Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Update:
Ultimate Vocab 3 is located here http://www.textfugu.com/season-5/dict-verbs/3-8/
Not sure if Koichi has recently added it there since I last looked or I just didn’t see it the first time.
Your best bet and what Bbvoncrumb said earlier is to make Japanese friends on Lang-8 and add them on Skype. Nothing is better than having a proper conversation with a native. This will improve your speaking and listening tremendously.
If you don’t want to go down the Jpod101 route again, you can always try Pimsleur. If you know “where to look” you can get hold of it for free.
As for the leisure learning, watching TV shows and movies is a good choice.
Tae Kim’s guide to Japanese grammar is a free online resource and highly recommended by a lot of Japanese learners. Check out http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/
http://www.japanesepod101.com/ is useful for podcasts. I believe you can sign up for a free account and get some podcasts free but after that you will need to subscribe. Subscribing is worth it as you also get the transcripts for the lessons.
AJATT is useful if you tweak it your own way. The backbone of your Japanese learning will still be TextFugu or whatever resources you use, but you can still learn Japanese by doing something you enjoy like watching Anime or listening to Japanese music. Basically, just pick out the bits from AJATT that are useful for you and integrate it into your study time.
Please explain to me how everyone past season 3 consider themselves intermediate level
Definitely not me lol. I’m still working through Season 5 albeit at a slow pace and I know just over 100 kanji. I wouldn’t even begin to consider myself intermediate until I’ve at least finished all the TF lessons, gone through stuff on Tae Kim which isn”t yet covered here on TF, and know around 1,000 – 1,500 kanji.
Firstly, if it works for you then it’s by no means atrocious. Everybody learns things in different ways. It’s not a bad idea, but probably one I wouldn’t do myself. When I got up to the post it note part of your post (no pun intended :D), I initially thought you were going to say you’ve been sticking the notes on various things around your house with the Japanese word written on them. That seems to work for some people in helping them remember vocab.
Once you’ve got a vocab word into your long term memory, start creating your own sentences containing that word to help cement it further into your brain. If you haven’t done so already, post on Lang-8. You’ll get feedback from native Japanese people who’ll correct your mistakes.
Basically, learning a word is only half the battle when cementing it into your long term memory. You have to use the word in sentences to have a greater chance of remembering it for years and years.
I do agree with Joel there. Some of Koichi’s Radicals are a bit far fetched when comparing it to the Kanji. This confuses me at times as I either forget the Radical and remember the Kanji or vice versa. But with Kanji like 工, the meaning is Industry/Construction and so is the Radical which makes it easy to remember.
Joel’s basically saying he doesn’t learn Radicals on TextFugu anymore because he prefers using other resources.
This is still the best explanation on the on’yomi and kun’yomi readings I’ve come across.
Credit goes to Tsetycoon:
The official rule is that if there is JUKUGO, or compound-kanji (at least 2 kanji NEXT to each other), both kanji use the ON’YOMI.
You use the KUN’YOMI when the kanji is BY ITSELF. You also use the KUN’YOMI when hiragana FOLLOWS the kanji to generate the meaning of the word.
HOWEVER, EXCEPTIONS are ALL OVER THE PLACE. A kanji by itself may favor the on’yomi, and two kanji in jukugo may favor the kun’yomi. A jukugo may even have on’yomi for one kanji and kun’yomi for the other!
I usually try to just know the actually word in the first place, and then understand how the reading of the kanji works. I’d say that despite these rules, at least 45% of all words have these reading exceptions.
@ Tang
Not all the sentences have audio unfortunately. For the ones that don’t, you could copy the sentence into Google translate and click the speaker button so a native speaker will read it out, and then download the audio and put it into anki. I haven’t been too impressed with it though as sometimes they speak too fast.
@ Ben
The more difficult it gets, the more satisfaction you get from learning :)
@ Neil
It’s very rewarding when you start to recognize words out in the wild. Makes you feel you’re making progress.
@ Tang
Season 4 is a step up in difficulty from the previous 3, however Season 5 is when you will really notice the bar being raised. You begin to learn casual speech among other grammar points.
As for the sentences, I and probably others here have just copy and pasted the example sentences in the lessons and added it to our own custom Anki decks. This is good for retaining what you have learnt and creating your own sentences is very rewarding too. Lang-8 is a good site to start posting your own content on.
I did the same thing. My vocab deck was getting too cluttered, so I made separate decks for the katakana vocab and the kanji vocab. Everything is a lot more tidy and organised now.
Cassandra, You should check out the forums on
http://www.japan-guide.com/forum/quedisplay.html
if you haven’t done so already. You’ll get lots of info on various topics on Japan.
http://www.japan-guide.com/ itself is one of my fav websites that I regularly visit.
-
This reply was modified 12 years, 4 months ago by
kanjiman8.
Each to their own. Everyone works at a different pace. What works for one person, might not work for someone else. Generally, I agree with you. It’s better to learn a small bit every day and solidify that knowledge, then to try and remember large chunks and forget most of it.
Another aspect you touched upon is what reason someone is learning Japanese for. If your doing it as a hobby and in no rush, then your more likely to go slower. But, let’s say your aiming to take the JLPT and only have a couple months left to study, you might want to up the stakes a bit and memorize more than you would normally do.
Koichi usually wants you to start typing in Japanese towards the end of Season 4 but I think it’s much better to get a head start and familiarize yourself with it ASAP.
Read this page from the Season 4 chapter on how to download, set up and install the Google Japanese IME. http://www.textfugu.com/season-4/social-learning/9-2/
Once it’s all set up and your familiar with how to type in Japanese, you can start adding kana and better yet kanji to your decks.
-
This reply was modified 12 years, 4 months ago by
