[Japanese] Daily Roundup

[karanguni]

Hi everyone. Sorry for the spam as I get things organised!

Pinned Masterpost

Is now available here or whenever you click on my journal name. Remember that most things are locked, so if you - lovely stranger reading this - want to study along, ask me for access.

Schedule

Considering the hugeness of each lesson, I'll be making those on a biweekly basis now. I'll try for around 3 posts a week:

Week 1: 15 - 21 Jan

* Lesson 1
* Round Up: round up resources, edits, and comments
* Read-a-long/Q&A: stepping through readings, questions from the week

Week 2: 22 - 28 Jan

* Goals Checkin
* Read-a-long/Q&A
* Homework/Quiz/Half-month Feedback: submit any homework you want marked in this post, and pick up a quiz for yourself. Feedback in general.

Lesson Edits

The lessons have been updated to include clarification on the ー long vowel usage in katakana. I realise I have no resource links for those absolutely just starting out with kana - but please use any of the textbooks or Tae Kim (linked below) to get you started in hiragana and katakana if so. Anytime you feel something is lacking for you to succeed, post an ask!

Resources

Resources Post

Several people have generously uploaded materials of their own and shared them in the comments there. Any new ones can go into the publicly editable Community Uploads.

chagrined's comment also has more stuff: here (textbooks &c.).

Checkin

How are things going for people? I failed epically to meet my personal goals of reading rakugo and kanji, but flipped that around to writing lessons (much more challenging, I've found) and searching out N2+ articles. I'm also beginning to look at this handheld scanner as I look at stuff I only have in bound hard copy and to the future where I'd try to give feedback on work. If at any point y'all want to chip in... /laughs

swan_tower mentioned the phrase お疲れ様でした (お・つか・れ・さまでした）, which is indeed a most useful expression! Read about it here and here and here. It's great for group activities and acknowledging effort. And sarcasm.

Questions, as always, can be put in any post.

For anyone who's struggling with grammar forms, I highly recommend Tae Kim as a place to go to to just look something up fast and then to get out. Don't overwhelm yourself! Drink water! Have fun!

Comments

[yhlee]

I did the ひらがな　カタカナ drill worksheets and read some of the grammar explanations book. I've been continuing Duolingo, which starts by introducing ひらがな + romaji, then some of the カタカナ more slowly as needed, and fairly quickly starts introducing kanji and making you use ひらがな to express the pronunciation. I would not recommend this as a primary resource because the lessons are very bite-sized (right now I'm up to daily expressions and time telling sorts of things), and as far as I can tell on the phone app there is no grammatical explanation whatsoever (I'm muddling through from what I remember about 日本語 grammar on previous attempts to learn the beginning stages of the language), but at least it gives me a pronunciation reference, which helps me out with the pitch accent. It also is a nice way of doing little bits of additional exposure to the language while I'm accompanying my family on errands out and about town.

I have pretty much failed to study kanji from the kanji text because I'm flattened from book edits that are due at the end of the month. :/ I'm probably going to lower my goal to 10 kanji/week for now and see if I can ramp up after the edits are turned in. I have printed out this week's lesson but have not started it yet.

I have also desultorily investigated the very beginning lessons of Imabi, which is probably of no use to anyone but me since I think I'm the n00best person here, but for anyone who is comfortable with linguistics terminology, it has great explanations--e.g. phonetics/phonology, allophones, pitch accent, morae, the works.

Do you have a Paypal account? Email me~ (I'm at yoon at yoonhalee dot com) I'm willing to put in $50 toward the cost of the handheld scanner, will that help?

[karanguni]

がんばって！

Let me know if there's ever more words/random practice I can help you with!

While I'm here...

Fun Things To Practice Saying In Your Head Or Whatever About Errands

Vocabulary:

今　（いま）　Now
スーパー Super(market)
行く　（いく） To go
買い物　（かいもの） Shopping (noun; the act of)
～時 (じ） ~ o'clock
午後（ごご）　PM [lit. noon-after]　(see also 午前　(ご・ぜん) for AM)
～時間　（じ・かん）~ hour(s) [lit. the space of an hour]
かかる　To take (as in time)

Polite Form:

I am going to the supermarket now.
いま、スーパーに　いきます。

It is 1 in the afternoon now.
いまは　ごご　１時（じ）　です。

Shopping took 1 hour.
かいものは　１時間（じ・かん）　かかりました。

Dictionary Form:
いま、　スーパーに　いく。
いまは　ごご　１じ　だ。
かいものは　３０分　かかった。

[chagrined]

My checkin: I didn't do one Pimsleur lesson a day but I did do ONE which is more than I've done in the past month or something so I'm calling it a win. XD

And I studied A FEW new kanji and started reviewing writing old kanji on an app on my phone. And I managed to catch up with all my flashcards, which was a huge chore.

