Japanese and Chill

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devilyoudont
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Japanese and Chill

Postby devilyoudont » Wed Jan 01, 2020 6:04 pm

Happy New Year and welcome to my 2020 log.

Last year I had a ton of goals and things were going along ok until real life snuck up and punched me in the face. As a result, I more or less let any Esperanto or Spanish goals go completely by the wayside. I only got 50% thru my Japanese goal... However, 50% means that I now know the entire Kyoiku Kanji list inside out, which is like a 4 grade level improvement on texts that I can attempt to read.

My basic theme for all of my goals for 2020 is "Learn to do this in a way that is low maintenance and relaxing."

In terms of language learning this means: No time tracking, no counting flash cards, no specific goals for 2020.

For Japanese specifically, I want to just enjoy the benefit of the work I put in in 2019 for a little while. So I will be focusing just on USING Japanese, rather than LEARNING Japanese.

Here's what I am doing right now:

At work, I am listening to NHK ラジオニュース (NHK Radio News) as a podcast. This isn't the most exciting content but: 1) They produce tons of content every single day so I don't run out, 2) Most episodes are about 5 minutes long, which is short enough that I force myself to listen to at least 1 an hour regardless of how I engaged I feel. I am also listening to News in Slow Japanese as new episodes are released and JLPT Stories as new episodes are released.

Something that remains amazing to me about podcasts is when your brain just randomly puts something together that you haven't been particularly working on. In the last two weeks, I randomly started to understand news stories about violent crime. I don't really know why those had been flying over my head for so long as words like "殺人" (murder) and "容疑者" (suspect) have been in my vocabulary since before I can remember but brains are mysterious.

I have started using https://langcorrect.com/ for writing with journal entry corrections.
--I like this site more than italki because I don't get a bunch of messages from people who don't share languages with me and are possibly attempting to recruit students/look for dating.
--I like this site more than Hellotalk because I never actually receive corrections on HelloTalk.

However, I also am interested into getting into some language exchange this year, so I might be getting back into italki or HelloTalk

Right now I'm watching a Netflix Series called Scams. This is something that I should be fairly interested in but everything seems so over the top that it breaks my sense of immersion at times. I really cannot believe that this is based on a non-fiction book and that the type of phone scam depicted in the show actually works. Watching in Japanese with Japanese subs, this week I learned the word "詐欺" (fraud).

I'm reading a Graded Reader called 永井隆原爆の地長崎に生きて (Takashi Nagai: Living at Ground Zero, Nagasaki). This isn't really the kind of book I like reading but since I already have it, why not read it. This is a story of a doctor who saved people at Nagasaki, while suffering from Leukemia and Radiation Sickness himself.

Something else I'm thinking about is how to allow myself a little room for "wanderlust." I want to keep with Japanese at least 5 days a week... But I would like to return to Spanish and Esperanto at some point. I'm also working with a Korean American woman who speaks Korean and is constantly recommending me Kdramas (Currently watching: Mr. Sunshine) so I'm somewhat feeling a call of Korean as well. But I still want to spend the overwhelming bulk of my time on Japanese...
Last edited by devilyoudont on Sat Oct 17, 2020 6:35 pm, edited 6 times in total.
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Re: Japanese and Chill: Devilyoudont's 2020 Log (Wanderlusting EO, ES, and KO)

Postby devilyoudont » Mon Jan 06, 2020 10:03 pm

So I finished reading 永井隆原爆の地長崎に生きて (Takashi Nagai: Living at Ground Zero, Nagasaki). Two more books to go in the Graded Reader set I got: 走れメロス (Run, Melos!) and 野菊の墓 (Tomb of the Wild Chrysanthemum)

I also wrote an entry on LangCorrect this week, and watched a few more episodes of スカム (Scams).

The compromise I've worked out with myself w/r/t wanderlust at the moment is: If I've done SOMETHING in Japanese on a given day, and I feel like more language stuff besides Japanese, then I can allow myself to mess around in Esperanto, Spanish, or Korean.

I need to work on reincorporating gaming into my life. I used to game on my lunch breaks but me and my new coworkers are usually doing power walks instead. More than practicing Japanese, I want to get back into Pokemon Sword :cry:

For Spanish, I decided to do the Harry Potter thing, but not with Harry Potter. I never really much liked Harry Potter, but there is a fantasy book that I did love that is for children around the same age: The Golden Compass (La brújula dorada). I must have read this book a dozen times when I was in middle school... I'm hoping that will somewhat offset that it is completely and totally above my level.

For Esperanto, I decided to just do a different book than the ones I have, since none of the ones that I have have really grabbed me. So I'm going with "Ĉu vi kuiras ĉine" (Do you cook Chinese food?) which is a murder mystery by Claude Piron (under a pseudonym). Esperantists may know Claude Piron for having written Gerda malaperis! (Gerda disappeared!).

