Fortheo's Japanese, Portuguese, and French language slog

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Fortheo
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Fortheo's Japanese, Portuguese, and French language slog

Postby Fortheo » Fri Jan 01, 2021 1:29 pm

Hey everyone! It's been a while since I had a log here, and even longer since I wrote in one consistently, but I've decided that it would be nice to keep track of my language progress on here again, so me voilà. The majority of this log will just be me keeping track of my weekly progress in my beginner languages (Japanese and Portuguese) and keeping track of whatever I read, watch, or listen to in french for that week. I'm going to just get straight to it:

French

My strongest language, other than my native English. After about 6 years (I lost count, but that sounds about right) I can read essentially anything I want without too much difficulty. My listening isn't as strong as my reading, but if I really focus and give it my full attention, I can listen to most French media and get 80-90 percent of it. I'm not actively studying it at the moment, but I will keep track of what I read or listen to. I just finished a book by Michel Bussi called "Sang Famille" and although the story kept me very intrigued, I can't say that I'm a fan of Bussi's writing style. The punctuation and grammar choices he used just rubbed me the wrong way, most noticeably his love for using very, very short sentences for dramatic affect. It's almost as if he'd use periods where commas should have been. I'm not a grammar nazi by any means, but the style just wasn't for me.

Japanese

I have a long history with Japanese. Ever since I was a kid I was fascinated with japan, probably because of all the ninja movies or animes that I watched as a kid. About 12 years ago I learned the kana, listened to 90 lessons of Pimsleur, and also listened to the Michel Thomas basic + advanced courses-- I reviewed both Pimsleur and Michel multiple times. RTK was popular back then and I tried it, but eventually I burned out around 1500 kanji and haven't done much of anything with Japanese since then other than a review of the Michel Thomas course a few years back. Fast forward to now and I've recently done the MIA version of the RTK deck, which teaches the 1000 most commonly used kanji with the RTK method. The idea of using the RTK approach to learn the most commonly used kanji just made so much sense to me that when I saw it, I couldn't help but get dragged back into Japanese. I breezed through that deck in about a month, and actually I'm surprised by how many kanji I still remembered the meaning of from 12 years ago. Now it's time to attach readings and vocab to all those kanji!

What am I doing now with Japanese? I'm going through an N5 sentence deck that I found on anki's get shared website. There's 967 sentences total in the deck and I've gone through 281. I typically only add about 10 new sentences a day because I'm in no rush and reviews are adding up. I also am trying to go through AT LEAST 4 Assimil lessons a week. The Assimil book for Japanese is really messy and poorly organized (exercises for the lesson begin in the middle of the lesson for example) but I enjoy the progressive nature of the course, and I'm essentially just using it as a graded reader right now to help build my vocabulary and associate the readings with the kanji. Who knows whether I'll stick with Assimil or not. My main goal right now is to just keep reading new comprehensible sentences in Japanese every day, and Assimil is a nice supplement in that regards. I'll keep doing both the N5 sentence deck and Assimil until I finish one, then I'll add a grammar book into the mix and study the grammar more thoroughly.

Where I stand right now?
281 out of 967 cards complete in my N5 sentence deck
9 Assimil lessons complete.


Brazilian Portuguese

Initially I began learning this language because I was curious to see what benefits there would be in learning a second romance language, and I gotta say that, although I'm finding it easier than when I first learned French, it's not as easy as I had hoped it would be. My familiarity with French allowed me to easily go through about a 1000 sentences from the old Glossika pdfs and mp3 files. The grammar comes reasonably easily because a lot of the constructions are similar, but this gives me false confidence and leads me to being able to comprehend a sentence while not having the in—depth knowledge of the grammatical structures that I need in order to create my own output. It's difficult to explain. It's as if I understand the grammar, yet I don't at the same time.

Vocabulary isn't that difficult because between English and French there are a lot of shared vocabulary. The biggest hurdle for me thus far has been pronunciation. For example, often times I can look at a Portuguese sentence and grasp the meaning just fine, but when it comes to actually reading that sentence out loud I just don't even know where to begin. I had hoped that listening to all those Glossika MP3s would just instill the pronunciation rules/reading rules in me, but I was mistaken. Nope, this language will actually take some real work. I need to learn the pronunciation rules and reading rules and really master them with confidence so I can read without the crutch of having mp3s with all the text I read. It's also become clear that I need to do some grammar studies so that, instead of having a vague comprehension of the grammar thanks to my experience with french, I will instead have a more profound and solid comprehension of the grammar, and thus hopefully be more confident with output.

What am I doing now for Portuguese?

