Rutine
To my surprise, this week wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be!
I was able to do reviews at the right time, and even started going to my local park, which is 5 minutes away from my house. Now when I think about it, it might also be my most favourite park!
By the way, I started going to that park because of this video:
There are definitely a few crows there, but only today I’ve managed to get as close as 5 meters to one of them. I’ve tried giving it some food, leaving it and stepping back, but the crow didn’t take it. As a snack, I used bread cut into pieces. The next time I go to the supermarket, I’ll buy some cat or dog food, as it seems to be a good snack for crows. From what I’ve learned from a perrot that I had, patience is a key here (and Gemini said that as well).
Getting back to my regular kanji learning routine, it’s been 80 days so far!
The big spike is me doing the reviews at night.
Recent activity, plans, and thoughts
History
I don’t know what’s going on with my history essay writing thing. There are a few points I didn’t like after trying the plan I created.
The first thing is, I literally spend the most time writing, and not learning, but maybe it’s a good thing, because this way I’m building a very long-term memory.
Another thing that I hate is getting corrected by Gemini, if I do that, I start to feel like nothing has changed from the time I was at around N4 level. It just says “this point is a little bit 不自然” but it doesn’t know how that 不自然 feels, and if that is something that native would render as an error or not. Of course, there are obvious grammar mistakes, and when it catches them I feel good, but when it starts saying “Japanese people don’t say it like this” it really bothers me, because I can’t know to what degree they don’t say that thing!
I know there’s an app where you can write texts, and people would correct them. I can’t recall its name at the moment, but I’ll find it, and maybe I’ll try working with it.
Speaking
I’ve tried using Hello Talk for the third time, mainly through the Voiceroom feature. This time I had some petitions and was able to find a few people (6 as of now) that are actually interesting, and somewhat share my absurd sense of humour! I still manage to make the atmosphere awkward by laughing when I don’t know how to say something, I probably should stop that and just be silent while thinking… I wonder how that app will handle it, I mean silence.
What I understood is that to use this app the user must be quite good at a language, or another option that I understood people use is to create a JP/EN or like IT/JP voiceroom, so when it becomes hard to speak, have an option of switching to a language with better proficiency, but even then.
Another observation is that people who say they primarily use Hello Talk to study sound extremely fluent in their 相槌, by which I mean not only “Um, um, hai” but how they ask questions and use little words for situations like when someone has left, or someone has a bad connection, and generally their language sounds extremely good.
One part that bothers me though, is how everyone says 上手ですね, and the reply is of course いや、まだまだです
Anyways, for now it’s going well as it has never before, so I’m going to continue using it.
Growth
As it’s been 80 days since I started this thread, I thought I’d also share some points where I’ve felt progress throughout this period.
The first thing is that so far, after 4 days of intense use of Hello Talk I’ve never been in a situation where I couldn’t understand the language. Except that one time where two people from Cambridge started talking about sub-university level math and physics. Not only listening, when I’m fresh enough, I feel like I speak really, really well, when we are talking on a somewhat familiar subject. When it’s not a familiar subject, I still manage to transmit my thoughts, but I feel like it’s not as easy for natives to catch what I’m talking about at many times.
Again about Hello Talk. I feel like little by little, but my absurd humour starts working in Japanese as well. If earlier it was just silence or a kind of “what?” sound in return, now it’s more like 40% success (I also do it less, maybe)
I feel like I’ve finally reached a level where I genuinely can understand the meaning of most comments under the youtube videos I watch. There are unknown words, but usually it’s not more than 1 or 2 per comment, so I can get the meaning without translating them. Or even if I translate, I’m getting the meaning, which wasn’t the case, for example 2 months ago.
I felt a huge jump in comprehension when watching content. I almost didn’t have to translate anything to watch Rezero or Dorohedoro and a few others, and usually, if I concentrate, I can also take any video, any channel of the ゆる言語学ラジオ family and understand it.
