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 Jun 07, 2020 8:28 pm

This was a tough week for languages. The local uprising somewhat disrupted my normal working schedule, which would have been fine on it's own, but then a major storm passed thru and knocked out the power for 100,000 people, including us and my job. We wound up without power for 2 days, and a combination of the stress and the lack of internet access was a setback for my language study this week.

Japanese
Read half of chapter 7 for 三姉妹探偵団 but I was really unable to keep my mind on it this week.

Based on golyplot's log I decided to check out both of Nihongo con Teppei's podcasts. I will probably listen to the full archive of both while working for the next couple of months. The host seems like a nice guy, so that makes me want to keep listening.

I started wanting to brush up on actual grammar lately, and I was thinking of how helpful it was for me when I read about 1/3 of Plena Manlibro de Esperanta Gramatiko in Esperanto. After an extended search for a similar site I ended up deciding that I will read thru 国語の文法 rather than read large sections of Imabi or one of my Dictionaries of Japanese Grammar. This week I read the section on 言葉の単位.

I spent a small amount of time trying to read my physical copy of 旅猫リポート in the dark but gave up with only a few pages of progress.

The priming I gave myself a month ago by quizzing myself on literally every joyo kanji has worn off, and now I actually need to pay attention while I am doing my SRS reviews. I expect to know in another month if I can increase my number of new cards without drowning in reviews, or if 5 new cards a day is the right amount.

Did a small amount of chatting on the Japanese discord server.

Esperanto
I helped komencantojn and I played Pictionary. I did some chatting but not too much. Listened to an episode of Kern.punkto. Spent some time looking at the Proverbaro because I love it.

Spanish
Made a small amount of progress in Esperanza Renace.

There's a major difference in what kind of words I don't know when I compare my experience of reading in Japanese and reading in Spanish.

For Japanese, the words I fail on are jukugo. If I know all the kanji involved, the meaning and often the pronunciation are guessable for me, but a lot of the time, I don't know every kanji. And so I fail at these words big time. However, my knowledge of native Japanese words tends to carry me thru, allowing me to continue on even when there are many many many jukugo on a page.

For Spanish, I know a basic vocabulary which is probably just a Swadesh list expanded to include a couple dozen more verbs. I can only use probably 3 of the tenses. I can passively understand a larger number of tenses, but not all of them. On the other hand, I know a huge amount of words already due to the shared Latin vocabulary in both English and Spanish. So, the kinds of words covered by jukugo are not difficult for me at all in Spanish, whereas basic everyday objects, parts of the body, and foods are just completely unknown.

A long time ago I read an article about Spanish sound shifts. Randomly this week I noticed myself connecting Spanish words such as llorar to Esperanto words such as plori due to having read that article. I might need to revisit this, because there should be more words which are shared between Esperanto and Spanish.
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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 Jun 14, 2020 7:07 pm

Japanese
I finished reading chapter 7 of 三姉妹探偵団. Previously, I liked the character Ayako, but now this chapter she is annoying me. Probably because she started an affair with someone else's husband, and because I think that that husband is, in fact, the killer.

I listened to more of Nihongo con Teppei. He has a podcast for both beginners and intermediate, but so far I don't really see a difference in the level of both. So far, it seems the main difference is that the intermediate episodes are longer.

I continued reading 国語文法. This week's chapter was about subject and predicate, which was a bit harder to wrap my head around. I already had somewhat an idea of how Japanese divide words (菜の花=1 word, なりました=3 words), but the Japanese view of what is a predicate was fairly strange for me. In a sentence like, "I want to love you" "want to love you" would be predicate in both English and Esperanto. But in Japanese only "want to love" would be the predicate. In other words, a Japanese predicate (述語) consists only of verbs (including だ and い adjectives) and helping verbs.

Esperanto
I read chapter 12 of Ĉu vi kuiras ĉine? I am really hoping that one day, our dear detective will no longer talk about the holy valley dialect of Esperanto. The author introduced another suspect yet again. I wish the story would just advance rather than yet more suspects.

Additionally, I listened to Kern.punkto, played Pictionary, and.... started a blog in Esperanto! Right now, my blog in Esperanto is just a translation of this language log. However, I would like to start tracking other goals there as well which would probably not be a good fit for this community (fitness, drawing, things about my pets)

Spanish
I started listening to Spanishpodcast.net again. I like this podcast because I can almost understand it. Actually understanding it is just above my level. I listen and I understand most of the words, but not the ideas. I remember feeling this way about some Japanese podcast or other, and it was immediately before I had a break thru, so I am hopeful I will have a break thru in Spanish listening soon. My brain will start to connect the words into sentences, and then the sentences into ideas. That's the hope anyway.

