So I've decided after a LONG delay to post a bit more. I expect this motivation will dies out again in a couple of weeks, but we'll see. First I'll post something that I started writing in late February but never finished. Tonight or tomorrow I'll try to summarize/ fill in the gaps since then.
18/2/2011 aprox
"So today I finally got my alien registration card, so very soon I will be getting a cell phone. Today while picking up the card from the city office, the woman working the desk had a long conversation with me, mostly in Japanese. It was probably about 25 minutes (good thing I wasn't in a rush). I found this extremly exciting to know that I could communicate on so many subjects, although I'm sure I sounded like a retarted yoda; messing up order and misusing particles. But the point was I was mostly understood. I was constantly using key words from my smart.fm/iknow.jp lessons so I've decided I'm going to stick with it and pay for the service once the free period is over. I'll briefly go over the converstation and try to bold words that I used from the smart.fm lists.
First I asked her if I could have a space put in my name on my health insurance card to separate my middle and last name and explained to her that a coworker said I needed it. (currently it has my middle and last name together in katakana). She explained to me how Japanese only have two names in so the software wouldn't allow for the space. She then asked what school I taught English at. I was able to explain to her that I had 4 schools: one in north Ashikaga足利, one in the south and two in Tatabayashi館林. She asked how I traveled to all of them and I answered by walking and train (for some reason I forgot what "train" was in japanese was and took a while to remember it. I actually was saying it correctly in my head but I started thinking "no that's not right..." and doubting myself). We then talked about the weather in Canada compared to Ashikaga, eating salmon in Canada and the proximity of various cities to the ocean, and how much nature and wilderness I see in the two locations. Next we talked about the sizes of the cities Burlington, Toronto, Ashikaga and Tokyo in terms of distance, population. She asked me if I had ever seen the northern lights. I told her that you can only see it in certain places but I wanted to see it, although I keep trying to use hoshi (欲しい) for "want" instead of the -tai(~たい) verb conjugation. That's a bad habit I'll have to break out of. (PS I often get asked about the northern lights by the japanese, so apparently it's something we're famous for. However they always call it the "aurora" which is next to impossible for japanese to pronounce like an Engish speaker due to the placement and combination of the R's and A's.)
Then after that I was walking to work and an older man started speaking to me in English. He was the best English speaker out of all the Japanese I have met so far. And he explained that he could teach me. I might take him up but I don't know if he's quite my vibe. We'll see..."
22/2/2011 aprox
"I'm confused about when to use hiragana vs kanji. for words is it like the englsih "3" and "three"?"
Friday, February 18, 2011
Saturday, February 12, 2011
A revelation on readings/pronunciations
So I've been doing a lot of smart.fm/iknow.jp to try and get back to where I was before I stopped it and to decide if I want to stay on that route once it becomes a paid service.
Before I thought I liked it because of the science terms they throw around claiming to have the optimized method of retention, but really I think I've come to realize the reason I like it because it seems more challenging than a lot of the other applications I've seen out there. Nothing else I have seen has gone to differentiate president of a company, and of a country and a prime minister and company from corporation. Maybe it's flawed logic, but it just seems like a harder tool is more designed for people whose final goal is fluency, not just basic knowledge of the language.
Anyways, so I've caught up now to where I was in Oct/Nov and I've started learning some new stuff (core 2000, step 4) and I was getting frustrated that the progress was so much slower for remembering the pronunciation of words compared to the writing using the RTK1 book. I can remember the kanji very well and that takes 10% of the brain power that it did before doing RTK1. So if going between English written words and Japanese written words, or vise-versa it's easy, but I found myself having to review the pronunciations over and over again. I was also having problems where I would mix up the pronunciations and the words and then I came up with an idea...
I decided to apply the Heisig method to the pronunciation. I would make up stories based on similar sounding English words. Here are some examples:
manufacturing/production= 加工＝かこう＝kakoo
sounds kind of like gakkoo, which I already know is school. You go to school so you don't get a manufacturing job. Even though I already know ka(加) from kaeru (加える）and koo(工) from koojoo (工場) I can't seem to remember it from 加工 easily, but once I made this story, I never stalled more than a second thinking about how to pronounce it.
drastically=大幅＝おおはば＝oohaba
I already know oo(大) as big then I think of the drastic change in health my baba (Ukrainian for grandmother) had right before she passed away.
success= 成功＝せいこう＝seikoo
sounds like "say code", so I think of a computer hacker who finally successfully breaks in and says what the code was.
directly=直接＝ちょくせつ＝chokusetsu
I think of "choke sets you" and have a mental image of going directly to a set of Mafia bosses and choking sets (or groups) of them instead of wasting time trying to talk with them.
graduation=卒業＝そつぎょう＝sotsugyoo
sounds like "so you go". I think of a valedictorian speech going "so you go out into the world..." also I already know gyoo.
