Japanese and Chill

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devilyoudont
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Re: Japanese and Chill (Also Wanderlust Chaos)

Postby devilyoudont » Sun Aug 16, 2020 9:13 pm

Just a quick update. I have mainly still been continuing on my current path of only engaging in languages for fun.

With Japanese, I've been watching 鋼の錬金術師 without any subtitles. This is my favorite anime TV show, and I've watched it 2x previously over the last ten years. I think under normal circumstances, this show would be too challenging for me. But, since I've seen it before, but not enough to have more than a general idea of what is happening in each scene, this is winding up being pretty good listening practice for me. I have continued to play Temtem in Spanish and watch 우리, 사랑했을까 in Korean. As always, I mainly use Esperanto to chat with friends, but I also read thru something short which someone had translated to Esperanto, and gave them my feedback. A friend talked me into messing with Dutch a little bit, and I am starting to use Toki Pona for sitelen sitelen. Here's a drawing I did using sitelen sitelen characters:

Image

I am aware that I can't keep juggling all these languages and messing around just for fun. My plan at the moment is to allow myself to continue this way, not particularly studying, looking at whatever takes my fancy until September 1st... after which point I will evaluate if my burnout has sufficiently subsided/return to a plan which only includes Japanese, Esperanto, and Spanish for a while. I haven't quite worked out what this plan will be, but it will probably involve Japanese every day, and Esperanto and Spanish on specific days. (besides helping out komencantojn because I love doing that). I figure that if I want to continue messing around with sitelen sitelen, my level of toki pona will be good enough after another 2 weeks that I do not need to put time into studying it anymore, and can just use it for art projects.
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devilyoudont
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Re: Japanese and Chill (Also EO, ES, & KO depending on mood)

Postby devilyoudont » Tue Sep 01, 2020 12:14 am

Starting tomorrow I will be trying to get back to my normal schedule.

Normal schedule is going to look like this for me going forward: Japanese everyday, dedicated time once a week for Esperanto, Spanish, and Korean.

Japanese:
Mostly I have just been doing listening practice, and nothing else.

Podcasts: 4989 American Life, Learn Japanese with Noriko, Let's Learn Japanese from Small Talk, Nihongo con Teppei, 朗読男女5分で聞けるオリジナル物語
Anime: 鋼の錬金術師、カードキャプターさくら

I came to realize that listening to a lot of podcasts is easier for me when I have a wide variety of Podcasts to listen to... I get sick of them less easily. I wish I was listening to more podcasts that target Native Japanese speakers, but it's hard to find ones that are not crushingly boring I guess. Most of the ones which I used to love listening to have just vanished from the internet.

I started watching anime a lot before bed. I guess it can't be a bad thing to get more listening practice in, and it's hard for me to make time for television at other times for me.

I have somewhat been keeping up with kanji cards, but not as consistently as normal. As a result, I accumulated a bunch of leeches over this last month.

Esperanto:
Same as always, chatting, playing pictionary.

Spanish
I did a purge of Discord servers this week, and I decided to get rid of any Spanish language Discord servers I am in. I plan to return to them one day, but with my current level of Spanish, these are just time wasters. I can't follow conversations well enough to learn anything from them. Also played some Temtem.

Korean:
Watched another episode of 우리,사랑했을까. My korean friend is lending me her box set of the drama 다모. This is her favorite drama so I am excited to watch it.

I realize that I should probably drop Korean because studying it and Japanese at the same time is too difficult... but I also feel like it makes such a difference to my Korean friend that I took an interest in her language that I really do not want to stop learning it. In terms of where I live, Korean is a more useful language than either Japanese or Esperanto. At the very least, I want to maintain the tiny amount of vocabulary I have already learned, so I plan to keep up some nominal quantity of studying.

Dutch:
I can't justify Dutch tho. Uninstalled duolingo and deleted my Dutch Anki deck.

Toki Pona:
I consider my study of Toki Pona to more or less be complete at this point. I'm not a fluent speaker by any means, but I don't feel like there's enough media existing in Toki Pona for me to push thru to fluency. For the time being, I'm still in the Toki Pona discord server, just as a way to keep from totally forgetting it. But, it seems possible to me that it won't be worth it to me to maintain Toki Pona. In the mean time, I did draw another drawing using sitelen sitelen, this time of the Buddha's 4 Noble Truths (my translation is probably suspect). I want to try incorporating language into my drawings using languages besides Toki Pona for a little while, so this probably is the last update on Toki Pona for a while.

Image
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Re: Japanese and Chill (Also EO, ES, & KO depending on mood)

Postby devilyoudont » Sun Sep 06, 2020 10:47 pm

I received some bad news which knocked me off my game this week, resulting in me not studying for 2 days, and me also not updating my Esperanto blog.

