I fail words -- devilyoudont's Japanese & Esperanto log

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devilyoudont
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Re: I fail words -- devilyoudont's Japanese & Esperanto log

Postby devilyoudont » Sun Jun 16, 2019 4:02 pm

Japanese:

Input:
Podcasts (56 minutes)
・メリケン!サックリドラマ!
・News in Slow Japanese
・恋愛心理学♡知りたい!相手の気持ち
・都市伝説オカンとボクと、時々、イルミナティ
Music (3 hr)
・Youtube music mixes
Gaming
・Let's Go Pikachu
・Final Fantasy XIV
・Draw it

Output:
Translation
・Answered 1 request on r/Translator
Conversation (5 hrs )
・Saturday was the day my Japanese friend who lives a state over had to go to a wedding, while her sister with no English is visiting the United States. So I took care of entertaining her sister for a few hours. She was interested in trying American "Japanese" food, so we went to a local ramen shop. After that, we are both interested in art so we caught the bus to the local art museum, which is running an exhibit featuring Monet, Van Gogh, Manet, and Renoir. After that we stopped at a cafe just to get some cool drinks. We made it thru the day without much struggle, but there were times (such as explaining things about my pet lizard) where I had to resort to caveman-speak. I never have very much confidence in my spoken abilities, even when I lived in Japan and had much greater spoken fluency than now. But, I hope that after I finish my current kanji-based project, I can remember this experience, and confidently start either working with a tutor or doing tons of language exchanges.

SRS:
Made: 54 cards
Reviewed: 943 cards

Favorite Kanji Etymology of the Week:
Image
I don't usually choose a phono-semantic compound, but in this case I was pleased to notice that the semantic component for this kanji is 心 (heart/mind) rather than 肉 (meat/part of the body/organ)

Struggles:
・Finally hit a kanji that is part of a common word, but has no examples listed in the Core 10k deck which I have been cannibalizing. 俵. Tried to make an ersatz Core card for the kunyomi, since the onyomi is fairly obvious and just used for counter words.

Successes:
・I have a 31 day streak of studying Japanese on Habitica at the moment, so it appears that I'm well on my way to restoring the strength of this habit from my bout of depression in February.
・Successfully spent a day with someone who knows practically 0 English.
2 x

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devilyoudont
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Re: I fail words -- devilyoudont's Japanese & Esperanto log

Postby devilyoudont » Sun Jun 30, 2019 4:32 pm

Last two weeks have been pretty rough

Japanese:
Input:
(In JA with EN subtitles)
・シン・ゴジラ
Podcasts (1hr 41min)
・メリケン!サックリドラマ!
・News in Slow Japanese
・朗読男女~5分で聞けるオリジナル物語
・恋愛心理学♡知りたい!相手の気持ち
・都市伝説オカンとボクと、時々、イルミナティ
・JLPT stories
Music (2 hr)
・Youtube music mixes
Gaming
・Let's Go Pikachu

Output:
・Answered 1 request on r/Translator

SRS:
Made: 87 cards
Reviewed: 1379 cards

Favorite Kanji Etymology of the Week:
Image

Struggles:
・I missed 2 days entirely over the last two weeks.
・A lot of stuff happening in my personal and work life eating up all the time. We were at the end of the fiscal year so the amount of overtime I've done is just truly nuts. My uncle has entered the hospital, perhaps for the rest of his life. Some good stuff also happened with the other side of my family, which kept me distracted (BBQs, going to festivals, family reunion planning, etc etc). Something had to give, and it was language study and also allowing laundry to pile up a little.
・No time at all even to really think of Esperanto.

Successes:
・Someone I don't know asked me to join their scanslation group randomly, after seeing a few of my posts on r/translator. Very flattering, but I don't have time. Also, they are probably overestimating my abilities. Still, nice to be asked.
4 x

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devilyoudont
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Re: I fail words -- devilyoudont's Japanese & Esperanto log

Postby devilyoudont » Sun Jul 07, 2019 3:51 pm

Japanese:
Input:
Graded Reader: ・雪女
Podcasts (1hr 56min):・メリケン!サックリドラマ!・朗読男女~5分で聞けるオリジナル物語・恋愛心理学♡知りたい!相手の気持ち・都市伝説オカンとボクと、時々、イルミナティ・JLPT stories
Music (2 hr) ・Youtube music mixes
Gaming: ・Let's Go Pikachu・Draw it

Output:
Translation:・Read 雪女 to my partner in English

SRS:
Made: 68 cards
Reviewed: 746 cards
Revised: 13 cards

Favorite Kanji Etymology of the Week:
Image

Esperanto:

Output:
・Wrote 1 diary entry in Esperanto

Struggles:
・I decided to start spending some amount of time revising images on the Core10k set I am using. Some small percentage of cards have completely unhelpful images. I believe these cards were made by multiple people in a series of steps. The person on the image step didn't know Japanese, and appears to have just run a google image search on the English keyword.

