Language Journal: April is upon us
I think I want to talk about what I might have done differently if I could go back in time and do it all over again.
The self-guided thing has it's advantages. But, it definitely also has disadvantages. The biggest being that most learning materials are guided. Which makes sense. It would be really hard to produce quality materials which would produce consistent results for a self guided learner.
For me it means getting into new material is increasingly harder. The longer I go on, the harder diving into something new becomes. It takes longer and longer to get to the content which is actually challenging. And, there is not even always a guarantee that whatever I'm looking at will ever actually get me where I'm going.
So, what I guess I'm saying is that, had I known I would have stuck with it. And had I known what my goals were in the beginning. I probably would have looked for a single program which would take me all or most of the way to my goal.
Of course, that wasn't where I was when I started though. I wasn't sure I would stick with it, and I didn't know really what I wanted out of it. And, to that end, the whole self guided thing is working out. It provides me with the freedom to toy around with new ideas and new sources of information. I only spend what I want to spend. Even if, in the end it might end up costing more, I don't think I'll regret any of the purchases I've made.
And that really is the bulk of what I would do differently. I can't go back now. I can't get to a place where being a beginner again doesn't feel like a waste of time.
My current form of self punishment is fairly simple. I watch some anime I wasn't going to watch with my wife and don't use sub-titles and see how much I can follow. I don't expect to learn tons in terms of grammar or vocab this way. If I do, that would just be a bonus.
I don't think I would really recommend this approach to others. I'm not in it for the grammar or the vocab. I know my listening skills are my weakest point. I know all of the N5 grammar basically and all of the N4 stuff I've encountered. My vocab is, I would say, decent. My listening skills are my weakness. With the grammar and vocab I know, if I can hear the sentence properly, more times than not I either know what is being said, can make a very good guess at it, or at least pin point exactly what parts of the sentence I don't get (including being able to classify them properly most times).
There are posts out there on how to use anime as a learning tool. It takes a special kind of commitment. I couldn't re-watch a show enough times to properly learn every single sentence. Especially if I weren't as far along as I am now. But even now I don't think I could. It would probably take me 2-3 times to be at a point where I could I fully understand something like 95% of the sentences. And then, to top that off, it can teach you some bad manners.
It definitely helps me meet my goal of feeling stupid every day :) I realise just how much I'm relying on context supplied by the show itself and I'm also noticing how much I had been relying on sub-titles even when I thought I was doing a good job of translating in my head. So much of it was reading ahead and being able to hear the words because I knew which ones to expect. I'm missing a lot more right now because I don't have that.
But, I *think* my listening skills are getting better.
The self-guided thing has it's advantages. But, it definitely also has disadvantages. The biggest being that most learning materials are guided. Which makes sense. It would be really hard to produce quality materials which would produce consistent results for a self guided learner.
For me it means getting into new material is increasingly harder. The longer I go on, the harder diving into something new becomes. It takes longer and longer to get to the content which is actually challenging. And, there is not even always a guarantee that whatever I'm looking at will ever actually get me where I'm going.
So, what I guess I'm saying is that, had I known I would have stuck with it. And had I known what my goals were in the beginning. I probably would have looked for a single program which would take me all or most of the way to my goal.
Of course, that wasn't where I was when I started though. I wasn't sure I would stick with it, and I didn't know really what I wanted out of it. And, to that end, the whole self guided thing is working out. It provides me with the freedom to toy around with new ideas and new sources of information. I only spend what I want to spend. Even if, in the end it might end up costing more, I don't think I'll regret any of the purchases I've made.
And that really is the bulk of what I would do differently. I can't go back now. I can't get to a place where being a beginner again doesn't feel like a waste of time.
My current form of self punishment is fairly simple. I watch some anime I wasn't going to watch with my wife and don't use sub-titles and see how much I can follow. I don't expect to learn tons in terms of grammar or vocab this way. If I do, that would just be a bonus.
I don't think I would really recommend this approach to others. I'm not in it for the grammar or the vocab. I know my listening skills are my weakest point. I know all of the N5 grammar basically and all of the N4 stuff I've encountered. My vocab is, I would say, decent. My listening skills are my weakness. With the grammar and vocab I know, if I can hear the sentence properly, more times than not I either know what is being said, can make a very good guess at it, or at least pin point exactly what parts of the sentence I don't get (including being able to classify them properly most times).
There are posts out there on how to use anime as a learning tool. It takes a special kind of commitment. I couldn't re-watch a show enough times to properly learn every single sentence. Especially if I weren't as far along as I am now. But even now I don't think I could. It would probably take me 2-3 times to be at a point where I could I fully understand something like 95% of the sentences. And then, to top that off, it can teach you some bad manners.
It definitely helps me meet my goal of feeling stupid every day :) I realise just how much I'm relying on context supplied by the show itself and I'm also noticing how much I had been relying on sub-titles even when I thought I was doing a good job of translating in my head. So much of it was reading ahead and being able to hear the words because I knew which ones to expect. I'm missing a lot more right now because I don't have that.
But, I *think* my listening skills are getting better.
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