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

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

Postby devilyoudont » Tue Jun 26, 2018 2:37 am

Jump to 2019 resolutions

Hello

I'm hoping to keep a language log here basically as a way to track my progress, and to keep myself accountable.
I hope to update three times a week, once for each language. I'll post updates after I complete my study of a particular language for the week.

Japanese:
I started learning Japanese because I lived there as an exchange student. I really fell in love with the language, but after I left I lost a lot of my ability. I started studying again a few years ago. I think that I am low intermediate. My goal is to spend Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday studying Japanese. I only know around 1000 kanji, having burnt myself out on kanji study multiple times.

Spanish:
I live in a city with a decent sized Spanish population, so I would really love to learn Spanish. I'm basically a beginner. I've tried to start learning Spanish several times, but invariably get burned out. For me, beginner resources are difficult in any language due to sheer boredom over the study material. Spanish verb forms are also intimidating for me. I'm hoping that I've accumulated enough vocabulary at this point to be able to start reading things, but am not completely opposed to continuing the Duolingo tree. I plan to study Spanish on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.

Esperanto:
I have reasonably good Esperanto. Improving it is not a high priority for me, but I do enjoy engaging with Esperanto texts and the Esperanto community. I'm also working on a few projects in Esperanto, so maybe tracking my progress with those will help me complete them, instead of wasting my time in Esperanto chatrooms. I'm limiting myself to studying 1 day a week in Esperanto. Saturday is kind of my chill out day, and so that's when I'll spend some time on Esperanto.

Also maybe hope to maybe meet some friends here :) よろしくおねがいします!
Last edited by devilyoudont on Sun May 12, 2019 5:00 pm, edited 5 times in total.
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eido
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Re: devilyoudont's Japanese/Spanish/Esperanto log

Postby eido » Tue Jun 26, 2018 3:34 pm

I hate beginner resources too. I know learning to order at a restaurant is important, but... all I do when I order is announce the name of the food after the line cook or waitress/waiter asks me, "What can I get you today?" In Spanish it's pretty much the same as English.
"¿Qué quiere usted para beber?"
"Un agua con gas."

No fancy introductions or conjugations, just straight up naming the thing. Or sometimes they ask you a yes/no question, so you only need to know those words. But what they teach you is so much more complex than what it is in reality sometimes.

I'm trying to learn Korean and I know there's variations they didn't cover, simple but necessary ones. Just so we're prepared.

I want to say Spanish verbs are not as intimidating as they look, but that's probably because I learned them in class. We learned the rules of conjugation. I think you could probably find these on the Internet too, maybe on a university website. Once you learn these, you're set. There's a regularity to the irregularities - it's nice.

Our teachers had us repeat the present tense conjugation for 'ir' and 'tener' so many times, and I've never forgotten them since. 'Voy, vas, va, vamos, vais, van' and 'Tengo, tienes, tiene, tenemos, tenéis, tienen'... Ah, the beauty.

I'll be following your log with interest! I'll love to see your progress with Japanese.
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Re: devilyoudont's Japanese/Spanish/Esperanto log

Postby Jaleel10 » Tue Jun 26, 2018 4:02 pm

Te doy la bienvenida también

Japanese is a future language that I want to learn so I will definitely be following your log. And I am also slogging away at Spanish so you have someone who understands those beginner pains.

I believe there are some good beginner courses. By good I mean engaging. Assimil (some people claim the older versions are better) and Language Transfer are two resources to which I owe a huge debt to my current Spanish abilities. I also kind of had to suffer through a bunch of other courses and resources but that was just due to fear or unwillingness to start using native materials. If you ever want to get early into reading+listening practiceI compiled a list of podcasts with transcripts that I aggregated from other members on this website and by snooping around myself.

Oh and Spanish conjugations are awesome. I will not be told otherwise!! I even learned Argentinian el voseo just for laughs. At the end of the day I see them like formulas which I can apply universally with a few exceptions. Sometimes the exceptions have their own groups and their own formulas. Fun stuff!

Good luck!
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devilyoudont
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Re: devilyoudont's Japanese/Spanish/Esperanto log

Postby devilyoudont » Wed Jun 27, 2018 1:45 am

Thank you both for the warm welcome @eido and @Jaleel10

@eido:
I do need to seek out a good text book for Spanish Grammar. Does anything like Tae Kim's guide or Imabi exist for Spanish online?

Korean is a language that I would really love to learn. I think it would just be fascinating to study Korean and Chinese due to the exchanges that happened between these languages and Japanese historically. However, I unfortunately don't have time to start any more languages at the moment.

@Jaleel10
I think Argentinian Spanish sounds really cool so I definitely see the appeal of learning vos forms. However, practically everyone around me speaks Caribbean Spanish!

If you are interested in Japanese, I highly recommend it. It has been an incredibly rewarding language for me.

Anyway, here's what I did since Sunday.