As expected, the father dying has made the story in Esperanza renace much more interesting. Her house has been burned down, an uncle tried to force her mother to marry him, and she is now moving to America! Finally stuff is happening.
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devilyoudont
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Re: Japanese and Chill: Devilyoudont's 2020 Log (Wanderlusting EO, ES, and KO)

Postby devilyoudont » Wed Jul 01, 2020 1:45 am

I haven’t made much progress in the past two weeks. A lot of things have happened. First, we got a new puppy and she is only 8 weeks old. Second, we had a big project at my job and it only finished yesterday. Third, maybe because too many things are happening at once, I’ve been really depressed lately.

Last week, I started feeling really bored by my target languages. I considered studying other languages for ​​a bit, mostly other planned languages. I was particularly interested in Globasa, Lidepla, and Pandunia but I also thought of some natural languages ​​- Chinese, German, Swedish, Haitian... I even started to make Globasan flashcards. But for now, I decided not to add any other languages. I don't have enough time for another language, and I know that my love for Japanese, Spanish, and Esperanto will return when my depression wanes. I also feel like I am becoming more and more interested in Korean. A close friend speaks it natively, and the similarities to Japanese are very interesting.

Japanese
I’ve been thinking a lot about flashcards lately. I messed with the settings for Anki a bit, and made it so that when I forget a card, it won't punish me so severely. I am feeling like I should probably be doing sentence mining for vocabulary, rather than using it only for kanji. But, I’m lazy and so I think I'm not going to pursue that until I learn all of the kanji.

I didn’t read much recently. I didn't read any of 三姉妹探偵団, and I only ready 1 chapter of 国語文法. I was able to understand this chapter as I was reading it, but now I can't really describe what I read in English. I guess you could say I read about grammatical complements. A complement can be attached to either a subject or a predicate. Weirdly, a comma can change where the complement attaches!

男の子は泣きながら走る女の子を追いかけた。
While crying, the boy chased a girl who was running.
男の子は、泣きながら走る女の子を追いかけた。
The boy chased a girl who was crying as she ran.

I'm aware that the above is possible in English as well, but it was a little harder to wrap my head around in a different language lmao.

I listened to tooooooooons of episodes of the Nihongo Con Teppei podcast. The most interesting episode I listened to was about when Teppei uses the Italki website to teach Japanese to his listeners. The listeners of his podcast are often a little surprised when they start lessons with Teppei, as their mental image of Teppei and the reality of Teppei are different.

My therapist thinks I should pursue a language exchange.

Esperanto
I haven't really studied Esperanto lately. I talked to people in chat rooms, and I played a game with others at skribbl.io. I read a little, but not from the book Ĉu vi kuiras ĉine? ... Instead, I read La Manifesto de Raŭmo. I think I would like to read more documents like this. Sometimes we talk about Raŭmismo or Finvenkismo... I guess that by reading the historical documents, I can better understand Esperanto culture.

Spanish
I read only a little bit, but I listened to a few episodes of Spanishpodcast.net. Someone asked me why I don't try and speak in Spanish much, and as a result I joined a Spanish discord server. But I still didn't really try using it.

Have a picture of my dogs :)
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Re: Japanese and Chill: Devilyoudont's 2020 Log (Wanderlusting EO, ES, and KO)

Postby DaveAgain » Wed Jul 01, 2020 5:49 am

devilyoudont wrote:I considered studying other languages for ​​a bit, mostly other planned languages. I was particularly interested in Globasa, Lidepla, and Pandunia but I also thought of some natural languages ​​- Chinese, German, Swedish, Haitian... I even started to make Globasan flashcards. But for now, I decided not to add any other languages. I don't have enough time for another language, and I know that my love for Japanese, Spanish, and Esperanto will return when my depression wanes.
You could argue that standard German is a planned language, being a deliberate merging of German dialects into one written form.
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Re: Japanese and Chill: Devilyoudont's 2020 Log (Wanderlusting EO, ES, and KO)

Postby devilyoudont » Mon Jul 13, 2020 12:32 am

My depression has continued. I also lost some hours of study this week due to an injury to my eye. Some bug bit me, and the right side of my face swelled up to the point where I couldn't open my right eye. I probably didn't study for two entire days due to that.

I read something interesting this week. More or less: spend half of your time as a student, and half of your time as an expert. In other words, half of the time seriously studying, but also make time for using the language as you would if you already spoke it fluently.

