Reading the News (2)

I'm far from understanding the news by audio sources. I'm doing it 2-3hours/day during weekdays. But it seems I need to listen to it more.

But I'm managing to get close to 100% understanding in from written material. Yes, it takes a while, I need the dictionary for it, but it is working.

And thanks to the news, my joyo count is raising quickly without extra effort again.

Reading and listening to the news is convincing me that the major obstacle of learning languages is vocabulary. It is simply a huge task. Way too many words. Grammar is not simple, but it fits for itself as you start to acquire more and more vocabulary. 

Learning a vocabulary of 10.000 words, 30 words/day, takes a lot of time. And during that time, you'll have plenty of time to practice the other aspects of the language.

Lastly, the joyo count for today:

The 2465 seen cards in this deck contain:

• 1615 total unique kanji.
• Jouyou: 1482 of 1945 (76.2%).
• Jinmeiyou: 31 of 287 (10.8%).
• 102 non-jouyou kanji.

Jouyou levels:

• Grade 1: 80  of 80  (100.0%).
• Grade 2: 159 of 160 (99.4%).
• Grade 3: 196 of 200 (98.0%).
• Grade 4: 186 of 200 (93.0%).
• Grade 5: 172 of 185 (93.0%).
• Grade 6: 165 of 181 (91.2%).
• JuniorHS: 524 of 939 (55.8%).

Why reading the news?

Over the last month I grew overconfident of japanese.

I'm already understanding a lot from anime/manga and that somehow made me think my japanese was already actually good.

The news put me in my place again. I'm just a beginner. I have tons to learn. And I cannot let my pace down in this critical time.

That was the first reason. The second reason is:
It is easier to come from nothing to being bad at something. Somehow languages look like creating a Diablo character (diablo the computer game). Going from lvl 1 to 10 is quick. Going from lvl 80 to 81 is a long way.

In anime, I'm already in 80%. It is hard to fight for every new 1% of understanding. And it is not that much motivating.

In the news, I'm lvl 1.

Starting from the beginning is painful, but everything is new. So everything I see will be contributing for my japanese.
Even if I only understand 10%, I like to think that these 10% are much more useful than the 80% from the anime.

The 80% from anime is pure confort. And confort is a dangerous thing.

I don't know if I made myself clear, but that's what I want to believe.

Btw, Phauna, thanks for the link for the kids news, it will be very useful.

Started reading the news

Yesterday I started hearing the news from yomiuri online podcasts.

Most of it sounds like gibberish. I can notice the sentence patterns, but there is so much unknown vocabulary that generaly I choke right with the first sentence.

I also created a policy of reading at least 1 article/day.

Today's lucky one was

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/atmoney/news/20081204-OYT1T00051.htm?from=top

I might've understood about 10% of it _after_ going trought it with the dictionary. Yup. It was sad. But watching anime isn't doing much for me anymore. I can already understand most of it.

Anki statistics in my first day of reading the news:

The 2326 seen cards in this deck contain:

• 1515 total unique kanji.
• Jouyou: 1401 of 1945 (72.0%).
• Jinmeiyou: 29 of 287 (10.1%).
• 85 non-jouyou kanji.

Jouyou levels:

• Grade 1: 80  of 80  (100.0%).
• Grade 2: 159 of 160 (99.4%).
• Grade 3: 193 of 200 (96.5%).
• Grade 4: 183 of 200 (91.5%).
• Grade 5: 166 of 185 (89.7%).
• Grade 6: 156 of 181 (86.2%).
• JuniorHS: 464 of 939 (49.4%).

Anki statistics

Today I finaly got to 70% of joyo! Hurray!

10 more kanji/day and in 60 days, I'll be done.


Kanji statistics

The 2260 seen cards in this deck contain:

• 1463 total unique kanji.
• Jouyou: 1361 of 1945 (70.0%).
• Jinmeiyou: 27 of 287 (9.4%).
• 75 non-jouyou kanji.

Jouyou levels:

• Grade 1: 80  of 80  (100.0%).
• Grade 2: 159 of 160 (99.4%).
• Grade 3: 193 of 200 (96.5%).
• Grade 4: 180 of 200 (90.0%).
• Grade 5: 165 of 185 (89.2%).
• Grade 6: 153 of 181 (84.5%).
• JuniorHS: 431 of 939 (45.9%).

AJATT youtube videos and Success in listening

I'll comment about this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J34i9lr94pI&feature=related

Somewhere in this video, Katz talks about 4 levels of listening.
Here they are:

1) You pick up the sounds that exist in the language and the sounds that don't exist in the language. You cannot understand anything. Everything sucks.

2) You can sometimes pick up a few words. It feels great to hear the words you know. And later on, to learn what the words you heard really mean while reading. It sucks because you cannot understand complete sentences.

3) You can sometimes pick up whole sentences, not only words. Sentences from the beginning to the end. It sucks because you need so much effort to understand so little.

4) The situation has changed. Sometimes you cannot understand a word or a setence. You are getting used to understand more than you dont understand. It sucks because you still don't have the complete understanding. You turned yourself into a spoiled brat.

My comment: What I wanned to say is what Katz already said. It sucks all the time. If you stop because it sucks, well, you'll stop sucking, but you'll stop learning. All you have to do is hang on. It'll work out by itself while if continue doing your parallel studies.

And, for the records, I wanned to register that I finaly feel like I achieved the lvl 4.
I watched the episode 07 of nodame yesterday and I think I understood about 95% of it.
There is still so much that I can't understand, but I'm already more used to understand than to not understand.

7 minutes of complete understanding.

Yesterday, I was watching the 5th episode of Nodame Cantabile Pari Hen for the first time.

At about ~10mins, I got pissed off because there was this word I could not understand. Then I noticed: Hey, taking the OP off, it is about ~7mins of real japanese that I could understand!

Hurray! AJATT is paying off.

Anki status (2): 65%!

Just for the records, the current anki statistics:

The 2092 seen cards in this deck contain:

• 1350 total unique kanji.
• Jouyou: 1265 of 1945 (65.0%).
• Jinmeiyou: 23 of 287 (8.0%).
• 62 non-jouyou kanji.

Jouyou levels:

• Grade 1: 79 of 80 (98.8%).
• Grade 2: 159 of 160 (99.4%).
• Grade 3: 189 of 200 (94.5%).
• Grade 4: 172 of 200 (86.0%).
• Grade 5: 159 of 185 (85.9%).
• Grade 6: 135 of 181 (74.6%).
• JuniorHS: 372 of 939 (39.6%).

Maybe I could pass the 6th grade now!