The Kuji Khronicles - JA, PT

[iguanamon]

Parabéns, Kuji, é a primeira série você já completou! Gostei muito de "Fábulas Africanas". Os atores das vozes são moçambicanos. Também, gostei da série História Africana – Era uma vez... em África.

According to HTLAL "Basic Fluency" is :

Intermediate is below 'Basic Fluency' and above 'Beginner'.
Basic Fluency - you understand at least 80% of a regular newspaper in your target language and can hold regular conversations about any topic, understanding what people say and getting your point across.
Advanced Fluency means that you can read a popular novel and not miss more than 2 words per page on average, and hold advanced conversations with minimal mistakes.

On HTLAL people didn't use CEFR designations unless they had passed a CEFR test. Here, most of the CEFR levels we see are generally self-estimates. Is it more accurate? I don't know. I describe my Haitian Creole as Basic Fluency because I can speak and understand responses, I can read news better than 80% but I have about four to five look-ups per page of reading. Whereas my reading in my other languages is nearly effortless.

I'm glad to see you are committed to finishing DLI. DLI is practically a multi-track approach in itself, especially when you take advantage of the readings at the end and answer the comprehension questions. I used to do that in a notebook. I would send the story to my tutor and go over them with her about half the time, the other half I would just do it on my own and send some of it to lang8. I do believe that if you keep up with what you're doing in Portuguese and finish DLI you will be at the cusp of B2, with speaking and listening needing the most work. You already have a good working knowledge of Portuguese. These last four volumes will give you the tools you'll need to be proficient.

I love how the DLI course is arranged with the nearly monolingual nature of the course, drills, pattern drills, dialog, drills based on the dialog, culture, reading, comprehension questions, drills based on the reading, grammar explanations in English and the vocabulary glossary. Then every 5th lesson is a review. In my opinion, it is the most thorough course I have ever done in any language. Combine that with some outside activity and you'll be cooking with gas!

I used to spend about 45 minutes to an hour a day on DLI in the mornings. I could often get through two lessons a week, but I wasn't learning Japanese too . The DLI Haitian Creole Basic Course is shorter than the Portuguese one but it did help me to get to where I could read. Of course, the more you read... the better you get at reading. I am making more of an effort to read in HC now and I expect to be able to move it to Advanced Fluency in time, provided I keep up with it, which I intend to do. Boa sorte, Kuji !

[Iversen]

On HTLAL people didn't use CEFR designations unless they had passed a CEFR test.

Ahem, that's not how I remember HTLAL - unless you refer to the annotations you could get to your profile (or still can, but the site is almost dead now). The vast majority of htalians judged themselves to be A1 or B2 or C1 or whatever they fancied. However they did stick to one principle, namely that the main element of the CEFR is speaking skills. The system does pay a nominal tribut to writing too, but in practice speaking skills dominate all discussions about CEFR levels.

I visited Macau in 1994, and the only thing in Portuguese there were some street signs - adn now, after it has become a part of mainland China, it will be even less. As for going to terrorstricken places (cfr comments from July 7) I have always wondered why there weren't issued dire warnings against going to Belgium and France and Spain and... when similar events immediately would have put more distant places on the black list. There are countries where crime and violence is so common that it can hit everyone, and there are places where the threats specifically to foreigners were too serious to take lightly (like Algeria, although the situation seems to have calmed down there), but Istanbul is not worse off than Brussels or Paris - except that the risk of an earthquake is larger in Istanbul than in Western Europe.

[kujichagulia]

@iguanamon - Thank you for the comments. I'm curious as to how you posted your DLI reading questions on Lang-8. It seems that, to get the answers checked, you would have to post the entire reading on Lang-8, along with the questions and answers. How did you get around that?

@Iversen - Thanks for dropping by! I've always had a "should I? Should I not?"-type situation with Macau precisely because of what you said. It doesn't seem like people use Portuguese much there in everyday life (although they do have a Portuguese-language radio station). I might end up going there one day to see for myself, since it's not far from here and it's fairly easy to get there from Hong Kong should I ever visit there. As for Paris and Brussels... yeah, maybe Istanbul is not worse off than those places (although the recent coup d'etat attempt has made the situation there more complicated), but my wife and I don't really want to go to France and Belgium either because of the rash of terrorism. Call us weak or whatever you want. I've never been much of a risk taker; I've always taken the safe road, and this is no different. I know I'm in the minority on this point, but it has served me well in life. Heck, I often drive 50 km/h on a 60 km/h speed limit road. That should tell you everything you need to know about me.

