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Lasonax

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Posts posted by Lasonax

  1. Gyush, I hate that phrase. Sounds so cheesy and unreal. Even in anime/entertainment does it sound weird.

    "Jag är din" - Swedish

    "Ich bin dein" - German (not sure of this... I'm just guessing. Haha)

  2. Hasn't a thread like this been made like 5000 times before? Haha...

    I'll just say what I've said in every other thread like this:

    I started learning english because it's part of the curriculum. Really, that's it.

    I started learning german because it's part of the curriculum. Yep, that too. (I did have a choice between Spanish, French and German, but you HAD to pick one.)

    I started learning Japanese because I'm heavily interested in japanese culture and entertainment. My goal is to be able to watch drama/anime, read novels/manga/visual novels, in japanese. I have no intention of speaking the language myself, but those skills might be picked up on anyway.

  3. I agree, "Samon" doens't look very good.

    I think one reason is just that... It's always been like that, and even though the l is silent, I feel like it matters. I feel like if it was written "samon" a lot of people would pronounce it like sam-on (like the name Sam).

    I suppose the silent l also causes a lot of people to say it wrong the first times... But well. I don't know.

    It's an interesting question though, but I think it ultimately just comes down to being something that has always been like that for a very long time, and the people who are in "charge" of the dictionaries just don't want to change it because it's always been written like that. You could probably ask them though, but you might not get a good answer...

  4. Hoho, what a necro. (bumping a very old thread)

    Anyway. I am a self learner in terms of japanese. Mostly when I had classes, I would study a lot on my own anyway, and I really find it to be mostly a limiting factor to be in a classroom. Surely it will make sure that you have a steady phase and constantly learn something... But sometimes you just have a lot of time, and you want to learn EVEN MORE. But if you're in a classroom, it makes it harder. Because if you learn more stuff now, you will already know those things when the class has catched up to that level, and by then you will be miles ahead of everyone else... And there won't be any point of you being in the class, kind of.

    I find self studying to be much better, but if you want to get good at speaking... Self-studying is of course not a good way to learn. Unless you have a studying partner that you can talk to every once in a while that is.

  5. Ah... I think I knew some very long word that I always loved to say.

    I remember that my classmates in german class always found it funny that I could say "nationalsozialistische deutsche arbeiterpartei". And no, we weren't nazi's or anything... But naturally we spoke of the second world war, because it is related to germany.

    One of the sentences i will never forget however, is "Ich bevurzuge käsewürstchen".

    So I think my favorite word definately is "käsewürstchen" just because of that sentence. It might not be very funny for everyone else, but well... I'll explain.

    I was playing an online game with a bunch of germans, and two of them which I played with regularly and talked with over skype. One of them told me to write in the chat (to the all the other germans) "Ich bevurzuge käsewürstchen" for some weird reason. I had no clue what it meant, so I just wrote it.

    Everyone laughed their assess off, possibly because they might have been talking about something weird, and then he explained to me what it meant, and I laughed so much that i couldn't sit straight anymore.

    Ever since then, I find that sentence to be a real bringer of good old memories, and I'm sure to never forget it. It may not be very funny for anyone else, but I find it very funny due to that memory :)

  6. That's a very interesting story Yorfs!

    I think we have a very simlar situation here in Sweden. I don't know what changes they have done to the curriculum as of now, but I honestly never see anyone using cursive writing at all, except for old ladies. I too was taught to write cursive writing during middle school and everything, and we were told that it was super important to learn. Because if you didn't know cursive writing when you were at high school and everything, you wouldn't be able to catch up to what the teacher was saying... That's what my teacher said.

    Obviously that isn't true. Noone ever uses cursive writing, and noone has any problems with taking notes "in normal handwriting". To be honest, my normal handwriting barely looks like proper handwriting anyway. And there is a reason that I always prefer to write everything on the computer as far as assignments goes... It's happened more than once that the teacher has returned something, and told me that they cannot read what I wrote. During classroom exams, I tend to write as clearly as possible, so it's not really a problem, but sometimes it can be a problem...

    What I mean with that is, with handwriting so weird even without cursive: How unreadable wouldn't my writing be WITH cursive writing? It'd be insane.

    I really don't see the reason to have cursive writing at all, and i hope that it's removed from the curriculum alltogether. The teachers should focus more on getting the kids to write in their own way, but in a way that people can actually read what they have written. It's much better if they spend time on teaching the kids how to write things that are readable, than to teach them how to write cursive.

  7. It's actually very simple. (somewhat...)

    You CAN write everything in hiragana, but that is not very commonly done. It's only done in children books for very small children. (Remember, the kids in japan start learning kanji at a very early age, so you're looking at very small childrens books here, as the somewhat older children books will have some basic kanji in them).

