This topic contains 40 replies, has 7 voices, and was last updated by 
-
Posts
-
@Gigatron: I’ve never been anywhere in Europe (alas), but I have a fondness for the general area just the same. Maybe someday we can meet up and chat about places other than here, or maybe we can just blather about it occasionally online. ;D Me, I like freezing winters with lots of snow. Boots, scarves, gloves and jackets are too awesome for me not to want to use them waaaay more than we get to here.
As for whether I’m doing better than you — ha! ;) We’ll see how long I last! Not that I intend on giving up any time soon, but I am somewhat whimsical. ;D Thanks for the encouragement, regardless … and even if it is true that I’m doing relatively well, it’s probably only because I’m tinged with crazy and am allowing myself to ride the wave of the obsession before it passes me by. (Seriously, though, it’s been a long while since I let myself do anything really well, so this would be kind of a milestone. But that’s a story for another time. ;))
@ Crystal
I guess a better question would of been, which season + chapter are you currently at on TF. Judging by your answer, your probably somewhere around Season 3. I’m actually on Season 3 myself. I’m going through the Katakana again which I have learnt before but doing again to refresh my memory. Keep up the good work. If you have a real passion for something you will succeed :). As for your comment about winter, I love winter too. Luckily over here our winters are very cold. I don’t mind the sun and hot weather, but it can be pretty full on at times. I’d say I’m more of a cold weather person overall :D.@ Gigatron
What stage are you at on TF and where abouts in Europe are you originally from?Hey Crystal from Florida, welcome to TextFugu! What kind of freelance writing do you do?
Good luck with your studies!
@Tom: Oh — I’ve only made it to chapter 5 of Season 2 of TF so far. :D Until about two days ago I was using mostly iPhone apps and rather old books to learn. Re: weather, I think I just like extremes (which sometimes includes extremely nice weather ;)). Hot summers, freezing winters, ridiculously great beach weather … ;D
@Hashi: Hiya, Hashi! Lately I’ve been doing copywriting and commissioned fiction, and in the past I’ve done magazine editing, copy editing and a teeny bit of poetry … but my real love is fantasy, particularly epic and humorous types. I haven’t written much of what I super-love in the past few years (bad me), but I do at least have a cunning plan to start doing it again more.
@ Crystal
Ah, your only on Season 2. It goes at a quicker pace than Season 1 and you learn alot. What books were you using before? Florida must have very hot summers. I’m not a fan of the beach tbh lol@Tom: The books I have at the moment are Beginning Japanese and Reading Japanese by Eleanor Harz Jorden and Hamako Ito Chaplin, Read Japanese Today by Len Walsh, and Barron’s Japanese Grammar. The books are definitely not standalone resources, IMO, especially since most of them are fairly old (the Jorden books and RJT are all from the 60s). I just take them with a handful of salt. The same goes for the apps, though, really.
We do have pretty hot summers, although it could be worse, and it is in some places in the US, I hear … ;D
Gosh, books from the 60s. How do they differ from more modern books? Are they harder to understand?
I think If I lived in the US It’d have to be somewhere cold. Somewhere on the East Coast or Colorado maybe :D
@Tom: Well, I’m not sure how my old-school 60s books compare to modern books, since I don’t actually have any modern Japanese-learning books. ;) (Aside from the grammar, which is, er, just kind of a grammar. So it reads like the reference book it is.) They don’t really seem extra hard to understand, though. They just kind of feel … quaint, like other older books, you know? (Lord of the Rings comes to mind…)
I know that with the older books there’s a danger of my learning Japanese that’s out of date, but I figure that as long as I keep consuming a lot of modern Japanese media, that will help offset the risk. And it’s not like reading a lot of older books in English has permanently mangled my ability to communicate in modern English, so I’m willing to take a chance on learning some old Japanese, too. ;)
Re: cold places in the US, there’s always Oregon! ;D It seems like it’d be nice — cool weather, rainforests, surfing, much closer to California quirkiness than the East Coast. Of course, we’ve got New York over here, which is nothing to scoff at, either. (Babble babble. ;D)
@Crystal: Indeed, that’d be nice. Wouldn’t mind chatting with a fellow Floridian with similar interests. :)
@Kanjiman: In TF, really not very far at all, I’m afraid. I don’t remember exactly where I left off, but I was fairly early in on it before I stopped studying altogether. Also, the UK, though I’m of Italian heritage. :3
@ Crystal
You raise a good point. In older books, the grammar must be the same but some vocab outdated. I’d imagine teachers would prefer more modern books than ones from years ago. I know in Chinese course books, there’s an excellent set of books called the DeFrancis Readers written by John DeFrancis. They are meant to be very good but due to their age and expensive price/availability, teachers choose more modern books like NPCR or Integrated Chinese.Oregon sounds nice. Northern California too. New York in winter does look very appealing.
@ Gigatron
Oh, sorry to hear you stopped studying Japanese. Do you plan to go back to it?I’m from the UK too. What part were you originally from?
@Crystal: I wouldn’t be so bothered about learning somewhat “old” Japanese. I think the language has stayed largely unchanged for a lot of its recent history anyway, so I don’t reckon you’d sound so outdated. And even if you did, when I learned English a lot of it was outdated and old-fashioned as well, and I’ve not had any problems so far. XD
@Kanjiman: I’m not sure if I will, to be honest. Half of me really wants to go back into it, but the other half feels it’s no longer worth it. :/
Also, out of Manchester. Though I only spent a part of my youth there. Eventually I’ll get round to posting the whole tangled tale of my origins in the proper thread. XD
What part do you hail from?
@ Giga
I’m from the South. In West Sussex.@Both of you: The only reason it even occurred to me to think about learning “old” Japanese is that in a few Amazon.com reviews of some books, people complained that they used such-and-such book to learn and were constantly being corrected on their out-of-date Japanese when they went to Japan. I don’t actually remember which books those were, but I guess the comment stuck in my head. ;)
@Gigatron: Hey, if you don’t feel like studying Japanese right now, no worries — you can always go back to it when you feel more than 50% interested. The language isn’t going to disappear into the ether. ;D
I totally feel like I should have more to say, but I am soooo tired at the moment that I don’t know what I should be saying. I hope you guys will forgive me if I drop the ball on some idea or other. Poke me if you want to resurrect a conversation item. :D
@ Crystal
Learning old Japanese would have it’s advantages if you wanted to real old texts. I think for now, I’ll stick to modern Japanese and perhaps learn some older Japanese in the future.If you wanna talk about anything in this thrad just post a message. I check the forums daily and post mostly on my study breaks.
@Tom: Definitely, learning old Japanese vocab would be useful for that, and I do have some interest in reading older things, so … I’ll just learn what I learn and see what happens. ;) It seems like a better idea to just keep learning than to tell myself “no, don’t learn that!” at any point. Sometimes I have to make adjustments to other things I’ve learned, so there’s no reason I can’t do that with Japanese if I have to, right?
You must be logged in to reply to this topic.