The Kuji Khronicles - JA, PT

[kujichagulia]

In order to slowly transition back into doing daily, consistent study for both of my languages, I thought it would be good to reevaluate my short-term goals and decide on a small number of activities to do.

JAPANESE
For input, I'm mainly going to continue what I've been doing with Japanese, even when I wasn't actively studying. I'm often on Twitter, and I follow Japanese-language and Portuguese-language feeds as well as English. Often, I'll read the tweets and sometimes click on a link leading to an article and read that. I'll use interesting articles for intensive study.

In addition, I'm going to get back into reading the articles at NHK News Web Easy. I'm now at a level where I can read the simplified news articles there and encounter 0-2 new words, and sometimes I don't even need a dictionary for those unknowns. The grammar at that level is not a problem, either. It's just about getting some exposure, solidifying the words and grammar that I've already learned, and keeping up with current events.

The only area where I have regressed in Japanese is listening, and I need to work on that. I'm trying to focus more on the TV when I'm eating breakfast in the morning. Also, at night I'm planning to go to the Yahoo News Japan website, where they have news videos with transcripts listed, and go through some of those.

For output, I want to get back into journal writing in Japanese. I plan to keep it simple at first: set the timer for 10 minutes and see how much I can write. If I can do that consistently, I'll think about raising the time to 15 or 20 minutes.

As for speaking, I do get daily opportunities to speak at least a little Japanese, but I want "sandbox" speaking time as well. What I mean by that is I want the freedom to make mistakes without pressure, play with the language out loud, etc. So I'm thinking of a way to do some self-talk at home, or "talking to the wall." I tried the Arekkusu method of self-talk before, and while I think the method is good, I think I need to tweak it to be a better fit for what I want to do. Let's see what I can come up with.

PORTUGUESE
Mainly, I will be pushing through the rest of the DLI Portuguese Basic Course. I just started Lesson 43 yesterday. My short-term goal is to finish up DLI Volume 5, and then do Volumes 6-8, which would conclude the course. (I just thought of something: why is the whole course called Basic? It starts teaching intermediate concepts from Volume 3.) If I do a little bit daily, I'm sure I could finish Volume 5 sometime in February, and, optimistically, I could probably finish off the entire course by the end of 2017.

The DLI course is pretty good for reading, listening, speaking and writing. However, being as the course was written over 40 years ago, I want to supplement that with some modern Portuguese. I want to get back into reading and listening to the news articles at NHK World. I'm going to continue listening to radio from Brazil and Portugal; even though I don't understand a lot of it, if anything, it keeps me motivated, which is important for me. And, like Japanese, I'm going to aim for journal writing and self-talk.

So, that's my attempt to keep things simple while still working on the four skills for both of my languages. Even this seems to be a lot, but if I can achieve just this, I'll be in a really good situation.

[kujichagulia]

I hope everyone had a good Christmas, and here's hoping you have an awesome New Year!

Here's an update on my battle to get back to quality consistent study. The last few days have been very slow at work, so I've had ample free time to work on my languages. I've been working through DLI Portuguese and reading news articles for both my languages. I've had a chance to go through my notes and clean things up a bit, putting interesting bits into Anki, reorganizing, and throwing out what I don't need anymore. I've had chances to write and some chances to do self-talk.

The bad part is that it's at work. Time is time, of course, but I don't think I'll be "back" until I can study in other places. I'm off work for a week from tomorrow. I'm hoping that, with more home time, I can get myself used to doing language activities there despite any distractions that may come up. It would be nice to begin the New Year with a system in place that helps me to accomplish what I want at home.

[kujichagulia]

OK, first of all, Happy New Year's! (Yes, it's quite late.)

Here's a quick update on my battle to get back to awesome consistency.

I'm starting to get better at studying at home. Right now my home routine is pretty simple for both of my languages. I'm trying to incorporate more writing into my study, so I begin my language time by writing a few lines in Japanese or Portuguese. I have a list of topics I choose from if nothing interesting happened that day. After that, if it's a Japanese night, I read an article or two, and jot down any interesting words/phrases. If it's a Portuguese night, I work on DLI.

Lately I have a little more time at work, so I can get a head start on some of those tasks in the office. That gives me more time at home to finish tasks or do something more relaxing like watch TV or YouTube, or listen to the radio, in my L2s.

That's pretty much all I seemingly have time for at the moment, but I'm hoping that once I get better at making use of my time at home, I can do more. It's a good start.

Oh, that's not all. I almost forgot... on days before my wife gets home, I do some self-talk while I'm doing chores. I think I have a good self-talk system; it seems to be working well so far. My goal is to speak for five minutes in the language. The first minute is a quick rundown of what happened that day, and the other four minutes are about a certain topic, usually from that same list that I use for my journals.

