Tag: HTLAL Archive

Tonight I completed Step 8 in iKnow, and at first I was happy, because that’s one more down, and two to go (with one at 90% and the other at 50% so shouldn’t be too much longer now) to actually complete the Core 1000 officially. But then I went to get an idea of what that was in terms of JLPT and realized that if I want to try to attempt the N2 next year, I need to 5 more sets of 1000, and there’s pretty much no mathematical way that’s going to work out unless I magically gain more hours in the day to study, and spend all of my free time doing so. Which kind of was depressing.

Pretty sure the N3 is still reasonable, so I guess if by next year I’m still feeling like N2 is a bit too much of a stretch for me, I’ll at least try the N3, and just aim for the N2 in 2014 instead. But ugh. I’m so frustrated with myself for not having focused more on learning vocabulary when I was in classes, so that it’s now taken me so long to get to this point. I feel like I’m never going to really get anywhere, because all my goals seem so far away, and like I never really make any progress toward them (even though I know I do, actually, but right now I’m just not feeling it).

I think not doing more output/voice practice was showing in my tutor session yesterday, too. I really ought to start doing Pimsleur regularly again at least, for now, since I still haven’t finished the third level. And probably going back to reading and more importantly, reading out loud to practice sound and rhythm. I do have Harry Potter now, but I’m not sure if I can read it. Probably going to take a look this weekend to see if I can manage it at all or if it still needs to wait, but it is kind of an incentive, seeing it on my shelf, to keep pressing on and trying to study harder so I can get there.

Hm. I haven’t really stopped studying, but I’m definitely sort of lacking in motivation for languages right now and so it’s all pretty minimal. Just ~2 hours of iKnow a week, occasionally poking at Lingualift, and my weekly tutoring session, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch or read things in Japanese lately or even listen to podcasts/Pimsleur in the car (part of that is a current annoyance with my ipod, so I’ve been listening to NPR). Occasionally I also try to test my memory of the Cyrillic alphabet, too, but those studies haven’t gone any further than that.

My tenso package is at my post office, but for some reason every time I get a package shipped from Japan, they supposedly “attempt to deliver” and leave a notice, but I’ve never gotten a first notice. I always end up with a “final notice” days/weeks later telling me I need to pick it up or they’re shipping it back. Which is extremely irritating when I never get the first notice in the first place. But I can see from the tracking number that it’s there, so I’m going to try to go in tomorrow to get it? Hopefully they can get it for me on my ID instead of needing a slip or something.

So also Russian? I’m still not saying I’m officially studying it, but I’m getting better at pronunciation-reading words and know most of the letters– there’s still a couple I mix up either with each other or in a false friends way. I’m learning to write them, too.

Mostly I’m mentally telling myself it’s just a fun distraction to learn the Cyrillic alphabet and pronunciation right now, because I’m wary of moving too quickly in the beginning? It seems like my Japanese learning was impacted a lot by my inability to be comfortable with hiragana/katakana, and I do notice I find it far easier to pick up vocabulary when embedded in sentences than otherwise.

I want to kind of reach a point where even if I can’t understand a text, I can pick up something written in Cyrillic letters and sound it all out and write it down with relative ease, before really delving into a lot of grammar studies, which are liable to distract me from the “boring stuff,” so I want to have a good foundation in the boring stuff first.

Although also right now it’s not actually boring yet. Maybe because I’m just doing brief forays as a hobby between my serious Japanese studies? Either way, I’m just going to keep doing that a little until/unless it does get boring, since it’s not costing me anything extra to have access to those materials. Actually I only have gone through the first three chapters in the lingualift text, because it’s pretty difficult to work through without a better foundation in pronunciation, so I just flip through the review on writing/pronunciation and simple greetings occasionally.

