Team East Asian Languages TAC 2016

Ongoing language-learning challenges, and team challenge logs (but not individual logs)
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AiyaLianxi
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Team East Asian Languages TAC 2016

Postby AiyaLianxi » Sun Jan 03, 2016 6:30 am

Welcome to Team East Asian!

What is TAC?
TAC stands for Total Annihilation Challenge, but what it really means is "to learn as much as possible in your chosen language(s) during the year, keep a log of your progress, and if you are on a team to join in discussions and help out your teammates as best you can." (quote from Brun Ugle, organizer of TAC 2016)

Who can sign up for Team East Asian Languages?
Right now, I believe primarily everyone who has signed up is focusing on Japanese, Korean, or Japanese. But if anybody is studying Thai or Vietnamese or Hindi or something a bit off the beaten path that is sometimes, or was historically referred to as Asian or Orient--we'll welcome you with open arms!

Your skill level and study plan and discipline are not under fire. This is a place to make your goals with other language learners, and find support from others working next to you.

What do members of Team East Asian Languages do?
* learn at least one Target Language (TL) throughout 2016
* follow this team thread
* keep a TL log
* read teammates' logs
* provide community, support, and encouragement to teammates

How do I sign up?
* post in the general TAC 2016 sign-up thread
* either start a log with TAC 2016 in the title or edit a current log to include reference to TAC 2016
* post in this thread with a link to your log

Who are the members of Team East Asian Languages and where are their logs?
AiyaLianxi: Korean, Chinese, Japanese
aliciaftw: Korean (absolute beginner), Spanish
Amyhere: Mandarin Chinese, French, German
Anya
Esme: Korean (beginner)
Evita: Korean
Expugnator: Mandarin, so many other languages, check out his log!
Jimjam: Japanese, German
lupine: Japanese, French
Nandemonai: Japanese, Korean, Mandarin
Polyglotmaya: Japanese (3 years studied), French
Rotasu: Japanese
Woodsei: Japanese
Yuhakko



Hey! I'm studying this Asian language, and I'm not on the list.
Did you sign up for a team through here, or the official TAC list? If you are listed as studying an East Asian language, you are more than welcome to join, but I'm also not going to force us to join your team. Many of us are studying many languages, and might want to be more active in a different team for whatever reason. Let me know you want to join either when you sign up, or by posting here, and I will add you!

Why didn't you link my log?
I'm sorry! post here or send me a PM. I will try to check for new members once a day.







Resources

Mandarin Chinese
[*]perapera: popup dictionary for Chinese for Firefox and Chrome

Japanese
  • NHK News Web Easy: Japanese newspaper with furigana and audio to help beginning Japanese readers. Also has definitions pop up over more difficult words.
[*]perapera: popup dictionary for Japanese for Firefox and Chrome

Korean
  • Talk to Me in Korean: A Korean learning podcast with 9 levels of free lessons, and many more resources for free or $$$.


Hey! What about this resource?
Comment or PM me, I'll make sure it gets added. Right now, I'm trying to get everything updated from this page, and then I'll be checkout out your various logs. If I miss an awesome resource, please let me know, and I'll add it to the list! We're going to WIN TAC this year, by which I mean, we are going to make it to Dec 31, you guys!





Week 0 Late Start:
How about we start with which language(s) we're focusing on, how we intend to study, and what our goals are for this year?

I'm focusing on improving my Mandarin Chinese and Korean, and maintaining my Japanese. I'm giving myself tangible deadlines for signing up for the appropriate language exams, HSK/JLPT/TOPIK. Though I need to call my regional Korean embassy on Monday, as I still don't know which date they're hosting the TOPIK for the school I will travel to.

I really want to increase input this year. Last year I tried doing podcasts but...it didn't really work in Korean, because my vocabulary wasn't there yet. Also falling behind didn't inspire me to catch up. So I'm going to aim for 9 dramas a year, three per language. I know I'll start watching at least 10 per language, but watching the full 12-16 hours of content only happens when the story is extraordinarily good, you know?