* * * * *

I finally decided to make the decision and drop シルバーブラスト. It was becoming unbearable. It became less like watching a silent movie and more like just walking through a thick fog, with no idea of what was in front of me or around me. I was starting to push myself through a mass of unknown vocabulary, and I had enough. Even before that, the story was becoming somewhat uninteresting. At first, I felt guilty to stop reading the book because I wanted to prove to myself that I could finish it. But was the effort worth it? I decided to answer that with a "No" and stop.

So over the weekend, I started reading やがて哀しき外国語 by Haruki Murakami. I'm about halfway through the Kindle sample, and it is far easier to follow the story than シルバーブラスト. Far easier. I'm thinking about buying the book once I'm done with the sample. Hopefully it won't devolve into a mass of unknowns like シルバーブラスト did, but even the beginning of やがて哀しき外国語 is far easier to follow than the beginning of シルバーブラスト was. There are far fewer unknowns per page. I should have dropped シルバーブラスト a long time ago. And again, I'm surprised that a Murakami book is this easy for me, because all I used to hear about before was how Murakami was so difficult for Japanese learners. (I don't know, maybe certain, more famous books like 1Q84 are more difficult, but I don't really know a lot about Murakami's works so I can't say for sure.)

Anyway, I should point out that that is the only "study" I do for Japanese nowadays. Just read. I'm happy with that. Trying to do rotations and all these various other things to learn Japanese just added clutter to my life. Now I just read, and other than that do Anki reviews, watch some TV, and have little conversations here and there. I'm trying to do the same for Portuguese as well. I was just focusing on Fábulas africanas before; now I'm focusing on DLI. DLI has enough to give me a "well-balanced diet" of Portuguese. I try to listen to radio from Brazil and Portugal as well. Again, less clutter, and it's making a difference, I think.

[iguanamon]

...I'm curious as to how you posted your DLI reading questions on Lang-8. It seems that, to get the answers checked, you would have to post the entire reading on Lang-8, along with the questions and answers. How did you get around that?

I'd post a short paragraph and the relevant questions, if they required a sentence answer. Sometimes just a question that required a more than one sentence response. Sometimes just the responses while explaining that I was more interested in knowing if my grammar and word choices were correct than if the response. was correct. If my tutor didn't mind, she'd read the text and I'd respond in writing or speaking.

About Murakami, his books are available in English and Portuguese translation. You could use the English translation, if you need it, as a "poor man's" parallel text. Read a chapter in Japanese, then read the same chapter in English, then back to Japanese again; or, as a check against comprehension for a difficult passage; or other combinations. It could also help, if you like the book, to read it again in a year or so in Portuguese, after you finish DLI .

[kujichagulia]

iguanamon, thanks for the reply!

About Murakami, his books are available in English and Portuguese translation. You could use the English translation, if you need it, as a "poor man's" parallel text. Read a chapter in Japanese, then read the same chapter in English, then back to Japanese again; or, as a check against comprehension for a difficult passage; or other combinations. It could also help, if you like the book, to read it again in a year or so in Portuguese, after you finish DLI .

That's a great point. Murakami does seem to have a lot of translations out there. Unfortunately やがて哀しい外国語 (Yagate Kanashiki Gaikokugo) doesn't seem to have a translation. However, if I enjoy this book, I'm definitely going to read more of Murakami's works, so having the English for parallel text purposes and rereading it in Portuguese are definitely things I am interested in doing!

[Zireael]

Murakami is really famous outside of Japan, so I assume やがて哀しい外国語 is either a very old book, before he was known, or a very fresh one since you're saying there's no translations.

[kujichagulia]

Well, the Portugal trip next month is cancelled for good. My wife and I have a pet rabbit, and when we travel, my mother-in-law takes care of him for us. However, my mother-in-law has been feeling tired lately, and she told us a few weeks ago that she won't be able to rabbit-sit for us in October. We looked into some pet hotels that can take care of rabbits but either (a) they don't take care of older rabbits, or (b) we don't trust the hotel enough to look after him. So, that's it. Not only are we not travelling in October, but I'm not even sure when we will be able to travel abroad again.

Ah, it's probably for the better. I think my passive Portuguese is at a high beginner level - listening to Brazilian news radio this morning, I was surprised at how many news stories I could get a basic gist of - but my active Portuguese is poor. I was doing some occasional self-talk to prepare for the Portugal trip, and it was painful to even have simple conversations. It's not too surprising, though, given that I never really spoke in Portuguese before doing those self-talk sessions. I was taken aback, though, by the gap between how much Portuguese I can understand passively and how much I can produce. That's something I'm going to attempt to correct in the near future, although if my schedule continues to be as hectic as it has been the past few months, that might be easier said than done.

