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Japanese from scratch TAC 2015 東亜 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4996 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 1409 of 1702 14 June 2014 at 8:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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Ok I finished Ghost Hunter. It seems the latter episodes got a little more detailed on the plot backgrounds and so I turned subs on unfortunately. Yeah, I tuned in on the Japanese on and off. I didn't tune out the Japanese completely but I didn't strain myself either so that's why it's not as good.
Anyway. I broke down and ordered a Japanese version Nintendo 3DS XL. I ordered two games for it - Monster Hunter 4 and PokeMon X. Although I played video games to death as a kid, after high school I switched to MMORPG games only and since I'm old that means I missed out on Pokemon completely. I have no idea what Pokemon is. Nor do I get how there seems to be a billion games called Pokemon. And this Monster Hunter game is a clone (albeit a very successful one) of Pokemon I think. Anyway. I have no idea what to buy regarding video games and these were just what Amazon said everyone else was buying. I have a Japanese copy of FFXII-2 for PS3 somewhere (I couldn't find it this morning when I looked though) and a Zelda for Nintendo DS. The Nintendo DS graphics do seem pretty dated which is why I wanted the newer system. Although side scrollers are really fun. Old games are still good. It's been a couple years since I tried playing games in Japanese. I found the kanji a bit too frustrating at the time (for Final Fantasy) and figured even if I got through the game I wouldn't learn much Japanese since it was too over my head. I think that it should be better now. I'm back to doing the Core deck on my FCD app. I liked the Japanese iOS dictionary cards but it's just not quite flexible enough to let me study the way I want to although I still think it's a really awesome flashcard tool. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4996 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 1410 of 1702 18 June 2014 at 8:27am | IP Logged | ||
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It turns out that I can't get a Japanese 3ds XL (LL) on the states side amazon dot com just the regular
Nintendo 3ds. So I ordered it off eBay from japan and it'll probably take a while to come. I found my old Nintendo ds XL with Zelda and tried it out. It's so much easier than last time and it's fun. It's past my bed time of course. So I will put more time into it later. The kanji look funny on the low resolution but are readable for the most part and hiragana is no problem at this resolution and everything has hiragana if you tap the kanji. Really a learners dream come true. I think I had to look up almost every word last time while now that's not the case at all. I barely found final fantasy for ps3 but when I tried it I was too sleep deprived to focus so I'll have to give it another go. I haven't really enjoyed gaming In a long time because I felt like it was too much of a waste of time but since it's Japanese I can pat myself on the back. I hope it stays fun. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| The Real CZ Senior Member United States Joined 5461 days ago 1069 posts - 1495 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 1411 of 1702 18 June 2014 at 5:55pm | IP Logged | ||
This is very common in Asia. Seeing as how education is much more competitive over there, if a student doesn't get into the school of their choice, they spend the next year studying for entrance exams to reapply for that school. I'm not sure if Japan is like Korea and China where a student can only apply for one university, but I would assume so since Japan has a similar education system. These prep schools are mainly dominated by smart people trying to get into the country's prestigious universities instead of going to a "2nd rate" -- albeit a still very good -- university. I haven't watched Chobits in about 6-7 years, but I believe the main guy was trying to get into Toudai, Japan's top university. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4996 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 1412 of 1702 18 June 2014 at 8:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yeah you can do that in the states too. My cousin tried it. He really wanted to go to an Ivy League school
(Harvard) and went to a prestigious high school for a year hoping it would help him but he just went to a regular (but also good) university after. I don't know if it works for other people. I could see it helping you get into a regular school if they had turned you down but prestigious schools generally I think you should move on and just go where you're accepted. Prestigious schools want rich people or way over talented people I think. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4477 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 1413 of 1702 19 June 2014 at 12:31am | IP Logged | ||
I know precisely zero about the Japanese education system, but one of the story arcs that JPOD101 present as a lesson involves a student preparing to apply for university. One piece of advice he's given is to make sure he applies somewhere else too, just in case he doesn't get in to his first choice. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4996 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 1414 of 1702 20 June 2014 at 8:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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omg my post got lost. I have to copy before pasting. Other forums have built in safety mechanisms to keep posts from being lost but not this place.
