Not all those who wander are lost

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sfuqua
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1642
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 5:05 am
Location: san jose, california
Languages: Bad English: native
Samoan: speak, but rusty
Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Fri Apr 28, 2023 4:52 am

I'm getting frustrated with Manjaro Linux Japanese language support.
I installed it and got it working after a several hour struggle. :shock:
I blindly followed different instructions about how to do it, and eventually came up with the right steps. :?
Many of the instructions were things like, "Try this." or "You might want to try this." This does not seem to be a common thing to do with Manjaro.
Mecab doesn't seem to want to compile with my system. Japanese dictionaries don't seem to want to install.
Now it doesn't work, and I can't figure out how to make it work. I haven't spent hours on it; I am getting ready to install another Linux distribution. Apparently Ubuntu does it easily. I am backing up files to do a reinstallation in the morning. I'm going to try to change the desktop environment to Gnome first, which I have heard makes the whole process easier. :o

Perhaps I have messed up my system somehow. Perhaps I am too stupid and uncool for Linux these days. I am quite sure, however, that I was using Linux well before many of the cool kids were born. :lol:

I should be well qualified; I mean, I once ate at the same restaurant as Linux Torvalds. Heck, I once stood next to Linus Torvalds and watched squirrels at the zoo for five minutes. I was even cool enough not to say anything to him 8-)
I walked by Dennis Ritchie in a hotel hall once. A friend of mine dated a friend of Kirk Mckusick. I mean, why can't I make the d**n Japanese IME work on my system?

It's time to give up and go to bed. Maybe it will be easy in the morning. :lol:
8 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

User avatar
sfuqua
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1642
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 5:05 am
Location: san jose, california
Languages: Bad English: native
Samoan: speak, but rusty
Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
x 6299

Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Tue May 02, 2023 4:57 am

I probably got my Manjaro Linux system corrupted with a couple of bad updates, and I wasn't giving it enough love to fix it.
I reinstalled Manjaro, this time with gnome, and it seemed to install less default software. I like that. Getting Japanese support to work was a miserable process again, but it is working now.
I got it running fairly fast whenever I just looked at the list of software to install, installed each one and tried to figure out how to configure each and it started working. Japanese support for Linux involve software from different places that have to work together, Since these packages are changing sometimes, the advice online often is not applicable.
Given how the whole system works together (quite nicely I must say, once it works), I think that somebody should write a more general explanation about how it all works, rather than the specific instructions about what to edit where.

Some people get everything working easily, many do not. I was one of the latter.

Japanese is still going well. I freaked a kid out by reading what his sweatshirt said today. I love the thrill whenever I can read something.

I'm doing cards now that have actual Japanese on them. You know learning to pronounce them and what their meaning is. This is slow, but not impossible. It was impossible six weeks ago. I'm improving rapidly, but the it's 日本語 and it is hard.

Today was miserable. I spent two and a half hours grinding on anki cards. I know some of you do more than that, but I get tired after an hour or so, and I'd rather watch my silly JDrama;

Drama: The Full-Time Wife Escapist (English title) / We Married as a Job (English title) / Runaway is Ashamed But Helpful (literal title)
Romaji: Nigeru wa Haji da ga Yaku ni Tatsu
Japanese: 逃げるは恥だが役に立つ


This show has too many titles in English

This show is strangely profound in its insights as it continues along in its silly way.

Of all the media I've watched, this show seems to be the one that all of my friends in Japan have seen, and most everybody likes it even if they haven't seen it.

One of my " Japanese" friends turns out to actually be Chinese. She grew up in China, and fell in love with anime. She said that it was hard to get anything translated in those days (35 years ago), so she decided she would learn Japanese. She went to college in Japan and got married to a Japanese guy after college and it's three decades later. She says that her interest in anime transformed her life. She adores Japanese and she admires Japan, but she doesn't really watch anime anymore. Too bad :-)

I think that pounding away at anki is having good effects on my brain in many ways. Maybe it is just because after Japanese anki, everything else seems easier than rememberint that 進 breaks down into 隹: bird; turkey and 辶: walk; road; way and that these combine to mean advance.

