Lupine's Language Log - TAC Les Voyageurs, East Asian Team

[lupine]

I'm finally biting the bullet and making my language endeavors public. Hopefully by doing this, I can keep myself motivated and on track toward my goals, though if the past is any indication, I'll likely just be talking about how I managed to avoid doing any worthwhile studying due to this or that, and ended up spending my day reading manga and knitting. Hopefully not though! Hopefully!

This year I'm using an iPad app called aTimelogger2 which should keep me from deluding myself about how I spend my time. My intention is to shame myself into a more productive lifestyle of study and work by separating my activities into Productive and Unproductive timers (with sub categories of language study, eating, sleeping, reading etc.) and then I can look at my pie chart at the end of every day/week/month/year/decade and compare how much time I waste with how much time I actually work. This app will prevent the need for spreadsheets, since I can export the data at anytime to a csv. Therefore, I can spend my time on this log filling in more interesting information about what I learned or focused on day to day or week to week.

My language learning journey, heretofore:

In 2009, when I was 20, I began studying Japanese. I had broken up with my first boyfriend, had dropped out of college after my first semester, was living at my parents house with some social anxiety issues, no driver's license, no job and no goals. I was ready to basically latch onto any avenue of study that would give my life a bit of fulfillment and not require me to venture outside of my house. I had previously watched a few animes with said ex-boyfriend (Trigun, Cowboy Bebop, etc.) though only in English. I started rewatching them probably as a means of torturing myself with past memories, and found that on YouTube I could only watch some of the Trigun episodes in Japanese. Once I heard the language spoken, I immediately fell in love with it. From then on, I spent all of my waking hours on subbed anime with a romaji to English dictionary and a notepad. I had no intention of learning to read or write Japanese, I just wanted to escape from reality and delude myself that I was doing something that was worth my time. It truly ended up being the best decision of my life, as it led me to join a website called smart.fm where I almost immediately found a study buddy who became my boyfriend of now nearly 6 years.

With his help I started using Anki, the Heisig method (which I regret, by the by) and then into Khatz's sentence method. I continued to spend most of my time watching anime however, and though back then I felt that I was really wasting my time and just being lazy, it turns out that all of that listening has really benefited my comprehension substantially. I took the JLPT N4 in December of 2010 and passed, went for the N2 the next year and failed miserably. After that, in 2012, I moved across the country to live with my boyfriend, found a job working 50 hours a week and all of my language studies hit the back-burner. I kept up with a few animes, One Piece for instance, and read a bunch of shoujo manga (more than anyone ever should, it's embarrassing and incredibly addictive) in what little free time I had, but mainly I just became depressed that I was working so much and couldn't focus on studying. I picked up German for a month or two, and though I really enjoyed it, the stress of trying to take on a new language while working and living in a new place got to me, and I gave up on it.

This lack of actual studying continued until I quit my job in the summer of 2014. I took up the November 6WC that year for French, worked really hard but with bad methods (mainly listening to movies with little to no focus on learning vocabulary), and then I didn't keep up with the language once the challenge was over. I moved back across the country with boyfriend in tow in 2015, and now, once again am living with my parents... at the age of 27 without a car or job. I'm extremely happy though. It may seem undesirable, but life is good here, and though I'm not working, my boyfriend and I are starting new entrepreneurial endeavors and we finally have time to study again. This past November I again took up the 6WC for French and managed to complete Assimil French with Ease in a more efficient and fruitful manner, by reading the textbook properly, shadowing, using an SRS and LWT, and doing scriptorium for each lesson. It's amazing how well that method worked for me.

I'm ready to start taking up Japanese again, and I've realized finally that if you start to learn a language you must study it EVERY DAY FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE. You'd think that concept would be frightening but actually it is sort of a relief to me somehow. It forces me to accept that there is no other option but to study, and each day that I do study is one more day I'll have wasted if I were to stop studying in the future. That sort of guilt really pushes me forward, haha.

So! This year I plan to focus on output for Japanese, and input for French. I already have pretty decent listening and reading comprehension for Japanese, but am almost completely unable to make a sentence of my own. I intend to read actual novels rather than manga (though they will be lower intermediate level books that I've read in English, like Harry Potter and Howl's Moving Castle), learn new vocabulary from them which I will study in LWT and Anki, and I want to do shadowing and scriptorium for practice speaking and writing. Perhaps on a weekly basis I will attempt to make a small diary entry in Japanese in order to get used to actually forming sentences. As for French, I intend to read and listen to the same books I'm using for Japanese, as well as cram in some French listening. I will continue to review Assimil, put all of my reading materials into LWT and new words into Anki as sentence cards, and do some shadowing and scriptorium.

I may not be able to do every activity every day, but I will definitely put in some effort toward each language on a daily basis.

