I’m up to lesson 18 of Teach Yourself Cantonese
Aqua Planet Chronicle Blue
What appears to be a series of short stories by Masaru Oishi. The cover is nice, but Aqua Planet Chronicle Blue
KLM in-flight entertainment and more
I took a couple of flights with KLM over the holidays. Being in the air is no excuse for keeping up with your language skills, so I took a look at what they have on offer. Their in-flight entertainment options are pitiful compared to Emirates, so I wouldn’t pick them for a long-haul flight, but the price was good and they actually traveled when a lot of airlines were cancelling flights, plus I felt very safe with them so I’m not complaining.
First they had this “Learn a language” program apparently given to them by Berlitz. It’s extremely basic though, just a few words like “Good morning” and “Help me”, nothing interesting for any serious language learner. The real problem with them for Cantonese was some random, crazy romanization system they pulled from goodness knows where. I really should have written down some examples because they were horrible. Think of something like “fay gai chong” for airport “fei gei cheung”, stuff that none of the common systems would ever write. And I hear Berlitz charge a lot of money for their programs. Is this the kind of useless lesson buyers typically get for their money? Sad.
The other thing I did was to see what kind of movies they were showing. I managed to find two in Cantonese, “Adventure of the King
So essentially all four flights passed without me getting any serious learning done. At least I got home safely and my other studies are going well, right? That’s what really counts.
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.
JLPT is over!
Phew!
When I posted last time about taking the JLPT level N1, I never thought the day would actually come. I have a habit of signing up for stuff and then going “Oh crap!” as the day approaches. I didn’t start studying till pretty late in November, but I was surprised at how much I knew already and how little was “new” to me. The majority of new things I learned were rarely used kanji for common words, like 頓て for やがて. The exam itself was no big deal, I finished with time to spare. The new N1 supposedly tests more advanced skills, which is why there’s less straightforward quizzing and more reading comprehension.
The best tip I can give anyone who wants to take it is: Work on your Reading Skills. The texts aren’t hard, but there’s a lot to read and not that much time. If you keep reading, your reading speed will grow and you should be able to finish everything. Otherwise you’ll be crawling along in a helpless panic, which you really don’t want to go through. As for the listening section, the pace is actually quite slow and they speak in clear, deliberate tones. You shouldn’t have any problems with it if you’ve been watching shows in Japanese for a while.
And that was it! I’m pretty sure I’ll pass, “I had a good feeling!” I’m just glad it’s over with! One of the criticisms of the JLPT is that you study your ass off for the test, pass, and never use half the stuff you learned again. Well, I’m not going to let that happen. That’s what my SRS is for, chock full of anything I found remotely useful. I made a separate deck for the JLPT stuff, even. If I can learn new vocabulary and constructs from the exam, then whether I pass or not, it’s worth it.
Now that that’s out of the way, it’s back to Cantonese! I finally figured out how to split audio files using Audacity (ah, the magic of Google!). It’s easier than I’d thought, and lots of fun too. I sit down and take a few minutes to chop up the file before adding the lesson to my SRS, and then everything goes smooooothly. I also discovered that my university has Yip’s “Intermediate Cantonese Grammar” or whatever that book is called, available as an e-book. I’ll leave that alone for now, but that’s my next step after I finish the book I’m working on. Why let free materials pass me by?
And that’s all that’s going on with me so far! I feel like a huge weight fell off my shoulders, lol!