Kelvin's RU, JP, ESP log <- In this order

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lingua
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Re: Kelvin's RU, JP, ESP log <- In this order

Postby lingua » Mon Feb 13, 2023 5:15 pm

I'm curious about how difficult Japanese is for you given your native and near native languages. I assume it's easier for you than for those who have English as a native language. Which language did you find to be the most difficult?

Just to be clear, I in no way assume Japanese is easy for you because 2-3 years is still a long time. When I learned Thai I found it a lot more difficult than romance languages although part of it was because of the lack of spaces between words.
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kelvin921019
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Re: Kelvin's RU, JP, ESP log <- In this order

Postby kelvin921019 » Tue Feb 14, 2023 9:25 am

lingua wrote:I'm curious about how difficult Japanese is for you given your native and near native languages. I assume it's easier for you than for those who have English as a native language. Which language did you find to be the most difficult?

Just to be clear, I in no way assume Japanese is easy for you because 2-3 years is still a long time. When I learned Thai I found it a lot more difficult than romance languages although part of it was because of the lack of spaces between words.


As a native Chinese / Cantonese speaker I consider Japanese something like German to English native speaker
- We still need to learn the grammar from scratch as chinese and japanese language grammar is very different
- We still need to learn the katagana and hiragana
- We definitely struggle in using appropriate tone or manner of speech due to cultural difference, we tends to be more blunt

BUT
- I can understand most of the common Kanji (there are false friends but that accounts only for a small portion), so I can guess the meaning of the verbs / adjectives just using the Kanji part, not to mention the words
- The pronunciation of Kanji (onyomi) basically derives from ancient chinese, so they sound quite similar to their counterpart in Chinese / Cantonese
- The more advance it gets, the more Kanji they use and the easier for us to learn (it's like in Spanish, the formal language resembles their English counterparts more than informal language)
- Chinese and Japanese share quite a lot of idioms
- in fact, due to the influence of Janapese culture in Hong Kong, the Cantonese speaking community in Hong Kong sometimes borrow words / phrases from Japanese

Cultural-wise
- J-pop, Japanse drama and anime are pretty popular here, and we usually watch dramas with subtitles (since the dubbing is pretty lame....), so even though we don't know Japanese, we listen to quite a lot of Japanese (especially for those who enjoys Japanese culture) since teenage and can recognise some words or short phrases even without proper Japanese learning


In terms of difficulty, I think Russian is by far the most difficult language I have learnt so far. It has the least cognates with the languages I know (namely Chinese and English). To me I rank the 3 languages I'm learning in this order
Russian >>>>>> Spanish > Japanese
Japanese: It takes more time for me to learn all grammar / common sentence pattern, but once I have completed N3 grammar, listening and reading became quite natural and easy for me
Spanish: The grammar is quite easy and the sentence pattern is very similar to English so I can breakdown the sentence structure almost right away after like A2/B1 level. Vocabulary is more of a stumble block but not really a big deal. Listening is hell tho.
Russian: Vocab is the biggest stumble block. Grammar is simpler than I expected and I can breakdown the sentences structures after completing the penguin book. It may take more drills for me to grabs the subtlty like imperfective vs perfective and verb of motions. Listening has not yet become a problem since I don't understand like 40% of the commonly used vocabulary.
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kelvin921019
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Re: Kelvin's RU, JP, ESP log <- In this order

Postby kelvin921019 » Tue Feb 28, 2023 5:55 pm

Progress check: Japanese N1
A short log on what I'm doing now
I finished the vocabulary books for N1 by the end of 2022 and started working on N1 grammar for almost 2 whole months.
Before I started the grammar part, I have completed 1 official mock exam and my results are:-
Vocab: 20/25
Grammar: 14/20
Reading: 23/25
Listening: 33/37 (This involves A LOT OF guessing work since I have not yet learnt any new N1 grammar item)

And I did one past paper, just the vocab and grammar part since it takes less than 30 mins to complete
Vocab: 18/25
Grammar: 13/19
So what the heck have I learnt these 2 months.....
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kelvin921019
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Re: Kelvin's RU, JP, ESP log <- In this order

Postby kelvin921019 » Mon Mar 06, 2023 8:29 am

Russian: latest thought
I tried some TV shows on Netflix recently and I can easily feel the difference before and after V Puti. My comprehension improved to the extent that most of the time I can hear where a word start and where a word end even if I don't know / recognise the word at all.