And finally for Korean, I'm messing around with it on Lingodeer. I've learned the alphabet, and lucky for me, I happen to work in an area where I see signs in Korean every day. Spanish is probably the foreign language I hear most often out "in the wild" but Korean is the one I see most often.
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Re: Japanese and Chill: Devilyoudont's 2020 Log (Wanderlusting EO, ES, and KO)

Postby Christi » Thu Jan 09, 2020 8:13 pm

I really like Lingodeer. They keep adding new features each update! Another app you might once you get a bit more advanced like is Wordeu, it's in development, but contains short news items. Beelingua is a similar app but contains actual stories with audio recordings.
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2020 resolution words learned: 472 / 1000
Pages read at end of 2020: 220 / 1500

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

Postby devilyoudont » Mon Jan 13, 2020 1:05 am

Christi wrote:I really like Lingodeer. They keep adding new features each update! Another app you might once you get a bit more advanced like is Wordeu, it's in development, but contains short news items. Beelingua is a similar app but contains actual stories with audio recordings.


Thanks for the tip about Wordeu :) I also like Lingodeer and will probably subscribe at some point.

This week turned out to be more of a "meta" week than normal for me. I downloaded keyboads for Spanish and Korean for my phone's GBoard... This turned out to be an unmanageable situation so I spent a bunch of time trying to fix Gboard, and then eventually started researching other keyboard options. I eventually settled on Swiftkey. Swiftkey compresses English, Esperanto, and Spanish into one keyboard, then a Japanese and Korean keyboard are available by swiping. No matter what I did, Gboard kept the spanish and Esperanto Keyboards separate... Checking the multilingual option added them to my English keyboard while still maintaining separate keyboards. So, we're still only at 3 keyboards EN/ES/EO, JA, and KO... I don't think I can learn any more languages unless I can merge them into one of those 3 :lol: 3 Keyboards is my max.

I also got my PC able to type Spanish diacritical marks. I haven't bothered to set up Korean yet because I don't really have a need to do so yet, and I'm not quite sure how to resolve an issue of having too many IMEs quite yet.

I also spent a bunch of time trying to decide between e-reader apps. I was looking for an app that will allow me to hook up a foreign language dictionary, and I was looking for an app that would read e-pubs. I decided on Moon+ reader... it correctly displays Esperanto words and I was able to set the dictionary to vortaro.net for now (an EO -> EO Dictionary).

In terms of Japanese, most of this week was just listening to NHK ラジオニュース (NHK Radio News). I did write an entry on LangCorrect reviewing the book I finished last week. I also wound up rewatching この世界の片隅に (In this Corner of the World). A friend was talking about how great this movie is, which made me want to watch it again. My comprehension was WAY higher than it was when I watched it last. Last time, I had a lot of trouble with the Hiroshima-dialect. I dunno if it's because I had seen it previously, I had previously researched the Hiroshima-dialect in more depth, or if my overall comprehension has improved. This time I was really able to appreciate the charms of each of the characters.

For Esperanto, mostly I've been correcting someone's entries on LangCorrect. I also read ±1% of Ĉu vi kuiras ĉine? (Do you cook Chinese Food), mainly in order to test e-reader apps.

I feel like I did a lot with Korean. I more or less set aside Thursday of last week for memorizing all of the Hangul. I initially tried just picking it up as I went along in Lingodeer but that was pretty hard. So then I tried using the Drops app to drill Korean. Let me tell you, I am not a fan of the 5 minutes at a time aspect of this app. Hangul is supposed to be one of the easiest alphabets to learn in the world, so I wound up ditching this and just plowing thru with an app that was just called "Hangul." Hangul might be one of the best alphabets ever created, however I think Korean orthography is actually a little tricky. There's a hand full of letters that have the same pronunciation in modern Korean, and there are sound changes that can happen when letters are in certain positions or are surrounded by certain other letters. This isn't very different from Japanese Rendaku in my mind, or from the shift that occurs when you add "ity" to "electric" in English. However, I haven't memorized the full list of what the batchim might become in certain letters (Looking at you ㅅ)

Me and my Korean American coworker have also been sending each other messages in Korean sometimes. I put 열심히! (Try your hardest!) on this motivational board that we keep between our desks, and she's signing off on requests to me with 감사! (Thanks!). I'm still making errors even transcribing words from the dictionary--Send 생일죽하해 instead of 생일축하해 for "Happy Birthday." I'm not in love with Korean the same way that I am with Japanese... (Honestly, no language is like Japanese for me)... but it makes a huge difference to have a friend who is excited to use a language with me, and she's so thrilled that I'm trying at all even when I mess stuff up!
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Re: Japanese and Chill: Devilyoudont's 2020 Log (Wanderlusting EO, ES, and KO)

Postby devilyoudont » Sun Jan 19, 2020 8:08 pm

I didn't do as much in the last week because me and my husband are IN THE FINAL STAGES OF BUYING OUR FIRST HOUSE OMG. Excepting less focus on languages for the coming weeks as well due to packing and moving, and getting some repairs done before moving in.