What I really need to do now is review grammar points from my textbook that I studied previously but have forgotten/gotten fuzzy on, probably doing writing practice for those would be good, and then come up with a concrete schedule/goal for sticking to my textbook going further.

That scanner seems pretty neat. I took some pics of a pronunciation guide in one of my dictionaries that is way more detailed than the one in my textbook & it's useful for some things that book leaves out, and thought about posting those but my pics are really crappy so I didn't bother haha.

[kurayami_hime]

I should go back and post this in resources, but I wanted to point people to http://laits.utexas.edu/japanese/joshu/index.php. It's got a lot of resources for people first starting out, including tons of kana practice. And grammar, and vocabulary, and reading, etc. There's even a build your own flashcards and HTML quizzes section.

[kurayami_hime]

For the actual check-in . . . I haven't done much. Went over Momotaro with swan_tower along with practice building complex sentences (ala "See Spot run . . . to the grocery store because Spot wants to get out of the house today"). Figured out how to make custom 原稿用紙 in Word, read about halfway through the names reading assignment (it's interesting!), and decided that I would start with my Japanese particle workbook. Haven't actually started with said notebook, but it's sitting on my desk giving me the stink eye as I type.

[swan_tower]

For posterity, the sentence we chewed over, with me asking lots of questions about the right way to construct something more complex than "See Spot run," was:

出かけたいから、トラグズで食料品を買いに歩いて行くつもりです。

And then transposing that to the past tense after we successfully went to Trag's for groceries.

I haven't done the formalized kanji and grammar stuff I meant to do, but I did write out sheets for hiragana and katakana, just as warmup review. I also didn't watch the entire zero episode of X, but that's because I decided not to simply watch it; instead I turned off the subtitles and made myself write out all of the dialogue and translate it as best as I could. This being much more labor- and time-intensive, I'm only partway through the ep.

Making a concerted if not highly structured effort with kurayami_hime to work on 日常生活語彙, so that we can have more casual conversations in Japanese around the house. (Featured word of the week, courtesy of that sentence above: 食料品!) This is why I retain any Spanish at all -- because I had random daily conversations with my friend in junior high about how we didn't want to do our homework, etc -- so I figure the same principle applies here.

I also, as advertised, read ももたろう (again asking lots of questions about "why is the sentence put together this way?"). She's got three other children's books, one from the same series, that I may try to scan and upload.

[karanguni]

Yeah! For a while I converted my browser over to Japanese and put post it notes on a lot of things around the house. Nothing like forced immersion.

I've uploaded a few others in that children's book series to the folder so you guys don't have to scan what I already have.

[karanguni]

Do itttttttt :3

[momijizukamori]

Continuing with WaniKani, and I printed out the kana drill sheets and did the first few - my handwriting has gotten really appalling, unfortunately. I also muddled through the first couple of pages of Momotarou - I need to pick it back up once I have the mental energy to keep pushing at it.

[karanguni]

I'd be happy to go over anything you want to scan! Don't burn out though :)

[swan_tower]

Also meant to say that I've read three articles on a particular site:

"The Surprisingly Simple Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure"
"A Visual Guide to Japanese Word Order"
"The Difference Between the Particles 'wa' and 'ga'"

The second one in particular was massively helpful, as it gives you both images and acronyms to articulate the most natural-sounding order for different elements in a sentence -- that being the big topic of discussion between me and kurayami_hime the other day. (e.g. why was it better to say トラグズで食料品を買いに歩いて行く rather than 食料品を買いにトラグズに歩いて行く or something like that).

[karanguni]

I like their stacking doll images - I do the same thing mentally in my head, where I withhold ascribing meaning to anything until I get to the end of the sentence.