住んだことあります。

日本語を勉強し始めた理由は、二つあります。一つは、アニメオタクとしてアニメやアニメ絡みのネタに直接アクセスを得たかったのです。もう一つは、言語学オタクとして日本語そのものに興味津々だったのです。 2010年に漢字や文法を勉強し始めて、 2011年に漫画、アニメと「Anki」というプログラムを使って語彙を増やし読解・聴解を磨きました。 2012年の12月に日本語能力試験の N3レベルに合格しました。翌年の6月にN2を同じく合格しましたが、 12月のN1に失敗したそうです。今年はまたN1をめざし、書く能力と会話力を高めたいです。

どうぞよろしくお願いします。

The second paragraph is basically an abridged version post 3 of this log, so I'll just translate the first one: "Everyone, nice to meet you. My name is Vadim. I go by the handle "vonPeterhof" online. I'm a 24-year-old Russian. My (parents') home is in Saint Petersburg, but I live in Moscow. I was born in Russia and grew up in Kazakhstan. I have also lived in the UK, the US and Norway."

In anime news, the good stuff has started trickling in again with a second season of 中二病でも恋がしたい!, an intriguing looking fantasy series named とある飛空士への恋歌 and yet another high school club comedy named ディーふらぐ! Yet again I've ended up with 20 current series to follow, and the new shows haven't even all premiered yet. I guess I have to start dropping shows more ruthlessly, since work starts tomorrow. Anyway, gotta do some Korean before heading off to bed.
vonPeterhof on 08 January 2014

So my last post on lang-8 only had one sentence corrected (a sentence in which I admittedly got kinda lazy with the phrasing) with the corrector saying it was almost perfect. My confidence in my writing ability has been restored, I guess all that massive input did leave a positive result. I think I'm gonna take a break from lang-8 until at least the next weekend (from writing, that is; I should probably do some corrections in the meantime). Editorializing about anime turned out to be both fun and challenging, so I'm definitely gonna keep doing it. Next week all the season premieres should come to an end, so I'll try to put together some sort of "first impressions" post.

It's probably also a good idea to start practising writing on topics related to my line of work. As much as the thought of one day becoming a token gaijin anime reporter for a Japanese entertainment news website appeals to me, I should probably also prepare for more realistic options :) I think writing a brief job description would be a good way to start.

Speaking of work, today I tried to get back to my studies of business Japanese by doing a couple of exercises from that textbook I mentioned earlier (にほんごで働く! ビジネス日本語30時間). The book consists of eight units, all of which follow the same basic structure: starting quiz, vocabulary list (even including pitch patterns), several dialogues for reading and listening, a couple of dialogues for retelling, a couple situation descriptions for conversational practice, fill-in-the-blanks/multiple choice final quiz, cultural notes. It's a pretty good resource for set phrases to be used in various situations at work. Right now I'm on unit 5, titled 頼む・断る.

Okay now, back to Anki and anime!
vonPeterhof on 11 January 2014

Today, in order to temporarily escape from all the stress of keeping up with nearly thirty ongoing anime series (yes, yes, I'm trying to be merciless in dropping them for not living up to my standards - http://myanimelist.net/animelist/vonPeterhof&status=1&o rder=0 - I'm evidently failing... ), I decided to do an exercise I haven't done in a while - lyrical analysis! It just so happens that today I can't stop listening to one song - http://vlog.xuite.net/play/SlRKZVVLLTIzNzYzODEuZmx2/%E5%A4%8 F%E5%B7%9D%E9%87%8C%E7%BE%8E%EF%BD%9C%E6%8E%8C%E5%BF%83%E8%A 3%A1%E7%9A%84%E6%B5%B7%E6%B4%8B%EF%BC%88%E5%A4%8F%E5%B7%9D%E 3%82%8A%E3%81%BF%EF%BD%9C%E6%8E%8C%E3%81%AE%E6%B5%B7%EF%BC%8 9 - 掌の海 ("A sea in the palm"). Written by Kazufumi Miyazawa of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7ggJquImms - 島唄 fame and sung (at least in the version I have) by Rimi Natsukawa of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQtFsu3G9f0 - 涙そうそう fame, this song appears to have less to do with Okinawa than its parentage (or having 海 in the title) would imply. Fair warning - I don't think I've ever been very good at analysing poetry even in my native language, so feel free to point out any brainfarts on my part. Since the version I have is sung by a woman, I will refer to the singer's character as "she", even though there are no direct indications of any of the characters' genders, and there's probably a version of the song sung by Miyazawa himself out there.

サヨナラと言われた朝にこの世界　色褪せていた
いつの日か届けてくれた花だけが赤く染まるよ

サヨナラと言われた朝にこの世界　音が薄れた
いつの日か聴かせてくれた歌だけがかすかに響く

Okay, the first four lines seem straightforward enough:

"On the morning when you said 'Goodbye' to me (lit. "when I was said 'Goodbye' to"), this world grew dull in colour. Only the flowers you sent to me one day are dyed red. On the morning when you said 'Goodbye' to me, this world's sounds faded. Only the songs I heard from you (lit. "song(s) you let me listen to") one day resound faintly."

教えてよ雨は川になりどこまで流れてゆくの
人の波に流されながら溢れ出すこの涙
掌の中で海になる

"Please tell me, when rain turns into rivers, how far does it flow? Being washed away by human waves(?), these tears (of mine) pour out and turn into a sea in my palm."

人の波 is the hardest image for me to interpret here. Does it refer to being in a large crowd (or, by extension, in an uncaring society, surrounded by others and being dragged in the same direction as everybody else), or does it refer to something internal, one's humanity that is giving rise to emotion and pushing the tears out of one's eyes? The latter interpretation seems to go well with equating crying to a phenomenon of nature, but having the first interpretation in mind seems to explain why the singer is crying into her palm in the first place - it seems to me that this would only happen if you were trying to cover your eyes, not wanting those "floating" around you to see you in your moment of weakness.

Now here's where it gets interesting from a linguistic point of view, at least to me. Unfortunately, this also means that it's pretty hard for me to come up with a naturalistic translation, so please bear with me for a moment:

もう一度生まれ直して温かいあなたの胸で
夢を見るその人よりもいつの日か輝いてみせる

"When I am born again, one day I will shine even brighter than the one dreaming at your warm chest." There are two linguistic points that I find particularly interesting in these two lines (both of those points also get reprised in the final two lines). The first one is the choice of the phrase 生まれ直す for being reborn. The default word/phrase for this concept would be 生まれ変わる (or 蘇る/甦る, but that one would have been harder to fit into the rhythmic pattern). 直す, meaning "to correct", as an auxiliary verb carries the meaning of "to do over again", "to retry after a failed attempt". The singer isn't just musing about the prospect of reincarnation, she is actually viewing her "current" life as a failure, now that her lover is with someone else ("the one dreaming..."). The second point, also a verbal phrase, is 輝いてみせる. 輝く means "to shine", "to sparkle", while 見せる means "to show", "to display". Showing usually implies an audience, so it's not just that she wants to be reborn as a more radiant person than the one she was dumped for, she wants to "show them" (either her ex-lover or their new crush, or maybe them both). All of this betrays great resentment, combined with extreme insecurity about the singer's present self.

想いではいつか砂になり風にさらわれてゆくよ
人の波に流されながら止まらないこの涙
掌の海が溢れ出す

"Memories will someday turn into sand and get swept away by the wind. Being washed away by human waves, these tears (of mine) don't stop and the sea in my palm begins to overflow." The first line seems seems somewhat ambiguous to me. Maybe the singer isn't as desperate as the previous lines suggested and on some level she does recognize that what she has gone through will be in the past (as a bonus, sand is what you're left with when a sea dries up). Alternatively, she could be implying that the memories of the happy times they had together will fade away, while the pain will stay forever. The next line shows that, at least for now, the pain isn't going away.

もう一度生まれ直して温かいその掌を
握ってるその人よりもいつの日か輝いてみせる

"When I am born again, one day I will shine even brighter than the one clutching your warm palm." A reprise of the rather extreme sentiment, with a slight change. The mention of the ex-lover's palm contrasts with the singer's own "sea in the palm". What could this imply? A tinge of envy? Growing self-pity? Dunno, I'm already exhausted from this exercise. Back to my anime binge :)
vonPeterhof on 12 January 2014

Okay, the season premiers are over (except for the new instalment of PreCure, which I'm not gonna be watching). From what I've heard, winter seasons tend to be "throwaway" seasons in anime, but this time around the amount of genuinely watchable shows turned out to be surprisingly large. I'll probably start on that lang-8 first impressions post later today or tomorrow, but now I'll talk my impressions language-wise.

- In contrast to the previous season, the number of shows with J-subs is meagre: in addition to フューチャーカードバディファイト and 銀の匙 Silver Spoon 2 mentioned in a previous post we have 桜Trick and 中二病でも恋がしたい!戀, and the subs for the latter apparently don't appear on kitsunekko until a few days after the initial broadcast [Edit: as I just found out, the situation is the same with ニセコイ].

- The prize for the most eclectic vocabulary goes to ウィザード・バリスターズ弁魔士セシル. It's basically a law procedural/courtroom drama... with wizards! Talks about spells and familiars are interspersed with discussions of capital punishment and legitimate self-defence. I don't have much experience with legal vocabulary in Japanese, so this should be informative.

- The prize for cultural impenetrability goes to 鬼灯の冷徹. As a lot of the early reviewers pointed out, in order to fully enjoy the first episode of this rather intelligent comedy you had to know a thing or two about both folk hero 桃太郎 and Softbank's mascot お父さん. Well, I knew a bit about both, but I still found myself lost most of the time. The show is heavily grounded in Japanese mythology relating to the afterlife, while also featuring contemporary references, so the barriers to entry are pretty high. I could pick up the manga just to improve my understanding, but this would probably just be time-consuming without much real reward. I'll consider it.

- Dialect warnings: the biggest one goes for いなり、こんこん、恋いろは。, which takes place in Kyoto and has most of its characters conversing in Kansai-ben (so far I haven't noticed any Kyoto-specific features). Additional warnings for ウィザード・バリスターズ and のうりん (each with one Kansai dialect-speaking character), 世界征服〜謀略のズヴィズダー〜 (one Hiroshima dialect-speaking character), 咲-Saki- 全国編 (a Hiroshima dialect-speaker in the main cast; several Kansai dialect-speaking supporting characters; lots of other characters with noticeable speech quirks that are harder to identify with a particular region), 銀の匙 (sporadically occurring features of a Hokkaido dialect), ノブナガ・ザ・フール and ノブナガン ("movie samurai-speak"; not sure if there's a proper term for this). Not implying that you shouldn't learn about dialects, just that if you don't want your Standard Japanese to be muddled you might wanna be careful about what patterns you pick up from the aforementioned shows and characters. For some reason I have no problems in resisting Kansai-ben, but Hiroshima-ben tends to creep into my speech after prolonged exposure. Probably has something to do with the former having a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansai_dialect#Pitch_accent - wildly different pitch pattern .

- Also speaking of dialects, I was a bit surprised that Wake Up, Girls! doesn't feature any Touhoku dialect, considering that the show makes no secret out of the fact that it takes place in Sendai. But then, I've never been to Sendai and therefore can't tell how well the dialect has been preserved there. Maybe a later episode will feature the cast touring outside their home region, with producers forcing them to speak with stereotypical Touhoku brogues to increase their appeal?
vonPeterhof on 18 January 2014

Oh, and an additional thought about 世界征服〜謀略のズヴィズダー〜. For as of yet unexplained reasons the "evil organization" trying to take over the world in this anime is called ズヴィズダー (Звезда, Russian for "star") and all its members have Russian aliases (Венера, Пламя, Пепел, etc.). The show appears to have a strong https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B8%AD%E4%BA%8C%E7%97%85 - 中二病 undercurrent, so it's highly likely that the only reason Russian words were chosen is because they sound "cool". There also appears to be a small but growing Russophile community in Japanese geekdom, judging by the rising popularity of http://www.crunchyroll.com/anime-news/2013/12/08-1/sumire-ue saka-in-the-land-of-the-soviets - Sumire http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjc0nBr4EVk - Uesaka , or the fact that ハラショー (хорошо) is apparently now part of Japanese Internet slang (my popup dictionary recognizes it as a word). I'm a little bemused by this, but whatever floats their boat, I guess.
vonPeterhof on 18 January 2014

Kansai-ben seeps into my Japanese all the time... but of course I live in Osaka. それはアカンやねん！　うっとし！
kujichagulia on 18 January 2014

ぼけとんのか、われ。 But seriously, after 5 months in Osaka, Kansai-ben was a problem for me
when I finally went to a language school in Tokyo. My teachers were all over me for my
pronunciation of 雲 and 蜘蛛, and then the same went for words like 雨, 橋, 箸 which are
all backwards in Osaka. Through all the corrections I've received, it's come to the point
now that I don't know which word has which accent on it. Heck, looking at your link, I
just noticed that I do the Tokyo pronunciation of こんにちは now, but I still do the Kansai
日本... And god help me if I ever stop saying 直す when I mean "put away"... I should just
give up on Standard Japanese.
Sizen on 18 January 2014

Hehe, well if I were living in Hiroshima, or Osaka for that matter, I probably wouldn't want to resist local influences, at least in the informal register. Considering that I've never even been to Japan, if I go there and go around saying アニメを多う観て、中途半端な広島弁でしか喋れんくなっちもうたんじゃのう I'll just feel like a phony. Funny thing, until last summer I didn't even realize how often Hiroshima dialect was used in anime - before that I thought that all those じゃのう's and 無かろう's were just stereotypical old people speech patterns, to go with 儂. And then I watched 君のいる町, a large chunk of which takes place in rural Hiroshima prefecture. That was when I finally learned to think in Japanese for extended periods of time, and the joy of that was somewhat dulled by my inadvertent absorption of those speech patterns. I mean, the show wasn't even that good, what the heck?!

As for the Osaka pitch accent, the main article on Japanese pitch accent has https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pitch_accent#Corresp& #111;ndences_between_dialects - this passage where it discusses some of the regular correspondences in pitch accents between Kansai-type and Tokyo-type pitches. When I was trying to learn BSCM earlier this year knowing the correspondences between https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%A0tokavian#Accentuatio ;n - Old and New Shtokavian accentuation gave me a good idea about where the pitch accents were (New Shtokavian is the basis of all standard registers of BSCM, whereas Old Shtokavian accents in a lot of cases fall in the same places as Russian stresses). Depending on how well you've internalized the Kansai-style accentuation patterns these correspondences could help you switch to Tokyo style accentuation, but it's still probably best to confirm the accents on a word-by-word basis.

Oh, and an additional thought I forgot to bring up about いなり、こんこん、恋いろは。 Turns out the こんこん (konkon) in the title is an onomatopoeia for a fox's bark. Someone needs to inform Ylvis - apparently the Japanese do know what the fox says ;)
vonPeterhof on 18 January 2014

Well, the weekend is technically over in my time zone and I still haven't started the new lang-8 entry. This is due to my succumbing to residual exhaustion from the working week and taking outrageously long naps, and also getting distracted by some "real life" business. I'm still calling this a productive weekend though, because unlike last time I did manage to finish all the other planned activities in Japanese (N1 grammar, Business Japanese, columns, novel, manga, and of course Anki), and also in Korean. Haven't been able to squeeze in a Latin lesson or a short read of the French translation of http://www.how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.a sp?TID=29067&PN=1&TPN=3#418374 - Katawa Shoujo for two weeks in a row, but I did manage to do some reading in Kazakh written in the Arabic script (it's used by the ~1.5 million Kazakhs living in China, as well as smaller populations in Iran and Afghanistan). Unfortunately, since my main source for reading in Arabic-scripted Kazakh (a journalist with a Twitter account) had been silent for a couple of months before suddenly producing tons of links to articles, I had almost completely forgotten how to read it and had to "decipher" texts all over again. Will try to at least get the writing started some time during the week.
vonPeterhof on 19 January 2014

Wanderlust update: ended up picking up modern Greek. 改めて申し訳ございません m(_ _)m. My parents decided that we will join a few relatives of ours on a large family holiday on Crete in late June/early July. It's been about 1.5 years since I've last been outside Russia, and taking a trip to Greece with six relatives will be much cheaper than going to Korea alone, visa or no visa, so I see no reason to opt out. Therefore I will be putting Korean into retention mode for now and picking up Greek instead. I'll also probably scale back my Latin in favour of Ancient Greek, since I was planning on taking it on eventually, and it could provide some reinforcement to its descendant (and hopefully, not too much interference). I've already started on the modern Greek Pimsleur course, and this weekend I'll be hitting the bookstores for some resource-hunting - I just happen to know two excellent bookstores that are both in the vicinity of pretty good Japanese restaurants :)

As a side note, if you're ever in Moscow, while it's probably not the best idea to ask me for a guided tour of the city, I'm always ready to tell you where you can find the most authentic Japanese cooking. Seriously, the number of places serving Japanese food in Moscow is staggering. There's even a halal Japanese restaurant not far from my workplace! I've yet to try it out though.

And, with that awkward segue out of the way, an update on my Japanese studies. No, I haven't started working on the entry, but I have looked through a few pages of the 鬼灯の冷徹 manga. While seeing the dialogue written down did improve my comprehension somewhat, I still have to spend way too much time looking up unfamiliar words and unknown concepts from Japanese mythology. With my goal of shifting focus from manga to non-fiction in mind, adding such a hard-to-read manga to my list is probably not worth it at this point. I might revisit it or the anime adaptation later.
vonPeterhof on 22 January 2014

Posted http://lang-8.com/253934/journals/21542787648989830559767967 0489445732732 - the first part of the "first impressions" entry . Yes, it's gonna be another multiparter, but hopefully I won't stretch it out to five days this time. Interestingly enough, this time around I got corrections from four people within thirty minutes after posting (although it seems like the last person retracted their corrections), in different places and with some variation in opinions. I'll study them all carefully before writing the next part.

As for today's bookstore visit, I ended up buying four books, three of them http://english.franklang.ru/ - Ilya Frank method books for Greek (BTW, the linked website has some free Japanese reading materials). One is a collection of fairy tales and legends, another is a collection of jokes, and the third one is Aesop's fables in Ancient Greek. Sadly, it doesn't specify which stage/dialect of Ancient Greek it's in, but from what I know of surviving compilations of Aesop's fables, I suspect it's more likely to be in Koine than in Classical Attic. The fourth book is an academic grammar of Hakka Chinese. Bought it on impulse, since books about non-Mandarin modern Chinese are a pretty rare sight in Russian bookstores. I recall having seen a similar grammar for Shanghainese in Saint Petersburg and that's it - not even a single booklet about Cantonese! Anyway, I guess if I work one legend/fairy tale/joke in modern Greek and one fable in Ancient per week into my schedule, in addition to one Pimsleur lesson per day during my commute, I won't be taking too much time away from my Japanese.
vonPeterhof on 25 January 2014

http://lang-8.com/253934/journals/11050734746881186385079655 3417255719292 - Second part up . This time I added a couple negative reviews, though the criticisms are still rather mild. I suppose the hardest task will be to write about the shows that produced neither a positive nor a particularly strong negative reaction. As for the mistakes, it's kind of annoying that I still sometimes misuse は and が after all this time. This feels like learning how to use articles all over again! I also seem to be trying to avoid making long strings of words connected with の, and end up dropping it in places where it apparently sounds perfectly fine.
vonPeterhof on 26 January 2014

http://lang-8.com/253934/journals/46908053642099408926444354 999837236836 - Part 3 . I felt like I need to post at least something during the week, but at the same time I was feeling kinda lazy after a day at work, so I just reviewed two of the shows I had discussed previously in this log. The first commenter complimented my entry by saying that it reads like something written by a Japanese person, while the second one confirmed my suspicion that using the "barriers to entry" metaphor in Japanese probably wasn't the best idea. She asked if I used such a phrase in this context "on purpose" and if I was trying to be funny. While I did use it "on purpose", knowing that this isn't the primary meaning of the phrase, I just thought that it was a nice figurative description of the phenomenon I was talking about (I think I might have actually stolen that phrase from an English-language review of the first episode of that show). I guess I'm not yet at that stage in Japanese where I'm free to use the language in unconventional ways without people questioning the purposefulness of such usage. Of course, if I were at that stage I probably wouldn't be writing on Lang-8 anyway :)

In other news, it looks like an interesting opportunity has come up in the city I'm in right now. The Japan Foundation is sponsoring a free http://www.jpfmw.ru/ru/events-archive/nihongo-shok yuu-kyoujuhou-2014-jan.html - series of lectures on the methodology of teaching beginner-level Japanese . The lectures will be in an interactive format and include discussions, observation of real classes and exercises in conducting mock classes. Participants who have attended 60% or more of the lectures (the whole series is for 13 weeks with two lectures per week) will get an official certificate. While I'm not entirely sure how much I want to apply myself in the area of teaching beginner Japanese, I feel like it would be a great opportunity to hone my active skills. Besides, the lectures will be from 7 to 9 PM twice a week, so I should be able to attend them without taking too much focus away from my job or my regular study of Japanese. The lectures will be entirely in Japanese, so the minimum requirement is JLPT N2, which I have conveniently attained. All I have to do is pick up my certificate, which has finally arrived in Moscow. While I'm kinda nervous about this, I also can't wait to apply. Hopefully it's not too late - the deadline is March 7, but there are only 20 spots and if they get filled up early they won't take any more applications.

And also, tomorrow I'll find out how poorly I did on my N1. I guess this weekend I'll be revising my strategies and planning my study process for the next six months.
vonPeterhof on 29 January 2014

My results:

Language Knowledge: 24 (Vocab: C; Grammar: B)
Reading: 34
Listening: 37
Total: 95/180 - Fail

The section pass threshold is at 19, while the total pass threshold is 100. While I did expect to fail, I didn't expect it to be this close. Only five points! I honestly expected to fail the language knowledge section, but being this close to passing the whole thing is pretty disappointing. Oh well, at least this means that passing it next time with better preparation is pretty realistic. 今年の夏こそ、日本に一度も行かずに合格してみせるぞ! [I just felt like using こそ, -ず and -てみせる in a sentence for some reason :)]

Anyway, like I said previously, this weekend I'll be planning the specifics of my preparations, but I'm already starting to implement a new strategy by reducing all my other target languages (save for both forms of Greek) into hardcore retention-only mode - pretty much nothing but Anki and possible random encounters. I've unfollowed all the twitter accounts and deleted all the news apps that I used purely in order to keep in touch with German, Kazakh, Norwegian, French and Latin. I'm also gonna stop playing Katawa Shoujo until the Japanese translation is complete - probably gonna try out ひぐらしのなく頃に [yes, the red な is an official part of the title] in the meantime.
vonPeterhof on 30 January 2014

So close! Sorry to hear those sad news, but I also failed once the JLPT (N2) by only 4
points. Although really frustrating, I'd advise you maybe to try out the next level next
time. When I did try again the N2, I did without preparation at all and crushed it so
much it felt like a waste of money to pass it
yuhakko on 30 January 2014

vonPeterhof wrote:

My results:

Language Knowledge: 24 (Vocab: C; Grammar: B)
Reading: 34
Listening: 37
Total: 95/180 - Fail

Sorry to hear you failed, but given that it was N1, that's pretty impressive!

yuhakko wrote:

Although really frustrating, I'd advise you maybe to try out the next
level next time.

