Canto-ing it up!

I mentioned last time that I was adding vocabulary items from my JLPT studies to my SRS. I did that, got a nice healthy number of items. There was an unfortunate side effect from inputting them as just kanji and kanji compounds though. What happens is that I always go straight from working on my Cantonese items to reviewing my JLPT words, and then I get completely confused and try to read them in Cantonese. Stuff like 膨張 looks completely Cantonese, doesn’t it? It takes me several minutes to reorient myself every time.

Apart from that, everything’s going swimmingly. I’m not even letting the Christmas holidays distract me (though I did skip SRSing on Christmas day). As a matter of fact, I’m starting to see the lack of Cantonese learning material as a clear advantage instead of a disadvantage these days. When you start learning a language with a ton of resources, there’s the temptation to spend days and weeks and months just gathering material, reading reviews, discussing best approaches, etc., etc., with fellow learners.

With Cantonese there’s very little to talk about, you just take what you’re lucky to get and dive in. There’s a limit to how many Canto-learning blogs and forums you can waste time on, and fellow Canto learners tend to be at a relatively low level so you can’t spend all day feeling intimidated either. It’s pretty swell.

So without much ado, back to Teach Yourself Cantonese! I try not to put too much pressure on myself, but I want to be done with that book by March, God willing. I skipped along to the end and there’s a ton of vocabulary in there so I should be pretty far ahead by the time I’m done with it. After that, well, we’ll see.

Back from an SRS break

Even before Khatz at AJATT put up this post, I was already on an extended break from my SRS. Meaning I was still doing my reps every morning but I hadn’t added anything in weeks. Somehow it just got tedious and unfun so I ditched it for a while. But now I’m back! And over the past 3 days I’ve plundered over 100 sentences from Japanese wikipedia, using the tried and tested “articles on subjects I like” method! This time I read up on my favorite and unfavorite pro-wrestlers from about 10-15 years ago when I used to watch wrestling, people like Bret Hart and Mr. Perfect and Shawn Michaels, etc. Good times, good times. As usual the writing is blander and less opinionated than the English equivalents, but still interesting to read. Next week I might read a bit about legends of Japanese pro-wrestling, like Rikidozan and stuff.

That’s all for today!

Sorting out a huge SRS backlog

By putting a temporary freeze on new additions to my SRS, I was finally able to bring my backlog of reps to a manageable number. This morning, for example, I only had 27 reps to do, quickly gotten out of the way. And when you have a nice small number you can take your time and write out most, if not all of them, perhaps even read a few out loud.

 So I just finished all that this morning and decided to get some more listening practice in. I remembered picking up a link to a podcast with some girls talking, probably from AJATT somewhere, so I went through my bookmarks and dug it up: Mariemo podcast.

Three schoolgirls from Hokkaido spend 10-30 episodes talking about nothing much. It’s…not very interesting and like all the other Japnese podcasts/radio programs it soon put me to sleep. But I shall persevere. I need listening practice badly because, not to boast or
anything, but my reading ability is nearly “there” while my speaking ability lags pitifully behind. Still, I don’t think Mariemo is the way for me.
I think there was some mention of Bakushou Mondai or something a while back, maybe that might be a more viable alternative.

Slacking on Japanese

I haven’t posted in a while because I haven’t studied Japanese in a while. I read a bit of manga last week and I’ve been keeping up with my SRS reps, but apart from that it’s been English media all week. I could blame it all on the lack of decent coverage of the US elections by the Japanese media, but I’ll just be honest and say I was lazy. Still the week off has given me a bit of fresh perspective …who am I kidding? I took the week off Japanese and now I’m back, end of story.

Mort was good, though. It was the only Discworld book I hadn’t read (apart from the two most recent ones, which I don’t particularly want to read). It made me pretty nostalgic, really. Right now I’m strongly, strongly resisting the temptation to read Small Gods again.

Another source for Japanese magazines

After the whole fs2you/raysource nonsense, I continued the hunt for Japanese fashion magazines online. I can’t remember where I found this link, or I’d give them the credit, but I found another site where you could read fashion magazines. It’s a Chinese site, btw. Who’d have thought the Chinese youth would be that much into Japanese culture? It just goes to show.

But I guess JPseek is still better if you want to actually download the pages as one big rar file instead of reading page by page. And of course JPseek has its other uses as well.

More good ood news: I cleared my backlog of SRS reps and entered 30 sentences so far today. Online Japanese reviews are such a great way of getting sentences. Too bad I keep getting distracted by the Beijing Olympics. I find myself watching even things I don’t care about like the discus throw and triple jump and stuff. But hey, it only comes once in 4 years and it’s almost over anyway. Might as well enjoy!