Japanese — Week Five

こんにちは

Learning Japanese. Week five.

Second rather lazy week in a row. Well, “lazy” is not the right word. Other stuff has been going on rather, which depleted most of my energy. But that’s private. :D

I have polished my Hiragana by reading, learned a few more Kanji and Katakana and listened to a Japanese radio station more. I love it when they just talk for a few hours. Highlights are if I understand a word here and there, but the way they are talking in some of the shows fascinates me beyond that. I hope the fascination does not degenerate once I understand a certain amount.

(Currently it seems to be Smooth Jazz hour, so it’s fine anyway. :))

Besides the image of me looking into my test book being a sparse sight this week, I nevertheless feel like I took one small step further on the “being serious” ladder. I started a vocabulary with all words I learned so far. Hand-written. In paper. Not sure why I did not do that earlier, but … now I did. :) Kana-only, means, no Romaji. Let’s see when I will be able to add some Kanji there. I might need a very fine pen for that.

In order to collect the vocabulary I redid the first few lessons of Rosetta Stone and the text book I use. I have to say that this gave me a little push in confidence. In general I am currently feeling intimidated by the amount of stuff I see in front of me. Looking back once in a while might be a good way to see what has already been accomplished.

In this spirit, I am starting into the next week. Katakana still being no. 1 priority, the vocabulary will be one of my main targets this time. Being able to read the “letters” does not mean a thing if they cannot be assigned to a meaning.

さよなら

Japanese — Week Four

おはよう

Week four, of me learning Japanese, passed by. Fast. Too fast.

I read some articles about learning in general and started reading a book about learning Japanese.
Then I fell ill and was in bed for a few days. And now I am back at my desk working on the backlog of my time off.

I feel like I am currently in the Conscious Incompetence phase of learning.
According to the article this is the phase where most learners quit. And I certainly feel why.

Anki should have a module for the login manager. So that you have to finish your daily set of cards before you can log in. :D

The nice thing of the week was when I watched Three Days of the Condor (great movie!) and the guy wrote down a Kanji asking what it meant and I could actually answer that before the woman did. :D (For the record: it was the Chinese 天, which looks the same in Japanese :))

Ok, off for another week of Kanji, Rosetta clicking spree, listening to Japanese radio shows (and starting to love the musik there) and all the other little things I am trying to establish in my daily life. :)

さようなら

Japanese — Week Three

こんばんは

Week three of my Japanese learning attempt. So what happened?

- I was able to repeatedly form whole simple sentences with all the は and を at the right place while not reading it from a text book and with my last learning session having been hours ago. That felt pretty good. :)

- A new unit introduced new grammar. Now I am confused with sentence structure again. :D

- This clickery-doo of Rosetta is becoming a bit tiring. I have to force myself increasingly with every additional session to not click what I know is right and actually read the texts.

- Numbers are evil! Well, numbers seem fine but numbering is evil. Japanese has different words for counting depending on what you count. Seems like an awful lot of trouble for just counting stuff.

- Hiragana are mostly fine now. I was a bit confused just today because “motte” is “もって” but “ikko” is “いっ” (I would have guessed “いっこ”). Or is Rosetta flawed?

- I started learning Kanji two days ago. Not sure if I am using Anki correctly, but the way I use it now is not enough yet. I want to train some Kanji several times a day but still have some postponed for a few days. But I only found a way to postpone by one day or not at all (immediate repetition). After a delay of one whole day, 20 new Kanji are added. That way I will have all 80 N5 Kanji there in two days with around 15 of them fluent enough to have them postponed for weeks. But I will have to use it more to judge it better. :)
I also have the feeling that just doing “flash card” learning is not enough for Kanji. Many have such a wide-spread meaning that it is hard to get the hang of them. On the other hand seem some Kanji closely related to other Kanji so it might be a good idea to see them in logical groups once in a while. But my text book exposes me to Katakana now, so…

- I have to start learning <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana"Katakana. They occur in my learning material now and I cannot read them yet.