I love it, however.
8 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

Lawyer&Mom
Blue Belt
Posts: 980
Joined: Sun Mar 04, 2018 6:08 am
Languages: English (N), German (B2), French (B1)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=7786
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby Lawyer&Mom » Tue May 02, 2023 2:35 pm

You know there’s a Japanese bookstore in San Jose, right?

https://usa.kinokuniya.com/stores-kinokuniya-san-jose

We have one in Seattle too, I may learn Japanese after Korean just for the thrill of a local bookstore!
3 x
Grammaire progressive du français -
niveau debutant
: 60 / 60

Grammaire progressive du francais -
intermédiaire
: 25 / 52

Pimsleur French 1-5
: 3 / 5

User avatar
sfuqua
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1642
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 5:05 am
Location: san jose, california
Languages: Bad English: native
Samoan: speak, but rusty
Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
x 6299

Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Tue May 02, 2023 11:34 pm

I've been there a few times. I need to go back, because my reading is opening up more each day.
It too k a little ng time for me to see progress with Japanese but it seems to have finally started. I always enjoy language learning at the stage where thing that you study start to snowball. Learning this helps you learn that and so forth...
I'm doing great with Japanese, after 8 months, i at the stage that i was in Spanish after 8 days
8 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

User avatar
sfuqua
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1642
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 5:05 am
Location: san jose, california
Languages: Bad English: native
Samoan: speak, but rusty
Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
x 6299

Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Tue May 09, 2023 4:22 am

Tatsumoto https://tatsumoto.neocities.org/ describes a step called "Kanji fluency" when kanji stop looking like a bunch of spaghetti thrown against the wall, and start to look meaningful.
He claims that it happens at about the 1000 kanji level, and implies that there is not need to continue kanji study at that point, one can start studying words and sentences.
I'm probably somewhere around that point, since I've started to see meaning "half-baked" very time I look at something in kanji. It would be nice if I could start to pronounce some of these things. I'm starting to work on it.
Even though Jlab https://www.japanese-like-a-breeze.com/ advocates learning a couple of thousand words with romaji before trying to learn kanji forms, I have been working with furigana versions lately and it seems to be working to speed up my reading. I may go back to romaji it things slow down too much. I am using kana and kanji is a couple of other decks, and I continue my separtate kanji study.
I have been through my cycle of increasing my new card number and then crashing again, For me at least, the secret for Japanese is limiting my new cards a day down to a comfortable level.

I have started to develop a bit distaste for many of the card types that show up from some of the big card decks. Not the material itself, but the style of deck. Just because you can do something with javascript or complex css doesn't mean that you should. Some of these cards have multiple steps to do on the front of the card and on the back, and I just think this is wrong.
It makes the card slow, and it makes it complex to decide if you pass it or not.

For my taste, one should make each of the steps a separate card. You can make a bunch of siblings that are fast and easy and probably learn and review them in the time it would take to do one of the more complex cards.

I have been doing a lot of cards lately that were created from subs2srs decks. One deck I'm going right now has a focus on common vocabulary words, and another ocuses on grammar, but each of the cards has an audio file from the original video, andeach has a picture. All of this is good, but I tend to get a little lost admiring pictures sometimes (I remember that. That was just before Hina...), which slows me down.

There is a lot of Japanese to learn, and I like cards that are fast to review.
6 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

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PeterMollenburg
Black Belt - 3rd Dan
Posts: 3229
Joined: Wed Jul 22, 2015 11:54 am
Location: Australia
Languages: English (N), French (B2-certified), Dutch (High A2?), Spanish (~A1), German (long-forgotten 99%), Norwegian (false starts in 2020 & 2021)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=18080
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby PeterMollenburg » Thu May 11, 2023 12:40 am

sfuqua wrote:I'm doing great with Japanese, after 8 months, i at the stage that i was in Spanish after 8 days


I know the feeling... Yesterday evening I was shadowing full (simple) Spanish conversations. I feel like my level of Spanish after four days coursework is equivalent to my perhaps one year or more of on again off agan Norwegian. At least you have an excuse with Japanese, sfuqua! It's a Cat 5? language, from memory. Meanwhile, Norwegian is a Cat... ummm... sorry, gotta run, people to meet, places to be! Keep up the hard work on your JP, sfuqua! Maybe one day you might be ready to tackle the mountain that is Norwegian!! :lol:
4 x

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tastyonions
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby tastyonions » Thu May 11, 2023 1:25 am

PeterMollenburg wrote:
sfuqua wrote:I'm doing great with Japanese, after 8 months, i at the stage that i was in Spanish after 8 days

I know the feeling... Yesterday evening I was shadowing full (simple) Spanish conversations. I feel like my level of Spanish after four days coursework is equivalent to my perhaps one year or more of on again off agan Norwegian. At least you have an excuse with Japanese, sfuqua! It's a Cat 5? language, from memory. Meanwhile, Norwegian is a Cat... ummm... sorry, gotta run, people to meet, places to be! Keep up the hard work on your JP, sfuqua! Maybe one day you might be ready to tackle the mountain that is Norwegian!! :lol:

The discount going from English to other Germanic languages is definitely less than moving between Romance languages, imo.