It reminds me of my time learning English. To a certain extent learning Russian is like doing English all over again. There's barely any cognate from languages I know, I need to spend a lot of time, a lot of repetitions and a lot of rote memorisation to build my vocab. With such perspective, I think I was too naive to think that I could reach a conversationally fluent level in like 2 years of intensive learning, when I took like 10 years of immerision to become kind of fluent in English.

As recently inspired by this old HTLAL post (being referred to in a discussion in this forum)
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/fo ... sp?TID=592
I think it would be a good idea not to learn any more language for the time being and bring my Russian to a higher level so that Russian can be a good foundation if one day I want to learn more slavic language.
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kelvin921019
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Re: Kelvin's RU, JP, ESP log <- In this order

Postby kelvin921019 » Sun Mar 12, 2023 4:53 pm

Russian: the intermediate podcast stage
I finally finished V Puti and I am technically, at least for reading and listening, reached the B1 stage. In terms of things I should be doing, taking reference from my experience in Japanese (after Tobira) and in Spanish (after Assimil), I should start listening to a [bleep] load of intermediate podcast until I can get used to spoken Russian language (deliberately slow down for learner).

I think one thing about Russan being my 3rd language in this journey, is that I am not particularly frustrated with my lack of comprehension when I'm doing listening (as compare with the constant frustration I had when I was doing Spanish). I am fully prepared to spend like months after months with intermediate podcast and accept that I will not understand 50% of the dialogue because 25% of them are new words and 25% of them are words that I should have known but I simply can't catch them. In the meantime I'm going through the B1 vocab list (minimum) to get myself equipped for the common words at that level.

My plan is to spend the next few months working on intermediate podcast (with Transcript), but it comes with a price, literally. Unlike Spanish, I found 3 podcasts channel which will likely suit my need (and I'm using this log as a bookmark):
Russian Progress (only this one is for free so far, but Артём is really fast for my ears )
https://russianprogress.com/
Russian with Max
https://www.russianwithmax.com/
Easy Russian Podcast
https://www.easyrussian.fm/

As to the question of when will I start speaking, my plan is to wait until the 2nd half of this year because I want to focus my effort on JLPT first. Anyway, I think the most important task right now is to get my ears ready for conversation. It will be meaningless to engage any kind of speaking activities if I can't understand what my tutor is talking about.

Japanese: JLPT
I finished Shin Kanzen master grammar for N1 and now move onto Soumatome N1 grammar. Apparently N1 grammar covers quite a very broad range of items because the first 2 lessons in this books are almost all new unencoutered item.

I am going on a trip to Japan in the end of March as tourist and I hope to engage in a few dialogue with natives to see how far have I gone so far. Funny enough, I have been to Japan many times before the pandemic but I never thought about learning Japanese. It was only after I could not go to Japan due to COVID I started my studies in Japanese.

What after JLPT N1? References from Spanish
I have completely stopped actively learning Spanish. I have deleted the anki deck and I am not doing any Spanish textbook lately. It doesn't mean that I have not been "using" Spanish. I sometimes watch videos in Spanish. Of course, colloquial Spanish at full native speed is still challenging for me but youtube videos (with clear and organised speech) are quite mangeable for me. I think that will be how I approach Japanese after the N1 exam. This will be the complete picture of my "language learning phases"
1. Initial learning - Assimil / Textbooks / Bidirectional Translation (with Anki)
2. Extensive listening / the intermediate podcast phase + advance textbook (with Anki)
3. Output and extensive native material phase (with Anki)
4. Usable Tool stage (No more Anki)
[5. Advance and professional stage] (This will be absolutely optional unless I want to use the language as a professional tool, but I don't think I need the new language for my profession except for casual conversation)

If Stage 4 is possible in the long run (i.e. I can use the language without spending a lot of time maintaining it), it will be a good news for me - I can "free up" my learning time for languages reaching that phase and move on to new challenges (new languages). I will keep an eye on my Spanish level over this year.
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kelvin921019
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Re: Kelvin's RU, JP, ESP log <- In this order

Postby kelvin921019 » Thu Mar 16, 2023 5:46 pm

Russian: what 80% comprehension feels like?
I started doing listening and reading exercise everyday on LingQ. One thing I can do with the LingQ system is to look at how many "unique words" against how many LingQs in the article. As a matter of habit, I marked all the unknown words (not in Anki) as LingQs. After completing 3-4 podcasts, I end up with a figure of a comprehension rate (reading transcript) of about 80 - 85% depending on topic, a 70-75% for news articles (reading). Of course, listening comprehenison rate will decrease by like 10-15% as my brain isn't quick enough to process declensions.

