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...

Last edited by aphasiac (2010 January 07, 9:13 am)

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'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.

Last edited by howtwosavealif3 (2010 January 09, 6:52 pm)

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!

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

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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

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.