I like this because like with the heisig method, it builds on the readings I already know. This allows me to reinforce what I already know at the same time as learning new ones. Otherwise stated, I don't need these stories for the kanji I already know the readings for, only with the ones I don't. Yet it saves me the time of having to go back and review the old ones specifically. (hopefully that makes sense)
Also once I figure it out from the story I always say it OUT LOUD. just to make sure that I say it correctly and not "so you go". I also suspect it just helps with the muscle memory.
So far this has helped me a TON and quickened my speed in iknow.jp but I'm still a little nervous about committing to it. I have a gut feeling that it may cause problems later on. One big thing that makes this different than RTK is that the book was made knowing what all 2042 kanji would be. This way Heisig could lay them out in way to avoid learning 然 before 犬. Where here I don't know all the words I will be learning and I don't feel like going through the effort to look them up and try to calculate some systematic approach of learning these words efficiently.
Either way, time to try it out for a week or so and we'll see how the experiment goes.
Before I thought I liked it because of the science terms they throw around claiming to have the optimized method of retention, but really I think I've come to realize the reason I like it because it seems more challenging than a lot of the other applications I've seen out there. Nothing else I have seen has gone to differentiate president of a company, and of a country and a prime minister and company from corporation. Maybe it's flawed logic, but it just seems like a harder tool is more designed for people whose final goal is fluency, not just basic knowledge of the language.
Anyways, so I've caught up now to where I was in Oct/Nov and I've started learning some new stuff (core 2000, step 4) and I was getting frustrated that the progress was so much slower for remembering the pronunciation of words compared to the writing using the RTK1 book. I can remember the kanji very well and that takes 10% of the brain power that it did before doing RTK1. So if going between English written words and Japanese written words, or vise-versa it's easy, but I found myself having to review the pronunciations over and over again. I was also having problems where I would mix up the pronunciations and the words and then I came up with an idea...
I decided to apply the Heisig method to the pronunciation. I would make up stories based on similar sounding English words. Here are some examples:
manufacturing/production= 加工＝かこう＝kakoo
sounds kind of like gakkoo, which I already know is school. You go to school so you don't get a manufacturing job. Even though I already know ka(加) from kaeru (加える）and koo(工) from koojoo (工場) I can't seem to remember it from 加工 easily, but once I made this story, I never stalled more than a second thinking about how to pronounce it.
drastically=大幅＝おおはば＝oohaba
I already know oo(大) as big then I think of the drastic change in health my baba (Ukrainian for grandmother) had right before she passed away.
success= 成功＝せいこう＝seikoo
sounds like "say code", so I think of a computer hacker who finally successfully breaks in and says what the code was.
directly=直接＝ちょくせつ＝chokusetsu
I think of "choke sets you" and have a mental image of going directly to a set of Mafia bosses and choking sets (or groups) of them instead of wasting time trying to talk with them.
graduation=卒業＝そつぎょう＝sotsugyoo
sounds like "so you go". I think of a valedictorian speech going "so you go out into the world..." also I already know gyoo.
I like this because like with the heisig method, it builds on the readings I already know. This allows me to reinforce what I already know at the same time as learning new ones. Otherwise stated, I don't need these stories for the kanji I already know the readings for, only with the ones I don't. Yet it saves me the time of having to go back and review the old ones specifically. (hopefully that makes sense)
Also once I figure it out from the story I always say it OUT LOUD. just to make sure that I say it correctly and not "so you go". I also suspect it just helps with the muscle memory.
So far this has helped me a TON and quickened my speed in iknow.jp but I'm still a little nervous about committing to it. I have a gut feeling that it may cause problems later on. One big thing that makes this different than RTK is that the book was made knowing what all 2042 kanji would be. This way Heisig could lay them out in way to avoid learning 然 before 犬. Where here I don't know all the words I will be learning and I don't feel like going through the effort to look them up and try to calculate some systematic approach of learning these words efficiently.
Either way, time to try it out for a week or so and we'll see how the experiment goes.
Sunday, February 6, 2011
A LONG overdue update
Hey everyone, I figure it's about time for an update.
I kept up a little bit of training with anki and RTK over my two week training period, but not much. I think at the worst time I had 1300 kanji due for review and over a 4 day period I whittled it down to 1000 but then after moving and starting my job I stopped again and now I'm somewhere around 1600 due!