But it's N1. It'll be a decade before they rearrange the levels again :-)

dampingwire on 31 January 2014

Oh right I thought I remembered it was N2! Well there always the 漢字検定試験 then! but
that would be a pretty badass challenge !
yuhakko on 31 January 2014

Actually I'm curious about the listening test on N1.

How does it compare to:
- listening to a news broadcast (say NHK News)
- watching a 30-45m drama
- watching a live film

On the JLPT website it seemingly suggests that only ~30% of candidates who passed N1
thought they could comfortably understand a news broadcast. I just wonder about how you
(@VonPeterhof) would assess the N1 listening compared to (say) NHK News.

dampingwire on 31 January 2014

I'd say there aren't many similarities between a typical N1 listening test and an NHK News broadcast. Unlike the reading section, the listening section tends to be more about the "real life" topics, even in N1. It's usually about situations one is likely to find oneself in at a university or a workplace - making plans, scheduling appointments, receiving instructions, discussing likes and dislikes, etc. I suppose the closest it gets to a news programme is the final task, the long talks. That's where some of the information may be given in the form of a monologue, or even something of a lecture. Still, I would expect the range of topics to be a bit more limited than in NHK News.

I suppose drama is a bit closer, although the N1 listening generally doesn't go into the really colloquial language or more nuanced expressions of emotions. I wouldn't say that listening to the news would be completely useless as preparation, since it can help expand your vocabulary and get used to the natural pace of speech, but you do need to keep in mind that the majority of the listening tasks will be in the form of dialogues, and not just one person rattling off what happened where.
vonPeterhof on 01 February 2014

Posted http://lang-8.com/253934/journals/33432231276582142449242382 0132310031972 - the fourth and final part of the "first impressions" series. While I haven't written about all the series whose first episodes I've watched this season, it's been between three and four weeks since I watched those episodes and the first impressions aren't fresh in my memory any more. So I decided to wrap it up by writing about the three series whose first episodes surprised me the most. Next season I need to try writing these posts immediately after watching the episodes.

With that out of the way, I can start thinking about the strategies for taking the N1 this coming summer.
vonPeterhof on 01 February 2014

Okay, I don't think I'm completely done designing my strategy for the coming N1, but I'm getting there. I decided that this time I will actually use some 完全マスター JLPT preparation books to hone my skills and close as many gaps in my knowledge as possible (as I have mentioned previously, I've already started working with the grammar book). There are two problems with this:

a) All the 完全マスター books I have are outdated. While I don't think the Japanese language itself has changed significantly since 2001/2, the format of the test has. While the grammar book I've been doing so far has been more concerned with the content rather than drilling specific types of questions, the reading and listening ones seem to be more suited for the latter approach.
b) I'm kind of a cheap bastard, and those new and improved 2011 新完全マスター books aren't exactly cheap (and the local Japanese library doesn't seem to have them either).

With these two considerations in mind, today I went to the book store and bought only the 新完全マスター vocabulary book, since my results seem to indicate that this is my weakest area right now. I've also heard that the range of vocabulary in the N1 has been increased compared to the old JLPT 1, but I haven't been able to confirm that. Either way, I'll also add the old reading and listening books to my weekly exercise and see how this all works out.

In other news, this week I finally got my certificate for last July's N2. I phoned the local office of the Japan Foundation, and it turned out that it had already been mailed to my Saint Petersburg address. Apparently someone at the post office there forgot to notify my family about the parcel and then sent it back to Moscow after the one month storage period had passed. Oh well, at least I have the certificate now.

When I went to the office to pick up the certificate, I also handed in my application for those lectures on the methodology of teaching beginner-level Japanese I mentioned before. While the only official requirements on applicants are an age of at least 17 and Japanese ability of at least N2, I'm still seriously doubting if I have what it takes. With my extremely limited experience in actually speaking Japanese, participating in discussions about teaching methods will be challenging, to say the least. What's more, since most of the other participants will presumably be either current or prospective teachers of Japanese, I wonder how they will judge the presence of a self-learner with neither experience in teaching nor intentions to pursue a career in it. With the added bonus of my poor communicative skills, my biggest fear is that I will end up confirming their most negative stereotypes of self-learners. I still hope that I get accepted though, since this is probably my only opportunity to place myself in a "sink or swim" immersive environment without going to Japan. Plus, the fact that the lectures are free of charge really appeals to my cheap bastard side ;)

In non-Japanese news, I've bought the tickets for my Greek vacation. Had to act quickly, since the rouble collapsed in relation to the euro near the end of last week and the prices for tickets to the euro area started climbing. The most optimally priced tickets I managed to get entail nearly day-long layovers in Germany (Düsseldorf on the way there and Berlin on the way back). I actually see this as a good thing, since that gives me an opportunity to use my German (as you can see, I reclassified it into a language I study again). I also have relatives I haven't seen since early childhood living not far from Düsseldorf, so now I'm looking forward to this holiday even more.
vonPeterhof on 08 February 2014

If you have chance to go into Düsseldorf itself there's quite a large Japanese community there, which makes plenty of opportunities (at least compared to other European cities) for browsing Japanese bookshops if you like that kind of thing!

I'm not sure if it's fair to say that the range of vocabulary for N1 has increased, but rather there is no longer an official list, so the examiners can pick anything they think is relevant to the level. I've yet to start work on N1 materials (I still have plenty of N2 level gaps to fill, despite my certification) but I would say that the new Kanzen Master N2 grammar book is much improved over the old 2-kyuu book. Much more thought has gone into the grouping of grammar points and much more detail is provided in the explanations. In short, it's a lot more user-friendly.
g-bod on 08 February 2014

g-bod wrote:

Oh yeah, forgot about that. A definite plus in my book! Too bad I won't be able to visit the Japan-Tag (or, for that matter, that Polyglot Gathering in Berlin, which will happen a little more than a week after I pass through there).

g-bod wrote:

I'm not sure if it's fair to say that the range of vocabulary for N1 has increased, but rather there is no longer an official list, so the examiners can pick anything they think is relevant to the level. I've yet to start work on N1 materials (I still have plenty of N2 level gaps to fill, despite my certification) but I would say that the new Kanzen Master N2 grammar book is much improved over the old 2-kyuu book. Much more thought has gone into the grouping of grammar points and much more detail is provided in the explanations. In short, it's a lot more user-friendly.

Yeah, I did notice that about the new N1 grammar book as well. Still, I think the old one is good enough for my purposes.
vonPeterhof on 08 February 2014

Last Sunday I tried out the old N1 reading book, which starts with a placement test meant to determine your strong and weak points, so that you can go straight to the necessary sections and drill them. Out of the 32 questions I only got two wrong. Those were in two different sections and I only got them wrong due to lacking some vocabulary, rather than misunderstanding the task. This led me to conclude that I don't have any specific problems with the reading section, outside the need to expand my vocabulary and increase my reading speed. In hindsight, it probably would have been more helpful to take the placement test with timing, because some questions did take longer to figure out. Still, I got a fairly decent score on that section on the actual test last time, so it's probably better to focus on other tasks. Today or tomorrow I will check out the listening book.

As for actual reading, I didn't do as much of it as I planned last month. Per week I managed an average of one-two newspaper columns, five-six news articles, one chapter of 時をかける少女 (those are hardly ever longer than two-three pages) and one-two chapters of manga. I'm only halfway through the novel and still have two full volumes of ワタモテ to get through before I catch up to the latest chapters (legally available for free http://www.ganganonline.com/comic/watashiga/ - here ). Since I did decide to prioritize non-fiction over fiction in preparation for N1, this time around I won't set goals on finishing the novel or the manga and just keep reading them at the current pace. Starting this week I've set a new goal of reading at least one Asahi or Nikkei column a day, and I've managed to stick to this plan so far.
vonPeterhof on 15 February 2014

vonPeterhof wrote:

When I went to the office to pick up the certificate, I also handed in my application for those lectures on the methodology of teaching beginner-level Japanese I mentioned before. While the only official requirements on applicants are an age of at least 17 and Japanese ability of at least N2, I'm still seriously doubting if I have what it takes. With my extremely limited experience in actually speaking Japanese, participating in discussions about teaching methods will be challenging, to say the least.

Somehow I don't think you'd have any problems and it would work out really well. I hope you get accepted and can post about it.
kraemder on 15 February 2014

Thanks for the encouragement, kraemder! They'll likely inform us about the decision in two or three weeks. If I do get accepted, I'll definitely post about my experiences, but I don't want to get my hopes too high for now.
vonPeterhof on 16 February 2014

So I checked out the listening preparation book, and the impression I got is that the listening section has changed quite a bit between the two editions of the test. One of the types of tasks given in the book involved answering questions based on the relative locations of objects in a picture. The book (designed for both the old JLPT1 and JLPT2) explicitly states that tasks like this will definitely come up on the test, but I don't recall anything like this from the actual N2 and N1 tests I took (I took the N3 too long ago to recall anything specific). I also didn't see any practise for the long talk task, which is the most challenging part of N2 and N1 listening. So I guess I won't be using the listening book either.

I've managed to stick to my column reading schedule, although I only managed to read Asahi's 天声人語 column. It's pretty challenging reading, both in terms of vocabulary and cultural references you're expected to get. Most of the time Nikkei's 春秋 column appears to have somewhat more accessible content, since it doesn't seem to rely on literary references as much, and its content tends to be more in line with my interests and professional background. Next week I'll read 春秋 exclusively and see which of the columns works better in developing my reading skills.

I don't think I've mentioned this here before, but I've also been reading a book on the grammar of Classical Japanese for the past few months. I've mostly been doing this out of linguistic curiosity rather than a real desire to get into classical Japanese literature, but now I've decided that it's something I'd like to branch out into at some point, so I've started mining the book for example sentences to put into an Anki deck. I'll keep it to a minimum to prevent myself from getting distracted from modern Japanese too much, but I don't think interference should be an issue. If anything, certain expressions and grammatical patterns inherited from Classical Japanese would only get reinforced.
vonPeterhof on 21 February 2014

Finally wrote that brief lang-8 post http://lang-8.com/253934/journals/26285447018060823868496241 9269662908004 - about my job . Had to look up nearly all the professional terms that I've used there. I've sort of put my business Japanese studies on hiatus while rethinking my preparations for N1, but it's probably a good idea to keep them up in order to have some more practical uses for my Japanese. Right now the thought of my office getting a phone call from a Japanese bank and my boss asking me to handle it both excites and terrifies me, since I would probably just have to resign myself to English after a few feeble attempts at discussing the matter in broken keigo.
vonPeterhof on 23 February 2014

Last night I got an email informing the attendees of the teaching lectures about a venue change and the rescheduling of the first lecture. I guess that means that I'm in! The start has been moved from the March 10 to March 12, so now I have a little less than two weeks to cram some education- and language acquisition-related vocabulary so that I don't make a complete fool out of myself. Re-reading that recent thread about classroom teaching methods should also probably be helpful.
vonPeterhof on 27 February 2014

I was thinking of making the lyrical analysis exercise that I made back in message 19 a monthly thing. Unfortunately, due to a ridiculously stressful week at work and having to take a train to Saint Petersburg on Friday night I didn't manage to do this until the end of February. Oh well, maybe I'll do two in March to make up for it.

Anyway, thanks to fabriciocarraro I've been thinking about Attack on Titan (進撃の巨人) lately. Specifically I've been thinking about its http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMXgHfHxKVM - first opening , a video whose popularity on its own has reached memetic proportions and inspired numerous remakes. The song, 紅蓮の弓矢 by Linked Horizon, appears to be very difficult to translate, since there are wild differences between the various fan translations of the lyrics I've seen around the web. I guess I'll try to make one of my own.

The opening line is in German, and for months before the official lyrics sheet came out the fans transcribed it as "Sie sind das Essen, [und] wir sind die Jäger!" ("They are the food, [and] we are the hunters!"). Then it turned out to actually say "Seid ihr das Essen? Nein, wir sind der (sic) Jäger!" ("Are you(pl.) the food? No, we are [of] the hunter[s]!"). The translation excluding the parts in square brackets corresponds to "der Jäger" being nominative singular, while the version including them represents it being genitive plural. Either way, you can probably tell why many fans still prefer to sing the misheard line.

踏まれた花の　名前も知らずに
地に堕ちた鳥は　風を持ち侘びる

Some translations, like the one in the video I linked to above, treat the two first lines of the song proper as two separate sentences. I see no reason to do so, especially since the ず negative form doesn't appear to be used to end independent sentences in modern Japanese, outside of fixed expressions.

Without even knowing the name[s] of the trampled flower[s]
The bird that has fallen to the ground pines for the wind

That seems to be a metaphor for the show's theme of choosing freedom over captivity, regardless of the benefits of said captivity. The flowers that the bird trampled having fallen to the ground don't interest it one bit, since the ground isn't where it belongs.

祈ったところで　何も変わらない
（今）《不本意な現状》を変えるのは　戦う覚悟だ...

According to my JLPT1 grammar guide, the ~たところで form from the first line is equivalent in meaning to ~ても ("even if"). I've seen some translation talk about a literal "place where we prayed" instead. As for the second line, the word in the parentheses is what is actually sung, while the words in the angular brackets is what it says on the lyrics sheet (Linked Horizon are pretentious like that). To minimize ambiguity I'll use the same punctuation in my translation.

Even if you pray, nothing will change
What will change (the now)《the undesirable status quo》is the resolve to fight

屍踏み越えて　進む意志を　嗤う豚よ
家畜の安寧　...虚偽の繁栄　...死せる餓狼の「自由」を！

First a few linguistic notes:
-The word わらう (to laugh) is written with the kanji 嗤 rather than the more usual 笑. The former kanji gives it more of a meaning of "to sneer" than simply "to laugh".
-The よ at the end of the first line in this case serves to call out the "pigs", as an archaic Japanese equivalent of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocative_case - vocative case .
-The word 死せる seems to be a bit problematic to translators. Some of the translations I've seen translate 死せる餓狼 as "dying starving wolves", but most of the uses of the word 死せる that I've seen in other contexts seem more consistent with the meaning "dead" rather than "dying" - most notably 死せる魂, the title of the Japanese translation of Gogol's Dead Souls. Since the word 死す appears to be archaic I consulted my Classical Japanese grammar, and it turns out that -eru is the attributive form of the perfective tense suffix -eri, which indicates an action whose result persists in the moment the speaker is describing. In other words, Classical 死せり/死せる = modern 死んでいる.
-To continue with the Classical Japanese theme, I suppose one could interpret the を at the end as an exclamatory particle rather than its more common direct object meaning, but that would probably be a stretch. It's more likely just a command/request with the operative verb left out.

That part is probably the hardest to translate, since that second line is the one least resembling a complete sentence. The prevailing interpretation of the second line ( http://detail.chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/qa/question_detail /q13106977198 - not just among foreign fans ) appears to be that the peace and complacency are being contrasted to freedom, and that the singing character(s) choose the latter. However, I've also seen translations (e.g. the one http://www.animelyrics.com/anime/shingeki/gurennoyumiya.htm - here ) that seem to imply that that the speaker is wishing death on the "pigs" and thus using the word "free(dom)" ironically. While the square brackets do sometimes add that nuance in Japanese, to me it seems more likely that the former interpretation is correct, as it reinforces the idea of choosing the struggle for freedom over complacency, even if you end up starving to death like a hounded wolf. I think the brackets are there just for emphasis.

O pigs who sneer at the will to step over corpses and advance!
Peaceful as livestock... living in false prosperity... [We choose] the freedom of wolves starved to death!

囚われた屈辱は　反撃の（嚆矢）←嚆-< だ　城壁の其の彼方　獲物を屠る（Jäger）《狩人》
迸る　（衝動）《殺意》に　其の身を灼きながら　黄昏に緋を穿つ－－

←紅蓮の弓矢-《《

Yes, the arrow pictographs are also in the sheet. The whole thing is http://en.dic.pixiv.net/a/Chuunibyou - 中二病 as hell. Anyway, 囚われた屈辱 ("the humiliation of being captured") is a reference to probably the most iconic (and memetic) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0w0LOQqPf88 - line from the manga and anime. 嚆矢 (こうし) is an arrow with a whistle attached to it that was used to signal the start of a battle. Metaphorically it may refer to the start of something.

The humiliation of being captured marks the beginning of the counterattack. Beyond the ramparts, [there is] a hunter slaughtering his prey.
His body being burned by a surging (impulse)《intent to kill》, at dusk the scarlet will be pierced by the crimson bow and arrow.

Now that I think of it, the sentences in these lines are also structured a bit weirdly. The verbs being placed before the nouns usually makes them attributive rather than active, thus making the second and third sentence just describe the hunter and the bow and arrow, respectively, rather than focus on something actually happening. What's more, 其の in the second line could just as easily mean "your" rather than "his". I'm afraid I don't know enough about colour symbolism in Japanese to tell if the juxtaposition between 緋 (scarlet) and 紅蓮 (crimson) means anything. The only thing dictionaries tell me is that 緋 can be used to mean "blood", but I'm not sure what "piercing the blood" would imply. Maybe in this song the "awesomeness" of the imagery trumps all considerations of actual meaning after all :p

Phew, that was quite the wall o' text! I guess I'll leave the updates on my studies till tomorrow.

Edit: also, yay 500th post!
vonPeterhof on 01 March 2014

On this fine morning, having yet again woken up with lots of effort and suffering after less than five hours of sleep, I've decided it's time for a radical measure - as of today my Core 2000 and Core 6000 Anki decks are suspended indefinitely. I do believe that I'm at a point in my studies where I should be able to get enough reinforcement for the more common vocabulary through regular consumption of native material, but my main reason for doing this is the desire to make my sleeping pattern at least a little bit healthier. With my current workload I have to stay behind after the official end of the working day for up to two hours almost every day, and this doesn't look like it's going to improve any time soon. Then, after I get home and have my dinner, I don't go to sleep until I'm done with my Anki reviews, which is usually around 2 AM. I'd probably get through them faster if I didn't watch anime or other videos at the same time, but that would probably suck the last bits of enjoyment out of my life. By far the largest contributor to my Anki workload is the Core 6000 deck which averages about 50 reviews per day - a far cry from this time last year, when it was more like a hundred, but still enough to keep me awake for a pointlessly long time. The Core 2000 deck doesn't get anywhere near that daily amount, but there's no point in keeping it unsuspended if that's the one with the more common vocabulary.

In addition to being able to go to bed earlier, I should also be able to put more work into developing my N1 grammar and vocabulary deck. Besides, maybe with more sleep my productivity at work will improve and this nightmare will end a tiny bit sooner.
vonPeterhof on 04 March 2014

I find it hard to believe over achievers like yourself manage to learn so much and yet get so little sleep. I've
read how sleep deprivation makes students perform in class as though their IQ were lower. It would seem
you have IQ to spare. Glad you're cutting back though.
kraemder on 06 March 2014

I'm afraid you flatter me, kraemder. It's hard for me to see myself as an overachiever. If I were one I probably wouldn't have found myself in this mess to begin with :) But still, thanks for the kind words.

Anyway, so far the effects of my radical decision appear to be marginal - my average sleep time seems to have increased only by about half an hour. Either the smaller amount of Anki reviews has made me more susceptible to distractions, or those reviews weren't that much work to begin with. Still, I appreciate any extra minute of sleep I can get, so I'll try to see if I can make my weekday evening studies more efficient.

In other news, I'm done with Pimsleur Greek I, and now I have taken up FSI Greek for modern Greek and Assimil Le Grec ancien for ancient. This has given me the excuse to get back into studying French. I really suck at this "focus on one language at a time" thing, don't I? ;) Thankfully, even though I still can't string two words together in French to save my life, my comprehension of written French is actually pretty decent (Merci beaucoup, Guillaume le Conquérant!), so it isn't too much trouble figuring out the explanations to the lessons.
vonPeterhof on 08 March 2014

Okay, the first lecture turned out to be pretty fun and not scary at all after all! The overall experience was like being in a class in a language school, except with the teacher not just assigning tasks and conducting activities, but also giving meta-explanations of the reasons behind the tasks and activities, as well as tips on how to carry them out better in a class of your own. Since this was the first lecture, the main focus were introductory exercises and "icebreakers".

Out of the twenty participants (not counting the eight people following along via Skype) there were seven or eight Japanese people, both exchange students and expats (one lady spoke such native-like Russian before the class I did a double-take when she introduced herself as Japanese - turned out she moved here more than fourteen years ago). None of the other Russians present revealed themselves as self-learners (neither did I), but, aside from a couple of really fluent people, I didn't notice much of a gap between my conversational skills and theirs, which is something I was afraid would be noticeable. While I did make a couple of weird vocabulary choices (I was very proud of myself for recalling the word 地平線, only to realize the next day that the correct term in a marine context was 水平線) and politeness-level mix-ups, I've managed to get my point across 99% of the time (a Japanese teammate took some time to figure out my pronunciation of 身を守る), which is good for a start. Looking forward to next week's classes!

In other news, last Sunday I took my parents out to see Miyazaki's 風立ちぬ (subtitled, natch) - all three of us ended up being puzzled as to why it didn't win an Oscar (although we've yet to watch Frozen). Well, actually I wasn't, given http://www.crunchyroll.com/anime-news/2014/03/03-1/anime-shu t-out-at-oscars - how seriously the Academy takes the animated nominations and how Disney is responsible for marketing all Ghibli movies stateside. Still, a very impressive film that everyone should see.

This week I've tried to mix up my daily reading routine by a) diversifying the columns I read beyond 天声人語 and 春秋 by reading ones from the regional papers as well, and b) dedicating both my morning and evening commutes to reading in Japanese. Before I finished the Greek Pimsleur course I would listen to it during the evening commute while simultaneously reading fairy tales from the bilingual reader. Since I can't do that with either FSI or Assimil, I decided to do all of my Greek at home. Now I think that this was a mistake, since I get so tired by the time I get home I barely even have the strength to get through the Japanese stuff and Anki. This ends up pushing all my Greek stuff to the weekends, thus making my exposure to the language a lot more infrequent. In order to have something to listen to while reading Greek in the metro I bought a collection of greteast hits by Notis Sfakianakis.