I am looking forward to another week. :)

さよなら。

Japanese — A Week

こんばんは

It must be day seven or eight of my Japanese learning attempt. Not sure given my sleeping hapits. And I made it through the first unit of the Rosetta Stone software course. Eleven lessons from “ridiculously easy” over “no idea what they are talking about” to a mixture of all lessons stuffed into the last lesson.

Not sure if I grasp the concept of the course. It is supposed to mimic the way children learn a language. By listening to the language and making connections to things you see. While this worked quite well for me during the first few lessons (especially the “numbers” one ;)), it became a bit of a charade during the last few lessons.

After seeing a sentence a few times, I start to recognise the crucial word or the sentence’s shape in the little box it is presented in. So I have to force myself to ignore that I know the answer and read it all nevertheless. I am not always successful in doing so. So sometimes, I run through the exercises only hunting for the crucial words, longest sentences or boldest font, with no errors at all. But do I learn something that way? Not sure. That might be part of the “unconscious learning” approach, the software follows. As I said, not sure yet if it is working for me.

To be on the safe side, I decided to start another course in parallel.
Rocket Languages
They have a trial online course so no money needed for the first few lessons. They go the more usual way of starting with basic introduction and short conversations.

So far I like it since the material seems to be high quality. Only the speakers are a bit too enthusiastic for my taste. It sounds like the audio to a billboard advertisement for a generic enterprise IT product. But well, so far I have only been working through the first two conversations, so their enthusiasm might actually be helping once you have gone through weeks or months of studying. :D

For now I will be repeating the last few lessons of the first unit of the Rosetta Stone course and finish the trial on Rocket Languages. In parallel I have to repeat and repeat and repeat the Hiragana (especially the compounds) and start the Katakana.

Dinner time. :)
さよなら

Japanese — Day Three

おはいおうございます

It’s day three in my one-lesson-a-day Rosetta Stone learning Japanese attempt. It becomes a bit harder, no question. But it remains fun to learn more words and also to see that my version of the language pack is very old (did I mention that? ;)). In today’s lesson a Mercedes-Benz from the 1970s is used to show you what “atarashii” means. And “furui” is some car from the 1950s. :D

さようなら

Japanese — IBus to the Rescue

こにちは … it works. :)
Hiragana typed on a normal keyboard. :)
The way to go seems to be IBus with the Anthy engine. That worked fine once I got all the environment variable set up the right way.

export GTK_IM_MODULE=ibus
export QT_IM_MODULE=ibus
export XMODIFIERS=”@im=ibus”

I had to put them in $HOME/.kde/env/ibus.sh for KDE to recognise them. $HOME/.bashrc was not enough.

Then I added ibus-daemon -xim to the autostart in KDE Systemsettings and after a KDE restart Ctrl+Space now activates Hiragana input. Very nice.

If only actually learning Japanese was that easy. :D

I afterwards remapped the activation key to the Scroll Lock key, since Ctrl+Space is already taken by Lokalize which I use quite a lot.

<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_Common_Input_Method"SCIM loses distro support because it is written in C++ and thus is a pain due to ABI incompatibilities when a distro wants to transition to a newer version. I am a bit confused by that justification. But well, my head is needed elsewhere now. :)

さようなら

Japanese — Second Day

So, this is the second day of learning Japanese with the Rosetta Stone stuff. Since my version might as well be ten years old, it sure feels like time travelling. Other than that it is quite nice, though. I even try to read everything out loud. I hope it is worth the embarrassment of sounding awkward and will pay off later.

Yesterday I pointed out that it is hard to distinguish between “onnanohito” and “otokonohito” on some pictures. It seems the people who entered the words had that problem as well. The same picture is referred to as “otokonoko” in one lesson and “otokonohito” one lesson later.

On one picture you might even confuse “inu” with “ume” if you do not look closely. :D

I would post screenshots. But these are the sharepression ages, so I better not enrage our almighty corp leaders.

I also started learning Hiragana again (I actually started before the holidays but then forgot about it due to all the visiting) so I am confident that I can switch from Romaji to Hiragana display in a few days. It will slow me down as hell at first, but I am sure it will pay off soon.

Now I just have to figure out how to type Hiragana in Linux/KDE. sKim seems to be discontinued and scim-bridge-client-qt4 the way to go, but I did not read the instructions yet.