*sneaks in*
So, man, it's been nearly a year since I last posted here, it seems.
What can I say, life happened, my language learning motivation went down pretty drastically (which may-- I say
may-- have been caused by my sudden addiction to Wuxia dramas) and I somehow fell out of the habit of even coming here, much less writing anything. *sighs* Also, due to the timing of the Gathering and its new location going there turned out to be pretty impossible this year, so apologies to everyone who was hoping for cookies. *ducks*
If I had to summarize this year language learning-wise it'd be a lot of Japanese in January, followed by a huge emptiness between February and June, complemented by some more or less successful, but certainly very haphazard language learning in the second half of the year. So, suffice to say, it was a far cry from 2016, unfortunately, though strangely reminiscent of a lot of years before 2016, so clearly I should try and go back to weekly goals and log entries (and general keeping in touch with all the awesome folks here on llorg) again.
And for the long version, here's some random facts and impressions from my languages in 2017 (with no guarantee of completeness):
SpanishNada.
FrenchWeekly French nights continued normally. At some point before the end we decided to stop watching Psych and moved on to Grimm and have so far watched the first 2.5 seasons. I know I watched this series in Spanish before, but what can I say, it's a pretty good series. My favorite part has got to be the silly and at times almost incomprehensible gratuitous German. XD
Went to Paris with my friend for a couple of days at the end of October for our annual book shopping and coffee drinking trip - and that even though the number of French books I read this year amounted to 0.0 before the trip. It has since increased to 0.6. Amazing.
I started reading "Les Manteaux de Gloire" 2 or so weeks ago (after buying it in Paris), but while I really enjoyed it to start with after putting it down sometime after the 60% mark I have yet to pick it back up. I should maybe do that though, so that I'll have read at least one French book this year.
I did read the new Asterix volume while I was in Paris, since it was shortly after the volume came out and it's one of the few French media things I actually like.
So yeah, not a lot of French this year either, but at least enough to prevent my French from regressing, methinks.
LatinIn the first half of the year I'm pretty sure I did some Latin, but not as regularly as last year and also, er, I don't really remember what I did. Not too much certainly.
In August my friend and I went to a week-long living Latin thing - nothing but speaking Latin all week long. It was brutal. Also fun, but frigging exhausting and afterwards I wanted to have a week of holidays, but instead I had to go back to work ~_~. Listening was actually quite alright - it would get exhausting trying to concentrate on understanding for an hour at a time and stuff, but I had little trouble understanding basically everything, which was nice.
Speaking myself was a whole other matter though. It wasn't exactly something we practiced previously and even though there was a sort of active Latin course in the mornings it wasn't too helpful and being unable to properly express myself proved somewhat frustrating. Still, I'm really glad we went and I'll probably want to go to some other living Latin events in the future.
Unfortunately, aftwerwards our Latin studies ceased for the time being, since my friend became very busy with her PhD thesis and I wasn't really motivated enough to keep it up on my own.
JapaneseThe January tadoku went really well - I ended up reading just over 2500 pages, 1000 pages more than I had set as my goal. The novels I read were:
*三毛猫ホームズの推理
*三毛猫ホームズの追跡
*鼠、江戸を疾る
*鼠、闇に跳ぶ
*鼠、影を断つ
*怪盗探偵山猫 1
*怪盗探偵山猫 2: 虚像のウロボロス
*怪盗探偵山猫 3: 鼠たちの宴
I followed the tadoku up by reading the fourth volume of the 怪盗探偵山猫 series before more or less stopiing with all things Japanese.
During January I also watched some Japanese drama, namely Nobunaga Concerto and Katou Tantei Yamaneko (怪盗探偵), the latter of which prompted me to read the novels on which the TV series is based, but I liked the drama a lot more than the novels. Unfortunately I watched those dramas with English subtitles, because I didn't manage to easily find them raw and was too lazy to painstakingly scour the internet.