This morning I went to another bookstore and ended up buying two more books from the しごとの日本語 series - the one on writing e-mails and the one on telephone conversations (the fourth book of the series deals specifically with working in the IT industry, so I don't see myself needing it any time soon). The books aren't cheap, but I liked the way things were presented in the business manners book. Besides, I'm almost done with the Business Japanese book and I'm going to need something to keep studying practical work-related Japanese afterwards.
vonPeterhof on 15 March 2014

I guess I forgot to comment on the fact that Ukrainian has slipped onto my "studies" list. My past studies of this language are limited to a Pimsleur course and a couple bilingual texts, but in combination with its close relatedness to Russian this makes for a pretty solid base for passive comprehension well beyond the level of my active skills. Before I decided to minimize exposure to languages other than Japanese I used to occasionally read articles in Ukrainian and Belarusian in order to expand my passive understanding of those languages. With the recent events in Ukraine I've found myself reading Ukrainian sources yet again. I suppose I could do some more active studying activities out of solidarity or something, but I've already let my wanderlust chase away all traces of an "AJATT" approach from my learning, so I'll probably have to limit myself to articles for now.
vonPeterhof on 16 March 2014

Holy crap, it's been twelve days since I last posted here! Thought I'd drop by to show signs of life or something. The situation at work isn't getting any better, but that wasn't the reason why I couldn't update last weekend. One of the few things I like about my job is that I don't have to take work home (heck, I'd probably have to be promoted two or three levels higher to even be allowed to take it home). It's just that we had a large-ish family celebration last weekend, so I barely even had the time to finish my reviews and no time at all for FSI Greek. My reading has been surprisingly stable though. One of the pluses of a standing commute - it's hard to fall asleep, so you're guaranteed some reading time (unless the train is too cramped up for you to reach into your bag, but this hardly ever happens during my usual commute time slots).

Today has been a particularly nasty day though: physically, mentally and especially emotionally. Depending on how I feel about it tomorrow I might go into more detail when I write a proper update, but for now suffice it to say that you know you're overexerting yourself at work when you're too tired to watch anime, let alone do Anki reviews. I think I'll make this the first time in several years that I go to bed without doing a single review. Thankfully, the card numbers are a lot more manageable now, so it won't be too much of a problem come tomorrow.
vonPeterhof on 27 March 2014

Warning: incoming rant/whining that has next to nothing to do with language learning.

I was too tired to update last night, so I'm doing this now. While Friday wasn't nearly as stressful as Thursday, I still ended up staying at work past 8 PM (especially egregious considering that in this company the work day ends at 4:45 PM on Fridays), and the pile of work still left to be done doesn't look like it decreased one bit. At this point I would actually appreciate the opportunity to come to work on a weekend, so that I can calmly sift through the documents without having to divert my attention to "urgent" tasks, but that's apparently only allowed in extraordinary circumstances.

I'm not gonna bore y'all with a detailed explanations of how banking groups, the interbank lending market and the division of responsibilities in my division work, but suffice it to say that due to our bank's recent acquisition by a banking group a massive extra load of work has dropped right into my area of responsibility in the past couple of months, on top of an important deadline set much earlier and lots of day-to-day business. The boss has reassigned some of my tasks to my colleagues who are less busy, but I'm still badly behind on a lot of unfinished tasks, and it appears that the deadline, which is April 1, will be missed pretty badly. That's in spite of the fact that I stay at work for up to seven extra hours each week (basically, every day when I don't have a lecture in the evening).

I could ask the boss for a permanent reallocation of responsibilities, but I doubt that I could make a strong case that my overload with work is due to circumstances beyond my control. I've never exactly been the best employee even before all the extra work, and I do have a bit of a history of screw-ups and brainfarts. The fact that right now I constantly have to switch my attention between a crapload of unrelated tasks has led to them becoming more frequent, which results in both me having to do even more work to clean up after myself and in me looking even worse in the eyes of my boss (and my own eyes as well).

Now the chances of me ending up without a job very soon are pretty damn high. There are three possibilities:
a) I end up making a major screw-up and the boss asks me to resign (this has happened to another employee around this time last year);
b) I lose my job some time this summer due to the downsizing that the group is allegedly planning;
c) my boss gets replaced by someone reassigned from the head bank; since I've been one of their liaisons on a few problematic questions and it's been my job to deliver them bad news on behalf of my bank, they pay me back by sacking me.

Frankly, a part of me would welcome such a development. It was never my intention to work in the Russian financial sector forever (and even if it were, due to the situation on the market right now the chances of me getting hired to do similar work in a different Russian bank are pretty slim). But still, I really have no idea of where else I'd go. With just a bachelor's degree in management and little more than one year of work experience I have very little to offer potential employers. As you can tell, I'm pretty conflicted as to whether or not I should keep exerting myself at this current job.

/whining

Anyway, as I've mentioned in my previous post, I'm behind on some aspects of my studies (as well as anime - the winter season is almost over, and I've only watched one finale so far). I haven't been able to properly start reading the new business Japanese books I bought. I also haven't written much on Lang-8 lately (although I realize now that I forgot to link my latest post on this log - http://lang-8.com/253934/journals/24097850128955185136214038 6020877900039 - here ).

However, my readings, JLPT preparations and lectures have all been going according to plan. I've managed to stick to the "one column" per day rule, even if I had to loosen the definitions a little - if I manage to read a particularly long and detailed news article I consider the daily requirement fulfilled. I've also found an interesting source for news style Japanese for times when I'm too worn out to read actual news - http://kyoko-np.net/ - 虚構新聞 . Basically, it's the Japanese equivalent to The Onion. Sure, some of the humour requires more awareness of current events and cultural insight than I currently possess, but overall it's a nice distraction.

The lectures are still a lot of fun while being quite informative. Last week was a particularly interesting moment when the topics of discussion were the use of vocabulary items that the students are unfamiliar with and the use of an intermediary language in the classroom. I was preparing to drop some Krashen wisdom in the discussion, but in the last moment I realized that I misunderstood the exact formulation of the discussion questions, so I ended up not saying anything. Then when the student discussion was over and the teacher started stating his point of view, he actually name-dropped Krashen and his i+1 theory. I was like "Damn! He stole my thunder!" :) Other than that, I've noticed that my ability to formulate grammatically correct sentences more or less spontaneously is improving, although accidental lowering of the politeness level is still a problem. I guess I need to practise by talking to others more. I could try to get used to it by switching my Japanese internal monologue to 丁寧語, but that just doesn't feel natural.

Anyway, I guess I'll spend most of the rest of the weekend finishing off the anime season before the next one starts.
vonPeterhof on 29 March 2014

I don't know what you do at your bank but I had a data entry job a while ago that was so boring that I was
pretty much on autopilot and I remember that if they mixed in different kinds of forms instead of giving me the
same ones they us usually did then I might not notice and therefore make mistakes. Not sure if that's similar
to what you're describing with them giving you different kinds of stuff to do which makes for more mistakes. I
suppose less day dreaming would help maybe? My job last fall I was genuinely scared I'd get let to for
making mistakes. It worked out though and I'm not at all worried right now. Like you said though, if you had to
get another job it would be annoying but this isn't your dream job anyway.

I need to look up this krashen thing now since I haven't heard of it.
kraemder on 29 March 2014

I wish most of my tasks were routine enough for me to be able to do them on autopilot. The kind of confusion I encounter at my work is usually caused by having to coordinate the negotiations of two or more completely different contracts with several banks, while also having to mail documents requested by other banks and order other documents from yet more banks. It's only after the official working day is over that I get the time to sift through those documents received from other banks in order to catalogue their info in our electronic database. As for daydreaming, I'm already in the worst position possible in that regard, seeing as how my workplace (including my computer screen) is the only one in the office that's fully in the line of sight of my boss. Although I do get the time to check Twitter on my phone whenever I have to walk to another part of the building. If I didn't get the occasional opportunity to do that I'm afraid I'd overheat and burn out completely. But there I go, whining and making up excuses for myself again! There's really no need to do that right now, since it's actually been a relatively good day today, and the week has been okay overall. Sure, we did miss the deadline, but at least my boss seems to have understood my situation and doesn't seem to be planning to scapegoat me. Next Monday's probably gonna be tough, but we'll cross that bridge when we get there.

Anyway, the Spring anime season has begun and I've started a new "first impressions" series on Lang-8. http://lang-8.com/253934/journals/45658240644688610299378377 032178048612/2014%25E5%25B9%25B4%25E6%2598%25A5%25E6%259C%25 9F%25E3%2582%25A2%25E3%2583%258B%25E3%2583%25A1%25E7%25AC%25 AC%25E4%25B8%2580%25E5%258D%25B0%25E8%25B1%25A1%25E3%2580%25 81%25E3%2583%2591%25E3%2583%25BC%25E3%2583%25881?t=correcti& #111;n#journal_comment_9359358704065252686887776483715258992 0 - Here 's the post I submitted last night. Just like I planned at the end of the previous "first impressions" series, I wrote the two reviews in this post as soon as I finished watching the respective episodes. I think my eloquence suffered a bit due to me rushing with the post, not wanting to deviate from my newly normalized sleeping schedule. Well, at least it doesn't seem like that caused me to make many outright errors.

Anyway, I'll write a more detailed post about my learning activities this week at some point during the weekend. Right now I've still got six winter season finales to go through. Time for another binge!

Oh, almost forgot - one of the series I discussed in my post, 僕らはみんな河合荘, already has Japanese subs on kitsunekko. Although I can't exactly give this series my endorsement just yet..
vonPeterhof on 04 April 2014

Here are parts http://lang-8.com/253934/journals/26658031381620532803665260 2042425971068 - two and http://lang-8.com/253934/journals/11304675365594652809860234 7083724725860 - three of the "first impressions" series. This time around I'm actually trying not to take up as many series as I did the last couple of seasons. Not sure if I'm doing a good job with eight series on my viewing list after four days of the new season.

Anyway, due to the workload on the last day of March I ended up skipping a lecture for the first time. I got its recording and handouts though, so I'll study it at some point. I'm glad that I didn't skip Wednesday's lecture, since we were doing learning games. Other than that I managed to get a bit more studying done this week than the previous one, including all the activities for modern and ancient Greek. Although I still didn't manage to fit in business Japanese - I guess I wont be able to until I'm done with the anime premieres and the "first impressions" series.
vonPeterhof on 06 April 2014

I wanna sign up for a lecture like what you're doing. It's sounds fun for a Japanese language nerd. I thought it
would be like a one time thing or one weekend thing where you exchanged some ideas and then did some
networking but this sounds like a course in its own right.
kraemder on 07 April 2014

I guess it sort of is. They're even going to hand out certificates at the end! Those don't count as proper qualifications, but still. If I had to complain about something about this lecture series, it's that whenever we get to try out the classroom activities for ourselves most of the time we play the role of students rather than teachers, essentially just doing what one would normally do in an ordinary language class. I've never taken Japanese classes, but I've done pretty similar exercises in English, Kazakh, German and Norwegian classes I've taken before, so I'm hardly practising anything new. There are mock classes scheduled later in the course though, so I will probably get the chance to try out the techniques we're learning about. I'm also looking forward to next Monday's lecture, where we'll be talking about teaching the kana and kanji. As someone who started out with the Heisig method I'm genuinely curious about the "conventional" methods of non-native kanji instruction. Our lecturer should also provide an interesting perspective, since he's currently teaching Japanese at Russian universities, but has previously taught Japanese in Hong Kong and South Korea, where students of Japanese don't need to be taught the basics of Chinese characters. He should know a lot about the differences between teaching the Japanese writing system to students with and without a Sinospheric background (the differences that Heisig's books aim to minimize).

I managed to write http://lang-8.com/253934/journals/23017563041894480014558544 3223399992711 - one lang-8 entry during the week. I wonder if the lack of corrections means that there are no noticeable mistakes, or just that I posted it at such an inconvenient time (around 5 AM in Japan Standard Time) that no one who'd bother to correct it managed to notice it.

Another thing I did this week is register for July's N1. I had all the documents except for the application form ready on Monday, but only managed to hand everything in on Friday, since Monday is the Japan Foundation's Moscow office's day off and on Wednesday there were some traffic delays, so I barely even made it in time for the lecture. Now I guess the game is truly on..
vonPeterhof on 12 April 2014

I post in your log almost as much as you do =p. Well, the conventional method for learning kanji at my local community college is really a joke but seems to work miraculously. To an extent. My teacher gives out a "kanji packet" for the semester. I kind of like it actually but it's no substitute for doing RTK. I'll send you an email with a link if you want to download it to take a look for yourself. We pretty much learn 10 kanji per week or so throughout the semester. He doesn't really teach it - he just has it on that weeks kanji list and we're supposed to learn it. In whatever way works for us. For that day's lesson, at the beginning of class, he calls on someone to read a sentence from the kanji packet with that day's kanji. So you look pretty dumb if you can't read it. That's about it.

RTK is a godsend. I'm not sure if they teach kanji radicals or anything in 3rd year Japanese at a University but 1st and 2nd year Japanese they barely touch on it. They might point out some easy stuff like water primitive on the left and the 心 primitives but that's about it.
kraemder on 12 April 2014

I'm finally back here, thanks to https://twitter.com/emk_langs/status/457557449084780544 - emk's latest update . My Mac OS X 10.9.2 has resisted all my attempts to fix the problem - not only did I have to learn about how to find the hosts file, I actually finally learned where the Terminal is, and all for nothing! Even following the tips http://blogote.com/how-to/duplicate-edit-locked-hosts-file-m ac-osx-lion/15895/ - here did nothing - even after saving the changes in the Terminal the actual hosts file stays exactly the same as before, reboot or no reboot. Well regardless, at least I can read other people's posts now, so it's cool (the ability to make posts of my own is secondary, since I wouldn't have had much time to write updates this week anyway).

Anyway, thanks for the file, kraemder. In my own musings on ways of teaching Japanese in a classroom setting I have actually thought about taking such a laissez-faire approach to "teaching" kanji as possibly the most efficient (or at least the least inefficient) method. Unfortunately, we had to breeze through the kanji teaching lecture really quickly, since we were a bit behind on our curriculum and the teacher really wanted to start the topic of teaching strategies for specific textbooks. He basically just had us discuss the various difficulties learners encounter when learning kanji and listed a number of exercises for specific difficulties without going into detail about the overall strategy.

The first lecture on teaching with みんなの日本語 was pretty interesting though. The teacher actually expressed quite a few disagreements with the book's approach (e.g. that it uses kanji from day one, but never drops the furigana, or that it sometimes gives examples of alternative usage without really explaining what the difference between the two variants is) and how to work around its weaknesses. But the part of the lecture that really stuck with me is when the discussion somehow veered into the subject of pitch accent. I actually got to witness the amazed reactions of Japanese people who found out about the concept of pitch accent and Japanese pitch patterns for the first time. And then the teacher asked if anyone knew about the common pitch patten in the construction "[country name]+人", and I restated my observation that I once mentioned on Josquin's log, that regardless of where the accent is in the country name it always shifts to the mora right before the "人", except for 日本人 where it falls on じ (I should have asked him if it works the same with other placenames ending in ん - 朝鮮, 香港, ベナン, etc.).

In lang-8 news, I've written http://lang-8.com/253934/journals/66864696391069478191348510 756398827169 - two http://lang-8.com/253934/journals/16278253659661914580100678 3212704204437 - new entries since the last time. I also finally got a very detailed correction on entry 4, where the person correcting asked me to explain what I meant in a couple of places. Explaining my word choice actually turned out to be a challenging exercise in and of itself, but I think I got him to see what I was trying to say.

Today I'm planning to write the final entry in my "first impressions" series with just two series left. I ended up watching fewer first episodes than last season, but once I write that last entry I will have written about everything I've watched, which I didn't manage to do last time. I've also dropped more series than last time, so now I'm following "only" 14 new series, in addition to two ongoing ones. The situation with Japanese subs is much better than last season, with the following new shows having subs up on kitsunekko: 悪魔のリドル, 僕らはみんな河合荘, 魔法科高校の劣等生, 一週間フレンズ。, 龍ヶ嬢七々々の埋蔵金, シドニアの騎士, マジンボーン, ブレイドアンドソウル, 蟲師続章, 金田一少年の事件簿R, ジョジョの奇妙な冒険スターダストクルセイダース, ハイキュー!!, ベイビーステップ, ピンポン THE ANIMATION, オレカバトル&ドラゴンコレクション, ヒーローバンク, カードファイト!! ヴァンガードレギオンメイト編, デュエル・マスターズ VS, レディジュエルペット, プリティーリズム・オールスターセレクション and 遊☆戯☆王ARC-V. Ugh, all that katakana makes my eyes hurt :)

I've also purchased a new learning resource - a book called 歌から学ぶ日本語. In this book various grammar points are illustrated via song lyrics. Naturally, the book comes with a CD with 21 songs. I actually bought it primarily in order to learn the songs rather than the grammar points - you never know when you end up in a situation where you have to sing along to a song everyone in Japan knows, or when you need to impress some Japanese people at a karaoke night :)
vonPeterhof on 20 April 2014

vonPeterhof wrote:

The first lecture on teaching with みんなの日本語 was pretty
interesting though. The teacher actually expressed quite a few disagreements with the
book's approach (e.g. that it uses kanji from day one, but never drops the furigana, or
that it sometimes gives examples of alternative usage without really explaining what
the difference between the two variants is) and how to work around its
weaknesses.

I presume his objection is that they don't drop the furigana later on, not that they
introduce kanji from the off? I did find the kanji quite daunting at first, but now I
wouldn't have it any other way.

I'd agree that it doesn't do a good job of explaining the nuances and the different
usages. However, at the time that I was working through みんなの日本語初級 there was enough
to learn and it was all quite overwhelming. Throwing in various similar phrases and
expressions and trying to teach the differences when I hadn't properly understood the
basics would have been overpowering, for me at least.

My fix for this is to work through other books too: 新完全マスター N3 文法, for example.
That's very much more exam-focussed (rather than "everyday language" focussed) but it
does gather together similar points and try to tease out the differences. It's not
always successful, but even when all I get out of it is that A and B are similar but
different, then I know I need to go and look elsewhere for further elucidation.

I'd be interested to know what your lecturer's suggestions are for shoring up the
shortcomings of みんなの日本.

dampingwire on 20 April 2014

dampingwire wrote:

I presume his objection is that they don't drop the furigana later on, not that they introduce kanji from the off?

Both actually, although he didn't go into detail why he considered the former a bad thing. He didn't suggest a workaround for that one either, but for the furigana on words that are already supposed to be familiar he suggested giving students additional reading materials without them, so that they can learn not to depend on that crutch. He also said that sometimes he actually goes to the trouble of whiting out the furigana on the handouts he gives to his students.

As for the nuances in alternative phrases, he simply recommended being prepared for questions from the students. Before starting each new module the teacher needs to look through all the material in it, take note of points that might be explained insufficiently in the book and might prompt questions, then do some research if you don't already know how to respond to them. This doesn't only apply to grammar points, since there are some cultural references, both all-Japanese (歌舞伎, パチンコ) and Kansai-specific (伏見, 甲子園), that some students might be unfamiliar with. He also warned about the overall structure of the grammatical topics, since many early dialogues make use of grammatical structures that are only explained in detail much later. He especially recommended introducing the -ました earlier than the book does, since that makes it much easier to engage students in small talk (昨日は何をしましたか。; 朝ご飯に何を食べましたか。, etc.).

Anyway, I've completed http://lang-8.com/253934/journals/18608714217223545166980327 0107821968490 - that lang-8 entry . Now I can finally stop writing about anime and actually watch some :) I'm also thinking of taking a short break from writing in Japanese by starting to write in Greek and resuming writing in German.
vonPeterhof on 20 April 2014

I'm finally up to speed with the ongoing anime series, in spite of both Crunchyroll and Daisuki throwing out extra new series unexpectedly, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPw-3e_pzqU - after I had written the "final" entry in my first impression series . I'll probably write about those two series next weekend, which will be long on account of May Day being a public holiday in Russia.

In reading news, I'm finally done with the novel 時をかける少女. I found the 2006 anime movie (which is more of a retelling/stealth sequel than an adaptation) more interesting, but the book was pretty easy to follow, with some more challenging scientific vocabulary scattered here and there. Now I thought I'd challenge myself with some grown-up literature, and what better place to start than Tatsuo Hori's http://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/001030/card4803.html - 風立ちぬ , the novel that Miyazaki's last movie is (rather loosely) based on?

A couple of weeks ago I figured out a way to tackle my politeness level dropping problem. I often think in Japanese, and whenever I'm alone in my room I sometimes think out loud for additional speaking practice. I've decided that while I'll still think in plain Japanese inside my head, whenever I think out loud it'll be in 丁寧語. Judging from my performance in recent lectures I think it's already bearing fruit, in that I've become better at controlling my output and thinking about how I'll end the sentence in advance. Maybe at some later point I'll try to do the same exercise with 尊敬語 and 謙譲語 (the tricky bit will be deciding where to draw the line between 外 and 内 when I'm talking to myself).

In addition to catching up on anime, reading and FSI Greek, this week I've been busy preparing the documents for my Greek visa application, which I'll try to submit next week. Because of this, as well as my workload (which didn't seem to diminish much even during my boss's vacation), I'm a bit behind on the JLPT preparation exercises. I've scheduled them with a few spare weeks to account for this possibility, and I've already scheduled my vacation for the last two weeks before the test, but still, I've always been rather uncomfortable with schedule slippage. I think I'll try to get some easier stuff done before going to bed tonight.
vonPeterhof on 27 April 2014

In spite of all the extra days off work these past two weeks I still didn't find the time to write anything, either here or on lang-8. The workload on the days when I did have to go work was so severe I had to spend much of my days off catching up on my slipping studying schedule, in addition to the requisite visits to relatives. In the end I decided not to write that anime entry on lang-8 - there isn't much to write about in those two anime I mentioned above anyway. I will probably start working on that Greek entry next week, since I did get my visa, so the trip is now all set.

Not much else to write about, other than stuff coming up in my lectures. On May 19 I'll be observing an actual Japanese language class, and on June 06 I'll be giving a 20 minute mock class on the topic of the "～を（数量）ください" structure. Everyone is going to write up a lesson plan and then "teach" the class with our fellow lecture attendees acting out the role of students.
vonPeterhof on 11 May 2014

Now it's been more than two weeks since my last update. Funny, when I was first considering starting a log my biggest concern was that it would turn into an excuse to procrastinate from my studies. Now it seems like it's become just another chore. Well, it's not like updating my log is the only thing I didn't manage to do the other week - I was also behind on most of my reading and nearly all of my JLPT preparations. The situation at work isn't quite as hectic as before, but it's still pretty busy, and having to make some changes to my commuting arrangements also messed up my studying plans a bit. Last week I made up on most of the stuff I had missed, but I'm still a bit behind on the JLPT preparations. I guess I'll be spending my Greek vacation buried in study materials.

I'm guessing I won't be writing an update this coming weekend either, because I need to prepare my mock class next Wednesday. Yesterday we had the first four students giving mock classes, and they all put so much effort into planning the lesson structure and designing study materials that the bar has now been set pretty damn high. The flow of their speech also made me very self-conscious of my own stilted spoken Japanese. My upcoming mock class will be literally the longest single interval of time I've ever had to speak Japanese for, so I'm already getting stage fright just from thinking about it. I'm certainly going to do my best not to screw up too hard.

