The Study Thread

[MisterM2402 [Michael]Member]

Couldn’t fit Japanese in my timetable, so tonight I went to Edinburgh University’s Japanese Society’s Language Classes! :D Started off in “post-beginner” – too easy! Stayed on for “intermediate” – too hard! XD Probably just go to both each week. I’ve never had ANY speaking practice before, so introducing myself was a chore and a half :P In the “intermediate” class everyone was older than me, and they all seemed to have been in Japan at some point. One guy who had worked there before was talking to the teacher for ages about himself (in Japanese). Very intimidating class! XD Well not “intimidating” – they’re all really nice – but more “too advanced” haha. When the teacher turned to me for input on the task at hand (reading a page from a Japanese travel guide magazine and gleaning some facts) I just said “This is too hard for me, 難しすぎるーー！！”. Even though everyone was shocked when I told them I could write all 2200 Jouyou kanji (actually more than the Jouyou list), they knew much more grammar and vocab than me. I was great at kanji and terrible at other stuff; they were the complete opposite hahaha.

Can’t wait to go back next week :)

[マーク・ウェーバーMember]

Haha awesome Mister :D
I guess not get speaking practise is one of the downside of being a self learner, but learning together with people better than you is a big motivation because you want to become just as good as them(maybe it is just because I am very competetive, but works for me :D). I think you should try to stay with the intermediate class if you are able to take part of the class. Going to a class that is too easy for you seems dumb to me :/

Good luck :D

[MisterM2402 [Michael]Member]

@Mark: I think the teacher said it would be fine if I went to both haha. It would probably be better to learn on two different levels – one backing up what I already know, and one expanding it greatly (though I’ll probably still learn a lot in post-beginner anyway).

:)

[winterpromise31Moderator]

Michael, your class sounds awesome! I hope you learn a ton.

And share some of it with us. ;)

• This reply was modified 13 years, 2 months ago by  winterpromise31.

[N’DonnaMember]

I’m wondering if I’m overdoing it.

I’m studying one and two stroke radicals, one and two stroke kanji, have noun lists 1-3, and I have my own personal noun list.

I have the job list two, but with all the other lists I’m using, some of the job meanings just aren’t sinking in.

And I’m halfway through Season two, insisting using わたし instead of あたし, even though I really want to use the later (because I used to be a mindless shoujo fan girl, it’s true, it’s true).

I’ve managed to balance my motherhood duties, my schoolwork (first year university), and my Japanese studies, insisting on JFDI, but I have to wonder if I’m overdoing it. I don’t want to take a break because I’m afraid I’ll give up, but I am worried.

[YeeshaMember]

If you don’t want to take a break: maybe cut a bit back?
But I think if you feel good doing it, it’s fine.

[winterpromise31Moderator]

Donna – how much time does all of that take you?

I have 14 goals on Anki and 11 or so of them have items due every day. It takes me under half an hour to get through all of the cards, averaging 250 a day. Some of them are new (the ultimate goals from TextFugu and a personal deck I created with vocab from the Japanese Pod 101 lessons). I study roughly an hour a day but your life sounds busier than mine. :)

Do you feel frustrated when you finish a study session? Content with your success? Are you feeling like you’re overdoing it NOW or like you might later? You can always cut back a bit later if necessary without dropping Japanese altogether. I have periods where I study 90 minutes/day and other times where all I do is keep up with Anki to avoid the piled up reviews.

[N’DonnaMember]

I usually spend about a half hour to an hour studying my decks, depending on if my son wants to play by myself or insists on having a toy car drag race (he wins every time).

I’m very happy every time I study Japanese. The jobs anki deck seems to be getting to me lately because some of the other words doesn’t seem to gel with me. I will do my best to remember, and I even bought a journal to write down the words that give me the most trouble. I guess I’m just so excited over my study, I hope that I can keep the momentum going.

Haha, I’m the same way. On some days, I’ll studying Japanese while listening to Japanese radio online or watching shows on Youtube, and other days, if I get through all my Anki decks to keep up with things, I feel like I’ve done a good job!

[マーク・ウェーバーMember]

Season 1+2 should take you about a month, if you are doing it in about 2 weeks then I would say you are overdoing it. As long as you feel good about studying then you should keep going :) If you can do it faster than others then just go ahead, but as far as I remember then season 2review says that studying s1+2(ARG NEW SEASON?!?!?!) should take about a month.

I have about 10-30min of reviewing a day(currently studying adjectives 0.o), but I move very slow at the moment, due to not wanting to learn too much before going on a study trip to England where I will not be able to review anything for a week.
Season 3+4 should take maybe 1½-2 months considering that you are learning katakana, verbs(40 vocab), adjectives(60 vocab) & adverbs(30 vocab). I havn’t gone through season 5 yet, and I still have alot to do in season 4, so I can’t tell for sure :D

[irmoonyMember]

It turns out I’m really godawful at memorizing the verbs. Or just Japanese words in general, besides those I picked up from watching anime :D
Well, I kind of expected that, Japanese vocab is so different from any European language after all. I’m sure I’ll eventually get better…
Reading Tae Kim’s guide is making me feel nervous about how much I still don’t know yet. Everything but the most basic points seems pretty complicated… I forgot what’s it like to be learning grammar already, been a good 4 or 5 years since I had to that for English. Hah.

