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Warp3: Korean/Japanese (TAC 2015 東亞) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5316 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 129 of 479 10 May 2012 at 6:14am | IP Logged | ||
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I would still consider myself far from fluent yet (mostly due to a lack of speaking practice). It's more a case of recently realizing that Korean doesn't really feel as much like a "foreign language" as it used to. I was also originally planning to wait until I at least felt somewhat "fluent" in the language to add another language (or to feed Spanish back in), but now...I'm not really sure there is any point in waiting that long. I'm definitely not fluent yet (my listening is better, but still lacking, and my on-the-fly sentence generation isn't nearly fast enough yet), but I would classify myself as at least "functional" in the language, and my vocabulary and listening/production skills are steadily growing. Plus I've linked myself so heavily with Korean media over the past couple years (my favorite TV shows are in Korean, my favorite songs are in Korean, almost every account I follow on Twitter is a native Korean speaker (even if they occasionally post in English or Japanese), etc.) it would actually take effort to disentangle myself from the language now.
In fact that last point, is one of the few things that has been keeping me *from* adding in another language. In the back of my mind, I wonder if I will get hooked on the media of another language and that will pull me away from having so much immersion time with Korean. But I can't let that stop me forever or I'll never learn another language. Which languages am I considering? Well...seeing and hearing them so much in Korean media over the past couple years has gradually increased my original levels of interest in Japanese and (to a slightly lesser extent) Mandarin. Both would also help make much better use of my 漢字 studies (since they use those characters far more than Korean does). Plus many of the Korean music artists I follow have been heavily promoting in Japan over the past couple years, which should make for a great jump off point into Japanese music. These Japanese promotion activities have also led many of them to tweet frequently in Japanese (often with the Korean version posted alongside), thus giving me ample reading practice on my existing Twitter feed. That said, though, I still want to get back to studying Spanish at some point. Leaving it to stagnate on the back burner feels like a waste and it is a language I still wish to learn. Honestly I'm tempted to try doing both. It may not work out and I may have to sideline one of them at some point (especially if it starts to impede my progress with Korean), but I have definitely considered restarting my Spanish studies and dabbling in beginner Japanese material at the same time. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5316 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 130 of 479 10 May 2012 at 11:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well I've pretty much decided to make an attempt to restart my Spanish studies regardless of what happens with any new languages. Today I took my Spanish Anki deck (which is 100% filled with content I've typed in from Assimil), deleted the active cards (I'll go back to reversing the cards later, but not yet), rescheduled the 946 remaining passive cards as new, and suspended them all. The next step will be to start back on Assimil (from the beginning) and re-enable the Anki cards for each lesson as I complete that lesson. Honestly one of the things that killed my motivation last time was typing data from each new lesson into Anki, so hopefully I'll get enough of a run at it this time to finish Assimil (since my only work in Anki will be re-enabling cards until I get about halfway through the book). If it starts to happen again, I'll drop the Anki step and just work through Assimil for now. I also need to decide whether to go back through Pimsleur again (albeit at a somewhat faster pace) plus I'm considering buying Michel Thomas Spanish and using it (which I was seriously considering shortly before I stopped altogether since I tried the sample lesson and liked the style).
