I really love being able to jump from one language to another without feeling guilty.
THAII had previously watched a Thai series called “The Stranded” (เคว้ง). Now I kind of started to watch it again, but I’m mainly focusing on copying/transcribing the Thai Closed Captions (CC) in my smartphone. As I haven’t learned the Thai script it was a difficult task, but very interesting at the same time. I downloaded an input method for Thai in my smartphone and then I just tried to copy what I was seeing in the Closed Captions. There were a lot of similar letters/characters so I had to pay attention to very small details to tell them apart, but fortunately my previous experience learning Chinese characters has helped me to improve my ability to notice small details/differences.
I didn’t take the time for the first line I wrote, but on another day I took the time for a two-lines segment:
[เสียงผู้หญิงประกาศ]
คนที่จะเดินทางออกจากเกาะในวันนี้
I took me 12 minutes and 55 seconds to transcribe this in my smartphone via the Thai input method I downloaded. I noticed that the more I wrote the easier it became to find again previous letters.
As I want to get better at quickly telling apart the different Thai letters/characters I’m using one of the apps I had previously downloaded. The app lets me practice the writing by hand and also shows me the direction of the strokes and it has templates I can write over. I think that app doesn’t teach the pronunciation but that’s fine; for now I just want to get familiar with the Thai script without the sounds.
JAPANESEI’ve been doing a lot of things related to Japanese.
I finished rewatching, with Japanese audio and without subs, an anime called “Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day” (あの日見た花の名前を僕達はまだ知らない). I had watched this anime twice before, I think; so this was my third time watching it. The first two times were many years ago and with English or Spanish subs. This is one of my favorite animes of all times and it holds an important memory in my Japanese learning journey. I watched it for the first time about a year or so after I had started learning Japanese and I remember that I felt really happy that I could remember the Japanese name, even if it was long, because its meaning actually made sense to me in Japanese. Transcribed into rōmaji the tittle is: “Ano Hi Mita Hana no Namae o Bokutachi wa Mada Shiranai” and it means “We still don’t know the name of the flower we saw that day”, so I just had to remember the meaning and that made me remember the Japanese equivalent.
“Anohana” is a beautiful anime and its ending made me cry again. Actually, as I didn’t want to miss any part of the emotional ending, I decided to activate the English subs two thirds into the last episode. But, as I was crying while watching, I couldn’t read the English subs well, so I ended up half reading the subs and half paying attention to the audio to try to complete the meaning.
Besides “Anohana” I also started to rewatch two other animes: “Naruto” (ナルト) and “Saint Seiya” (聖闘士星矢-セイントセイヤ). Both with Japanese audio, but “Naruto” without subs and “Saint Seiya” with Spanish subs. I watched Saint Seiya (the first arcs at least) for the first time in my childhood with Latin American Spanish dubs, so this was my first time watching those early arcs with Japanese audio. It was a novel experience. Maybe I’ll eventually start to watch the rest of “Saint Seiya” without subs and just the Japanese audio, but I won’t force it.
Besides rewatching old animes, I started to watch a new anime called “Violet Evergarden” (ヴァイオレット・エヴァーガーデン). I watched the first episode four times: 1) Japanese audio and Spanish subs 2) Spanish audio and Japanese Closed Captions 3) Japanese audio and Japanese Closed Captions 4) Japanese audio-description and no subs. After that I created a customized group in the
“Kanji Study” app with all the kanji used in the first episode (347 kanjis in total) and I divided it in 9 groups of 35 kanjis each and 1 group of 32 kanjis. In the future I would like to copy the Closed Captions using my smartphone’s Japanesse input method, so I decided to practice the stroke order and stroke direction of every kanji in episode 1, so that when I’m copying each sentence I’m familiar enough with each Kanji and can draw it fast. Later I may try to copy it again but this time writing in kana and choosing the right kanji when needed, but I haven’t decided about that yet.
The way I’m studying with the “Kanji Study” app is by means of the “Caligraphy challenge”. These are the settings I chose:
- Automatic detection of strokes
- The cue is the character’s main associated meaning
- It doesn’t show the Japanese readings (because each kanji usually have many possible readings and that confuses me a lot) but it shows the Korean readings in hangul (because it usually only shows one or two readings for Korean, which is way more manageable that the amount of readings for Japanese)
- Normal stroke detection (the other options are “Permissive” and “Strict”)
- Show answer (it shows the whole kanji in gray and I can write/draw over it while my strokes are shown in black). I chose this option because right now I’m not trying to test my ability to write a character from memory, but just practicing how each character should be written)
- Show clues (If I’m struggling too much with a kanji it shows me, with a small animation, which one should be the next stroke and how it should be written)
- Repeat a kanji until I get it right from start to finish (so if I make a mistake while writing a kanji, I have to correct my mistake and finish writing it right, and then I go back to try to write the same kanji from the beginning. I can’t move on to a new Kanji until I’ve perfectly written the previous one from start to finish)
At the end of the challenge it shows me a summary of my performance for each kanji and where I made mistakes and it also shows an overall percentage of precision for that group of kanjis. So far my precision for all groups of characters has been between 92% and 98.3%. I would like to eventually get my precision for all groups up to 100%
KOREANI finished watching the K-drama Train (트레인). I watched most of this drama’s episodes twice. The first time without subs and the second time with English subs. I didn’t especifically do it with the intention of studying Korean, but because I was too impatient to wait for the English subs when a new episode had just aired.
