Japanese and Chill

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devilyoudont
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Re: Japanese and Chill: Devilyoudont's 2020 Log (Wanderlusting EO, ES, and KO)

Postby devilyoudont » Sun Feb 09, 2020 6:03 pm

No real progress over the last two weeks. I was hoping to move already, but things, while busy, haven't progressed fast enough to do so. The repairs on our new place are going well, some even coming in below the budgeted cost. Everything just takes longer than I thought it would. Hopefully only another 2 weeks of this, and then I can go back to being a normal person.

In terms of Japanese, I have really only been listening and watching things. I wound up binging a ton of the 僕だけがいない街 (A town without only me/Erased). I watched the drama previously, and I can never tell if I've improved or previous exposure is the reason why my comprehension is so high in this case. I also finally, due to other people doing it, watched a bunch of Peppa Pig. This is probably the only thing that I've ever watched in Japanese where my comprehension is over 99%. Like, literally 1 or less unknown words in an "episode." I think this probably means it's not useful for me to watch Peppa Pig, but having such high comprehension of it is addictive, IDK. The difference between 90 or 95% comprehension and near full comprehension is huge. Finally, I've still be listening to NHKラジオニュース as always. I am way over saturated in Coronavirus coverage so I wound up deleting a bunch of of episode. This is kind of frustrating for me because coronavirus is being used to justify anti-asian sentiment around me, and literally no one cares about the flu, which coronavirus seems similar to. A friend confided in me that she's literally worrying about people thinking she is Chinese due to this disease.

For Spanish, I'm still just playing Temtem. Love this game. Despite it being a Spanish game, sometimes the Spanish translation breaks. As an example, an item may have a Spanish name when I select it from the menu, but when it's used in combat it goes back to it's English name (within the middle of a Spanish sentence). My guess would be that this is some kind of coding issue where the game is grabbing the wrong string from a database in certain instances.

I've done a tiny amount of tweeting in Esperanto.

I haven't had time to devote to Korean unfortunately. When I see a sign in Korean, I try to practice reading it. We also went to a Korean restaurant with a friend, where I learned 소 (cow) and also just reading random letters on the menu.

One thing that surprised me this week is that there is no mainstream way to type using romaja to input Korean for Windows. The Korean learner community is also incredibly dismissive of of romaja input--surprising to me because this is basically the default option for Japanese when your system detects that you have a QWERTY keyboard. There are all kinds of ridiculous claims that romaja input would prevent acquisition of hangul or impede pronunciation in some way. Somewhat hilarious to me because I want this feature and recognition and written production of hangul letters is literally my only area of competence in Korean. And if we truly follow this logic, surely typing gksrmf to produce 한글 is more detrimental than following the official romanization scheme and typing in hangeul for "hangul."

I have 1 physical keyboard. I'm not buying more keyboards. I'm not going to deface my keyboard by trying to macgyver additional letters onto every key. This keyboard works fine for 4 languages, 3 of which contain challenges when applied to an English QWERTY layout. Yet somehow there is a normal non-sketchy solution for Japanese, Spanish, and Esperanto. The solution for Korean is that you use Korean enough to memorize an invisible layout. I already understand that I don't use Korean enough for this, and so I guess I am resigned to pulling up my Korean phone keyboard as a guide any time I want to input Korean on my desktop. That or, type it on my phone's keyboard (which is the same layout, but I can actually see the hangul letters), email what I typed to myself, and then copy paste it.

This whole thing caused me to spend some time thinking about why I see a Japanese layout as superior on a phone, rather than using QWERTY input for Japanese at all times. Here's the honest answer: My typing accuracy is low on the phone no matter what I do. The suggestion dictionary/autocorrect solves this issue in English Spanish and Esperanto, but the whole thing breaks when I make a single minor typo using QWERTY input for Japanese. I probably would have no desire to use a native layout if this weren't the case.
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golyplot
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Re: Japanese and Chill: Devilyoudont's 2020 Log (Wanderlusting EO, ES, and KO)

Postby golyplot » Mon Feb 10, 2020 3:49 pm

devilyoudont wrote:I also finally, due to other people doing it, watched a bunch of Peppa Pig.


