Tag: here be links to elsewheres

Meanwhile, I did a really poor recording of me reading something in Japanese tonight. My roommate started cleaning in the kitchen halfway through which distracted the hell out of me, not to mention is hilariously recorded as well. But it’s also pretty exemplary of my failure to read/say even words I know correctly sometimes, lulz. Maybe in another couple months I’ll do another one and see if I’ve improved.

Had an unplanned mini-hiatus/break due to personal life scheduling conflicts, but I’m getting back into the swing of things again. Finished iKnow’s Step 5, and I’m in that awkward last “week” of review for 6 and 7, nearing the end with 8 and something like a fifth into 9, so probably won’t be able to start 10 until October, but I should be finished with Core 1000 sometime next month, then, finally?

I’d been thinking I need to work on my writing again and ended up taking the kanji placement test in the Intermediate Kanji Book 1, with… amusing results. This was how it turned out after I finished. My writing is terrible! I was realizing while taking it that my method in college for taking tests made it seem like I had a greater kanji writing ability than I actually did. On the one hand I definitely did know more offhand then than I do now, but I supplemented kanji I couldn’t remember in their entirety by finding them written in other parts of tests and copying the characters from there, or typing it out on the computer first if I was at home. Which sort of explains why it’s deteriorated to almost nothing, since it probably was pretty weak to begin with, even if my understanding/recognition of individual characters and radicals was okay. I may have to step down and start with Basic Kanji 2 for some review first, but I haven’t decided what exactly I want to do yet.

Some time back, I was nearing the end of CCS and speed-read through most of the last four volumes, ahah. Which I didn’t really count pages for the Super Challenge, because there was a lot of skimming and extrapolating based on past knowledge/pictures, so I think my actual reading amounted to much less than usual. Then I kind of stopped entirely and haven’t picked up reading at all due to the break. Need to get back into reading, but right now I just haven’t been feeling into it.

And then yesterday I started a trial account with lingualift to see what they had. I haven’t entirely made a decision on which parts of the service is worth the price. I’m finding myself half-tempted if only because there is also access to Russian learning materials, but I’m trying not to get too distracted by the prospect of something new and really weigh whether their Japanese offerings are useful. I am almost certainly going to take advantage of the games, as Frenzy, at least, is kind of a fun way to improve my reading/typing speed in hiragana and katakana (the latter being more my concern). But I’m still evaluating the textbook and vocab/kanji. I have five days before the 6-month free offer expires, at least, so I’m going to try to play with it over this week and see how well it works for me.

Since I’m going to be finishing up Pimsleur relatively soon, I started looking for other things I could do in the car to not waste that potential study time, and ended up figuring my best bet would be just to listen to some podcasts, since I’m not finding other good options really, and I don’t think I’m quite up to dedicating all my car time to something like self-talk, though I may try to do that instead of a podcast once a week.

But it’s kind of difficult to find podcasts that are things I can understand enough that I’m not just completely confused and bored. I don’t expect to find any that I actually understand all of yet, but I’m trying to find enough that I can get at least something out of, to add up to about 5 hours of new material a week since… repetition is not a strong suit of mine, and I really just want to be able to set things playing and not fiddle while I’m driving.

Anyway, so I figured I’d post some of the ones I found as maybe someone else will find them useful too.

Let’s Read THE NIKKEI WEEKLY– Business news is not generally my thing, but the interesting thing about this podcast is that it’s meant for Japanese people to understand the English articles, so even though it reads out the article in English, they read it paragraph by paragraph and stop to note vocabulary and seem to sometimes explain some English concepts/sentences in Japanese. Ideally for me, it’s a half-hour program, too. The website also gives a vocab list and some sentence examples in English/Japanese, which is nice. iTunes link

おそらく役立つ四字熟語講座– Yojijukugo teaching aid. It seems the setup is to use a conversation to help introduce the 四字熟語 of the lesson and talk about it. The conversations seem to tend to be … odd from what I can tell. Honestly I can’t understand most of this one, but the speaking is slow enough for me to at least hear individual words and the conversations sound entertaining enough that it’s worth subscribing to me since they’re only 5 minutes long. iTunes link

スマスマE-KIDS Short (~10 minute) introductions of elementary/middle school kids, particularly kids who are full of endless energy, I think, according to their blurb. Probably the one I actually understand the most out of in all the podcasts I’ve found so far, because it’s geared toward/talking to children/children talking, so. iTunes link

Still looking for others, since all of these are weekly, so I will definitely need more to fill the time, ahah.