    In normal writing, hiragana is mostly used for grammatical particles, and certain words. I'm not certain why they choose to write some words in hiragana, but I just know that they do that.

    Katakana is used "only" for foreign words that the japanese has imported into their syllabry (instead of making new words, they often just change the sounds a bit so that they can say it properly. Be warned though, that they do not always mean the same thing as the thing it sounds like) aswell as names. (not personal names, but companies, plants, animals... And so on).

    Katakana is also used for empathis/as a stylistic choice sometimes, on scientific terms, and sometimes it's usage can seem a bit random to us who are new to the language... So if you're trying ot learn how to write japanese (I'm not, I'm only learning japanese passively. as in, I want to understand written and spoken japanese, but i don't care to write or speak it myself) stay away from using katakana in these less common situations, unless you are absolutely certain that katakana is being used in that situation.

  8. Well, I do not think that these easy "how-to" books are really good. I haven't personally read any of these, but I have a feeling these are the kinds of books that advertises themselves as "Learn this language in less than 3 weeks by using only this simple how-to guide!". And of course, we all know that ain't going to happen. They might help you to learn some of the common sentences, and saying "hello" and all that... But that's not really getting you very far.

    As far as books in general goes though, I love books. You do of course also need some listening/speaking tools outside of just the book (assuming you want to learn how to understand and speak the language in question. There are actually lots of people who do not want to do that, that only want to learn how to READ a language) if you want to fully understand the language... But I don't think you need too much of that to be honest. If you want to become fluent in speaking, of course you need to speak a lot. But you can probably go a pretty long way just by knowing how to pronounce the syllables/letters if they are all pronounced the same, like in japanese, and many other languages. You will still need to speak to become fluent, but as long as you learn how to pronounce those things in teh beginning correctly, you will be able to pronounce most things/everythign correctly.

    Personally I'll take things one step at a time. Once I have learned how to read the kanji, and gotten some grammar/vocab/etc in my "backpack", I will try to watch some japanese dramas without subtitles. I will probably not be able to catch up to the meaning of everything, and it might take a while to get a good listening comprehension, but ti will be possible. I'm not a big fan of learning everything at once. I mean, of course you can split up things even more than I am, but I'm trying to learn X hundred kanji first, then I learn some basic grammar, then I learn some basic vocab... Then I might try some basic listening comprehension, if i feel like it... And then I go on to the next level (I go by the JLPT levels, as most other japanese students outside of japan does).

  9. Haha, what a funny thread.

    Swedish:

    1. Flyg, fula fluga, flyg och den fula flugan flög.

    2. Sju sjuksköterskor skötte sju sjösjuka sjömän på skeppet Shanghai.

    3. Packa pappas kappsäck.

    English:

    She sells seashells by the seashore,

    The shells she sells are seashells, I'm sure.

    So if she sells seashells on the seashore,

    Then I'm sure she sells seashore shells.

    How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? It chuck all the wood a woodchuck could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood.

  10. It does happen to me too, that i don't study for several days or so... But that's mostly due to not having time, rather than lacking motivation/willpower/focus.

    I suggest setting up a schedule, to learn X amounts of words or somethign per day. Set a VERY LOW number, that you are guaranteed that you will make every day even if you have only 15 minutes each day. By doing this, you feel like "ah it will just take a few minutes and then I'm done with it". And if you happen to feel very motivated/focused/have a lot of time one day: you can just double that amount.

    That is how I do with japanese atleast. Instead of learnign everything at once, I am now studying ONLY kanji so that I can put all my focus on that. I'm trying to learn atleast 5 per day, althoguh some days I have to spend entirely on repeating what i have already learned (because I forgot some of the ones I already learned). If I have enough time and all, I will double this amount, so I will learn ten one day. I rarely learn much more than that, but it has happened that I have learnt up to 15 or 20 kanji on one day, but I usually had to spend a day or so extra on repeating these, because a lot of them I forgot.

    Setting too low goals is much better than setting unachievable high goals. Set high goals for your long term (unspecified time?), but short/easy goals for short term.

  11. I edited your post with some grammar/spelling corrections. You can of course edit it again if you think that I edited it so much that it doesn't mean the same thing, but yeah...

    I definitely think that it's possible. Three years is a lot of time if you put a lot of time and effort into this, but if you do want to become fluent in only three years: be prepared to spend hours and hours each day on studying alone.

    You should also consider getting a microphone, and someone to talk with on the internet (over skype, or such). You don't need to pay some teacher for this, just find some native japanese speaker that wants to help you out, or someone else which already knows a bit of japanese, that you can speak to in japanese.