Out of curiosity, where are you watching them?
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devilyoudont
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Re: Japanese and Chill: Devilyoudont's 2020 Log (Wanderlusting EO, ES, and KO)

Postby devilyoudont » Mon Feb 10, 2020 10:18 pm

golyplot wrote:
devilyoudont wrote:I also finally, due to other people doing it, watched a bunch of Peppa Pig.


Out of curiosity, where are you watching them?


On the Japanese Peppa Pig Youtube Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCldXju ... kGw/videos
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golyplot
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Re: Japanese and Chill: Devilyoudont's 2020 Log (Wanderlusting EO, ES, and KO)

Postby golyplot » Tue Feb 11, 2020 12:35 am

That's the one I've been using, but the problem I found is that there is a lot of repetition. There's no easy way to watch episodes you haven't seen already.
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Re: Japanese and Chill: Devilyoudont's 2020 Log (Wanderlusting EO, ES, and KO)

Postby devilyoudont » Sun Mar 01, 2020 3:06 am

More or less an update just to say how things have been going.

My husband got seriously ill with a rare syndrome of the gall bladder. Ultimately his gall bladder is removed, and he is recovering. However, his gall bladder damaged several ducts and his liver before being removed, so the recovery is expected to stay fairly slow. There were a few days where things were very scary. But things are ok now. I'm just kind of overwhelmed with taking care of him.

Due to this we needed to push back moving again. None of this is ideal and some of this is pretty expensive. But it is what it is.

He is hoping to begin doing his normal household chores this week. I am hoping this means a slight return to normalcy for me, but it can't be guaranteed.

I am hoping also to have us moved out in 2 weeks, but again we shall see. I'm paid up on rent until the end of March so it's ok if we don't make it in two weeks exactly.

Whatever time I've been able to spare for languages over the last bunch of weeks has gone to Japanese exclusively, and nearly entirely to listening to about an hour of podcasts each workday.
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Re: Japanese and Chill: Devilyoudont's 2020 Log (Wanderlusting EO, ES, and KO)

Postby IronMike » Mon Mar 02, 2020 2:05 pm

Get well soon, Mr. Devilyoudont!
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devilyoudont
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Re: Japanese and Chill: Devilyoudont's 2020 Log (Wanderlusting EO, ES, and KO)

Postby devilyoudont » Tue Mar 10, 2020 1:29 am

Thank you IronMike for the well wishes. He is doing a little better every day.

Faced with a shortage of time, I decided to subscribe to Lingq. This has been both a positive and a frustrating experience for me. So here's a short review of Lingq

Cons:
-Lingq has a terrible UI, and their website is buggy as hell
-Some advertised features flat do not work, such as import from Netflix.
-Cleaning up imports to remove random text from the website it came from is unnecessarily difficult
-Uncommonly bad robot voice
-Free trial is so restricted as to be unusable
-Lingq seems to randomly add other languages to my profile and then I am unsure how or why I ended up in the polish library.
-Documentation is out of date and error messages don't clarify why something hasn't worked.
-Japanese parser is bad. I imagine it's as bad for any language without spaces. I believe the issue would be difficult for a beginner, but for intermediate and above it's more or less an occasional frustration.
-Unclear to me if the SRS system in place for flashcards is any good.
-High cost to pay for something with the above issues

Pros:
-If you're willing to deal with it, it does its basic functions way better than free services I have used in the past.
-Huge library on site
-Importer tool works well with youtube, animelon, text based web pages. Have yet to try with ebooks.
-Flashcards are auto generated
-Subscription includes all languages on the site
-Mobile app possibly better functioning than the website

The end result of this is that I was able to do way more studying than normal, despite having less time than normal. I'll be sticking with the program for now, even if all the bugs make it a negative experience sometimes.

Japanese

Read 4 stories from 福娘童話集. 2 of them, I was able to attach an audio file to. I've been experimenting with listening first then reading, reading first then listening, reading while listening... Listening then reading then listening again... I have no idea what kind of activity is most useful.

I read thru the beginner level explanation of how the site works. I also read thru a bunch of their mini stories and got sick of them.

I imported the entirety of the N5 content from JLPT stories. Being able to complete something really easy is still fun for me sometimes. I went thru all of the N5 lessons on Lingq and will probably next upload N4, until I have a complete collection of the JLPT stories podcast.