Self-talk is very unstructured. I'll just start talking, as if I'm talking to an imaginary friend. If I can't think of a word in Japanese or Portuguese, I'll just use the English word and continue on. If I have my phone or some paper nearby, I'll quickly record the English word that I didn't know the L2 word for. (Google Keep is amazing for this; it will transcribe what I say, although only in English.) I'll look up those words later on if I have time. If not, no worries.

Since I use the same topics for both writing and speaking practice, I get a lot of reinforcement. If I speak about a topic I already wrote about in my journal, then I can use words that I already looked up when I wrote. It works the other way, too: I can write using vocabulary words that I looked up after doing a self-talk.

That said, I don't always do self-talk when I can. Some days, I'm just stressed from work. Sometimes I'm cooking dinner and I really need to concentrate on the recipe (usually in Japanese), so I don't talk to myself. That's fine for now. Any practice is better than no practice, and I think I'll eventually get better at doing it more consistently.

[kujichagulia]

I've been battling a bit of wanderlust lately. It's ice hockey season, and my favorite team is the Montreal Canadiens. During the winter holidays, I watched a little of French news from Canada, which sometimes contains Canadiens highlights. It made me think, How cool would it be to be learning French right now?

It was probably a bad idea to watch French news videos, because lately I've had to fend off French wanderlust. I even thought about replacing Portuguese with French in my study routine, because I've had to battle motivation problems with Portuguese. One of the reasons I started learning Portuguese was because of an interest in Brazilian soccer, and that interest has waned a lot. (There doesn't seem to be a way for me to watch match highlights for games from Brazil.) Also, I haven't listened to much Brazilian music lately.

I actually made a decision after Christmas to at least take some time every week in 2017 to study French. But when January 1st arrived, I couldn't bring myself to do it. First, it's foolish trying to learn three languages at once when I can barely keep up with two. Second, I haven't reached a low intermediate level yet, but I've learned so much Portuguese. It would be a shame to throw that away, or even compromise my study time. I should see how far I can go in Portuguese. French can wait. Besides, if I learn Portuguese to a decent level, I'll get a discount when I do start to learn French. That's that.

Since then, my Portuguese motivation has actually shot up, thanks to two apps I downloaded: HelloTalk and Tandem. I actually tried those two apps some time ago on my iPad, but it was only connected to the Internet at home, and I didn't always have time to chat at home. Now that I have a smartphone, it's better because I can check messages anywhere and anytime, and I can keep conversations going. It's a great feeling actually communicating with people in Portuguese.

I haven't had much luck connecting with people on HelloTalk so far, but I've met some people on Tandem and have chatted with them. I'm really happy because, compared with when I used Tandem before, it's a little easier to chat in Portuguese. I'm thinking of words faster and typing faster, and I can understand the replies faster. I'm not sure how long I can keep using Tandem and HelloTalk, but I hope it's for a long time, especially if it is useful.

[kujichagulia]

Whats your thoughts on Tandem? Is it just a copy of HelloTalk or do they do something different? From their site, it looks like it more focused on speaking than messages.

Yeah, it is more focused on speaking. You can send messages to people just like in HelloTalk, but Tandem seems to quickly encourage you to move to video chat once you have made a connection with the other person. Of course, you don't have to, but that is definitely the focus of the app. For example, you can leave recommendations for a person on their profile for everyone to see... but only after you have had a video call with that person.

I haven't tried video calling yet because I haven't been able to make the time to sit down and chat with someone. It's pretty easy to send messages to someone on the train or at the office, but doing a video chat is another thing entirely. Anyway, so I can't comment on how good the video call feature is. HelloTalk has more features on its messaging service, such as a correction feature, transliteration for languages like Japanese and Chinese, translation, etc., although some of those require a subscription. You need a subscription to list more than one target language on HelloTalk as well, while in Tandem you can list as many as you want for free. You can't list in Tandem what level you are in a language (beginner, intermediate, etc.) like you can in HelloTalk, though.

At the moment, I use HelloTalk for Portuguese practice mainly because it's more focused on messaging, and also because I can send short audio messages from time to time, which is less taxing for someone at my level than video chat. It's pretty easy to find people in Brazil, and I can even filter it to find people in Portugal if I wish. I have Tandem running as well, though, for Portuguese and Japanese.

EDIT: I should say that, for some reason, all of a sudden I was able to connect with a lot of people from Brazil yesterday in HelloTalk, so now I'm chatting in Portuguese with people in both apps.