I seem to remember the kanji I studied in the middle the best, but some of the early ones I mix up with the mid/late ones. What I mean by this is that anki will ask me for the kanji for "street" and I'll write the one for "road-way". The good thing is there usually isn't the same mix up the other way around. The last kanji I studied in the two weeks before Christmas are barely in my memory and I forget/mix them up them quite easily.
I have returned to smart.fm and Rosetta Stone but due to the long time of not touching them I'm only reviewing old things at the moment. I'm also finding that a lot of the smart.fm stuff didn't stick, which is making me wonder how good of a system it is.
I also started doing Pimsleur's japanese 1 on my ipod while I walk to work / commute on trains and I think it's great! Especially since it seems to work more on building what you learn. It makes you think more about how to USE the words, you have to do some conjugation, and you end up having actual conversations.
Smart.fm seems too disjoint. learning single words with little to no connection to the words you previously learnt. There is also the problem that there are so many words in a step (200) that the time between reviews is just too long. However I guess at some point or another you do need to just drill vocabulary, but I feel I shouldn't' be at that stage just yet.
I am also more skeptical of the order of words. I always get "chairperson", "president of a company", and "company" and "business" mixed up. Also I haven't learnt how to say "purple", "sun" and other words I feel I should know how to say by now.
On that note it looks like smart.fm is changing to iknow.co.jp and will be a paid service soon, so I'll have to decide if it's worth sticking with soon. Recently I'm thinking not, but the "promise" that it will have an iphone app might make me stick around (I'm planning to get one in 2 weeks).
So now I'm really stuck with what to do next for learning spoken Japanese and even the "readings" of the kanji. I browsed RTK2 and it seemed to have some good points so I'll need to look into that more and decide soon. I'm definitely going to keep going with the Pimsleur but I'm almost done the first level and I know that the 3 levels won't be enough to take me to the spoken skill level I desire to be at.
I think the most important thing will be finding a Japanese person to have conversations with. I'm hoping to do something where I speak with them in English for 30min and then we swap for 30min. But right now I'm still adjusting to work, my town and sightseeing to look into it.
I'm slightly afraid that it might turn into one of those chores that gets put off for too long, so please hold me to it.
I kept up a little bit of training with anki and RTK over my two week training period, but not much. I think at the worst time I had 1300 kanji due for review and over a 4 day period I whittled it down to 1000 but then after moving and starting my job I stopped again and now I'm somewhere around 1600 due!
I seem to remember the kanji I studied in the middle the best, but some of the early ones I mix up with the mid/late ones. What I mean by this is that anki will ask me for the kanji for "street" and I'll write the one for "road-way". The good thing is there usually isn't the same mix up the other way around. The last kanji I studied in the two weeks before Christmas are barely in my memory and I forget/mix them up them quite easily.
I have returned to smart.fm and Rosetta Stone but due to the long time of not touching them I'm only reviewing old things at the moment. I'm also finding that a lot of the smart.fm stuff didn't stick, which is making me wonder how good of a system it is.
I also started doing Pimsleur's japanese 1 on my ipod while I walk to work / commute on trains and I think it's great! Especially since it seems to work more on building what you learn. It makes you think more about how to USE the words, you have to do some conjugation, and you end up having actual conversations.
Smart.fm seems too disjoint. learning single words with little to no connection to the words you previously learnt. There is also the problem that there are so many words in a step (200) that the time between reviews is just too long. However I guess at some point or another you do need to just drill vocabulary, but I feel I shouldn't' be at that stage just yet.
I am also more skeptical of the order of words. I always get "chairperson", "president of a company", and "company" and "business" mixed up. Also I haven't learnt how to say "purple", "sun" and other words I feel I should know how to say by now.
On that note it looks like smart.fm is changing to iknow.co.jp and will be a paid service soon, so I'll have to decide if it's worth sticking with soon. Recently I'm thinking not, but the "promise" that it will have an iphone app might make me stick around (I'm planning to get one in 2 weeks).
So now I'm really stuck with what to do next for learning spoken Japanese and even the "readings" of the kanji. I browsed RTK2 and it seemed to have some good points so I'll need to look into that more and decide soon. I'm definitely going to keep going with the Pimsleur but I'm almost done the first level and I know that the 3 levels won't be enough to take me to the spoken skill level I desire to be at.
I think the most important thing will be finding a Japanese person to have conversations with. I'm hoping to do something where I speak with them in English for 30min and then we swap for 30min. But right now I'm still adjusting to work, my town and sightseeing to look into it.
I'm slightly afraid that it might turn into one of those chores that gets put off for too long, so please hold me to it.
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