Japanese and Chill

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Xenops
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Re: Japanese and Chill

Postby Xenops » Sat Oct 17, 2020 9:35 pm

devilyoudont wrote:I've been hit with depression as well as trying to restructure my daily activities to incorporate more fitness. For now, I am focusing only on keeping on with Japanese, tho I expect I will continue to socially use Esperanto in the meantime.

In terms of Japanese I have been doing a bunch of different things but not sticking with anything.


Depression is tough. I’ve struggled with it for over a decade, and I know others have on here as well. Be gentle and kind to yourself. The good news is that you’re still going with your language learning.

And it might be my bias speaking, but I think you’re focusing on the best language. ;)
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Re: Japanese and Chill

Postby tangleweeds » Sun Oct 18, 2020 4:01 am

Xenops wrote:
devilyoudont wrote:I've been hit with depression as well as trying to restructure my daily activities to incorporate more fitness.
<snip>
In terms of Japanese I have been doing a bunch of different things but not sticking with anything.


Depression is tough. I’ve struggled with it for over a decade, and I know others have on here as well. Be gentle and kind to yourself. The good news is that you’re still going with your language learning.

Agreed. I think when depression hits and extended focus becomes difficult, sampling a bunch of things is not a waste of time. Things that catch your interest when depressed (even if you can't dive deep right then) will tend to hold your interest more compellingly once you resurface.

There's a lot of interesting work going on showing the many contexts in which self-compassion leads to better outcomes than being self-critical--Neff and Germer are the big names to look for. For example, being tough on yourself leads to more procrastination than being self-compassionate. It's so easy to empathize with others yet criticize oneself when faced with a similar situation.
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Re: Japanese and Chill

Postby devilyoudont » Mon Oct 19, 2020 8:17 pm

Thank you both. The self compassion thing is difficult for me, but something I am working on.
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Re: Japanese and Chill

Postby devilyoudont » Mon Oct 26, 2020 2:13 am

Mostly this week the only real study I did was keeping up on kanji reviews. I still had slightly higher leeches than average, due to previously not keeping up on my reviews well enough.

What I have been doing this week is wasting a ton of time on video games, youtube, and twitch. I lost a day of my life watching vtubers after the discussion about them in golyplot's log. I also spent some time in the twitch channels of minor artists. My main activity tho has been being addicted to a game called Genshin Impact (原神). It's not a Japanese game, but I've been playing it in Japanese. I feel like this is the first time I've ever been so addicted to a game I've been playing in Japanese. My comprehension is not as high as when I was playing pokemon, but the situation is not unmanageable. The thing I am struggling the most with is the behind the scenes stuff... set bonuses attached to gear, and character customization. I am doing pretty much fine getting thru the quests. For me, this will probably be a single player game, so it doesn't super matter if I can't figure out how to spend talent points or what gear is best.
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Re: Japanese and Chill

Postby golyplot » Mon Oct 26, 2020 6:19 pm

devilyoudont wrote:What I have been doing this week is wasting a ton of time on video games, youtube, and twitch. I lost a day of my life watching vtubers after the discussion about them in golyplot's log.


Sorry :P

Any recommendations?
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Re: Japanese and Chill

Postby devilyoudont » Tue Oct 27, 2020 2:22 am

golyplot wrote:
devilyoudont wrote:What I have been doing this week is wasting a ton of time on video games, youtube, and twitch. I lost a day of my life watching vtubers after the discussion about them in golyplot's log.


Sorry :P

Any recommendations?


I ended up watching a ton of Kizuna Ai. I have also been looking at random channels associated with Hololive and Nijisanji.
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Re: Japanese and Chill

Postby devilyoudont » Mon Nov 02, 2020 1:44 am

Let's see...

Proper study this week was again limited to kanji flash cards. In the last six months I've more or less reversed the numbers on kanji I can write vs kanji that I can't write... meaning I've added close to 700 kanji to my "can write" list. If I can stick with it, that means that it's reasonable to hope that I finish out the final stretch of kanji I need to learn in less than 8 months, since 6 months took me a little less than half way thru.