I can’t tell if the Russian text is not structured as well as the Japanese one, since I’m at such different levels, but I get the impression lingualift is probably not good for anyone who needs training on writing/pronunciation basics in general. The Japanese section has chapters on the writing systems, but like the Russian text, there aren’t any real exercises/drills to help you really get hiragana/katakana and pronunciation down, even though there are audio for most of the words. So you really have to do that as a self-study elsewhere if you’re literally a beginner entirely.

The creators are really responsive to emails, though. At least in sending you a response. I sort of didn’t expect it, but every time I leave a comment, they email me within a couple hours to thank me for the suggestion and/or apologize for inconvenience and explain where they are trying to take the site. So I’ve been considering asking them about more pronunciation/writing system drills, too.

Originally I meant this entry to be a shorter one, but somehow it’s gotten away from me into a half-review of the lingualift system…

One of the nice things about using lingualift is that it also tracks minutes spent when doing things like studying vocab. Keeping track of time is not something I’m good at. It’s also nice because even though there’s overlap on basic terms, they break it up by section, so there’s also quite a bit in the “Food and Drink” section that I’m in right now that I’m either fuzzy on or never even heard used before. I’m finding using the kanji and vocab sections is a good way to start working on my basic kanji writing again.

Last week I apparently studied about 38 minutes in the vocab and 16 minutes of kanji. I’ve been using a notebook with graph paper and basically just writing out each word one or more times as I learn or review them. I didn’t bother with their kanji practice sheets– they have giant practice boxes, and it seemed like a waste of paper to print out so many, especially when I naturally tend to have small handwriting and already owned a graph notebook. I’m also actually working through chapters in the book, but I’m taking my time with it a bit as I catch up the vocab to the chapter. I’m still Level 1 in vocab, but Level 2 on kanji (as I skipped the first level), and in the book, on chapter 10. I just did the assessments for previous chapters, and then started reading through in more detail on chapter 9 (on adjectives), which I needed the formal review on.

Still working through iKnow, too. I’m finishing up 8 and 9, going to start on 10, maybe this week. I’ve been completely neglecting the Super Challenge, but my thoughts are somewhat that if I do more focus on vocab, it will improve my reading/listening comprehension, so I will be able to read more/faster later and can hopefully catch up. But right now I’m just not able to get excited about it, so I think I’m just taking a break from it.

My tutoring has been a bit sporadic, sadly, I missed a week because of awkward budgeting and I couldn’t purchase more tickets in time, and then missed scheduling the next lesson because the tickets didn’t process in time. But I’m having a lesson today, and hopefully will be back on track again.

September was a weird month. I hope October goes a little smoother. I’d been having a ton of trouble with sleep during September, too, but that seems to be evening out a little again.

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.

Current progress:

Nearly done with Steps 5 & 6 in iKnow’s Core 1000 (96% and 92%, respectively). I should be finished with those this week. Pretty close with Step 7, too (76%), but that might take until next week (it says 1~2 weeks for me right now). Step 8 is going pretty quickly; a lot of the words in it I already knew (I thought we’d already studied all the numbers, but then 九 and 七 came up again and things like that), so it’s already starting to tell me I can start on Step 9. If I can continue at this rate it should be pretty easy to finish Core 1000 by the end of the month, or maybe even by mid-month, depending on how 9 and 10 go.

I’m nearly done with CCS 8, which means I actually already caught up with my Twitterbot for the Super Challenge now. Lately I’m much faster at reading, which is nice. It only takes about 30 minutes to get through a about a fourth of a 単行本. Little longer when there are sections where I don’t know/can’t guess words well enough I have to pull out my dictionary and look up some things. I stopped reading out loud as much, though, to gain the speed, and I think my pronunciation’s starting to suffer for it. I do read in my head, but the mouth doesn’t always follow along properly without practice. Not sure if I want to start reading aloud again, though, since it’s more enjoyable to just read things at the moment.