[kujichagulia]

An update:

Japanese
Lately I've begun my Japanese time each day by writing a journal entry. The length of it depends on how much time I have and how I feel, but the goal right now is to write an entry at least each of my Japanese priority days (which is basically every day except Tuesday and Friday). I've also started to put selected entries on Lang-8 for correction. I'm keeping up with my Anki reviews as well.

One thing that has been problematic lately is reading. At times, it's hard to muster the motivation to read something. Perhaps part of the problem is that lately my reading has been limited to news articles. I use NHK News Web Easy, for example, and the articles there are easy for me at my level. I only have to look up 1-3 new words, if any. However, the articles can sometimes be dry and uninteresting. I think I need to read other types of stuff, such as articles on Wikipedia, the stories at Hukumusume, etc.

The Murakami book I was attempting to read last summer... I really haven't touched it since the summer, because the book became both more difficult and more boring. However, I actually paid money for that e-book, so I feel like I should try to finish it. Perhaps the chapter I was reading before I stopped was just a difficult part of the book, and maybe it gets better from there.

Portuguese
I'm writing journal entries for Portuguese as well, although of course they are simpler. I'm putting those on Lang-8. In addition, I mentioned earlier about chatting in Portuguese on HelloTalk and Tandem.

I just finished Lesson 43 of DLI Portuguese Basic, apart from the Narrative. The Narrative sections of the lessons and I are not on good terms at the moment. Sometimes they are interesting and sometimes they are boring as heck. I've been reading and answering the questions for interesting ones and skipping boring ones. That's probably not good, but oh well. The Lesson 43 Narrative is about the history of mankind and their desire to fly, so this one sounds interesting.

I downloaded Duolingo on my phone and I've been going through the Portuguese courses. The grammar is way too easy in the lessons I'm currently doing, but I'm picking up some new vocabulary. For example, I was surprised to find out that I didn't know the Portuguese word for "apple." How about that.

I have a ton of reading material for Portuguese that I need to go through (some of them thanks to iguanamon!), but the main goal right now is to get through DLI. I think I have enough on my plate for Portuguese at the moment.

[kujichagulia]

For some reason, I find it odd that it is video chat and not just like calling them. I remember on HelloTalk that they really wanted the app to be only used for language learning, "This is not a dating app!!" kind of deal. Do you see anything like that on Tandem? Cool that you can list other languages for free. Do you do any chats in Japanese?

I'm not sure yet if it is only video chat, but on the message screen the button has an icon of a video camera and not a microphone, so I assume it is video chat. Maybe there is a way to do it audio only.

Tandem is strict about the app only being used for language learning as well. They also explain that it is not a dating app, and they also have to manually approve your application before you can start using the app (which took me only an hour).

I have not yet done any chats in Japanese. I was waiting to see if anyone would contact me, but I might need to take the initiative and contact them instead.

[kujichagulia]

Ugh... didn't do a lot of language study at all this past weekend. My Japanese study was limited to (at least) an hour of TV, while the only Portuguese I did was listen to a radio station out of São Paulo... and that station was mainly playing American pop songs. (It's the only station my wife will tolerate me listening to in the car when we go out, since there is little Portuguese.)

The reason why I didn't do a lot of language study is partly because of laziness, partly because of following the news out of the U.S. regarding the Trump inauguration, and partly because I spent a lot of time thinking about what I'm doing with my language studies. (I still do that waaay too much.)

I usually start my language studies each day (sans the weekend) by writing in my journal. It's nice and peaceful to write in my Portuguese and Japanese journals, but I'm wondering if I'm going about it the wrong way. First of all, I limit each writing to one day. What I mean by that is that I need to finish the writing the same day that I begin writing. So I'm writing on a new topic each day. The big problem I've noticed by doing that is that, even on days when I have time, I feel rushed. Writing in Japanese or Portuguese is a time-consuming process. Heck, I've been working on this post for 20 minutes already and I'm not finished. If it takes me this long to write something in English, I can't expect to write anything elaborate in a short time in my L2s.

Second of all, I start writing with the intention of limiting myself to 15 minutes or so, but in reality that never happens. I feel like I spend too much time on writing and not nearly enough time getting lots of exposure to the language. This is especially true for Portuguese, where my exposure is at an extreme minimum.

