CDR's Japanese and Portuguese Language Log

[CDR]

I will attempt to post more often, it was going to be at the end of everyday, but on a night schedule, it feels like there is no end to the day, just a nap and it keeps going...

Japanese
Yomujp N6 Articles Read : 25 / 25
Yomujp N5 Articles Read : 2 / 28

Finished all the N6 articles, not difficult. I have started on the N5 articles. I had previously read most of these as well, but then they added a lot more since last year! I've read only 2 N5 articles so far, they are both ones I've read before. I can remember the first time I read them, it was such a struggle. This time it was quite easy. Amusingly, there were at least two or three sentences that I cannot recall at all from my previous readings.

There was one sentence I can recall reading it before, but the other times, I did not understand it for some reason.

"鹿児島の黒豚はよくサツマイモを食べます。それで、肉がやわらかくて、とてもおいしいです。"

"Kagoshima Black Pigs often eat sweet potatoes. That is why the meat is so tender and delicious."

I am not sure why I missed it, or did not understand it in the past. Maybe I did understand it, but the effort of reading in general made me gloss over it the other times.

Vocab Cards to meet Tango N4 Deck Equivalent : 109 / 699
I mined from the N6 articles above, but also from two other places.

First, a website for vegans in Japan, which has a long dictionary of words and sentences you should know if you are vegan. I cannot do these all at once, as some of the words are much too similar, so I will comb through the website maybe once a week and take a bit from each section.

One of the words the site brought my attention to was 乳化剤, which is "emulsifier". Because it contains the kanji for milk [乳], many people will assume a product with an emulsifier is not vegan. However, the author notes that most emulsifier's in Japan are made from soy, but really, you need to communicate with the manufacturer to be sure.

I'm vegan, so, this is an important topic for me! One of my goals for this year is to get good at reading ingredients lists on food products, as this is something that needs to go smoothly when I visit.

The second, I started mining words from people's profiles on Tandem. I read through 15 or so profiles and mined all the words I did not know.

Schuam's Outlines Japanese Grammar, Chapters Read : 1 / 15
I have had this book since my first attempt to study Japanese many years ago. I've read some of the chapters before, but the other day I started from the beginning, mostly to read the example sentences for each grammar type.

So, I sat down yesterday and finished the 1st Chapter, and I am 3 pages short of finishing the 2nd Chapter.

I use a flashcard to cover the romaji and English translation of each example sentence. I highlight words I get wrong (meaning, reading) and highlight beside the sentence if I got the translation of the sentence wrong. Not sure if I will ever come back to review, but if I do, I will know exactly which sentences to review .

Hours of Japanese Study : 622 / 1700
2x Super Challenge Films : 36 / 200
2x Super Challenge Books : 3 / 200

French
Kwiziq A1 Reading Practice Stories : 7 / 9
These remain not difficult to read, but hard to pronounce.

Portuguese
No changes here, but leaving it in so I can quote myself and modify for the next post.
Paid Conversations : 6 / 52
Super Challenge Films : 42 / 100
Super Challenge Books : 1 / 100

[CDR]

Japanese
Yomujp N6 Articles Read : 25 / 25
Yomujp N5 Articles Read : 4 / 28

Read two more N5 articles. These two I've read a couple of times, they were pretty easy even the first time around as they are simple. Maybe they could be considered "N6".

Schaum's Outlines Japanese Grammar, Chapters Read : 3 / 15
Finished Chapter 2 and 3.

Chapter 2 was adjectives, their conjugations, and auxiliary adjectives. There were two sections where I struggled to translate the sentences, so, I found some weak spots! The first was Verb stem + tai. I've had plenty of exposure to this in the present tense, but I was getting it wrong in the past and past negative, for example [1]. The second weak spot was knowing the difference between the plain past and negative plain past for both -I and -Na adjectives. I'm not very fast at translating these, or accurate. Most of my study time so far has been with the polite form.

Chapter 3 was adverbs. I had to check back a few times for the negative meanings of もう. For まだ, there were a few sentences I did not read properly. So, I should review these in the future as well. Everything else was fine in this chapter!

[1] 日本語が上手になりたくて、日本に来ました

Vocab Cards to Meet Tango N4 Deck Equivalent : 139 / 699

This continues to go well. Currently, it takes about an hour to review. This is because some of the new cards have extra junk in the sentence field. Reformatting takes time!