Speaking of the lectures, the library where they take place always has a stand where old editions of foreign language-related books are given away for free. Most of them are linguistics papers and study materials for various languages, with an occasional novel in a European/former Soviet language or two. This time around when I glanced at the stand my eye was caught by a pocket-sized paperback edition of Yasunari Kawabata's 山の音. Needless to say I immediately grabbed it (I also couldn't resist taking a small http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fering - Fering -Russian dictionary). So I guess now I got my hands on my first physical novel in Japanese! What's more, when I opened the book it turned out to be written in pre-reform orthography, even though the novel's serialization began in 1949 and the edition of the book I have was published in 1958. I had heard that when the reform was launched in 1946 many publishers resisted the limitations on kanji use which led to their eventual loosening, but apparently some authors and publishers continued writing in completely unreformed kana and kanji long after the war. Reading it is going to be a bit challenging, but it seems like the kind of challenge I actually enjoy.
vonPeterhof on 27 May 2014

So instead of writing the lesson plan, practising my teaching or making learning props I have spent most of today watching anime, both current and old, as well as going out for a big meal at my favourite Japanese restaurant (I couldn't afford not to go - yesterday was payday, and I had a coupon that was about to expire on Sunday...). I feel like I'm a university student again! Might as well write a brief update while we're at it :D

I managed to complete my reading goals for the week by now (for Japanese; not so much for Greek). The first chapter of 山の音 was really enjoyable, mainly because it offered a somewhat humorous look at some quirks of the Japanese language - politeness levels, homophones and near-homophones, as well as the notorious pitch accent. I'm also almost done with the JLPT grammar book - all that's left is the last revision test. I'm really behind on the vocabulary book though - at this pace I might end up having to cram nearly a quarter of the book's material within the last two weeks of preparation.

Okay, it's not like I didn't do anything for the mock class - at least I read through the material I need to cover in Minna no Nihongo! The overall structure of the lesson seems straightforward: quickly revise the basic numerals, introduce the -つ numerals, demonstrate the counter 枚 using pictures or props (possibly also introduce 台, if there's enough time), practice them by asking questions, then end by having the students do a short "at the store" dialogue in pairs. I guess tomorrow I'll have to plan the specifics.
vonPeterhof on 01 June 2014

Good luck on the Japanese presentation. If seems really backward being a
japanese teacher and explaining Japanese etc. and being the authority.
But you seem to be on a pretty high level so I'm sure it'll be good. I
hope your accent is better than mine (●´□`)♡
kraemder on 01 June 2014

A bit late, but thanks, kraemder! And yeah, it does feel a bit weird, especially when most of the others in the class are either native speakers or Russians who had been studying to become teachers of Japanese (including a few who have already taught some actual classes). Although it's somewhat offset by the fact that the course is on teaching beginner-level Japanese, so we are expected to keep our language in the simpler range. In fact, it's quite a challenge, trying to maintain that simple level when explaining a grammar point or the usage of a word.

I just got back from the mock class. Since I'm really tired right now (and since there's an unexpectedly large number of Anki reviews waiting for me...) I'm gonna leave the detailed write-up of the experience till later, but for now suffice it to say that I did... sorta okay for someone with no teaching experience whatsoever. The consensus in the classroom appeared to be that I had a surprisingly good idea, but the execution of said idea was rather sloppy.
vonPeterhof on 04 June 2014

In the "best" traditions of university students, I ended up doing the majority of the work for the mock class the night before (and I only finished making the props fifteen minutes before the class). I did have the structure of the introductory part of the class planned on Monday (revise basic numbers 1-10 while writing them out on the whiteboard, then introduce the つ numbers by showing pictures and writing furigana over the numbers), but I couldn't think of a good classroom activity to follow it. At first I was planning on making up dialogues for pair work, in a store or something, but I couldn't think of anything sufficiently interesting to get the students involved. Then, late on Tuesday night it struck me - if the structure that I'm supposed to teach is for asking for certain quantities of something, then why not just have everyone ask everyone for certain quantities of something? This "brilliant" thought led me to plan a game:

1) I make lots of little cards with each one having one of a limited number of items drawn on it;
2) I randomly distribute the cards to students, so that everyone gets the same number of cards;
3) I set the students of how many items they need to get (e.g. students in the first row need to get 10 apples, second row - 10 bags, etc.) by asking them from other students;
4) Students go around asking each other for the needed items, using the following pattern: ____は、ありますか。/ はい、あります。/ ＿＿＿は、いくつありますか。/ ＿＿は、Xつあります。/ ＿＿をXつください/ はい、どうぞ。

According to what we learned about interactive activities this would have been perfect: all the students are involved, there is a bit of a competitive element, and the completion of the activity leads to a sense of achievement. As I said before, everyone seemed to agree that it was a great idea. The realization though...

I guess my biggest problem was the fact that I did everything in the last moment. That left me very little time for planning and practically none for practice. Since I only made the actual cards in the last moment I couldn't didn't manage to arrange them in decks to be handed out to each student. Heck, when I entered the classroom I didn't even know how many cards I'd have to hand out, since I wasn't sure how many students would be present. My mock class was second, so I frantically did all those calculations and redistributions while the first person was talking, and by the time I was supposed to start two latecomers whom I hadn't taken into account had appeared in the classroom. Since there was no time to rearrange the cards I had to exclude them from the game. Due to this I got pretty nervous and forgot to write the furigana on the whiteboard during the introductory part. When it came to the actual game I messed up the card distribution and accidentally excluded another person from the game. Then I found it really difficult to explain the rules of the game. Thankfully, the game itself seemed to go pretty smoothly, at least for the people whom I managed not to exclude.

When the game was over I realized that I had more than five minutes leftover. The teacher told us to always have an activity up your sleeve precisely for these cases. I did have one, but it was probably not the best idea - introducing some new material. You see, the chapter of みんなの日本語 that my topic was taken from also introduces the 枚 and 台 counters in addition to つ (yeah, there's also 人, but you can't really say __をX人ださい). I thought of introducing at least 枚 as well, but then I thought that introducing the つ and the dialogue needed for the game would take too much time, so I decided to put the introduction of 枚 into overtime, thinking that there won't be any time left over anyway. Needless to say, when I actually ended up having to do it my explanation of it was pretty sloppy. I guess I learned that planning and practice are not to be neglected.
vonPeterhof on 08 June 2014

You managed to exclude students from the game? What? How? It sounds entertaining lol. Your idea sounds good in practice too. I think that just like anything, people benefit a lot from experience. An experienced teacher will just reuse material over and over so there's no careless mistakes like excluding people.. (I'm a bit baffled at this).

I remember teaching English to a bunch of Germans for my CELTA certificate and I was a nervous wreck and it was my native language. Just like you I was being graded on my presentation and that really doesn't help things.

I'm sure there's lots of stuff you could do to kill time if you have 5 minutes or something. Teachers at JOI tend to just do kanji practice, which I enjoy. My teacher at the community college had a fun game we did in my class where you have to think of a word that uses the last letter of the word that the last person said. There's a time limit. The teacher had us choose the time limit and I think we did 10 seconds or something. We didn't keep score or anything. If the word you said ended with a ん then you failed (how many words start with ん after all). So if the guy before me said アパート for example, then I had to say a word that started with と or ト. (yes katakana was fine in our version of the game and you could even reuse previous words if you changed the conjugation). In our version, you could reuse previous words without even changing the conjugation if it were a new round. So if someone got a wrong response then it reset. Considering a lot of the students were pretty weak in vocab our rules were pretty generous but you could change them to make it harder. I got one wrong response.. 意見 .. it just came out and I didn't even think that it ended with a ん.
kraemder on 09 June 2014

kraemder wrote:

My teacher at the community college had a fun game we did in my class
where you have to think of a word that uses the last letter of the word that the last
person said.

That sounds like しりとり.

I'd like to try it sometime, but in a class of one I'm not sure it would be that much
fun. Anyone know of an online version?
dampingwire on 09 June 2014

Phew, looks like I've survived until my two weeks off! In less than an hour I'll be heading for the airport to catch a plane to Germany, spend a day with my relatives there, and then depart for Greece on Sunday morning. Since I'll be either too busy or too exhausted to update during the weekend I'll do it now.

Looks like I am gonna be cramming a lot of N1 vocab studying into these upcoming two weeks after all - there's two and a half modules left to cover. Plus the module I'm on right now is probably the most annoying of them all - オノマトペ. All those ぐたぐたs, てくてくs and ちらほらs that have tripped me up harder than any kanji compounds in previous tests. Even if the phonetic symbolism for a certain word from this category does make some sort of sense to me, there's always a few that sound pretty close to it and cause confusion when I encounter them in multiple-choice questions. I guess there's no other way than hard memorization for most of them.

Last weekend I was on a roadtrip from Saint Petersburg to Moscow. When I ran out of things to do and got bored of reading the books I've been reading for the past few weeks I (re)started reading ゼロの使い魔, that light novel that I tried to read more than a year ago. Reading a page or two a day, I hadn't even got through the first chapter by the time I stopped reading it due to becoming too busy and unmotivated. This time, after countless newspaper columns and several chapters of 風立ちぬ and 山の音, completing the first chapter was like a leisurely stroll in the park. That reminder of my progress was really motivating - makes me think that I might be able to read "grown-up" stuff just as easily at some point... eventually... a long, long time from now...
vonPeterhof on 20 June 2014

An update from sunny Crete! Having a great vacation so far. I did manage to make a short trip to Düsseldorf during my stay in Essen. Turns out that there's a whole street, if not neighbourhood, filled with shops, cafés and other establishments servicing the local Japanese expat community. I visited a small bookstore hoping to buy a novel. Unfortunately, they didn't have light novels in stock, and the Haruki Murakami novels were all sold in volumes rather than single books (1Q84 was divided into six volumes), which made me feel stingy about buying them. I didn't want to leave empty-handed, so I picked up volume 8 of 進撃の巨人 and completed it on the plane to Crete. I also bought Sophocles' Electra in Ancient Greek during an excursion to Santorini. Not sure if Sophocles is the best author to start reading Ancient Greek, but the selection of Ancient books in the store wasn't that great and again, I didn't want to leave empty-handed (while I'm more of an e-book person, I do think that paper books are the best souvenirs).

Regarding my JLPT preparations, I've finished the revision tests in the grammar book, so now all I'm doing for grammar study is looking through A Dictionary of Advanced Japanese Grammar and mining it for sentences illustrating grammar points not covered by Core 6k and the JLPT1 grammar study guide. As for vocabulary, until today I haven't been reading any new pages or doing any new exercises, but instead I've been adding sentences to Anki. In the weeks preceding my vacation on most days I didn't have the time to add all new words I encountered in the vocabulary book to Anki, so I just wrote them down and added them whenever I had some free time. Now that I've caught up I've decided to complete one sub-module per day, doing all exercises and adding all words into Anki on the same day. Today I've finished reading the second sub-module on オノマトペ and now I'm adding the new words (almost thirty of them; hopefully the other sub-modules will have fewer words unfamiliar to me). If everything goes according to plan I'll be done with the study material in the book by next Wednesday, right on time to start writing about my first impressions of the Summer season anime.

And finally, about the results of my Greek studies. Perhaps if I weren't studying for the JLPT I might have been able to reach a more comfortable level where I'm confident enough to proceed with basic conversations in Greek rather than defaulting to English most of the time. But even with my meagre skills I have been able to have a few enjoyable conversations and impress a couple of locals. The guy running a public restroom on Santorini even let me use it for free just for asking him "Πόσο κάνει;" and responding with "Λίγο" to his "Μιλάς Ελληνικά;" - my Greek saved me 50 cents :D
vonPeterhof on 26 June 2014

Having finished cramming the N1 vocabulary I have started the Summer season with http://lang-8.com/253934/journals/28427330536529193312424531 4657291537514 - two new anime . When writing this entry I started thinking that I might be overusing the conjunctive が (...ですが、..., ...ますが、..., etc.), and somewhat randomly replaced two of them with けど. Two people changed them back to が, so I guess けど really won't fly in written language. I remember in an earlier entry I did something similar by changing one of the verbs' て-form to a ます-stem, while leaving the て-form in all other continuing/sequential action verbs intact. Back then nobody called me out on this inconsistency. The ます-stem is supposedly more formal, but maybe the difference doesn't have as much to do with the written-spoken language divide in this case. I distinctly remember hearing this kind of form-mixing in songs - off the top of my head, in Queen's Teo Torriatte (Let Us Cling Together) :

手を取り合ってこのまま行こう
愛する人よ
静かな宵に光を灯し
愛しき教えを抱き

But then, in songs and poems meter and rhythm often take precedence over grammatical consistency, so maybe it would be less acceptable in a piece of prose.
vonPeterhof on 03 July 2014

Finished N1 about an hour ago. I feel like I did better than last time on the fist part (vocab+grammar+reading)
- at least I didn't leave any questions unanswered this time round. The vocabulary was still my weakest bit,
with plenty of words that the preparation book didn't cover. Of course, since there is no exhaustive N1 word
list under the current system, that was to be expected. The grammar bit went surprisingly smoothly though,
reading the old JLPT1 grammar guide and skimming the Advanced Dictionary certainly paid off. Thanks to
speeding through grammar and finishing reading when there was about 10 minutes left I had enough time to
fill in some blanks and rethink a couple problematic answers in the vocab section.

The listening part didn't feel much more difficult than last time. However, the fifth part (long talks) was
disappointing - I did take notes, but all that did for me was help rule out one or two wrong answers in each
question, leaving me with no clue as to which of the remaining answers to choose from. Still, I'm somewhat
confident in the section, and cautiously optimistic about the test as a whole. Now all that's left is to wait until
September for the results.

Right now I'm not entirely sure about how I will structure my studies between now and the result
announcement. Since I've added a very large amount of new cards in the past couple of weeks, and since the
first week at work after the vacation is probably going to be a busy time, even continuing the Anki reviews
feels like it will be too much of a chore. Because of this I'm going to suspend all of my (modern) Japanese-
related decks at least until next weekend, when I'll think more carefully about how to go about studying
Japanese in the meantime. I'm still going to keep watching the new anime premiers and trying to write about
them ( http://lang-8.com/253934/journals/33246565128280395888977621 1874375077626 - here's the
latest entry ), as well as reading novels and manga.
vonPeterhof on 06 July 2014

Wrote http://lang-8.com/253934/journals/11030666645458492760419245 2433381644940/2014%25E5%25B9%25B4%25E5%25A4%258F%25E6%259C%2 59F%25E3%2582%25A2%25E3%2583%258B%25E3%2583%25A1%25E3%2581%2 5AE%25E7%25AC%25AC%25E4%25B8%2580%25E5%258D%25B0%25E8%25B1%2 5A1%25E3%2580%2581%25E3%2581%259D%25E3%2581%25AE3?t=correcti on#journal_comment_168886630386541372873865025629787066 106 - another entry last night. While reading the corrections made by the last user (as of now, that user is mix) I ended up slapping myself of the forehead twice. The first time was because I had spent something like twenty minutes trying to structure the first sentence with the word 初めて somewhere near the end, only to give up and replace it with 最初. For some reason it never occurred to me to use it to modify the verbal phrase 大人気となった instead of the noun phrase 日本のアニメ.

The second time was in the very next sentence, where I missed a perfect opportunity to use のです. I remember the teacher of the lectures I attended mention a couple of times, that there are three little things that, if used correctly, automatically make your Japanese sound much more fluent. Those are は, という and のだ/のです. Having read a lot about (and struggled with) the distinction between は and が and the usage of は with things other than the subject, I could see his point about the first one, but not the other two. Now I'm starting to see what he meant with respect to the third one. The extra nuance the explanatory の adds to the phrase 観なかったのですから feels inconsequential to me as a non-native speaker, but its addition makes the sentence that much more natural to a native speaker. I still don't get what's so special about という. I wish I had asked him to elaborate when I had the opportunity.

Speaking of which, I actually met him yesterday at the test - he was proctoring in the other N1 room. There were also at least two other attendees of the lectures taking the N1. I talked to one of them in the break between the sections and complained about my lack of opportunities to converse in Japanese. She told me that the Moscow State University's Japanese Centre hosts monthly all-Japanese meetups, where anyone can come to converse with the Japanese speakers living and studying here on various topics. Unfortunately, this month's meetup already happened this past Friday, but now I'm looking forward to the one in July (although I'm not sure if they'll still be doing in in July, since most Japanese exchange students will presumably be away on holiday). I hope the teacher attends those meetups as well; if he does I can ask him all about という :)
vonPeterhof on 07 July 2014

I was focusing on という a while back.. still haven't really gotten it. I ended up just saying it at every opportunity and that somehow made me feel more という knowledgeable. It makes what you're saying a little longer so that kind of translates into more polite is my guess and maybe you sound smarter too? I'll keep an eye out for a good explanation.

I feel smarter when I say it at least.
kraemder on 08 July 2014

I'm still not an expert on という, but I've learned a few uses of it.

For example, you use it to report news or facts.

私はジョンさんが明日ここに来るという知らせを聞いた。
I heard that John is coming here tomorrow.

彼女は結婚するという理由で仕事を辞めました。
She quit her job because (of the fact that) she is getting married.

Also for feelings. I can't think of a good example sentence right now, but という is often used with 感じ.
kujichagulia on 08 July 2014

Oh, that's right! I guess I was only thinking of a very narrow usage of という, simply stating what something is called. The more abstract uses are indeed a tricky thing to grasp. I guess the fact that I couldn't even think of them off the top of my head shows how far I am from a native-like grasp of those nuances. And, to drive the point home, apparently my http://lang-8.com/253934/journals/13606454768019709032921569 1615884349178 - latest post has a few places that could have used an extra は. I guess I still need much more practice.

Edit: I have now responded to one of the editors of the Lang-8 post linked to above to clarify what I meant. In my response I tried to practice using という. I think I might have gone a little overboard by using it four times in two sentences :)
vonPeterhof on 08 July 2014

vonPeterhof wrote:

Edit: I have now responded to one of the editors of the Lang-8 post linked to above to clarify what I meant. In my response I tried to practice using という. I think I might have gone a little overboard by using it four times in two sentences :)

Well, hey... practice makes perfect, right? :)
kujichagulia on 09 July 2014

While this week at work wasn't as hard as I had expected, I still didn't dedicate much effort to either planning my language studies or actually doing them. The burnout and wanderlust from the test preparations seem to have surfaced fully. It's a good thing that I suspended all my Japanese Anki cards though, since now I have so few cards to review each day I complete them all during my commutes. I have long forgotten what it felt like to watch anime without doing Anki reviews at the same time. I think I'll keep it that way until the results announcement; then I'll decide what to do with the cards from then on.

As for the wanderlust, while I would really like to indulge myself and do more in languages other than Japanese, I feel like it would be counter-productive to start studying a new language while I still have unfulfilled goals for Japanese. As a compromise, I've decided that I would indulge myself by refreshing my knowledge of languages I once studied or dabbled in. I actually started doing this the week before by downloading shared decks of Armenian letters and numerals. This week I followed this up by starting to re-listen to the short Eastern Armenian Pimsleur course and buying an Ilya Frank method beginners' reader with Armenian fairy tales. I've also started making Anki decks for Romanian and Yiddish (okay, I never actually studied Yiddish before, but I did learn the Hebrew alphabet and the way it's used for Yiddish, and my knowledge of German does make basic Yiddish sentences transparent to an extent). Other than that, once I feel less burned out I plan to resume regular studies of languages I put on hiatus for JLPT preparations: Kazakh, Norwegian (Nynorsk), Latin and/or Korean (I still haven't decided if I'll take them all up again, or just one or two). I have no plans to continue studying modern Greek for now, but I do intend to proceed with Ancient Greek via Assimil.

As for Japanese, I'm most definitely not going to let go of it completely for the next six or so weeks, but I am going to relax the programme a bit. In addition to the Anki suspensions, reading-wise I'm going to focus fully on manga. Perhaps now I will finally be able to catch up to the current releases of chapters of ワタモテ and resume reading one of the series I put on hold earlier (the one I'm most tempted to resume is 進撃の巨人). For listening I will still have my anime and audio dramas. For speaking practice, I'm going to check out the Moscow State University meetups when the next one comes up. As for writing, even though I'm very much behind I'll do my best to complete the first impressions series ( http://lang-8.com/253934/journals/64958817566292337198428422 350756056170 - here's the latest entry ), after which I'll probably take another break from Lang-8. While writing these entries is probably the most tiring thing I'm doing right now outside of work, it's also one of the most rewarding. I do actually feel like I'm learning something from most corrections, and I've also gained a couple of regular readers interested in my opinion.

Now we just have to wait and see if balancing all these activities will lead to even greater burnout...
vonPeterhof on 12 July 2014

http://lang-8.com/253934/journals/65530759968242275576659342 158994561676 - The latest lang-8 entry . I was planning to wrap up the series by writing about the last four shows over the weekend, but I ran into some unexpected problems with my computer. Everything appears to be fine now, but I'll have to put off finishing the entry until some time this coming week. However, I did manage to catch up to the http://www.ganganonline.com/comic/watashiga/ - fortnightly online releases of Watamote , so now I can switch to reading 進撃の巨人. Not much else to report for Japanese I'm afraid.

As for my adventures in wanderlust, I've switched from Romanian to Albanian. I've decided to stop working on Ancient Greek for now, since I noticed it was getting kinda hard working through the Assimil lessons with my level of French. When I realized that I recalled that I never actually finished any French programmes, having dropped Assimil at lesson 72 of the first course and Pimsleur at unit 11 of French II. I have been reviewing and adding Anki sentences though, so picking back up where I left off in Assimil wasn't that hard. I guess I'll get back to Ancient Greek once I'm done with French. I've also resumed playing/reading the visual novel Katawa Shoujo in French. Also, during a trip to a bookstore I bought a curious little book on Kazakh, a reprint of part 1 of P.M. Melioransky's 1894 "brief grammar of the Kazak-Kirghiz language" (back then Russians referred to both Kazakhs and Kyrgyz as "Kirghiz"; if a distinction needed to be made the former became "Kazak-Kirghiz" and the latter "Kara-Kirghiz"). I've already found a lot in there that I've never seen covered in school textbooks or other learning material for Kazakh - some information on dialectal variations, the ways the Arabic script was used for writing Kazakh before it became a fully-fledged literary language, the Kazakh-Tatar and Kazakh-Chagatai diglossia among the educated Kazakhs, etc. As a bonus, the original pre-Revolutionary Russian orthography is preserved, which makes it extra enjoyable to read.

On a somewhat related note, I've also decided to diversify my reading by actually adding literature from my native language. Since I'm on a sort-of break from Japanese, might as well make a sort-of comeback to Russian. Okay, the real reason I'm doing this is that I'm finally jumping on the "rediscovering Dostoyevsky" bandwagon. For some reason, Dostoyevsky's books appear to be having a bit of a revival in popularity right now, and many people I know have started re-reading his books they haven't touched since high school. It's even more tempting for me, since Dostoyevsky is the only Russian classical author on the school programme none of whose books I ever actually finished. But then, I decided to start from "Demons", which is missing from the school programme (probably due to it having been kinda-sorta banned during the Soviet times). And, just to be a little different, I've hunted down an e-book version of the book in the original orthography. Только Бѣсы Ѳ.М. Достоевскаго, только хардкоръ ;)
vonPeterhof on 20 July 2014

With the http://lang-8.com/253934/journals/14494040282997471406470973 2904352419578 - last http://lang-8.com/253934/journals/22428593838289181140304956 2850647300748 - two entries submitted, I'm finally done with this season's first impressions! Submitted the last one just before the end of July. I guess this would have taken even longer if I weren't on vacation when the season just started. Now I guess I know when to schedule my next vacation ;) I'll take a break from writing in Japanese at least until the end of August. I was thinking of devoting this coming week's lang-8 time to correcting other people's writings, and in the weeks after that I might try to write something in my other languages.