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| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5316 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 131 of 479 13 May 2012 at 7:13am | IP Logged | ||
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2012.05.06 - 2012.05.12:
한국어 Hanja: 7 Korean cards: 39 Completed SKV sections: - 1.1 Personal Data (7 cards)(+2 cards for related terms) - 17.2 Mountain (B words only)(3 cards) Scorched earth reading: None Memorized song lyrics: None I'm getting close to done with "G.NA - Black and White", but haven't quite completed it yet. I also haven't added any new songs to the memorization queue yet. Listening: I listened to a few passes of TTMIK 이야기 제3회 (which I SE read recently). Reading: I read a few more pages of "Jonathan Livingston Seagull / 갈매기 조나단" and stopped by Twitter a couple times. --- español Assimil: - Lección 1 (15 cards reactivated) As noted recently, I've decided to begin working on Spanish again. Currently my base plan for Spanish is one Assimil lesson per day. On Thursday, I nuked my active Spanish cards (there were only 40-50 of them), rescheduled the remaining 946 passive cards as new, then suspended them all. As I do each lesson, I plan to reactivate the cards from that lesson. I've got up to lesson 52 entered already (which is how far I made it through Assimil last time out of 109 lessons), but I will need to figure out whether to add as I go once I get to that point (which is part of what sapped my motivation last time) or start adding ahead of time then I'll only need to activate when I get there. I haven't decided yet if I plan to make another pass through Pimsleur Spanish, but I may do that as well (in parallel with Assimil). --- I'm still not 100% decided on starting Japanese, but I have been investigating my options, including the possibility of trying to learn Japanese through Korean. Hanbooks has a beginner Japanese book for Koreans but it comes with audio-cassettes (not CDs) so I kind of worry about the age of the course (plus I'd have to figure out a way to get those tapes into MP3). Learning that way would definitely have its issues, but it would also allow me to learn via direct links between the two that would otherwise go unmentioned in English-based learning materials. In other words for many grammar points, it would be easier to just point me to the similar Korean grammar form rather than try to explain it fresh in English. The same would be true with honorifics, word order, concepts like the 이/그/저 triplets, etc. However, it may be better to just get learning materials for both and let the Korean one clarify the main language material rather than being the sole source. The ideal for me would be English-based learning material that references Korean similarities when relevant, but that sounds like a bit of a pipe dream. If anyone has suggestions for beginner Japanese materials that they found particularly useful, please feel free to share. I've already learned the Kana and have them in an Anki deck which I review daily, if that makes any difference in your suggestions. I also have 367 cards in my Hanja deck currently which will hopefully give me a nice head start on Kanji. Edited by Warp3 on 13 May 2012 at 7:32am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| The Real CZ Senior Member United States Joined 5430 days ago 1069 posts - 1495 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 132 of 479 13 May 2012 at 2:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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The three most useful books for me in Japanese (aside from novels/manga/etc.) were A
Dictionary of Basic/Intermediate/Advanced Japanese Grammar. They're quite expensive though at $50 per book. It probably would be better for you to get a Korean-Japanese grammar book anyway lol. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5316 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 133 of 479 15 May 2012 at 11:07pm | IP Logged | ||
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Since I already have the demos of various Pimsleur courses (i.e. lesson 1 from each course), I did lesson 1 of Japanese on the way into work today to try it out.
Some thoughts: - {sigh} I see this is another Pimsleur course where the male speaker and female speaker have notably different pronunciations for some words so I have no easy way to know what is considered the "standard" pronunciation for those words. The Japanese word for "English" was a prime example of this. The narrator asks the listener to note the "ng" sound in 日本語 then later asks if you noticed that this same sound is in the word for "English" as well. "Actually, Mr. Narrator, no...I didn't notice until you said something because the male speaker doesn't seem to actually make this sound and he is the speaker that you used to teach me the word." The female speaker *does* seem to make that sound in that word, though. (EDIT: This evening I looked up the various words that were in Pimsleur Lesson 1 this morning and 英語(えいご) has no "ng" (or even "n") sound in it. Maybe I misheard the narrator but swear that's what I thought he said. That also means that the male speaker's pronunciation *did* apparently match the spelling after all.) - I swear lesson 1 of Pimsleur Korean seemed harder than this. It required effort to recall the new words, but I recalled them most of the time without pausing despite this being the first pass. Most Korean lessons took at least 2 passes to reach that point, if not 3. However, this could be due to the fact that the word order and use of particles seems "normal" now, which was not true when starting Korean. I also seem to be able to keep with the listening part (e.g., understanding the dialog when they repeat it after teaching you everything in the dialog) better than I could initially with Korean. - I've noticed that I still have a tendency to try to spell words in my mind when I hear them in Pimsleur (I guess I'm not really cut out to be an audio-only learner...hehe). The unexpected part, though, is that most of the time I found myself mentally spelling them in 한글, not using the Roman alphabet! That won't be all that useful for some letters (like the very small number of sounds that Japanese has which Korean does not), but that was still an interesting development nonetheless. - So the Japanese for "no" sounds somewhat like 이예, which is awfully close to the Korean 예 which means "yes". Yeah, that won't be confusing at all...ㅋㅋㅋ Edited by Warp3 on 16 May 2012 at 4:09am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5316 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 134 of 479 16 May 2012 at 3:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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So this morning I decided to try Pimsleur Mandarin 1 on the way to work. Yeah...no. I won't be learning that language quite yet. I expected the tones (and was honestly kind of looking forward to them), but even without the tones I seemed to have a bit more difficulty recalling the Chinese words than the previous day's trial run of Japanese. Some of the phrases I got down pretty well (including tones), but others I had trouble remembering at all (or I'd remember the basic pronunciation but forget the tone pattern completely).
