mafried Wrote:Wow I wouldn't consider that a problem anymore--I wish I could study for 2 hours straight. My brain starts to hurt after 30 minutes.

Jumping off what you said, I found my first attempt at reading without resorting to a dictionary to be painful, tedious, frustrating, and slow. My mind wandered *a lot*, now that I recall. But I resisted the temptation to skim ahead, and stopped instead when I got bored. Eventually my frustration at not making progress (because I kept stopping because my mind was wandering) caused me to force myself to pay attention, and that's when I really took off.

So yeah, my experience matches yours, Lyulf.

Nice weather is the real killer right now. I like to study in the middle of the day so great weather makes it harder to concentrate. I recently changed when I study so weather isn't too much of a problem anymore. Now I study later at night which has helped. The beginning was just brutal. It took several tries before I felt like I could continue the story. Once you figure out a word or two the method becomes easier. My biggest mistake was not stopping. I would get frustrated, and try to fight through it which would lead to more frustration.

brianobush Wrote:On how-to-learn-any-language.com, I read that doing L-R for less than 2 hrs/day is basically pointless. hmm... I do about an hour/day, since that is all the time I have. Is it really pointless? I myself don't know yet, as I have only spent a little more than a week on this method, but have learned much new vocab. Comments?

If you are learning new vocab at a good pace just keep going. If the method is working for you why stop. I would keep going until you stop learning new words, or you learn new words at a pace you do not like.

Lyulf Wrote:If you are learning new vocab at a good pace just keep going. If the method is working for you why stop. I would keep going until you stop learning new words, or you learn new words at a pace you do not like.

Another more important benefit of the L-R method is the way one's brain begins to naturally understand the grammar within the vocabulary learned... Once enough hours have been put in you'll see what I mean. I've started to understand many of the particles that I've heard about when learning Japanese.

I've decided to skip the text2speech method... I heard many errors in intonation of words that I know I should of been expecting... I'm going to move on to "I am a Cat" later this week. I'll be back with Harry Potter at the end of the week.

digitlhand Wrote:

masaman Wrote:Care to check the size of your vocabulary?
http://www.kecl.ntt.co.jp/mtg/goitokusei/goi-test.html

Mac users may need to switch your browser's Text encoding to Japanese - ISO2022-JP.

That wasn't much help... 1,700 ??? I don't think I have that big of a vocabulary yet... maybe between 500 and 1200 but it's just a guess. I really don't know :-(

There are different ways to count the size of vocabulary, and this one shows how many headwords you know in the dictionary (新明解国語辞典第四版), and it tends to show larger numbers. An average native Japanese speaker probably have 40,000 or so according to this estimate, and I'm guessing you will need 6000 words to be able to hold basic everyday conversations, so you might actually have 1700 already. In any case, as long as you don't compare it with the numbers from other methods, it should give you an idea on how much vocabulary you earned. Unfortunately, there are only 3 tests, so if you take it frequently it may become unreliable though.

masaman Wrote:Care to check the size of your vocabulary?
http://www.kecl.ntt.co.jp/mtg/goitokusei/goi-test.html

Hmm, those three tests give me answers of 9800, 5300 and 2600... That's quite a large variation. Maybe it gets better for the sorts of vocabulary sizes a native speaker would have, but it looks like for typical second-language-learner vocabularies the error is the same sort of size as the actual answer.

pm215 Wrote:

masaman Wrote:Care to check the size of your vocabulary?
http://www.kecl.ntt.co.jp/mtg/goitokusei/goi-test.html

Hmm, those three tests give me answers of 9800, 5300 and 2600... That's quite a large variation. Maybe it gets better for the sorts of vocabulary sizes a native speaker would have, but it looks like for typical second-language-learner vocabularies the error is the same sort of size as the actual answer.

I've got 55750, 55100, 50500 which I thought was OK. It seems the size of variation doesn't change regardless of your size of vocabulary, which makes sense now I think about it. May be doing some sample tests using a learner's dictionary is more accurate than this...

I will never again listen to the Harry vs. Quirrell fight. Voldermorts voice is just so awful. As soon as I hear the voice my brain immediately shuts down. From now on I think I will skip that chapter. I have been experimenting with this method a bit. I now keep a notebook by my side to write down words. It feels like I am concentrating more because of that. Now since I don't have anything planned for tomorrow I will try and read for 8 hours. I'm going to do it in 2 hour chunks.

Quote:I will never again listen to the Harry vs. Quirrell fight. Voldermorts voice is just so awful.

Haha, I think it's brilliant! Perhaps it wouldn't be so bad if one only listened to it once and I'm sure it was meant to be listened to... I'm glad I'm not the only one who suffered through it!

brianobush Wrote:On how-to-learn-any-language.com, I read that doing L-R for less than 2 hrs/day is basically pointless. hmm... I do about an hour/day, since that is all the time I have. Is it really pointless? I myself don't know yet, as I have only spent a little more than a week on this method, but have learned much new vocab. Comments?