I'm using this course book from the University of wisconsin: https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/portuguese/

It's the best course book I've found for Portuguese and it's free. The structure of it is very logical and the explanations direct and straight to the point. From the very beginning it has already helped me a ton with pronunciation. I've got a better understanding for the open and closed vowels and the rules that dictate when to pronounce them while reading. The book also has fill in exercises on the site, which is a bonus for me. I can't tell you how many poor quality books I've encountered for portuguese— Glossika was a mess, by the way, nearly every other sentence had errors. This book by the university of wisconsin seems to be a gem, but I've only just begun It, so we'll see.

Where I'm at?
First preliminary chapter of the text book
500 sentences out of my sentence deck complete.

Once I finish this Anki sentence deck, I might start working with audio books of books that have been translated into Portuguese. I'll see how I'm feeling.

I'll likely update every week. Hopefully this will be a good year for us all.
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Fortheo
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Re: Fortheo's Japanese, Portuguese, and French language slog

Postby Fortheo » Sat Jan 09, 2021 8:08 pm

Time for a quick update.

French
I read a couple volumes of the BD Blacksad. It's good, but I'm not a big fan of how most BD's are kind of Monster or Case of the week type formats instead of a long continuous story that spans across several volumes. I've also noticed a trend of women being overly sexualized in BD's. It seems like if there's any BD with a strong, stoic lead male character, he needs to pick up random women here and there regardless of whether or not it has anything to do with the plot. Complaints aside, this BD was still one of the better BD's that I have read thus far. I still have a few volumes left and I'm looking forward to them.

In regards to books, I started the classic "Sans Famille" by Hector Malot, not to be confused with the Michel Bussi book that I finished a week ago called "Sang Famille", which I'm just now realizing may have been paying homage to Malot's book. Anyways, I love Malot's writing style. It's simple, but absolutely beautiful and reads smooth like honey. I can't praise his writing enough.

I also watched 5 or six episodes of Buffy in French, simply because I felt like re-watching Buffy for the first time since it aired during my childhood. I remembered people on here saying that the dubbing was good for this series, so I figured I may as well watch it in French.

Japanese
371 out of 967 cards complete in my N5 sentence deck
14 Assimil lessons complete.

Not much to add here—I'm just chugging away.


Brazilian Portuguese

I reviewed the 500 sentences from my sentence deck, now I'm ready to add more.
Finished the first 2 preliminary chapters out of my text book.


The preliminary chapters in my text book already helped a lot with pronunciation rules. Firstly, it helped me grasp open and closed vowels a lot better and the spelling rules that dictate when to pronounce which, although of course there's a lot of times when you just need to hear the word to know whether or not it's an open or closed vowel. The section on diphthongs and nasal diphthongs was also extremely useful. I'd say some of the more difficult aspects or Portuguese spelling is the fact that certain letters like X for example can represent four different sounds and there's not always a way to tell which sound it represents without first hearing the word. Then there's things like the letters s, sc, sç, ss, and even x sometimes all being pronounced as the English S in the word "sat". As someone who mainly learns languages for reading, this can be tricky, but it's alright, I do train listening so I hope that over time I'll get a feel for things like this.

There was a very long section on stress which was very difficult for me to grasp because there's so many rules and exceptions, but I'll take what I can get from it and hopefully combined with listening practice I'll eventually have a decent idea of where the stress falls on words.
From here on out it looks like the book is going to be mostly grammar, which is exactly what I want.

The sentence deck I'm working with is probably too easy for me and also a little boring. I'd much rather work through an audio book, but I find books still to be a little to difficult with me. I'll continue working through my sentence deck for now, but If I find an audio book and text that I feel is at my level, I'll likely switch over to that.


Oh, and I may have dabbled in Russian :oops:
Last edited by Fortheo on Mon Jan 25, 2021 6:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Fortheo
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Re: Fortheo's Japanese, Portuguese, and French language slog

Postby Fortheo » Mon Jan 25, 2021 12:25 am

I just wrote up a long update, but when I went to post it I somehow got logged out :x Here it goes again:


French
Not much. I'm using it for about an hour a day just to maintain my level. I'm still reading Sans Famille, but not consistently—just picking it up here and there. I've started a BD called Sillage that I'm enjoying, and I've continued watching an episode of buffy in french every day. I also started a show called Psych dubbed into French. There's not much structure here, but I am using french daily and maintaining it, so I'm content.

Main goal for now: continue to use French daily for at least an hour.

Japanese
588 sentences from my N5 sentence deck complete.

I stopped using Assimil Japanese. The structure and organization of this particular assimil course was just such a mess and it was annoying me a lot. Fortunately, it wasn't a big part of my study routine—it only served as a source for I+1 sentences, but my sentence deck already does that so I just increased my rate from 10 new sentences a day to 15 new sentences a day in my sentence deck and I'm happy with that.

