Back to Basics, Haiku 4

Yesterday, I opened my Anki app for the first time in about…3 months!!! Strangely enough, this is the same amount of time since I took my new job (which is very different from my new-new job!) so it’s no surprise that I let it fall to the way side.  Now I’m about 3 weeks into a job I actually enjoy and have been finding more time to spend on my favorite hobbies.  So I fired up Anki and you know what the first thing I did was?

I deleted EVERYTHING.

Yep.  Over the last week as I’ve slowly gotten back into trying to read and write and understand Japanese, and I’ve realized that my reading is far slower than it ever has been. So I went and downloaded a new Anki deck to refresh my Hiragana and Katakana fluency.  And part of that means I should start writing it more as well, so without further ado, I present a photo from this weekends hike to Kennesaw Mountain, and a hiragana only haiku!

さむいです。
でもかれはでは
さむくない。

Kennesaw Mountain Leaves, Nov 2013

Why Language Exchange is Awesome

こにちわ、みなさん！

I’ve mentioned a few times about my ‘study buddy’ あさこさん, she lives in Tokyo and we generally chat for about an hour each morning before I head off to work. I’ve been recently reading a lot about language exchange and surprisingly there are a lot of negative articles about it. According to most of what I’ve read, the issues include:

-Only for advanced speakers
-Tend to ‘devolve’ into just english/your native language conversation
-Unstructured/unruly
-not useful

While there are several valid points here, I think the general consensus is that it is a waste of time unless you have 3 years experience and bring an agenda to keep the topics on track. This is ridiculous. I’ve been practicing pretty seriously for the past 2 months, and am anything but advanced. And yes, we spend a lot of time speaking in english. BUT, that is because I cannot speak in Japanese yet… duh! What do first year Japanese classes sound like? Probably mostly japanese sounds surrounded by English conversation. But the key is, whenever there is a moment that I can speak in Japanese, I take it! We may be talking about how tattoo’s are viewed in Japan, and if a revelation makes me want to say “really?” I take that opportunity to practice my ‘ほんとに‘s and when I want to ask “what is that’ I don’t waste that moment in English.

But there are other HUGE benifits that come from a language exchange partner that I have found invaluable to just starting out:

Accountable to another person

Your language partner probably (like you) doesn’t have much opportunity to speak their target language. Thus they look forward to getting to practice and refine their skills as well. All that time they are explaining the appropriate time to use ’へんだね’ in English is going to be as helpful in refining their english skills a it is to your Japanese.

‘Pop Quizes’ and making it a habit

This is the biggest thing for me. When your language partner switches temporarily to Japanese, it really gives you a chance to test what you’ve learned. And as you talk more, you both get a feel for each others level of mastery. So after a discussion with あさこさん over the use of がんばて, a few days later I received an email using that word as, coupled with other familiar words, and was over joyed that I was able to understand what she was trying to convey. So even though I may have had those thoughts of putting it off, or even worse, quitting, I was instead rejuvenated and ready to continue my studies because I had just made a very tiny bit of measurable progress!

And finally, it’s FUN!

I just have fun talking to people about Japan. I’ve gained a lot of confidence in my morning meetings and have started to reach out to other would be pen-pals via email. So if you’re on the fence, and you’ve seen all these people moan-and-groan about language exchange, just ignore them and try it now! http://www.verbling.com is a great place to start. I’ve also finally ponied up the 7$ for a month at mylanguageexchange.com where you can email other non premium members and I’ve met a few new friends this week already.

Studying on the Go

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been going back and forth on whether or not to purchase the Anki mobile application.  If you’re not familiar with Anki, it’s a memorization software that allows you to study flash cards containing plain text, audio, video, and even HTML code.  It is really versatile and even syncs between many devices and has a slew of pre-made  or ‘shared’ decks for you to start studying right away.

Anyway, the desktop apps and web versions are completely free and I’ve been using them for a few weeks now (I’ve even verified that you can use the web version on your iPad).  But the iPad/iPhone version cost a whopping $24 USD!  Now considering that you get so much for free, this isn’t that bad, but still, I’ve never paid that much for an iPhone app!  (Thus the reason for so much time to decide on the purchase) Well, this past payday I decided to pony up the cash.  And I have to say I am not disappointed!

After buying on my iPhone, I immediately checked to see if it included on the iPad app as well and luckily it did.  So the $24 includes both the iPhone and iPad versions.

As for use, I’ve been using it almost exclusively.  Several times I find myself wanting to study, but not in the mood to go fire up the laptop, and realize that I just have to grab my phone.  So far though, I’ve only studied plain text and audio flash cards, but they work great.  I’ve yet to test the video feature, but that’s because I don’t have any video flash cards.

The only issue/bug I’ve found thus far is that sometimes the audio won’t replay if you wait too long to listen to it again.  So if you hear a word, then get distracted for a few minutes, coming back and replaying may or may not work.  But that has happened only a few times at this point.

While it was a hefty price, I am very, very satisfied with the result.  No internet connection is required (except for syncing results), so I get to practice in the elevator, walking around at lunch, or just before going to bed.  If you’re thinking about buying it, but you’re on the fence, I would first make sure that you’re going to keep up with studying by using the free desktop (Mac and PC) apps.  After you’re sure you won’t give up tomorrow, get it.  And study everywhere!