Japanese:

This was mainly a listening week for me. Something cool that happened... I was listening to NHKラジオニュース (NHK Radio News) and I kept hearing the word "こうくう"... My brain suddenly realized the meaning is "air." Then I started wondering... what is the difference between this and "空気" and without looking at a dictionary (in fact I was driving at the time), my brain just materialized that this must be spelled "航空" This turned out to be correct. 航 was one of the Kanji I learned last year, more or less without successfully tying it strongly to any particular word. In a weird way, there are maybe a hundred or so kanji like this floating around in my head, which I haven't strongly associated to a word yet. It's kind of nice to know that somehow, my brain is linking these puzzle pieces together.

Everyone got laid off at one of my favorite English Youtube channels. It's a channel where the hosts talk and draw a picture at the same time... This is fairly encouraging to me in my other main hobby which is drawing, and the potential death of this channel caused me to realize that chilling out and watching someone else draw is something I can switch to Japanese. My favorite that I have found so far is Emoco Ch. She mainly does tutorials or product reviews while she draws... which I'm kind of ok with for now. I had some trouble finding channels where the artists speaks instead of draws silently... I would rather they talk about why they make the choices they made, things which turned out good or that they would like to improve... however tutorials and product reviews are a very good way for me to get a deeper idea of drawing related vocabulary in Japanese for the time being.

I also started doing Lingodeer in Japanese... but my goal with this is kind of weird. I got a Lingodeer subscription for Korean, and I figured why not test their entire Japanese course while I'm here... I'm just choosing "test out" for right now and completing the test for each section. These early lessons are too boring for me to repeat, as I won't learn anything new from them. However, I switched the Japanese keyboard on my phone to a 10-key layout... I've actually been using romaji-input for years and years due to being incredibly slow on a 10-key. My goal here is to improve my typing speed with a real layout while testing the course. I'm actually typing faster with the Korean layout on my phone than with the Japanese one at this point :oops:

Korean:

I've mainly just been doing Lingodeer randomly for Korean. In some way, I think the shared chinese vocabulary, but lack of chinese characters makes basic Korean words somewhat sticky to me... To give an example... it's fairly transparent to me that 시계 (clock) is a sino-compound written 時計... 남자 (man) and 여자 (woman) are 男? and 女? with a number of possibilities available for the second syllable... My guess is 人. On some level it does not matter whether or not I have assigned the above words to correct Chinese characters... only the fact that there appears to be a pattern here, and that pattern makes some Korean vocabulary stickier for me, and that it's different enough from the Japanese that I am unlikely to accidentally mix the two up.

Korean grammar is so far very similar to Japanese grammar... The first difference I have found that possessive particles do not seem to be quite so mandatory in Korean...

That girl is Chinese
中国人です
여자아이중국사람입니다

As you can see, except for possessive particles marked in red, so far Korean and Japanese grammar is the same.

However, choice of Chinese vocabulary is also different, with Japanese creating a compound for "girl" out of two native words, and Korean constructing the compound out of Chinese roots. Then Japanese uses a Chinese root for the -ese in Chinese, and Korean appears to use a native word.

If we mark the same sentences for clear cognates (green) we also get an interesting result.

そのの子は中国人です
자아이는중국사람입니다

In other words, half of the nouns. Altho I guess 女 and 여 are not actually cognates... but onyomi and kunyomi are so closely tied up for 女 in my head that the meaning is still nearly transparent in this case.

Also even the 100% match between 中国 and 중국 sounds completely different (chuukoku vs Chung-guk), so is recognizing this even useful?

I wonder if it will continue like this, or diverge further from Japanese.

Esperanto:

It's nice to finally be reading something I enjoy in Esperanto. Piron's prose is expressive, while remaining approachable, and appearing completely effortless. These are qualities I wish I possessed even in English... But maybe he will serve as a model for me in at least Esperanto, and I will internalize some of his style.

I finished the first chapter, about 2.5% of the book.

Spanish:

Read 1 page of La brújula dorada. The book is way above my level, but I might try to power thru it without a dictionary anyway. There's just too many words to look up otherwise. Or maybe I should just look up obvious nouns or something. I don't know.
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Re: Japanese and Chill: Devilyoudont's 2020 Log (Wanderlusting EO, ES, and KO)

Postby golyplot » Mon Jan 20, 2020 4:42 am

devilyoudont wrote:I also like Lingodeer and will probably subscribe at some point.