I found Harry Potter on there, but I'm not sure if I'm reading it yet. Read just about a page or two probably. Imported a video about eating cleanly to test youtube capabilities, went thru a very small amount of the video. Imported Psycho Pass from Animelon because someone said it was good. Also went thru a very small amount of that.

Attempted to read some 銀河英雄伝説--a series I've wanted to read for a long time. Unfortunately above my level. Tried to read some 吾輩は猫である... Unfortunately, the version I found handled Ruby in an annoying way (parenthesis after the word?!?!), and so I quit that one nearly immediately. Started reading some NHK easy news stories someone uploaded, but it was all very old news so I lost interest.

I'm kind of spoiled for choice with this. I expect to choose between Harry Potter, Psycho Pass, and Veggie Youtube fairly soon. I can't maintain doing that many different activities at once.

Currently know 1242 words in Japanese according to Lingq.

Also listened to a bunch of NHKニュースラジオ.

Esperanto

Imported Ĉu vi kuiras ĉine? into Lingq. Reread Chapter 1, finished Chapter 2.

Currently know 1196 words in Esperanto according to Lingq.

Started listening to Kern Punkto again on a whim this week. Was surprised by how little my listening capabilities have declined since the last time I listened to Esperanto.

Spanish

More Lingq nonsense. I've been going thru more of the mini-stories in Spanish. 431 known words in Spanish supposedly.

Korean

Tested Lingq in Korean as well. My level is still too low to use it for Korean. Dragged myself thru 1 lesson and came out the other end with 4 known words :lol: Redid the Lingodeer lesson on set phrases as a refresher. We were exercising and my Korean friend said something in Korean to encourage me. I heard 운동 in whatever she said, and was correct that this is the korean version of 運動 (exercise)
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ryanheise
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Re: Japanese and Chill: Devilyoudont's 2020 Log (Wanderlusting EO, ES, and KO)

Postby ryanheise » Tue Mar 10, 2020 8:49 am

devilyoudont wrote:Faced with a shortage of time, I decided to subscribe to Lingq. This has been both a positive and a frustrating experience for me. So here's a short review of Lingq

Cons:
-Free trial is so restricted as to be unusable


Last time I was on LingQ, I found that after you exhaust the limit of lingqs that you can create, deleting previous lingqs doesn't give you any more. And once that happens, you can no longer click on words to use the integrated dictionaries. So if you intend only on using the free trial, and knowing what the lingq limit is, you could try just not creating any lingqs at all, and just use the known/unknown classifications. i.e. white/blue colours. It's not ideal, but then you would still be able to use the integrated dictionary and the trial wouldn't become crippled.

-Lingq seems to randomly add other languages to my profile and then I am unsure how or why I ended up in the polish library.


Yeah, from memory if you browse the library of another language at all, it permanently adds it to your menu. I did this for English because I wanted to read the English version of the same Japanese story, and then LingQ started sending me flashcard emails for English periodically with no way of turning it off (although eventually I just disabled all emails from LingQ).

Pros:
-Huge library on site


This is one of the best things about LingQ for me. They have a large community of language learners that create and share content with each other, so they've managed to build quite a nice library. I don't really mind about the UI at all, I more enjoy being able to find interesting content to work through, and the UI is good enough. I never bothered with the flashcards, I just used it to work my way through content.

The end result of this is that I was able to do way more studying than normal, despite having less time than normal. I'll be sticking with the program for now, even if all the bugs make it a negative experience sometimes.


Right. I think the nice thing about authentic native content is that you can sometimes forget that it's study, as you're preoccupied with wanting to find out what happens next in the story.
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devilyoudont
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Re: Japanese and Chill: Devilyoudont's 2020 Log (Wanderlusting EO, ES, and KO)

Postby devilyoudont » Tue Mar 24, 2020 1:28 am

Things have been crazy. Here's the good news: My husband is working again, and we have finally moved!!! So hopefully we are going to be moving towards a more normal schedule for me.

Due to covid-19, my family has insisted on taking me to and from work, so that I am not exposed to risk on the bus. This is of course very kind of everyone who is giving me rides, but it does remove over an hour of language study time daily. So I got less done since my last post again.

Japanese:

Mostly just Lingq and NHK.