Tobira : 0 / 15
I started on the first chapter of Tobira today. At first, I thought it was too difficult for me, but after actually trying to read it, it's fine. I do suspect it will be a lot of effort to work through the main text in the chapter. I don't know if I will continue with this, but it was nice to take a look.

Hours of Japanese Study : 625 / 1700
2x Super Challenge Films : 36 / 200
2x Super Challenge Books : 3 / 200

French

I watched two videos from Piece of French! I discovered this channel, and the first video I watched[1], from the French listening and oral production thread[2]. For the first video, I did not understand much. Just individual words. The second video[3] was better. I understood the tour of the van pretty well. When it cut to the advantage/disadvantage part with her speaking directly at the camera, I thought I was in trouble, but, I could understand the general points of the 4 advantages she listed for the van (Freedom, Flexibility, Making it easier to travel?, No check-in\check-out), and I understood 1 disadvantage (the style of living the van enables), but I don't know how many there were in total.

I went back and skimmed the disadvantages again, there were two titled disadvantages. The other one was the toilet!

[1] https://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=18043
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_EkF94Zg0k
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gkFuX3uhbs

Kwiziq A1 Reading Practice Stories : 7 / 9
I watched the videos, so I skipped this.

Portuguese
No changes here
Paid Conversations : 6 / 52
Super Challenge Films : 42 / 100
Super Challenge Books : 1 / 100

Scripting/Automation

I figure I would tack this on, as it is kind of related to language learning.

Today

I updated a script I wrote that pulls everything from my time tracking application, and adds everything up and combines them into the categories I track in my Language Learning spreadsheet. When I updated the language learning spreadsheet for this year, I change what columns tracked what, so I finally made this change to my script.

Earlier This Month

I installed ntfy.sh locally, and re-wrote my language learning related cron scripts to send notifications using ntfy, so everything is collected into one place now. Since ntfy was set up, I wrote up a script to check mylanguageexchange for new Japanese language exchange partners in my city. It runs every night and sends a notification if there are new language exchange partners or not. There hasn't been anyone new since last year, but now I don't have to check manually.

I fixed my 6-week challenge script, which scrapes my time tracking app, and tweets out how much time I studied to the 6wc bot on Twitter. I wrote it in a hurry and did not notice during the challenge that it was tweeting out 0 minutes everyday I did not study. The 6wc challenge bot disliked this, but admittedly, I didn't notice until after it was over.

I, finally, got around to installing Learning with Texts locally as well. Thanks to Rdearman's Docker version, it was super quick to set up.

[CDR]

Unfortunately, my wife tested positive for COVID the other morning. First she was running a fever, but it has gone away now, along with her ability to smell. Hopefully her symptoms will continue to improve. I think it's only a matter of time now for me. We'll see.

Japanese
Yomujp N6 Articles Read : 25 / 25
Yomujp N5 Articles Read : 11 / 28

Yesterday, I read another two N5 stories. I hadn't read either of them before, so it took longer. I also got sidetracked, one of the articles linked to popular fast food restaurants in Japan, so I browsed their websites and tried to read some stuff with the help of Yomichan. Two or so days ago, I mined "おすすめ" (recommendation) from someone's Tandem profile (the sentence was something like "Please recommend a French film"). Yesterday, I saw it on at least two of the fast food websites, so good to know it's actually used in the wild.

There were a few sentences that "appealed" to me, not sure why. Here's one 山梨に着くと、何も食べなくても、空気がおいしいですよ。

Today, I read 5 more articles. Here is one sentence I had some debate with.

これは、おばあさんの草履です。
お茶を習いに行くとき、着物を着て、これをはきます。

DeepL was the one that could give the best translation of these sentences, but it translates them into the past tense?

"These are my grandmother's sandals.
When she went to learn tea ceremony, she wore a kimono and these sandals."

I don't see anything that would suggest this is in the past tense? It seems both sentences are in the present, given the verb endings. I thought maybe とき would give me a hint, but JLPT sensei says it can be used for both present and past tense, and gives this example:

行く とき (iku toki) when I go

So, I suspect translating into the present tense is correct.

Schaum's Outlines Japanese Grammar, Chapters Read : 4 / 15
Yesterday, I finished Chapter 4 for pronouns, started Chapter 5 for numbers, time, dates, and counters. Nothing I haven't seen so far yet in these chapters, but I know in two pages it will introduce some counters I have never seen before.

I did not get to reading this "today", but my "day" continues into the morning.

