Finished learning all I need to know about the Win32 API for game development tonight. Gonna start learning Direct3D tomorrow. Kind of disappointed in myself for spending the last 5 days doing absolutely nothing. I need to make up for that lost time in the remaining 100 or so days of my summer break.

I've been successfully keeping a Japanese 日記 for over a month!

I'm accumulating interesting reading material faster than I can keep up!

My reading endurance is reaching the same level as my native language, and I rarely run into completely incomprehensible passages (average incomprehensible passage length has reached < 1 sentence length).

I've watched most of the new content on ANN's and FNN's Youtube channels everyday for the last couple of weeks.

つまり日本語レベルが上がったそうだ。

I feel motivated when I listen to this:

I actually switched to french as a detour, which would make me more employable in europe, then I'm going to continue with japanese... makes sense?
Anyway, ~10K words in japanese just seems too intimidating for me.....

Had my very first Skype voice chat with a Lang-8 friend. It was difficult and only said short, simple sentences. Despite my terrible speaking ability, this motivates me to learn more so I can have more meaningful convos in the future

I’m recently motivated by the detour my "language study" has taken through all kinds of media.
I have always felt that reading a novel gives the reader a vantage point beyond cultural trappings into the experience and mind of the artist, the individual. There is often a tendency on this forum, understandably, to ask about how any particular material directly improves your Japanese and with what efficiency. But by haphazardly engaging any material that was comprehensible and entertaining to me, I have enjoyed books and movies I would not have come across with more informed (i.e. native language) browsing.

A forum member once said that through studying Japanese he has learned not to buy books he isn’t going to read. I have learned to do this only if I can help it. Sometimes I won’t know if I’ll understand a book well or if it will grab me until I have it. It stare at me from the bookshelf and it might become a good motivator for me to get to that level. Or I might try it and keep returning it to the shelf because it was boring. That usually happens for me with books that are designed to teach you Japanese, but it doesn’t happen so much with native material even if I struggle through it. So this journey has opened me up to figuring out how things affect me without prejudgment.

Now, even when I engage books or movies in other languages than Japanese, I absorb them with an invigorated sense of novelty. In one week I might read only ten pages in a Japanese novel, but I will read and re-read some pages or paragraphs multiple times to continue. The picture of the story grows behind my eyes like a fog slowly lifting.

I've heard people say they don’t like reading translated books because the translator can't possibly recreate the original work. However, I’ve been able to see how a strong story comes through to the reader, even if the writing of the translation is just okay. Subsequently reading the native text after I know the story from the translation or the anime is like going down the proverbial rabbit hole. Speaking of which, has anyone read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in Japanese? It’s sitting on my shelf.

I'm motivated from having a plan lol. Learning is soooo much more enjoyable when you don't have to think about structure. Ah its also great when you take your time. So far I go at a pace of about a lesson a week lol. Should be all done within a year, with pretty comfortable basic Japanese skills as well.

Yay for repetition!

I feel motivated because I've watched a documentary about the japanese culture, and it's simply super amazing...

I'm motivated by listening to Japanese music and imagining the appropriate hiragana in my head then looking up the kanji using that hiragana. Next time I listen to the song, I can imagine the kanji in my head instead of (or in addition to) the hiragana. It's a fairly fun way of both learning new vocabulary and reviewing it, so I'm surprised more people don't do it.

P.S. don't think in romaji, it messes you up real bad. I made that mistake, now I'm spending way more effort "unlearning" thinking in romaji

Lol that's true. For me I never bothered with Romaji so in my head I picture the kanji or hiragana and then it takes extra effort to picture that in romaji when I tried to picture romaji for the heck of it

Romaji, Please release me let me go.. For I don't love you, anymore... xD

Thanks or the tip, Silty. Wish I thought of doing that myself lol.

I'm getting myself motivated by logging my progress everyday. I created a schedule and plan (currently to pass JLPT N1 in December 2013). I need to see my progress since I'm visual. Also, I remind myself to do something everyday instead of aiming to do too much in one day and end up not doing it.

sansa43 Wrote:Also, I remind myself to do something everyday instead of aiming to do too much in one day and end up not doing it.

Ah I need to do this. Well, I do something everyday, but I often set lofty goals that aren't necessarily possible to live up to.

Motivated because I just started online private tutoring
I get 8 1 hour lessons for about 4800 yen each month, which is a bazillion times better than the 300 euro the language center over here asks for covering 4 chapters of Genki in 12 weeks.

So I want to do my best for that.