@ http://hukumusume.com/douwa/index.html
Read and listened to:

白雪姫
ネコが鼠を追いかける訳

@ https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/
Watched News clip and read:

沖縄県 太平洋戦争で亡くなった20万人のために祈る式
東京湾で鯨が泳いでいる「船は気をつけて」

Listened to 3hr and 35min of the following podcasts:

News in Slow Japanese
Japanese LingQ
エッチな女子会
犯罪心理とトラックやロー

Played some:

ぷちっとくろにくる
Fire Emblem Heroes

Made 57 Anki flashcards
Reviewed 164 flashcards

Struggles:

Hard to find material at my level, especially audio material.

Was not able to understand any of the crime podcast... Was hoping that I would be able to listen to longer audio if I selected something that conformed with my interests, but since my comprehension was so low, I ended up zoning out. Hoping it was just an issue with the podcast I chose at random, and that if I pick another one, the vocabulary will be more accessible to me.

Unknown kanji in texts without voice acting and furigana are presenting a problem for me, but I'm not ready to start focused study of kanji again because it always burns me out. I am trying to mentally psych myself up for working on this again tho.

With a lot of audio content, my brain is not understanding things correctly. I might understand a bunch of words in a row, but my brain doesn't form a sentence. This is especially frustrating, because I know this wasn't a problem for me while I was living in Japan.

Successes:

I am trying to transition towards using monolingual dictionaries. Probably 20% of the cards I made used a definition from a monolingual Japanese dictionary (using http://www.sanseido.biz/ because it functions with FLTR)

Understood this week's News in Slow Japanese article without any difficulty.

Was able to understand the tutorial in ぷちっとくろにくる without a dictionary.

Until next time :)
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Re: devilyoudont's Japanese/Spanish/Esperanto log

Postby eido » Wed Jun 27, 2018 3:27 pm

I actually don't know about a guide like that for Spanish but searching that type of thing in Google/Bing ("Spanish grammar guide") returned this one. It's not as comprehensive as Tae Kim's, but it might be a start. I'm surprised there isn't something like this for Spanish. SpanishDict.com might be a good resource, too.
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Re: devilyoudont's Japanese/Spanish/Esperanto log

Postby devilyoudont » Sat Jun 30, 2018 2:11 am

@ http://www.elhuevodechocolate.com/

Read:

El abuelo, el nieto, y el burro
Los Tres Perezosos

Read in English:

First three sections of: http://www.bowdoin.edu/hispanic-studies ... newgr/ats/

Listened to the following podcasts for 4hrs 9mns

Beginner Spanish with Spanished Obsessed
Duolingo Spanish
SpanishLingQ
Cienciaes.com
Ser Historia

Made 78 anki cards
Reviewed 108 cards

Struggles:

I decided to start over with flashcards. The ones I had previously made were kinda all over the place and sort of useless.
I really struggled reading "Los Tres Perezosos," even with a dictionary
I didn't read as much as I'd like
I wanted to pick up a telenovela which is available on Netflix, but due to working overtime, I didn't have time this week.
The first version of "El abuelo, el nieto, y el burro" I started reading didn't have any accent marks and I didn't realize it until over halfway thru the story :(

Successes:

While listening to the LingQ podcast, I realized that when one of the people said "Sho" it was actually "yo" in Rioplatense Spanish. I tried to listen for other features of this dialect, but unfortunately was not able to hear anything other than periodic "sh" sounds. Still hype I caught that :D
The Duolingo Spanish podcast finally released a new episode! I really love the approach of this podcast, where they have a native speaker tell a very engaging story in simple Spanish, and then an English speaker adds some context in English, but does not translate the Spanish into English.
I feel like I've outgrown the Spanish Obsessed Podcast :)
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devilyoudont
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Re: devilyoudont's Japanese/Spanish/Esperanto log

Postby devilyoudont » Sun Jul 01, 2018 3:07 am

For Esperanto today, I just spent some time chatting with friends. Also, I moderate a chatroom that is part of a language learning network. The network has a bot, and users can ask the bot to set a topic for the chat. They can change the topic every two hours, should they so desire. I've been gradually going thru the topics the bot has on file for the English study group, and translating them to Esperanto. I translated about forty topics today, bringing the total number of topics that the bot has on file for Esperanto to somewhere around 400.
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Re: devilyoudont's Japanese/Spanish/Esperanto log

Postby devilyoudont » Wed Jul 04, 2018 5:21 pm

Happy 4th of July to anyone who celebrates!

Japanese Log:

Reading:

@ http://hukumusume.com/douwa/index.html

七夕物語 (The Story of the Weaver Girl and the Cowherd)
この正直者め (This Honest Idiot)

@ https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/

ホンダがロボットの「アシモ」の研究をやめる (Honda Stops Research on The "Asimo" Robot)
「ハローキティ」の絵で飾った新幹線の運転が始まる (A Bullet Train Decorated with Pictures of Hello Kitty Begins Operating)

Watching: (2hrs)

@Netflix

この世界の片隅に(In this Corner of the World)

Listening: (podcasts, 2hrs 57min)

エッチな女子会 (Perverted Women's Association)
Japanese LingQ
News in Slow Japanese

SRS:

Made 107 anki cards, lost track of percentage of cards which use definitions from monolingual dictionaries.
Reviewed 189 cards.