This season I'm watching 18 anime series (three of them are shorts, and 16 of them are ongoing). I guess the only one of them with something interesting language-wise is ばらかもん, a slice-of-life comedy about a calligraphy artist transplanted from Tokyo to a small rural community on the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Got%C5%8D_Islands - Gotō Islands . The http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%BA%94%E5%B3%B6%E5%88%97%E5% B3%B6%E6%96%B9%E8%A8%80 - local dialect is one that doesn't appear much in media, and the series features it prominently. I've had some exposure to the closely related Nagasaki dialect, but it still took some time to get used to.

Speaking of dialects, I've actually learned a few things about them over the past couple of anime seasons. Turns out that my earlier observation that elderly characters tend to speak Hiroshima dialect wasn't entirely accurate. I've had a brief conversation with a Japanese speaker in the comment section of my http://myanimelist.net/profile/vonPeterhof - MyAnimeList profile , where it was pointed out to me that the stereotypical old people speech pattern is similar, but not identical to the modern Hiroshima dialect. It's actually based on a stereotypical portrayal of Edo-era Kyoto/Kansai dialect, also known as http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B8%8A%E6%96%B9%E8%AA%9E - 上方語 . Apparently when the de facto capital moved to Edo some of the elite relocated there from the Kyoto area, resulting in a situation where it wasn't uncommon for a family in Edo to have parents speaking the Kyoto dialect and for the children to speak Edo dialect. Edo-based fiction turned that into a trope which is still used in the portrayals of old people and royalty. The reason why this stereotypical speech resembles Hiroshima dialect more than Kansai dialect is that the latter has changed since the Edo era (with じゃ shifting to や, etc.); my guess with regard to the pitch accent is that Edo-era performers eventually stopped bothering to imitate it (what little evidence we have of Heian era pitch accent seems to imply that it's the Tokyo dialect's relatively simple downstep-based pitch that's more innovative, rather than the more variegated Kansai pitch).

As for my wanderlust adventures, after having re-listened to the Eastern Armenian Pimsleur mini-course I've proceeded to Vietnamese, also adding sentences into Anki. The last time I looked into Vietnamese I remember getting the impression that it seemed to use borrowed Chinese vocabulary less frequently than Japanese or Korean (most noticeably, the Chinese numerals feature a lot less prominently). Now that I actually try to write everything down and look up the etymologies of the words I'm adding it seems like I was wrong. Apparently all the second person pronouns introduced in the course (differentiated by age and gender) come from Chinese - bà (婆), ông (翁), cô (姑), anh (英). Even some of the basic grammatical particles are Chinese borrowings: "not" is không (空) and "but" is nhưng (仍). Naturally, learning about all this really isn't helping me resist the temptation of starting to learn Mandarin and/or Cantonese. If I were seriously pursuing the goal of mastering the whole CJKV set, going in the order of J-K-V-C seems like really a bass-ackwards way of doing it, but since my Korean studies are still suspended and I don't really have any grand plans for Vietnamese, might as well dive into Chinese.

...no, I've gotta resist the temptation of new languages until at least the end of the year. I've already got enough wanderlust just dragging me between languages I've already tried learning, just adding more to the mess will nullify all my goals for Japanese. I'll just keep on refreshing those other languages and limit my serious efforts to Japanese... sigh, and French. The thing about French is that I always forget how much I love it when I'm not doing anything in it, but whenever I start it's really hard to stop myself. There are many languages whose sound I like, but French is one of the very few languages in which I genuinely enjoy the mere act of saying stuff out loud, no matter what the content (the only other ones I can think of are Danish, European Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese, but my enunciation in those three is a lot worse than in French). Plus, since right now it looks like French is my second most successful self-study project, it's about time I had something to show for it in terms of active skills. I think I have an idea for my next lang-8 entry...
vonPeterhof on 02 August 2014

After gushing about French in my last post I ended up doing very little of it this week, just some Katawa Shoujo and a news article. I've been very busy at work, so I would come home too tired to do the Assimil lessons. I've also added a few sentences in Indonesian, Lithuanian and Serbo-Croatian (mostly Croatian). Now the only languages that I've dabbled in but haven't made an Anki deck for are Swahili, Swiss German and Esperanto. I don't seem to have a Pimsleur reading booklet for Swahili, so I'll need to re-listen to the course to do that (or just take some sentences from an online phrasebook). With Swiss German it's harder, since it's not really a written language. As for Esperanto, I don't really see myself wanting to reactivate my abilities in it. So I guess I won't be adding any decks for the latter two.

I'm still taking it easy with Japanese, watching anime, reading manga and news articles, learning an occasional song. The MSU Japanese Centre still hasn't announced a meetup for August, so for now the only thing I'm looking forward to is the JLPT results announcements, which has been scheduled for August 28.
vonPeterhof on 10 August 2014

I have the Little Prince and one detective story in two different dialects of Swiss German, so you can borrow them from me ;)
Serpent on 10 August 2014

Thanks for the offer, that sounds awesome! I don't think I can fit any more reading into my schedule right now though, so maybe at some later point. But it's great to hear that such books exist. I wonder if there are any books in Schwäbisch...
vonPeterhof on 11 August 2014

I managed to do more French this week - Assimil, Katawa Shoujo, news and my first Lang-8 entry in the language (no, I'm not linking to it here). I've also finished the Vietnamese Pimsleur mini-course and started re-doing the Swahili one. I also got some unexpected exercise in German, having been asked to translate a German company's balance sheet into Russian by my father (we work at the same company, but in pretty much completely unrelated departments, so I can't really call this a work assignment). Since accounting was always my worst subject at college even in my first language, and we don't seem to have covered accounting terms in my Business German course, I end up having to look up nearly every term in both languages (or sometimes in English, if I can't find a direct German-Russian translation).

As for Japanese, I've been doing some thinking with regard to how to proceed with it until the end of the year. I've decided that what I need to work on the most is business language. In addition to working on my active skills via lang-8 and conversation practice sessions, I will start working with the two business Japanese books I bought earlier (on writing e-mails and talking on the phone), as well as conduct regular shadowing sessions with conversations from the book I finished. Even if it turns out that I've failed the last N1 and I end up needing to prepare for another one, I won't put off business Japanese until later like last time, since it's about time I developed some practical skills. The chances of me losing my job by the end of the year, if not sooner, remain pretty high, so trying to add another marketable skill to my résumé makes sense right now.

If it turns out I've passed and no longer have to study from the test preparation books, then I'll dedicate the time to another area of study - Classical Japanese. I already have a deck for it, with sentences mainly from Syromyatnikov's grammar and http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=9143&p=1 - this thread , but in September I would like to try to dedicate some time every week to serious activities in the language, like reading 源氏物語 with a side-by-side translation into modern Japanese and commentary (I recall having visited a website that had exactly that, but I don't seem to have bookmarked it). Sure, this probably won't do much to help me reach C1 and beyond in modern Japanese, but it's something that I'm genuinely interested in.
vonPeterhof on 16 August 2014

This week I've done pretty much all my regular language learning activities, but at a minimum (for example, only correcting others on lang-8, less than 20 minutes of gameplay in Katawa Shoujo, etc.). Mostly it's because I've been trying to catch up on the Monogatari anime series before they start streaming the new instalment. Seeing as how I've got two episodes left, and the first new episode is already up on daisuki.net, I've failed at this, but better late than never. I kinda want to get the original light novels now, mainly because of the clever wordplay the author uses (and also because an important prequel novel still hasn't been adapted into anime form). The anime does a surprisingly good job of both staying faithful to an original work that is almost 90% talking with nothing happening and actually making it visually interesting, but there is only this much text you can adapt into on-screen dialogue. Fair warning though: this is decidedly not a show I would recommend to those uninitiated in the world of modern anime (with the possible cautious exception of the first instalment, Bakemonogatari). The series treads such a fine line between anime at its most artistic and insightful and anime at its most vulgar and trashy, "Oh, Japan..." doesn't even begin to cover it.

I've been doing some more thinking about my studies from September until the end of the year, specifically on how much time I'm going to devote to languages other than Japanese. Next week I should be done with the short Swahili Pimsleur and the beginner French Assimil. I've decided that once I'm done with them I will re-suspend my active studies of those languages, and resume my study of Korean through Talk To Me In Korean. If I'm going to try to focus on Japanese while also giving vent to my wanderlust, at least now I'll do so with a language that's similar to it, so that I don't have to shift paradigms too much between study sessions. I've also thought of resuming Kazakh due to its similar grammar, but decided against it. While Kazakh usually doesn't seep into my Japanese, the opposite does happen and I haven't thought of a good strategy to tackle it. Maybe at some point closer to the end of the year I'll do some Turkish as preparation for http://www.how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.a sp?TID=39113 - Chung's challenge .
vonPeterhof on 24 August 2014

So, the results are out:

Result: passed

Language knowledge - 46/60
Reading - 51/60
Listening - 43/60

Total - 140/180

Vocabulary - B
Grammar - A

やったぜ！ No more JLPT for me!
vonPeterhof on 28 August 2014

Congratulations! That's not only a pass but a very good pass too! Well done!
g-bod on 28 August 2014

Congratulations from me, too!
Josquin on 28 August 2014

おめでとうございます!

Wow - no more JLPT indeed. Are you still planning to try one of those killer kanji tests?

dampingwire on 28 August 2014

Thanks, guys!

@dampingwire Well, at the moment I'm viewing taking them as less of a goal and more of a pipe dream, since I've still got plenty of more realistic and practical goals to attain. Besides, studying for those tests would require me to almost start from scratch in learning kanji, since I never actually memorized readings. I just went from Heisig straight to sentences, so I only really think of kanji in terms of the words they appear in. I'd still be willing to read through the study materials to find out more about unusual and obscure readings, but as of now this seems overwhelming and completely at odds with how I've been trying to learn all this time.
vonPeterhof on 28 August 2014

Good job on the JLPT!
nandemonai on 29 August 2014

Wow nice results. I figured you would pass but I know you were busy and distracted with other
languages too. Good job. Motivating for me to do my best too.
kraemder on 29 August 2014

vonPeterhof wrote:

Thanks, guys!

@dampingwire Well, at the moment I'm viewing taking them as less of a goal and more of a pipe
dream, since I've still got plenty of more realistic and practical goals to attain. Besides,
studying for those tests would require me to almost start from scratch in learning kanji,
since I never actually memorized readings. I just went from Heisig straight to sentences, so
I only really think of kanji in terms of the words they appear in. I'd still be willing to
read through the study materials to find out more about unusual and obscure readings, but as
of now this seems overwhelming and completely at odds with how I've been trying to learn all
this time.

I'm curious what these tests are? They're not just say daily use kanji tests but designed to
test your knowledge of obscure stuff that Japanese people might find challenging?
kraemder on 29 August 2014

I was talking about the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji_kentei - Kanken , the main test of kanji knowledge and aptitude. Unlike JLPT it's actually designed for native speakers rather than foreigners, but there's probably nothing preventing a foreigner from taking it anyway (as long as they're in Japan). Levels 10-2 (ordered in reverse, like the JLPT levels) do fall within the daily use kanji range, while level 1 tests knowledge of more than 6000 characters, as well as things like obscure readings, historical shapes, etc. The pass rate for the final level is apparently extremely low, while the practical benefit of the certificate is probably only marginal, so I seriously doubt that I'll ever actually take it. I would like to get my hands on the books they use to study for it though - I'm sure those would make for some good bedtime reading :D
vonPeterhof on 29 August 2014

I remember that I planned to take a break from writing on lang-8 in Japanese for this month, but there's been some stuff I've wanted to get off my chest for a while now, and for some reason I really wanted to do it in Japanese. So, here's http://lang-8.com/253934/journals/98723314999390174953471594 106978241642 - a wall of text I wrote about the current events in Ukraine, the public opinion in Russia, the use of patriotic rhetoric, as well as a bit of my personal opinion an all those subjects. I'm pretty sure it's the longest single post I've ever written on lang-8, as well as my first attempt at writing about politics in Japanese seriously (minor bickering in YouTube comments doesn't count :) ). I'm genuinely curious about what kind of responses I'll get (if anyone bothers to read through the whole thing), since while I'm broadly familiar with the range of opinions on the issue in the West and the former USSR, what the Japanese have been thinking about it is a bit of a mystery for me (aside from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natalia_Poklonskaya#Inter net_popularity - Natalia Poklonskaya 's viral popularity and Abe's disappointment at the failure to build an anti-Chinese coalition with Russia).
vonPeterhof on 30 August 2014

Isn't there a rule against politics on lang-8?
Serpent on 31 August 2014

Hmm, I'd never heard politics are banned from lang-8? What's it matter though, if no one complains. Ooh, you passed N1, though, that's cool.
cathrynm on 31 August 2014

I assumed there wasn't one, since I remember having read and corrected a few entries that had to do with political subjects. After having checked the rules I see that the first item on the list of prohibited activities is "Discussions regarding religion, political problems or subjects that are controversial in other countries". But then, one of the people who liked my post is a Lang-8 staff member, so maybe it wasn't political enough? Or didn't generate enough of a discussion? :) Since I didn't actually ask for people's opinions on the events in Ukraine I guess it's not surprising I didn't get any. I did get some interesting answers to my questions about the use of the word and concept of patriotism in modern Japan. But yeah, it's probably better to refrain from writing posts about controversial topics from now on.
vonPeterhof on 31 August 2014

This week I started to slowly make my way back into studying business Japanese. One activity I've started doing is shadowing one dialogue from にほんごで働く！ビジネス日本語30時間 per day. First I read the dialogue out loud while listening to the recording, then I read it without the recording, and after that I listen to it again and repeat the dialogue without reading. If the exercise includes this part, after that I also try to recite the dialogue from memory using picture clues. I've also started reading the books on business e-mails and phone calls, but so far I've only read the introductory parts that discuss basic manners and provide a primer/refresher on keigo.

In other Japanese activities, naturally anime, manga and music haven't gone anywhere. In addition to those I've resumed reading 風立ちぬ. I'm itching to start reading 傷物語, but I thought I need to finish at least one of the novels I started earlier before moving on to a new one. For now I have to get my Monogatari Series fix through audio recordings. The CDs of character songs for the anime adaptations also include long talks on the subject of the characters and their arcs between Hiroshi Kamiya, the voice of the protagonist, and whoever played the character in question. For the past few weeks I've been listening to those talks while trying to shadow Hiroshi Kamiya's lines.

However, what I've been most enthusiastic about doing this week was resuming my studies of the language of my ancestors (well, one of the languages of my ancestors). In preparation for that last Sunday I re-read the pdf files for all the Talk To Me In Korean lessons I had done before going on hiatus, and after that I decided to try watching an episode of a Korean drama with English subs. I didn't really know where to start so I just went for the title I've heard the most about - Boys Over Flowers (꽃보다 남자; an adaptation of the manga 花より男子). I couldn't help but feel a bit underwhelmed, since the quality of the show didn't seem any higher than that of the few Japanese dramas that I've watched. I was also surprised by the length of the episode, having got used to half-hour and one-hour slot TV series (although 1.5 hour slots were pretty common for old Soviet TV series), and by the next episode preview that was detailed to a spoilerific extent. Other than that it was bizarre to once again feel entirely dependent on the subs, but also pleasantly surprising to recognize Sinitic loanwords here and there, like 학교/学校 and 선배/先輩 (I also could have sworn I very distinctly heard the yakuza term けじめ in a somewhat appropriate context, but I probably just misheard).

Starting from Monday I did one Talk To Me In Korean lesson per day, getting to lesson 2 of part 2 by today. Can't say I felt comfortable listening to the test dialogue, but apparently I did get the majority of the words and constructions that had actually been introduced in the lessons, as well as manage to figure out at least one word that hadn't - 피자=pizza :)

Today I met up with some of my Korean relatives who aren't really fluent in Korean but are big fans of K-dramas. When I told them that I had watched Boys Over Flowers they said I should have chosen something else. They recommended the political drama Empire of Gold, the comedy A Gentleman's Dignity and the coming-of-age drama/comedy Reply 1997. I had heard of the latter show and was somewhat interested in watching it for its perspectives on the changes Korea underwent in the past couple of decades and the roots of modern South Korean pop culture, but I'm somewhat intimidated by the fact that it's set in Busan and features dialogue largely in the Gyeongsang dialect. While I won't be able to understand natural dialogue in any sort of dialect at this point, it's still probably better to leave the introductions to the dialects until later, when I've got some grip on at least the standard grammar.

Speaking of dialects, today I discovered that the https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%91_%D0%B C%D0%B0%D1%80 - Russian Wikipedia's article on Koryo-mar , the dialect of former Soviet Koreans, has been greatly expanded since I last read it, with detailed information on its phonological and morphological differences from standard Korean (and apparently in some cases even from the Hamgyeong dialect it's derived from). Now I think I understand why my relatives say "hangabi" instead of " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwangab - hwangab ", although I'm still puzzled as to how we got "daebi" from "dubu" (tofu). Sadly, it's pretty hard to find proficient speakers of this dialect even among my grandparents' generation.
vonPeterhof on 06 September 2014

When I made that last update almost two weeks ago I forgot to mention the fact that I had signed up for Moscow State University's Japanese Society's September meetup (they call them "Romashka Clubs", "romashka" being Russian for "camomile"; not sure why though). Well, I had, and now I just got back home from there. Aside from (quite) a few awkward moments, that was a great experience.

The meeting was held in one of the buildings on MSU's campus, in what looked like a large classroom with the desks rearranged as several tables for eight to ten people. We were seated so as to make each table's Japanese-to-Russians ratio as close to 1/1 as possible, even though the Russians were slightly in excess. Most of the people in both groups appeared to be students, but there were both Russian professionals like me and Japanese working expats. One guy at my table gave everyone his business card, which made me feel bad for not having ordered mine (although I doubt that my company would make a version with my name and job title in Japanese ;) ). We started from about an hour of talking amongst ourselves over tea and sweets, then proceeded to play a game where you stick a card with a word on your forehead and have to guess the word from the other's explanations. I humiliated myself several times throughout the game: described 戦車 by using the word 戦争 (you're not supposed to use words with the same root), failed to guess 耳栓 even though I knew exactly what they were describing (because I had never heard the word in Japanese before) and mistook 蠅 (fly) for 亀 (tortoise). Still, that was a pretty fun and thought provoking exercise.

As for the actual conversational practice, I got to practice both polite and casual language (and also finally learned what the latter is called in Japanese - ため口). Two girls from Osaka University immediately insisted on talking to them casually. One of them also kept using the や copula, which made me think they were from Osaka even before they said so. Ironically, that one turned out to be originally not from Osaka, but from Ishikawa prefecture (where they also use や instead of だ). Anyway, I think I got the hang of talking to someone else casually (which is a weird thing to need to get the hang of for me, since I normally use casual speech when thinking in Japanese), but alternating between politeness levels when switching between conversation partners is still far from smooth. There were also many times where I found myself having trouble recalling the right word. The worst part of the conversation was when the girl from Ishikawa talked about how her family and friends reacted to her going to study abroad in Russia with all the events around Ukraine unfolding. I said that I could relate to an extent, having gone to study abroad in Norway less than a month after Breivik's attacks. She hadn't heard of Breivik, so I proceeded to fumble my way through an extremely detailed account of what he did in Oslo and Utøya. Now that I think of it, that was a poor decision on my part on so many levels. Not sure how we managed to steer that conversation back to a more positive direction. Talking about language learning, travel and pop culture went much smoother, so I guess it's better to stick to that for now.

Anyway, I think this is just what I need to work on my spoken Japanese. If only these meetups took place more frequently than once a month! I'll definitely try to attend as many as possible from now on. Now, since I need to catch an early morning train tomorrow, I'm gonna have to postpone writing about other language learning activities I've engaged in over the past two weeks until some time this weekend.
vonPeterhof on 19 September 2014

Right now there are three activities that I do every day: Anki reviews, TTMIK lessons and shadowing business Japanese conversations. I've made a slight adjustment to the latter some time the other week: now when listening to the conversation for the first time instead of reading its transcript I try to write it down by hand. The usefulness of handwriting may be lower now, in the age of nearly omnipresent IMEs, but you never know when you might need to write something by hand in Japanese, and when you do you'll probably look smarter if you don't write in all-kana.

As for the Korean lessons, recently I've discovered something interesting about the infamous consonants. Like lots of other learners, I often had trouble hearing the difference between the three categories of consonants (aspirated, plain/unaspirated and tense). I could understand the theoretical phonological descriptions to an extent, but when it came to actually listening to how the speakers in TTMIK pronounced the sounds I couldn't hear anything particularly "tense" about the tense consonants, while the "unaspirated" ones often sounded totally aspirated word-initially. After having re-read the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_phonology#Cons onants - Wikipedia article's section on consonants I see that the problem might be that the traditional descriptions of those sounds don't apply to how the young generation in South Korea speaks today. It has been argued that the main distinguishing feature of the "plain" consonants in young people's speech isn't the presence or lack of aspiration or tenseness, but rather that they give the syllable they're part of a low tone, while the other two kinds of consonants produce high tone syllables. I tried to pay attention to the pitches of syllables in TTMIK's speaker's pronunciations, and that actually does seem to be the case. So the actual pronunciations of their word-initial consonants can be summarized thus:

"plain": voiceless aspirated consonant followed by a low tone vowel
"aspirated": voiceless aspirated consonant followed by a high tone vowel
"tense": voiceless unaspirated consonant followed by a high tone vowel

I had heard of how young Seoulites' speech deviates from the traditional standard language of the preceding generations, and I've actually tried to do my best to avoid acquiring those deviations in vowels. I've made an effort to retain the e/ae distinction, the monophthong pronunciations of oi and ui and the long vowels (at least in the words where I'm aware of them). With consonants though, I'm now starting to doubt if it's worth it to try to affect a more conservative pronunciation. The biggest difficulty with that is that I still have no clue how the traditional pronunciation of tense consonants is supposed to be different from that of plain old unaspirated voiceless consonants or Abkhaz ejectives. Well, if people my age in Seoul can distinguish between the three kinds of consonants without really pronouncing them the way traditional textbooks describe them, then maybe I should just take a page out of their book instead? Besides, I am planning to take on Chinese at some point, so the more practice I get with tones the better :)

Anyway, back to Japanese. In addition to the embarrassing moments at the conversational meetup, recently I got another grim reminder that having passed the N1 is still very, very far from native level comprehension. After having caught up on the Monogatari series I decided to check out something by my favourite anime screenwriter, Gen Urobuchi. The series I started watching is Fate/Zero, supposedly a very faithful anime adaptation of his eponymous light novel (itself a prequel to the visual novel Fate/stay night). Even though I've watched other stuff written by him and other anime in the genre of urban fantasy, I found it pretty damn hard to follow what was going on. After three episodes I decided it was time to revive my old method of following up each episode of the anime with a read through the corresponding parts of the source material. Well, after noticing that just reading through the character profiles from the book's introduction took me more than forty minutes my first thought was "How the f@&k does this pass for a light novel!?" Seriously, even 風立ちぬ feels like an easier read! It's about as hard as reading 山の音, but with that book I at least have the excuse of owning an edition written in pre-reform orthography! Oh well, I guess I found myself yet another challenge! But it also looks like I'll never be able to focus on one novel at a time... Yes, I'm still reading Dostoyevsky's Demons - just about to reach the middle of chapter 2 :)

One thing Fate/Zero has already given me is an opportunity to make another Japanese acquaintance. While riding the train to Saint Petersburg this morning I noticed that a young couple sitting in the row in front of me were talking in Japanese and reading a Japanese tourist guidebook to Saint Petersburg. I was slowly making my way through Fate/Zero's prologue, looking up pronunciations of nearly all words unfamiliar words, and I came across the word 喪っている. I could have looked it up with the help of handwritten Traditional Chinese input, but I thought that the Japanese couple will probably be able to tell me the pronunciation right away. When I asked them they had no idea, and had to use the Internet to look it up (it turned out to be a less common way of writing 失っている, with the loss being a person rather than a thing). However, this did work as a conversation starter, so we ended up exchanging phone numbers and promising to meet up when we're all back in Moscow. I never realized how easy it was to initiate a conversation with Moscow-based Japanese people! Running into them is still a bit tricky though..
vonPeterhof on 20 September 2014

vonPeterhof wrote:

Starting from Monday I did one Talk To Me In Korean lesson per day, getting to lesson 2 of part 2 by today. Can't say I felt comfortable listening to the test dialogue, but apparently I did get the majority of the words and constructions that had actually been introduced in the lessons, as well as manage to figure out at least one word that hadn't - 피자=pizza :)

I remember I was very upset when I listened to that test dialogue after level 1, they were speaking so fast I could barely catch anything. That sparked my resolve to listen to natural Korean much more.

