1,5 years of Japanese studies – passed the JLPT N5!

February 18th, 2012, 14:25 | 2 comments

Today I’ve studied Japanese for exactly 1,5 years – I began on 18th August 2010. In December last year I wrote the JLPT – Japanese-Language Proficiency Test. I wrote the N5, which is the lowest level of five. The results came timely for my 1,5 years celebrations, cause they arrive yesterday. And I passed!

Here are the details. Keep in mind the scores are not the actual raw scores, but scaled scores. I actually thought I did better than this, but nevermind. At least I got A’s in all sections. That means I got at least two thirds of the answers right.

An important mark has been passed! In July I’ll conquer the N4 level in Hamburg. (JLPT can be written twice a year, but Berlin only offers the December test.)

In other studies, I’ve kept up vocabulary training with Iknow – here’s my Iknow status as of today:

I’ve also kept up my tandem training with Kohei.

What I’ve done less of is grammar. I’m currently on chapter 18 in Elementary Japanese, volume 2. But I’m doing Genki II simultaneously.

Last week I started teaching Swedish to Germans at a language school. Yeah, I got a sudden offer and thought I should accept as a way to get out of my comfort zone. (A job that demands I leave my flat is unusual – and good – for me!) I’ve only had two lessons so far, with two different groups, but they’ve demanded plenty of preparations, not to mention anxiety – I’ve never teached before! So I’ve sort of abandoned Japanese for Swedish in the last week.

Anyway, that’s it. In the next few months you’re hopefully going to see some concrete examples of how I’ve put my fresh Japanese knowledge to use. Now, back to your text book, Karl!

Category: English, Japan, Japanese
Tags: Japanese, JLPT, learning Japanese

10 months of Japanese studies – less studies, more conversation

June 19th, 2011, 22:30 | 3 comments

I’m one day late with this post and not really in the mood to write it. I haven’t studied much in the last month, I’m afraid. I moved in to my new apartment, and what else? Don’t remember.

However, I had plenty of conversation training; a whole 7 tandem sessions with コウヘイ, who has become my main tandem partner – each of our sessions is 2 hours. I also spent Karneval der Kulturen with コウヘイ and his Japanese girlfriend – that was a blast to speak Japanese for a whole day! And some English, naturally.

I also met my tandem partner みずき 3 times, but she went back to Tokyo today.

Next week, I’ll meet two new tandem partners, as well as あゆみ, whom I’ve met once before, and コウヘイ of course.

In addition to the tandem training, I’ve had 2 paid tutoring sessions with my tutor 真吾. I actually said no this week, since it’s important that I study before these sessions in order to get the most out of them.

Iknow status: 989 items (words) started, 733 mastered. I’m about to finish step 5 and 6, and have just started step 7 of Japanese Core 1000, which contains the 1,000 most commonly used words in Japanese (100 of them per step).

And today (one day late, I know, so I can’t really count it), I studied chapter 7 in Elementary Japanese.

As for Genki II, I think I’m at chapter 16, somewhere in the middle of it. Yeah, that must be right. And I’m about to finish the exercises to that chapter in the workbook, or if I’m still at chapter 15 in the workbook …

Suddenly it all became so blurry.

Anyway, wish me good luck with my next month, the 11th! In only two months I will have studied Japanese for a year, but I also feel that is a great responsibility! When that date comes, I feel I should provide you with some sort of proof of my success/failure.

PS: I’ve watched some anime as well. Which ones you can see on my anime list.

Category: English
Tags: Japanese, learning Japanese

9 months of Japanese studies

May 18th, 2011, 23:53 | No comments

Oh God, is it already that time of the month? Yes it is! Today I’ve studied Japanese for exactly 9 months. It’s been quite a lazy month though, study-wise. Cause I was busy with so much else.

I haven’t made any progress at all in my text books during the last month, but I did meet two Japanese girls for tandem training, after having advertised on a board at a German language school. First I met one with whom I spoke Japanese for half an hour, and then English (since she wanted to learn English) for the other half of the time. Then I met one who wanted to learn German, so we first spoke German and then Japanese. Of course, my German sucks, but what the heck, it worked and she got her conversation training.