People may think: 80% is a lot, but no, it's absolutely frustrating. This article illustrates that perfectly
https://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2016/08/25/what-80-comprehension-feels-like

As a reference, my comprension rate is roughly around 90 to 95% for both Spanish and Japanese, 98% up for English (depending on the nature of the article - usually lower for literature or novels)

Japanese
I finally enrolled N1 exam this July. Wish me luck.
Last edited by kelvin921019 on Fri Mar 17, 2023 4:09 am, edited 3 times in total.
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stell
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Re: Kelvin's RU, JP, ESP log <- In this order

Postby stell » Fri Mar 17, 2023 1:44 am

kelvin921019 wrote:People may think: 80% is a lot, but no, it's absolutely frustrating. This article illustrates that perfectly
https://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2016/08/25/what-80-comprehension-feels-like
That’s really interesting! Thanks for sharing! I find that I can comfortably read for pleasure at 95% comprehension. There are words that I don’t know, but it doesn’t lead to a breakdown in comprehension. Anything less, and I miss important details - and reading extensively becomes “unfun”. But at 95%+, I can read extensively without issue. 98%+ feels almost like reading in my native language.
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kelvin921019
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Re: Kelvin's RU, JP, ESP log <- In this order

Postby kelvin921019 » Wed Mar 22, 2023 3:21 pm

Japanese trip: A reality check of my Japanese skill
So I am now travelling in Osaka with my family and, of course, I am the "translator" for all my family members.

Trying to communicate in Japanese here is unforgiving, people, who are doing their job, has no obligation to slow down their speech and to listen to my "broken" japanese with patience. Often time they just give out answers after hearing the keyword. Fortunately, perhaps it's due to the top quality service of Japanese (in tourist districts), they tend to be more accomodating and try to communicate with me in a "simplified" Japanese (I can clearly hear that their choice of words are less formal when speaking to me).

In general, I am pleased with my performance despite the above as I managed to use 100% Japanese in the communication and the most satisfying point is that the Japanese did not switch to English right away and can give the response I looked for (so, at least there's no miscommunicatoin). I am also engage in some more advanced conversation (e.g. checking if a product is available in other branches, ask for the spec of a specific product and ask for recommendation of products based on specific instruction). I ranked myself around B1 to B2 in communication.

Of course, I made a LOT of mistakes and often can't remember the words (even the simple one) on site. I sometimes need to rely on gesture (like pointing to the object). I sometimes used expressions which may sound a bit impolite. But fortunately Japanese are generally nice to foreigners. I think for the very least, I made their live easier (as I often overheard them struggle to communicate in English).
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kelvin921019
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Posts: 388
Joined: Mon Apr 13, 2020 12:11 pm
Location: Hong Kong
Languages: Cantonese (N)
Chinese Mandarin (Semi-Native)
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Spanish (B2)
Japanese (N1)
Russian (B1)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=16306
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Re: Kelvin's RU, JP, ESP log <- In this order

Postby kelvin921019 » Sat Mar 25, 2023 3:14 pm

Japanese: My first compliment
Near the end of the trip, I can feel my spoken japanese is getting more and more smooth (although still with all sorts of error). I think it's more or less because before the trip I had never communicated or practised speaking on topics I come across in shopping or in restaurant. These are not topics I would have practised in speaking lessons. I talked about travel, I talked about politics, I talked about cultural different, but asking about if a product has other colour, or ask if the dish in front of me is for 1 person or 2 people, these need some creativity. Fortunately my foundation in Japanese help me in constructing these phrases and it become more and more natural when I got plenty of practise.

few days ago I had dinner in a yakiniku restaurant and as usual I started talking in my quite broken Japanese with the waiter. After a few rounds of ordering, the waiter said my Japanese was 上手 (pretty much more of a polite compliment when comunication in Japanese could actually take place, by no means it really means good.) I will take this as a recognition that at least I can communicate in Japanese without causing too much trouble to native speaker. That's basically all I aimed to achieve - not perfection or anywhere near proficient, but to get my message across and can carry out communication.
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kelvin921019
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Joined: Mon Apr 13, 2020 12:11 pm
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Russian (B1)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=16306
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Re: Kelvin's RU, JP, ESP log <- In this order

Postby kelvin921019 » Tue Mar 28, 2023 2:40 am

Spanish: warm up time?
I have "disconnected" with Spanish for like a month due to various reasons and now want to reconnect with the language.

The first 1-min news segment I watch I can basically understand nothing and it is only after 3 or 4 takes I can start picking up words again. It seems to me that there is a "warm up time" for reconnecting with a language which is shelved.

I may need to look up some articles and discussion on how to re-activate a shelved language and how long it may take.
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