Language Learning from the average unaverge high school kid Headline Animator

Thursday, November 29, 2007

What a week

This is now officially my 6th post, but it's coming a little later than I planned on it being. It has been a hectic week due to a lot of work being due, plus having a couple health problems hinder me so I haven't been able to keep up with by blog this week. But I did make a little progress, especially in my Japanese. I was unable to do much work, but when I was fine I put in a lot of work into memorizing more kanji and I am currently up to 751 characters, and I have been counting down everyday to the final character in the book, so I now have 1291 characters left, which actually surprises me and motivates me to get them done. I've been trying to do about 50 a day which would get me to 1300 in 26 days, just in time for Christmas! Now realizing that my goal would be reached right around my day, I have proposed to finish this book and my 2042 kanji by Christmas Day, a hefty proposal but definitely a possible one. I know it won't be easy, but I'm fine with that and I am ready to do it. Memorizing the kanji usually takes me about an hour, which is a long time, but I usually have a lot of time on me, especially on the weekend, so I will probably step up the input on the weekend to maybe 80 and maybe drop the load down to 40 during the week, but always try and do 50 if I can. Now, coming into what I am about to say, I understand I am dealing with enough languages as is and adding yet another could really be too much, but at this point in my language learning "career," I find it quite easy to handle multiple languages, I never get confused except for the occasional pause when I am talking to people in different languages at once, or, I must admit, I have some situations where I am not sure how to say something in English! I am kind of worried, my brain is starting to think moreso in Portuguese or French than English and I have to say things aloud to myself a couple times before I am sure it is right. But, I don't really care, I'm not planning on being an English major. Now, what I was going to say was, I think I might try to pick up Russian or German, or maybe both. I might have mentioned it in one of my earlier posts, or on my blog before I changed it around and lost it, but I did do a little bit of German study but I didn't keep it up just because of loss of interest and tutor :). As with Russian, I've ran by PLENTY of materials I could use to teach myself Russian and I think I am pretty good at putting together a curriculum for myself. As with Portuguese, I have been talking much more in Portuguese and I think once I go back over my conjugations I will be at an intermediate level of Portuguese, I think at this point it's basically just a matter of learning vocabulary and working on my speaking/listening. My speaking is decent, I sort of developed a strange brazilian accent, I was talking to someone and I forget which region of Brazil, but I am kind of happy that I don't sound like an English speaker completely. But the thing I have to work on is just putting together sentences and sounding smooth when I talk. Listening is just really hard because Brazilians talk SOOOO fast. I can understand a little bit because I just take keywords and put them together and figure it out, but I want to be able to understand everything. Due to lack of time as always, I have to end it here but I will try to post again later, 1~

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hello, this is snozle from the how-to-learn-any-language forums and snozle.com. Thanks for the comment on my blog. It's always nice to know that there is someone else working towards the same goal.

It's quite impressive that you already two languages in addition to your native tongue. Japanese is my first non-native language (aside from Spanish and Italian in school, of which I hardly learned anything).

Anyway, I'm a first-year college student and I have a similar issue with lack of time that you do. I have found that studying in small chunks of time works best. 15 minutes here, 45 there, etc.

Good luck on your self-imposed challenge to complete RTK1 by Christmas. I would like to have the same goal, but it would require me to do around 70 a day. Instead, I'm going to set a slightly less ambitious goal to have RTK completed by the end of my winter break, Jan 6th.

I'll keep posting, and I hope you do the same. We should use each other's progress as motivation. If you ever want to converse in Japanese (down the road of course) email me and we can arrange a skype conference or something. Gambate!

Kevin said...

Hey Torrey, -- The blog looks like it's really coming together. Glad to see that you are sticking with it and making connections.