ALTVM VIDETVR
Posted: Mon Aug 31, 2015 11:45 am
The following post is the first post of the thread "VonPeterhof’s log - Yürükler’15+". For the beginning of the 2016 log, ALTVM VIDETVR, see post 9.
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Looks like it's time to fully migrate to this forum - or at least duplicate my log over here. A brief introduction for those who don't know me from the old forum: I'm a 25 year old male Russian with some Korean and German ancestry who grew up in Kazakhstan. In spite of my background, while growing up I haven't had that much meaningful exposure to languages other than Russian and English outside classes. That changed in the spring of 2010 when I decided to learn Japanese on my own. Long story short, I passed JLPT N1 last year, and right now I'm on a three month course in Osaka with the aim of improving my business Japanese so that I can use the language professionally. I'm also taking part in Chung's Turkic Challenge (planning to do all the languages in the plan, except I've scheduled Uyghur instead of Kazakh, since I'm not a beginner in the latter and constantly trying to brush up on it anyway) and doing semi-regular learning and maintenance exercises in several other languages. With that out of the way, here's the duplicate of my latest post on the other log, with a couple extra details added for the benefit of people who haven't read the posts preceding it:
"My second month in Japan is soon coming to an end, and since this has been a rare week where I managed to complete all my planned language learning activities I might as well write a quick update here. The 15-minute presentation I gave in class went fairly well - the only criticisms I got were that I speak too quietly and monotonously, which probably means that my speech was okay in terms of content and grammatical correctness. On Friday I also wrote the final test for the elective subject of international commerce. For it we had to write between 1000 and 1600 characters about the present state and major issues in our respective countries' external trade within two hours. Mostly I just had to expand my text for a presentation on the same subject I had given earlier, so the biggest challenge was to write it all down within the time limit. While my speed of writing in purely mechanical terms is pretty good right now, I got really slowed down by having to look up words and how to write them every other sentence. Still, I think I did fairly well.
My exploration of Japan has also been going well. The trip to Tokyo was a bit of a logistical challenge, since we (my two schoolmates and I) went there using the Seishun 18-kippu pass, which only works for local trains (so no Shinkansen, night trains or other express trains with fixed seating). Departing from Osaka at 9:30 AM we passed through eight prefectures, made six transfers and reached Akihabara station around 8:00 PM. At least we got some good views out the train windows, even if Mount Fuji wasn't visible due to the cloudiness. We spent the next day visiting the Comiket, walking on the Odaiba and singing karaoke in Akihabara, while the next day we explored the areas around several other Yamanote line stations (Shinjuku, Shin-Ōkubo, Ikebukuro, Harajuku and Shibuya) before going back to Osaka on a night bus. Other places I've visited in the past month include Hyogo prefecture (Kobe, Himeji, Takarazuka and Nishinomiya), Shiga prefecture (Hikone and Toyosato) and Osaka's neighbouring cities of Sakai and Kadoma, plus I couldn't resist a second visit to Kyoto and Uji. Places I've visited include both traditional tourist spots like temples and castles, and more unconventional attractions, like an old school building in Toyosato that was used as the model for the school in the anime K-On!, or a bar in Kyoto famous for having 200 brands of vodka and endearing signs in broken Russian. I probably won't be able to afford any more distant trips, but I've still got some places I'd like to see in Osaka that I can visit with my handy all-city bus pass.
As for other language learning activities, my travels haven't left me much time for them, but I did try to fit in at least three Uzbek GLOSS lessons per week, and I've also managed to complete two additional units of TY Gulf Arabic (although I only kinda skimmed through the exercises, instead focusing on shadowing the dialogues and mining example sentences). I've completed Syromyatnikov's Classical Japanese grammar and Melioransky's old "Kazak-Kirghiz" grammar, so now their places in my weekly routine have been taken by 百人一首 and advanced Kazakh lessons on til.gov.kz. The novel that I'm reading in Japanese right now is 響け! ユーフォニアム (about 3/4 of the way though the first book in the series). While I think that the recent anime adaptation of the first book is written better in nearly every way, the book is pretty entertaining light reading with most of the challenging vocabulary being music-related. Although I'd probably rank it as upper-intermediate in terms of overall difficulty level, due to the fact that aside from the protagonist nearly all characters speak the Kyoto dialect (not the stereotypical どす/やす/はる kind, but the real modern thing, which has only a few subtle differences from the Osaka dialect), so the dialogues might be harder to follow without prior exposure to Kansai dialects.
