Sumisu's Japanese Log

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Sumisu
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Re: Sumisu's Japanese Log

Postby Sumisu » Sun Aug 28, 2022 1:35 pm

golyplot wrote:One thing I'm curious about is how much of the style stuff the show talks about is actually accurate. When the characters play different versions, they make a big deal about copying Ajino's style or not, or how Kai plays in an unorthodox style, while Shuuhei plays everything perfectly by the numbers. But of course, as a layman, I couldn't hear the difference at all. I'm curious whether they got whoever was doing the recordings to actually perform in different styles like that and whether trained pianists can tell.


It's not really accurate. There might have been one or two times when the section of the piece they were playing kind of matched up with the commentary, but for the most part this was not the case. There were quite a few times where the reactions bordered on comical, as an audience member would come to some sweeping conclusion after only hearing one or two notes, played in a standard manner. Once that started happening, I realized that the show wanted us to sort of use our imaginations and pretend that what we were hearing matched up with the descriptions. Once I started doing that, I just focused on the characters and the story.
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Sumisu
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Re: Sumisu's Japanese Log

Postby Sumisu » Sun Aug 28, 2022 1:43 pm

Fortheo wrote:If you like music themed anime, I recommend のだめカンタービレ. It's about university students at a music school. You do need to suspend your belief, but it's quite good. They also made it into a live action series that was good, too, and the musical performances were fun to watch as well.

Another personal favorite is a 12 episode anime called 坂道のアポロン. It's basically a coming of age story about a high school kid who was trained in classical piano, but ultimately stumbles upon another student that Is a jazz drummer. It's a nice coming of age story and has great jazz music throughout.


Awesome - I will check these out!
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Sumisu
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Re: Sumisu's Japanese Log

Postby Sumisu » Mon Sep 26, 2022 4:32 am

Tonight, not for the first time, I mixed up the kanji 環 and 壊 when reading a news article. In addition to their similar looks, it doesn't help that their readings are so similar (環=かん、壊=かい). More and more, I find myself associating kanji with their readings as much as anything else. As I slowly move away from the Heisig keywords, I have to find some other "hook," and the readings are a good fundamental thing to grab onto. However, as in the example from tonight, this can lead to new sources of confusion in some cases. The subtlety and nuance of Japanese seems bottomless to me at times. At the same time, however, those times when I'm able to read a few sentences perfectly, sometimes even effortlessly, make it all worthwhile...

I've also watched the first five episodes of the anime Odd Taxi for listening practice. My listening remains much worse than my reading, but I'm able to understand about 25%. I haven't watched a lot of anime, but this show seems like one I may be able to watch multiple times, which is something I've been looking for. It's an unusual show in that all of the characters are animals, but it's a kind of noir-ish mystery aimed at grownups.

Finally, I'm using Anki less and less lately. I keep up with my cards each day, but I rarely add new cards, so it adds up to only a few minutes a day. I'm currently relying mostly on my reading of news articles to maintain and expand my vocabulary. If I can do 1-2 hours per day of reading, I feel like I'm making progress.
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Re: Sumisu's Japanese Log

Postby Sumisu » Wed Oct 05, 2022 3:38 am

Language learners sometimes talk about an Intermediate Plateau. I think I am at this stage now with Japanese. My impression is that "intermediate plateau" has mostly negative connotations: it seems to refer to a stage of language learning where the learner makes no progress for a long period of time. However, I don't see it in such a negative light, because I don't experience it as a plateau, but rather as a very gently sloping, very long hill. Whereas the beginning stage of language learning consists of scaling previously unthinkable peaks relatively quickly ("I can read hiragana!!"; "I know 1,000 words now!!"), the learner on the intermediate plateau rarely reaches significant peaks. It's a long slog up the gentle but seemingly never-ending hill.

What keeps me going is that, every once in a while, I get just a tiny glimpse of what it's like on the other side of this hill. For a brief moment, I will experience something I've read or heard in Japanese at what feels to me to be an "advanced" level of understanding. I would describe these moments as "forgetting" that I am reading/listening to Japanese, and am just receiving information that just so happens to come in the guise of Japanese. And that, to me, is the goal of the language learner: to experience the language not as a painful chore, but as a means of learning/communicating/being entertained. Unfortunately, getting there does involve some blood and sweat, but so does doing anything worthwhile, and I believe language learning is definitely worthwhile.
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Sumisu
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Re: Sumisu's Japanese Log

Postby Sumisu » Thu Oct 13, 2022 2:47 am

This headline just popped up on my twitter feed and I was happy that I was able to understand the pun(s):

負動産を「富動産」に 増える空き家、負の連鎖断つ

The Japanese word for real estate is "fudousan" (不動産). 負動産, the first word of the headline, is a pun on 不動産, in that it has the same reading ("fudousan") but the 不 ("-un") is replaced with 負 ("defeat"), which transforms the meaning from "real estate" to something like "distressed property" or "unsellable property."