Norwegian definitely tempts me. I even have the Assimil course and Story of Nils sitting on my bookshelf untouched. Greek still has its hooks in me for the time being, though.
5 x

User avatar
PeterMollenburg
Black Belt - 3rd Dan
Posts: 3229
Joined: Wed Jul 22, 2015 11:54 am
Location: Australia
Languages: English (N), French (B2-certified), Dutch (High A2?), Spanish (~A1), German (long-forgotten 99%), Norwegian (false starts in 2020 & 2021)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=18080
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby PeterMollenburg » Thu May 11, 2023 1:51 am

tastyonions wrote:
PeterMollenburg wrote:
sfuqua wrote:I'm doing great with Japanese, after 8 months, i at the stage that i was in Spanish after 8 days

I know the feeling... Yesterday evening I was shadowing full (simple) Spanish conversations. I feel like my level of Spanish after four days coursework is equivalent to my perhaps one year or more of on again off agan Norwegian. At least you have an excuse with Japanese, sfuqua! It's a Cat 5? language, from memory. Meanwhile, Norwegian is a Cat... ummm... sorry, gotta run, people to meet, places to be! Keep up the hard work on your JP, sfuqua! Maybe one day you might be ready to tackle the mountain that is Norwegian!! :lol:

The discount going from English to other Germanic languages is definitely less than moving between Romance languages, imo.

Norwegian definitely tempts me. I even have the Assimil course and Story of Nils sitting on my bookshelf untouched. Greek still has its hooks in me for the time being, though.


In truth, most of the early dialogues from Destinos An Introduction to Spanish were in my memory banks like the lyrics to rap songs I learnt by heart 20 years ago. Little effort was needed to bring this 'stored data' back when listening to the Destinos video and audio content again. Not to mention more accumulated hours learning Spanish up to this point compared to Norwegian. Yeah, I wasn't honest in my last post, but it was mainly in jest. I also haven't been a great example of a consistent language learning student with Norwegian, for various reasons.

With Spanish, due to my French, previous Spanish learning, and simpler phonetics (compared to Nor), I feel like a bull at a gate, bursting through and taking off. Whereas, Norwegian requires careful methodical study of the tonal phonetics. With Nor, I'm only just getting into my second past tense, while with Spanish, despite only starting now, I have knowledge and a better feel for the various tenses. Also, Spanish is an absolute joy with Destinos (imo, the best language course ever developed). The Mystery of Nils is fun, but it can't compare to Destinos. So, an unfair comparison...

Norwegian might seem much easier once the Spanish subjunctive rears its ugly head.

Combining Assimil's Le norvégien with The Mystery of Nils, as well as a good dictionary at hand, Norwegian isn't difficult, only tedious where pronunciation is concerned if you wish to sound more like a local. If you have some time, have a dabble and see where it takes you!
4 x

User avatar
sfuqua
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1642
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 5:05 am
Location: san jose, california
Languages: Bad English: native
Samoan: speak, but rusty
Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Sat May 13, 2023 5:49 am

Well, I actually think that Japanese is going to speed up quite a bit from here on.
The Japanese writing system is a beast, but it has advantages once one can get to an advanced level. I was so busy whining about how hard kanji are to notice the real advantage of them. Once you are familiar with a thousand kanji and the radicals that make them up, you never see anything written in kanji that doesn't have meaning. It is very different than a language written in an alphabet. If you are looking at a page full of kanji, you see a sea of meaning rather than the simple jumble of shapes you see with an alphabetic language, where you are looking at stuff way over your head.
Let me rephrase this. A page of unknown words in kanji looks much friendlier than a page of Russian.

Anyway, it feels to me that a lot of things about my Japanese are starting to fall into place. I don't mean to claim any sort of amazing breakthrough, but it is starting to feel like Japanese is a regular language instead of a puzzle.

(Japanese bosses are forbidden from reading the stuff below)

One of the wonderful things about studying Japanese has been the great people I have met online. Many people in Japan would love to improve their English, and they are willing to do informal or formal language exchanges. I'm actually so much worse than them that it is usually way more in English than it is in Japanese. My Japanese is still pretty much nonexistent in a productive direction. I think I have helped a couple of people a lot, more by activating what they already know than by really teaching anything. Anyway, they are way smoother than they were. I have always shied away from living in Japan, mostly because it seems to me that Japanese people work too long and too hard. I am kind of surprised to discover that a lot of Japanese folks seem to agree. A whole bunch of Japanese folks are unhappy with their lives. They are unhappy, and they don't see any way out. Maybe this is just some of the folks I have been talking with, but it is a theme that comes up pretty frequently.