Quote:

Today I met up with some of my Korean relatives who aren't really fluent in Korean but are big fans of K-dramas. When I told them that I had watched Boys Over Flowers they said I should have chosen something else. They recommended the political drama Empire of Gold, the comedy A Gentleman's Dignity and the coming-of-age drama/comedy Reply 1997. I had heard of the latter show and was somewhat interested in watching it for its perspectives on the changes Korea underwent in the past couple of decades and the roots of modern South Korean pop culture, but I'm somewhat intimidated by the fact that it's set in Busan and features dialogue largely in the Gyeongsang dialect. While I won't be able to understand natural dialogue in any sort of dialect at this point, it's still probably better to leave the introductions to the dialects until later, when I've got some grip on at least the standard grammar.

Oh no, Boys Over Flowers was one of the worst dramas I've ever seen. I dropped it by episode 5 and the only reason I lasted even that long was because it was so famous. I have no idea how it got the big ratings that it did.

I haven't seen Empire of Gold but I've heard good things about it and it's on my to-watch list. I have seen Reply 1997 and while it's a good drama I agree that you better wait a while before watching it. By coincidence, I'm watching A Gentleman's Dignity right now and it's fun enough, I suppose. The characters do talk very fast sometimes, I even have to pause to read the subtitles.

I would recommend the following dramas to you:

Secret Garden - it was one of my first dramas and I enjoyed it very much
Two Weeks - if you want to check out a good action drama
It's Okay, It's Love - this one finished only recently and I thought it was very good.
Evita on 21 September 2014

Thanks for the recommendations, Evita! I've actually decided to postpone watching K-dramas until after I'm done with the grammar lessons, but I'll definitely get to them once I dive into native materials. Right now the exposure I get to Korean outside the lessons is limited to songs by Kim Kwang-seok (of whom I only heard thanks to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRxDuRLC8d4 - that song by Die Orsons ).
vonPeterhof on 21 September 2014

Welp, it's that time again, for the last time this year - I'm kicking off a new season of anime by http://lang-8.com/253934/journals/27915845722721523044417761 0129292614284 - reviewing the first episodes of two comedies by, for and about otaku. When I reread the post almost an hour after uploading I realized that I had accidentally misspelled もっと as もった in the penultimate sentence. What I find interesting is that, as of now, only one of the people correcting and commenting seems to have understood my intention and corrected the た to と. Most of the others didn't do anything to the sentence, probably because they didn't catch the typo. One person removed the word completely, which sounds sorta weird to me, since I tend to associate the construction "Xよりもっと" with the English construction "more than X", with もっと corresponding to "more" and より to "than". Well, if a native speaker feels that より is fine on its own then I guess I have to accept that it's not the same as saying "while watching this show I laughed than when I was watching that other show" in English.

Like I said in the preface to the post, I intend to take up fewer series this time. If I manage to, I intend to spend more time on reading Japanese and, eventually, Korean. If not, then business as usual ;)

In other activities, I've made another minor change to my daily routine - since the units in しごとの日本語　電話応対基礎編 are so short I decided that I should do one per day rather than per week. This hasn't worked out so well this week, since I had to finish up lots of stuff at work due to my week off coming up, so most of the evenings I was too tired to do all my scheduled activities (Anki, shadowing conversations, TTMIK, 電話応対) and had to drop one or two of them.

Last weekend I had travelled to Saint Petersburg, then to my birthplace of Gatchina and back to Moscow. Those travels gave me lots of time to read, so I finally got through Fate/Zero's prologue and started reading Act I. Unfortunately, that's still a bit less than the material covered by the first episode, and with this week being as busy as it was I didn't manage to read any of it since my return to Moscow. My reading tempo had increased near the end of the prologue, but it's still quite slow. I'm thinking of trying to rewatch the episodes I've seen and see if I still get as little out of them as the first time. If my comprehension gets noticeably better I might try to stick with the anime, if not I'll try to read the book after all.

While taking a break from the Fate/Zero anime I started checking out another work by Gen Urobuchi, 仮面ライダー鎧武 (Kamen Rider Gaim). While I've watched several Power Rangers series as a kid (as well as the seemingly much reviled American remake of Kamen Rider, Masked Rider), this is the first time I'm watching one of the original Japanese tokusatsu series. So far it feels like at least the Power Rangers series I've watched captured the feel of the genre pretty well (I don't remember Masked Rider well enough to comment on that one). The interesting thing I've noticed so far it that this particular series is gleefully aware of its own silliness and doesn't shy away from poking fun at all the cheese for the benefit of the casual viewer, but in a way that doesn't alienate or belittle the true fans of the genre. Since it's aimed at a slightly younger audience the language is much easier to follow than Fate/Zero, but from what I hear it does get pretty dark later on (they don't call Gen http://img1.ak.crunchyroll.com/i/spire1/c0757d6f2622f8425ab7 9a79b508498d1368983089_full.jpg - the (Uro)butcher for nothing), so I guess I've found a more accessible way to get my Urobuchi fix for now.

In other news, on Monday I had the pleasure of meeting one of this forum's celebrated contributors, Solfrid Cristin, who was visiting Moscow this week. I only managed to spare the time for a quick lunch in a department store near the Red Square, but we had an interesting chat about language learning and beyond. Since my Norwegian is badly out of practice I didn't even attempt to say anything in it and we never switched to Russian either, but she did seem very confident ordering the food and interacting with strangers in Russian. Definitely more confident than I was in Norwegian even after 3+ months in Oslo. Meeting other forum members in person is certainly an interesting experience; now I'm regretting the fact that I didn't make arrangements to go to the polyglot conference next weekend (especially since I did end up taking a week off now, and Serbia is one of the few countries where we Russians don't need a visa).

My plans for the week off mostly revolve around reviewing anime on lang-8, lunching at Japanese restaurants, attending another Japanese gathering at the MSU and going to Saint Petersburg for a birthday next weekend. Now it's time to watch some more new anime.
vonPeterhof on 04 October 2014

http://lang-8.com/253934/journals/29083247708846524719343825 2328821938828 - Wrote the next entry , this time about two action/fantasy series. Apparently I keep using のですから where a simple ので would have sufficed - this is probably the fourth time I get this correction. However, I'm also (perhaps excessively) pleased with myself for having managed to work in a grammatical pattern I picked up from the Dictionary of Advanced Japanese Grammar, the "XといいYといい" I used in the first sentence of the second review.

The second show I reviewed here is a new adaptation of one of the scenarios from the Fate/Stay Night visual novel, to which Fate/Zero is the prequel. One of the commenters said that it's easier to follow than Zero, since the main character is a beginner mage learning how to use magic, so the viewers are eased into the material, whereas Zero either presupposes the knowledge or dumps it in long expository speeches. On the other hand, nearly everyone I hear from considers Zero to be a vastly superior work, with assessments of F/SN ranging from "a very interesting idea with inconsistently good execution" to "creepily misogynistic piece of trash". Oh well, since the first episode of F/SN's current adaptation has apparently already spoiled who's gonna die in Zero for me, might as well try watching them both.

Today I finished level 2 of TTMIK by listening to the test dialogue. This time I feel like I got a lot less than out of the first one: the only thing I got is that they kept saying something about learning Japanese (and, on one occasion, Chinese). Perhaps I should change my approach to making Anki cards - for the past several lessons I've rarely added more than one sentence per lesson. When adding the sentences I tend to prioritize new vocabulary over variety of uses of grammar points, and since they keep reusing the same words from lesson to lesson I don't feel the need to add many of their example sentences. This has probably resulted in insufficient exposure to the grammar points. Perhaps I should try adding more of the example sentences, or just download a shared deck based on TTMIK.
vonPeterhof on 05 October 2014

vonPeterhof wrote:

Perhaps I should try adding more of the example sentences, or just download a shared deck based on TTMIK.

You can try https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/3614346923 - my sentence deck , it's based on TTMIK but there are also sentences from other resources because sadly TTMIK's coverage of grammar is not quite complete. I'd be happy to hear some feedback about the deck. Sometimes it seems that I spend more time working on it than actually studying Korean.
Evita on 05 October 2014

Wow, thanks, that looks great! I thought I noticed your name there last time I checked the Korean decks :) I'll definitely try it out. Right now the only change I would make is adding a Hanja field to the back, but I'm not sure how much demand there would be for that, especially since this isn't a vocab deck.
vonPeterhof on 05 October 2014

Yeah, I don't think adding hanja to this deck makes sense, but I have a separate vocabulary deck and I might add it there.
Evita on 06 October 2014

I guess that's just my Japanese habits - reading normal written Korean gives me kanji withdrawal, so I feel the need to "complete" it with hanja wherever possible :)

Today I went to a bookstore and got myself an Ilya Frank book in Korean - a fairy tale collection. I'm a bit cautious in using fairy tales - the language in them may be easy for native children, but I also think it tends to be somewhat different from normal spoken language (I wonder if there's a Korean equivalent to the Japanese Kamikata dialect that only old people and nobles in fiction use). However, since this is apparently the only Ilya Frank book for Korean available so far I'll take what I can get. I also bought copybooks for practising Armenian and Arabic handwriting - maybe learning to actually produce the characters manually will help me remember and distinguish them better. There was also another book I was considering buying - a rather massive Russian textbook of Hanmun, i.e. Classical Chinese as used in Korea. I do intend to take up Classical Chinese at some point, but until now I've been considering doing it either through Japanese or through modern Chinese (preferably with Cantonese readings rather than Mandarin ones). However, that book looks so good I'm starting to think about doing it through Korean, or maybe just using the book to read up about the specifics of Classical Chinese in Korea. Since the book isn't exactly cheap, I'll have to think about it a bit more :)

After the visit to the bookstore I finished writing http://lang-8.com/253934/journals/25664497232537762456583443 845128064106 - the next entry , this time about three series.
vonPeterhof on 06 October 2014

Evita wrote:

vonPeterhof wrote:

Perhaps I should try adding more of the example sentences, or just
download a shared deck based on TTMIK.

You can try https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/3614346923 - my sentence deck , it's based on TTMIK
but there are also sentences from other resources because sadly TTMIK's coverage of grammar is not quite
complete. I'd be happy to hear some feedback about the deck. Sometimes it seems that I spend more time
working on it than actually studying Korean.

I just started this deck after seeing this post. It's fantastic. I love the native audio and the grammar
explanations. Sure I'd like some pictures thrown in but it I'm not feeling the lack at all yet. The grammar
explanations are fantastic. I'm slightly concerned that studying passively hurt me. Am I paranoid? Did I
mention I liked the grammar explanations？ ^_^
kraemder on 07 October 2014

It's been a pretty busy two weeks, and not just with the anime. Although that did contribute - I still haven't written the reviews for the last three shows I watched, since I got so burned out by all the writing. I ended up picking up 15 new shows, bringing the total number of shows I'm currently watching to 19 - can't say I succeeded in cutting down on it.

Anyway, another reason I've been busy is that I took part in the https://otakumode.com/sp/mtb_third - Manga Translation Battle . It's a contest where you have to translate an excerpt from one of four manga series from Japanese into English. Prizes include tablet computers, a trip to Japan and a job offer to translate the manga. As a non-native English speaker I'm obviously not hoping for much, but it's still an interesting exercise. The title I chose to translate is the shoujo manga いばらの冠, mostly because I didn't immediately run into something really tricky to translate on the first page, unlike two of the other manga. The biggest dilemma I ran into here is how to translate the word 悪魔. The Devil? A devil? A demon? As I read through the chapter I've switched between all of these options several times, and was still debating whether or not I'd made the right call as I was clicking the "submit" button. Other than that the dialogue and narration were mostly straightforward with no puns, not much culture-specific knowledge and few unfamiliar idioms (the only one I recall as having given me some trouble was ハイ、そうですかって言えるか, which could have been clearer with different punctuation), so most of the challenge was in re-writing it in English as naturally as possible. I had almost forgotten how much I actually enjoy translating stuff. Now I want to do more of this. I just wish there was a contest like this in Japanese-to-Russian translations...

Most of my other activities continued as usual, with some pauses due to watching and writing about lots of anime last week. After I tried rewatching the first few episodes of Fate/zero I found that my comprehension improved, and the episodes following them became more less exposition-heavy and more action-driven, making them easier to follow. So I decided to shelve the novel for now. As for Korean, I haven't listened to new TTMIK lessons in the past two weeks, since I've been working on Anki decks - eliminating the overlap between my own deck and Evita's shared deck, suspending stuff I haven't covered yet, etc. My daily reviews for Korean are now in the forties, but I do feel that many of the grammar points have stuck better now.

Oh, almost forgot to talk about the MSU meetup. This time I didn't just get to chat in Japanese, but even got to say one sentence in Korean! There was a group from Waseda University visiting Moscow that day, and one of them was a Korean girl who graduated from high school in Japan. I managed to say 저는 한국어 공부했어요 clearly enough for her to at least identify it as Korean before proceeding to explain in Japanese that I had only just started (only the day after did I realize that I meant to say 공부하고 있어요, not 공부했어요). Other highlights of the evening included me explaining to the aforementioned Waseda students what sambuca and absinthe were (kinda tricky to do when you don't know the Japanese for "anise"), discussing current trends in manga and anime, catching up with one of the guys from the teaching lectures back in spring, and a game of 神経衰弱 (concentration) where the matching cards had antonyms on them.
vonPeterhof on 19 October 2014

Not much to report in Japanese and Korean, other than that I finally managed to fit it all my regularly scheduled activities into the week, and that my N1 certificate has arrived. Other than that, wanderlust has hit me hard again. Well, probably not exactly "wanderlust", but more of a peculiar form of "homesickness". This was provoked by some of the events of the past week: getting an invitation to attend a wedding in Almaty (which I'll most likely have to decline), reading a large article dealing in part with the language situation in Kazakhstan, as well as getting my Japanese certificate. While I was pleased with the latter, in light of the other two events a sardonic thought crossed my mind: "Here's your official proof that you understand the language of a country you've never been to better than the language of the country you grew up in!" It also doesn't help that often when I try to read news articles in Kazakh I run into not just words, but grammatical structures that I have no memory of having covered at school.

Since I had some time left over after completing my Japanese and Korean activities today, I thought I'd indulge myself by doing one lesson of Kazakh from my self-study book. I did one thing differently from when I last studied from that book - whenever I added the example sentences I first converted them into the Kazakh Arabic script using http://www.transliteration.kpr.eu/kk-cyr/ - a handy online converter (the Arabic letters come out disjointed, but when I copy and paste them into Anki they show up properly; the only problem is that full stops and exclamation marks end up at the beginning of the sentences). I'm at a point where I know the Cyrillic-Arabic correspondences perfectly, but my reading speed in Arabic script texts is still extremely slow, so I thought that it might be a good idea to increase my exposure to it. After completing the lesson I went ahead and converted the entire deck into the Arabic script.

While I doing all that I remembered that Chung had a Turkic languages challenge planned for next year. I was planning on doing Turkish Pimsleur before joining it, since Chung wasn't going to include Turkish in the challenge, so I guess it made sense to me to start doing it right after the impromptu Kazakh lesson. My first impression was that the mutual intelligibility between Kazakh and Turkish probably isn't very high. While I could recognize the person suffixes and the root of the verb "to know", most of the other suffixes were either entirely unfamiliar to me or were combined in weird ways. I guess I can continue doing the Turkish lessons during some of my commutes, but I'm not sure If I'll be able to keep fitting in the Kazakh lessons in every week. Either way, it was a bit refreshing to get back into Turkic languages seriously, so now I'm really looking forward to the challenge.
vonPeterhof on 26 October 2014

Your comment about Turkish has made me consider adding it to the challenge even though it didn't enter my mind initially because I've been studying it for a while already (and intend to continue it).

The biggest problem is that I can't find any useful and free primer of Turkish along the lines of http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/creees/outreach/azeri.php - this for Azeri or even https://www.livelingua.com/peace-corps-kyrgyz-course.php - this for Kyrgyz which we can all use for free as common course. FSI Turkish Basic Course doesn't seem ideal even though it is free. Something like TY Beginner's Turkish would be nice though since it doesn't go into depth and can be finished in about 3 months. Yet I'm not comfortable making it the common course since all participants would have to shell out a bit of a money if they don't already have the course (I want to keep things on the level; no illegal downloading of copyrighted courses).
Chung on 27 October 2014

I don't think adding Turkish is necessary, since I'm probably the odd one out as someone with an interest in Turkic languages who hasn't tried studying Turkish, but if it doesn't screw with the scheduling too hard I guess it would make sense to add it.

What's wrong with FSI Turkish Basic Course? Is it outdated?
vonPeterhof on 28 October 2014

It seems a little too intense for the purpose of dabbling or short-term studying. After having used FSI Hungarian Basic, Czech FAST, Polish FAST and Conversational Finnish, I've concluded that the old FSI courses are better as supplements than the main resource when you're learning alone.
Chung on 28 October 2014

It's been a while since I've written an update here, and I'm not really sure why. Might have to do with my daily Anki reviews for Korean reaching the seventies, bringing the total daily reviews well over a hundred. But I haven't stopped doing things in Japanese, Kazakh or Turkish either. I've been using Google Translate for Turkish so much lately I've started getting ads in Turkish on YouTube, as well as Russian and English ads about travel and real estate in Turkey (the former is kinda understandable, since YouTube is owned by Google, but the latter is a bit unnerving..)

Anyway, I've finished the しごとの日本語 telephone conversations book, so now I'm concentrating on the e-mail writing one, a lesson a day. Apparently after the explanatory lessons there is a practice writing section - looks like I'll have something to put on lang-8 pretty soon.

As for the speaking practice, there's been another meetup at the MSU ln Friday night. This time most of it was taken up by a game of bingo, with Japanese vocabulary from several categories (food, means of transportation, animals, etc.) instead of numbers. I didn't win any prizes, but it was kinda fun. After the game was over we had some time left over to talk, and I ended up talking quite a bit about economics: Russia's and Japan's current economic situations, our changing relations with the West and China, the differences between Russia's regions, etc. This was a huge strain on my vocabulary, and not just when it came to economic terminology - I think I stalled the longest when I tried to talk about the fact that many if not most cars in Vladivostok are right-hand drive, but then realized that I not only didn't know how to say "right-hand drive" in Japanese, I didn't even have a clue about what the word for "steering wheel" was. I guess that's another good thing about this conversation practice thing - identifying gaps in vocabulary.
vonPeterhof on 16 November 2014

Last night I tried writing the first practice business e-mail on lang-8 - a brief message asking a person from another company to send detailed information about a particular product. I got a number of corrections and comment noting that what I wrote was basically fine as is, but there are places where it was possible to make the phrasing more polite, if one feels the need to err on the side of caution. Most of those improvements actually involved stock phrases that were suggested for use in this particular task by the book itself: things like お手数ですが (->お手数をおかけしますが) and お忙しいところ恐縮ですが (->お忙しいところ(誠に/大変)恐縮ですが). Some even suggested changing よろしくお願いいたします by either adding どうぞ in the beginning or by spicing it up with kanji (宜しくお願い致します). One person also suggested replacing 御社, the word used in the majority of the example e-mails in the book, with 貴社, quoting a website where an expert suggested that the former is more appropriate for the spoken language and the latter for the written. The reasoning behind that seems to be that 貴社 is used in more stock letter/e-mail phrases (e.g. 貴社ますますご清栄のこととお喜び申し上げます), while 御社 is less confusing in speech, since 貴社 is homophonous with 帰社 and a few other words. Looks like writing longer e-mails is gonna be challenging, but also quite informative.
vonPeterhof on 23 November 2014

Another two weeks have passed without an update, so here's one. Last weekend I attended J-Fest, an annual 2-day festival of traditional and modern Japanese culture held in Moscow. This was my second time there, so this time I was hoping to get a bit more Japanese conversational practice than last year. The only person I got to interact in Japanese that time was the guest of honour, the Russophile singer and voice actress Sumire Uesaka, with whom I exchanged a few lines as I was getting her autograph. I remember that last year in addition to the participants, organizers and Japanese exchange students there was a large group of her fans who came over from Japan just to attend her concert. I never quite worked up the courage to talk to any of them. This year's special guest, singer Eir Aoi, didn't have an army of Russophile groupies with her, but I did get to talk to her (asking her to sign a map of her home island of Hokkaido worked at getting her to say more than a "hello" and "thank you"), as well as the teacher from the lectures I attended earlier this year and one of the regular attendants of the MSU meetups (speaking of which, only today did it occur to me that I should probably check the date of the this month's meetup - it turned out to have been December 5; oh well, I guess there's next year). Since I was a bit busy with other things I couldn't attend many events, but I did get to watch an interesting movie - a musical called 舞妓はレディ. Inspired by "My Fair Lady", it's a story of a girl who comes to Kyoto with the dream of becoming a geisha. Due to family circumstances she grew up speaking two of the most notoriously impenetrable Japanese dialects, those of Tsugaru and Kagoshima, so before she can be accepted as an apprentice she has to master the Kyoto dialect. Overall it's a pretty silly movie, but with interesting commentary on the changing role of the geisha in modern Kyoto, and of course some fascinating Japanese dialectology.

