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

[SGP]

In Japanese spaces, I usually go by リリー in Japanese people, and allow people to decide whether they want to add さん or ちゃん

Not sure about the meaning of "in Japanese people" in this sentence. Because it doesn't really seem to mean that リリー is "people" in Japanese. Looked it up, but didn't find any result of this kind. Side-note only: I am well aware of its (other) meaning.

So maybe it means "I would do it like this among Japanese people". Anyway, in case what you wrote isn't restricted to Japanese spaces and people, I would say the following.
"If I would be addressing you in JP in any future "guest post" in your log, I personally would tend to use the latter. That's what I would do when there has been some Forum Post Contact for a while, and also because of "in-group"."

What's more, I recently called the maker of AJATT "Khatzumoto-kun" a short time ago in a post, without having spoken to him even once.

As for how to kanjify my handle, I'm not sure. I think it would be best to find a yojijukugo which captures the intended meaning. But, this is probably the weakest area of my Japanese vocabulary, and I am not familiar with one.

As for a non-literal translation, I also was thinking that this would be the way it is usually done.
Any particular reason why you aren't familiar with this area?

And apart from that, I recently added a new tool to the toolbox. This means quoting "any" text, partially or even completely sometimes, marking some words, adding grammar notes and language-related observations below, etc. Among the first topics I plan to, so to say, study that way would be several Japanese song lyrics. But I couldn't expect you to always skim-through my log just because of the "maybe today there is something in JP, too" possibility. Needless to say, not expecting you to even read any of it, even if you did read some in the past. Long story short... whenever there is something that I consider important enough to you, too, I think I would simply visit your log once again and drop a few links.

[SGP]

Japanese lyrics quotations, notes, color-coding, starting with "Over the time dance" by EasyPop (100% pure JP, apart from the usual loanwords, but English title):
https://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=9263&start=130#p126881
and the three posts after that one.
______________
What aspects of Japanese learning, if any, could currently be a bit difficult or even impossible for you, if I may ask?

[devilyoudont]

In Japanese spaces, I usually go by リリー in Japanese people

Sorry, I have no idea what was going on when I wrote this. Probably was just tired. The goal was probably:

In Japanese spaces, I usually go by リリー.

"Japanese spaces" just meaning physical or digital spaces where Japanese is used.

Any particular reason why you aren't familiar with this area?

I just simply haven't prioritized it. The ones I know are the ones that I have come into contact with, more or less. Given how low my literacy is currently (reading books for second graders), there are a lot of other things to study right now that will give me "more bang for my buck."

I more or less try to follow all the logs of everyone who is learning any of my target languages. Sometimes I learn things from them, sometimes I am able to offer some clarification or encouragement to them. However, I may miss things as I don't visit the site every single day, or because I jump to the most recent page.

What aspects of Japanese learning, if any, could currently be a bit difficult or even impossible for you, if I may ask?

I don't consider anything to be impossible within the goals I have set for myself.

My personal goals are to learn Japanese well enough to talk about anything I'm interested in, follow along with things I am not interested in, and read books at an adult level. I don't have a goal of speaking without an accent or to never make grammatical errors or stuff like that. I am basically ok with having an accent and making small errors so long as they don't cause a complete communication breakdown.

Actually, this is my goal for all of the languages I am studying.

The biggest problem for me about Japanese right now is kanji. When I see a lot of kanji in a row with only a few particles scattered between my brain just seems to shut down. The most troubling part of this is that they don't need to be unknown kanji for me to just immediately enter into this defeatist mindset. I've become over-reliant on furigana as well. It's a lot easier for me to tackle something if it has furigana just on an emotional level. I am hoping to resolve this problem in the next year.

[SGP]

In Japanese spaces, I usually go by リリー in Japanese people

Sorry, I have no idea what was going on when I wrote this. Probably was just tired.

ハクナマタタリリーちゃん.

I more or less try to follow all the logs of everyone who is learning any of my target languages.

And I wish I could do the same.

Sometimes I learn things from them, sometimes I am able to offer some clarification or encouragement to them.

Same here. And especially for the logs of people with whom I share something like a Least Common Language Learning Determiner, I could read their logs more than those of others.

However, I may miss things as I don't visit the site every single day, or because I jump to the most recent page.

And there are some logs that could advance a bit faster. So... sometimes a short re-visit (providing a few links as well) really could make some sense.

I don't have a goal of speaking without an accent or to never make grammatical errors or stuff like that. I am basically ok with having an accent and making small errors so long as they don't cause a complete communication breakdown.

Still haven't got the slightest clue why some people require a native-like accent that could be really difficult to achieve sometimes.

A long time ago, I watched a YT video of someone starting to learn Spanish. Now one could say, "you made some interesting progress by gaining some ES momentum". But guess what one of those commenting said instead of that? "Couldn't you keep your German accent at home?" (literal translation).

And as for errors, what I am doing is to be very exact about, for example, not mixing up "watashi" and "anata". Alright... this example is too easy anyway, but I guess you get the picture.

