Learning Japanese From Zero

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golyplot
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Re: Japanese listening from nothing: 2020 Log

Postby golyplot » Tue Jan 21, 2020 2:57 pm

I started Bunpro on Sunday. It seems pretty nice so far, though I haven't actually managed to learn anything with it yet.

Also, I read that Duolingo got a course update (the v3 tree) several months ago, so it is much better now, and the conventional wisdom that Duolingo is crap for Japanese is probably outdated. There's also a v4 tree in the works, but that's still unfortunately in beta testing. Anyway, I decided to try out the Duolingo Japanese tree to see what it's like. I was surprised that the placement test had word banks enabled, since there were a lot of questions I was able to guess, just based on what was in the word bank and the parts I knew. Anyway, I placed out of the first nine skills. I haven't gone much father yet, since I'm still trying to find a comfortable setup.

I recognized another word (important/taisetsu) while watching Sword Art Online. Though "recognize" isn't quite accurate. I saw "important" in the subtitles and listened to see if I could hear the reading I learned from Wanikani. Still, it's pretty cool to even be able to occasionally recognize words like that at all.

Speaking of Wanikani, I made a slight mistake on one of the kanji readings last night. Luckily, you only need 90% of kanji to advance, but it means I can only afford to make two more mistakes. On the last level, I made two mistakes but still leveled. It's pretty nerve wracking when reviewing level critical items. The stress seems like it might be counterproductive to me, but on the other hand, Wanikani is boring enough even when you're leveling at full speed, at least for the early levels. So far, Wanikani is the most effective learning tool I've found, and I can't wait until I can understand more of the kanji. I just wish it wasn't so slow at the beginning.
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dicentra8
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Re: Japanese listening from nothing: 2020 Log

Postby dicentra8 » Tue Jan 21, 2020 8:18 pm

golyplot wrote:I recognized another word (important/taisetsu) while watching Sword Art Online. Though "recognize" isn't quite accurate. I saw "important" in the subtitles and listened to see if I could hear the reading I learned from Wanikani. Still, it's pretty cool to even be able to occasionally recognize words like that at all.

I just had the opposite experience. Seeing the english word in a subtitle, my brain expecting one word and then being confused because I wasn't hearing it. Basically I've been watching Terrace House and they were reapeating a lot questions like "what are you going to do this weekend? Do you have anything planned for this weeekend?". The first word that came to my mind was 週末(shuumatsu) but they weren't saying it. :x Luckily they repeated those questions so often that at some point my brain picked 土日(donichi) and had this eureka moment! Both those words can mean weekend but 土日 is literally just the two days (Saturday and Sunday) while 週末 includes Friday to its meaning. And now I'll probably never forget it! *fingers crossed* :lol:
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golyplot
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Re: Japanese listening from nothing: 2020 Log

Postby golyplot » Wed Jan 22, 2020 1:29 am

dicentra8 wrote:I just had the opposite experience. Seeing the english word in a subtitle, my brain expecting one word and then being confused because I wasn't hearing it.


I haven't been bothered too much by that since I know there's so many synonyms and different ways of saying things that I can't expect it to always match what I've learned. Heck, there are some cases where I've already learned multiple words for the same thing on Wanikani. It's the rare exceptions where I do recognize it that make me happy.
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golyplot
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Re: Japanese listening from nothing: 2020 Log

Postby golyplot » Wed Jan 22, 2020 3:38 pm

I think I'm dangerously close to transitioning from the initial excitement phase to the stage of disillusionment. It's a really good thing I have Wanikani, which forces me to stick to a rigid schedule and continue making progress, even when it feels like I'm not getting anywhere with Japanese.

Speaking of which, I sort of cheated on Wanikani this morning. I got paranoid about making mistakes on level-critical items and missing a level up and started writing them down. I check them periodically to confirm my memory, but it never felt like cheating before, because I always remember them perfectly anyway. It's just an additional safety against making mistakes. This morning, I misremembered the reading for one of the kanji and would have gotten it wrong if I hadn't "cheated" by checking my answer first.

