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I’m currently towards the end of Season 2. I’m not having any trouble with reading and interpreting the sentences in Anki so I thought I’d try something different by not looking at the kana and just listening to it and trying to interpret it.
Wow!
What an eye-opener.
Many times I have to replay several times to understand.
I especially have trouble with the female voice that is used. As a teacher I have often suspected that women have the ability to talk much faster than we poor males can listen. It’s like a super power.
But it’s an interesting challenge and I’ll keep at it and hope to get better.Yeah, I agree at first it is a little odd to listen to and pick out different words because of the way stress cetain sylibols and such.
Really thus far, I’ve only been reading to interpret form Japanese to English. But I find it very hard to recall Japanese words when reading the English version… is there any way to train that?
The Anki decks we download go from Japanese to English so I make my own to reverse this and just practice a lot.
@Noah What drives me nutz is the unvoiced vowels such as in がくせい (student) where the ku is pronounced just as if it was a lone k.For now, don’t bother doing English->Japanese – you don’t exactly know enough yet to have any kind of proper communication with other people (I don’t mean to be harsh, that’s just what being a beginner is :D), so there isn’t much use in being able to translate your thoughts to Japanese. You’ll be *inputting* a whole lot more information (books, websites, TV, etc.) than outputting (speaking, writing, etc.) for quite a while, so it’s more important to be able to recognise what a word means when you see it in Japanese than the other way round.
Even when you do get around to making your first steps towards communicating with the rest of the world, it still won’t be worth the extra effort. Do everything Japanese->English, then when the time is right, switch to Japanese->Japanese (I’m WAY WAY off that point yet haha).
@Tang: Don’t worry, you get used to unvoiced vowels pretty fast :) You’ll get to a point soon enough where you can just tell when something’s probably going to be unvoiced, before you hear it :D
I’m gonna have to to ahead and disagree with you on that one Mister.
Learning just Japanese->English is useless, (in my opinion). If you are unable to recall the word you want to use when you are speaking/writing Japanese, you haven’t truly learned it. Maybe, MAYBE it is in your passive vocabulary and if you are lucky, you might recognize it when you hear it… but what’s the point if you can’t use it.
Learning a language is an active process, not a passive one. Just listening and reading won’t give you any ability to communicate and use the language in question. You have to make effort to use it and teach your brain that it is important so you’ll be able to use and recall it much easier.
I spend the biggest percentage of my study time doing English -> Japanese study of the vocab. I figure sooner or later I should know it. For some reason kana -> English is not too much of a challenge…yet! ^_^;
That’s why I started just listening to the words rather than reading them. I copied the sound file to the front of the vocab and sentence cards except for the ones containing kanji since that would be self-defeating. That way the sound file is also played when the card comes up rather than only when it’s ‘flipped’.Part of learning any language is to learn the rhythms and sounds, just listen more to Japanese, the stuff in typical japanese language learning is very sterile and unnatural, try listening to japanese podcasts, or videos etc.
Here’s a challenge for you :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ra6kolkZJnsSome things to consider is that punctuation isn’t really the same in japanese as english. Double vowels or double consonants break up sentences more than words beginning or endings. Particles also break up the sentences, a ga here a wa there, a wo over there. Listen for the particles. By identifying the way the sentences are built its easier to break them down into sounds you might recognise.
That was a fast talker! O_o
I do have some audio lessons that I use and the native speaker there does put in a short pause after the particles which help greatly.
I’ll keep working on the brain training!@KiaiFighter: ahh but thats where the debate comes in! Input theory and output theory are often put at opposing ends and a lot of prominent learners online advocate high levels of input with little output until you’re advanced. For instance Khatz, or Heisig.
However since you’ve moved to Japan you’ve got a totally different experience and little output isn’t realistic for you, although I think if you live in japan theres no reason not to do Output simultaneously, although most learners have to divide their study time.
@ Sheepy: I won’t be so naive as to say my study method isn’t different because I live in Japan. Indeed it is, but there are tools that exist to give people opportunity to practice output. Be it Lang-8 or other pen-pal~like sites or the teamspeak here or whatever it may be.
If your excuse for not practicing output is that you don’t live in Japan, then I think that doesn’t hold up. We have to make our own opportunities. Even I do too. I spend all day at work speaking English and talking to my friends and family back home in English. Aside from the casual encounter at stores etc, I have to go out of my way to really “practice” Japanese speaking too.
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