On a side note, I introduced my mom to Duolingo, and now she and I are studying Irish via that method. I intend to do 1 new lesson and 2 review lessons daily on there. I think this will encourage my mom to keep working at it, and I also enjoy the language and intend to delve deeper into studying Irish at a later date when my other languages have improved.

[tangleweeds]

Hi, and welcome to the forum! I have also enjoyed using software to track and optimize my use of time, though right now I'm living as an agent of chaos, facilitating TAC team Wanderlust and and letting my curiosity guide my language studies. I still use Pomodoro software, though.

Your story reminds me of my younger brother's, though his happened back when anime travelled via VCR duplication parties. Ordinary college didn't work out, but he learned Japanese by translating for his anime group at a nearby university, and ended up marrying his Japanese co-translator. They have lived in Japan with her family for the past twenty years, helping take care of her elderly parents.

I was more boring, and learned Japanese at university, but forgot it over time, and am now looking at bringing some back as part of my Team Wanderlust explorations. I'll look forward to consulting you for anime recommendations for beginners.

[lupine]

Hi tangleweeds! Thanks for commenting on my log and welcoming me! I added you as a friend, feel free to add me as well if you haven't already. I am more than willing to provide anime recommendations whenever you are interested, though I'll be honest, it's been a while since I've really been able to watch much, and thus my recommendations may be a bit dated!

That's really wonderful that your brother's pursuits with Japanese led him to love and moving abroad. My boyfriend and I had grand dreams of moving to Japan, but we later decided that perhaps it wasn't for us. We would like to start a small self-sufficient farm somewhere, and Japan doesn't seem to have much cheap real estate for such ventures. Still, someday I would at the very least love to visit Japan, and actually communicate in the language I've put so much time into studying!

So far I've managed to keep up with the time tracking, though I have to say, it's really sad how unproductive I've been these past three days! Yesterday I spent 79% of my day on unproductive things: 6 hours of sleep (which was less than I might have liked), 2 hours eating (pretty normal, I guess), 5 hours on entertainment (went to see Star Wars and then played board games with my family) and then another 5 and a half hours of just family time. I don't know if it's because of the holiday season or if I just get preoccupied with family obligations on the weekends, but I'm thinking that weekdays will most likely be my most productive time for language learning.

At the very least, I try to keep up with Anki reviews usually, but I didn't manage to work on them at all since we started the new year! Today I battled with 250 french sentence reviews, but I'm currently almost done. I work through them in 25 card intervals, which takes about 5 minutes to review. I switch back and forth between 5 minutes of video games and 5 minutes of reviews until they're all done. 50 cards remain, so I'd better go finish it up! Once I'm done I intend to try out a parallel text alignment program called LF Aligner on my French and English copies of Howl's Moving Castle. I still have to scan my copy of the book in Japanese, and then run it through Abbyy Finereader before I can convert it to a txt file that I can use. Since it's written vertically, I have a feeling it's going to be rife with errors once I've gotten it converted. Sometimes I think it might be faster to hand type the whole thing, lol.

[AiyaLianxi]

I'm going to have to try out that LWT method you mentioned, that sounds great!

Sorry to hear you've had a rough few years studywise, but I'm glad you're back on track now. Looking forward to watching your skills evolve this year.

[lupine]

Thank you AiyaLianxi! I have added you as a friend

I really enjoy using some of the LWT features, particularly annotated texts. I used to have trouble deciding exactly how to define my words in LWT; should I put in every definition available for nouns, should I only put in the infinitive/base form of verbs... I decided in the end that the easiest thing for me to do is to put the direct translation of the word in the sentence. If I see the sentence "Je suis pris samedi soir." then I put the definition of "pris" as "taken" or even "busy" though the infinitive form of the verb would be "take", and nouns and other words only get the definition for what they mean in the sentence. As I run into them again where they perhaps mean different things, I add the other meanings accordingly, though I usually do so when I'm making annotated texts. I love having the annotated interlinear texts for shadowing and scriptorium, it makes things so much easier. When I'm all done with that I export my new words as close-deletion cards for anki. This is of course my method for French specifically. Japanese I find to be a bit harder to use in LWT, and I'm not sure I will take the time to work out the kinks with it. I never kept track of which words I actually know in Japanese also, so I would basically have to build up my database of terms from scratch, which would be painful.

The past few days I've been trying to set up listening/reading materials for both languages. I was planning on using Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones for both French and Japanese, but lo and behold there are no audiobooks for this story in these languages. I thought for sure there would be, since the movie is so popular in Japan, and for some reason I figured it would be popular in France as well. So far as I can tell there is only the English audiobook, read by a woman with a Welsh accent by the way (which is fitting I guess, since I think Howl is actually a Welshman).