I've done 20-30 minutes/day (honestly all I have), and it's working. A half hour is much closer to the lower limit in my experience.

Anyone recommend where to find the Japanese text for the first Harry Potter? I've checked eBay and a couple Japanese bookstores in my area (Los Angeles), but can't find it.

haplology Wrote:Anyone recommend where to find the Japanese text for the first Harry Potter? I've checked eBay and a couple Japanese bookstores in my area (Los Angeles), but can't find it.

Amazon has it. Just give me a min and I will get you a link. It looks like they only have the paperback version. http://www.amazon.com/Harry-Potter-Philo...279&sr=8-3

haplology, the public library in LA has many copies of the text as well.

I've been doing 1-2 hours a day. I wouldn't even want to attempt to do any more.

For each chapter, readL2/listenL2, readL1/listenL2 and that's about all I can manage. THe longer chapters, like 5/6 (60min) are brutal.

I've been breaking up the reps throughout the day.

Just some quick notes:

My observation thus far is that listening while reading in English gives the occasional new word but that listening to the audio after having read the English yeilds many more words and phrases. This is what I experience with watching Japanese movies: When I have subtitles on I hear the Japanese and read the English but am not very good at parcing both simultaneously unless I am very familiar with most of the words already (in which case picking out the single new word is relatively easy). But if I turn off the subtitles, even on a movie I don't know, I can focus enough on the aural component and visual context that I pick up and deduce a lot more of the language.

Digitalhand, this interests me because you've mentioned that most of your time is spent listening to the audio while not reading (after having read the English). Maybe this is a more profitable way to go about LR. I haven't been reading the Japanese text with the audio as much as I had hoped (time constraints), so I can't comment on how the ability to focus on the language changes from reading in English versus reading in Japanese while the audio is playing.

That's all for now.

k.

@kodorakun And also I'd point out that with German and Swedish, digitlhand was L2/L2. When he has reached natural listening, I'm curious to see which he feels is better, L1/L2 or L2/L2.

pm215 Wrote:

Blahah Wrote:I'm thinking こころ by 夏目 漱石.

I'm a bit wary of pre-war Japanese literature as texts for learning purposes personally. I get the impression that the written style and language is somewhat divergent from modern usage (more than you might expect from English texts of the same age). It might be a bit like learning English from _Moby Dick_, perhaps -- it's not that MD is hard to understand for a native speaker, but it's clearly not how anybody speaks or writes these days. (I ignore the 歴史的仮名遣い question since you can get modern-usage text.)

But perhaps I'm overly cautious (or perhaps being able to read classic Japanese literature is one of the reasons you're learning the language...)

I've been listening to the audiobook of it for the last couple of weeks and it's fine, perfectly understandable. I've had a browse through the text as well, nothing too difficult.

Listening-Reading completed this week:

French: 1 hours of L1 Reading L2 Listening
Japanese: 4 hours of L1 Reading L2 Listening; 20 hours of L2 listening

French
I'm sad to say that I only completed about one our worth of L1 Reading L2 Listening in French this week. This was due to my inabilities to wake up at my early morning desired time. I do not intend to makeup the hours, I will take it as a loss of about a week in learning French. I feel I can live with it as my French comprehensibilty skills are pretty high, especially in this book.

Japanese
My Japanese time also suffered this week. I was only able to complete about 4 hours of L1 Reading L2 Listening. I did get a chance to listen to Alice in Wonderland, which used much more formal Japanese, and The Little Prince. Both books were nice to listen to, as they were a change of pace to the Harry Potter series;however, I did notice that I prefer the story of The Little Prince to Alice in Wonderland. My plan for the following week is to listen to both books again as well as finish reading I am a Cat in English so that I may listen to it in Japanese. I believe the audio for that book will be about 20 hours bringing me into a stronger number of unqie audio hours.

digitlhand Wrote:Listening-Reading completed this week:

French: 1 hours of L1 Reading L2 Listening
Japanese: 4 hours of L1 Reading L2 Listening; 20 hours of L2 listening

French
I'm sad to say that I only completed about one our worth of L1 Reading L2 Listening in French this week. This was due to my inabilities to wake up at my early morning desired time. I do not intend to makeup the hours, I will take it as a loss of about a week in learning French. I feel I can live with it as my French comprehensibilty skills are pretty high, especially in this book.

Japanese
My Japanese time also suffered this week. I was only able to complete about 4 hours of L1 Reading L2 Listening. I did get a chance to listen to Alice in Wonderland, which used much more formal Japanese, and The Little Prince. Both books were nice to listen to, as they were a change of pace to the Harry Potter series;however, I did notice that I prefer the story of The Little Prince to Alice in Wonderland. My plan for the following week is to listen to both books again as well as finish reading I am a Cat in English so that I may listen to it in Japanese. I believe the audio for that book will be about 20 hours bringing me into a stronger number of unqie audio hours.