What else have I been doing... I've been watching a lot of Vtubers and other streamers on Twitch... Like 3 hours a day, which is a lot for me. After all this time, I have finally found Japanese content which I am able to binge and it is Japanese people talking while they draw... sometimes about the drawing sometimes just interacting with their chatroom. It amazes me watching the chat on these streams, because often the bad behavior seems to come from people who are learning Japanese :roll: I've seen multiple of these scenarios play out. One guy starts spamming おしり in chat, then gets upset and feels bullied when the entire chat turns against him. What was your end here game bro? Then there's people disrupting the conversation and demanding that someone teach them hiragana...on art streams! It's honestly embarrassing to be in the same group as these people.

Unrelated to language learning, but watching all of these art streams makes me want to try to start an art stream of my own. The social component of this website has really helped me with sticking to my language studies, and I've for a long time really needed some sort of similar social accountability tool for my drawing... maybe having a twitch stream could be that? Well, I'm not sure when that will happen because it turns out running a stream is not quite as easy as just downloading the twitch app... We shall see what happens with this.

I have also continued to play Genshin Impact (原神)... I love this game. I had been struggling a bit as a F2P player, so I decided to reroll my account. I expected to get some practice playing thru the intro at least 10 times, but I lucked out and got a good reroll on my very first attempt. Unexpected struggle: Characters either come from Fantasy Europe or Fantasy China... I can never correspond the Japanese version of Chinese character's names to English versions of Chinese characters names making finding out info about all the Chinese characters on the English Speaking internet kind of a chore. In some cases names of stats have been intuitive to guess, in other cases impossible. Turns out words for RPG stats like 会心率 are not in the dictionaries that I use, so I would up switching the game to English briefly to sort out what the heck all the stats are. The game is a really great tool for Japanese practice for me... The main story quests are 100% voice acted so if I don't know some kanji I still get the gist of the quest... and If I don't get the gist of the quest I can turn on this golden trail thing which will show me where to go (which in turn narrows down possible meanings if I wasn't completely sure what I was doing). However, I didn't make too much progress on questing because I've been too busy exploring the map, and also because of the reroll.

I decided I want to give Nanowrimo a shot. For right now, I am going to try working on it for a week in Esperanto. I don't have much hope of hitting 50k words, but I just want to see how I manage with it. We'll see how it goes.
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Re: Japanese and Chill (Also EO, ES, & KO depending on mood)

Postby devilyoudont » Sun Nov 08, 2020 9:15 pm

Japanese:
My proper study time this week was once again made up entirely of drilling kanji, but there's good news with this. I am finally good on the review queue which I had previously generated, which should hopefully open up more time for me to study on Lingq.

In terms of kanji study, it's frustrating to not be moving faster, but I feel like the slow pace is really helpful for me. On the one hand I can probably continue on this path indefinitely without any problems, but on the other I feel like if I just learned in some different way, I would know more than 65% of the kanji at this point.

Some kanji are easy for me... I have a mental dictionary entry for them already, and I just need to either make some minor correction or I need to attach it to a word I already know... For instance in kanji which were an issue this week: 線 is a character I already know the word for, and I also already know both of it's components. But I persistently write the left side incorrectly as the component in 原. It is the case that the component in both characters is an evolution of 泉, but 原 has experienced some divergent evolution resulting in it more closely resembling the oracle bone script than the others. Or, I needed to improve my cards for both 差 and 識... because the Heisig Keyword for 識 is discriminating which gets mixed up with the Japanese word I already know 差別. But, I also already know words like 知識 意識... so improving the card is just a matter of of giving myself a phonetic clue and associating what the kanji looks like to words I already know. 塚 was originally being confused for many kanji pronounced おか because of the keyword "hillock" until I found it is a totally different word つか so that card just needed a phonetic hint as well. (The おか variants which I know mostly from place names will have to wait until they turn up as leeches and I find some method of distinguishing them)

On the other hand, as I am entering the final 700ish kanji on the joyo list, there are more and more kanji that I have simply no connection to. I am consistently failing 庸... not only do I not know any words related to this kanji, but some of it's component pieces are from outside of the joyo list... meaning that the semantic portion of this kanji is just completely opaque to me. Knowing that 用 is phonetic tho, and that the pronunciation よう at least matches in Japanese is good to know tho.

