(no subject)
Mar. 9th, 2018 09:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysobelCurrent status of learning Japanese: progress is being made! I have hiragana down pretty well; I have katakana somewhat down, but it's a lot slower ("this letter is ... re. This letter is ... ma? No, su" levels of slow) and more error-prone. But I do have a few sentences, and I can recognize a handful of kanji -- 私 and 名前 and 何 and 元気, though with the last I can never remember which order the two go in.
I'm using two main apps (not counting the ones for kana and for kanji), and they've both been cracking me up.
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Duolingo is mostly in "hiragana with occasional individual words" rather than sentences. Some words are sticking, mostly ones I was already familiar with (watashi, arigatō, sayōnara, and 1-10) or have something to hang them on (neko already had cat associations, inu has dog associations because shiba inu), but the rest just aren't sticking at all.
But, uh.
Occasionally it gives me super hard stuff, like manga, which translates to ... manga. And emoji translates as emoji. Who knew?!? ^_^
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Memrise seems to be sticking better, and also has sentences and stuff. (私の名前は……です! Watashi no namae wa ... desu. "My name is..." Except I don't know how I'd transcribe isabeau. イザボ maybe?) And it's mostly sticking, except for some of the kanji. I'm totally hopeless at, uhhh, *looks it up* 調子 "condition", which I can recognize but not generate, and can not remember the pronunciation, chōshi, to save my life; 乾杯 "cheers" I can reliably remember the second bit with the up arrows, but the first I just randomly flail at the available kanji options until it says I'm right. And for the kanji, they don't give the option of using hiragana instead -- 私 (watashi, I/me) is always 私 and never わたし, just like marina is always winter and never Christmas.
But I digress.
So, okay: with languages like Japanese that have different lettering systems, they have "translation" of letters, e.g. "き" to "ki (hiragana)". (And I am very glad for the (hiragana) even though sometimes I do things like stare at "me (hiragana)" and wonder why "私" isn't one of the options...)
Now, each item has three (sometimes four) associated objects: English written version, Japanese written version, and Japanese audio (sometimes also video). And there are lots of options for how they drill you: a) translate from English to Japanese; b) translate from Japanese to English; c) given Japanese audio/video, select or transcribe the correct Japanese text; d) given Japanese audio/video, select the correct English translation; e) given Japanese text, select the correct Japanese audio; f) given English text, select the correct Japanese audio. Basically, all permutations of English/Japanese/audio.
In the context of actual words, like いいえ "no", this is all very useful. Ditto sentences.
In the context of the letters, option f is *really fucking hilarious* to me.
I mean. Drilling that や is "yo" is useful. Drilling that "yo" is よ, also useful. Drilling that "yo" sounds like "yo" ... um ... not so much.
I'm using two main apps (not counting the ones for kana and for kanji), and they've both been cracking me up.
#
Duolingo is mostly in "hiragana with occasional individual words" rather than sentences. Some words are sticking, mostly ones I was already familiar with (watashi, arigatō, sayōnara, and 1-10) or have something to hang them on (neko already had cat associations, inu has dog associations because shiba inu), but the rest just aren't sticking at all.
But, uh.
Occasionally it gives me super hard stuff, like manga, which translates to ... manga. And emoji translates as emoji. Who knew?!? ^_^
#
Memrise seems to be sticking better, and also has sentences and stuff. (私の名前は……です! Watashi no namae wa ... desu. "My name is..." Except I don't know how I'd transcribe isabeau. イザボ maybe?) And it's mostly sticking, except for some of the kanji. I'm totally hopeless at, uhhh, *looks it up* 調子 "condition", which I can recognize but not generate, and can not remember the pronunciation, chōshi, to save my life; 乾杯 "cheers" I can reliably remember the second bit with the up arrows, but the first I just randomly flail at the available kanji options until it says I'm right. And for the kanji, they don't give the option of using hiragana instead -- 私 (watashi, I/me) is always 私 and never わたし, just like marina is always winter and never Christmas.