Grammar will need to be studied more thoroughly when I finish this N5 sentence deck. I've been fortunate enough to remember lots of basic grammar from all the times I reviewed Michel thomas about a decade ago, but there's a lot I've forgotten and even more that I never knew to begin with. I've had this book that I've wanted to use for over a decade

Image

I plan to use it in about 3 weeks when I finish my N5 sentence deck. This book gives small, concise grammar explanations with plenty of examples showing that grammar subject in use. Fortunately, a kind person on the internet shared an excel file with all the example sentences typed out in kanji and kana, so If I want I can make Anki decks out of these sentences while I study the accompanying grammar in the book.

There's also a textbook called "Japanese for everyone" that I think is very underappreciated in the Japanese language learning world. I've browsed through it and I think it's absolutely brilliant with how it's structured—it seems like a better organized version of Assimil, but with more grammar instruction and exercises and structure. That said, I do not think I'll need both of these books because they both cover a lot of the same material, so I must make a decision within the next three weeks.

Main goal for now: Finish my N5 sentence deck and chose a grammar book

Brazilian Portuguese
Preliminary chapters 3-4 complete. Chapter 1 complete.

The university of Wisconsin virtual textbook continues to be one of the best textbooks I've used for language learning. The preliminary chapters were tedious, but that's because they focus a lot on phonology and reading rules, which I find to be the most boring aspect of starting a language. That said, the diphthong section, the section on stress, and the section on open and closed vowels really did help, so I'm glad I did those preliminary chapters. Now that I'm into the actual lessons, I'm loving it. The book has everything you'd want from a language learning book: Short, but clear grammar explanations with examples; quizzes on the grammar topic that get graded instantly, vocab with audio, dialogues with audio, reading comprehension quizzes on the dialogues. To summarize, I'm glad I found this textbook.

In regards to input, I've stopped using the 1000 most commonly used sentence deck simply because it was far too easy. Instead, I've been watching youtube videos like this:



I find videos like these to be a far better use of my time than the sentence deck that I was using.

Main goal for now:
continue working through my textbook, keep getting some sort of comprehensible input daily from youtube.


The journey continues.
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Fortheo
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Re: Fortheo's Japanese, Portuguese, and French language slog

Postby Fortheo » Thu Mar 11, 2021 10:30 am

Long time no update, but I've mostly just been slowly grinding away and haven't had much to say. Still, I've been working everyday, so I'll give an update of what I've been doing.

French
I've simply been continuing to read and listen to french for anywhere from 1-2 hours a day. I continue to binge watch shows—mostly shows dubbed into french simply because I haven't found French shows that interest me yet—and I've also continued to read BD's. The BD I'm currently reading is a thriller called XIII and I enjoy it thus far because unlike most BD's it seems to have one continuous story that connects from volume to volume, rather than it almost being a serial procedure type format where each volume is a isolated story only connected to the first tome by the main characters. As far as output goes, I text in french sometimes, but that's about it.


Japanese
800 sentences out of my N5 sentence deck
Sentence pattern number 9 in my JSPFEC textbook that I shared in my last post.

I'm not adding anymore sentences from my N5 sentence deck in the near future. I believe there's about 150 sentences left in the deck, but It's just not the best use of my time right now and I find my motivation for it to be VERY low. I'll keep reviewing the 800 I already did in the deck, but yeah, I'm not adding any new ones in the near future.

I started my book Japanese Sentence Patterns for Effective Communication, which is a much better use of my time at this point. I'm on sentence pattern 9 which begins teaching the past tense. I'm also sentence mining from this text, so far I have 81 sentences from this book in anki with relevant grammar notes and furigana for the kanji. I'm enjoying the bite size grammar lessons that are broken down into sentence patterns (of which there are 142 in the book). The cons for this book is that there are romanji and no audio, but since I've been making the sentences into anki cards, I simply don't add romaji and I use text to speech for audio, which isn't the best but better than nothing for verifying my own reading/pronunciation. Overall, I'm really enjoying working through this book and it will be my main focus for the foreseeable future. A typical anki card that I make from this book looks like this:

Image


The front of the card is just the kanji. I color match the kanji vocab with the kana equivalent and then the english translation. I add the essential and relevant grammar note, then if needed I post the RTK keywords for some kanji at the bottom. Progress is slow, but steady.


Brazilian portuguese
I'm on chapter 6 of my text book.

My general enthusiasm for the textbook I'm using has dwindled from a 9 out of 10 to a 7 out of 10. It's fallen in the same traps that many Portuguese textbooks have fallen into—not having answer sheets for some of the questions, and not quite enough audio. That said, It's still good and I think the most important thing for me with Portuguese is to simply stay consistent with one book in order to progress, otherwise I'd jump around and start with basic stuff again in another textbook until I run into something that I dislike with that textbook. Rinse, wash and repeat. To avoid that, I will simply keep chugging away at this text book even if there are a few things that I don't like about it that have popped up. The pros still outway the cons.