Japanese

I think I found a solution to my flashcard problem. Rather than trying to figure out how to use Anki for sentence mining, I instead spent some time figuring out how to make LingQ flashcards usable. I wound up posting about this already in the LingQ thread so I won't repeat it here.

I read two chapters of 国語文法 but only half a chapter of 三姉妹探偵団. I also watched a movie called 泣きたい私は猫をかぶる. I didn't like it. I felt like the heroine was some kind of crazy person and I thought her love interest should try to get away from her. At some point I found myself hoping for the antagonist to win. I also received a Japanese gift this week. My husband gave me 名探偵コナン. He bought this from Japan for me for my birthday, but it hadn't arrived because of coronavirus. But yesterday it finally came! I intend to read it without a dictionary because I am already using a dictionary for 国語文法 and 三姉妹探偵団. In addition to all that, I listened to episodes of Nihongo Con Teppei and the new episode of 朗読男女5分で聞けるオリジナル物語.

Esperanto

I used chatrooms, and I read the 13th chapter of Ĉu vi kuiras ĉine? I also helped beginners and updated my Esperanto language log.

Spanish

I only read a little bit, but I did listen to a few episodes of spanishpodcast.net. The episode about idioms about Luck was the one which interested me the most.

Korean

I changed the settings for Lingodeer, so now when I study Korean, I will be studying it thru Japanese rather than English. Also I watched some Japanese youtube videos about Korean.
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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 Jul 26, 2020 8:09 pm

Recently I haven't really wanted to study languages, and I realized that means that I am burning out.

I don't want to take a break, so for now, my plan is to use languages mostly to have fun, and not study particularly hard for maybe a month. I might have been too focused on reading and studying flash cards, and that's the reason for the burn out. I'm not saying I won't study or read at all, but I am not going to set a daily goal for that.

Japanese

During the last 2 weeks, I watched 2 anime movies. The first one was 打ち上げ花火 、下から見るか?横から見るか? and I thought that was a pretty bad movie. I really wanted to like that movie, but it just sucked, was ugly, and largely incomprehensible. The problem of incomprehensibility was not due to my Japanese… I found other people online complaining that the motivations of the characters don't make any sense.

The second was 小さな英雄… It's actually a collection of shorts. Comparing it to 打ち上げ花火 and 泣きたい私は猫をかぶる, I liked it. The collection had 3 short stories. The first one: カニーニとカニーノ I didn't like. It is a story of 2 crab children… and it has no dialogue. I just think you just can’t express much without dialogue. I really liked the second one: サムライエッグ. It was about a young boy who has a deadly allergy to eggs… Watching the short, I was very moved because when we were young, my sister had a similarly dangerous disease. When she was ten years old, her illness was able to be cured with surgery. But I can remember spending time in a hospital with her, or when she, as a 5 year old, worried over her own possible death. Because of this, that short seemed very realistic, in. 透明人間 was the final story. I liked it, but not particularly strongly. It was about an invisible man. I understand that the story was really about loneliness, but for this one I mostly liked the visual style.

I made an account at Myanimelist. I hope to find more watchable anime through this site. I don’t really like watching an anime TV show because the quality of the animation is often low. That’s why I would rather watch anime movies, or live action dramas. Unfortunately, finding Japanese dramas can be kind of a pain, and anime is everywhere

Esperanto

The mods of the Esperanto discord server gave promoted me and gave me the roll "teacher" because I spend so much time helping komencantojn. I also updated my language log in Esperanto.

Korean


I learned about forming questions… in Korean, the particle 까 is used for that. Apparently it works like the Japanese word か… and is actually a bit similar to the Esperanto "ĉu" (but there are many differences between か or 까 and ĉu) The sound of ㄲ surprised me a bit because I expected it to sound like the Japanese っか would sound… It's similar but still a bit different. I can’t really explain the difference (nor produce the sound).

My Korean friend made me watch Korean TV show with her… and now I'm completely obsessed with it. It's called 우리, 사랑했은까. Of course, I had to watch the show with English subtitles. I prefer to watch with no subtitles (Esperanto, sometimes Japanese) or subtitles in my target languages ​​(in other words, Spanish subtitles or Japanese subtitles). Unfortunately, my understanding of Korean is so low that I am not capable of that at all. I watched six episodes of the show, but probably only recognized five words: 이, 누나, 네, 아파, 어마 ... I could also momentarily recognize a few words from English (e.g. fighting -> 파이팅) or from Japanese (e.g.簡 単 -> 간단). Since I understand almost nothing, I really tried to listen to the pronunciation of names. The pronunciation of Korean is still a bit mysterious. I can read the letters, but the sounds and lyrics never seem to correspond how I would expect. I think by listening carefully to names, I got a little closer to understanding it.
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eido
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Re: Japanese and Chill: Devilyoudont's 2020 Log (Wanderlusting EO, ES, and KO)

Postby eido » Sun Jul 26, 2020 11:17 pm

Have you learned some other ways to form questions yet?

