Good morning,
I'm going to name this update "an exciting discovery".
(Skip to how my languages are going if you don't want to read me gush about a multilingual library)
Yesterday, I met up with my Japanese language partner again. Though, I don't quite think that's the right term for it as we mainly meet just to hang out and speak a mixture of the languages
The weather wasn't looking too great but we had a day full of activities planned. We started the day off by going to a multilingual library in my city. It's tucked away inside a shopping centre. I had no idea of it's existence until I met with the Japanese-English exchange group last week, as some of the members there worked at the library on a volunteer basis. They mentioned it in passing, and I was intrigued, so I thought before we got onto our main activities for the day we'd just drop by. I didn't have high hopes, I guess. My main city library has a foreign language section but it's dedicated to the most spoken languages in the city as well as popular languages in Europe: Chinese, Urdu, Polish, Russian, French, Spanish, German and Italian. Fantastic selection if you are learning any of those languages - which unfortunately I am not, so you can imagine why I was a little cynical about the multilingual language library.
Boy, I'm so glad I was wrong.
To sum it up, it is a language learner's paradise.
They had a wide selection of books in every language you could imagine. Catalan, Icelandic, Norwegian, Mongolian, Korean, Japanese, Finnish... to name a few. Name a language, they probably had a book in it.
It's my understanding most of their books were donated by universities, or by volunteers / members of the public. They've done a fantastic job as they have a collection to brag about. As it is a library, you can only lend the books, and some are quite old, but there was a healthy selection of modern fiction and non-fiction books as well... as far as I could discern from the covers, anyway
For someone who has had an interest in languages since I was young, and always thought my city was limited in what it could offer, this was a very exciting discovery. My friend and I must have spent about 2 hours oo-ing and aw-ing over the variety of languages, trying to read them, talking about the countries, what languages they speak etc. A great deal of fun. I eyed up the Norwegian/Swedish section... I love to read, and I especially love to read in foreign languages, and my main goal with my "hobby language" Norwegian is just to be able to read in it - so you can imagine how excited I was to see almost 3 medium sized book cases full of Norwegian books
As well as in the childrens section, they had tons of children books in Norwegian as well, from activity books to fiction novels!
The Japanese section was a little smaller but it still had 3 shelves dedicated to Japanese novels, and a whole bookcase with more academic focused books. I found one on translation which I'm very tempted to pick up next time I visit. Also a few novels I'm interested in. As it's a library, it'll have a deadline, so it'll probably urge me to actually read them
I'm very excited to visit next Saturday and get some books out!
How my languages are goingJapanese is 順調. I had a bit of a crisis the other day
I've more or less set up camp in the intermediate plateau. My crisis, as I sat around my metaphorical campfire, was that I want to improve my vocabulary by studying more actively, as in, picking a reading material aimed at native speakers and making notes of the new words, adding them to Memrise, and studying them. The idea itself is fine, it's just finding articles with vocabulary I'm going to use. I've been reading a lot of news articles recently, I've been trying to keep it fresh, going for a different category every time - politics, science, society, weather - which is fine and all, but after a while, you realise the vocabulary isn't that different from article to article. I read a nice article about Space-X the other day, got some nice space vocabulary, but the other 80% of the article didn't hold anything new because I'd already picked up on it in another article. It could be I just need to give the news a rest
A lot of Japanese news articles follow the same formula more or less. The contents is interesting though, and it does allow for me to talk about current events in Japan, which is always a bonus. But yesterday caused the crisis. I sat down to find an article and I went through every category, and it was all just doom and gloom. The main articles for the day were, "woman swept into river dies," "two teenagers hit by a truck have died," "hot weather in Japan has killed X people," ... my Memrise deck is already looking a bit worrying after reading a wikipedia article on a famous American murder in Japanese, so I figured, I could deal with less doom and gloom in there
But then I sort of sat there like, "what do I use now?" You might have noticed I said I don't look at entertainment or music articles. I did venture into a few, but alas, they followed the same formula, and were quite short. The only things I'd be picking up from there is names of actors and actresses, and maybe reinforcing some words I encountered in a previous article.
I do think, I need to give the news a rest.
Wikipedia has been fun, but it's getting tiring thinking of a topic to read about every day
Not to mention, the articles themselves are very long, so it's quite time consuming. I do have some websites I visit, both aimed at women, one is like Reddit I guess, the other is more of a forum, where women go to post their worries about love, life, marriage, health etc. I think I might lurk about on those websites more, as they are fantastic for vocabulary and new ways of saying things, as language is ever evolving. My only concern is that the language is very 日常生活 (daily life), so I won't really be getting a lot of new vocabulary in the way of more specific topics (politics, society etc) but I guess it's handy because, it'll be words I'll actually use I guess?
Can't hurt.
tends to the campfireI'm having no problems with practicing output lately, I know that to improve in speaking and writing, I need to just speak and write, no two ways about it - they'll improve on their own, and slowly, passive knowledge will become active knowledge. I'm very fortunate to have ample opportunities to do both, so I'm not worried about that. Listening, as well. If I'm too tired to sit down and actually study, I just watch a drama in Japanese, or listen to a Japanese podcast. So, my main concern right now, is just upping my knowledge and finally jumping into advanced territory. I'll keep pushing on!
Norwegian and Dutch... both have unfortunately taken a back seat, I've had a particularly rough week in terms of my work commute. I haven't been getting home until 7:30, by the time I eat dinner, do chores and sit myself down, it's 8:30 and I'm usually exhausted. Dutch is at the level where I really need to blast through a guided course or two, then I can realise myself into the Dutch wilderness. Norwegian as well, however, I am flirting with idea of Swedish again, so I'm not too worried about my lack of progress as I might be hopping over to Swedish soon, we will see!
I'm hoping to find a new job soon because my days are very long with this job (I leave the house at 7am, home at 7:30pm if traffic is bad) and thus it is leaving with me 0 energy for anything, let alone languages. So I am forgiving myself for not keeping on top of all my languages. I still need to find a nice way to include Dutch and Norwegian into my commute. Maybe a Memrise deck, or Duolingo. We shall see.
Enough rambling for today! Congratulations if you've made it this far!