I'm surprised how well I've been able to communicate with people right off the bat. It's exciting to think where I'll be in just a month or two's time. I'm focusing on studying sentence structures and kanji right now.My most intensive area of study right now is on learning the readings of kanji. Right now the book I'm using is called Essential Kanji by P.G.O`Neill. I've had it for a while but was always a little intimidated by it. Now that I've had a lot more experience with the Japanese language, it's making for a great resource. I still don't feel confident in my kanji at all, so I'm starting from the beginning. Of course I know a few of them pretty well by now, and I'm already 35 kanji into the book. I'm sure I'll hit the ceiling of my pretty-well-known-kanji soon and the speed at which I pick up new ones will fall drastically. As I mentioned before, I'm memorizing the readings of each kanji as well as writing each about 20 times.
At the same time I'm working on using transitive and intransitive verbs correctly, as well as some of the sentence constructs surrounding them. I'm also brushing up on older sentence structures that I haven't used for a while and therefore am rusty in their proper usage. I've brought the Japanese in Mangaland books with me, and packed some other ones to be shipped to me once I have a permanent address.
Showing posts with label language. Show all posts
Showing posts with label language. Show all posts
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Update
My original tutor has returned to Japan, and I didn't have one for a while which limited my studying. I was just focusing on memorizing vocab and the associated kanji while I was tutorless. I used Craigslist again to find another tutor, and she is really great. I'm studying several things in parallel at the moment:
The JLPT or Japanese Language Proficiency Test seems to be widely known, but somehow I hadn't been exposed to it up until now. There are four levels of proficiency, and people take tests created by the Japanese government to determine what proficiency they are at. I'm not too interested in taking the test, but it's another thing that can help my studying become more structured. For now I'm just learning the kanji that I'd need to take the test at JLPT level 4 (the lowest). Right now I'm studying off of a worksheet that has 120 characters on it. The sheet also includes the readings of the kanji that I have to memorize. Fortunately I already knew most of the first 75. I need to study more regularly so that I can figure out how many kanji per week I can memorize.
I've often wondered how important sentence structures are compared to vocabulary. When I'm at Japanese class, I'll frequently try to use some convoluted sentence to say something, and then I get corrected by just being taught new vocabulary that means what I was trying to say. This leads me to believe that learning vocabulary is more important than sentence structures, but of course you need both if you are to communicate well. A very important benefit of studying sentence structure is that to do so you need to form sentences! This means that the act of actually speaking Japanese is being studied, and not just memorization/recollection.
Because of studying sentence structures, I realize that I need to speak Japanese more often. We were studying "n desu" and "hazu", forming sentences that encompass the entire range of usage scenarios for these sentence structures. There were times when it took me 10 seconds just to parse all of a sentence's information and say the Japanese equivalent of the English sentence I was translating. I could tell that my teacher frequently thought I just didn't know the vocabulary, however it was just me fitting everything together in my head. I'm just not used to speaking Japanese, and that's something that I have to practice outside of class somehow. I feel like if I were to move to Japan, my ability to form Japanese sentences from English thoughts would quickly catch up with the rest of my Japanese language ability at least.
- Kanji vocabulary from the book Kanji in Mangaland
- JLPT kanji worksheets
- Weekly sentence structures
The JLPT or Japanese Language Proficiency Test seems to be widely known, but somehow I hadn't been exposed to it up until now. There are four levels of proficiency, and people take tests created by the Japanese government to determine what proficiency they are at. I'm not too interested in taking the test, but it's another thing that can help my studying become more structured. For now I'm just learning the kanji that I'd need to take the test at JLPT level 4 (the lowest). Right now I'm studying off of a worksheet that has 120 characters on it. The sheet also includes the readings of the kanji that I have to memorize. Fortunately I already knew most of the first 75. I need to study more regularly so that I can figure out how many kanji per week I can memorize.
I've often wondered how important sentence structures are compared to vocabulary. When I'm at Japanese class, I'll frequently try to use some convoluted sentence to say something, and then I get corrected by just being taught new vocabulary that means what I was trying to say. This leads me to believe that learning vocabulary is more important than sentence structures, but of course you need both if you are to communicate well. A very important benefit of studying sentence structure is that to do so you need to form sentences! This means that the act of actually speaking Japanese is being studied, and not just memorization/recollection.
Because of studying sentence structures, I realize that I need to speak Japanese more often. We were studying "n desu" and "hazu", forming sentences that encompass the entire range of usage scenarios for these sentence structures. There were times when it took me 10 seconds just to parse all of a sentence's information and say the Japanese equivalent of the English sentence I was translating. I could tell that my teacher frequently thought I just didn't know the vocabulary, however it was just me fitting everything together in my head. I'm just not used to speaking Japanese, and that's something that I have to practice outside of class somehow. I feel like if I were to move to Japan, my ability to form Japanese sentences from English thoughts would quickly catch up with the rest of my Japanese language ability at least.
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