But I digress.
So, okay: with languages like Japanese that have different lettering systems, they have "translation" of letters, e.g. "き" to "ki (hiragana)". (And I am very glad for the (hiragana) even though sometimes I do things like stare at "me (hiragana)" and wonder why "私" isn't one of the options...)
Now, each item has three (sometimes four) associated objects: English written version, Japanese written version, and Japanese audio (sometimes also video). And there are lots of options for how they drill you: a) translate from English to Japanese; b) translate from Japanese to English; c) given Japanese audio/video, select or transcribe the correct Japanese text; d) given Japanese audio/video, select the correct English translation; e) given Japanese text, select the correct Japanese audio; f) given English text, select the correct Japanese audio. Basically, all permutations of English/Japanese/audio.
In the context of actual words, like いいえ "no", this is all very useful. Ditto sentences.
In the context of the letters, option f is *really fucking hilarious* to me.
I mean. Drilling that や is "yo" is useful. Drilling that "yo" is よ, also useful. Drilling that "yo" sounds like "yo" ... um ... not so much.
no subject
Date: 2018-03-10 06:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-03-11 04:37 am (UTC)Duo operates very much on the "just use it" theory, where instead of explaining that ... I'll use Spanish for examples: instead of explaining that "el" is used with masculine nouns and "la" with feminine nouns and generally -o words are masculine and -a words are feminine and blah blah blah, it just tells you that "la manzana" means "the apple" and "el pan" means "the bread" and so on and your brain picks up patterns as you go. Which is closer to how kids learn. But sometimes I feel like I'm flailing around in the dark because of the lack of explanation. More so with Welsh, which is more differenter than Spanish for an English speaker.
(It also operates on the "five minutes every day (is better than an hour once a week)" theory, which I definitely approve of.)
For Japanese, I would strongly recommend learning hiragana first. Duo does cover hiragana, but I found it a lot easier to use other sources first. If you have iOS, Learn Japanese!! is what I use; it does cost money (first lesson, which is the vowels, is free, and then it's $2 to unlock the hiragana or $8 for the full thing which includes katakana and kanji and some basic lessons) but it's free to try and it teaches writing. Though tbh there are also free resources. I also made heavy use of http://tofugu.com/japanese -- it has mnemonics for hiragana, worksheets you can download, and links to several free online tools to test yourself with.
I had my own mnemonic variants (ke in hiragana け looked like "it" to me, and while there was nothing linking ke to it, it proved useful for katakana because ke ケ also kind of looked like capital IT; se せ looked like LJ so I did a "LiveJournal let you have your say" (going for the sound of se rather than the letter e); katakana to ト looks like the sandal of someone standing on their toes; hiragana me め looked like nu ぬ but without the extra swirl, and nu was noodles so me was "I got my noodles and they weren't awesome, meh" but ... it really really does help to have mnemonics, when you have things like nu/me, or ne/re/wa (ね れ わ) or ru/ro (る ろ) or whatever.
And like I said, I don't know how they will handle sentences. It's all well and good to say that watashi means I and watashi no means my and namae means name and desu kind of means is and that "watashi no namae wa yoko desu" means "my name is yoko" ... but I don't know if they will explain things like wa (topic particle).
I think memrise -- which is free, although they do have a pro option -- does a slightly better job in some ways. It's not perfect either, but one thing I like is that it gives the literal piecemeal translation as well as the overall translation. So it would list "watashi no namae wa yoko desu" as "my name is yoko" but also "I-(possessive) name-(topic particle) yoko (politeness particles)" so that you know which piece does what.
...hi, I babble a lot, lol.
And Japanese kanji is not exactly Chinese kanji but it's strongly related and some meanings and/or pronunciations do carry over sometimes. So I don't know if that will help or hurt you, but I'd guess help more than hurt.
no subject
Date: 2018-03-11 04:43 am (UTC)http://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/
http://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-katakana/