So I'm not sure how to feel about it now. On the one hand, it kind of did it's job. On the other hand, it's kind of cheating. Though ultimately, I don't think it'd matter, since I'd still have leveled up as long as I got through the final round in two days with at most one mistake (now I can afford two mistakes). Also, there's the argument that bypassing the SRS process like that might interfere with learning, but on the other hand, the hard part with Wanikani is simply leveling up and thus unlocking the items, and I figure once I've unlocked them, I can let the SRS work its normal magic. Plus it's not like anyone strictly sticks to Wanikani's schedule anyway, since at least for common words, you might see them elsewhere in between reviews anyway. And I doubt that the intervals are perfectly calibrated either. But it's an interesting philosophical debate.
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golyplot
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Re: Japanese listening from nothing: 2020 Log

Postby golyplot » Thu Jan 23, 2020 5:41 am

In honor of learning "ice"/koori on Wanikani, I decided to listen to Let It Go again to see how many times I could recognize the word. I don't know how many times it appears in the lyrics, but I managed to recognize it once, possibly twice. Still, it's notable that I managed to recognize a word without the assistance of subtitles at all, even when specifically listening for it.
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golyplot
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Re: Japanese listening from nothing: 2020 Log

Postby golyplot » Sun Jan 26, 2020 5:40 am

As expected, I hit level 5 on WK Friday morning, and with it, a massive wall of reviews and lessons. One of the flaws of WK's design is that it leads to reviews clumping up at specific times and days and particularly the time when you level up. I wish they'd adjust the intervals a bit to reduce clumping. Also, when you level up, you have a massive amount of lessons you have to do all at once in order to get to the new radicals and begin progressing towards the next level.

I decided to try find a way to reorder lessons so that I can just do the radicals when leveling up and spread out the rest of the lessons over a week, instead of having to do an entire level's worth of lessons in just an hour or two. That should make the next level up a lot less punishing. I know there's user scripts to do this, but I don't want to have to install anything, and besides, it's more fun to do things yourself. So I looked at the code for the reorder userscript today and figured out how to manipulate the lesson queue myself from the Javascript console. It's a pain to do by hand, but I'll only have to do it once a week anyway.


Apart from that, I reread the MIA manifesto and got inspired, so I decided to try Peppa Pig again and watched four shorts today. I still pretty much can't understand anything they say, but MIA says that you are still learning subconsciously even if it feels like you don't understand anything, so hopefully that's still helpful. I decided to watch at least one Peppa short every day to develop my listening skills. At least its nature as a cartoon for preschoolers means that it's easy to follow the plot even if you don't understand anything they're saying.

I've also continued watching Sword Art Online but that's more for entertainment than learning, since I watch it with subtitles. Still, I can recognize bits of the dialog increasingly often. I usually consider watching stuff with subtitles to be worthless when it comes to developing listening comprehension, but ironically, it seems like it might actually be the best way to learn right now.


I also gave up on Bunpro a while back, but I plan to give it another try soon. I figure I might as well try it out while my free trial is still going.
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golyplot
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Re: Japanese listening from nothing: 2020 Log

Postby golyplot » Tue Jan 28, 2020 2:18 pm

I've heard Yotsuba is often recommended for beginners, but none of the libraries near me carry Japanese manga (only the English translations). Luckily, I came across bilingualmanga.com, which even has a convenient language toggling hotkey. I'm not sure how it is able to stay up, but I figured I might as well take advantage of it.

Unfortunately, it turns out that I wasn't able to read any of Yotsuba, despite it being comparatively easy. I think writing everything in kana instead of kanji actually makes things harder to read. I guess what I really need is something with simple sentences that is annotated with all the grammar explanations.
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golyplot
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Re: Japanese listening from nothing: 2020 Log

Postby golyplot » Thu Jan 30, 2020 3:58 am

Time for a bit of a rant:

To date, I've learned 168 kanji and 323 vocabulary items on Wanikani, but I still basically can't read anything and can only occasionally understand an individual word in spoken Japanese. I'll admit that it has been frustrating and disheartening, but while WK isn't sufficient for understanding, it does seem to be necessary.