Japanese headline writers often use quotation marks to indicate either a neologism or an otherwise "clever" kanji combination. Here, we have the coined word 富動産 in quotes, which is also pronounced "fudousan." In this case the "fu" kanji 富 means "wealth" so we get the punchline: "bad property turned into good property." In America, we would call this "house flipping."

The cool thing about this is that it's probably impossible to translate this into English while retaining the "joke." The headline plays on the ambiguity of Japanese kanji readings. The language is full of this type of thing, and most of it goes right over my head so it was nice to actually understand some wordplay for once.
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Re: Sumisu's Japanese Log

Postby golyplot » Fri Oct 14, 2022 3:01 pm

That's pretty clever. I didn't even know the word 不動産, so I wouldn't have gotten the joke.
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Sumisu
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Re: Sumisu's Japanese Log

Postby Sumisu » Tue Nov 15, 2022 5:14 am

Today something happened for the first time, at least that I can remember. I was reading a newspaper article aloud (I always try to read Japanese aloud to give myself extra speaking practice), and came across the word 衛生. I read it correctly ("eisei") but got the meaning wrong. I thought it meant "satellite" when it actually means "health." The problem is, the word for "satellite" is also pronounced "eisei," but uses a different "sei" kanji: 衛星. Looking at these two words now, their meanings seem obvious ("protect life"; "protect star"). But up to this point I had seen 衛星 many more times than 衛生 so my brain misfired.

I think this happened because, for several months now, I've been focused more on kanji "readings" than kanji "meanings." I'm discovering more and more that the English "keywords" for each kanji, whether those keywords come from Heisig or any other source, must play a smaller and smaller role as one advances in the language. In order to read fluently, the kanji must be understood in relation to each other, rather than being filtered through English translations. But what happened to me today shows that the English keywords still have a role to play. As much as I wish I could, I'm not ready to let them go completely.
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Re: Sumisu's Japanese Log

Postby golyplot » Wed Nov 16, 2022 4:10 pm

I make mistakes like that all the time. In fact, I've probably confused that specific pair before as well.
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Sumisu
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Re: Sumisu's Japanese Log

Postby Sumisu » Mon Nov 28, 2022 4:31 am

Tonight I finished watching a Nihongo no Mori lesson for the first time in a while. It was about an hour long lesson on N3 grammar, going through 50 sets of example sentences. I realized while watching this that I need to spend more time with educational materials. For one thing, it's nice because I can understand much more of the material compared with native material. But there are also huge gaps in my grammar and vocabulary (especially grammar) that these kinds of videos help to plug.

Besides this video, I feel like my progress has stalled lately, as I haven't been reading/listening as much as I was over the last several months, which had been a really good stretch for me. In fact, I've done almost no listening in the last few weeks now that I think about it. I'm in a bit of a slump. Hopefully, posting this will inspire me to increase my efforts. 頑張りたい。
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Sumisu
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Re: Sumisu's Japanese Log

Postby Sumisu » Thu Jan 05, 2023 5:16 am

Tonight I did something I had been dreading for months: creating Anki cards based on my italki lessons. In the past, I would create these cards after every lesson, but recently I'd let several months pile up. As each week went by, it became harder and harder to go back through time and create all of these cards. In the end, it only took me about an hour. That's always the way with procrastination: the task you've been putting off isn't nearly as difficult or time consuming as you thought it would be. If I was smart I would simply make this a habit. Do it every week, without fail. I'm going to try.

I think I procrastinated this long because I'm using Anki less and less. I had been making really good progress with my reading over the last several months, to the point where I felt like I didn't need Anki anymore. But I realized during my last italki lesson, which went terribly, that all of that reading wasn't helping my speaking ability at all. 90% of it ends up being passive vocabulary.

As much as I hate to admit it, Anki does a great job, in fact a better job than anything else I have used, at turning passive vocabulary into active vocabulary. I hate to admit it because I dread opening Anki and competing my decks. It's no fun. It's even LESS fun to create new cards for Anki, which is what I did tonight. If I want to get better at this language, however, I'll have to keep this up and make it a habit. Someday maybe my Japanese will be good enough that I can abandon Anki once and for all, but I'm definitely not there yet.
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