Speaking of which, on that same day I discovered http://en.rocketnews24.com/2014/11/28/how-to-say-i-love-you- in-japanese-47-different-ways/ - this series of ads from Shiseido, showcasing confessions of love in the dialects of all 47 prefectures. I think this is a great idea that needs to be realized in more countries. I was especially interested in hearing the Okinawan version, since it's classified as a separate language more often than not. I was a bit disappointed when I heard that the first sentence sounded like straight up standard Japanese with a weird intonation. The second one sounded more like the full-on Okinawan you hear in songs from there, but the actual "I love you" bit sounded much less "foreign" than the Kagoshima one. I would have appreciated an extra video with the four other languages of Okinawa prefecture.

As for my studies, everything is going in order. My Anki reviews have stabilized somewhat with Korean now averaging about 50 cards per day, and the other languages adding up to a similar number. I was a bit too busy to write another practice email last week, but I wrote one this week - one inquiring about whether or not a certain delivery deadline can be met. I guess next time I should make it clearer what the task in the book says when writing it out on Lang-8. In both of the tasks I've done the email was written to a counterpart in another company with whom I'm supposed to have interacted on a regular basis for a while. The majority of corrections I get are either making my message more polite or more informative, possibly under the assumption that I'm writing to that person for the first time or that it's someone I don't interact with that often.
vonPeterhof on 07 December 2014

Looks like people have started summarizing this year’s challenge. Seeing as how I have some time to spare on the train ride back from Saint Petersburg where I just celebrated my 25th birthday, I should probably also give it a try (although with the poor signal on this train I will probably actually post this once I get home). The two goals I set for myself in Japanese were a) to pass JLPT N1, and b) to reach C1 level in all skills. While the first one has been reached pretty unequivocally, it’s harder to tell with the second one. My current level seems to fit most of the requirements for C1 to an extent, with the most doubtful being “Can express ideas fluently and spontaneously without much obvious searching for expressions”. What I can definitely say about my progress is that at the beginning of the year I had big doubts as to whether or not Japanese belongs in my “speaks” category. Now, after a series of lectures and practice sessions, I can say with confidence: I speak Japanese. I may not always think of the right word for the concept I’m thinking of, and I may accidentally slip between politeness level, but most of the time I can produce utterances that convey my meaning accurately.

While I originally planned to stave off wanderlust as much as possible, I’m not really regretting all those times I gave in. I’m probably not going to try to reach the level of my Japanese in Greek (Modern and Ancient), French, Korean, Kazakh, Turkish or any of the other languages I’ve distracted myself with. Still, it has been pretty fun and informative to go off on these tangents. I guess I’m just not the kind of language learner who can focus 100% on one language. And I’m afraid I’m going to add a couple more distractions before the end of the year. In addition to the Turkic challenge (more about this below), I guess I can no longer resist getting a taste of Classical Chinese. When my colleagues approached me asking what I would like as a birthday present from them, I couldn’t resist asking that hanmun textbook I mentioned in an earlier post.

As for the Turkic challenge, following the discussion in its thread about the inclusion of Turkish and the option to take it up in place of the originally planned Azerbaijani, I’ve considered it and decided against it. Well, it’s not that I’ll drop Turkish completely. I’ve finished the Pimsleur course this week, and now instead of continuing to study Turkish from a textbook or a more comprehensive course, I bought an Ilya Frank book of short stories about Nasreddin Hoja in order to focus on reading only. I hope that if I do Turkish in a passive-only mode it won’t interfere too hard with Azerbaijani and the others.
vonPeterhof on 14 December 2014

皆さん、明けましておめでとうございます！今年もよろしくお願いします。 Happy belated New Year, everyone! It has been very interesting to share experiences in learning Japanese with the others in Team 旅立ち. Since I'm now learning Japanese, Korean and Classical Chinese while doing retention Anki reviews of Vietnamese, it would seem like Team 東亜 would be the perfect fit for me. However, I'm afraid I'm going to refrain from entering that team since I can't really come up with any specific goals in any of these languages other than "keep doing what I'm doing and see what happens". Right now my main challenge is the Turkic challenge, thus making me a member of Team Yürükler.

As I've mentioned in the team thread, I intend to take up all the listed languages in their designated periods, except for Kazakh which I'll continue doing non-stop, with its spot in the schedule taken by Uyghur. Thus my personal preliminary schedule is going to look something like this:

Dec. 15, 2014 to Mar. 31, 2015: Azerbaijani
Mar. 15 to Jun. 30: Turkmen
Jun. 15 to Sep. 30: Uzbek
Sep. 15 to Dec. 31: Uyghur
Dec. 15, 2015 to Feb. 29, 2016: Kyrgyz
Feb. 15 to Mar. 31: Tuvan
Mar. 15 to Jun. 30: Tatar
Jun. 15 to Sep. 30: Bashkir
Sep. 15 to Oct. 31: Crimean Tatar
Oct. 15 to Nov. 30: Chuvash

While the specifics will likely differ between languages, especially with those that have fewer resources and therefore have less time allotted to them, the general pattern I intend to follow with most of those languages is read up on the phonology, complete an introductory course, go through some sort of reader, listen to lots of internet radio or music, and perhaps write a simple passage on Lang-8 in languages supported by it (I'm surprised and a bit annoyed that while Kyrgyz and Turkmen are available, there are apparently still no native speakers of Kazakh in the Lang-8 userbase).

Before I get into my plans and current practices in specific languages I'll bring up a little change I've made into my Anki routine - I have decided to delete my Anki decks in languages I understand well enough to support exposure via independent extensive (and, whenever I feel like it, intensive) reading and watching of native materials. For now those languages are German, French, Kazakh, Norwegian, Ukrainian and Belarusian. Combined with slowed down new card additions in Korean and Turkish this gives me a bit more Anki-free time. While I was already getting more or less regular native material reading in all of the languages listed above, now I have to make sure it's completely regular. Now for the specific languages.

Azerbaijani
The current language in the spotlight for the challenge. By the end of this week I'll be done with the https://www.livelingua.com/peace-corps-azerbaijani-course.ph p - Peace Corps course, after which I intend to go through the Ilya Frank http://www.franklang.ru/dfree/Azerb_skazki_M.pdf - Azerbaijani folktales reader . I've also been playing http://www.azadliq.org/ - Azadlıq Radiosu and http://www.itv.az/ - İTV internet radio in the background.

Hanmun/Classical Chinese
A project that I'm just as hyped up about as the Turkic challenge. For a few days after I got the textbook its (rather long) preface was the only thing I would read. Before moving on to the actual lessons I spent a lot of time thinking about how to organize the Anki cards and what information to include. After experimenting with adding readings in Vietnamese, various modern Chinese varieties and reconstructed Middle Chinese I gradually removed all but the Korean ones from the textbook, due to not being able to easily locate some of the readings for the less common characters. Mandarin and Japanese readings were easy to locate for all the characters, but I eventually decided against including the former and never wanted to use the latter. The former because I eventually plan on taking up modern standard Chinese and while Classical Chinese should provide some discount it's probably better to keep them separate. The latter because nobody in Japan reads Classical Chinese by simply vocalizing the Sino-Japanese readings - Sinologists use modern Mandarin readings while Japanologists http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanbun - read the texts out as Classical Japanese . Since my Classical Japanese is still pretty basic at first I thought that adding the Classical Japanese translations would be too much work. But then, just for the heck of it, I tried to find a Classical Japanese translation of one of the example sentences from Confucius' Analects and came across http://kanbun.info/index.html - this website with side-by-side Classical Chinese texts and Classical Japanese translations. Since the grammatical patterns in the early units are still pretty basic it actually turned out pretty easy to extrapolate from those translations and make them on my own for example sentences not from texts available on that site (whenever I'm not sure about the correct Classical Japanese word I look up the Chinese characters on http://kobun.weblio.jp/ - this archaism dictionary ). So now all the cards in the deck have the Chinese sentence on the front, with the Classical Japanese translation and Sino-Korean readings on the back. I might have to switch to Russian translations when the sentences get too advanced - translating from a language with too little grammar into a language with too much of it is a very creative task.

Turkish
While I'm continuing it as planned, I've decided to reduce the frequency of my reading of the Nasreddin stories from one per day to one per week, in order to give more focus to Azerbaijani.

Korean
I guess with two new crushes my second honeymoon with Korean comes to an end. However, I really don't want to drop it completely this time, so I'm just reducing the frequency of TTMIK lessons to one per week, like with Turkish.

Kazakh
No changes here, other than quitting the Anki reviews. Still doing one lesson from the textbook per week. I've recently reached the part of the book that deals with the more advanced grammar that I don't remember from school, so I have been tempted to make a new deck and add new sentences to solidify those grammar points, but eventually decided to persevere with the reading approach.

French
Continuing to read the French translation of the visual novel Katawa Shoujo. I'll probably do Assimil Advanced French after I'm done with TTMIK for Korean... which should take me about 120 weeks at the current pace.

German, Norwegian, Ukrainian and Belarusian
With these languages I'm just reading at least one news article or editorial per week. This is meant to be the absolute minimum and not a limit - I'll read any article in those four languages that looks interesting.

Japanese, Classical Japanese
So where does this leave my greatest love of them all, Japanese? Well, it's already too big a part of my life to just let go of. My otaku-ism hasn't diminished in the past year (look forward to my top 10 anime series of 2014 Lang-8 post!), and now my interactions with Japanese speakers are no longer confined to the online realm. So I'll keep on watching anime, reading manga and novels (gonna be done with 風立ちぬ some time this month), listening to music, attending meetups and slowly making my way through Syromyatnikov's Classical Japanese book and the 百人一首 poem collection.

Welp, that's the game plan for the year - no big goals, no specific targets, just some leisurely studying at my own pace :)
vonPeterhof on 03 January 2015

Sorry to see you won't be on the team 東亜 but I get that having passed the N1 you are at a loss for goals in
Japanese. Most of the time when I see someone studying many many languages at once I start hoping they'll
narrow it down and just focus on one language but you're one of the exceptions. I wish I were as talented.
Good luck on all your studying this year.
kraemder on 03 January 2015

@kraemder, a bit belatedly, but thank you for the kind words. Personally I don't really consider myself that talented. I guess I just happened to be extremely motivated to learn English and Japanese, and I actually doubt if I'll ever be able to sustain that much motivation in any other language for a sufficient amount of time. İ guess this is why something like Chung's Turkic challenge appealed to me, since with it I can prioritize quantity over quality and move on to the next language by the time I get bored with it.

After having finished the Peace Corps course I decided to check out the GLOSS modules, and I think that's exactly what I need for this challenge. It looks like there are enough modules in there to last me for the rest of the Azerbaijani period. It's a great way to pick up vocabulary from various contexts and reinforce grammar points. Thanks to those modules my daily number of Azerbaijani Anki reviews has surpassed that of Korean (I'm actually tempted to start doing their North Korean modules on the side..). The only problem is that the site occasionally suffers from technical problems and goes down. This has happened twice this week (though, thankfully, never while I was in the middle of studying a module), and in those two days I filled my Azerbaijani quota by reading from the Ilya Frank reader instead.

My activities in other languages have also proceeded according to schedule. I've written http://lang-8.com/253934/journals/61003131024122274984814161 882447679226 - two http://lang-8.com/253934/journals/61125321768121996701765473 136970895098 - parts of my Top 10 anime of 2014 list, and will try to complete the final part tomorrow (which might not work out, since most of tomorrow will be taken up by my road trip back to Moscow). In Korean I've completed the level 4 lessons and will move on to level 5 next week. The Classical Chinese unit for this week was a pretty straightforward introduction to the numeral system, much of which I'm already familiar with through Japanese and Korean.

Additionally, in my free time I watched a film that I got almost three years ago and have been meaning to watch all this time. It's a Kazakhstani Russian-language drama film from 2010 called Сказ о розовом зайце (The Tale of the Pink Hare). It takes place in modern Almaty, Kazakhstan's largest city, and tells the story of a student from out of town trying to make ends meet, befriending representatives of the city's gilded youth and getting caught up in a web of intrigue, corruption and crimes of varying severity. The thing that particularly struck me is that it's probably the first time I've heard dialogue in a Russian-language film that almost perfectly matches the ideolect spoken by my peers from where and when I was growing up. The fact that rules against swearing in movies are apparently less strict in Kazakhstan than in Russia certainly helps add realism to the characters' speech, but even beyond that the slang, specific turns of phrases and even the intonation all felt very familiar and real to me. That's not to say that the film is free from clichéd dialogue, or that all the words were exactly the same as what my friends and I used back when I lived there. The biggest offender was the use of the word мобила - for as long as I can remember the default slang term for a mobile phone in Kazakhstan has been сотка. My use of that word occasionally resulted in confusion after I moved to Russia ("Can I see your сотка?" "What, you've never seen a 100 rouble note before?"). But then, I haven't been back to Kazakhstan since 2006, so for all I know the slang could have changed since then.
vonPeterhof on 10 January 2015

Interesting about the movie :) To me сотка can also be a kind of фишка that was used in some playground games. I've never played them though. (And interesting how playground here conveys best what I would call во дворе)

And wow, GLOSS having technical problems? Never seen that :O The lessons can be downloaded to study offline btw, so you may want to get some spare ones. But really, :OOOOOOOOOOO
Serpent on 11 January 2015

It's back up now, but I have downloaded a few lessons just in case. Thanks for the suggestion! I'm now also considering doing at least one module of German per week as well, just to give myself a bigger challenge than "read one random article per week". Too bad that there's no Norwegian.

I've completed the http://lang-8.com/253934/journals/72324789021648950333997872 125836594938 - top 10 anime list . I should really think of more creative ways of saying what I like about a particular anime than just listing the things I like separated by commas. Better than bulletpoints, but still..
vonPeterhof on 11 January 2015

I've watched barakamon and I have to agree what you wrote. It has a very different feel
compared to many other animes coming out. Hearing the dialect, the topic of calligraphy,
and some other aspects of it made me appreciate it much more compared to the more
"classic" animes that keep coming out.

Anyway, good luck for this year!
yuhakko on 12 January 2015

Thanks, yuhakko, likewise!

Until I started writing that third part I was actually planning to give Nozaki-kun the first place instead, but as I was writing up my thoughts on Silver Spoon I reconsidered. Nozaki-kun may have absolutely excelled at what it set out to do (get laughs by toying with manga tropes), but Barakamon was such a unique experience in pretty much all aspects.

And of course, the dialect was a major plus for me. I had watched shows featuring various Kyushu dialects before, but back then I couldn't understand it without subs and therefore couldn't really let their features sink in. I got particularly curious about the -か adjectives and how their origins differed from the -か adjectives in the standard language. I can also sympathize with the girls in https://twitter.com/ggsk_underside/status/500308340455374849 - this cartoon now - 強か is such an uncommon word that it's really hard not to read it as つよか :)
vonPeterhof on 14 January 2015

Haha, well it appears you got even more out of it than me! I'm now able to get a feel of the
nuances and differences of dialect but could definitely not point out exactly a specificity
from any other dialect than the Kyoto one.

Quite a funny cartoon as well. I definitely would have read those with the original kanji
reading. :)
yuhakko on 14 January 2015

I guess it's time for some sort of summary of the first month (and a half) of the Turkic challenge. So far the thought that keeps occurring to me most often is "I really should have studied some Arabic and/or Persian before doing this". When it comes to Azerbaijani vocabulary the words that just don't stick in my memory seem mostly to be Arabic and Persian loanwords that I hadn't encountered before via Kazakh. This problem is at its worst with nouns ending in -ət: müraciət, mülkiyyət, xüsusiyyət, istirahət, etc. Even if I do passively recognize some of those words, it's hard to actively reproduce them from memory, since they tend not to obey vowel harmony rules very strictly and I get confused which vowels are the "odd one out", if any (xüsusiyyət? xusüsiyyət? xüsüsiyyət?). I also keep discovering words that I do know from Kazakh, but previously had no idea about their Perso-Arabic origins, due to their pronunciations getting altered to fit Kazakh vowel harmony. This seems to happen a lot less frequently in Turkish and Azerbaijani.

However, my familiarity with Kazakh does give me a great boost. Normally I wouldn't even think about reading news articles in a language I had only been studying for a month, but with Azerbaijani I can get the gist of most articles I come across. Listening comprehension is a bit harder, but I have been listening to Azadlyq Radiosu to notice that they keep reusing certain programmes - one about the history of programming, one about Ismail Gaspirali (Gasprinski) and one about conspiracy theories, to name a few. And the other night I tuned in to İTV's live TV streaming service and saw that they were showing a voiced-over version of The Butterfly Effect, which used to be my favourite movie for some time. I haven't re-watched it in like seven years, so I don't remember every line by heart any more, and I only tuned into the stream about halfway through the film, but I could remember enough to follow what was going on most of the time. I think I only managed to pick up one new word (İlahi, which was the default translation for "Oh my God"), while also confirming a couple of words I knew from Kazakh (diary - gündəlik/күнделік; help - kömək/көмек).

My studies of other languages have gone on steadily as well, except I didn't manage to get through 風立ちぬ by the end of January. There's still a quarter of the book left, but I should be able to finish it within a month this time. I'm reading this book and Dostoyevsky's Demons now, and about two weeks ago I decided to increase the frequency of my reading of both books from once a week to every day, alternating the books between each other. This was especially necessary for Demons, since not only was I moving through it as a snail's pace before, I also had great trouble remembering who the characters were. Since 風立ちぬ only has two central characters it's easier to keep track of them, but it's still hard to remember what had happened if I just read one short passage per week.

Given the problems I mentioned above with Arabic vocabulary in Azerbaijani, I think I've decided on what I will do once the Turkic challenge is over. I've actually been planning this for quite some time, but kept getting distracted by other languages. I want to seriously concentrate on the internationally influential classical languages. I've already dabbled in Latin and Ancient Greek, and I'm doing Classical Chinese now. I'm gonna need to restart the former two, while also adding Arabic and Sanskrit later on. Maybe I could add a few others, like Persian, Biblical Hebrew or Old Church Slavonic. That should make vocabulary acquisition in many other languages easier, while also satisfying my curiosity for historical linguistics.

That's all hypothetical for now though. Right now I have to concentrate on the more immediate future. The date for my parting of ways with my current employer has been set, and it's coming in less than two months now. So right now I should be concentrating on finding a new place of work. I've actually had a job interview over Skype with a company in Japan, but they promised to get back with an answer in January and I've yet to hear from them. It doesn't look likely that I'll get hired there though, since they honestly told me that the fact that I've never even been to Japan was concerning for them. The industry they work in depends pretty heavily on familiarity with the local corporate culture, and while they could tell that I was well informed, hearing and reading about it isn't the same as experiencing it first hand. They suggested I come to Japan for some studying or part-time employment to improve my chances.

There are actually a few opportunities for that, since the JET Programme has some Russian-speaking ALT vacancies this year. Since they'll probably focusing primarily on applicants with teaching training or experience I doubt that I'll make it, but it might be worth a try. If not, I could use my severance pay to take a business Japanese course at a language school in Japan that offers career assistance (assuming that the rouble doesn't pull a Zimbabwe on us in the meantime).

My father, who works at the same company as I do and apparently isn't getting laid off for now, actually approached his boss asking "Would you happen to have an opening for an economist with knowledge of Japanese... English, German, Norwegian and Kazakh?" The boss was apparently impressed and asked how much I was being paid now. After hearing how low that was he said something to the effect of "Well, if we don't have an opening we'll just have to make one!" While I appreciate my father's concern about my future employment, I couldn't help but feel that this was all designed to push my impostor syndrome to its limits :)
vonPeterhof on 01 February 2015

Wow, has it really been that long since I updated? I mean, I don't recall having posted anything here during "the week that wasn't", so I have to assume that it really has been more than a month. The main reason for that, especially in the last two-three weeks, was that I was busy working on my ALT application - filling out forms, collecting documents, getting letters of reference, that kind of stuff. The last one was a particularly interesting challenge, since it involved me getting in touch with the teacher from last year's lectures. I actually got to put my business email writing skills to practice, and apparently I wasn't too disrespectful. Anyway, I've handed in the documents, so now I have to wait to find out if I've made it to the interviews in April. Don't wanna sing my own praises too hard, but considering that the materials say that additional consideration will be given to candidates with high level of Japanese ability and teaching experience and/or qualifications, I think my chances of making it to the interview stage are pretty good. Not confident at all as to what will happen after that though...

As for my language learning activities, while I've tried not to let the application process interfere with them I haven't succeeded at that consistently. I've done the majority of level 1 Azerbaijani GLOSS lessons, when I decided to focus exclusively on the Structural competence lessons. I've done all of those in levels 1 and 1+ by now, so I'm moving on to level 2 next. After finishing reading the Ilya Frank Azerbaijani folk tales book I tried to read the Azerbaijani translation of Orwell's 1984. Unfortunately, the vocabulary proved way too demanding for me right now, and even having the original text at hand didn't make it exactly effortless. I've decided to stick to learning text on azeri.org.

I guess all that Arabic vocabulary finally pushed me to my limits that I could no longer resist dabbling in Arabic. The Arabic script copybook I started working on a while ago has several example sentences at the end, and I started slowly adding them to Anki. I doubt I'll take it far beyond that in the foreseeable future, but I did need that outlet for my wanderlust. Well, this one and hundreds of others: re-listening to Croatian and Indonesian basic Pimsleur courses, following new Twitter accounts in several languages I have limited passive understanding of (Yiddish, Czech, SLovak, Polish, Macedonian and Rusyn for now), visiting a bookstore to buy a book on teaching Russian as a foreign language in preparation for the ALT interview and ending up buying Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in Karachay-Balkar, a book of poetry including translations of Russian classics and song lyrics into Hebrew and a grammar of written Manchu - that sort of thing :)

As for my Japanese, aside from the aforementioned experience in email writing, I've had another first - http://lang-8.com/253934/journals/31240747582746864356439372 292860893836 - nitpicking a translation of a phrase into Japanese (I had nitpicked translations from Japanese lots of times before, but not the other way). Oh, and I did finally finish reading 風立ちぬ. For my next book I decided to step back from "grown up literature" and go for the light novel 傷物語 (Kizumonogatari) by 西尾維新 (NisiOisiN). It's part of a massive franchise known as the Monogatari series, much of which has been adapted into a popular TV anime. This particular novel is chronologically a prequel to the first novel, and plans to adapt it separately as a movie were announced back in 2010. Since that hasn't happened yet, might as well read it. While the subject matter should be easier to get into than in the "adult" novels I've tried to read so far, the series is pretty heavy on soliloquies, wordplay and unconventional vocabulary choices, so it's not without challenges.
vonPeterhof on 09 March 2015

I've heard back from the Japanese embassy, and, just as I predicted, I've made it to the job interview stage. Now I need to hear from the consulate in Saint Petersburg in order to specify the date. Now I guess the difficult part begins. In order to prepare for the interview I've temporarily suspended most of my activities in Korean, French, Turkish, Kazakh and German so that I can focus on reading the teaching methods book. I'll also probably need to keep up working on the email writing practice, re-read my notes from last year's teaching lectures and re-start reading editorials, especially from Hokkaido-based papers. I have next to no idea of what to expect, but hopefully I can present myself well. Just gotta remember not to utter the word "anime" ;)

Also, in order to get into a Hokkaido mood I've started dabbling in Ainu using http://www.unilang.org/course.php?res=58 - the UniLang beginner course and http://www.stv.ne.jp/radio/ainugo/index.html - the corresponding STVradio lectures , although I'm thinking of switching to a different series of lectures for which the Japanese textbook is available online. The phonology appears extremely similar to Japanese, the most striking difference being the syllable-final -r, while the use of personal prefixes on verbs and (inalienably possessed) nouns reminds me of Abkhaz. This is very interesting so far, but I wonder if it's possible to find any more advanced resources for this language.