So, I'm a bit bummed, but I reverted to Harry Potter instead, which I already have in Japanese and French. I used LFaligner to make parallel texts from my English and French copies of the text, and though it isn't perfect, it worked well enough. I read the first chapter of The Philosopher's Stone last night, which is about 30 minutes. Unfortunately, from what I've heard the best results come from using the L/R method for sessions of 5 hours at a time. As I can't make language learning my top priority anymore, I probably can't put in more than 3 hours total over both languages, and I still have anki to work on for French. Still, I think this method will be worthwhile. Perhaps it's only because I've just started, but I wonder if when I "finish" the book I'll feel like I've actually read the book in French. I intend to go through the book twice looking at the English, and once reading along with the French. If by then I still don't feel that I've really read the story in French, then I guess I'll just keep reading it until I'm satisfied.

When I finish the whole Harry Potter Series, I have Pride and Prejudice to listen to. I started L/R with this book a year ago actually, and I was surprised at how easy it was to follow along. Usually this book is translated with antiquated language (I ran into this problem with Japanese), but perhaps it's because French hasn't changed too much over the years that the book seems to be translated into fairly modern speech without losing the sense of the period in which it was originally penned. I honestly have so little understanding of French that this might all be in my imagination, but compared to reading it in Japanese (the language I am much better at), I found the French version to be less difficult. Of course, it might also have more to do with the cultures and languages being more similar to each other...

I still have to align my Japanese and English texts, because I spent my Japanese study time yesterday watching Super Sentai, haha. My boyfriend and I are big fans. I have never watched the American version (Power Rangers) though it was really popular when I was in 5th grade, but my boyfriend was a fan (though now he can't stand to watch it in English). I'm therefore catching up on Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger in Japanese, which was the iconic series that first came over to America. I have previously watched Kyoryuger, some of Hurricanger, some Jetman, and all of Kakuranger. My boyfriend just finished Taiyou Sentai Sun Vulcan and has moved on to Magiranger, but he's also completed all the series that I have watched, and some series I haven't like Dairanger. We're both watching the current series too, Ninninger, though it's on hiatus right now! Eventually we'll likely branch out into other tokusatsu like Kamen Rider and Garo, but for now we are trying to cram in as much Super Sentai as possible, because we want to be able to watch the new season this spring, which will likely have tons of cameos, being that it's the 40th anniversary of the series.

My timelogging is still going well. I just have to keep it up!

[Cavesa]

A great story! Thanks! I am looking forward to following your log, even though I am not a Japanese learner. French is a good language to learn, you might especially appreciate the tons of BDs, as a manga lover.

[lupine]

Thanks for commenting Cavesa! I will definitely look into BDs, I knew there were comics translated into French, but I didn't know this was the name for them!

I spent more time with French L/R today. I'm really enjoying rereading Harry Potter in French. To be honest, though it was my generation that was hooked on these books as children, I somehow managed to avoid reading them until I was about 25. How much more magical might my youth have been had I found them sooner! I listened to them for the first time via the Stephen Fry narrated audiobooks, and they were excellent! I find though that I'm enjoying the French audiobook just as much! It's different, the voices for the characters are completely different really, but the narration is excellent. Hagrid's voice is very slow and difficult to understand, which bothered me at first, but then I suppose if I was trying to imagine a voice for him without any reference to the previous audiobooks or the movies, I might expect an uneducated giant to speak a bit slowly. I'm sure I'll get used to it. What really matters is that I find the L/R for this book enjoyable, and look forward to it!

As for Japanese I am still flaking out on the L/R. I need to get started on that tomorrow. Instead I spent my day watching Ao Haru Ride. I'd read the manga for Ao Haru Ride before, actually if I remember correctly it hasn't been that long since the manga was completed, but anyway, it was nice to revisit the story via the anime. Sometimes manga drag on so long (one issue a month for years on end) that by the end of the story you forget all about what happened in the beginning. This was one of those times, so the anime helped me remember why the story was worth reading to begin with.

I also watched about 8 episodes of Zyuranger, some of which had me in stitches! Sometimes Super Sentai is just sort of cute and charming, especially the older series, but then there are other times where it's just riotously funny and ridiculous! I'm going to try and rush through the last 20 or so episodes so that I can move on to another season though. My boyfriend tells me that Majiranger reminds him of Hurricanger, which is disappointing because I was excited to see Majiranger before. I just didn't enjoy Hurricanger at all, in fact I gave up about three episodes in, and though my boyfriend watched the whole thing, he said that it never got better. I'm thinking maybe I'll watch Ohranger next instead? It has an Egyptian theme which sounds pretty neat.