I should start keeping track of how many hours I put in each day. So far I can say that I went through HP1 2 times and I am almost done with HP1 again. Total hours so far is 27 hours. I'm going to start giving weekly updates on my progress. I also started Tae Kim. I tried doing Tae Kim's basic grammar during the first week, but I stopped because I was lazy. Right now I am learning all the words I need, and I am about half way done. Haven't started the grammar yet. This week I want to finish HP1 one more time. Then, I will move onto HP2.

I don't worry about learning words anymore. Either I learn them or I don't. The more I listen the easier it is for me to follow along. Sometimes I can go a few pages being perfectly in line with the audio. This week I finally got HP2 in Japanese, and I also got the first book for KO2001. I want to set a realistic goal for my Japanese. Is it possible to get intermediate level Japanese in one year if I study for 4-5 hours a day?

Japanese: ≈27 hours Total L1 Reading L2 Listening (2 weeks)
Tae Kim: Just started to learn the words I need.

Digithand how have you fared so far? Quick update I have done another 10 hours of L1 reading and L2 listening this week. I still feel like I have a long way to go before I get to natural listening. It has been a slow process so far. Every time I read It is easier to follow along, but I am still not learning words. So far this is what I have done.

Tae Kim Basic: I made it all the way to Negative verbs. I am going slow on purpose when it comes to the grammar. I feel like I learn the grammar better when I take my time with each part. I first learn all the words for the new lesson. Then, I learn the grammar portion of the lesson. I make flash cards for all the words, and all the sentences in the lesson. After three days I test them on anki.

RTK:I am doing about 25-50 a day depending on how busy I am. I learned a while ago that 50 is my limit. When I try to learn more than 50 RTK kanji a day my reviews suffer.

Japanese: ≈38 hours Total L1 Reading L2 Listening (3 weeks)
Tae Kim: Up to Negative Verbs
RTK: About 300

I figure it's time for an update:

After reading about the method here, and on the original forum, I was very curious to see how effective this method is. So far, I've been using this method for 28 days for a total of 29:30 minutes of (R-L2/L-L2) & (R-L1/L-L2) using HP.

The first thing I want to note is that, I haven't really been picking up many new words. On the other hand L-R has been a decent way to review and see familiar and newly learned words/patterns in action/context.

Let me hypothesize for a a bit... According to FSI it takes 600 hours to become somewhat proficient with Spanish and 2200 hours with Japanese. Therefore, if it takes 40 hours with L-R to achieve native listening in Spanish, it would take 146.67 hours for Japanese. So at 29.5 hours I'm about 20% there.

How does my experience compare with the math? I'm not sure. I get listening comprehension and reading practice. But as far as learning lots of new vocab, it hasn't happened yet. Lately I've noticed that I'm trying to sound out a bunch of compounds I am not familiar with. But I suspect this is partially because I'm doing KiC.

Other info:
RtK - finished (while ago)
Total kanji in Anki ~ 2150
TaeKim - finished (while ago)
KiC - Chapter 15 finished (entered) today

Lyulf Wrote:Digithand how have you fared so far?

@Lyulf, I've been on it, I've just been reading up on and trying out Lucid dreaming, so it's taken my time away from logging on here and reporting my progress.

I'm trying to finish "I am a Cat" in English so I can start L-R it soon. My vocabulary and comprehension are both getting better, I can understand big chunks of Harry Potter now, sometimes I understand every word being said.

I'll try and post tonight.

Has anyone considered speeding up the audio they're using? Most media players are able to preserve the pitch just fine, so it just means getting a bit more done. At a speed increased 10%, you can hardly tell the difference unless you're listening for it, yet it cuts down a full run-through of Harry Potter by an hour. Plus, I've found that the little increase in pace seems to help me focus better, since it's just a bit more taxing.

nucleargorilla Wrote:Has anyone considered speeding up the audio they're using?

I think the audio is hard enough to keep up with at natural speeds - especially the quidditch game play announcer.

As a side, I feel that my RTK knowledge is helping me a lot. Following the L2 text while listening to L2 is really easy since I am quite familiar with most, if not all kanji.

Is your Japanese Harry Potter book with or without furigana?
Mine is with, but I wonder which is better for L/R.

Proxx Wrote:Is your Japanese Harry Potter book with or without furigana?
Mine is with, but I wonder which is better for L/R.

Mine has furigana, but afterwhile they are dropped once it has been shown with furigana <n> number of times. I think it doesn't matter, but that depends on your Kanji exposure. I find it easier to look at the Kanji itself.