Vocab Cards for Tango N4 Deck Equivalent : 192 / 699

This took a long time yesterday, the problem was I was falling asleep while attempting to do it. Today, I was falling asleep while reading and doing Anki.

I noticed that the number of words I am mining from Yomujp articles has quickly gone down. When I started studying again, I could easily find 30+ words in under 1 hour of reading. Today, I read for almost 2 hours and barely found 20 cards. These were all new articles as well. It seems like I've found most of the very frequent words I had forgotten. Additionally, some of the N5 articles have a very similar templates, so a lot of the words are probably the same.

I am sure once I move to the N4 articles, I will start finding more words. I am not sure if I will mine from people's Tandem profiles again. It was useful, but the underlying structure of Tandem's pages means your sentences comes with a huge amount of junk you have to clean up.

Hours of Japanese Study : 631 / 1700
2x Super Challenge Films : 36 / 200
2x Super Challenge Books : 3 / 200
Tobira : 0 / 15

French
No progress
Kwiziq A1 Reading Practice Stories : 7 / 9

Portuguese
No progress
Paid Conversations : 6 / 52
Super Challenge Films : 42 / 100
Super Challenge Books : 1 / 100

[golyplot]

Shouldn't you be able to tell whether it should be past or present text from context? Or is this just isolated sentences with no context?

[CDR]

Shouldn't you be able to tell whether it should be past or present text from context? Or is this just isolated sentences with no context?

Good point, yes, the rest of the article is in present tense! Thanks! What I had in my post is all of the context for that particular subject however, as it is supposed to be a text for Pre-N5 learners, so it is quite short.

[CDR]

Japanese

I got back the results for the N3, much earlier than expected. I failed, which is not a surprise, given I was 300 study hours short of the minimum number of study hours expected to pass the exam. I failed the Vocab and Grammar section, I passed the Reading and Listening sections. I am surprised I managed to pass listening, I for sure thought I failed when I made the mistake of looking at the wrong question. Oh, well! Really, I am surprised I passed any section at all. I did not finish the N3 Tango deck nor my grammar deck based off of JLPTSensei's list for the N3. Most of what I managed to do at the N3 level was reading with a pop-up dictionary, and watching videos that reviewed all the N3 grammar points, reviewing videos that contained a vocab list for the N3, etc. Regardless, if I had gotten 3 more points to pass the Vocab and Grammar section, I still would not have had the 95 points to pass the JLPT overall.

Back to the grind, I am hoping to sit the N2 at the end of the year, so I can do the same thing over again and walk away with another fail .

This post combines two days of study in very unclear ways, but I gotta post it now, so it doesn't start collecting a 3rd day!

Yomujp N6 Articles Read : 25 / 25
Yomujp N5 Articles Read : 14 / 28

Halfway! One of the articles on bento seemed quite difficult, but I think it was because I was tired and distracted.

Schaum's Outlines Japanese Grammar, Chapters Read: : 5 / 15
I finished Chapter 5 and started Chapter 6, which is the chapter on particles. It is a big chapter, so maybe it will take a few more days to clear.

Tobira : 0 / 15

I did around an hour of work on Tobira, it is quite slow as I am still trying to figure out how the heck I am going to do this. It is also tedious to pull out and look up the words I do not know. I did not even finish the main reading in the chapter.

I have been brainstorming a semi complicated workflow that takes place over multiple days to get around this, but I think it's a mistake. Instead, I will try this for each chapter:

1. Download the Anki decks for the chapter on their website. Merge them into the same format and remove duplicates. Work through all of them, if you answer correctly on the first guess, delete the card. Move whatever is left to your main vocab deck.

(This doesn't cover all the new words in the chapter, their flashcards are incomplete for some reason. However, it isn't worth the trouble, if I just jump in and read, I will find out which vocab I don't know.)

2. The same day, just (start to) work through the chapter, any words you need to look up, get an example sentence from a sentence bank and make an Anki card

毎日の聞き取り50日、Days Completed : 2 / 25
I've been on the hunt for a resource to help me practice listening. So, I found this just last night, it is a two-volume series, 25 "days" in each. You're supposed to do one per day. I did the first day yesterday, the audio quality is terrible, but it might be my source.

1.1 Correct
1.2 6/8 (I cannot recall why I got these wrong)
1.3 Wrong (I did not recall the word for "woman", I heard it and my mind said it was "person")
1.4 3/4 (Speaker said めがね, I heard "fdgfgdfsa") めがね has been a real pain in the butt word for me, I kept failing it as 眼鏡 in Anki.

Today, I did the second day.

