Month: July 2012

shleechan:

hellmonks:

“Julie D’Aubigny was a 17th-century bisexual French opera singer and fencing master who killed or wounded at least ten men in life-or-death duels, performed nightly shows on the biggest and most highly-respected opera stage in the world, and once took the Holy Orders just so that she could sneak into a convent and bang a nun. If nothing in that sentence at least marginally interests you, I have no idea why you’re visiting this website.”

 #where’s my miniseries

I need this to be made into a movie or miniseries because of reasons!

今週から、友達は家に二週間いますから、あ まり時間がありません。でも運転するときま だPimsleurを聞いています。そしてちょっと漫画も読んでいます。SRSのことをあまり 使いませんけど。

From this week, I have a friend staying for two weeks, so I don’t have a lot of time. But I’m still listening to Pimsleur while driving. And also reading a bit of manga. Not really using SRS practice (in my case, mostly the readthekanji has been absent, but I’ve also not been using iKnow).

Seems like a lot of people like Memrise, but I get kind of annoyed at either needing to use their romaji (and not really being able to figure out how to input certain things in it? Also things like “shi” being an incorrect way to type し and requires “si” which is not normal for me– I always end up using “shi” when typing) or actually switching my input, so I haven’t really found much use for Memrise yet. I do like that their interface is very keyboard-friendly, and also kind of usable on my phone. Except
the romaji/input problem makes it not really usable, so then…

Well, I signed up for the Super Challenge? Just doing a Half Challenge in film only, officially, with 100 conversations additional since I’m … basically doing that anyway with my weekly lessons, so why not. But I’m registered on twitter with a full “Duper” challenge so I can log it all, but mentally not thinking about doing 100 books so I don’t freak myself out. I end up getting easily overwhelmed which leads to just plain giving up, so I like setting goals for myself I’m pretty sure I can achieve (or at least get really close on), so I’m only really aiming for 25 books, unless it looks like I can increase that goal and still reasonably meet it.

So anyway, it will hopefully give me the motivation to at least attempt to finish my reading projects. I did finish reading CCS 2, finally, and I’ve started on 3. I feel like I’m getting ~70% comprehension out of it now, there’s sometimes several pages where I am actually getting 90-100% comprehension, and then pages where I’m getting the vague idea out of a speech bubble, but don’t actually recognize a lot of the words. But surprisingly enough, even though I’m not directly studying any of the words in the manga, I’m noticing overlap from Read the Kanji, which is awesome. I’d be half tempted to count my reading for Read the Kanji as “books” but I have no idea how I’d count that, actually? I mean I guess I could estimate approximately how many lines would add up to a “page” and then count when I read enough lines, since I’d say most of my reading practice right now is coming from Read the Kanji, and I’ve noticed a lot of improvement from doing that regularly, but it’s also not exactly reading paragraphs so I’m not sure it really fits in with the theme? So yeah, still waffling.

Anyway, I’m probably mostly going to log via the twitterbot (my handle on twitter is @elegantreason), but I’m also keeping a list on a page on my blog with titles. (Which is mostly a code-blog right now, but I’m sort of waffling about making it just a language-learning log of all sorts.)

I’ve also been reading Making Sense of Japanese. I’ve had this book forever since we had to pick it up for uni classes, but they only had us read the wa/ga section, I think, which even that I had forgotten (or never properly understood?) what it was getting it, so it’s been interesting to clarify some of these things that I have trouble with, like passivication of sentences in translation versus the actual passive conjugation. I’m still kind of confused about things like … how do you say “The shop is closing” versus “The shop is closed” when it seems like it’s generally taken as the latter (お店が閉まっています）, though, but maybe I just need to read/listen to more native Japanese, and it’ll become clearer.

Sometimes I feel like it’s weird where I think I understand something when I read/hear it, but I have no idea how to replicate the pattern myself. Kind of the 3-second memory thing on Chinese tones I was reading yesterday. (I’m thinking of adding Mandarin studies back in after I finish Pimsleur III for Japanese. In some ways Mandarin would be easier, since I can practice with my mom. I mean, I could use Japanese with my mom, too, but she’s as bad or worse than me in Japanese grammar, even if she’d probably understand what I said, whereas she could totally tell me if I sounded weird in Mandarin.)

I write really long entries, ahah, sorry to anyone trying to read them?

Update-wise, I’m somewhere around lesson 20 in the second set of Pimsleur, which is back into giving directions, which I have learned something like four times now and still never seems to quite stick. I suppose on the other hand, I generally go blank when people try to give me directions in English without just writing me a map, though, so probably it’s just always going to be a bit of a problem for me, whatever lanaguage I use.

Was looking up the CEFR levels to kind of see where I was at in those, and I think I’m feeling like I’m only about A2 on input (listening outside of conversations and reading), but edging more solidly into B1 for output, which is interesting, since at the beginning of the year I was feeling more like my output was far below my input, and now it seems reversed.

Keep getting confused with ni/he/de, lately, where I know a lot of the time ni can be used interchangeably with he or occasionally de, but half the time I end up getting corrected for using the wrong one anyway, so I feel like I’m missing some connotation somewhere.

Also watched 千と千尋の神隠し over the weekend, with friends so with subtitles on, but I was catching some things without reading it, which was fun. I’m thinking I’d like to rewatch it without subs. The first time I saw it was actually when it was premiering in Japan, and I went with my cousin but had almost no idea what was going on. So it’s in some ways a sort of interesting marker for me of progression whenever I rewatch it and realize what else I can get out of it.

Whoops, haven’t updated in a while.

I kept being too tired to really use Pimsleur on my drive for a while… kind of ended up listening to the same couple lessons over and over again, but still feeling like I was missing a lot of it, but I’ve started doing those again so I’m up to 14 in series 2.

Doing a bit of readthekanji, but not as much as I was for a while there, so I’m only through about 1/5th of the N4 words still, but accuracy’s closer to 70% now, which is good.

And I kind of stopped reading CCS again, but I have been watching a bit more anime. Watched through Kids on the Slope which I liked quite a bit, and now I’m borrowing my roommate’s copies of Sailor Moon to finally watch… all of it. I’m in R now, sooo, still a ways to go (I have yet to get to the episodes I didn’t see via the dub forever ago). I sort of keep the subtitles on, but don’t literally watch it all the time, so it’s more of an ear-thing, where I can just check if I think I understood something.

It’s nice noticing things that transfer from one set of learning tools to another, like. I’d never noticed anyone using あいにく before I heard it in Pimsleur, but it’s been used several times in Sailor Moon?

Still doing lessons with JOI, too, though I think after I finish up with the soon-to-expire flex lessons (next month?), I’m actually going to drop down to just my weekly private lessons out of lack of time.