This week in language learning

This week I had some spare time because student teaching is over and I haven't gone back to work yet. So, naturally, I put my time to use for language. This pleased me.

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!

New blog, starting Japanese

So, this is the new blog wherein I discuss all the language acquisition stuff that I do. For now, you can expect to hear about me starting out with Japanese, getting better at Spanish with particular focus on figurative language and conversational skills, improving my Arabic, and maybe starting up again with French (if not that, then just listening to French techno). There will be talk of what I'm doing, what I've learned, and probably lots of other bits and pieces.

I've decided to start learning Japanese with the goal of teaching English in Japan after two or so years. Right now I'm working on learning the alphabets, or more accurately, syllabaries. The Japanese writing system includes Katakana, which is used for words taken from languages other than Chinese, Hiragana is for other phonetic writing. There is also Kanji, which are symbols that are not written phonetically and which represent words/morphemes.

For the moment, I'm mostly just working on learning the Hiragana. I've been using A Guide to Learning  Hiragana & Katakana. It's been useful, but I don't think they really give you enough space to practice.

And for the curious, here is a chart that shows all the Hiragana.

I feel pretty ready to get going on learning some actual words, but I know it's best to wait until I have this down at least. I think while I get the rest of the letters down, I'm going to start on some listening stuff. I heard that Japanesepod 101 is quite useful, so I'm going to try that out.