If you want a contrary opinion, I found Lingodeer to be terrible and a complete waste of money. I really can't understand why everyone keeps praising it. Of course, this might be a bit late for you, since it looks like you already subscribed.
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Re: Japanese and Chill: Devilyoudont's 2020 Log (Wanderlusting EO, ES, and KO)

Postby vonPeterhof » Mon Jan 20, 2020 4:53 am

devilyoudont wrote:남자 (man) and 여자 (woman) are 男? and 女? with a number of possibilities available for the second syllable... My guess is 人.

It's 子, so the words are 男子 and 女子. I think words that have the vowel [ɨ] in modern Mandarin tend to have [i] in Japanese and [a] in Korean.
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Re: Japanese and Chill: Devilyoudont's 2020 Log (Wanderlusting EO, ES, and KO)

Postby devilyoudont » Tue Jan 21, 2020 1:12 am

golyplot wrote:If you want a contrary opinion, I found Lingodeer to be terrible and a complete waste of money. I really can't understand why everyone keeps praising it. Of course, this might be a bit late for you, since it looks like you already subscribed.
You don't have to worry about me :) I previously tested the app quite extensively when it was free for Japanese, and I'm more or less just looking for a course for complete beginners, without errors, for my phone, which will prep me to do more difficult materials if i ever decide to pursue that far in Korean. I trust Lingodeer for this. I also got my membership at a discount due to a new years sale (but maybe they are one of those companies that runs sales constantly)

I wonder if your experience with Lingodeer is worse because you're a more experienced language learner? People who have studied lots and lots of languages often seem to me to be able to jump right into much denser courses which may have too much of a curve for less experienced learners.

vonPeterhof wrote:It's 子, so the words are 男子 and 女子. I think words that have the vowel [ɨ] in modern Mandarin tend to have [i] in Japanese and [a] in Korean.
Whoops, wasn't going to guess this one at all, my second guess was that maybe they would use 者 in a compound like this.

Maybe a quick study of the pronunciations between kanji and hanja would be interesting for me. (and maybe I would throw in mandarin too, just in case I ever go down that road)
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Re: Japanese and Chill: Devilyoudont's 2020 Log (Wanderlusting EO, ES, and KO)

Postby golyplot » Tue Jan 21, 2020 5:46 am

devilyoudont wrote:I wonder if your experience with Lingodeer is worse because you're a more experienced language learner? People who have studied lots and lots of languages often seem to me to be able to jump right into much denser courses which may have too much of a curve for less experienced learners.


I'm not sure about that, but there are other factors that may contribute to the difference of opinion. You're looking for a mobile app, while I prefer websites where I can use a keyboard, and Lingodeer is mobile only (the web version of Lingodeer is so bad it may as well not exist). Also, I paid full price instead of catching a sale, so it was pretty pricey for me.
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Re: Japanese and Chill: Devilyoudont's 2020 Log (Wanderlusting EO, ES, and KO)

Postby devilyoudont » Sun Jan 26, 2020 11:32 pm

Not a very productive week overall, but packing and meeting with contractors to repair things in our new house is eating a lot of my free time still, and probably will for up to another 3 weeks.

Japanese
This was kind of just a very by the numbers week in Japanese for me. I packed up most of my Japanese books, and didn't take the chance to read something else. I watched an episode of Scams, listened to NHK ラジオニュース, and watched youtube videos in Japanese.

Korean
Grammar wise I learned 것 which functions exactly as the れ in Japanese これ、それ、あれ. I think I've also mentally nailed down all the vowels at this point (certain pairs had been problematic for me). Finally, me and my Korean friend went to H mart together. I looked up at the sign and saw 한 and suddenly realized the H in H Mart is for Korea! My friend explained to me that the name is also a kind of pun, so there's a double meaning in Korean. I also watched half an episode of Mr Sunshine with English Subs... I understood nothing, but Korean phonology is starting to sound distinct from Japanese phonology to me. Previously Korean sounded like "Japanese but completely incomprehensible."

Spanish
I've been playing an Early Access pokemon-like game called Temtem. A few hours in, I realized that this is a Spanish game, and so why not play it in Spanish instead of English, especially as the English translation is skill kind of rough. In some cases, I'm using a dictionary to get by, but in other cases, I can get by on context or trial and error. A few hours after switching to Spanish, I realized, hey why not just name any Temtem I capture after whatever animal or thing they remind me of... So I am also getting loads of exposure now to uncommon words like "Luciérnaga." The only downside is that for some reason this Spanish game does not accept accent marks in names.
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