Questions Resulting from Anki

So a few weeks ago, I built an Anki deck out of the the top 25 verbs from LearningLanguage.com.  And finally this week, I took the time to learn how to reverse them! (In other words flip the front and back so that I have to say the Japanese version of the English word).  Anyway, generally while studying Anki I find my self questioning a number of things that I’m just not sure about.  So this post will server as my question log for today.

りかいする = To Understand.

This is strange to me.  I’m very familiar with わかる (to understand) and use it often in practicing for example: わかりません or わかりました to explain that “I understand” or “Now I understand (implying that I didn’t before)”  But I don’t believe I’ve ever heard りかいする used in speech before.

よぶ = To call (not phone)

What does that even mean!?  I actually came across this in another pre-made anki deck that said it meant ‘to call, name’ but I’m not 100% on how I would use this verb.  I assume that you could that you could call/name a pet, so maybe something like “ぼくはいぬのJavaよびました.”  I think that would be “I called/named my dog Java.”  But that’s the best I can think of for this verb.

ほしい = To want

I actually discussed this verb with あさこさん a while back and her feedback was that ほしい was a rather childish way to express wanting something.  Maybe I need more clarification on this…

Well, hopefully I’ll come back to this and update with answers soon 🙂

 

Momotarou Practice Reading

Reading practice. I decided to read Page 2 of Momotarou and see how much I could understand (without cheating, I promise!)

Here is the Japanese text:

むかし、 むかし、 ある ところ に
おじいさん と おばあさん が いました。
おじいさん が 山（やま） へ 木（き） を きり に いけば、
おばあさん は 川（かわ） へ せんたく に でかけます。
「おじいさん、 はよう もどって きなされ。」
「おばあさん も き を つけて な。」
まい日（にち） やさしく いい あって でかけます。

But Feel free to read the full version with translation here:
http://life.ou.edu/stories/momotarou.html

With regard to my comment about へ木 it turns out I was backwards, and somehow imagined a slash through the trunk. In actuality the kanji for book (ほん：本） is the tree with the slash through it. Thus, you cut the tree to get paper to make the book. I’m pretty sure that this came from “Remembering the Kanji” found at http://kanji.koohii.com.

Where do I eat lunch?

すごい！ I learned a lot today.  Well, I should say I went over a lot today.  阿沙子さん (Asako-san) introduced me to more new vocabulary, sentence structure, and topics than I think we have ever chatted about in a single session.  Which is good, since she mentioned that she won’t be available tomorrow.    But I’ve also started looking at TextFugu and per its suggestion I’ve re-purposed this old blog into my ‘learning log’ (wow… I wonder what the Japanese word for cheesy is haha).  But I was very surprised at how long it took me to go over such simple statement: “I come home for lunch from work.”

I’ve only read a little about the ordering of objects within sentences, but I don’t even know the correct nomenclature for all of the English words in this sentence!  The most I was able to point out was ‘I’ and ‘come.’  This is probably a good time to point out that English was always my least favorite and lowest scoring section in school…

So let’s see, my first attempt came out something like this: “ぼくは、ごほんにくました。。。” at which point I trailed off realizing I had left out work and home but also had no idea where to put them.

This of course led to 阿沙子さん very confused, and forcing me to take the English route.  So here are my notes from her explication (using unique English vocabulary makes me feel better about my lack of Japanese vocabulary… just sayin’).

くる is “to come/to arrive”, but apparently only when talking about someone else.  So your coworker, friend, or a stranger can ‘きます’ but when referring to yourself… you cannot… well… come.  That sounds dirty no matter how you type it.  I believe she then said that I should use いく but now that I look over my notes, the final sentence doesn’t seem to have it in there.  へんだな。。。

The next thing I realized in trying to say this sentence was that I didn’t know the word for from.  This is kind of a surprise for me since it’s such a common word, but now that I think about it, it seems pretty advanced.  We didn’t dive into anything crazy though, just the translation:  から = from.     From here she would out a simple template for me to use in the future

~からきたくする or, ~to come home from

So now I can put the place of origin at the beginning and I have most of my target sentence:

しごとからきたくする  = I come home from work

Of course now we have to add our politeness filter to the sentence to get:

しごとからきたくします

And now let’s make sure our listener knows that we are talking about the past, because I’m describing what I do usually, or have usually done:

しごとからきたくしますた

At this point, I was running late for work so we breezed through the hard part which describes that this takes place during lunch unfortunately.  For the most part it seems pretty self-explanatory; basically lunch is a common loan word pronounced ランチ.  After that… I actually don’t know what’s going on:

ランチをとるために

I’m familiar with に referencing a place, but I’m not even sure that’s what’s going on here.  I will have to do some googling to figure it out I believe. When we put it all together we get the following:

ランチをとるために、しごとからきたくしました

And in actuality, we can shorten this since most likely you wouldn’t say this without establishing that you were talking about lunch:

ランチをするために、いえにかえりました

Care to know the reasoning behind the above changes? Yea, so do I :/.

But overall a good lesson, especially the discussion on tattoos, やくざ, and bathhouses.  Mostly because I got reference the following picture with a serious question: ‘Is this really a fad in Asian countries?’

It means ‘go with the flow’