I read an article about a Japanese Guild on Warcraft 15 Minutes of Fame: Japanese Players build their own community on World of Warcraft and decided to see if I could join. I applied and they are just as nice as they seem in the article. Well I actually talked to one of the same people in the article. I don't think everyone is as friendly but that's to be expected. I have been in the guild a few hours and got the tail end of their gaming night.. which was 9:30 am my time and 1:30 am their time or something like that. I'll have to wake up early to play more with them I guess. I understand most of the chat so it's good. Previously I was really hard on myself when I could understand a kanji (word) but not say it in Japanese. As I was chatting I realized I didn't care at all I was just happy to understand lol. At the moment there are only a few players on and they're not too chatty but it's 4 am their time I guess so I can't blame them. They use a voice chat program too but I haven't tried it since well they're all half asleep and not talking. I'm slightly concerned this will backfire and I will just waste hours playing Warcraft in English. It's an American server (no Japanese servers exist) and the client is all English. Warcraft can be very addictive. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4996 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 1415 of 1702 28 June 2014 at 4:15am | IP Logged | ||
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Well I've been playing a lot of warcraft lately. There's not so much opportunity to speak Japanese in game since most players are sleeping or busy when I play. The most active hours would be early AM for me - 4 AM to 9 AM I guess. They raid (group event with voice chat) at 6 AM my time. Right now I can't participate because my character is too weak but I think that a few weeks and I could. It would be good practice I think if I did that although just chatting in game not so much.
So all this gaming has had an impact on my study habits of course. I pretty much stopped doing SRS. And I thought about catching up and I didn't want to. And I thought about starting over and I didn't want to. So I thought about reading Harry Potter book 2 (and the rest of the books) and maybe some manga or something and that seemed a lot better. I started rereading from the beginning today (I don't know how far I got previously before I lost discipline) and it's pretty entertaining. I can "hear" more interesting Japanese style voices in my head now that my Japanese has gotten better. I really don't know how this will impact my vocabulary etc. With German I got so much out of reading and pretty much stopped writing down vocab for later study in favor of just reading more and more. That's basically what I'm doing now but I'm just starting. I'm guessing that short term I won't learn as fast but long term if I do it every day it should be very good. It's being lazy but it's still good. I was thinking of still doing the RTK SRS deck I have been sort of doing. I think I will sort of keep doing it. I get a lot of kanji practice this way anyhow since I have rikai-sama and can test myself on kanji meanings as I read if I choose. I was also thinking of doing the grammar SRS deck I have. In theory, since the amount of cards is way way less than a vocabulary deck, it shouldn't take too much of my time and not doing vocabulary SRS frees up tons and tons of time. But experience shows that I'm bad at doing the RTK and grammar decks so I should mostly focus on reading and more reading. I'm also still doing the JOI lessons and they're really helpful and fun. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4996 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 1416 of 1702 30 June 2014 at 1:54am | IP Logged | ||
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I found a legal (and professionally edited) version of Harry Potter in Japanese.. just go to www.pottermore.com www.pottermore.comto grab a copy if you're interested. I had wanted to read Potter on my computer in Firefox with rikaisama in the worst way but that didn't seem to be happening. Although I can convert it to plain text and then to a webpage no problem, Harry Potter has a good amount of furigana and the conversion process just sticks that furigana next to the kanji without parenthesis or anything. Really annoying and not something I can put up with. But you can download a MOBI version that works with kindle. So I fired up my iPad with the kindle app and got going.. and it worked well and looked great. Selecting words is usually ok although occasionally it's annoying for longer words as the iPad seems to think you want to select the whole paragraph. You can quickly switch dictionaries. I was pleasantly surprised to see I can understand the Japanese to Japanese dictionary pretty well. (maybe I already achieved this a while ago but forgot?). Then I remembered that the new Kindle has a feature to save vocab for studying as flashcards (not on the iPad app though).. so I just started trying that out. If you use a stylus on your kindle (regular tablet stylus) it works a lot better for selecting words I find. And it saves the vocab and sentence for studying. I think I declared already that I wasn't going to do flashcards so this is a small renege on that idea but it's not SRS and I probably won't use the flashcards much. Just a little. Kind of the opposite of how I was doing Japanese before - daily flashcards and once a week read for an hour or so if that (and tons of anime).
One thing about the kindle is that I don't see how I can quickly get kanji info like you can with Rikai-sama. So I might want to be a bit more diligent about my RTK deck, which I keep telling myself to do anyway. I've heard from a few sources online that kanji hurts your eyes. I think it's probable that my eyes became near sighted due to reading a lot as a teenager so this makes sense.. I'm slightly concerned by this. I don't need my eyes to get worse than they already are. I googled it and found a strange article about how Asians are all near sighted possibly from staying inside too much (doing stuff like reading) than going outside. Apparently the sunlight is good for your distance vision is the idea. Interesting. It seems logical like a good guess. I know people who spent lots of time inside but didn't read much (more video games and movies) and maintained good vision so I don't know how well this holds up. When people speak of reading too much they generally really mean too much. They stay up for 24 hours straight reading like an addict because they don't want to put a book down. That's how I used to be. So in this study the guy says that people who read a lot but still went outside regularly to get their sunlight had better vision.. well it kind of tells me they weren't reading way too much like I did. Not to say I never went outside but I had a lot of these binge reading sessions. Truly rambled a lot here. Gonna go back to reading Japanese. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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