While doing Lingodeer or reading examples in Tae Kim's guide or whatever, I've found that they are much easier to understand if I've already learned the kanji on WK. This phenomenon isn't limited to Japanese, or even to language learning. I've seen it in math, or playing games, or any sort of skill. You can try to read an advanced math topic by looking up the component definitions, and the definitions of the terms those definitions use and so on all the way down, but it won't do you any good. We can only keep a few things in our minds at once, so in order to handle more complex problems, we have to first learn the individual components until they are second nature. I think this is also what makes Japanese so hard to learn. It's not the kanji or the unfamiliar grammar or whatever attributes people trot out when talking about how difficult languages are. It's all of them together. When you have to learn everything from scratch, it's like an interlocking set of obstacles which must be tackled simultaneously, and that's easier said than done.

Anyway, one aspect I've been particularly struggling with on Bunpro is verb conjugation. I think this is partly Bunpro's fault. For some reason, they saw fit to make kore/sore/are/kono/sono/asono/koko/soko/asoko/etc. individual grammar points, yet they decided to throw an entire conjugation chart under the label of "ru verbs" as a single grammar point, despite consisting of more things you have to remember than all the other points put together.

At any rate, I've been reading various pages about grammar in the hope that if I bang my head against the wall enough times, it will absorbed into my head (how's that for a metaphor? :) ), and I came across this page, which seemed particularly helpful. It's an example of what I was talking about earlier. Before, "godan" and "ichidan" were meaningless gibberish, but now that I know they of course mean "five steps" and "one step" and can connect them to the already learned meanings of five and one, I'll never forget them.


Edit: New milestone: I finished my first Peppa Pig video (63 minutes in total). I've been watching at least one episode every day in hopes that it will subconsciously improve my listening comprehension skills.

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golyplot
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Re: Japanese listening from nothing: 2020 Log

Postby golyplot » Fri Jan 31, 2020 3:59 pm

ロータス wrote:No grammar explanations but here are some free graded readers:
https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/ ... s_into_an/
https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/ ... df_merged/



I haven't been posting much lately, since there's relatively little to talk about. I reached level 6 on WK this morning as expected. I used the Javascript console to do only the radical lessons this time which worked perfectly. Now I have 104 lessons remaining to spread out over the next three days.

I read the first 50 pages or so of the graded reader ロータス posted, but it didn't seem particularly helpful. (Note for those not familiar with it: This is far less impressive than it sounds because what it really means is "I looked at 50 pictures and some corresponding captions"). I did learn in the process that some green things are called blue, and I learned the word for black (kuru).

I understood a couple sentences in a Peppa Pig episode I watched this morning, though mostly by context and knowing one or two words in the sentence. I couldn't transcribe them or anything. Still, hopefully this means I'm slowly improving.
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golyplot
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Posts: 1726
Joined: Mon Jan 16, 2017 9:41 pm
Languages: Am. English (N), German, French, ASL (abandoned), Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Japanese (N2)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=12230
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Re: Japanese listening from nothing: 2020 Log

Postby golyplot » Sun Feb 02, 2020 3:31 am

This morning I watched a Japanese Ammo video I found linked from Reddit where she breaks down a scene from Sword Art Online and explains several sentences of dialog in detail. It made me realize just how far beyond my level it actually is, which was pretty disheartening. Which got even more depressing when I happened to come across an old journal entry where I mentioned watching Black Mirror dubbed in Italian (with no subtitles) only two and a half weeks after starting Italian, and understanding a lot of it.

In my head, I knew all along that Japanese is a cat4 language and it is totally unfair to compare it to the easy cat1 languages, and that this was only to be expected all along, but I wasn't really prepared for it in my heart. It's hard not to give up at times like this. On the bright side, I'm sure my mood will once again shift, and as long as I keep going, I can't really fail anyway.

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