On the other hand, using some Tarzan speech as in "using the infinitive as a conjugated verbs substitute whenever necessary" is something I don't even consider an error. And I do know that many people out there (especially outside of this forum) don't agree at all. But there is one thing I have in common with whoever said "Well I don't really care what people seh, I don't really watch what dem wan do". And this is simply not caring about things like these, while fully retaining politeness and my self-imposed Zero Bashing Policy. (This is about this particular saying only. As for the rest, including his saying's original context, there are some things I detest even. But not continuing to explain, because then, I would start an off-topic conversation).

The biggest problem for me about Japanese right now is kanji. When I see a lot of kanji in a row with only a few particles scattered between my brain just seems to shut down. The most troubling part of this is that they don't need to be unknown kanji for me to just immediately enter into this defeatist mindset. I've become over-reliant on furigana as well. It's a lot easier for me to tackle something if it has furigana just on an emotional level. I am hoping to resolve this problem in the next year.

Did you know that I only asked if there is anything difficult right now for the purpose of trying to find a solution? If you didn't, well, now you know .

The following ideas aren't all the same. Some possibly wouldn't be too useful for your own learning situation. But I am still mentioning them without omitting any of them. "Besser haben und nicht brauchen, als brauchen und nicht haben" is a principle I, sometimes, would stick to. It means, "It is better to have (something) and (then) not to need (it), than to need ((something) but not to have (it)".

- You could try to color-code these Kanji by drawing every radical in a different color

- Calligraphy. For a more intense emotional connection.

- There are symbols that we recognize at first glance, without any thinking process involved. Like the logos of well-known brands. Kanji are symbols, too.

- Esperantizing Kanji. (Intentionally using a very broad-scope term without any specific details, because there is more than just one way to interweave these two).

- Putting some Kanji labels on some of your everyday objects.

- Starting a dedicated Kanji notebook. I.e. one that doesn't contain anything else.

To be continued.

[SGP]

Some Remembering Kanji Strategies (part two)

- There is a reason why any individual Kanji is drawn like this and not drawn like that. Story. History. Background information.

- We already talked about radicals. But could there be something beyond them, too, related to the combination of everything that is included in a single (compound) Kanji?

- The pressure-less immersion and exposure approach. Do you know what I used to do when I started to be able to immerse Swahili words? I tried to develop a deep emotional connection to some of them, one by one. "Kinyonga" means chameleon. It is one of the words that I learned when still using flashcards (oh my... that was a long, long time ago). Looked at its picture. Listened to its pronunciation. Thought about the kinyonga as the "king of changing colors", even if usually what is called mnemonics didn't work for me very well at all.

So this is what I did maybe once or twice before it was "burned into my brain" (a feeble attempt of translating a German way of expression ). I could try as I may, but I don't know any way to "kick it out of my brain". Despite never having used it, and not having revised it for too many months.

- What if you could treat an individual Kanji like an individual letter, and a Compound Kanji (consisting of several parts) like a Latin Alphabet Word (which consists of several parts, too)?

[SGP]

Some Remembering Kanji Strategies (part three)

- Another strategy, which is something beyond the previous plain calligraphy hint: Drawing/painting the same Kanji using more than one drawing/painting technique. You could include the EN/EO translation as well.

- Drawing a certain subset of the Kanji you would like to learn over and over (as the time goes on, without any pressure or anything), without even trying to actively memorize it. I am currently learning about botany and the specification of plants using this technique (among others). Some say that trying to actively memorize something (which doesn't equal simply trying to remember it) blocks the mental process needed for the Recalling Ability. And while I don't fully agree with them, I also don't fully disagree either.

- Continuing to learn Esperanto, other languages, and even something entirely different like how orange blossoms (--> tea) compare to any of these: mint, cherry blossoms, ginseng, dandelion (a.k.a. "The European Ginseng"), guarana and cocoa. Dead Serious. #InterlinkingOfDifferentTopics

- Sometimes pausing (even if it is for a few hours only). This is called the Less is More Effect.

Right now, that's all that came to my mind.

[devilyoudont]

Rather than doing a regular log entry this week, I am going to expand on my new years resolutions for this year.

This week, I basically did all the normal stuff I usually do. But still feeling kind of under the weather, so I did a little less than normal.

This is kind of also a response to SGP's points above. I may end up incorporating some of your ideas (calligraphy is especially appealing to me) as I work out the bugs below.

2019 New Year's Resolutions

Japanese:
Learn all 2136 jouyou kanji.

