I re-started reading Historia breve de china to work on my Spanish. The goal has been to read for about 20 minutes a day, which has worked out alright. I have the last bit of the run of Camaleones, a Mexican soap opera, on the DVR that I've been watching as well. It's kind of hard to follow because I came in halfway through the show and because the language is fairly colloquial; colloquial language is not my strong suit. I think the plan for the summer is to read a bit more non-fiction, read some narrative fiction--figurative language is always difficult--, build my vocabulary, learn some idioms, watch some TV shows. I need to find another good show to watch. Suggestions are welcome.
In regards to Japanese, I've not done a whole lot of study, but rather, I've been preparing to study. I joined JapanesePod101 with a one month subscription. Since I don't want to keep paying for the subscription, I've been systematically downloading all the podcasts with the lesson notes. I am going to have plenty of Japanese to do for some time. I worked through their "Absolute Beginner" lessons, so I've learned how to say things like "thank you" and "nice to meet you" and "This is a ___." I have the hiragana alphabet pretty down, I need to get started on the katakana now.
I'm trying to decide which materials to use to get going on my reading and writing for Japanese. I have Japanese the Manga Way, which I'm planning to start on this week. I asked the learn Japanese section of Reddit what their suggestions for learning Kanji are. There were a lot of good suggestions and I decided to order Remembering the Kanji, which apparently is quite a good book for learning to read kanji. I've also been looking at Kanji Damage, which is a really amusing way to be introduced to kanji. It has hilarious example sentences and breaks things down really well.
One of my current questions about learning kanji is how does one look them up? It can't possibly be alphabetical look-up because if you don't know the symbol, you won't know what it the phonemes are either. Hopefully, I'll have the answer for this next time!
I'm trying out a flashcard program called Anki. It uses a spaced repetition system of reviewing vocabulary. You can either make your own set of flashcards, or download a set of cards that other people have made. There are a ton of sets for Japanese and for kanji, which look super useful. I also downloaded one that says it has the 10,000 most common Spanish words, so we'll see how that one goes.
Here's what needs to happen in the next week or so:
- Learn katakana
- Read something in Spanish 20 minutes a day
- Start learning some new Spanish vocab
- Keep going with the JapanesePod lessons.
- Start on Japanese the Manga Way.
- Find out how kanji is listed in a dictionary!
On kanji lookup: if you're using paper dictionaries then get yourself a dictionary that uses SKIP (System of Kanji Indexin by Patterns) lookups. This way you first establish the pattern: vertical split, horizontal split, enclosure or solid, and then count the lines. For example 何 is pattern 1 (left-right split), left half has 2 strokes and right half has 5 strokes, thus the SKIP number for 何 is 1-2-5. Then just flip the dictionary to 1-2-5 part and find it there. To help sorting other 2-5 pattern kanjis words may be further sorted by radicals. Computer and web-based dictionaries allow direct lookup by radicals and narrow down possible matches with each selection.
ReplyDeleteBtw, how do you Historia breve de China? I might be interested in reading it, but it is kinda expensive and I'm hesitating on making an impulse buy. Would you say it is worth it?
Thanks for clearing that up for me! I was having a hard time conceptualizing how it would work.
ReplyDeleteHistoria Breve de China seems pretty alright, I'm reading it on the Kindle so it was only $10. I'm reading it more for the Spanish than for the information since it's still difficult for me to focus on both language and information, but it is pretty accessible. It kind of depends on what you're looking to get out of it.