2.1 3/4 (I did not understand in the fourth one that the lady asked for change...)
2.2 0/4 (In this one, there are items on the page, and in the dialogue, they talk about a transaction of one of these items, but they do not say the name of the item, they only use a counter word. Problem: I told myself before that I did not know the counters well, so I demotivated myself before doing it. Before looking at the answers, I read the script and got 4/4, I should have tried harder!)
2.3 2/4 (I heard 100 yen as 190 yen, and I got the Japanese 1000 and Portuguese 100 confused)
2.4 4/8 (I spelled いっぽん as いっぱい, I heard 190 instead of 110, I spelled ikko as iko, and 79100 instead of 79800)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/63143784-listening-tasks-for-beginners-every-day-listening-in-50-days-vol-1

Vocab Cards for Tango N4 Deck Equivalent : 245 / 699
I went through the cards for Chapter 1 of Tobira. In the end, it was 53 words I decided to keep. So, a big jump! Otherwise, today was a good review, it felt faster. That's because it was, I covered about 23 extra new words today compared to yesterday, but was still 4 minutes faster.

Hours of Japanese Study : 638 / 1700
2x Super Challenge Films : 36 / 200
2x Super Challenge Books : 3 / 200

French
No progress. My wife remains sick, but is recovering well now. I also remain negative.
Kwiziq A1 Reading Practice Stories : 7 / 9

Portuguese
No progress
Paid Conversations : 6 / 52
Super Challenge Films : 42 / 100
Super Challenge Books : 1 / 100

[CDR]

So, my wife seems back to normal now and it seems I've managed to completely avoid to get COVID. Regardless, I have not been studying much at all. Just 5 hours since the month started.

Most I've managed to do is keep myself and the house clean, and go to work. Admittedly, there was a week where I did not want to leave my bed, but fortunately I didn't have a choice, I had to get up and take care of my wife and go to work.

There are many problems, but related to Japanese the problem is how I view my progress thus far. The fact that I continue to struggle in the language is really messing with me. It shouldn't be shocking, I am the level expected of me for the number of hours I put it. This also isn't my first time around the block learning a language, although I suppose it is the first time I've attempted to study (a language) intensively. So, maybe it is hard to grasp just how much time I spent studying Portuguese, since I never attempted to track it.

I have considered stopping tracking my time studying Japanese, but I don't think that is going to result in more studying at the moment.

I've also struggled to put 2022 in perspective. While 600 hours studied is nice, and I was attempting to be positive before, I still leave the year behind feeling like I did not accomplish what I set out to accomplish. The question really is what exactly did I set out to accomplish? The one I emphasized the most was the # of hours studied. Half of 1700 is 850. I didn't manage that. Another was to write the N3. I did write it, I did not pass it. Considering however the min hours studied to pass is 950, even if I had achieved my hourly goal, I might not have passed anyways, and the N3 was always supposed to be a long shot that kept me studying.

But, that was just the most explicit goal, there is a complicated mix of reasons why I wanted to study Japanese. As the first language I decided to study on my own, it's something I wanted to come back to and do a much better job at this time around. I've changed a lot since my first attempt and I wanted to come back and do it better this time. Another thing I wanted to do was to be a more studious person. I realize my wife and other's in my life already view me as a studious person, but I really wanted to push myself further, and in something that could not be "binged".

Maybe you can study binge for a language test, but the language itself, you cannot binge it. It's a marathon, not a sprint, and I wanted to jog a really harsh marathon. Reflecting on that, even if I didn't reach 850 hours, I certainly ran a marathon (with some breaks) and I did push myself, maybe not as far as I wanted, but I was out of my comfort zone and I was, for at least a few weeks, not totally emotionally damaged by reading Japanese .

It really does need to be about the process, and not the destination, because it seems unlikely I am going to reach the destination any time soon. 1700 hours is really the second milestone at best, it isn't the end. I am hoping that by the end of 2023, I have reached a level in Japanese in which it can accompany me for the rest of my life. If my life is a canvas, I want Japanese as another shade (or maybe it's a different painting style) that I can deploy as I try to create this picture. Let the first 1700 hours be intense, and after that, who knows how long it will take and where it will take me.

I think this word barf has helped. What I am doing now isn't working for me, so I need to do something new. I am going to shutdown my Beeminder goal for Japanese for now, and instead of letting it lapse tonight and charge me $90, I am going to dodge it and earmark that $90 for lessons. I stopped writing this post to go book a lesson, my first one is later this week. I've asked him to base a lesson on an N4 level story from yomujp.