My basic plan is this:
-I've already decided that next December I am giving myself a letter grade for this resolution, rather than considering it pass/fail. So if I make it thru 1800, I will consider that earning a "B" for this resolution.
-I have organized all jouyou kanji into order by grade level, and then by number of strokes.
---Most people do not study kanji in this order, and I personally have never tried it this way. However, I think there is a benefit to learning them in roughly the order that Japanese children do--I already know all kanji for grade 1 and 2, so right now I can pick up books for second graders. in the future, if I know all of the kanji for grade 1-6, I will be able to pick up books for sixth graders.
-Each week I will take the next fifty kanji on my list and generate flashcards for those kanji.
-I will break the kanji down into radicals, and move any kanji that is a component of the 50 kanji up the list.
---This should result in an average of learning 7 cards a day, and also give me several weeks of wiggle room, in case I get sick for a week and can't study that week, just need some extra time to blow thru some additional kanji at the end of the year, or need to take a mental health break.
-Cards will teach the Heisig keyword associated with the kanji, how to write the kanji, and it will create mnemonics out of the actual etymologies of the characters.
---Most methods revolve around creating your own mnemonics. However, I am apparently incapable of creating a memorable mnemonic. On the other hand, I can spend hours upon hours reading etymology dictionaries. So I am hoping to utilize my actual interests to my advantage here. I will include an image of the evolution of the character just to help me understand how the etymology connects to the current form.
-I have an old Core 10k deck that I will also be cannibalizing for this project. I have set up a second deck. When I add a kanji to the Heisig keyword deck, I will transfer the most relevant cards from the Core 10k to the kanji in context deck. Thru this, I will learn the important readings of a kanji thru the context provided by vocabulary words in full sentences. This deck is fully voiced by native speakers, and includes indications about pitch accent, so I will also be using this to continue my study of pitch accent.
-As much as I can, I am restricting the Kanji in Context deck to vocabulary items that are either in the 2000 most frequent words, or the most frequent word in the top 10k words that uses that kanji. This is in order to keep myself from going nuts while working thru the first bunch of grades which will have kanji like 中 which is just in tons and tons and tons of words in the top 10k.

I did a dry run this week to figure out how I wanted the cards to look, what info I wanted on the cards, etc etc. Because I spent a lot of time figuring out what info I actually wanted on the cards, it took much longer than it should have. Next week, I will be able to do the next fifty and figure out if this project is actually feasible within the parameters outlined above.

Spanish:
Choose a basic Spanish course. Complete the course.

Right now I am trying to decide between 3 courses:
-Assimil
-FSI
-NHK出版 これならわかるスペイン語文法 入門から上級まで

The last course would be for laddering Spanish thru Japanese. That textbook seems to be reasonably well respected for people doing self-study.

I am somewhat leaning towards Assimil since so many people in the community use it. I'm open to input on this. I can't imagine that I will do duolingo tho, because I've gotten bored and failed to continue with that course so many times.

Esperanto:
Create a better layout for my website, then translate the entire new site into Esperanto.

I used to like to draw comics (hopefully will again some day). So the end result of this would be (1)A better website layout which will allow me to more easily add things like a gallery, a store, links to versions in other languages (2)A layout which also would allow me to update site content easier and, most relevant for this thread, (3) A few short comics becoming available in Esperanto for free.

[SGP]

This is kind of also a response to SGP's points above. I may end up incorporating some of your ideas (calligraphy is especially appealing to me) as I work out the bugs below.

Whatever the outcome would be, looking forward to hearing about it.

Bug fixing? It would also be interesting to know how you would smash them, as soon as the time is ready.

A little anecdote: The first Computer Bug was, reportedly, a physical, non-metaphorical, biological one. I.e. an insect. A moth, to be more specific. It was found by a woman called Grace Hopper [yesss]. If what the German Wikipedia mentioned is true, the term itself has been used by engineers for a long time before that First Generation Computer even existed.

[SGP]

-Cards will teach the Heisig keyword associated with the kanji, how to write the kanji, and it will create mnemonics out of the actual etymologies of the characters.
---Most methods revolve around creating your own mnemonics. However, I am apparently incapable of creating a memorable mnemonic.

A similar non-issue [*] also prevented me from making too many "Big Jumbo-Sized Mnemonic Associations" when words in Spanish and other languages didn't start to stick yet. It sometimes really could take too long to make a new association. And copying or even, well, copycatting these of others wouldn't always be to useful either.

What I like to do instead (as one out of many tools) is to take advantage of those associations that chime in anyway without any effort on my part. They aren't far-fetched either, because they even start appearing "out of nowhere" from time to time.

[*] Writing it like that because of a positive mindset (but without any of the mindset-related exaggerations out there).

[SGP]

Spanish:
Choose a basic Spanish course. Complete the course.

Right now I am trying to decide between 3 courses:
-Assimil
-FSI
-NHK出版 これならわかるスペイン語文法 入門から上級まで

The last course would be for laddering Spanish thru Japanese. That textbook seems to be reasonably well respected for people doing self-study.

Some information about the FSI courses (not limited to Spanish):

- As it is no secret, they have been made for natives of English who decide to live abroad.

- Or more specifically, for a certain subset of them. I.e. they mainly were designed for diplomats and persons with a "similar" profession.

- So the words and phrases being taught are in accordance with their needs.

- Of course that doesn't mean that the course materials don't cover anything of interest to others as well.

- However, one should keep in mind that they are, somehow, dated. A non-official slogan, made up by one of the reviewers, is "Speak like a diplomat from 1961".

- A possible pro: They tend to be more comprehensive than some other courses.

- A possible con: "Fossilization" of, sometimes, outdated language use.