In April I went to Japan for 2.5 weeks with some of my friends! Suffice to say it was awesome. While such a holiday with friends doesn't provide a lot of opportunities to have philosophical discussions and such in Japanese, I was nonetheless able to use my Japanese a lot and felt completely at home while doing so, which made me even happier! (Compared to my previous trip to Japan, where I could get by in Japanese --much to my amazement-- but it was difficult and every Japanese encounter filled me with a certain amount of anxiety) I especially liked Osaka, where people generally seemed to assume everyone spoke Japanese and basically never tried to speak to me in English. (My non-Japanese-speaking friends seemed to disagree though XD) I could go on about the food (the food!), the bookshops, the lovely scenery and temples/castles, all the opportunities to speak Japanese, actually getting to watch a Detective Conan movie in the cinema (I've been a long-time fan, okay?) and, basically, all of the things, but suffice to say it was amazing and I want to go back. Unfortunately, this didn't translate into any sort of motivation for doing Japanese after my return and so everything went back to pretty much nothing for the next couple of months.
During summer I started reading an English translation of a Chinese web novel (The King's Avatar - highly recomended, especially if you like video games, but it's not necessary) and it was only after I'd already read several volumes in English that I found out that there happens to be a Japanese translation of the first 4 volumes. So after catching up with the English translation (which is still a WIP), I decided to go back and re-read the first 4 volumes in Japanese.
Possibly motivated by my enjoyment of reading the abovementioned novels, combined with the realisation that reading them was still a bit more difficult than necessary, at the beginning of September I suddenly felt the urge to take the JLPT (at the beginning of December). This urge hit me a whole 1.5 days before the application deadline, so naturally I signed up (for level N2). I've never taken the JLPT before, but I thought it might be a good motivation for actually doing a bit more serious Japanese study. My plan was basically to learn some vocab and work through grammar/reading/listening workbooks in September and November, while using October to participate in another Tadoku round. This worked reasonably well and I worked through one listening workbook and 3/5 of a reading workbook in September, familiarized myself with about 1000 new vocab words through Anki in September and October, read about 1780 pages of Japanese in October (I sort of burned out a week or so before the end of the month and stopped reading) and worked through about half of a book of sample questions from the language knowledge section of the N2. Instead of actually working through a grammar workbook I went through an Anki deck with all the example sentences from the N2 Shin Kanzen Master grammar book (incl. explanations) which was very helpful and I found that there were quite a few grammar concepts on this level that I was pretty shaky on. All together, I feel like those two months really helped me improve my Japanese and that makes me very happy. Of course, I then went on to do basically nothing for Japanese in November, but such is life. I sat the JLPT this past Sunday and nonetheless felt pretty well prepared. Listening was quite a bit harder than I'd anticipated and grammar was a bit hit and miss, but I'm pretty sure that I passed and it shouldn't be too narrow either - moji and goi sections went better than I'd feared and reading is definitely my strongest area and I think I only messed up on the compare two opinions questions. Well, I'll know for sure at... the beginning of March, apparently. But really, as far as I'm concerned, I already have no regrets because it'd been a couple of years since I did anything that even comes close to studying for Japanese and I'm convinced that my Japanese really profited from those two months of 'serious' study.
When I was looking for something to read while waiting for the JLPT to start & during the break, I naturally wanted to pick something Japanese - to stay in the language, so to speak - and ended up picking up another volume of the Nezumi (鼠) series - a series of jidai shousetsu by Akagawa Jirou of which I read 3 volumes in January and when I started reading it I noticed almost immediately that it seemed easier to read now than back in January where I remember it being very borderline and almost too difficult to be enjoyable, so that was very nice. I've continued reading it since, but only really on the way to and from work (all 20 minutes of it =x )
ChineseChinese too was not safe from my general lack of motivation in 2017. I think I did like lesson 6 of NPCR in January and then started on lesson 7, but never finished it. In February I kept doing a bit of Skritter, iirc, but then that stopped too.