I've now got three weeks left here, during which I'll need to make another long presentation and take tests in the rest of the classes. Gotta keep on making the most of my stay here!"
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Looks like it's time to fully migrate to this forum - or at least duplicate my log over here. A brief introduction for those who don't know me from the old forum: I'm a 25 year old male Russian with some Korean and German ancestry who grew up in Kazakhstan. In spite of my background, while growing up I haven't had that much meaningful exposure to languages other than Russian and English outside classes. That changed in the spring of 2010 when I decided to learn Japanese on my own. Long story short, I passed JLPT N1 last year, and right now I'm on a three month course in Osaka with the aim of improving my business Japanese so that I can use the language professionally. I'm also taking part in Chung's Turkic Challenge (planning to do all the languages in the plan, except I've scheduled Uyghur instead of Kazakh, since I'm not a beginner in the latter and constantly trying to brush up on it anyway) and doing semi-regular learning and maintenance exercises in several other languages. With that out of the way, here's the duplicate of my latest post on the other log, with a couple extra details added for the benefit of people who haven't read the posts preceding it:
"My second month in Japan is soon coming to an end, and since this has been a rare week where I managed to complete all my planned language learning activities I might as well write a quick update here. The 15-minute presentation I gave in class went fairly well - the only criticisms I got were that I speak too quietly and monotonously, which probably means that my speech was okay in terms of content and grammatical correctness. On Friday I also wrote the final test for the elective subject of international commerce. For it we had to write between 1000 and 1600 characters about the present state and major issues in our respective countries' external trade within two hours. Mostly I just had to expand my text for a presentation on the same subject I had given earlier, so the biggest challenge was to write it all down within the time limit. While my speed of writing in purely mechanical terms is pretty good right now, I got really slowed down by having to look up words and how to write them every other sentence. Still, I think I did fairly well.
My exploration of Japan has also been going well. The trip to Tokyo was a bit of a logistical challenge, since we (my two schoolmates and I) went there using the Seishun 18-kippu pass, which only works for local trains (so no Shinkansen, night trains or other express trains with fixed seating). Departing from Osaka at 9:30 AM we passed through eight prefectures, made six transfers and reached Akihabara station around 8:00 PM. At least we got some good views out the train windows, even if Mount Fuji wasn't visible due to the cloudiness. We spent the next day visiting the Comiket, walking on the Odaiba and singing karaoke in Akihabara, while the next day we explored the areas around several other Yamanote line stations (Shinjuku, Shin-Ōkubo, Ikebukuro, Harajuku and Shibuya) before going back to Osaka on a night bus. Other places I've visited in the past month include Hyogo prefecture (Kobe, Himeji, Takarazuka and Nishinomiya), Shiga prefecture (Hikone and Toyosato) and Osaka's neighbouring cities of Sakai and Kadoma, plus I couldn't resist a second visit to Kyoto and Uji. Places I've visited include both traditional tourist spots like temples and castles, and more unconventional attractions, like an old school building in Toyosato that was used as the model for the school in the anime K-On!, or a bar in Kyoto famous for having 200 brands of vodka and endearing signs in broken Russian. I probably won't be able to afford any more distant trips, but I've still got some places I'd like to see in Osaka that I can visit with my handy all-city bus pass.
As for other language learning activities, my travels haven't left me much time for them, but I did try to fit in at least three Uzbek GLOSS lessons per week, and I've also managed to complete two additional units of TY Gulf Arabic (although I only kinda skimmed through the exercises, instead focusing on shadowing the dialogues and mining example sentences). I've completed Syromyatnikov's Classical Japanese grammar and Melioransky's old "Kazak-Kirghiz" grammar, so now their places in my weekly routine have been taken by 百人一首 and advanced Kazakh lessons on til.gov.kz. The novel that I'm reading in Japanese right now is 響け! ユーフォニアム (about 3/4 of the way though the first book in the series). While I think that the recent anime adaptation of the first book is written better in nearly every way, the book is pretty entertaining light reading with most of the challenging vocabulary being music-related. Although I'd probably rank it as upper-intermediate in terms of overall difficulty level, due to the fact that aside from the protagonist nearly all characters speak the Kyoto dialect (not the stereotypical どす/やす/はる kind, but the real modern thing, which has only a few subtle differences from the Osaka dialect), so the dialogues might be harder to follow without prior exposure to Kansai dialects.
I've now got three weeks left here, during which I'll need to make another long presentation and take tests in the rest of the classes. Gotta keep on making the most of my stay here!"