Japanese:
I watched a few episodes of カードキャプターさくら. I listened to podcasts, but my work schedule was disrupted so I missed a few days of doing even that. I read a chapter of 国語文法. I had a couple of short, text based conversations in Japanese. I did manage to do Kanji Flashcards every single day. I read grammatical explanations about Korean in Japanese on Lingodeer.

I started rereading 三姉妹探偵団. I decided to restart the chapter that I had left off with. Unfortunately, I did not make it very far into the chapter. I realized that this chapter is, vocabulary wise, for me substantially more difficult than the preceding chapters were. There is just a very high density of unknown words on every page, resulting in me only making it just past where I had previous left off with the book.

Spanish
Rather than doing something in Spanish every day, I read an entire block of Esperanza renace one night. I have no idea how much I read. However long the subdivisions that Lingq made when I imported the book, one of those is how much I read. The book is continuing to get more interesting, yet Esperanza continues to be an endlessly annoying brat. I also listened to an episode of SpanishPodcast.net.

Korean:
I spend a bunch of time this week on looking at the difference between ㅓand ㅗ in terms of mouth shape, vowel height, etc. I am well aware that ㅓ does exist in English, but it seems like I forget exactly what it sounds like whenever I take a break. I am hoping some proper linguistics knowledge will help this stick. The difference between ㅡ and ㅜ is easier for me because I guess ㅡ resembles Japanese and ㅜ resembles Spanish.

I completed a unit on Lingodeer which was about yet another category of Korean こそあど words... except as always Korean is less regular than Japanese. I learned こそあど words for place... It seems like Korean always ends up being more irregular, this time with 2 entire irregular categories. I had to remind myself that all of this stuff is pretty irregular in English, and that this is also a category where even Japanese has 1 irregularity (あそこ). But I will admit the memorization task for Korean at times seems impossible... Whatever Japanese has, Korean has more of it pretty much. More particles, more vowels, more endings on verbs, more exceptions, and no kanji to ever give you a hint on the meaning.

Esperanto:
Helped beginners, played Sketchful (we switched from Skribblio). I read a chapter of Ĉu vi kuiras ĉine? I am now officially half way thru the book! (at least in terms of chapters). Finally Detective Karal seems to have started making deductions... I am hoping that we get no more major characters to keep track of at least.
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devilyoudont
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Re: Japanese and Chill (Also EO, ES, & KO depending on mood)

Postby devilyoudont » Mon Sep 14, 2020 1:25 am

This week more or less just got away from me. I got way less done than I wanted. My issue this week was more or less just that a lot of stuff is going on which caused my normal schedule to be disrupted. I may need to eventually change what times I normally do my studying, or maybe not. We shall see.

Japanese:
This was pretty much just a podcast and flashcard week for me-- those things which I normally do while working, or on my breaks at work. I probably listened to around 5 hours of podcasts in Japanese this week, which is around the amount I want to be listening to, so that is good at least.

Spanish
Spanish was also just podcasts and flashcards. I wound up listening to 2 episodes of SpanishPodcast.net rather than my normal 1, so that is a slight improvement over normal to me. I do so few Spanish flashcards that I feel like it practically doesn't count... It's more or less just a way to keep Spanish in my mind on a daily basis.

I joined a new Guild in World of Warcraft. One of my guildmates is a native Spanish speaker, so I am hoping that talking to him may be a motivating factor for me.

Korean:
Basically no progress in Korean, just did flash cards. Like Spanish, my daily card goals for Korean are extremely low, so this is more or less just ensuring I spend five minutes looking at the language a day. Words which would be written in Kanji are very sticky for me, but most native Korean words as well as conjugations are still kind of in one ear and out the other for me.

Esperanto:
This week was just chatting.
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golyplot
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Re: Japanese and Chill (Also EO, ES, & KO depending on mood)

Postby golyplot » Tue Sep 15, 2020 4:27 am

devilyoudont wrote:I started rereading 三姉妹探偵団. I decided to restart the chapter that I had left off with. Unfortunately, I did not make it very far into the chapter. I realized that this chapter is, vocabulary wise, for me substantially more difficult than the preceding chapters were. There is just a very high density of unknown words on every page, resulting in me only making it just past where I had previous left off with the book.


I'd never heard of 三姉妹探偵団, so I looked it up out of curiosity. There don't seem to be any English language resources about it, so I ran Google Translate on the ja Wikipedia page. I found one passage hilarious because Google Translate managed to use three different pronouns (but not the correct one!) to refer to one person, all in the space of a single paragraph. I often wonder if I'll ever manage to learn Japanese faster than Google Translate does.