And I like your philosophy with Korean!
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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 Jul 27, 2020 12:21 am

eido wrote:Have you learned some other ways to form questions yet?

And I like your philosophy with Korean!


I haven't yet! It could be a while, my progress with Korean is always ponderously slow. And thanks.
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Re: Japanese and Chill: Devilyoudont's 2020 Log (Wanderlusting EO, ES, and KO)

Postby ryanheise » Mon Jul 27, 2020 5:35 am

devilyoudont wrote:The sound of ㄲ surprised me a bit because I expected it to sound like the Japanese っか would sound… It's similar but still a bit different. I can’t really explain the difference (nor produce the sound).


Here's one way to get a bit closer, although not all of the way there:

With っか there are two parts:

1. Holding in the pressure with っ and letting it build up.
2. Releasing the pressure with か.

With 까, you can try building up MORE pressure with (1) but release LESS pressure with (2) by changing か to が. (2) is not meant to be aspirated, and yet you are supposed to be able to hear some sort pressure build up, it's just that you hear it through its effect on the throat rather than through aspiration. Even in Japanese, か isn't supposed to have much aspiration, but in 까 there's even less as the tension moves into the throat.

Producing the sound this way will feel overly tense at first, but it's really just a stepping stone to get you closer. From there maybe you can experiment and refine the sound and eventually relax the whole maneuver once it starts to flow more.
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devilyoudont
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Japanese and Chill: Devilyoudont's 2020 Log (Wanderlust Chaos EO/ES/KO/NL/TP)

Postby devilyoudont » Mon Aug 03, 2020 1:52 am

Japanese

I read an article in Japanese about な-adjectives. In the Japanese discord group, I asked why Japanese people say that these words have conjugations. The article more or less explained how な adjectives are taught in Japan ... and that the way they teach it makes no sense from a linguistics perspective.

I watched two movies this week. The first was 若おかみは小学生. I actually really liked this movie. It's about grief after the death of a loved one. It’s a children’s film, so the presentation of the theme isn’t too dark. If Netflix had subtitles for that movie, I would have probably studied the dialogue via LingQ, however unfortunately Netflix doesn’t have that.

The other movie I watched was 夜明け告げるルーのうた. Unfortunately, I didn’t really understand the movie. I think I basically got the Cliff Notes. This film is also a children's film, but for me, the characters' vocabulary and pronunciation were much more difficult than in 若おかみは小学生. I watched both movies without subtitles because Netflix didn’t have them in Japanese. But, I'm thinking about rewatching 夜明け告げるルーのうた in English, then again in Japanese so I can better understand it.

This week, I hit a milestone. I can now write half of the joyo kanji. I didn’t realize that had happened until I counted how many kanji I can write. I’m a little sad I didn’t notice it on the day I hit that goal. Because I didn’t notice it, I didn’t celebrate it.

Esperanto

I played skribbl.io and I chatted a bit at on discord.

Spanish

I restarted Temtem. Temtem is a video game from a Spanish company that is very similar to Pokemon. You can play it in English, but since it's from Spain, I try to play it in Spanish.

I downloaded a flash card deck of Spanish sentences. I plan to study a new sentence every day. It’s not the main way I will study Spanish, but I think a good set of flash cards will be helpful.

Korean

I watched the two most recent episodes of 우리, 사랑했을까. I can hear the names of the characters more and more clearly.

I continued to practice using 까 with the Lingodeer app.

I also downloaded flash card deck of Korean sentences and started studying it. Same as with Spanish, I will study one new card every day.

Toki Pona

I started studying Toki Pona again yesterday. Previously, I learned to say a few easy sentences but soon became disinterested in the language. I’m still not sure if I really care to learn this language. I know I like the sound of the language, and the unofficial writing system sitelen sitelen. However, Toki pona seems to lack the espressiveness of a true language and because of this I am still not sure if I want to study it. Despite my doubts, for now Toki Pona is a fun toy, so I'm messing with it a bit. I have already passed my previous level in the language. It is possible that I will know all of its vocabulary and grammar before next week.
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