Weekly update #14: Another so-so week

4 Responses to Weekly update #14: Another so-so week

1. emmie says:

   July 23, 2011 at 5:05 am

   I just read your entry at Ameba and I became…絶句！　
   You’re amazing! どんどんこの調子で、突き進めー！^^

2. Liana says:

   July 23, 2011 at 7:45 am

   Thank you! I’m flattered ^^ I have to thank everyone at lang-8 who spent so much time correcting my writing, though… and I still have a long ways to go!

3. e_dub_kendo says:

   July 23, 2011 at 6:03 pm

   I really hope you can make your 1,000,000 words before your interest in tadoku fades too much. I periodically grow bored with on medium or another, which is why i also do large amounts of watching, listening and gaming as well as reading. For instance, after the tadoku contest wraps up each time, I often spend several weeks reading very little but doing a massive amount of watching anime, movie’s, dramas and documentaries. Fortunately, Japan has a culture which produces tons of media, so just about anything I want to do, I can find a way to do it in Japanese. Of course, sometimes what I WANT is to be able to read/watch/listen to something with perfect comprehension. When that happens, I just have to remember that if I ever want to get to that point in Japanese, I have to stay the course. Then I find something super easy to understand and do that a little while.
   Also, I have to say thank you. Thanks to the massive amount of Japanese children’s stories I’ve been reading in anki each day, I solidified so much latent knowledge. This in turn, enabled me to read four books this round of tadoku that had previously gone way over my head, despite the fact that I had always felt like I knew most of the words being used. I have essentially jumped from being between a level 1.5 reader to being a level 2.5-4 reader (Really, that wide a range, it really just seems to be a book by book case depending on the author’s vocab and style) in about 1 months time. This is incredible.
   I realize that future gains may not be quite so quick, because the latent knowledge will run out eventually and I’ll only be moving forward as quickly as I learn new words and grammar patterns. But still, hell yeah! Been a huge boost to my motivation, and it really started right here with your manifesto.
   PS. I am hugely curious about this post you’ve alluded to twice now. Any chance that’s gonna get published soon? (By all means don’t work on that at the expense of your Japanese, but, you know, when you can…) ;P

4. Liana says:

   July 24, 2011 at 9:12 pm

   Maybe I should find some drama or anime that I like, or re-watch some that I’ve liked in the past… I’m so-so on both, most of the time. It’s kind of ridiculous, but if a story is too dramatic I get too worried and stressed out, I’m such a softie that I just can’t stand watching the heroine get bullied or whatever over the course of several episodes. I don’t want to watch her win over her enemies with her genki spirit, I want her to GTFO and spend time with decent people. Or, if it’s a romantic story, half the time I’m sitting there I’m thinking “For God’s sake, people, it’s called COUNSELING” and the other half I’m probably thinking “Honey, just pick. up. the. phone and talk to him directly already.” Yes, even though I know all too well how complicated these things actually are ^^;; I enjoyed Osen, a few months ago… When the main problems are things like “Are we going to be able to make the miso this year” and the emotions aren’t turned up to 11 the whole time, I can usually take that… For anime, I have a really low tolerance for randomness… You see how picky I am ^^;; Documentaries, that’s an idea! I’m a visual learner and I literally can’t learn a word from listening to it even if it’s repeated 50 times in the same episode, so I don’t focus much on listening because it’s frustrating. But I will re-evaluate my listening resources, I think… I’ve found that as I’ve learned/reinforced more words through tadoku, listening has been easier as well. So we’ll see.

   I literally bounced up and down in my chair and clapped my hands when I read your comment. That’s a wonderful result for just having been doing it a month! I hope you’ll keep me updated on how it goes for you ^^

   I got most of the work done on that post while I was out at the beach this week, but I just had a little left to go, so thanks for prompting me to finish and post it! I guess it was rather at the expense of reading – I really did work on it for a while, and I kept thinking “I could be reading how many words in this time?” but hey, this is a long term project, and thinking about the learning process itself is such fun ^^ Hope you find it interesting!