Outside of those things and Pimsleur, I’m really not very regular with studies, I think? I have a couple textbooks I’m sort of using, but I never seem to actually do a lesson a day or a week or anything, just whenever I feel like it I pull out one and do some exercises. Using J301 (which is review for me; I can’t remember if I kept my old homework and keep meaning to look because if I had the correct answers, that would be nice), Unicom’s old 3級 grammar book, and Complete Masters (also old) 3級 book. The Unicom book seems to be the best so far, since it has the answers to the practice questions, but also forces me to read and understand the concepts in Japanese, since there are no English example sentences or explanations. Which is also a bit difficult sometimes, but the grammar is review for me, so I seem to be okay at understanding the explanations so far.

My tutorial yesterday was kind of blah. I was really tired and sluggish and kept reading things wrong and not remembering words or grammar to say what I wanted (though I was also trying to say some things I wasn’t really sure how to express anyway). I have 小さい宿題 due for next week, I guess, just making up three sentences, since we ran out of time. Though as we got sidetracked, we also didn’t really spend a lot of time on ～とのことです, so I’m kind of confused how it differed from ～ということだ (someone said that~) and ～ということですね (so you meant~). She said ～とのことです is basically the same as ～ということです though more like written language, but the examples we went through were still spoken language examples, so…

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.

I need to do more output practice. But I’m struggling to figure out how to make myself do it? Kind of ahh… acquired Assimil to see if maybe just skipping ahead and/or only doing the Second Wave on it would be helpful, but I’m still kind of undecided. Several times I’ve thought about making myself do some sort of X posts to Twitter or Lang-8 per week thing, though I kind of suck at coming up with anything to say. It’s the worst part of my JOI sessions too, having to make up example sentences, because nothing ever comes to mind to talk about, or if it does, I can’t think of how to say it because I don’t seem to have the vocabulary.

Oh, y’know, I realized I had my inaugural dream of speaking Japanese the other day. I sort of thought it was noteworthy to myself, but kind of just realized it was because I hadn’t ever had a dream where I know I was actually speaking Japanese and not just kind of a universal translator version of my English turned into another language/vice versa. It wasn’t a lot, and it was actually sort of weird as I was speaking Japanese to a friend who really doesn’t actually know Japanese, but in the dream he did, at least on a basic level, so I said a couple things to him. Not that I remember what exactly, but I rarely remember specifics from dreams, so that’s unsurprising.

Started trying to describe/translate my thoughts to Japanese when I remember. It is mostly translation now since I default to English all the time, but I think the more I do consciously the more comes up naturally, too. It’s just that I can’t do it at work much since I’d need to know more tech/programming terms than メール and like. プログラム or コンピューター It probably doesn’t help that tech is generally English-dominated anyway, from what I know.

Tangentially, I notice I actually have the most trouble pronouncing English loan words, because I get caught in this halfway between trying to say it as I would in English and how it should be in Japanese. Has anyone else found that to be a problem? Anyone have a good way to reset your brain to not do that? I think maybe some of it is that I’m used to being around multilingual speakers, who will just use the word they’re more comfortable with in whatever language inserted into other languages, and so I catch myself half-thinking that’s what I should do (especially if I’m talking to someone who knows enough English I know they’ll understand me) rather than Japanese-ify it. But partly it’s also that I get annoyed at how much longer it takes to say コンピューターのプログラマー than it would be to say “computer programmer” which is like, milliseconds in reality, and it ends up taking longer if I pause and say it wrongish and have to fix it. It’s awkward since generally my accent is one of the things I feel most confident about– my pronunciation and intonation are good enough I often get comments about how much like a native-speaker I sound, but then I end up tripping over loan words, which to most English-speakers seemed to be easier.

Started on Step 8 in iKnow and amusingly have found that there are a significant amount of words I know in this step again so I guess it’s sort of hit-or-miss still at this point, and I haven’t really hit the wall.

Ahah, I keep thinking I need to make shorter posts because it seems like shorter ones are better for people to read, but unfortunately I’ve always leaned wordy, and they come out monsters. Sorry to anyone who actually tries to read my log?