Google Translate wrote:Yuriko Sasamoto
The second daughter of the Sasamoto family. I go to a private high school where I can go on to junior college by escalator. He is the strongest of the three sisters and brings together the three sisters. When angry, it looks just like a dead mother. The ball is scratched and strong.
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devilyoudont
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Re: Japanese and Chill (Also EO, ES, & KO depending on mood)

Postby devilyoudont » Tue Sep 15, 2020 11:12 am

golyplot wrote:There don't seem to be any English language resources about it, so I ran Google Translate on the ja Wikipedia page.
It was actually translated to English back in the 1980s, but it's out of print and I have no idea about the quality of that translation. The title of the translation is "Three Sisters Investigate."

Google Translate wrote:Yuriko Sasamoto
The second daughter of the Sasamoto family. I go to a private high school where I can go on to junior college by escalator. He is the strongest of the three sisters and brings together the three sisters. When angry, it looks just like a dead mother. The ball is scratched and strong.
:lol:
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Re: Japanese and Chill (Also EO, ES, & KO depending on mood)

Postby dampingwire » Tue Sep 15, 2020 10:15 pm

golyplot wrote:
Google Translate wrote:Yuriko Sasamoto
The second daughter of the Sasamoto family. I go to a private high school where I can go on to junior college by escalator. He is the strongest of the three sisters and brings together the three sisters. When angry, it looks just like a dead mother. The ball is scratched and strong.


You made me go and look ... "the ball is scratched and strong" indeed :-)

佐々本家次女。短大までエスカレーター式で進学することができる私立の女子高に通う。3姉妹の中で一番のしっかり者であり、三姉妹をまとめている。怒ると死んだ母親にそっくり。はねっかえりで気が強いのが玉にキズ。


My Japanese isn't very good but she's on the rebound (maybe), strong willed and a bit of a stumbling block or an impediment. Somehow I'm going to have to use 玉にキズ somewhere :-)
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devilyoudont
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Re: Japanese and Chill (Also EO, ES, & KO depending on mood)

Postby devilyoudont » Tue Sep 15, 2020 11:51 pm

佐々本家次女。短大までエスカレーター式で進学することができる私立の女子高に通う。3姉妹の中で一番のしっかり者であり、三姉妹をまとめている。怒ると死んだ母親にそっくり。はねっかえりで気が強いのが玉にキズ。

Not a great translator, but here's my try to translate it...

Second daughter of the Sasamoto family. She attends a private girl's school which allows advancement to junior college using an escalator system. Of the three sisters, she is the most stable, and she brings her sisters together. She is the spitting image of her dead mother when angry. Her flaw is a strong willed rashness.


(In other words 玉にキズ scratched ball is an idiom about flaws or drawbacks)
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devilyoudont
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Re: Japanese and Chill (Also EO, ES, & KO depending on mood)

Postby devilyoudont » Mon Sep 28, 2020 12:49 am

I am trying to reshuffle my schedule again. I am trying to lose weight, so I am trying to find a new way to structure my free time in order to accommodate me going to the gym 5x a week. I haven't completely settled into this yet, so I did miss Japanese a few days over the last two weeks, and I also barely did anything for my other languages.

Japanese:
Mostly podcasts and kanji flashcards unfortunately.

I did make it over the hump with 三姉妹探偵団. Two of the sisters are back together again and I find the conversation between them to be much easier to follow than the conversations with the detective, the king of the homeless, and the security guard earlier in the chapter.

I've been watching カードキャプターさくら almost exclusively. I just find it to be a much more chill show to watch before I go to sleep. The show is simultaneously both super charming and super weird at the same time. An example of weird: Sakura is completely estranged from her mother's family. I'm not sure if the reason for this was explained or not, but I just find it weird that these relatives are all super obessed with Sakura but don't care about Touya at all?? WTF is up with that. I appreciate the unambiguous same sex relationships in this show as well, especially given the age of this show and it's target age group.

Spanish
Podcasts and some flashcards.

Korean:
Finished 우리,사랑했을까. Ending was really stupid. Excited to start 다모 (茶母) this week. Otherwise, I only did some flashcards.

Esperanto:
Just chatting again.
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devilyoudont
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Re: Japanese and Chill

Postby devilyoudont » Sat Oct 17, 2020 6:42 pm

I've been hit with depression as well as trying to restructure my daily activities to incorporate more fitness. For now, I am focusing only on keeping on with Japanese, tho I expect I will continue to socially use Esperanto in the meantime.

In terms of Japanese I have been doing a bunch of different things but not sticking with anything. I read some more of 三姉妹探偵団. I also started reading the Wikipedia article on the みどり荘事件. I started on 吾輩は猫である at http://www.sosekiproject.org/ but this is still really hard for me. I have been working on kanji, but inconsistently so now I am generating tons of leeches in Anki. Teppei and Noriko started a podcast together, so I started listening to that as well as what I normally listen to at work. I have started following the chat more in the Japanese/English language exchange discord, and occasionally chiming in.
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