As for the Turkic challenge, I'm proceeding with Azerbaijani and am now near the end of GLOSS's level 2 structural lessons. I've also tried http://lang-8.com/253934/journals/27792590299938673365963372 2636263971468 - writing a Lang-8 entry about myself and why I started studying Azerbaijani. I had to look up a lot of words and it took almost a week for someone to correct the entry, but apparently there weren't as many mistakes as I expected. Additionally, I've started a preliminary exploration of Turkmen via David Gray's Short Descriptive Grammar. While the letters that are absent in both Turkish and Azeri alphabets aren't too hard to get used to, the fact that the non-trivial vowel length distinction is almost completely absent from the orthography, as well as that the rounded-unrounded vowel harmony isn't as straightforward as in the other two Oghuz languages, is a bit worrying. I am already looking forward to sinking my teeth into it though.
vonPeterhof on 22 March 2015

I can't help thinking you're a shoo-in for the Jet program. I can't imagine very many applicants have N2
certificates let alone N1 certificates. Just don't come across like you hate teaching in the interview and your'e
good.. (btw what's wrong with anime?)
kraemder on 22 March 2015

The N1 certificate is a plus, but an N2 certificate with some actual teaching experience is probably a stronger combination. And I have no idea if my age and work experience in a completely unrelated field speak in my favour or against me. As for anime, it might not be a good idea to set off any otaku/weeaboo alarms. Although I guess I can mention it as part of my progress to my current level of Japanese, since that seems likely to come up.
vonPeterhof on 23 March 2015

Congratulations! I hope everything works out for you.

vonPeterhof wrote:

... I've started dabbling in Ainu ...

I loved how you put that so matter-of-factly. :)
espejismo on 23 March 2015

espejismo wrote:

Congratulations! I hope everything works out for you.

Thanks! It helps a bit that my term of employment at my current place of work has been extended by one more month, but here's hoping for a favourable change of scenery in the future.

espejismo wrote:

vonPeterhof wrote:

... I've started dabbling in Ainu ...

I loved how you put that so matter-of-factly. :)

Hehe, well if my experience with Abkhaz is anything to go by, chances of me making any significant progress in a language with few native speakers, very little available media and a low cognate/loanword discount are pretty slim, so I don't think it's something to write home about :)
vonPeterhof on 23 March 2015

片輪少女日本語版の刊行日付がせっかく知れましたらしい。でも四月一日だって……奇妙な気がしますｗ
Ezy Ryder on 29 March 2015

ww　まあ、翻訳チームのツイートには「日付が日付ですが、エイプリルフールではなく本当です。」と書いてあるので、信じていいのかもしれませんね。 Mais je n'ai pas encore complété la version française...
vonPeterhof on 30 March 2015

Good luck for the job in Japan! (Although it's probably happened already I guess).

And concerning Ainu, I've looked for different level textbooks but nothing seems to be
for upper-level. Then again, I haven't looked so much from Japanese...
The STV classes start every april (every sunday for a year) so the first lesson of
this year was last sunday. I guess you can reach a　日常会話レベル if you follow along
the whole year but from that point onwards, I'm not so sure.
Every year the teacher is different and they teach some variations of Ainu based on
their hometown if I understood well.

Anyway, good to see someone else here interested in Ainu! And good luck again for the
job!

yuhakko on 08 April 2015

Thanks, yuhakko! It hasn't happened yet, in fact I only got my interview appointment yesterday. It's scheduled for next Wednesday, so I've got a week to prepare, and then I'll probably have to wait two more weeks for the results.

Also thanks for the heads-up about the Ainu classes. I see they even have the new textbook uploaded to the website. I guess I'll start following along this course as well.
vonPeterhof on 08 April 2015

Congratulations! First, I see yuhakko's announcement, and now yours. I'm jealous,
everyone's moving to Japan :) How did it go with your interviews? I'm hoping it's all
good.

I'm currently busy with studying for my steps, but after I'm done...I can't help but feel
like looking into Ainu. You and yuhakko got me infected with the Ainu bug :)
Woodsei on 11 May 2015

Thanks, Woodsei! Although there isn't much to congratulate me for yet. The results are supposed to be announced some time in May, and I don't feel like writing a detailed report of my interview until then. I'll definitely do it once I hear from the embassy.
vonPeterhof on 12 May 2015

After another month-long pause I guess it's time for an update. To get the biggest question out of the way - no, I didn't get the JET position. I was informed about it two weeks ago, but I didn't report that fact here right away, because I immediately initiated my plan B. The result is that I may still go to Japan for three months starting in July. More about this later, because first I'd like to talk about the interview.

My interview took place in the Japanese consulate in Saint Petersburg on the morning of April 15. While the email inviting me there stated that the interview would be conducted in Russian, English and Japanese, after I entered the room and greeted the interviewers one of them looked at my file and said "Since it says here that you have an N1 certificate, if you don't mind we shall conduct the whole interview in Japanese". It didn't take long for me to see how unprepared I was for this possibility - when answering the very first standard ice-breaker question of "did you get here alright?" I screwed up by repeating the interviewer's honorific verb for "get here" (いらっしゃいました) and applying it to myself. I immediately realized my mistake and corrected myself, but by their faces I think I could tell that the first impression was already ruined. I decided to steer clear from 尊敬語 and 謙譲語 from then on. The good thing is that I understood and answered all the questions to the best of my ability, but I struggled to recall words on more than one occasion (including something as basic as 手伝う - I never recalled it and instead went for アシストする :D) and probably got a couple of Sinitic compound words wrong. Worst of all, sticking to the words and patterns I'm more or less comfortable with likely made some of my answers sound tangential at best and elusive at worst. Thanks to such answers I may have given the impression that my English is worse than I indicated in my forms (since no questions were asked in English I didn't get the chance to correct that misconception), that I'm less than enthusiastic about working with teenagers, and that I don't have a clue about what I'm going to do with my further career (okay, that last one is sorta true). When I left the interview I was actually feeling good about myself for having endured it almost entirely in Japanese (they did ask me to answer one question in Russian - not sure if this was to test my speaking skills in Russian, or just because they thought that it might be too difficult for me), but the more I analysed what went on there the more I got to thinking that my only hope is for all the other applicants for my position to be even worse.

The week of the interview also happened to be my last week at work - I've now been unemployed for more than two months. I wasn't really busying myself with finding a new job, since I had a different plan B in case I fail to get the ALT position - namely to go to Japan to study at a language school. The irony of me having earned the JLPT N1 without having visited Japan or taken classes only to end up taking classes in Japan doesn't elude me, but, as my experience at the interview showed, my ability to actually communicate in Japanese is nowhere near a satisfactory level, let alone a professional one. I had looked into language schools before and knew that there were some where I could attend advanced business Japanese classes at prices affordable to me with my savings. However, I hadn't actually researched this very well before having heard back from the consulate, so when I actually started carefully weighing my options it turned out that I was rather limited in both my choices and the deadlines I'd need to meet. These past two weeks I've been busy assembling various documents, taking tests, writing emails and calculating costs. While I've now done most of what needed to be done on my end, there still remains a possibility that the documents from the school won't arrive in time for me to apply for my visa in order to get it before the start of the term on July 6 (which would be extremely inconvenient, as I've already bought the plane tickets).

Anyway, the school that I got accepted into for the 3-month business Japanese course is in Osaka, which probably means that I should kiss my hopes of mastering the Standard Japanese pitch goodbye :) On the plus side, there are plenty of interesting historical places in the Kansai region, and it should also be marginally easier to survive on a limited budget than in Tokyo. So I guess now all I can do is cautiously look forward to it and hope I can get my visa in time.

As for my language learning activities, until this week the only language I did every day was Turkmen (I don't think I can honestly consider watching anime every day a Japanese learning activity at this point). Until this week I've alternated between doing GLOSS lessons and reading news articles in it. I've also written a lang-8 entry in Turkmen - in the two weeks it's been up it's been viewed 8 times but still has no corrections, so either the Turkmen community on lang-8 isn't very active, or the entry is just that good ;) My overall impression has been that Turkmen has some interesting deviations from the other two major Oghuz languages in its phonology and morphology, marginally more Russian loanwords than Azerbaijani. Unfortunately, its peculiar orthography combined with Turkmenistan's relative technological isolation makes using it online rather inconvenient. Fortunately the Azerbaijani keyboard's extended character set, at least on a Mac, makes it possible to input all Turkmen chaacters, even if you have to press a sequence of three keys to type ý. Incidentally, the Azerbaijani keyboard is surprisingly versatile - holding down the alt key gives you access to a ridiculous number of diacritics and alternative characters. Out of the Latin script using languages I've dabbled in the only ones that it can't support are Vietnamese (it's possible to input the tone marks and the special diacritics, but not both simultaneously on the same character) and, somewhat ironically, Uzbek.

I guess that was an appropriate segue into the news that this week I started exploring Uzbek, the language of the country where the vast majority of my adult relatives either were born or have lived in. After having tried to, and failed to find a phonological description of Uzbek that was neither too dumbed down nor http://ling.umd.edu/~glynis/uzbek_phonetics.pdf - much too technical for me , I decided to start off with a basic grammatical introduction by https://moodle.hu-berlin.de/file.php/39256/Uzbekisch_Crash_K urs.pdf - Ingeborg Baldauf (German reading practice, yay!), and then move on to GLOSS and try to get a grasp of the phonology from listening. So far I've noticed a very familiar face in the negating particle emas, which must be a relative of the Kazakh емес instead of the Oghuz değil/deyil/däl. Another interesting thing is that the Uzbek o seems to correspond very well to the Turkmen long a, both in Perso-Arabic loans and native Turkic words (the only exception I've found so far is the ethnonym "Kazakh", which is gazak with two short a's in Turkmen, but qozoq in Uzbek).

As for other languages, the list of languages I'm studying actively at least once a week includes Japanese (through lang-8), Classical Chinese, Classical Japanese, Korean, Kazakh and Ainu. Languages that I'm studying semi-actively (by reading one chapter of an Ilya Frank-style reader per week) - Turkish (the Nasreddin reader) and Norwegian (Knut Hamsun's Pan, including a vocal recording for shadowing). Languages that I'm only supporting passively - Ukrainian (news articles and editorials), Belarusian (same), French (Katawa Shoujo; have now cleared the good and neutral endings of the Hanako route) and German (just for the heck of it, I'm trying to get used to Fraktur by reading through an https://archive.org/stream/deutschesbuchna00wormgoog#page/n1 /mode/2up - American "natural method" textbook from 1880 ). Languages for which I'm not doing anything other than Anki reviews of basic sentences I picked up at some point earlier: BSMS (predominately Croatian), Indonesian, Swahili, Latin, Lithuanian, Romanian, Albanian, Vietnamese, Ancient Greek, Modern Greek, Abkhaz, Eastern Armenian, Yiddish and Arabic. I average just under 100 reviews per day, with the biggest contributors being the Korean and Turkmen decks. Considering that I'm unemployed this is a piece of cake, but I'll probably have to do something to cut that number down when I start looking for a job again.
vonPeterhof on 19 June 2015

I'm glad you posted - your entries are always a lot of fun to read because you're well read and have a
fantastic command of English. If you were expected to teach English in the jet program I think they really did
a disservice not testing your ability. I would have hired you. If they hired someone who spoke no Japanese
instead and let them speak Russian in their interview the interviewers did a poor job. I was thinking of
applying for the JET program too and I'm seeing it's anything but a sure thing.
kraemder on 19 June 2015

I actually specifically applied for the Russian ALT position in Nemuro, Hokkaido (one of only two such
positions available this year, and the only JET position that wasn't tied to a specific region of Russia). Funny
thing, one of the questions they asked me was why I didn't apply for an English ALT position. In hindsight it
was probably better to answer honestly and say that I assumed there would be less completion for the
Russian position. At the very least, that would have been better than what I actually answered. I was trying to
say that my ability to teach English probably can't compare to that of a native speaker, but it ended up coming
out more like "Because my English isn't all that good" :)
vonPeterhof on 19 June 2015

I hate to say it but you might have yourself to blame for the interview. Oh well. You'll do ace your next
interview I'm sure.
kraemder on 19 June 2015

Yeah, I'm not denying that it's my fault, and hopefully I can do better next time. It's a shame that my next time is very unlikely to be in the JET programme though. Japanese high schools that teach Russian are few and far between, so the ALT vacancies don't come up that often (I think the last time the Nemuro one opened up was three years ago - I found out about it too late to apply back then), while the CIR ones tend to be limited to residents of specific regions of the Russian Far East that have partnership agreements with specific Japanese prefectures. Considering that the maximum possible duration of an ALT's contract is five years, my next opportunity might not come up until I'm 30, and the very idea of a 30 year old ALT seems all sorts of wrong to me :)
vonPeterhof on 19 June 2015

It's been a bit more hectic and stressful than I expected, but today I finally got my Japanese visa for 90 days! On Saturday afternoon I'm flying to Osaka via Dubai to arrive at the final destination on Sunday evening. For this occasion I actually tried to cram ten units of Teach Yourself Gulf Arabic into ten days, but due to all the things I had to take care of before the flight that didn't work out. Oh well, I'm still gonna be passing through Dubai on my way back, and the stopover will actually be longer that time, so I might still do something with it (plus, I guess I've settled the dilemma of which Arabic dialect to start from - I couldn't decide between Egyptian and Levantine :) ).

Anyway, aside from all that these past two weeks I've been trying to finish up some of the books I'm studying with right now, so that I don't need to take them with me. I only managed to finish two of the books - the Bekturovs' Kazakh textbook and the Japanese business email book. Thankfully the Turkish Nasreddin reader and Syromyatnikov's Classical Japanese grammar are both pretty compact, so the only relatively massive book I'll be taking with me is the introduction to hanmun. Since the Japanese course I'll be attending in Osaka will be a business language course the replacement for my business email writing exercise has been taken care of, but I'm still not sure what I should do for Kazakh - either start making my way through Ilyas Esenberlin's Nomads trilogy (I've read 1.5 of the books back in high school, but in Russian), or just take it easy with news articles until I finish one of the other books I'm reading. It's such a shame that there are no GLOSS lessons for Kazakh!

As for Uzbek, even though I've completely switched over to studying it from Turkmen after I completed the last GLOSS lesson for the latter last Monday, due to all the distractions I'm only about halfway through Baldauf's grammar. I guess I'll be done with it some time next week, after which I'll do the same thing I did with Turkmen - alternating between GLOSS lessons and news articles.

Now I guess I need to start packing my bags. 大阪、ほな行くで！
vonPeterhof on 02 July 2015

Since it's already the third over here, I guess it's been a month since I last updated, as well as nearly a month since I arrived in Osaka. I was planning to update two weeks ago or so, but that was when the domain expired. The rest of the time I was just too busy with classroom study, homework and sightseeing. I've once again suspended my studies of Korean, haven't really made any progress with Gulf Arabic and didn't manage to finish a Classical Chinese unit this past week. However, I did manage to finish some things since I got here - the novels The Demons and 傷物語, as well as Baldauf's Uzbek grammar this week (did my first Uzbek GLOSS lesson today).

Now for the actual purpose of my coming here, Japanese study. Every weekday I have two hours of core Japanese course lessons and two hours of elective classes. For each weekday we had to choose one of three classes belonging to three different categories - business, academic and cultural. The only non-business class I'm taking is the class on natural Japanese pronunciation, most of which is about the rules of the pitch accent. There's homework every day with a fair amount of handwriting, and tomorrow we're giving 15-minute long presentations about companies from our respective countries (and no, I don't think I'm procrastinating right now, since I'm pretty much ready for it). It's probably a bit too early to judge my progress, but I think my knowledge and ability to operate business vocabulary has been increasing, and I also seem to be getting more comfortable in producing speech in high politeness levels.

The immersion environment in the school community is pretty good for me, since I'm the only Russian here, and there's only one native English speaker in my course (and, as far as I'm aware, none in my dorm). While the locals can immediately tell that I'm not Japanese, I haven't had people switch to English on me or have trouble understanding my Japanese, even if I do still stumble over longer sentences and often find myself struggling to recall the right word.

While I have neither the time nor the money to explore Japan as thoroughly as I would have liked, I've managed to visit a few famous spots here in Osaka, and yesterday I did a quick and relatively cheap run through Nara and Kyoto, thanks to the Kansai Thru Pass. The week after next will be the Obon holidays, so I'm planning to do a similar trip through Hyogo prefecture, and I've also managed to recruit two fellow students to accompany me in a shoestring pilgrimage to the most important otaku event - the Comic Market (Comiket) in Tokyo. Overall I'm enjoying myself and am looking forward to what else I can learn and experience here.
vonPeterhof on 02 August 2015

Interesting post - just a couple questions for you for my own curiosity/study. How important do you think
tones and being able to fluently write Japanese using Kanji are?
kraemder on 03 August 2015

Both of these things probably depend on a several factors, most notably on what you plan to do with the language, how much of a perfectionist you are and (in the case of pitch) where in Japan you plan to interact with people. The teacher for the pronunciation class told us that Japanese speakers rely on pitch to hear word boundaries, but this seems like it would be less reliable with speakers of dialects with Kyoto-Osaka type pitch, since the "first and second mora of a word must have different pitch" rule doesn't apply here. So I can't yet speak for people in Tokyo, but I haven't had trouble being understood in the Kansai area, even if my pitch tends to get way off in unrehearsed speech. Aside from the peculiarities of the local dialect, it might also be due to the fact that people from Kansai are more used to hearing a variety of pitch patterns. Some time ago I read a forum thread asking people from Kansai whether or not they were annoyed by Nozomi from the Love Live! franchise speaking in fake Kansai dialect (she uses vocabulary and grammatical patterns from Kansai, but her pronunciation is standard Tokyo Japanese in every way), and nearly all the posters said they weren't bothered, with one saying "People talk about this 'Kansai dialect' like it's all the same, but there's actually so much variation within the region that even I, a native, can't always tell whether someone's faking it or just speaking a particularly obscure sub-dialect I've never heard". Either way, it seems to me that unless you're aiming for a job that requires you to sound like a native it should be enough to be aware that pitch accent exists and to make sure that you don't put unnecessary stress on vowels.

As for handwriting, obviously with the spread of modern technology it's a lot less relevant nowadays. However, if you're planning on applying for any job in Japan that requires some level of Japanese proficiency, chances are that you'll need to fill out forms and/or write your résumé by hand, not to mention writing notes and memos at work. I believe it's perfectly possible to learn to read and type in Japanese without ever writing by hand, but it is a useful skill if you're actually planning to live hire.
vonPeterhof on 03 August 2015

My second month in Japan is soon coming to an end, and since this has been a rare week where I managed to complete all my planned language learning activities I might as well write a quick update here. The presentation I gave in class went fairly well - the only criticisms I got were that I speak too quietly and monotonously, which probably means that my speech was okay in terms of content and grammatical correctness. On Friday I also wrote the final test for the elective subject of international commerce. For it we had to write between 1000 and 1600 characters about the present state and major issues in our respective countries' external trade within two hours. Mostly I just had to expand my text for a presentation on the same subject I had given earlier, so the biggest challenge was to write it all down within the time limit. While my speed of writing in purely mechanical terms is pretty good right now, I got really slowed down by having to look up words and how to write them every other sentence. Still, I think I did fairly well.

My exploration of Japan has also been going well. The trip to Tokyo was a bit of a logistical challenge, since we went there using the Seishun 18-kippu pass, which only works for local trains (so no Shinkansen, night trains or other express trains with fixed seating). Departing from Osaka at 9:30 AM we passed through eight prefectures, made six transfers and reached Akihabara station around 8:00 PM. At least we got some good views out the train windows, even if Mount Fuji wasn't visible due to the cloudiness. We spent the next day visiting the Comiket, walking on the Odaiba and singing karaoke in Akihabara, while the next day we explored the areas around several other Yamanote line stations (Shinjuku, Shin-Ōkubo, Ikebukuro, Harajuku and Shibuya) before going back to Osaka on a night bus. Other places I've visited in the past month include Hyogo prefecture (Kobe, Himeji, Takarazuka and Nishinomiya), Shiga prefecture (Hikone and Toyosato) and Osaka's neighbouring cities of Sakai and Kadoma, plus I couldn't resist a second visit to Kyoto and Uji. Places I've visited include both traditional tourist spots like temples and castles, and more unconventional attractions, like an old school building in Toyosato that was used as the model for the school in the anime K-On!, or a bar in Kyoto famous for having 200 brands of vodka and endearing signs in broken Russian. I probably won't be able to afford any more distant trips, but I've still got some places I'd like to see in Osaka that I can visit with my handy all-city bus pass.

As for other language learning activities, my travels haven't left me much time for them, but I did try to fit in at least three Uzbek GLOSS lessons per week, and I've also managed to complete two additional units of TY Gulf Arabic (although I only kinda skimmed through the exercises, instead focusing on shadowing the dialogues and mining example sentences). I've completed Syromyatnikov's Classical Japanese grammar and Melioransky's old "Kazak-Kirghiz" grammar, so now their places in my weekly routine have been taken by 百人一首 and advanced Kazakh lessons on til.gov.kz. The novel that I'm reading in Japanese right now is 響け! ユーフォニアム (about 3/4 of the way though the first book in the series). While I think that the recent anime adaptation of the first book is written better in nearly every way, the book is pretty entertaining light reading with most of the challenging vocabulary being music-related. Although I'd probably rank it as upper-intermediate in terms of overall difficulty level, due to the fact that aside from the protagonist nearly all characters speak the Kyoto dialect (not the stereotypical どす/やす/はる kind, but the real modern thing, which has only a few subtle differences from the Osaka dialect), so the dialogues might be harder to follow without prior exposure to Kansai dialects.

I've now got three weeks left here, during which I'll need to make another long presentation and take tests in the rest of the classes. Gotta keep on making the most of my stay here!
vonPeterhof on 30 August 2015

vonPeterhof wrote:

I've completed Syromyatnikov's Classical Japanese grammar and Melioransky's old "Kazak-Kirghiz" grammar, so now their places in my weekly routine have been taken by 百人一首 and advanced Kazakh lessons on til.gov.kz.

Hyakujin Ichiguchi? 100 people 1 neck? What is that?
Monox D. I-Fly on 26 September 2016

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogura_Hyakunin_Isshu - Hyakunin Isshu .
vonPeterhof on 27 September 2016

I... didn't know that the Kanji for "neck" can mean "poem"...
Monox D. I-Fly on 27 September 2016

It's used as a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measure_word - counter for poems and songs in both Chinese and Japanese. There's probably a story behind that, but I don't know what it is.
vonPeterhof on 28 September 2016

So, if I want to say "I have written some millions of poetries", will it be "Watashi wa hyakujuumanshu wo kita" in Japanese?
Monox D. I-Fly on 28 September 2016