It’s that time of the week. How are you doing?
It’s been a serious few weeks. I haven’t posted for a bit on the weekly updates, so there could be a lot to cover.
My German class (B1.2) is going well. I’m really starting to understand more of the German language structure and patterns. I’m finally starting to get Nominative/Accusative/Dative and how adjective endings become what they based on article changes.
Past tense is still very rough, especially in sentences with multiple clauses. There was also a whirlwind of logical operators that I need to practice for a few solid weeks.
I’m still churning through Angelika Bohn’s German language books. I’m on a B1/B2 that’s just pushing my vocabulary a touch more than I wanted.
My ability to listen to spoken language is getting better, but I still get hung up translating in my head and miss the rest of the sentence. Holding it all in there while the person is still speaking is rough.
I’ve been doing much better in shops and stores with both conversation speaking & listening, as well as vocab on items & checkout systems.
I can do this. I have to. In 11 months I need my B1 test certificate in hand for my early residency application. That’ll be an awesome day!
Made my way through learning to write 75% of the Joyo Kanji via Rembering the Kanji and Kohii. Love the way this satisfies the number-go-up instinct in my brain, even if going through doing isolated kanji study isn’t the most valuable thing.
I’ve also just generally been kinda absorbed in Anki this weekend. Had a few days where I couldn’t really watch/listen to anything, but I could kill time on my phone w/ flashcards. Caught up on my Core 2k/6k deck (I’m about 1100 cards deep into that).
Also messed around with importing media decks from Jiten and messing with those. It’s like a buffet tho, where my interest is higher than my capacity. Looked at these decks, but ultimately realize I should be focusing more on my core deck if anything, to get all these common words out of the way. The media decks are more compelling when they can be less than 1000 cards for high coverage, but for a season of anime or something, I’m still looking at about 2k card decks for 95% coverage.
Oh hey, my niece bought me that Koohi book just last Christmas. I haven’t gotten into it since I’m already knee deep in MaruMori SRS. But I’ll probably dig into that app and etc for when I start trying to write. Never knew how popular it was. Neat.
How does MaruMori handle kanji?
I think RTK has definitely been good for me. I was doing Genki stuff and common words in Anki for a while before I tried it. Building up kanji knowledge the RTK way helps with not getting similar characters confused near as often, and not having to copy every time I write one.
You can get a lot of milage out of just reading the first bits about the method if you don’t want to go all in on flashcards.
But getting that strong familiarity with kanji makes it easier to learn new words and such, so earlier is probably better if you want to do it.
MaruMori has it’s own system for learning both the readings and the meanings, but I honestly skip them completely since I just ignore the stories made since they never help me remember them any better. I feel the best way to memorise a hard to figure out word is always a more personal story. For instance I had issues with the word “とにかく”, and the pre-made story wasn’t helpful. So I just imagined a mobster called Tony being dismissive going “anyway…”. And that helped me remember a lot better than the pre-made stories.
MaruMori does have a building of sorts for their words, but you need to sort of get in to them early to help make earlier meanings make sense of later meanings, so I’m far too deep to start them properly now which is another thing I can’t really jell with it fully. I guess it can work, but just not the way I use it.
MaruMori also doesn’t stay to a strict N5 list then N4, they do it based on what they think is more useful, and in terms of usefulness, it’s not always about word frequency, but about how a kanji you just picked up relates in words its used to indicate how it’s used. Like I learned 機体 in Japanese, despite hardly ever using that word in English. MaruMori also builds from base kanji into more and more complicated kanji, using older kanji as references to newer kanji in order to cement meanings of the strokes.
It’s not the best way to pick up Japanese vocabulary, but at the same time I don’t think there could ever be a realistic best scenario. So it works for what it is I guess.
It sounds pretty good. As long as it does have a systematic way of approaching Kanji, I think that’s what counts.
Heisig’s way is similar but different. It’s just kanji only, no vocab or readings. And since he thinks you need all the common kanji anyway, it’s done purely by components with no care for how useful the character is. The building-up-parts and mnemonics stuff I like, but I do think the ordering could use a little more consideration.