I have been particularly amused by some of the stories of rebellion in the workplace that come up.

Japanese workplace, no talking and no cell phones rule, when the boss looks away, people compete to hold up the funniest picture. Boss looks back, every one is hard at work. When the boss looks away again, people vote for the best picture. The boss looks back and sees his hardworking, concentrating crew, 100% on task.

One guy worked at a place where someone had a blog online about the idiocy of the company's process for developing their next software product. The guy I talked to wasn't sure that anybody outside the company actually read the thing even though it was available to the whole Internet. The blog was funny and many of the people in the company read it every day. The blog also included reports on who was sleeping with whom, and which boss was doing what in their spare time. Some of these reports were even true. The company was infuriated and went to great effort to question everybody and find the evil blogger. This amused everybody, even if they thought the blogger was in idiot.

This all sounds a lot like middle school kids, and most Japanese folks just suggest that they are tired and need a vacation, but there seems to be growing frustration with the hard-working Japanese lifestyle.

Maybe it is just friends making up stuff to amuse their anarchistic American friend.

Japanese folks are very cool, and I'm glad to have gotten to know some new friends.
10 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

User avatar
sfuqua
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1642
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 5:05 am
Location: san jose, california
Languages: Bad English: native
Samoan: speak, but rusty
Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
x 6299

Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Sun May 21, 2023 4:57 am

OK, for some reason, somewhere in the system a huge post of mine just went away. :o
Maybe it was a good thing. This shorter post will waste less of your time. :D
Some of the cards in the anki decks made from subs2srs cards have been giving me trouble lately.
It is not useful to learn the "car crash sound" is how you pronounce 何. I will know forever more that "car crash sound" means "what".
I think there are just some bad cards in the course. :shock:
I am going to gradually decrease my number of new kanji a day and increase my cards from my grammar and vocab subs2srs decks. As I understand studying kanji by themselves will become less and less useful over the next thousand cards.
I don't think I explained why I think a page of unknown Japanese looks friendlier than a page of unknown Russian.
With the Japanese(or Chinese), the very shape of the characters will give you a lot of hints about what it all means.
With the Russian, a page of unknown words gives you a lot of hints about how it all sounds.
The meaning is actually more transparent with the Japanese once you know the kanji. :D

I feel I am floundering with Japanese grammar right now; I have a lot to learn, and the material that I have been using isn't teaching it very well. I've got to read a grammar book and do some exercises to get myself and overview of the grammar. :?

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt24059730/ :D
One of the most successful shows in Tagalog in history, Ang Probisyano, ended recently, and I think everybody took a vacation, but they are back now with a new show, Some of the same actors are back with a new show, that I like it a lot.
Batang Quiapo is actually shot in Quiapo, and it is great fun to see streets and places where you have walked show up in a show. Coco Martin the big star again and of course there is the usual teleserye issue of unknown partentage and plenty of running around fighting and shooting. Drug deals and pickpockets and poor girl abused at rich kids school where she got a scholarship. And through it all there is the story arc of the unknown father and son slowly figuring finding each other.

Now it is at least as silly and full of melodrama as most soap operas are, but this show is different because it actually looks like Manila because it is shot in Manila in the neighborhood where it is supposed to be happening. It is all familiar if you live there, from the religious processions to the pickpockets. The show would be a good way to learn about urban life in the Philippines even if you ignore the plot. :lol:

Another nice thing about the show is Lovi Poe, an actor that I have never seen a series before. She is a lovely young woman, who plays her role well, and she has a characteristic that makes it impossible for me to take my eyes off her. Maybe she just moves her head and smiles and frowns like my wife (who is a Filipina), but I think it is more than that. Different nationalities have characteristic ways of doing expressions, from a tilt of the head when teasing to a lowered chin when angry or whatever. I think Lovi is a beautiful sum of the way Filipinas move and act. If somebody had to pretend they were a Filipina and wanted to get the characteristic way of standing, smiling, moving, crying, teasing, and threatening, well watching Lovi Poe move and act would be a good way to learn about how to do it. She is especially good at the typical expressions used when correcting a man who is being stupid.
Anyway she is wonderful. :D
Japanese reps and cards as of 5/20.:
15982 : 15982 / 100000 100000 reps
1059 : 1059 / 10000 10000 cards
5 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...


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