Arizakai's log: English/French/Japanese

[Arizakai]

There was a small change of plans. I put Polish on the back burner for the time being. The fact is I would really like to learn Polish because I have a few Polish friends, so I would be happy to talk with them in Polish. But I feel I am not ready for learning any Slavic language yet.

WEEK 39
English: watched a bit of Netflix's Tales of the City.
French: nothing
Swedish: did a few exercises practising pronunciation
Polish: studied basic vocabulary
Japanese: practised handwriting of hiragana

[Arizakai]

WEEK 40-43
English: continued reading The Man in the High Castle by PK Dick and Little Dorrit by Dickens
French: studied grammar from Bescherelle La grammaire pour tous
Swedish: continued with my Swedish textbook
Persian: studied Persian phonology
Japanese: practised handwriting of hiragana

Actually, I did very little of language study this past month. But I have signed up for the 6 Week Challenge with Swedish, so I expect to study a bit more during the challenge.

[Arizakai]

WEEK 44-50

At the last minute I decided to change the target language for this round of the 6 Week Challenge, so I signed up with Japanese instead of Swedish. I studied Japanese on average about 73 minutes a day. I also did a bit of French with a daily average of 44 minutes.

I joined the 2019 365 Day Language Challenge with French and Japanese, even though only for the last two months of the year. So far I have not missed a single day, but sometimes quite tired in the evening I felt like going to sleep would be more beneficial than studying. On the other hand I see that forming this daily habit of studying helps me to study more.

English: I continued to read intensively The Man in the High Castle by PK Dick. I decided to look up every unknown word or phrase I would encounter in the novel and this resulted in a very long list of mostly obscure words I had not seen before and I will not probably see again. But reading the novel with perfect understanding of everything caused me a real pleasure and convinced me of the importance of intensive reading/listening. A few memorable passages like discussing psychological profiles of nazi leaders, crafting jewellery or trading antique weaponry will undoubtedly stay with me for some time.

French: I studied verbs in Bescherelle La conjugaison pour tous. After I had finished this book I went back to Bescherelle La grammaire pour tous. I find these grammar books very good. They helped me to clarify a few points already.

Japanese: After I had learned hiragana and katakana I moved onto some real studying. And then I got overwhelmed by zillions of those particles. My impression is that the progression is substantially slower than with any European languages I studied before. Learning a new vocabulary of Japanese origin is quite a hindrance since it sounds so alien, but on the other hand learning loanwords is rather fun.

I dabbled a bit in Italian, Russian, Swedish, Hindi and Persian too. I am also tempted by Chinese but I do not think that beginning both Japanese and Chinese at the same time would be sensible.

[kraemder]

WEEK 44-50
I dabbled a bit in Italian, Russian, Swedish, Hindi and Persian too. I am also tempted by Chinese but I do not think that beginning both Japanese and Chinese at the same time would be sensible.

I focused completely on Japanese for years and years and I can’t say for sure what’s best but maybe studying Chinese isn’t so bad. When studying Japanese you have a basically three groups of vocabulary words to learn: native words, Chinese loanwords, and all the other loan words (mainly English). Everything was hard for me but I found my brain wanted to ignore the Chinese loanwords because well they’re structured differently than native words. I can’t say for sure because I didn’t try it but maybe studying Chinese a bit at the same time might have facilitated learning Chinese loanwords. I really really struggled with them. Anyway, good luck with Japanese. It’s hard as hell but talking to Japanese people is fun.