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Going back to Europe TAC 2014 DE|FR|日本語 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4974 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 81 of 142 26 May 2014 at 6:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
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heh. I like looking at the rankings of the challenge to see how others are doing. I started really slow and I'm not exactly speeding through now either but I know I'll make the movie/video watching goal at least. But I saw your numbers and I thought you were doing really really well. At first glance I'm pretty sure you were ahead of the curve although there's some real monsters on that list too.. but I think most people are studying easier languages and I keep that in mind.
If this is a bad month for you then you have nothing to worry about =). 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Kerrie Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Kerrie2 Joined 5185 days ago 1232 posts - 1740 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 82 of 142 26 May 2014 at 7:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
Oh, wow. You and me both. :) I think it's important to remember a few things: * First, this is a marathon, not a sprint. At the rate some people are going, they will be done before the end of summer. You have twenty months to do this - we are not even a whole month in! * Everyone has different stuff going on in life. Vivian has 1900 pages of French read. I don't have time to read that much in English, much less a language I'm learning. I'm impressed, and have lots of respect for that, but there's no way I can *compare* myself to that. It's like comparing apples and space ships. :D * We are all at different levels. I'm going pretty fast in Spanish. And I'm crawling in French. But that's because my Spanish is better than my French. I can enjoy reading a book in Spanish, whereas I have to *work* my way through a page of French. * Some languages are harder to read than others. This kinda goes along with different levels, but reading Japanese is a much bigger challenge than reading French. If you speak and understand both of them equally well, Japanese will be a much bigger challenge. Slow and steady will get you where you are going. The improvement I saw in my Spanish reading and comprehension over the last SC was really huge. And as you read more, you will get better, and it will be easier. Just keep going, and don't worry about what the rest of them are doing. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5772 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 83 of 142 26 May 2014 at 10:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Kerrie, kraemder, thank you both for your words of support.
I spent some time this evening tackling those two pages of Japanese text which I found so demotivating earlier. This time I reread them intensively, looking up everything I needed to on the computer. I came up with a list of around 24 new words, most of which were descriptive words (to describe a variety of threads, wools and yarns as it turns out) and one of which, 仕切る (to partition), was repeated a lot on the page but I hadn't been able to work it out from context thanks to the other massive vocabulary gaps. Once I'd done this, I reread the two pages normally and carried on, finding myself back in the flow. So I'll put it down to an unusually tricky, but short, section of text combined with the unusually bad mood that I woke up in this morning! I certainly won't be making the effort to memorise all the words for different types of thread. At least not yet! 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4455 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 84 of 142 27 May 2014 at 12:40am | IP Logged | |||||
Some people will always have more free time. I've probably leaned too far towards the watching side of things and not put enough time into reading so far. That's probably because I see listening as my weakest skill. Once the JLPT is over I'll probably redress the balance somewhat. There is, however, no way I'm going to have time for 4000 pages of reading in any month, in any language.
I'm definitely treating it as a personal challenge. The film side won't be an issue, but the reading side is likely to pose a greater challenge for me. I like the idea of following other people's tweets to look for nuggets woirth reading or watching. I hadn't thought of doing that. Good idea! 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ezy Ryder Diglot Senior Member Poland youtube.com/user/Kat Joined 4139 days ago 284 posts - 387 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 85 of 142 30 May 2014 at 12:12pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I've been reading a thread on koohii, and found a post which you might find motivating/helpful:
"I had a vocab deck until 10k, then just dropped it and started reading Japanese. The first few thousand pages were very straining, with many new words, but it got a lot better after ~5k pages, then again at 10k and 15k pages. I'm now at 20k pages read and I don't need to look much up if anything. Maybe a word every few pages, but most times I don't bother. Of course material more difficult than light novels still has more unknown words." The original thread (Reply #19) PS.: Sorry if you've already read it. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5772 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 86 of 142 02 June 2014 at 10:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
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May Update
Firstly, the "study" stuff: I had a strong start with German at the beginning of the month, getting through 7 whole pages in my textbook, then finishing off season 2 of Warum Nicht and listening to the first episde of season 3, before everything tailed off again. For Japanese, I managed to work through a whole 4 chapters of Kanji in Context (and I polished off another chapter since the start of June too). I think the reading element of the Japanese SC is proving strong motivation here. I just need to balance my desire to get through the whole book asap with the practicality that there is only so much I can squeeze in my head at any one time, and long term it really is better if I study no more than a dozen or so new items a day. I haven't been able to have a language exchange or Japanese lesson every week, but things have still worked out so that I've had some speaking practice at least once a week. Then the SC stuff: I wrote a much longer update on the SC update thread about what I've been reading/watching, which I won't repeat in full here. I've managed to log something for all three languages, but making the most convincing progress in Japanese: Japanese: Books: two graded readers for third graders and half a children's novel Films: some episodes of season 2 of the drama 相棒 and some episodes of the anime series ヨルムンガンド, 宇宙兄弟 and 蟲師 French: Films: two documentaries German: Books: an A1/A2 level Lernkrimi Films: Hin & Weg, a travel show on DW 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5772 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 87 of 142 02 June 2014 at 10:42pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Plans for June
I'm keeping things quite free for June. The SC provides a nice gentle prod for me to continue using the skills I've worked so hard to develop over the last six years, at least for Japanese. It also provides some motivation to keep working on my kanji (since I want to graduate from children's lit already) but I have to balance this with the hard learned lesson from experience that I can't cram them all overnight, or even over a month or two. But generally, I haven't been in a studying frame of mind lately and I don't think this is a problem to be fixed, because I'm actually quite happy not doing too much study. I'd rather drink beer with friends or watch comedy with my husband. As long as I'm still finding use for my language skills, rather than letting them rot completely, it's all good. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4455 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 88 of 142 04 June 2014 at 12:31am | IP Logged | |||||
When you say "a chapter", do you mean a whole chapter? The introduction suggests going through KIC three times, working on progressively less common stuff on each pass. Are you tackling it like this or are you covering everything in a chapter before moving on to the next one? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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