As for my sensei, he’s in Japan for two weeks. So I will try to be good without him.

I still wake up to Tanabe FM every morning. I still hardly get anything. But I recognise more words, and now I’m so used to every show beginning with saying the day of the week, the time, “today’s subject”, etc, that I get much of the “frame” of the show so to speak.

That’s all for now. Here is this month’s Iknow progress so far (with the upper bar summing up the totals since January):

Category: English
Tags: Japanese, learning Japanese

Half a year of Japanese studies!

February 20th, 2011, 19:14 | 2 comments

This is an uninspired post, but I think I should mention that last Friday (February 18, 2011) marked my half year anniversary of my Japanese studies.

I hardly studied at all last week – so much else to do at the moment – but I do keep meeting my sensei once a week.

So, how good am I? Well, I can speak Japanese – yes! I can hold a simple, very simple, conversation. Understanding is harder. I still only pick up words here and there when listening to Japanese radio, and reading (though I haven’t done much reading outside the text books) is very hard too, not to say impossible. Recognising a few words isn’t reading.

Still, I’m confident I’m very well on my way to mastering Japanese. I think I did the right thing when I started out hardcore – conquering one chapter a day. I invested my passion in my language learning, and I think that’s the only way to do it, at least in the beginning. It’s the way to get over the first threshold, that biggest one of them.

Actually, learning a language is not that different from writing a novel. You got to start out fiercly, devoting all your energy to it. But what’s even more important is to stick to it, every single day. Even when you’re totally uninspired. If you do, you will be amazed at how your language knowledge grows almost magically – just like a novel should if you write a bit every day. That said, learning a language is easier, because you don’t feel that you destroy your work when you have a bad day. Even bad learning is good learning, so to speak, whereas bad writing remains bad writing.

Yeah, I’m babbling. Like I said, I’m uninspired. But still, half a year – yoooooooohooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Here are all my study reports up to now:

Category: English, Personal
Tags: Japanese, learning Japanese

今日は春ですよ！！！

February 4th, 2011, 8:32 | 5 comments

As you know, I listen to a Japanese radio station every day: FM Tanabe. It’s quite frustrating, because so far I’ve hardly understood anything. Yes, dates, days of the week and a word here and there. But nothing more. Until last night, when I for the first time understood a whole sentence. Breakthrough!

The presenter repeated the word 春 (はる/haru). Is he talking about spring? I thought. Hm, doesn’t spring begin today in Japan? I had read something about it the same day. And then he said it:

今日は春ですよ！

Today it is spring!

He repeated it a few times too, to my delight, and also talked about 冬 (ふゆ/winter), all the while sounding very happy. I was happy too. Actually, I fell asleep with a smile on my face. Just like I’ll always remember the first time I really understood manga, I will always remember when I understood my first complete Japanese sentence in a non-study setting.

Category: English, Japan
Tags: FM Tanabe, Japanese, learning Japanese, Setsubun

My epiphany with Yotsuba-to!

January 23rd, 2011, 14:28 | 20 comments

This was supposed to be a post about practicing your Japanese by reading Yotsuba-to! (よつばと!), a popular manga which according to this post is ideal for Japanese learners, partly because of the furigana (small hiragana letters printed next to the kanji characters, thus revealing how the kanji should be read).

I managed to find the comic both raw (meaning in Japanese) and translated into English. I’m reading them on my computer and keep the window with the English version under the raw one. It’s perfect to have a key handy!

(And don’t worry, Yotsuba-to! publisher, I will probably buy the print versions eventually, just like I did with all volumes of Loveless after having discovered the manga through filesharing. Or some merchandise.)

However, something happened as I started to read. I suddenly found myself staring at the frames at the top of this post for a long time.

First I realised that they are slightly different; they added some details on the right frame, or took them away on the left one.

But that’s not the point.

The point is that this difference made me realise just what an art it is to reduce as much as possible from a picture without losing its expression. Yes, the art of reduction! The left frame is even more expressive than the right one – you can really see that little enthusiastic girl in front of you!