Here's an example of what I mean:

Image

(I made the choice to censor this... it's not an explicit image, but I would rather censor it lol)

So, there's all kinds of images like this which are more or less inappropriate both due to content and lack of relevance for the meaning. So, I'm just taking some time every week to go thru those which I have flagged, and replacing the objectionable/irrelevant image with something better.
・Learned a joyo kanji 仁 which is used in a common word, but has no example sentence in the Core10k deck. I attempted to identify example sentences to help learn this word using Tsukuba, but all sentences I was able to find were above my level. I'm content to let this be... knowing that 人 is phonetic clarifies the pronunciation very well, so I think I will be ok in this case with just the Heisig Keyword and knowing the on-yomi.

Successes:
・Using https://tomato-timer.com/ for better time management
・Kanji-wise I am now firmly into the sixth grade.
・I bought these graded readers back in Februrary but haven't touched them since. I felt that since they are filled with images, this would be a good way to ease myself back into reading. They are slightly below my level (something like 3 unknown words in the entire 35 pages of 雪女). I plan to just read the entire 5 book set, translate them for my partner, and then pass them on, perhaps to a friend or to the local Japanese conversation club which I still haven't made it to.
・I bought a personal diary for writing about my days in Japanese or Esperanto. I was inspired by Maria Ortega Garcia, interviewed on The Fluent Show to just start some kind of small creative project in order to use the languages for pleasure for myself, with no fear of judgement or being incorrect, just self expression. I purchased a journal whose pages are a dotted grid--meaning I can choose to write vertically for Japanese or horizontally in Esperanto, and everything will still look neat unlike if I wrote on completely unlined paper. I only wrote 1 entry this week, but I am hoping to gradually build keeping a diary into a daily habit, and why not have that habit also be a language learning habit.
Last edited by devilyoudont on Sun Jul 07, 2019 7:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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dampingwire
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Re: I fail words -- devilyoudont's Japanese & Esperanto log

Postby dampingwire » Sun Jul 07, 2019 7:32 pm

devilyoudont wrote:・Learned a joyo kanji 仁 which is used in a common word, but has no example sentence in the Core10k deck.


Just out of curiosity, which common word uses it? On it's own it means benevolence or compassion, but I can't think of something common that uses it. Of course, my idea of "common" is really "I remember seeing it" so I may be a little off ... :-)
1 x
新完全マスター N2聴解 : 94 / 103新完全マスター N2読解 : 99 / 177
新完全マスター N2文法 : 197 / 197TY Comp. German : 0 / 389

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devilyoudont
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Re: I fail words -- devilyoudont's Japanese & Esperanto log

Postby devilyoudont » Sun Jul 07, 2019 7:39 pm

dampingwire wrote:
Just out of curiosity, which common word uses it? On it's own it means benevolence or compassion, but I can't think of something common that uses it. Of course, my idea of "common" is really "I remember seeing it" so I may be a little off ... :-)


EDICT considers it by itself to be a common word, and it does get close to 3k hits on the Tsukuba corpus.

Here's an example sentence (which I can't fully understand) from Tsukuba:

孝悌はそれ仁を為すの本なるか。
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vonPeterhof
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Re: I fail words -- devilyoudont's Japanese & Esperanto log

Postby vonPeterhof » Sun Jul 07, 2019 10:22 pm

devilyoudont wrote:Here's an example sentence (which I can't fully understand) from Tsukuba:

孝悌はそれ仁を為すの本なるか。

That's not even modern Japanese, it's a 書き下し文 (Classical Japanese transcription of a Classical Chinese text) of a line from the Analects of Confucius, "孝弟也者,其為仁之本與". One possible translation is apparently "Filial piety and fraternal submission!—are they not the root of all benevolent actions?" (from here).
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Re: I fail words -- devilyoudont's Japanese & Esperanto log

Postby devilyoudont » Sun Jul 07, 2019 11:40 pm

vonPeterhof wrote:That's not even modern Japanese, it's a 書き下し文 (Classical Japanese transcription of a Classical Chinese text) of a line from the Analects of Confucius, "孝弟也者,其為仁之本與". One possible translation is apparently "Filial piety and fraternal submission!—are they not the root of all benevolent actions?" (from here).

