Learning Japanese Continues
Holy crap! End of January already!
I guess this means I've been learning Japanese for something like 7-8 weeks now.
Honestly, I knew I wanted to do it. But I'm still surprised I've stuck at it this long. Especially since my holiday vacation ended and I've been devoting far less time to it and the progress isn't as quick as I'd like.
But to that end, the progress is also different than I expected, and to be frank, I'm not really sure where my proficiency lies. I don't know if I'm 1% of my way to my goal or 10% (but I'm pretty darn sure that I'm not more than 10%).
What I mean by that is, there are 2 areas I'm much further ahead in than I thought I would be. Even if things like vocabulary and sentence structure and the like is still very much a work in progress. Firstly, my Hiragana and Katakana skills don't appear to be fading even though I'm not emphasizing them as much now. And secondly, I can "hear" the sentence structure often times when I listen to an anime or song in Japanese. By which I mean, my ear is already pretty good at identifying the syllables, and the knowledge I do have of sentence structure allows me to say "while I don't know what the word means, I heard so and so use this adjective".
That may not sound like a lot, but we're not talking about listening to learning resources where the only sound is the speaker and they are using loud, well enunciated formal sentence structures. We're talking anime with a lot of informal dialog delivered at the pace a native speaker uses and at varying degrees of enunciation and speed. And in music, we're not even talking about proper sentence structure at all some times.
In other words, it still sounds like a foreign language in that there are a lot of words I don't understand. But I'm getting closer to the point where it doesn't ever just sound like jibberish and more to a point where I could say, to a native speaker, in their tongue "that word X you just used. What does it mean?".
On the flip side, my memory sucks. So vocabulary, conjugation and remembering rules about structuring sentences is still coming at a slow pace. But, at least it IS coming. MAYBE, when this is all done I'll trying learning French as well.
I guess this means I've been learning Japanese for something like 7-8 weeks now.
Honestly, I knew I wanted to do it. But I'm still surprised I've stuck at it this long. Especially since my holiday vacation ended and I've been devoting far less time to it and the progress isn't as quick as I'd like.
But to that end, the progress is also different than I expected, and to be frank, I'm not really sure where my proficiency lies. I don't know if I'm 1% of my way to my goal or 10% (but I'm pretty darn sure that I'm not more than 10%).
What I mean by that is, there are 2 areas I'm much further ahead in than I thought I would be. Even if things like vocabulary and sentence structure and the like is still very much a work in progress. Firstly, my Hiragana and Katakana skills don't appear to be fading even though I'm not emphasizing them as much now. And secondly, I can "hear" the sentence structure often times when I listen to an anime or song in Japanese. By which I mean, my ear is already pretty good at identifying the syllables, and the knowledge I do have of sentence structure allows me to say "while I don't know what the word means, I heard so and so use this adjective".
That may not sound like a lot, but we're not talking about listening to learning resources where the only sound is the speaker and they are using loud, well enunciated formal sentence structures. We're talking anime with a lot of informal dialog delivered at the pace a native speaker uses and at varying degrees of enunciation and speed. And in music, we're not even talking about proper sentence structure at all some times.
In other words, it still sounds like a foreign language in that there are a lot of words I don't understand. But I'm getting closer to the point where it doesn't ever just sound like jibberish and more to a point where I could say, to a native speaker, in their tongue "that word X you just used. What does it mean?".
On the flip side, my memory sucks. So vocabulary, conjugation and remembering rules about structuring sentences is still coming at a slow pace. But, at least it IS coming. MAYBE, when this is all done I'll trying learning French as well.
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