And still, even though I am spending more time than I would like with writing, my writings are still unsatisfactory. One of the reasons why I wanted to write was to increase my vocabulary by finding out what I would like to say in Japanese/Portuguese, but don't know how, and looking up those words later. However, I'm trying my best to think only in the L2 when I'm writing. When doing that, coupled with the fact that I'm sometimes rushing near the end of the day, I end up writing short entries that largely use words that I already know and don't really challenge me. Here are some examples (uncorrected, so if you see any mistakes, don't hesitate to let me know!):

* * * * *
JAPANESE
2017年1月12日(木)
TOPIC: 未来で何をしたいですか？(What do you want to do in the future?)
いろいろな言語が話せるようになりたい。今では日本語とポルトガル語を勉強していて、未来で他の言語も習いたい。
旅行ももっとしたい。行ったことがない国はまだ多いから。
私の仕事はいいだけど、私にもっといい仕事があるかなと思っている。But before that、日本語が上手にならなければいけない。

PORTUGUESE
terça-feira, 10 de janeiro de 2017
Está frio aqui hoje. Está ventando também. Ontem estava ventando também.
No trabalho não tinha aulas para dar. Ajudei um aluno com seu inglês. Ele quer ir aos Estados Unidos para estudar na universidade americana.
* * * * *

Luckily, I think the solution is easy for this type of problem. First of all, just stop trying to use writing as a way to expand my vocabulary. Let reading and other means do that for me. Simply let my journals function in the same way my personal journal in English functions: as a means to get my thoughts down on paper. It'll just be a simple output exercise and nothing more.

Second, don't worry about writing something new every day and trying to finish it the same day. Don't limit myself. If a writing takes a month to finish, so be it. Just write in a relaxed way.

At the same time, however, I really should limit the amount of time I spend on writing each day. I should use a timer and timebox my writing sessions, and focus more on getting exposure instead.

[kujichagulia]

Hehe... I've kind of gone the other way today with my writing. In other words, I didn't write anything today. That's fine.

Tuesday is Portuguese priority day, so I spent my free time at work working on the questions for the narrative in DLI Lesson 43. Oh... yes, I did write something today: the answers to those questions.

I get home late on Tuesdays because of English Club activities at my school. I made dinner for us, did household chores, exercised and took a bath. The plan was to do some more DLI before bed. However, people in Brazil started contacting me on HelloTalk and Tandem, so I spent time texting them. I've spent almost two hours texting some people, and I'm literally switching between using the two apps on my phone and typing this post on my computer. I must be really happy since I'm telling you all of this right now.

I think it's a lot of fun because it's easier for me to text in Portuguese now than it was when I first used those two apps last summer (I think it was last summer!). Not sure why that is, since my Portuguese study was really slow the second half of last year. Right now it's usually small talk, but I'm finding that I can think of what to say without using a dictionary most of the time. It's a great feeling.

Texting is fun right now, but the big challenge will be speaking. A lady on HelloTalk has just invited me to send audio messages in Portuguese during our next conversation. I'm worried about how I'll sound and if I can make myself understood, but it'll be interesting to see what happens. It's great to be able to use my Portuguese.

Anyway, gotta go to bed now. I should have been asleep an hour ago.

[kujichagulia]

I'm glad I'm starting to get some of that language-learning fire back! Looking through iguanamon's log and how he mentioned the TV shows he's watching, it makes me think, Man, I can't wait to be able to do that! But I know he and so many others put in the time and work to get to that point, so for me patience is key here. It's important to go slow and steady because when I think about the things I will be able to do in Japanese and Portuguese when I reach fluency, it causes frustration that I'm not there yet and I have so far to go, and that creates unnecessary stress. So, slow and steady. Slow and steady. Keep my eyes on the prizes that are within easy reach, and that will lead me to the prize down the road.

Last night, I sat down at the computer to work through the first episode of this YouTube series called Easy Japanese. It's by the same organization that makes a bunch of Easy (insert language) videos: Easy Spanish, Easy German and so on. So, I sat down to go through the video, but then my phone kept buzzing with messages from users from Brazil on HelloTalk and Tandem. It has come to the point where I'm getting so many messages that it's hard to reply to them all. I never thought I'd be so popular! Must be the handsome photo of myself I put up there. I had a silly decision: chat in Portuguese or watch a video in Japanese? Considering I had spent a lot of time on those two apps this week, I chose the video.

Anyway, back to Easy Japanese. Despite the name, it's not really easy for me to follow along without looking at the provided subtitles. I knew many of the words when I read them, and the interviewer is pretty easy to understand, but the people on the street speak in real time and very colloquially, so it's hard to understand. This made me wonder if I should do some targeted listening practice. My Japanese study routine lately has been just reading to build vocabulary, writing a few lines in my journal, and just going out in Japan.

When vocabulary and grammar are not issues, I can 100% understand a Japanese person speaking in real time in standard Japanese, like how you would hear a newscaster speaking. (Now that I think about it, any person studying any language at any level could say the exact same thing. ) But not many people talk like that; they speak more colloquially. I'm planning to do targeted listening practice with the Easy Japanese videos at home, and after that I want to find some other videos or audio in which people are talking colloquially.