Outputwise, I'm still working with my italki Korean tutor for the TOPIK, focusing on grammar, pronunciation and vocab still. Since (I believe) I'll be taking the TOPIK first, I'm thinking I'll hold off fitting Japanese and Mandarin italki lessons into my week (also I don't know when I'd fit it in), so I'm going to work this week and next to committing to a Korean, Japanese, and Chinese language text/workbook to work through by March 30.

Anyways, welcome! I'll try to check in on us once a day, because I did love the challenge, when people were active.
Last edited by AiyaLianxi on Tue Jan 05, 2016 12:31 am, edited 7 times in total.
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Esme
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Languages: English(N), Irish (B2), German (A1), Korean (Beginner)
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Re: East Asian TAC

Postby Esme » Sun Jan 03, 2016 9:26 am

I'm Esme and I will be focusing on Korean. It's a language I have wanted to learn for a long time but I have made excuses. I decided about a week ago that I shouldn't keep procrastinating life so I began.

I would like to reach a conversational level and also improve my writing speed.

It's such a lovely language :)
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Anya
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Location: France
Languages: Russian (N), French (C1), English, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, German, Turkish, Mandarin, Sanskrit, Catalan, Portuguese, Hungarian, Greek, Romanian, Occitan, Latin ...
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=21&t=754&p=11667#p11667
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Re: East Asian TAC

Postby Anya » Sun Jan 03, 2016 10:15 am

Hello,

I will focus on improving my Mandarin Chinese and Japanese.

I would like to reach a conversational level.

For input, it will be reading of parallel and adopted texts. In January I will read adopted books in Chinese for Tadoku challenge.
Also, I like a lot to watch historical drama. Last year a started " Gou-himetachi no sengoku" in Japanese, it's quite interesting.

Then, I will try to produce some regular writing output.
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amyhere
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Location: Vienna
Languages: English (N), Français (~C1), Deutsch (~C1, ÖSD B2), 中文 (~A1), Suomi (~A1)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1540
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Re: East Asian TAC

Postby amyhere » Sun Jan 03, 2016 11:27 am

Hi everyone, it's great to have a group of other people here learning similar languages and I'm looking forward to a great year together.

I've just recently started learning Mandarin (both my French and German are in the B2-C2 range) and I'm using mostly assimil, NPCR and anki. I'm learning to write characters as I go. I'm putting as much time as I can into studying Mandarin at the moment as I'll be going to China for 2 months in July-September. If anyone has any suggestions for how they learnt Mandarin I'd love to hear!
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ZH: NPCR Books 1-2: 26 / 26 Assimil: 69 / 105 FSI Pronunciation: 7 / 7
SpoonFed Anki Audio Sentences: 829 / 8142

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Expugnator
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Location: Belo Horizonte
Languages: Native Brazilian Portuguese#advanced fluency English, French, Papiamento#basic fluency Italian, Norwegian#intermediate Spanish, German, Georgian and Chinese (Mandarin)#basic Russian, Estonian, Greek (Modern)#just started Indonesian, Hebrew (Modern), Guarani
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9931
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Re: East Asian TAC

Postby Expugnator » Sun Jan 03, 2016 11:58 am

I'll be starting my 4th year and a half in Mandarin but I'm still a shaky B1. I will focus on listening and on output. This year I had some output, mostly chatting thanks to HelloTalk, and I feel I can work as a tourist, have basic conversations and so on. This alone made me excited about going to China, but it is not something I foresee in the near future though.

I'm looking forward to sharing experiences with other learners. We had quite a few ones joining the forum in the past two months and I hope we can really build a sense of community, with the help of other senior members from old HTLAL as well. 加油,朋友们!
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Corrections welcome for any language.

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PolyglotMaya
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Joined: Sun Dec 27, 2015 7:49 pm
Location: Toronto, Canada
Languages: English (N), Russian (N), French (advanced fluency), Japanese (JLPT N3), Spanish (intermediate)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1861
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Re: East Asian TAC

Postby PolyglotMaya » Sun Jan 03, 2016 1:48 pm

Howdy!

I will be working on my Japanese. I'm currently at a JLPT N3 level, can have basic conversations, and read some manga.

