Shopping in local Oxfam charity shop, and found みんなの日本語　+ 英語 Translation Book + Answers guide book, £10 for the lot.

Not sure how this fits with sentence method, but can't hurt going through them at least once...

Bought this novel not knowing what on earth it was way back in early 2009. Tried (and failed) a couple of times to even attempt reading it. This morning picked it up and started reading and felt it was actually within my grasp!

The only thing holding me back was vocab so with a few lookups here and there I was actually able to read and comprehend the first few pages. I'm pretty proud of that because it marks sort of reaching a new level for me, a level where reading a novel seems like it's in my reach.

Personally that's a pretty cool thing because being able to make it through a novel will teach me so many words and so many new kanji which is exciting

Kanji reading count is sitting at 1560 now. Can't believe how much stuff i'm adding these days!

Finally got to 900 Kanji today.

My goal was to go from 600 to 2042 over winter break, but I only ended up doing about 300 in a month. Sadly, most of it it was in the first week -- after that I ran into the problem of getting many of them wrong and a huge pile of 'failed' cards that I've had to chip away at (down to 75 atm).

There are 2 days left and I'd love to get to 1,000 before school starts, but I doubt it...

I mined my first sentence from an anime (千と千尋の神隠し). ^_^
Also, I switched to only mining native material about halfway into last month, but forgot to post here. XD

I've really just got into Japanese TV... it's like I converted from American TV to Japanese. Like I would die without it.

It's like special cause you just know that there's nothing similar to my favorite japanese show _ on american television just b.c. of the cultural differences everything. IT has to be japanese tv otherwise, i can't watch it. i'm not talking abt the weird perverted crap (i hate those shows with the girls with those high pitched fake ass voices lol)... just talking about talk/variety shows in general.

all the talk/variety/manzai/red theater/educational /etc shows. Of course I mine sentences/vocab from those and re-watch some of them to understand/catch anything and everything that is within my range. But like AJATT goes I don't force myself to watch Japanese TV. I watch it cause I love it. I do it cause I like it, find it fun. So of course there are Japanese tv shows I hate,,, I just watch the ones I like.

And SO I will watch my american dramas/etc in the SUMMER. There was a time where REALLY LOOKED watching _ show at the desginated time at the designated day it airs but now i'm just like i'm still going to watch... just like 9 months later lol. It's better to watch the 20 episode drama in the course of 2 weeks than over a course of like 8 months anyway right? Rather than I built patience, it's more like my thinking process has evolved? I don't know.

I got back to studying after a way too long 3 month break and finally got past the gigantic chapter 23.

5350 sentences in my kanji-kana deck for reading comphrension+understanding monolingual sentences. Have a kana-kanji deck around 102 cards, which i practise for writing, i general add a few a day, around 20-50 depending on the reviews. My other deck i used to add 100 per day but that's just crazy cuz of the reviews. So i went down to 50-60 daily if my reviews aren't high. I have 3 kanji decks. One for general hesig up to 3007 kanji, other is keyword to kanji that i keep reviewing and another is just abit more kanji. I feel after doing 3 months of kanji plus 5 months of japanese srsing, monlingual,decoding,understanding,reading,immersion. My japanese in understanding and reading has grown pretty well. I'm not fluent but i believe now i can in around 1 full year of doing this, or at least near fluent in terms of reading+speaking+understanding. Writing i'm working on now so when i get to that level, it'll all combine in all skills for my fluency. That for sure i'll make happen!

Just got past half of Remembering the Traditional Hanzi, Book 1.

I used to restrict myself to the "Remembering Hanzi" subforum for the couple weeks I've been here, but as usually happens on forums I started to want to read more and more new threads, hence this post in this thread I've just discovered. By the way, great thread.

I'm planning on finishing RtTH Book 1 by the time college starts again on January 27th. I should be on track by continuing to input 40 characters/day, but I'm sorely lacking in reviews. I'll try out what blackmacros posted earlier and try review/add/review/add/etc.

Woohoo!

I just came back from my winter vacation and was praised several times for my Japanese. This happened often, but mostly after a few words. This time they praised me after having quite a long conversation with me, saying that my "発音" is "とてもきれい".
There's still a loooooooooooong way to go, though

Finished Koreanclass 101 Beginner Season 1 -4 after 3 long months!

So now my skills are:
Grammar (Intermediate - can say "All I have to do is hit her with a bat", used to be: no knowledge)
Vocabulary (800 - 1000 words, used to be: 10 words?)
Pronunciation (Near perfect - still find trouble with ㅈ and ㅊ for certain words, used to be: problems differentiating ㄱ and ㅋ, ㄷ,ㅌ and ㄸ, 시 and 씨).

With that ends my "textbook era", and tomorrow I'll dive into native material stuff

chochajin Wrote:I just came back from my winter vacation and was praised several times for my Japanese. This happened often, but mostly after a few words. This time they praised me after having quite a long conversation with me, saying that my "発音" is "とてもきれい".
There's still a loooooooooooong way to go, though

Don't want to burst your bubble or anything but there's a theory that when 日本人 praise your language ability it means you suck It's when they stop that you should be proud of yourself.

thurd Wrote:Don't want to burst your bubble or anything but there's a theory that when 日本人 praise your language ability it means you suck It's when they stop that you should be proud of yourself.