Struggles:

I had a lot of trouble with the language used in "In this corner of the world." I was still able to follow the basic plot, but a lot of the dialog was just going over my head, maybe due to the use of Chugoku dialect. I spent a little time on wikipedia reviewing features of the dialect, and maybe by the end of the film came to understand that じゃ=だ, けえ=から, とく=ている etc etc on and on forever. There were some sequences in the movie that I could understand very well, and other parts where I was just lost. If the film weren't such a downer, maybe I would do a rewatch with english subs, but I feel like I maybe had a better experience watching it and trying to learn from it, since if I had watched it with english subs, I think I would have gotten too depressed from the story, and then been useless for a little while after.

Going thru children's folktales, I'm discovering an entire category of words that I just don't know... adverbs ending in り... I suppose that when I was in an immersive environment in Japan, if I understood the verb and the nouns, that was enough to get me by, and so that environment failed to teach me certain adverbs.

Successes:

Was able to use HelloTalk to ask for information about an idiom (精を出す) and understand responses using only Japanese

この正直者め is the first folktale I've gone thru that I didn't have previous knowledge of, so whether or not I could follow it was kind of a test, which I passed! Not sure if I can recommend it to other people tho, kind of a gross story :lol:

Basically understood 100% of the Hello Kitty newsstory!
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devilyoudont
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Re: devilyoudont's Japanese/Spanish/Esperanto log

Postby devilyoudont » Sat Jul 07, 2018 1:11 am

Spanish Log:

Reading:

@ http://www.cuentoscortos.com
Caperucita Roja (Little Red Riding Hood)

@ http://www.elhuevodechocolate.com/
El abad y los tres enigmas (The Abbot and the Three Enigmas)

Listening: (2hr 56min)(podcasts)

Duolingo Spanish
Cienciaes.com
Ser Historia

Watching: (50 mins) (Spanish Audio with Spanish Subs)

@ Netflix
Juana Inés episode 1

Gaming:

Played some Fire Emblem Heroes in Spanish, but I'm not sure about the quality of the translation. Does anyone know any text heavy games for Android in Spanish, that were either originally in spanish, or definitely have a good quality Spanish translation?

Language Exchange:

Feeling kind of burned out on reading, I decided to try doing language exchange again. I decided to use HelloTalk as a dedicated app for Japanese, and Tandem as a dedicated app for Spanish. However, I got bombarded with messages on Tandem, felt overwhelmed by having about a dozen chats up at a time, and ended up resorting to English only chat just to be able to keep up. I decided to block men from contacting me, as I was simply getting too many messages, and some percentage of them did not seem to be interested in doing language exchange.

After a few tries, I found a woman around my own age who responded to my messages, and we scheduled voice chat for this weekend :) We also kept up a text message chat for a little while in English and Spanish, and decided that when we do voice chat, we will do a theme of our hobbies and our job.

SRS:

Made 105 anki flashcards
Reviewed 112 cards

Struggles:
My comprehension of Juana Inés is really low. I read a wikipedia page on the real life of Juana Inés so that I can better understand what is happening, even if I'm only understanding based on imagery and prior knowledge of her life.

El abad y los tres enigmas is a bit hard for me... It took me a lot longer to make it to the end of this story than I expected.

Successes:

The duolingo podcast is about at the perfect level for me... but I already went thru the full archive... Maybe I should go thru it again? Idk it's only got a backlog of about ten episodes.
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devilyoudont
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Re: devilyoudont's Japanese/Spanish/Esperanto log

Postby devilyoudont » Tue Jul 10, 2018 10:53 pm

I was basically useless over the weekend, so no Esperanto Log, sorry.

Japanese Log:

Reading:
病院で男性が殺された事件 看護師をしていた女を逮捕 (Men Killed at Hospital Incident, Woman who was Working as a Nurse Arrested)

Watching:
伊藤君 A to E (Episodes 1&2)(The Many Faces of Ito)

Listening: (podcasts, 2hrs 16min)
Japanese LingQ
News in Slow Japanese
エッチな女子会 (Perverted Women Association)

SRS:
Made 10 cards.
Updated 206 cards
Reviewed 273 cards.

Struggles:
Had the experience that the example phrase used on one of the anki cards was just too little information for me to truly see the word used in context. FLTR generates this automatically, but depending where the word appears in the sentence, this can be truly useless "context." So I went thru and added proper example sentences to all my anki cards from FLTR. I only started using the program a little bit before I started using this log, so it wasn't so arduous. But this did end up eating a bit of time that I would rather have spent reading or watching something.

FLTR helpfully strips the furigana off of text that I input. I think this is probably good in the long run, but in the short run, I'm mixing up certain transitive verbs while reading. So I read 入れる as 入る and then the sentence doesn't make sense until I realize my error. I'm hoping more reading will eventually solve this.

Successes:
I'm closing in on finishing the Japanese LingQ podcast! I'll have to find another podcast to work thru the archives of, since I am up to date on all of the other Japanese podcasts I listen to. If you know a good learner podcast that is primarily in Japanese, or a native language podcast that publishes short episodes, I would love to hear about it! :)
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