Thanks so much for the translation!

It's slightly weird to me that this is the origin of this phrase, as Tsukuba is a web corpus, so usually it pulls fairly straightforward sentences out of Japanese websites. I generally try to select a sentence where I know every word but the word I am learning, but this (unknown to me) word 孝弟 or 孝悌 recurs in the examples on Tsukuba, and now it appears to me that a large number of the examples are various ways to rephrase the above line from Confucious.

But usually tsukuba will give fairly easy, grammatically correct, sentences. I was just able to find a sentence for 陛下 (no core 10k card for 陛) where I understand every other word in the sentence already, and the grammar is easy as well.

これは女王陛下の像だ。
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devilyoudont
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Re: I fail words -- devilyoudont's Japanese & Esperanto log

Postby devilyoudont » Sun Jul 14, 2019 6:55 pm

Japanese:
Input:
Graded Reader: ・Part of 杜子春
Podcasts (49 min): ・News in Slow Japanese・恋愛心理学♡知りたい!相手の気持ち・都市伝説オカンとボクと、時々、イルミナティ
Gaming: ・Let's Go Pikachu
Output:
Diary Entries: 3
Translation: ・Answered 4 requests on r/Translator
SRS:
Made: 66 cards
Reviewed: 782 cards
Revised: 4 cards
Favorite Kanji Etymology of the Week:
Image

Esperanto:
Output:
Diary Entries: 2
Letters: 1

Struggles:
・For some reason, the cards I made this week often just required a little bit extra research to put together compared to normal.
・I need to work on confidence. Looking at a phrase in handwriting, the only possible character given the context was 学... but I just couldn't find enough strokes for it to be 学. Should have gone with my gut. Or maybe there is a resource somewhere where I can come to understand written variants of characters.

Successes:
・Made enough cards this week to stay on track despite technical issues with my computer.
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devilyoudont
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Re: I fail words -- devilyoudont's Japanese & Esperanto log

Postby devilyoudont » Mon Jul 22, 2019 11:49 pm

Japanese:
Input:
Podcasts (1hr 57min): ・メリケン!サックリドラマ!・News in Slow Japanese ・朗読男女~5分で聞けるオリジナル物語 ・恋愛心理学♡知りたい!相手の気持ち・都市伝説オカンとボクと、時々、イルミナティ
Gaming: ・Let's Go Pikachu
SRS:
Reviewed: 649 cards

Favorite Kanji Etymology of the Week:
Image
(lol the kid's mouth in the oracle bone version)

Esperanto:
Output:
Diary Entries: 1
Gaming: ・Vortludo

Misc:
・Signed up for Cainntear's study, and did that this week. This was kind of an interesting experience, because I was able to choose a language which is technically a heritage language for me. Heritage may not be the right word, because by my estimate, the last person in my family who spoke this language lived something like 150 years ago. There are other languages that are much closer to me, but since my mother passed away, it feels pointless to learn Arabic now, and I don't get along with my father or his family, so there is no reason to learn Portuguese either. I think this was overall a kind of nice experience for me. Who knows, if I ever hit a high advanced level in Japanese, maybe I will take up a kind of dilettantish study of Arabic, or this language as a result of participating in this study. (Avoiding naming the language just in case Cainntear reads this and knowing which language I did is problematic)

Struggles:
・This wasn't a very productive week due to a stomach bug which prevented me from doing much for like 4 days.

Successes:
・Still keeping the language habit consistent.
・Somewhat successfully increasing the amount of Japanese I listen to, without evidence of burn out currently.
0 x

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devilyoudont
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Re: I fail words -- devilyoudont's Japanese & Esperanto log

Postby devilyoudont » Sun Jul 28, 2019 5:21 pm

Japanese:
Input:
Webcomics: ・6 Chapters of こえ恋
Netflix (in JA with JA subs): ・2 Episodes of リラックマとカオルさん
Podcasts (4hr 35min): ・メリケン!サックリドラマ!・恋愛心理学♡知りたい!相手の気持ち ・都市伝説オカンとボクと、時々、イルミナティ
Output:
Diary: ・2 entries
SRS:
Reviewed: 487 cards
Esperanto:
Diary: ・2 entries
Gaming ・Vortludo

Struggles:
・No progress on kanji project this week, due to last week's illness continuing to linger

Successes:
・Just took a kind of relaxed week and spend some time just doing fun activities in Japanese, rather than attempting to push flashcards down my throat
・Reading comprehension has improved a huge amount in just the last 6 months just from learning to write the kanji + doing Core 10k flashcards to learn their readings.
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