So this is how you should read manga. This is their allure. Manga readers don’t see cartoons – they see real characters, created with the help of lines that the manga readers’ brains know how to parse just in the same way as the novel reader’s brain knows how to parse words and sentences expressing the same thing. It’s really just the same! And the step to expressing something with a picture instead of with words is of course smaller in Japan, since kanji actually linger somewhere in between text and drawings. After all, kanji is nothing but very reduced pictures.

This made me think of Donald Richie’s Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics. Yotsuba-to! is a perfect example of the Japanese aversion to our Western mimesis, and of the Japanese “tendency to value symbolic representation over realistic delineation,” as Richie puts it. What an art!

This might be obvious to all of you, but I actually haven’t read that many manga, except Loveless. This was my epiphany, and I will always remember it. The moment when I fell through the paper and into the manga.

Category: Culture, English, Japan, Personal
Tags: Japanese, learning Japanese, manga, Yotsuba-to!, よつばと!

4 months of Japanese studies – back on the horseback!

December 19th, 2010, 17:18 | 1 comment

I’m one day late with this post – yesterday (18 December 2010) marked four months of Japanese studies for me.

I’m happy to inform you that I studied more during my fourth month than during my third. I’m now on chapter 9 in Japanese From Zero 3, and I’ve also studied from Let’s Learn Kanji, and increased the frequency of my tutor visits from every second week to once a week.

It’s hard to learn Japanese. Partly because what you learn is basically two things: Speaking and writing. And they are not as closely connected as in the Indo-European and Uralic languages that I’ve studied before. (Japanese is a Japonic language, hm, obviously…) This means that when I learn kanji, which is quite time consuming (but also fun and sort of relaxing in a meditative way), I don’t make any progress in the grammar and speaking department.

Right now I’m in a very snowy Sweden for my Christmas holiday.

Berlin was snowy too: The airport train was 55 minutes late, so I had to take a taxi to the airport, only to find out that my flight was delayed three hours. Didn’t matter, the taxi driver was a sweet and fat old man from the former GDR who was divorced and therefore would spend his Christmas in the company of André Rieu, or at least his cd’s. He praised the old East German Wartburg automobile and an former East German winter tire factory that is still around and apparently the best.

Since I travel luggage free, I couldn’t bring my thick text books. This means I’m taking a break from Japanese From Zero, and instead go through Genki I from start on my sweet little companion Samsung N310. (I didn’t mind the delay at all, since it made me conquer two Genki chapters!) Instinctively, I prefer Genki to Japanese From Zero. It feels more serious, it’s not cluttered with typos and I’ve heard it’s used at universities. However, it is not from zero, and it contains lots of “pair work” and “class activities” that are not suitable for self studies. And it’s not from zero. So I must say Japanese From Zero has suited me pretty well after all.

Ok, now we’re apparently about to go out and play in the snow a bit, me and my host.

Category: English, Japan
Tags: Japanese, learning Japanese

3 months of Japanese studies: This is a sad day!

November 18th, 2010, 13:13 | 4 comments

Dear people,

I’m still on chapter 2 in book 3 of Japanese From Zero. Yes, that’s right. I haven’t studied at all this month.

How did this happen?

First of all, I thought I did it all a bit too fast. I devoted about 3-4 weeks to each book with 12-13 chapters, whereas one week per chapter would probably have been better for deep learning. So I figured I had missed a lot (which maybe I hadn’t!), and therefore set out to repeat old chapters from the first two books.

But it turned out I’m no good at repeating. I love the feeling of conquest. That’s what kept my studies going: The exhilaration of conquering chapter after chapter, book after book. It was a high! Whereas repeating was just plain boring.

I must also blame the books. They mix new grammar with exercises in a way that just become very, well, cluttered. It’s excellent for “conquest learning”, but it would have been easier to repeat from a kind of reference with only the grammar and words, not the exercises. I can suddenly see the point with Japanese learning resources that divide text books and exercise books, as Genki does.

Also, since Japanese From Zero uses the “progressive” method of replacing romaji with kana step by step, chapter by chapter, as new kana is learned, you have to read the romaji when you repeat what you’ve learned, which is irritating after you’ve learned the kana.