I know, so don't worry
It still is an improvement from the way they used to praise me a while ago, so I guess I do make some progress. Although I still feel like a total beginner and probably ever will

chochajin Wrote:I know, so don't worry
It still is an improvement from the way they used to praise me a while ago, so I guess I do make some progress. Although I still feel like a total beginner and probably ever will

Nah, it wont be that long. Remember that you're always a year away from fluency

For my recent accomplishments:
- dug myself from another kanji hole (damn you ski holiday & New Year's Eve)
- changed my commute soundtrack from Japanese j-pop to Michel Thomas Japanese Foundation
- discovered by accident I can now understand what 日本語能力試験 means and its reading

Main reason to pick MTJF was to learn new words. Listening to J-music doesn't help my vocabulary, just reinforces things I already know and can recognize. Next stop is his Advanced course and later probably Grammar Plus for JLPT3&4.

Today was my first day in my intermediate conversation class. I've never had a decent "vocal" in Japanese so it may be strange that I'm in an intermediate class, but once I started talking to the teacher the words were coming out naturally like they never could before. Certain teachers and people in general bring out that kind of thing, I think. I just had to find someone I'm comfortable with to get good, flowing Japanese out. Anyway, I understood around 90% of what she said, and I never had to repeat myself so I feel like I'm already starting to accomplish a lot in the class (which, today, only had 3 people in it. Hopefully it's not canceled...)

Last night, I had a dream in which I spoke Japanese. I don't remember much about it, except that I was telling someone that my boyfriend had caught a cold. It didn't seem unusual at all at the time, but now that I think about it, I think it's kind of neat.

Also, I have had Japanese songs stuck in my head for the last few days. (especially あなたに and 小さな恋のうた from Mongol 800's Message). Since I can't have headphones on all the time, it's the next best thing!

Nuriko Wrote:Today was my first day in my intermediate conversation class.

Nuriko, for some reason I have it in my head that you live in the Bay Area (maybe you mentioned it in a post somewhere? Or I could be thinking of someone else...). If I'm not totally off base, then do you attend a local language school, or is this at a college/university? Sorry if I seem like I'm prying into personal information, feel free to ignore this if you want . It's just that I'm both curious about the various classes around the area, and wondering if we coincidentally attend the same school.

...or maybe I'm completely misremembering and you're not in the Bay Area at all. In which case...never mind!

Nuriko Wrote:Certain teachers and people in general bring out that kind of thing, I think. I just had to find someone I'm comfortable with to get good, flowing Japanese out.

Alcohol works too. :-) (Someone in another thread wears hidden in-ear earphones to class for study purposes. So I suppose a pretty silver flask might work well.) Only 3 students sounds ideal - good luck with it.

My milestone discovery this year was pm215. Cannot recommend pm215 highly enough.

Thora Wrote:My milestone discovery this year was pm215. Cannot recommend pm215 highly enough.

o_O;

(Re alcohol, somebody I know has a story about a class who perplexed the teachers by doing much better than expected at a speaking test. Turned out it was St Patrick's Day and they'd all been out to the bar for a drink at lunchtime just before...)

I posted recently but much things have been done:

1. Used Postpone Reviews plugin to handle my 300+ sentence wall.
2. Decided to stop adding sentences for a while and concentrate on vocabulary, first stop JLPT 4.
3. Burned through 100 words in under an hour & enjoyed every minute of it.
4. Finally realized Anki is not my teacher, an oracle or some Japanese God. It's just a tool and I can do everything I want with it.

Finished my first full video game in Japanese! Proud to say it was my all time favourite Final Fantasy 8!

There we're things I didn't understand along the way but the overwhelming majority made itself understood to me and it just gives me a really good feeling reflecting on it to know that I did all of that in a completely different language!

mezbup Wrote:Finished my first full video game in Japanese! Proud to say it was my all time favourite Final Fantasy 8!

I couldn't even finish that in English. I always get bored of FF games before they finish.

Jarvik7 Wrote:

mezbup Wrote:Finished my first full video game in Japanese! Proud to say it was my all time favourite Final Fantasy 8!

I couldn't even finish that in English. I always get bored of FF games before they finish.

FF8 was actually the only one I couldn't finish in English. I personally find playing the games in Japanese adds an extra layer of entertainment, which really hlps during the slow/boring parts.

After I finish FF13, I'll be giving FF8 a try again! I got it for less than 500 yen!

I used to play the FF series and various other RPG's as a teen pretty much non-stop so they're kinda perfect for me

Just realized Thurd picked a slightly altered version of Jarvik's avatar. Hmmm....

bodhisamaya Wrote:Just realized Thurd picked a slightly altered version of Jarvik's avatar. Hmmm....

Hehe, took you a while. Truly a kanji masterpiece and absolutely confusing for non-practitioners.