I did find the similarity of one of the words with Korean interesting, though. They mentioned that in mainland China Mandarin is called the "standard language" (or "base language" or something like that). The first two syllables of that sounded (to me, anyway) like 포텅 which is not far at all from the pronunciation of 보통 in Korean meaning "basic, normal, usual" (and probably comes from the same 漢字). It also appeared that the word for America seems to come from the same stems in both, since the pronunciation of 미국(美國) was quite similar to the Chinese word they used.
I've noticed that this behavior also has a very annoying downside. When I try to type a word in Japanese (using a "Romaji" style IME, which seems to be the most commonly used method for Japanese), my brain apparently just registers it as "not English" and thus tries to type the Hangul equivalents instead (which is how it has learned to exclusively type "not English" for the past year or so). I'll have to work on breaking that habit. Hopefully reintroducing Spanish and adding Japanese will work to resolving my brain's habit of sorting into only the categories of "English" and "not English". I was finally starting to see *some* separation of Spanish and Korean in the past, but that was before I ended up mostly dropping Spanish by the wayside to focus on Korean. It appears that dropping back to two languages (native + non-native) has reverted my brain into "bilingual" mode again. It's time to see how my brain handles quadrilingual mode. :) I'm also officially adding "Japanese" to my "Studies" list, since not doing so would merely be denial at this point. Korean is still my primary focus (and I am determined to sacrifice time and resources on the other two as necessary to ensure it stays that way), but I guess I'm officially studying 3 languages now. It's mostly a matter of figuring out the "how" for Japanese now. I've found that I like some of the aspects of how kanjidamage.com handles Kanji study, so I'll likely merge that (somehow) with my current Hanja study to handle the Chinese characters. I'm really tempted to go with Pimsleur for the audio portion again, but this time I am more likely to opt for the $335 MP3 downloads over the $470 CD sets (since I ripped the previous CD sets to MP3 and never really used the CDs much anyway). However, I'd also like to do more formal book study for Japanese (which is something I often find myself wishing I had done for Korean) to learn the grammar constructions in a more structured way. I also still want to make sure to do as much of the study of Japanese via Korean as possible to take advantage of their similarities and to continue to build my Korean in the process. A big question that still lingers, though, is immersion time. Part of the reason that I suspect I lost interest in Spanish previously was simply not using it regularly. However feeding in Spanish and/or Japanese immersion would have the negative effect of reducing the amount of time I spend with Korean media (which was a big part of *why* I didn't feed in much Spanish media before). Fortunately I've already been dabbling with some Japanese media anyway (much of which doesn't really have direct Korean equivalents) so I'll get some Japanese immersion regardless. Spanish however will be trickier. There is plenty of Spanish media available, I just need to find something that interests me and that won't take a large amount of time away from my Korean media immersion in the process. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4649 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 135 of 479 17 May 2012 at 12:46pm | IP Logged | ||
Oh, I never really thought of this, but it makes perfect sense. The word you mean must be Putonghua and the "hua" should be the same as in 대화. This reminds me of watching a Chinese TV series and reading subtitles about someone preparing something and suddenly doing a double take because I realised that I had just matched a sound to the subtitle, something that sounded a whole lot like 준비. Ever since then Mandarin hasn't quite felt as intimidating as it did before. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5316 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 136 of 479 17 May 2012 at 2:10pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yeah, the final syllable did sound somewhat like 화, so I could see it being linked to 대화. There are quite a few words in Chinese and Japanese that are very similar to their Korean counterparts (since, in those cases, both the Korean and Japanese words are usually loan words from Chinese). In fact, this is a big reason that Korean and Japanese have so many homonyms. They both took words from Chinese, but dropped the tones on them which led to more duplicates than the tonal Chinese language already has.
--- Last night I purchased and downloaded Pimsleur Japanese 1 (lessons 1-30), so my learning process (for more than just the Chinese characters) has officially begun. I'm still debating which textbook options to use for it though. I may try Assimil since it isn't very expensive and I'm already using Assimil for Spanish anyway. I still plan to do at least some of the learning via Korean, though, I just have to acquire the right materials. Some of this can be done via the NHK site for learning Japanese, though, as Korean is one of the base languages you can choose (as are both Spanish and English). 1 person has voted this message useful |
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