My goals for the year are:

-- To learn to write and know the meaning of at least 2,000 kanji (Heisig);
-- To be able to read up to a middle school level (without having to use a dictionary);
-- To be able to have more in-depth conversations about more topics, and express more nuance in what I say;
-- Overall, to reach a solid N2 level.

I will be using Anki, focusing heavily on input, and producing output in certain settings (lang-8, conversing with some close Japanese friends) where I can be corrected.

Good luck, everyone!
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: 9 / 200 French active listening

: 464 / 2000 Japanese kanji

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AiyaLianxi
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Re: East Asian TAC

Postby AiyaLianxi » Sun Jan 03, 2016 8:22 pm

Ok, I've been informed I need to redo the first post to maintain TAC guidelines, so I will do that a bit later today. But welcome, everyone! I'm glad to have a community of us, learning together with tips and tricks to help each other out.

If you could post a link to your language log, when I update the list, I'll include a link to your log so we can easily find it here, too.

加油加油!がんばれ!화이팅!
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amyhere
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Posts: 77
Joined: Fri Nov 06, 2015 7:59 pm
Location: Vienna
Languages: English (N), Français (~C1), Deutsch (~C1, ÖSD B2), 中文 (~A1), Suomi (~A1)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1540
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Re: East Asian TAC

Postby amyhere » Sun Jan 03, 2016 8:43 pm

Thanks for setting this thread up! My log is linked on the side of my post. :)

I'd also be interested in hearing what level everyone is in their languages, maybe we could put an overview of everyone's starting levels in the original post?

My Mandarin is currently only at about a A1/HSK1 level (I know these aren't equivalent, although I don't quite yet have the vocab for HSK2 I still feel I'm at about an A1 level rather than A0) for both productive and receptive skills, in writing and in speech.
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ZH: NPCR Books 1-2: 26 / 26 Assimil: 69 / 105 FSI Pronunciation: 7 / 7
SpoonFed Anki Audio Sentences: 829 / 8142

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Brun Ugle
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Location: Steinkjer, Norway
Languages: English (N), Norwegian (~C1/C2), Spanish (B1/B2), German (A2/B1?), Japanese (very rusty)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=11484
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Re: East Asian TAC

Postby Brun Ugle » Sun Jan 03, 2016 8:52 pm

There aren't really so many guidelines when it comes to TAC. How you want to run a team is up to you; it's just that it makes it easier for everyone to follow each other's logs and know what's what if there is a post at the beginning with a list of team members and stuff like that. Sorry if I sounded strict.
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AiyaLianxi
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Re: East Asian TAC

Postby AiyaLianxi » Mon Jan 04, 2016 1:19 am

Brun Ugle wrote:There aren't really so many guidelines when it comes to TAC. How you want to run a team is up to you; it's just that it makes it easier for everyone to follow each other's logs and know what's what if there is a post at the beginning with a list of team members and stuff like that. Sorry if I sounded strict.


No, I just received a few PM's warning me that there were guidelines I hadn't followed. I'd hoped Yuhakko might show up and help me out, but until she arrives, I'll keep on. Today's been a bit busier than anticipated, and I want the post corrected once, so that subsequent edits are only for new team members!

amyhere wrote:I'd also be interested in hearing what level everyone is in their languages, maybe we could put an overview of everyone's starting levels in the original post?


I like that idea, though I think we should defer to whichever grading system we're familiar with. The CEF if you're used to the A and B levels, The language's proficiency exam if you're studying for it and/or have taken it. Otherwise, how long you've been study, or what course year you're taking in school? I know it took me a good year to figure out the CEF levels.

Just so nobody feels uncomfortable if they don't know what TOPIK or C1 means, you know? Reduce pressure and fear for people who might otherwise not sign up, if they feel they don't know something. What do you think?

Week 0 Recap

It's Sunday evening on the west coast of the US, which means week 0 is over for some, and rapidly approaching for others. Still, it's Day 2, so if you don't start until next week, I think that's fine, too.

How has Week 0 been going for everyone? Still going strong? Anyone flagging, or flying high?
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