The Kohii app is actually a Foss thing that’s not officially associated with the book or author. You can customize all the keywords and you record your own stories (or use ones shared by the community). I think it could still be useful for tracking characters you know, even if you’re already deep in another app. (Then again, you’ve got a system and it’s working, so no need to overcomplicate things and spend time on tools you don’t need.)
Only managing to scrape by with 30 mins of Japanese a day and 1 Duolingo lesson of Spanish a day. No Irish. Still sorta depressed I think. I think to regrow my efforts I want to just focus in on my Japanese until that’s doing an hour, then grow my other language muscles again. Still amazed how I just completely fucked up after missing a day or 2 to that heatwave. Absolutely insane.
Also want to reply to some folk here on this thread at times, but can only see them if I go directly to this current Language Learning website/page (sopuli.xyz). Can’t see most posts from this instance. I know Ashtear pops on here every so often, but can’t comment to people if I can’t see them on my own feed. Reoccurring issue for me.
Also if anyone has any tips on getting back on the horse. I’d be appreciative.
No idea on the federation issues. With Lemmy I guess I never feel sure whether I’m seeing everything either.
For getting back, I think you’re on the right path. Just keep doing some consistently. Motivation comes and goes, but as long as you have a consistent habit, I expect you’ll be fine.
If it helps, try to think back to why you want to learn [whichever language]. What would it enable you to so? How cool would it be? What if you had consistently worked as hard as you want to starting 10 years ago? Then realize today is 10 years before some other day.
I think that’s a huge part of it. I don’t see the end results being all that worthwhile anymore. For a while I was told learning Japanese will get me nowhere, and it was my focal language, so that really shot my nerves. Next to that, I don’t really find myself being anyway competent at the languages so it’s just struggling uphill constantly with no payoff. At least not yet.
Feels like the better part of 2 years down the drain at the moment if I end up do giving up. Effort levels for attempting studies is very high so I want to engage slowly and not force myself to over indulge to keep up with full force studying. Honestly I just feel like I’m in a slump and when I see things right again, I’ll be rearing to go again. No idea what’s caused the downfall though. I know I’m near homelessness, but that’s just about it for me. I really shouldn’t be all too far gone. There still should be hope, and yet I just feel like I’m wasting away. Don’t mean to emotionally dump/vent, but studying is just so hard to do right now with regards to my languages. I used to always enjoy it. Something is off, and I’m not sure what.
I basically have a couple things I’m doing right now:
- Once/week I take a lesson from a private tutor.
- Each lesson we spend time talking about how our weeks went in Japanese. After that we do grammar points from Genki I & II. The “今週はどうでしたか” (How was your week?) section keeps gradually getting longer and longer as I can hold more of a conversation. This week we spent basically all the lesson just talking (in Japanese!) about my recent trip to Japan. I still fee like it’s baby-level Japanese but it’s exciting nonetheless
- I made a friend in Japan last year and he and I speak on zoom once a week for language exchange
- His English is significantly better than my Japanese so it’s been a lot of English, which is good for him and I enjoy but we discussed starting to enforce japanese only for the first 20 minutes. We should start that next week
- I’m reading manga in Japanese
- Currently working through the first book of Sakamoto Days. It’s slow going but I’m finding it engaging enough that I’m having fun reading. I brought a few more volumes with me from a bookstore in Kochi City I went to.
- One interesting observation: Now that I know a reasonable amount of Kanji I sometimes wish the furigana wasn’t there for the ones I already know. I comprehend the sentences faster if I just look at the kanji but I reflexively look at the furigana anyway…
- Anki vocabulary
- I started with the genki vocab deck but made some improvements
- I added a kanji -> kana + english card
- I’m adding sounds for every word as I learn it (mostly from https://nadeshiko.co/) and pictures when appropriate
- Youtube podcast immersion
Language learning is such an emotional roller-coaster. You go from feeling great about your progress one minute to feeling dumb and terrible the next. It’s nice to be able to look back and remind myself that last year I could barely order coffee in Japanese, but now I’m actually communicating.
- Once/week I take a lesson from a private tutor.