In listening news, I am still watching tons of art streams on twitch... I am generally doing this while working from home, generally from 7am to noon when I don't have any conference calls. This is probably resulting in 3 hrs a day, 5 days a week which is a huge improvement for me in terms of how much I am immersing myself in the spoken language. My favorite right now is a vtuber named Yuma. He streams drawing, games like pokemon, and his English practice. His channel has auto closed captioning and auto English subtitles, which isn't perfect, but it's useful if you lose track of what's going on.

And I'm also still doing Genshin Impact! This game is really great for me because I can kind of choose how much Japanese I want to engage with. For the past 2 days I've been going in hard core on the quests, doing lots of reading or listening and reading at the same time (main story is voice acted)... Or like, closer to election day, I just decided to chill the hell out and focus on exploration. Both valid, both providing some Japanese exposure... but one day I'm mainly only seeing the names of objects I pick up, and on another it's a whole story. Also, I don't generally play single player games, but because this is mostly single player, it literally is fine if I misunderstand something on the first try.

Esperanto:
I started doing Nanowrimo but have made basically no progress. I don't believe I will finish in a month, but I am just happy to have started something.

I told a friend I wanted to start a twitch stream, and he said he wanted to join too. So that would be mostly in Esperanto if/when it happens. Our first try had to be aborted because I couldn't figure out how to get both of us on a stream.

As always did my normal activities including chatting and weekly pictionary.
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Re: Japanese and Chill

Postby devilyoudont » Sun Nov 29, 2020 11:37 pm

Mostly I've been doing the stuff that I always do. In some areas, I've been less consistent (Kanji study) in others, I've been more consistent (listening practice, watching films and tv shows).

I'm setting this post down as a goal marker more or less. Like, ok, there was thanksgiving, and ok things got a little crazy at work. Now it's time to get back to work.
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devilyoudont
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Re: Japanese and Chill

Postby devilyoudont » Sun Dec 06, 2020 6:36 pm

NGL this week hasn't been super productive for me but that should hopefully be changing. Management of my department at work is changing again, so there is reason to hope that our situation may change. My husband and I are trying to do hardcore in World of Warcraft: Shadowlands. This is going to eat into my study time somewhat, but my hope is that it won't be unmanageable.

A bummer about WoW for me is that it's not available in Japanese. There is a fanmade addon which partially translates the game into Japanese. I have a plan to test this out and see if it offers anything useful for a learner at all. Since WoW is taking over my gaming time, I do not know when I will be getting back to 原神. If anyone cares about this, it is an addon called Nihongo and it is a continuation of the old WoWJapanizer addon. I love this style of game, so if we get sick of wow, I might try to go it alone in FFXIV on Japanese servers. Unfortunately, absolutely none of the people that I typically play with have any interest in FFXIV.

I only studied a total of 3 new kanji cards this entire week... a new low which cannot be justified!

But there are good things which happened this week... I am more or less certain to get thru my anki review queue today which had grown kind of large. This puts me on a decent path for the rest of the week assuming I do not flake out. My schedule did not line up well with Twitch Art Streamers recently, so I listened to a bunch of podcast episodes from Teppei and Noriko. I also have been watching a lot of カードキャプターさくら... I am 33 episodes in, putting me around half way thru. This means that CCS is almost certainly the longest thing I have ever watched in Japanese with no English subtitles... since my typical pattern with Anime (subs or no subs) is only watching a handful of episodes. Movies in general are more my speed. In terms of vs things I have watched with English subs, CCS will eventually surpass 鋼の錬金術師... so it will eventually be the longest thing I have ever watched in Japanese. I am interested in watching other things by CLAMP after this.

Streaming study sessions on twitch has been a pretty good productivity tool for me. It happens that 1 or 2 people stop in, and being conscious that anyone sees me prevents me from fucking around. I am also doing some drawing and some gaming on my channel so it's not exclusively language related. I can't set a consistent schedule at the moment, so it's more or less a "when I have time" thing. I put the link in my signature if anyone ever wants to hang out.
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