Japanese Progress Report

Today while watching the episode 19 of Tales of the Abyss, I realized I was not chocking on unknown vocabulary anymore. 

I'm finally starting to get that native feel of vocabulary, where you only need to listen the word once to "get it". Like when you hear a new word in English and think "ah, this must be that", without looking it up. I had already experienced that many times while reading, sometimes while listening, but now it's turning into something usual.

Nevertheless, I'm feeling great about it.

Learning french from the perspective of a portuguese/english bilingue

I started listening to lots of French today. One might try and do the same expecting to get the same results. For that, I'll leave here a disclaimer.

At the time, I can speak and listen both english and portuguese at native level. This gives me a huge advantage for learning French. I have an impression that 95% of French vocabulary is cognate or with English or Portuguese. The grammar has a lot in common with both languages and pronunciation has a lot in common with Portuguese.

If one starts to learn French only knowing English, he might have much more troble with vocabulary and pronunciation than me. So be more carefull.

Prerequisites for learning a language

When I first started this blog, I thought that anyone, at any age, could learn a new language. After this long year, I realized there actually are some requirements.

1) The habit of reading.

If you don't normally read in your own language, you will not be able to read in a foreign one. Reading gives great opportunity to learn new words while having fun.

2) You must enjoy listening to something.

Music is not the best. In my experiente, the best are dialogues. I strongly recommend shows like South Park. It's almost only made of dialogues and its fun. Also it gives you opportunity to learn words that you'd normaly won't learn from books. Hahaha.

HJHFATT

HJHFATT stands for half japanese, half french all the time.

I just happened to get southpark completely dubbed in French and I'm simply too curious to not enjoy it.

I plan to start it half time tomorrow.

Kanji statistics

The 2917 seen cards in this deck contain:

• 1863 total unique kanji.
• Jouyou: 1676 of 1945 (86.2%).
• Jinmeiyou: 41 of 287 (14.3%).
• 146 non-jouyou kanji.

Jouyou levels:

• Grade 1: 80  of 80  (100.0%).
• Grade 2: 160 of 160 (100.0%).
• Grade 3: 200 of 200 (100.0%).
• Grade 4: 198 of 200 (99.0%).
• Grade 5: 185 of 185 (100.0%).
• Grade 6: 180 of 181 (99.4%).
• JuniorHS: 673 of 939 (71.7%).

Hehe, nice way to ruin your new year's resolutions. ^_^

Back in the year

Yo, the new year finally starts for me. I already had some fun, but from today on I'll be serious.

Then, I'm setting some goals:

1st: Putting all the joyo in my anki cards. There about ~250 kanji that are still not there. I want to finish it in 2 months, so I'll need about ~5 kanji/day. Sounds it will be easy.

2nd: Fix my writing. I'm doing recognition only. It makes wonders for reading comprehension, but I need to work on my handwriting. I'm able to write with the IME, but I want more than that. My plan at this point is simply start copying the harder sentences during my anki reviews. After some more experimentation, I'll decide something better.

3rd: Fluency. I think I'm doing good on this one. I'm breezing trough my 涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱 novel, reading the slashdot.jp daily, acompaining the headlines from 読売新聞 and TBS and a few more blogs, like the awesome http://nihongodaybyday.blogspot.com/

Well, that's it.

Vacations, more or less.

No, this is not a post to excuse myself for not using a SRS again. I'm still using it daily. I have not skipped a review since my last post. I'm just adding fewer cards.

5 days ago, my Haruhi Suzumiya novels arrived, and I'm reading the first volume. I'm doing 3-4 pages and watching/listening only 1 houre of japanese for day only. I'm only adding sentences for the words I want to know really baddly, so it means only 4-5 new sentences/day.

The great thing is: I'm doing fine!
I can read these novels without much effort, for laizure. And I'm loving them. The plot is really nice and all, but these novels have something that really impressed me:
The ultra long sentences it cointains. It is one thing that until now I ignored and I'm still not used to it, so it is gonna be great training.

Short pause and reacceleration

The listening the news project is somewhat halted. I'll go back to it soon enough.

I did not reviewed my sentences and RTK decks for 3 days. The following day, I had 500+ sentences to review, mainly from the mass adds from the hollydays. The RTK review was very small and it is back on track. The sentences review is probably gonna be back on track today. For 6 days I only added 3 sentences.

But I did not stopped with the fun stuff. I started a new experiment. I got Code Geass again, now with subtitles. It was not on purpose. It is harder to find raw series as soon as they get out of fashion.

So I started to watch them with the subs.

For my admiration the lyrics translation is not that great. There is even a mounstruous transcription mistake. Also I've seen many other mistakes in the series.

Well, what am I doing with subbed anime? I'm watching it slowly. I let it go while I get 100% of understanding. When I hear something I cannot figure out, I go back 10 secs and read the subs. Then I go back and hear it again. Most of the times I get that "click" and figure out the meaning of the word that I could not understand. Then I go back again and listen to it one more time.

Because of that, I can say that I understood 100% of the first 5 episode of Code Geass season 1. Yeah, it is cheatting. But hey, it gives me motivation!

The audio is also in the mp3. Only today I listened to episodes 1 to 5 two more times each.