Instead of actually, ya know, learning Chinese, starting in February I started collecting reasons to learn Chinese instead. XD
It started with a cautious foray into Wuxia dramas that quickly blossomed into something of a Wuxia drama addiction and went on until April/May, by which point I had sort of ran out of translated dramas I was interested in but that was probably a good thing.
Afterwards I sort of started getting into Chinese (web) novels (in translation, of course!), starting with The King's Avatar and including Nirvana in Fire, Border Town Wanderer and Tales of Demons and Gods.
Towards the end of October a series I'd been looking forward to for quite some time - The Legend of the Condor Heroes (2017) - was finally nearly completely subbed and so I started watching that (and finished sometime towards the end of November. Chinese TV shows are long. Very long.)
At the beginning of November I actually started doing some Chinese again. However, I most definitely didn't feel like working through a textbook, so I chose a different method which has been working very well so far: I got a bunch of pretty easy Chinese graded readers (though still not easy for me at that point) with audio and every day I go through a couple of paragraphs (about 3-6), first listening to see how much I can understand, then listening again while reading along. Then I mark the words I don't understand and look them in a dictionary. Then I listen-read again to until I understand everything (usually 1-2 listens) and then I listen without looking at the text. If there's some grammar I don't understand (which happened a lot in the first reader) I'll look it up in the Chinese grammar wiki or google it. Of the words I looked up I pick 5-10 to add to my flashcards (I try to keep it at 5 because I don't want to have too many reviews due in the long run, but sometimes I can't help myself and pick a couple more, but more than 10 is definitely not okay, since I know I'll regret it.) I prioritize words I've encountered before but not added (due to the limit), words I remember from all my wuxia watching (but can't read) and words that seem useful. Afterwards I review the words and maybe do another listen of the whole reader up to the point where I got. Sometimes I repeat this listening (or previous stories) 1 or more times during the day, but that's purely optional. The next day I first review my flashcards, then re-listen (blindly) to the previous day's parts and then get started on my new paragraphs. Rinse and repeat.
I've been doing this every day for the last 34 days and so far I can say: It's fun, it's (as of now) easy to keep up and I feel that it's very helpful. I've gone through 6 readers this way (each reader has 24 pages/paragraphs comprising 1000 characters).
Korean*ducks* This is how it goes - I'm away for a year and suddenly come pack with a new language in tow. XD
I'll keep this one brief, since this post has already gone on for too long: Sometime in May, when I ran out of Wuxia dramas, I decided it'd be a good idea to try out kdramas instead! (Spoiler: It was not.) After picking up a word of Korean here and there (often due to a striking similarity to their Japanese counterparts); I decided to at least learn Hangul (and the correct pronounciation that goes with it), because Korean romanization is the worst. That being done, I could not squash the urge to learn some Korean because a) watching dramas all the time made me want to understand more and b) hearing Korean all the time made me like Korean (what can I say, I'm easy like that ^^#). Feeling a bit uninspired as to how to go about learning Korean (all while realizing that this was a very, very bad idea, naturally), I decided to get a Korean lesson on italki. I ended up liking the first teacher I tried out a lot, so I stayed with her and have been taking one Korean lesson per week in most weeks since then (barring 2 cases of scheduling conflicts and a period of 1 month where I ended up not taking lessons due to illness/business and general lethargy) for a total of 15 lessons so far. I combine this with pre-learning vocab for the upcoming lesson in Anki and, more recently, going through 5 sentences from Evita's sentence deck (+ reviewing previous cards of course) every day. I've been enjoying the italki lessons quite a bit, but pre-learning vocab is something I begin to dread more and more, especially since I'm learning the vocab productively (English -> Korean), so I'll be able to use it in the lesson. Right now the routine doesn't seem sustainable, but I'm not sure how to change it up. If I don't pre-learn the vocab the lesson just becomes frustrating because I'm really bad at remembering and using new words ad hoc. Any tips would be appreciated. [Okay, so that wasn't as brief as I'd hoped
]
Anyhow, that was my year so far. As for where to go from here, I'm not quite sure yet...