If he works out, I can purchase 10 more 30 minute lessons from him for the same price as I would have paid for failing to study this evening. That could either be 10 weeks or 5 weeks of lessons, not sure what I will do.

In other news, another thing I do when I want to get out of a rut is to sign up for some volunteer work. I've gone back to an old classic for me, and volunteered to be a local immigrant's English practice partner. This is something I've done off an on for almost a decade now, and I always enjoyed it.

While I was on italki, I also booked my Portuguese lessons for the next two weeks, got to get back on that!

My wife wants us to start exercising together, it looks like we going to start with a stationary bike class at the local gym. It's expensive, but I really need to get back to exercising, and it's a good way to hang out with my wife.

[CDR]

In another attempt to boot myself out of my funk, we were at my parent's this weekend and we returned to our old regular thrifting spot. This spot has produced a handful of interesting books for me in the past. This time, it delivered as well!

First, a book that at first glance, I thought was just a book about Japan in English, but when I opened I was surprised, it's a parallel text!

First result was Amazon Canada: https://www.amazon.ca/Nippon-Land-Its-People-Steel/dp/4311700024

This book was published by Nippon Steel Metal Products Co, first complied by their Personal Development Department for two reasons:
1. To make Japanese readers more familiar with their own country and;
2. To promote a better understanding of Japan throughout the world

The forward and introduction suggest it was created because as the company has become an international company, they've had many international employees ask about Japan and Japanese Culture, and so they complied this book as an overview. The Japanese authors note that most of the information about Japan that makes it to foreigner ears are the things the most different or unique about Japan, but not much else (the book was first written in the 80s).

So, an interesting piece of history.

The other people is also a parallel text! This one is called "Bushido" - Link: https://us.amazon.com/Bushido-Kodansha- ... 4770024029

It seems that this is an old work by a Japanese person, however they wrote this work in English, as an "explainer" of Japanese Bushido for the West. This text also provides a Japanese translation in parallel. I read some of the reviews in Japanese on Amazon, and one of them notes that the Japanese is quite simple, so maybe that is promising...

From a quick skim, it seems to me the sentences are relatively short... for Japanese, and the grammar seems straight forward, nothing too crazy, from what I saw. The vocab seems like the trickiest part, but the translation is right there.

We'll see how I fit these in.

[CDR]

I'm still kicking, I managed to get sick for a while, although apparently it wasn't COVID.

I've continued with my Japanese and Portuguese tutors, and I've recently found a new Japanese language exchange partner, online this time, although it doesn't seem to be an exchange per say.

We've been meeting once a week, I attempt to speak Japanese, do poorly, attempt to explain in English, but she does not understand me well it seems. Her English is much better than my Japanese, of course, but sometimes there can be quite a bit of silence as we struggle to communicate. We'll see if she continues to tolerant me, as she does not seem to be particularly interested in improving her English, and I doubt chatting with me is that fun.

I am hoping to find 1 language exchange partner in Portuguese who I can also meet with once a week. This way I will have one tutor and one language exchange partner in each language per week.

Two weeks ago I paid to meet with my Japanese tutor everyday for a week, I read things out loud and we chat about meaning, pronunciation, etc. I mostly pay so I am forced to read in Japanese once a week at least. Reading with my tutor is not nearly as painful as reading alone.

Last week I did 14 hours of Japanese study, I'm working my way back towards my previous pace.

I have not tracked my Japanese reading well. I know how long I've read, but not how many characters/pages, but I was ready to give up on my Japanese Super Challenge anyways. The tracking situation for Portuguese is not as bad, but I don't feel like attempting to do the math right now.

Japanese

Yomujp N6 Articles Read : 25 / 25
Yomujp N5 Articles Read : 20 / 29

Language Exchanges : 2 / 52

Tutor Read Alongs : 11 / 25

Schaum's Outlines Japanese Grammar, Chapters Read: : 7 / 15

毎日の聞き取り50日、Days Completed : 8 / 25
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/63143784-listening-tasks-for-beginners-every-day-listening-in-50-days-vol-1

Vocab Cards for Tango N4 Deck Equivalent : 266 / 699

Portuguese
Paid Conversations : 12 / 52

[DaveAgain]

I'm still kicking, I managed to get sick for a while, although apparently it wasn't COVID.

The front door of my local doctor's surgery has a notice saying not to enter if you have any of the symptoms of Ebola.