There are two terms that I used to mix up a lot: 범인 [(convicted) criminal, culprit; suspect] and 피해자 [victim] but I think thanks to this K-drama I’ll finally be able to tell them apart. What I mean is that in the right context I could tell apart those terms in other K-dramas, but when I was not watching those K-dramas but just trying to remember the meaning of each word, I knew one was for the criminal and the other for the victim but I could not remember which was which. But in this K-drama Train (트레인) there was a very distinct feeling/emotion when the characters used those terms, so I ended up associating each term with the particular feeling/emotion the characters were transmiting and that suddenly made those terms quite easy to tell apart.
I remember something similar happened many years ago when I couldn’t remember which was which between “aunt” and “uncle” in English. At that time I just remembered that those terms referred to one’s parent’s siblings, but I could not remember which one was for males and which one was for females. But when I read (with a lot of effort and a dictionary at hand) a book from the Harry Potter series in English (so far I had been reading the series in Spanish but this book was new and it hadn’t been translated into Spanish yet) it made it really easy to tell those terms apart because I would immediately think/remember “Aunt-Petunia”, “Uncle-Vernon”. And now that I remember… I also learned to tell the colors in English apart thanks to the Power Rangers XD!
Just out of curiosity I looked at the “Law and Order” chapter of the book “Essential Korean Vocabulary” by Kyubyong Park and found these terms that are associated with 범인 (criminal) and 피해자 (victim):
범죄 —> crime
죄 —> crime, misdeed
피해 —> damage, harm
해 —> harm, damage
범법 —> law-breaking
범죄자 —> criminal
범법자 —> law-breaker
I know that 인 and 자 are associated with the meaning of “person”. So it makes sense:
[피해 —> damage, harm] + [자 —> person] = 피해자 —> victim
[범죄 —> crime] + [자 —> person] = 범죄자 —> criminal
[-범 —> an offense, a violation] + [인 —> person] = 범인 —> criminal
[범법 —> law-breaking] + [자 —> person] = 범법자 —> law-breaker
Writing this made me want to read the book “Handbook of Korean Vocabulary: A Resource for Word Recognition and Comprehension” by Miho Choo and William O'Grady. I remember that book has a big section for words with roots of Chinese origin and also another smaller section for words with roots of Native Korean origin.
As briefly mentioned before, while studying Japanese I also ended up learning a bit of Korean because I activated the Korean readings for the Chinese charactes I’ve been practicing from the anime “Violet Evergarden” (ヴァイオレット・エヴァーガーデン). I didn't enable the Japanese readings because a single character may have many readings in Japanese, but for Korean the app usually only lists one or two readings, so it’s more manageable and if while paying attention to the readings I remember a Korean word associated to the meaning of that character, then I’m also kind of studying Korean while also sudying Japanese. And as there’s an overlap with characters used in Mandarin Chinese then with that activity I’m actually progressing in three languages at once, which is great!
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Changing topics, I’m also watching a K-drama called “It's Okay to Not Be Okay” (사이코지만 괜찮아). I watched the first episode with dual (Korean-English) subs using the Chrome extension “Language Learning with Netflix”. Then on another day I watched episode two, the first few minutes with just Korean Closed Captions and then I went back to the beginning and watched the whole episode with English subs only. I could understand a good chunk of what I watched with the Korean Closed Captions, but I was missing important details I wanted to know, that’s why I decided to go back and watch the whole thing with English subs (I watched episode 2 in my tablet, so I didn’t have the dual subs option available).
For the next few days I continued watching up to episode 7 of the drama (with Spanish subs this time) and it has already made me cry many times. It's a healing journey for the main characters and those around them. “It's Okay to Not Be Okay” (사이코지만 괜찮아) is quickly becoming one of my all-time favorites.
FILIPINO/TAGALOGI rewatched the first 30 minutes of a Filipino movie called “Can’t help falling in love” which is about a woman who is preparing to marry her fiancé but finds out she is already married with an unkown man she briefly met a year ago in a friend’s wedding. As I had already watched this movie before with English subs, this time I focused on paying attention to the Filipino/Tagalog Closed Captions. In general I’m trying to see the words and phrases/sentences as images so I just glance at them and pay attention to what I’m hearing, but I don’t try to go letter by letter or syllable by syllable. Something interesting I noticed was that the parts when they talked in English were translated into Tagalog. As they use quite a lot of English in this movie, I use that time to pay attention to the Tagalog subs, compare both languages and try to guess the meaning of some words.
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