Chapter five and six are all about the preterite and the imperfect tenses, which I can understand passively well enough, but I do not have a solid, active grasp on all of the conjugations. My passive understanding of them almost tempted me once again to gloss over these sections, but I need to bite the bullet and really drill these conjugations for the next week or two in order to have full command of them and recognize them instantly.

One of the most frustrating aspects of learning romance languages is that course books typically begin teaching you the regular verb conjugations, yet at the same time many of the most common verbs are irregular, so the beginner student is frequently using these irregular verbs from the beginning to say some of the most basic sentences all while the book is teaching and focusing on regular verb conjugations, which actually seem to show up less frequently in beginner level sentences than the irregular verbs. I understand why this is somewhat unavoidable, but the introduction of irregular and regular conjugations at the same time always proves to be a hurdle in my ability to feel confident with conjugations. Drilling them separately in anki was the answer for me in French, so this is what I'll do with Portuguese too.

Brazilian music is great though and it's keeping me motivated. Seriously, if any of you are acoustic guitar players, do yourself a favor and check out some of the Brazilian greats like Luiz Bonfá, Baden Powell, and especially Paulinho Nogueira. Brazil has a vast history of great acoustic guitarists and I'm enjoying discovering these guys.
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Fortheo
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Re: Fortheo's Japanese, Portuguese, and French language slog

Postby Fortheo » Fri Apr 16, 2021 1:26 pm

Alright, it seems like I'm on that monthly update schedule. Here we go

French
Same old same old. Lots of bouncing around between reading BDs, starting books, then bouncing back to BDs, binge watching series etc etc. I'm considering starting the Advanced book for CLE's grammaire en dialogues. The beginning and intermediate books were my favorite french learning materials, but I never did the advanced one because I had already reached a level where I could read and understand the majority of French I encountered. That said, I do miss actually working with french, so an advanced grammar book won't hurt me. Also, I'm trying to find ways to work on my accent more because a few people have told me that my Rs are a little weak and I need to emphasize them more.

Japanese
Sentence pattern number 20 in my JSPFEC textbook

Progress with Japanese has been dishearteningly slow, but I'm just grinding away a little bit each day. Between the vocabulary learning curve, and the kanji learning curve, I find I can spend 5-10 minutes just figuring out one example sentence, and that doesn't include the time it takes adding the sentence to anki. Reviews are a huge time sink as well—after reviews, I often only have enough energy to add a few new sentences from the text book a day. I might need to find a better way to organize my time with Japanese, but I haven't figured out a better approach yet. Everything about Japanese is just very time consuming. I'm progressing, though, just at a turtle pace.

One last thing about Japanese: I'm not sure the Heisig method is worth it at all. Despite having learned around 1500 of the most commonly used kanji with this method, It has helped me very little with my actual Japanese studies. What it is good for, in my experience, is getting used to stroke order, and it also does help with vocabulary when that vocabulary has ONLY ONE KANJI. The problem, obviously, is that a great deal of vocabulary possess far more than one kanji. Honestly, for every ten sentences I read, Heisig maybe helps me slightly in 3 of them. It just feels like I've received very little reward for what was an immense amount of work. If I could go back in time, I think I'd tell myself not to do RTK at all.

Brazilian Portuguese
Big changes here: I dropped the university of Wisconsin textbook. Despite the fact that I was constantly praising that textbook—which by the way, I do still think it's a great textbook—I simply needed more audio, and by more audio I mean I wanted practically every Portuguese sentence in the book to have accompanying audio. I've known for a while what I should do, but I didn't want to make the commitment, but It's time..... I started DLI Basic Portuguese. It's a mammoth of a course, perhaps the most expansive language learning course I've ever seen (right up there with French in action), but the abundance of audio is what I needed to assuage my insecurities about pronunciation, and the drills are what I needed for grammar. I'm currently on volume 1, lesson 9. I seem to be averaging a lesson every 3 days. Thus far, it's been smooth sailing.

Anyways, that's it for now. If you're reading this, take care.
Last edited by Fortheo on Fri Apr 16, 2021 3:42 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Carmody
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Re: Fortheo's Japanese, Portuguese, and French language slog

Postby Carmody » Fri Apr 16, 2021 1:47 pm

Congratulations on all your good efforts; you sound productive.

I totally love Rémi sans famille and have watched it about three times on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJP4Nx6vzVM&list=PLaMzSHCVzZaKILRk0PCO7ZErCr-XZ6E1N

The writing, the music, the visuals are all really special.
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