And I want to improve my vocabulary so I can watch this movie:

The DVD doesn't come with subs...not even Japanese subs

oh jeez no subs. what a nightmare especially with j-movies. Hopefully english subs come out or someting to help with you with lines that are hard to catch. I wouldn't get too worried about catching every line or 98% (Before I used to have a goal of understanding japanese movies 100% or something like that to reach fluency since that's where i'm at with english which is my native language but now-a-days i completed eliminated that from my personal requirements for fluency because of actors with shitty enunciation/pronunciation or actors that mumble because they want to or the director wants them to or whatever. I do have a goal of understanding japanese movies with japanese subs 100% for fluency... that i definitely i've reached minus whatever words or references that appear that i don't know since I read japanese fairly fast). There are lines that even japanese people can't catch. as you know japanese movies are known for being shitty (this is the general consensus among japanese people) though there are good ones out there i'm sure ( though i personally have never seen a good j-movie minus the anime ones).... but anyways one of the reasons for the shittiness is the budget and part of the budget is the sound engineering or whatevre youcall it.

I was curious about the whole whycan't i understand japanese movies when i have no trouble with talk/variety shows. Obviously it depends on the movie and the actors and whatnot with the ease/difficulty/impossibleness. I just googled around about the sound qualitY? or recording? or whatever with movies and dramas and i got some interesting hits so i wanted to share.

http://detail.chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/qa/...1199687436
http://tsukinofune.tumblr.com/day/2013/01/04
http://detail.chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/qa/...1417572859
I just found some solace reading comments from japanese people about the difficulty in understanding actors in movies due to sound quality, sound effects, mumbling, loud bgm, etc etc.

here's more links

http://detail.chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/qa/...1364321668

http://komachi.yomiuri.co.jp/t/2010/0708...tm?o=0&p=2

http://www.logsoku.com/r/movie/1021005871/

http://filmmania.blog.so-net.ne.jp/2009-09-05

http://sooda.jp/qa/176431

http://smcb.jp/ques/23644

I found them to be an interesting read and it definitely cleared up my concerns.

Though it may seem small, I get really motivated when I'm walking around in an area with lots of Chinese stores (my school is near China town) and though it's not Kanji and there are differences, I see many characters that I understand and can decipher. This makes me really motivated to keep moving so I can read even more.

Also (again this my seem unimportant) when I'm watching or listening to Japanese in a TV show, song, or whatever, and hear things that I understand I get really excited.

And most of all, I'm getting really close to 300 kanji (yes, I know very few) and though I have a long way to go, getting to a milestone is wonderful.

I'm sorry if these are trivial, but sometimes it's the little things that can get you motivated the most.

Today, I stumble upon a comment on Youtube completely in japanese (3 lines worth of length). I read it, understand everything, and simply feel awesome to have understood it all, even thought it was kinda simple.

Since I learn by theory, I only see progress in numbers. So, once in a while, it's nice to actually go into the real thing and notice the progress in practice. And the more I can understand, the more it motivates me to keep going. It makes me feel like I'm so close to the goal, even thought the path is still huge.

(also, noticing the Kanji 盗 on the back of Team Snagem in Pokemon XD in english makes me laugh. I would never have noticed it before, but it's really quite amusing and motivating to notice untranslated parts in games)

Super motivated right now. The last weeks I've been constantly 400-500 Kanji behind schedule. But now it's looking up. I'm only 98 behind schedule and I just finished what I believe to be my best review session ever:
92% retention, I wrote down all 204 Kanji I reviewed, and it all took me 48 minutes. Which boils down to 14,11 seconds per Kanji.

Unfortunately I should go to bed now, least I be sleepy when tomorrow comes.

I have been really interested in grammar lately. And although I don't srs all the grammar points to prevent overload I have been reading ahead in my grammar books and just familiarizing so when I study them later and add to anki it feels like i already know it and can make better sense of it. Also I have increased my listening practice by rewatching a lot of older dramas I haven't watched in a while.

I also work in a restaurant and served a Japanese father and son completely in Japanese. I heard them asking each other what they wanted to drink to each other in Japanese so I just walked up and started with いらしゃいませ。using my たしこまりました's and 待たせしました's like a boss. They were surprised when out of nowhere I'm speaking to them in their native tongue. Feels good to use my Japanese.

Well, I've been doing 50 words and 30 RTK everyday with a 99% retention rate. So I decided to kick it up a notch for a week to make it 100 words a day keeping the 30 RTK. If I like it and the reviews aren't making me want to kill someone, I'll keep the pace.

NoSleepTilFluent Wrote:using my たしこまりました's and 待たせしました's like a boss. They were surprised when out of nowhere I'm speaking to them in their native tongue. Feels good to use my Japanese.

I think this should be 畏まりました and お待たせいたしました.

Also if you guys have french fries you should never miss a chance to use「ご一緒にポテトもいかがですか？」because its awesome on so many levels.

There's also a whole level of バイト敬語 that is kind of below regular 敬語 so you might hear lots of variations on this stuff depending on where you go. You can find endless amounts of discussion on this by searching バイト敬語 on Google.

I think episode 3 of 日本人の知らない日本語 is about バイト敬語. I could be wrong about which episode. Yes, I do think バイト敬語 is great though. All that use of なります. Just don't think too literally about it.