I imported all of JLPT stories into Lingq and made them public courses. I worked thru the entire N3 course... Had to skip N4 because despite importing it, I had no access to the course to edit it for several days...

A frustrating aspect of Japanese listening for me is how poorly I understand male speech. My teachers were all female, my friends were mostly female, and I am female... The result of this is that the N3 course which has a female speaker and I finished is easier than the N4 course with a male speaker that I just started. Subject matter maybe also is important... The N4 speaker, mainly seems to be speaking about business related things. The N3 mainly speaks about things like salons and so on. Of course, there are also a few episodes where she talks about her workplace, and those ones were still easier for me than the N4 ones. Reading thru the N4 ones is also not very difficult, so it really is very tied up in how they speak rather than what they say. In terms of grammar, neither N3 or N4 material is challenging for me. Mainly I'm doing listening practice with these JLPT stories, and using the transcripts in Lingq to clear up what is being said when I mishear it.

According to Lingq, I know 1888 words in Japanese.

Esperanto

Read another chapter of "Ĉu vi kuiras ĉine?" Am now further along than I was when I started using Lingq.

According to Lingq I know 1317 words in Esperanto.

Listened to the episode of "Kern punkto" on epidemics.

It remains kind of amazing to me how much Esperanto I have retained despite an incredibly long period of disuse. I don't know when the last time besides the last 30 days I listened to Esperanto was, but there are no comprehension issues. It goes to show how easy it is to lose a language when you're at a beginner level, and how easy it is to hop back in at an advanced level.

Korean:

Did some research into sound correspondences between Korean and Japanese only to find that this information will not be useful to me... Japanese has fewer sound distinctions and so it seems kind of impossible to me to determine whether ん corresponds to ㅁ or ㄴ as an example. However, the chart I found (and then colored and removed columns relating to languages I am not learning/more uncommon on-yomi for Japanese) might be useful to someone else (possibly someone going from Middle Chinese to Korean or Japanese, or Korean to Japanese...

Initial consonants:

Image

Final consonants:

Image
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ryanheise
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Re: Japanese and Chill: Devilyoudont's 2020 Log (Wanderlusting EO, ES, and KO)

Postby ryanheise » Tue Mar 24, 2020 3:54 am

devilyoudont wrote:A frustrating aspect of Japanese listening for me is how poorly I understand male speech. My teachers were all female, my friends were mostly female, and I am female... The result of this is that the N3 course which has a female speaker and I finished is easier than the N4 course with a male speaker that I just started. Subject matter maybe also is important... The N4 speaker, mainly seems to be speaking about business related things. The N3 mainly speaks about things like salons and so on. Of course, there are also a few episodes where she talks about her workplace, and those ones were still easier for me than the N4 ones. Reading thru the N4 ones is also not very difficult, so it really is very tied up in how they speak rather than what they say. In terms of grammar, neither N3 or N4 material is challenging for me. Mainly I'm doing listening practice with these JLPT stories, and using the transcripts in Lingq to clear up what is being said when I mishear it.


I've also been listening to the JLPT Stories recently and noticed the same thing.

The N3 speaker is definitely the easiest to follow.
The N5 speaker speaks quite fast, although it's good practice and the words are not too difficult.
The N4 speaker is not as articulate as N3 or N5. While the N5 speaker may speak quickly, he does give a big pause between sentences while the N4 speaker doesn't quite as much.

On vocabulary, I did a computer analysis of all of the stories and created the following chart:

Image

Each dot is a different story. I found it interesting that N3 isn't particularly more difficult in terms of subject matter than N5, but I was somewhat aware that JLPT does not necessarily design their levels based on vocabulary frequency. When I looked at the JLPT website, I found this explanation:

N4 and N5 measure the level of understanding of basic Japanese mainly learned in class. N1 and N2 measure the level of understanding of Japanese used in a broad range of scenes in actual everyday life. N3 is a bridging level between N1/N2 and N4/N5.


So basically, N5 gives you a lot of vocabulary that you might use in the classroom, related to high school and study, and they also describe on the page that N3 is intended to develop your ability with "everyday topics". This is probably why the N3 topics doesn't necessarily seem more difficult than N4 or N5 and due to the overlap the topics can sometimes even be easier.
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