Even though I don’t know quite a lot of words, I feel like my basics have become very strong, and with that, my Japanese intuition got much better, so my brain just feels in the missing components. But in the past week, there were two times where in an important moment they said like 10 unknown words in 5 seconds, which was of course too much to understand something.
Another achievement, is that I really don’t have to concentrate now in order to catch Japanese, if the video is lower than my level. Before I could get lost easily or miss something, now it seems that my brain is just filling that in for me if, of course I had it before, but I’ve just noticed that this month it has gotten much stronger.
Another achievement of mine, is that I’ve tried joining a Minecraft Server, and I’ve passed all the rules reading sections and tests without using yomitan. At the end, I didn’t like the server’s structure and idea too much, so I decided to leave it for now, and not connect with Japanese people there.
The last one is again, the thing I noticed a few days ago, but I now I can read everyday Japanese without struggling. And what I mean by that is that I don’t struggle when I talk with Gemini and it responds fully in Japanese, or if someone sends me a message, I don’t have to get my brain together to read it. As long as all, or most words are known, reading it feels natural!
So ye, these are the points of growth I’ve noticed, mostly this month.
Other studies
Italian
Besides Japanese, I also study Italian. I have one or two lessons every week with my teacher:
I do my deck with corrections, but not regularly, maybe 1 or 2 times a week, it’s kind of boring, so I do it when I fill motivated.
The progress is quite good, as for now sometimes I can have a fluent small talk with a cashier without making mistakes visible to me. Also, today will be the fourth time that I visit a language exchange site, here in Rome. There are tables where people speak italian, but they are mainly foringers, so I just go to the English table and end up speaking English with Italians there, untill they become tired and switch to Italian.
The hardest part about Italian now, is that in the evening, when I have to talk in a fast manner, I mess up genders and number of nouns and adjectives as my brain is kind of already cooked at 10 pm (we can see it from my anki stats). Anyhow, I have a good progress here as well, and btw, when I’m finsihed with this post I’m heading straight to that language exchange meetup.
It says that it’s held from 19:30 until 22:30, but I usually stay up untill 23:30.
English!
After speaking English with Italians, I again understood that my spoken English is quite good, because I don’t really have to think about grammar, it usually comes out naturally, as well as the words just flow out of me. So when I think about improving English it’s about learning an accent, for me it’s RP. In the span of last two years, I’ve been doing some practice. Mainly mistakes with sounds, like sounds like /s/ and /z/ /th/, /ə/, and and others as well.
Now I’m using a deck I created for my student, with RP pronunciation of the most used English words.
The idea is that I have the written word on the front and audio on the back, and I have to say it in the RP way automatically, and if not, I work with that word, and fail it. The big achievement is that I somewhat got how to say all the 44 sounds of RP, and now it’s just relearning which one the word actually use. Though I’m not fully sure about/ʌ/ /æ/ /ɑː/ and other A sounds as well, I kind of got them, but not fully. There are also other important rules, like how to aspirate /t/s and /d/s, or how to end each word (not silencing the sounds), and probably much more which I’ll discover as I fix more probinant mistakes.
Also, I use a “English brick by brick, British pronunciation” podcast to practice when sounds are compared, and do some tongue twisters.
As a person whom I would shadow, I’ve chosen a Spiffing Brit, as people say he has a really polished and exaggerated RP, which is what I’m aiming for, plus I like his content and was subscribed to him even before thinking about shadowing him, so it makes it not only a good RP practice but also a quite fun one!
To test my progress I use BoldVoice Accent Oracle wich guesses accents quite well. I can see progress as from telling me that I’m 95% my native language, if I try now it can say that it has 10, 21, 30% British in it, which wasn’t the case till just a few days ago, and now I can get it quite often.
Thanks for reading through!
Wow, I’ve written quite a lot today!
I’m not sure how many people are going to read this all, but to those who did - my greatest thanks!
If you have any decks where you folks did something simmilar, could you share how did the graph went down?