[lupine]

I'll be honest, today I did nothing toward either of my languages. I spent the majority of my day running errands and becoming Miss Fix-It for a day. I soldered new earbuds onto my bluetooth headphones (something that should've been done, oh I don't know, maybe a year and a half ago, haha), and I also performed the arduous 3-hour task of leveling the printbed of my 3D printer. I wanted to print a Sailor Moon bookend for all of my binders (I have one for each of my pursuits, Japanese, French, gardening, writing, etc.) because they keep falling over when I bump into my desk. Now it's nearly 10pm, so unfortunately it will have to wait until tomorrow. I intend to play the theme to Sailor Moon at least 4 times while it prints. I may even go play it now just for the heck of it

Yesterday was productive though, exceptionally so! I did my French anki cards as usual, but I also listened and read a 45 minute chapter of HP in French. I thought that there was no way I'd be able to make it that long in one sitting, but it was the chapter about Diagon Alley, and I kept anxiously awaiting the scene at Ollivander's where Harry's wand picks him

I also went back over one of the later lessons of Assimil French with Ease and did scriptorium for it. I think I'll continue to do this, because near the end of the last 6WC I became really busy with family and holiday events, and dropped my scriptorium practice on the later lessons. I have trouble remembering the later lessons, probably due to the lack of scriptorium, though it might also be because they're long and boring!

I also finally tried aligning my Japanese and English copies of HP and the Philosopher's Stone, but as I had feared, it was a lost cause. The languages are too different I guess, and the LFaligner software just couldn't make a parallel text that was usable. It did, however, take my two texts and create new versions where each sentence was on a new line. Therefore, I decided to just open up both files side by side in Notepad++ (which conveniently has line numbers) and I listened to the first chapter while reading these two separate texts. I just paused when I reached the bottom of the English text, and then scrolled each text until the top line was the one that the narrator had last read. It wasn't perfect, but it was much easier than trying to manually line up each text using LFaligner.

While we're still on the subject of Japanese, I mentioned on tangleweeds log yesterday that I previously tried to study the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu for the sake of someday playing karuta, supposing I ever go to Japan or find a fellow enthusiast. I sort of explained a bit about the game and why I was interested in it, so I'll just throw that bit in here as a quote (though I did decide to edit a typo):

One of the things I got swept away with in regard to Japanese was Hyakunin Isshu karuta. If you've never heard of it, it's basically a card matching game, but the cards you match are the beginning and ending lines of waka poems taken from the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu anthology. The poetry was written by 100 different people (hence hyaku nin) between the 600s and the 1200s. Obviously, these poems are written in extremely antiquated Japanese and even a lot of native speakers have trouble deciphering what's being said, but I love that each poem is sort of a window into ancient Japan, and I feel like I will understand the modern culture more by learning all 100 poems.

The game is played for fun around New Year's, but it's also played competitively, and competitive karuta is sort of amazing to watch. There is a reader who has cards with the entire poem, and there are typically two players who have cards laid out in front of them with the endings of the poems on them. The reader reads their card (actually they are sung in a traditional way), and within seconds the players can recognize what card they're looking for and locate it on the floor in front of them. Sometimes they pick up a card before the second syllable is read! As play continues the cards are moved around, and the players have to continually reassess and commit to memory where each card is placed. The game requires intense focus, strategy and skill. I find the whole thing really incredible, and quintessentially Japanese. The players even where hakama when they play in the higher tiers of the competition.

All that talk about karuta made me want to start my deck again, so I refreshed myself on the first five poems. Someday when I finish all 100 poems I'll upload my deck to the anki database so that someone might be able to use it too! If I work on just one new poem a day I'll get there eventually! I hope that by the end of this TAC challenge I could actually play a game of karuta

[Rotasu]

I also went back over one of the later lessons of Assimil French with Ease and did scriptorium for it. I think I'll continue to do this, because near the end of the last 6WC I became really busy with family and holiday events, and dropped my scriptorium practice on the later lessons. I have trouble remembering the later lessons, probably due to the lack of scriptorium, though it might also be because they're long and boring!

Can you explain the steps you do when you do scriporitum? I also thought about doing scriptorium with Assimil but was confused on what you're suppose to do. Is it just writing each line multiple times or the dialog multiple times?

For your Japanese, are you listening to English audio while looking at both languages? Wont it be better to use Japanese audio instead?

[Yuurei]

Ah, hyakunin isshu karuta, that brings back memories. I was also quite taken by it back when the first season of Chihayafuru was broadcast (a game that combines Japanese poetry and fast reaction? What's not to like?!) and even got a set of cards and a CD with readings and everything, but of course there was no one who wanted to play it with me since they didn't fancy learning 100 poems in a foreign language by heart.
I hope you you'll be more successful and I'll be following your log with interest.