[kujichagulia]

Hi, everyone! How are you? Long time no see!

As you can tell, I'm still very much alive and well. I'm not, however, really happy with my language journey over the last several months, as I have gone way off track, especially in Portuguese. I have not put in as much time studying languages as I used to. It's been a really minuscule amount of time - we're talking maybe 15 minutes a day if I'm lucky, and none on the weekend - and that little time has, for the most part, gone to improving my Japanese. I'm not going to get anywhere at that rate.

Why have I gone off track? I don't think it's one thing or another thing, more like many things that have come together and thrown me off track.

• I've never really adjusted to the change in schedule that came with my transfer to another school over one and a half years ago, including the reduced commute time (riding on the train was a great way for me to focus on my languages without distractions).
• I've never really been able to discipline myself enough to get a lot of studying done at home, with all of its distractions. And it's becoming harder to do so. My wife and I have started doing yoga at home every day after dinner and chores. Great for my health and marriage, not so great for my L2s.
• We go out a lot more on the weekend. My wife hates being at home nowadays, and she wants to get out more. She also wants me to come along. I am grateful that she wants to spend time with me - a lot of married couples end up not being able to stand each other - but at the same time I do wonder what I could do for my L2s if I had a lot of time to myself on the weekend.
• Of course, it's not all about my wife/marriage. I have other interests as well: sports, keeping up with news, reading, spending time with friends. I could do some or all of those things in my L2s, but I'm either too lazy or not willing or motivated enough to change things.

The good thing is that I'm now aware that I need to change things if I am serious about becoming fluent in Japanese and learning Portuguese to somewhat of a high level. I need to add more time to my daily studies. I'm still working out what to do and how to do it. I don't want to change things too fast; I want to slowly get into more of a serious routine, because it's a big change.

I also wonder if not regularly visiting this forum has added to my problems. I decided to take some time away from language-learners.org because I thought that it was becoming unhealthy for me. Let me explain. I see all of you amazing language learners, and you are disciplined and motivated. I know that I can do what you guys do, but I need to be able to do it in my own way and at my own pace. Unfortunately, sometimes when I'm here, I'm comparing myself to you guys. I'm thinking, Wow, I don't do that technique/study as many hours/I'm not into those books, but he/she is and why aren't I/etc./etc./etc. It became frustrating at times, and it interfered with what was a good study routine. I don't need to try to learn a language as fast as someone else, but it became a search to get to that point. That is when I decided to take a sabbatical from this site. I thought it would help me to refocus and study without feeling like I'm competing to be the best.

However, what I didn't realize is that I also get a lot of inspiration from this site. I see what a lot of you do and the passion you bring to it, and also the results (being able to communicate in another language), and that motivates me to keep going. So when I stopped coming here, I lost that motivation.

I hope that all made sense to you.

Anyway, I'm back, and I'm trying to find ways to make this forum work for me and not against me. I'm also trying to get back to a place where learning languages is a passion. It was for a couple of years, and I want to make it so again.

[MamaPata]

Sometimes a break (intentional or otherwise!) is exactly what you need to regain your motivation. I definitely understand what you mean about the forum - it can be very hard to balance that excitement for other people with the desire to compare your own progress to theirs. But you should remember that other people look at your log in the way that you do theirs! You have accomplished a lot in your language study and you should be proud of your successes.

[kujichagulia]

Sometimes a break (intentional or otherwise!) is exactly what you need to regain your motivation. I definitely understand what you mean about the forum - it can be very hard to balance that excitement for other people with the desire to compare your own progress to theirs. But you should remember that other people look at your log in the way that you do theirs! You have accomplished a lot in your language study and you should be proud of your successes.

Thank you for the comment, MamaPata! I'm not sure if people look at my log in the way that I do theirs, but if they do, I hope they can get something from it, although I'm not sure what. I think I write a lot about my struggles learning languages. I'm not sure how helpful that is to others; it's more of a way for me to vent.

You do make a good point about being proud of my successes. I often look at how far I have to go to reach my destination, but I often forget how far I've come. The big struggle for me - and it's always been that way - is to just not worry about how much ground I have to cover, and just put my head down and study consistently and everyday, with whatever time I can put into it.