Random Japanese reflections
I already did my chunk of academic writing today (dear god, I have no idea if any of this is any good), which means I get to kick back for a little while.
I don't think I had a chance to do this earlier, but I wanted to thank mangaroo for pointing me to the Core 2000/6000 Japanese decks that have images and pronunciation. She gave me the link a while ago, but a few weeks past, I finally got around to downloading it, and I've been adding it to my rotation (along with my long-standing decks that I never miss, namely my five-year-old "vocab" and "kanji" decks).
I really love two things about these decks:
It forces me to practice pronunciation. Since I started at the very beginning, I pretty much know all the words (although having to come up with them actively instead of by recognition, e.g. "to speak" --> "hanasu," is good practice - my default deck is recognition-based), but I'm trying to concentrate on getting the intonation right. Japanese words have pitch accent, which I have NEVER learned. For a plus, the cards also have full sentence examples also with audio, which is even more helpful. I have started to recognize all sorts of bad pronunciation habits I have (for instance, I routinely pause between words where a Japanese speaker would slur the two words together, and it appears that my pronunciation of both お and え have been off for years).
It's hard to know for sure yet how much difference this will make, but I swear that lately, when I listen to Japanese audio, it sounds clearer to me. I always suspected that my extreme difficulties with listening comprehension had something to do with my poor pronunciation, but it may have been affecting me even more than I knew.
The second thing I love is the pictures. I am more an audio/analytical learner, meaning that I rarely rely on images, but I've noticed how much easier a vivid image makes it for me to retain some things. As a result, I've systematically been going through and adding images (taken from a Google image search) to the vocab cards in my traditional deck that I have the most trouble with. Again, it's early to tell, but I think it's making a real difference.
On a final note, I've started playing around with my Nazotte oboeru no kanji renshuu DS software again. Sadly, it seems this is largely out of print (sadly, because my cartridge is showing signs of glitches), but I always found this to be the most fun way to practice drawing kanji. Plus, it uses a lot of unusual native-speaker idioms as practice, and while I used to find that frustrating, now I find it gives me a good opportunity to learn new vocabulary.
I don't think I had a chance to do this earlier, but I wanted to thank mangaroo for pointing me to the Core 2000/6000 Japanese decks that have images and pronunciation. She gave me the link a while ago, but a few weeks past, I finally got around to downloading it, and I've been adding it to my rotation (along with my long-standing decks that I never miss, namely my five-year-old "vocab" and "kanji" decks).
I really love two things about these decks:
It forces me to practice pronunciation. Since I started at the very beginning, I pretty much know all the words (although having to come up with them actively instead of by recognition, e.g. "to speak" --> "hanasu," is good practice - my default deck is recognition-based), but I'm trying to concentrate on getting the intonation right. Japanese words have pitch accent, which I have NEVER learned. For a plus, the cards also have full sentence examples also with audio, which is even more helpful. I have started to recognize all sorts of bad pronunciation habits I have (for instance, I routinely pause between words where a Japanese speaker would slur the two words together, and it appears that my pronunciation of both お and え have been off for years).
It's hard to know for sure yet how much difference this will make, but I swear that lately, when I listen to Japanese audio, it sounds clearer to me. I always suspected that my extreme difficulties with listening comprehension had something to do with my poor pronunciation, but it may have been affecting me even more than I knew.
The second thing I love is the pictures. I am more an audio/analytical learner, meaning that I rarely rely on images, but I've noticed how much easier a vivid image makes it for me to retain some things. As a result, I've systematically been going through and adding images (taken from a Google image search) to the vocab cards in my traditional deck that I have the most trouble with. Again, it's early to tell, but I think it's making a real difference.
On a final note, I've started playing around with my Nazotte oboeru no kanji renshuu DS software again. Sadly, it seems this is largely out of print (sadly, because my cartridge is showing signs of glitches), but I always found this to be the most fun way to practice drawing kanji. Plus, it uses a lot of unusual native-speaker idioms as practice, and while I used to find that frustrating, now I find it gives me a good opportunity to learn new vocabulary.