But those are just excuses.

Oh, and I have another one: I released my first book and travelled to Sweden for the release party on October 27. It was fantastic, but it took all my energy for some time.

Ok, just one more: I’m participating in this year’s Nanowrimo. But as of today, I’m a whole 9,000 words behind.

Oh, and then I watched some Japanese movies.

But mostly, I just lived like a cat: Sleeping, eating, and going to the cat disco.

Category: English, Personal
Tags: cat life, Japanese, Japanese From Zero, learning Japanese

Richie’s Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics

November 6th, 2010, 16:49 | 3 comments

I just read my first Donald Richie, a short “treatise” called A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics. It begins:

Aesthetics is that branch of philosophy defining beauty and the beautiful, how it can be recognized, ascertained, judged.

Japan and the West differ vastly in their view on aesthetics, for example in the simple fact that the very word is of Western origin; in Japan, “aethetics” has always been inherent in all aspects of life, not least the tea ceremony, called 茶の湯 (chanoyu).

One aspect of Japanese aesthetics that appealed to me is their “tendency to value symbolic representation over realistic delineation.” (p. 23) Western art has traditionally been obsessed with “mimesis;” the attempt to imitate nature, to represent it just like it looks. Whereas the Japanese rather try to represent what’s underneath, the concept rather than the surface. I can relate!

Richie dwells on what he calls “elegance,” a kind of beautiful simplicity to be found for example “in the precise stroke of the inked brush, the perfect judo throw, the rightness of the placing of a single flower.” (p. 31)

I love it. I didn’t grasp half of the contents of this little book, but I have the feeling it will grow on me, and that I will understand more as I get to know Japanese culture more. It reminds me a bit of when I was 20 and tried to grasp the concept of “camp.” I couldn’t, but as I digested more gay culture, I was slowly beginning to “get it.”

This book was an appetizer for me.

Category: Culture, English, Japan
Tags: aesthetics, Art, Donald Richie, Japanese

Two months of Japanese studies

October 18th, 2010, 20:00 | 1 comment

Yes, it’s the 18th again, my Japanese birthday since it was on August 18th, 2010, that I began to study Japanese. So I’m turning 2 months today – happy birthday, Karl-san! (One month post here.)

I thought I’d introduce you to a language learning community today. It’s called Lang-8 and is a great place for everyone who is learning a language.

The idea of Lang-8:

You write texts in the language that you study, and your texts are corrected by people who have that language as their mother tongue.
You correct texts that other users have written in your mother tongue.

It’s such a brilliant idea. Incidentally, I had it myself back in 2002, when I sketched the outlines of a site I called Teach Me – peer 2 peer language studies:

Språkstudier peer-2-peer! En webbplats där man registrerar sig. Vilka språk kan man, vill man lära ut eller lära sig? Osv. Grundidén är att webbplatsen ska funka precis som de lappar som sitter på universitet runt om i världen: ”Jag är portugis. Om du lär mig tjeckiska så lär jag dig portugisiska.” Detta fantastiska utbyte av kunskaper som båda vinner på. Men problemet har varit för dessa människor att hitta varandra. Internet har hjälpt folk i en mängd andra situationer och fört samman personer med samma intresse osv. Men något sådant här finns ännu inte. Det vet jag eftersom jag i så fall hade varit reggad direkt!

I’m so happy to see the idea up and working, pretty much as I pictured it. Though, I must admit, I had an additional centralized (= expensive) twist to it.

I’m sure there are more communities like this one, but Lang-8 is perfect for me since it has plenty of Japanese users. But there are also plenty of Swedish journal entries for me to correct. I love it!

If you’re interested, read my Japanese journal. And start your own in the language you are studying. If it’s Swedish, make me your friend and I’ll look forward to tutor you!

And here’s the guy from Tofugu.com who showed me Lang-8:

I look forward to exploring the rest of his list, but as I’ve pointed out before: Don’t underestimate the hours you spend with your text book! So I’m getting back to that one now, to finish lesson 2 in Japanese From Zero 3. さようなら!

Category: English, Japan, Japanese
Tags: Japanese, Lang-8, learning Japanese

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