Kraemder's attempt at JLPT N1 (Japanese)

[kraemder]

Just a random thought. I think I realized the difference between Japanese and speaking English, German, Spanish. When I speak non Japanese languages, I think of words basically one at a time. I think of the next word to say and then the next word and just start talking trusting that my mind will think of what comes next. Especially English of course. Occasionally I'll think in whole sentences but I wouldn't say that's the norm. However, in Japanese, I'm not sure why but I usually think in whole sentences at a time. This slows me down if I talk a lot so several sentences at a time just doesn't come out rapid fire so easily. I think reading can help this maybe but I'm not really sure how best to solve it.

[kraemder]

when you go to a foreign country and start speaking the language for real I think most people will find that there's a sound or two (at least) that is maybe a little hard and when you speak some people won't understand you. For me, it's come to my attention that my pronunciation of りょ just doesn't penetrate the brains of some Japanese speakers. Some people can understand it just fine. Well in my case there's a particular girl that never understands it. It's really starting to get on my nerves. I know this sound combination doesn't technically occur in English but the individual sounds do so it doesn't seem like it should be so hard. I don't know about other people, but having someone completely fail to understand the most basic of words and names you say no matter how many times you repeat yourself is a bit humiliating.

[kraemder]

Last time I posted, I took a bit of time to voice my frustrations with pronouncing the Japanese りょ. Since it's just one person who is having difficulty I'm not putting special time into it. That and I am hoping to go back to the US where I will rarely speak Japanese at all. Instead I'm focusing on reading. When I studied foreign languages before, this was the skill that was most important to me. It has a lot to do with the fact that I never really believed that I could speak foreign languages growing up. Sure, I disproved that theory when I learned German, but speaking at a high level with a nice pronunciation has been another matter entirely. But I really like reading. Even in your native language, when you read a book, you feel good after. Like you accomplished something. In a foreign language I think that sense of accomplishment is even greater. Also, the escape effect is stronger too. If you can get absorb d in the material that you're reading, the escape from reality is more surreal. I like that. I like to escape reality sometimes.

My Japanese reading ability is getting stronger. I'm reading 白夜行 right now and I can read several pages where I know all the vocabulary. I never achieved that with German although I did read material where I could understand every word via the context. I'm starting to do that with Japanese. Reading Japanese has been so hard for me because I just couldn't understand new vocabulary via the context. Kanji are slowly getting easier for me. I was reading articles in Wiki last night in Japanese and barely using the dictionary at all. I'm hoping that this will help with 読解 for the N1 but I don't have any plans to try again this year.

[kraemder]

Just a short post because I wanted to mention that I'm making a new kind of flashcard. It's not too fancy or anything but I like it a lot. Basically just screen shots with my phone instead of inputting text via a keyboard. So if I'm reading a news article online and I want to save a word, I highlight it, screenshot, then look it up in the iOS dictionary (or an app or whatever), and do another screen shot. Then pop over to my flashcard app Flashcards Deluxe and screen shot one is side one and screen shot two is side two. This works well with the kindle app also. It's not as easy as just using Midori but the flashcards are a bit more interesting. I started doing this a because I started studying Spanish again in addition to Japanese and I don't have a dictionary app for Spanish with SRS built into it like Midori and this came to mind. I've also started taking pics of text from paper books I read too. I circle words with an orange pen (highlighting was too brutal to the paper and pencil didn't stand out enough). Midori is easier to so sometimes I am lazy and just use that instead but this is nice. I'm sure this would work fine with Anki too. Although I kind of have to make the cards as I read if I'm doing news articles on the web, in the kindle or a paper book it's easy to mark stuff and just come back to it later when I feel like making flashcards.

[kraemder]

There's a new girl in my share house who is pretty into Spanish and there's a guy from Germany and two French speakers. I'm feeling more motivated to brush up my European languages. Initially I tried books - I have German Harry Potter, the French around the world in 80 days, and a Spanish translation of Twighlight. While these books are all interesting and stuff I wanted to read i think it's just biting off more than I want to chew for non main focus languages as Japanese is my main foreign language in Japan. I then remembered you can switch the country and language pretty easily in the Google News app and tried that out this morning. Simply wonderful. I like to import the article into my text to speech app Dream Voice and listen and follow along with the app as it reads. One drawback is that for some reason Spain is not included in the app as an option but it seems all the other Spanish speaking countries are including the US. After reading a couple Spanish articles which only took 5-8 minutes or so, I could feel my brain warming up to Spanish a little bit already. This is a very good idea. I was way too inconsistent with the novels. Of course, it works with Japanese too.

[DCDC]

I started learning Spanish recently and all I can think is "Learning basics of Spanish is so much easier than it was to learn the basics of Japanese!" Good luck with your studies and I hope you aren't too discouraged by the JLPT stuff

[kraemder]

I started learning Spanish recently and all I can think is "Learning basics of Spanish is so much easier than it was to learn the basics of Japanese!" Good luck with your studies and I hope you aren't too discouraged by the JLPT stuff

nah, I'm not too discouraged. I passed the N2 and a friend of mine who has stronger conversational Japanese has yet to pass it. So go me heh. However, I'm still sticking to Japanese for now so my Spanish studying consists of listening to Spanish music when I go running :/.

[kraemder]

It's getting closer to my flight back to the US. I wonder how easily I'll slip back into my old life before coming to Japan. When I initially bought my tickets, I kind of lost interest in studying Japanese which let me get caught up on some English dramas like game of thrones. But it seems that was temporary. I'm now grabbing ebooks off the Japanese Amazon store and listening to them on my iPhone. I had been doing this on my app but following along with the text as I went to improve my kanji and increase my understanding of the text. It definitely has that effect but by not looking at the text while it reads, I get the effect of reading a book similar to that of reading German or whatever. Kanji are so visual that studying texts/vocabulary, there's too many times where you can get the meaning of and even be able to read the kanji but if you hear it in real life you don't have a clue. Just watching Shingeki no Kyojin and try to understand 救世主 just by hearing it. But looking at the kanji it's pretty intuitive especially given a context. Watching this anime with Japanese subs on I can keep up with the dialogue pretty well but I'm lost without the kanji. Listening to books I think should really help this a lot - (As needed I can pause, go back, and add vocabulary for studying etc.). I'm also switching my flashcards in Midori to show hiragana on the front instead of kanji. Maybe my ability to read kanji will suffer a bit but I really would appreciate a boost to my listening comprehension. Mind you, my listening comprehension is pretty darn good. I just want more. I read kanji better than any non-asian foreigner that I've met in a while and if I leave Japan, I think watching anime / listening to enovels is what I'll find most enjoyable anyway.

[kraemder]

I got my first VPN subscription last night. It seemed so shady and I figured it would take time an effort to setup etc., that I never bothered before but going back to the states and thinking about all the online Japanese content I'll be missing I asked my friend if he'd ever tried it and he said it works great. I picked the service he's using and I think it's the most expensive one but they're all kind of close in pricing (expressVPN) and at about six bucks per month it's very reasonable. And they take most of the work out of it for you for the money you pay. I was watching Crunchyroll in Japan last night (I rather dislike torrenting as it's a bit of work involved) and this morning I was watching the French Netflix. I don't know how much I'll really take advantage of it but the different Netflix shows from around the world really makes the VPN appealing. Of course, I only ever study one language at a time but it's just so cool .

[overscore]

I got my first VPN subscription last night.

ExpressVPN is fine for a basic service, but be careful with the apps, I've heard some stories that NetFlix is fairly aggressive in closing down accounts flagged for VPN use.