I’m not close to finishing TextFugu anytime soon, but stince I like to plan, what would you guys recommend doing after that, or even now, besides Fugu? I’ve only done RtK so far. The world of Japanese is huge and I’m not sure which direction to take =D

[ElenkisMember]

Study vocab. Be sure to learn new words every day, learn them in their full kanji glory. I’m not happy unless I’m learning at least 10 new words per day, preferably 15. That’s going to be different for everyone though.

Personally I don’t like the idea of dividing vocab up into separate decks for verbs, adjectives and so on. Studying too many of one particular type of word in a row (aside from nouns) would be more likely to hamper my memorization as you’re going to start getting multiple words that sound too similar in one session. I like to mix things up more. I shudder at the thought of an adverb deck!

You’re going to finish Textfugu long before it’s complete, this is inevitable. So you will need to go elsewhere to learn the rest of the grammar you will need. Either continue reading Tae Kim’s guide all the way through, if that’s working for you, or buy a decent textbook/workbook combo like Genki 1/2 (the advantage with these is that they have plenty of exercises including reading exercises for each lesson such as short stories, the disadvantage is that they aren’t cheap). You can then progress onto intermediate textbooks if you wish.

Start jumping into native media as soon as you feel comfortable, again this will vary greatly for everyone. My recommendation is to use subs2srs for Anki. Basically you feed the tool a Japanese language movie or tv show, along with japanese and english subtitle files. Then it will automatically chop it all into separate lines and turn them into Anki cards, complete with audio and video. So it will play a line from the movie and show you the line in Japanese on the front of the card, and the english translation on the back.

Instructions here: http://subs2srs.sourceforge.net/ – and if you like anime then someone created a nice deck for ‘The Girl Who Leapt Through Time’ that you can try out.

Oh yeah, and keep doing vocab!

[RavenTwoFiveMember]

@irmoony “Well, I kind of expected that, Japanese vocab is so different from any European language after all.” Not true at all, all languages are seen in difficulty from the speakers native language. Meaning the difficulty is determined by your native language, the language you’re studying, and your ability to understand.
As for “vocab” which includes verbs and their conjugation, considering you mentioned “European Language”. Here is an example.
http://www.spanishdict.com/conjugate/estar
http://www.spanishdict.com/conjugate/ser (PS, “irregular” in red does not mean that it is not used, it just doesn’t follow the basic conjugation rules)
I just feel confident using this as an example. Both of these “European”(Spanish) verbs mean the same thing “to be”, and they have 100+ conjugations each, and the context you use them is completely different. Crazy right?

Anyway, I’m having a tough time getting my self to study in the first place, I have 6+ hours of Geology a week (plus 3 other classes), 20 hours of work a week, homework, I will be starting a second job (because I can barely afford simple things like gas to go to school) in 2 weeks. And when I do have time all I end up doing is playing games or wasting away on youtube. I try to stay up with my anki decks daily, but even that isn’t enough to keep it fresh in my mind, I’m digging my own Japanese grave and it’s driving me crazy. Sadly, College and grading processes aren’t based off intelligence and knowledge retention but rather a scale of “effort” which in my opinion is complete BS. Grading should be based on tests and tests alone, not the fact that people have more time than others. So FML, I hate my life.

[irmoonyMember]

@Elenkis: thanks for good advice – the only thing I’m wondering about, though, is where I should get the vocab to study from. I’m not even nearly good enough to use native media yet, I fear. I’m sure there are a lot of resources on the internet, but I’m not sure which are good and which are crap, to put it simply.

[ElenkisMember]

Most people (including me) start with the Core 2000 created by iKnow and then progress onto their Core 6000. These are supposed to cover the 6000 most frequently used words and you can find decks for them in the Download area inside Anki. I’m still making my way through the Core 6000 myself.

[マーク・ウェーバーMember]

Recently when making senteces I have found it hard to mix old and new stuff together. So today I decided to do something about it and went ahead and made 20 sentences(I think I will do 40 by then end of today).

I came across one thing that I wasn’t sure about, so maybe someone can figure this out:
How would you say this in Japanese; The healthy woman ate two hamburgers.

I would say it like this:
二つハンバーガ元気な女を食べました。

But I am not quite sure if this is the right way to say it.
In fact I am pretty sure it is wrong, but how should it be said. removing “two hamburgers” makes the sentence very easy, but where in the sentence should 二つハンバーガ be added in order for the sentence to make sense?

• This reply was modified 13 years, 2 months ago by  マーク・ウェーバー.

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