    You will probably not be able to become "completely" fluent in only three years, but you will probably be able to become somewhat fluent in three years time. After all, it is possible to learn all the kanji in less than two months if you put enough time into it (using Heisigs method. That is, you do not learn any of the readings, and you only learn one/the most common meaning - but the rest can easily be covered simply by practise/experience with the language) and if you can learn over 2000 kanji in less than two months... I definitely think that you can become fluent in three full years. But as I said, this will require a lot of time. And I honestly don't think anyone can keep up that amount of motivation for three full years, no matter what.

    Study hard, but don't study "too" hard. As in, don't burn yourself out. Burning yourself out will only make yourself hit a wall, and you'll have a harder time studying overall.

    Good luck with your studies, and remember to ask us if you need any help!  :smile:

  12. If you count being able to say a few sentences/just a bit of school-sentences:

    English (fluent, A-level as far as marks goes)

    Swedish (native)

    German (3 years of school studynig, but I am no longer studying it: I do remember quite a bit though)

    Japanese (currently studying, very limited knowledge as far as vocab/actual talking goes. I can however say a few words...)

    So, yeah. I guess you can count for yourselves. I'm not one who aims to go around and brag that I can speak 12 different languages fluently or something... I learn languages for other reasons than to brag with how many I can speak :)

  13. Feels like we have a very simlar thread already... But whatever, I will answer the question as best as I can, and if some Moderator on the english board thinks it should be deleted: then so be it.

    I started learning english because it was part of the curriculum. I think I started in the third year of school, so when I was... 9 or 10, I suppose.

    And after that, I started learning German because it was also part of the curriculum. Or rather, I had an option to choose between French, Spanish and German. And at the time, I was very interested in German classical music (still am, but not as much as back then) aswell as german culture: so naturally I started studying german. I studied german for three years. Still studying english as of today, although I have recently skipped a course and only done the exams (still got an A even though I only did the exams without studying... It was basically just a repetition course from high school anyway. I'm on senior high school now. Next year I will not skip it, and I am plannig to take an extra, advanced class in english in my last year of senior high school. It's not compulsory, but I feel that I am so good at english that I won't have any problem with an extra, advanced class)

    Uh... I could answer why I'm studying japanese too, but I feel like I'm not really answering the question OP wanted me to answer  :frozen:

  14. Well, this is a bit of a unclear question if you ask me, I feel like I don't really know what to answer.

    As far as getting better at speaking, speaking is the one any only way you will get better at speaking. You can find several ways of finding people to talk to, but in the end: they way to become fluent in speech is just to speak. It's of course also possible to talk to yourself/read out loud and become fluent that way, as long as you make sure you are pronouncing thigns right (there might be mobile phone apps for this, or something... I don't know) - but I don't think it's as effective as talking to another person. Doesn't matter if that person is on the other side of the internet and you're having a chat over skype, or if you're talking eye-to-eye: the most important part is that you are actually talking.

    Singing kareoke/singing along with songs in the language you are learning will of course help too, but I don't think it will actually help THAT much in becoming fluent. It might help a bit, and maybe even quite a lot if you do it a lot, but I still think you're going to need to speak to become fluent in speaking.

    As far as anything else than speaknig goes, I'm a huge fan of flashcards.

    Vocab? Flashcards.

    Grammar? Flashcards.

    New characters/letters/way of writing? Flashcards.

    You get the point... No matter what it is about, I use flashcards. It's almost always a superb way to learn new things. True, it is a way of working on your route memory and simply learning by repetition, which many people are against simlpy because it's working on your route memory, but I actually find it to be more effective than any other method as far as everything goes. I've used it in the past for learning new words and rules in German/english, and I'm using it today to learn new japanese words/kanji/grammar/... . I usually read all the words and kanji out loud, and try to match my pronounciation as well as possible to how the natives say it (I have audio files in my flashcard program/Anki for the vocab. I do unfortunately not have this for the kanji, but I know how to pronounce all the hiragana/the sounds in the language, so it's not a very big problem for the most part. I sometimes google up a pronounciation if I am not quite certain of the pronounciation).

    The reason for reading them out loud for me is mostly so that I know how it COULD sound being said by someone. I'm not personally trying to become fluent in speaking, but I am trying to be able to understand spoken japanese. And of course, it would probably not be too hard to understand speech as lnog as I know all the words... But it will definately make the process faster if I start recognizing how the words sound as soon as i learn them. After all, don't we all read out loud in our heads anyway, regardless of the language?

    I could write more... But I think this is enough, for now. If you do want me to write some more... Tell me, and I can try to come up with some more things that I do/think about  :wacky:

  15. My german teacher always said to think of "die" as feminine things, and "der" as masculine things. Taking it to the extreme...

    Der Tisch is obviously male, because it's hard, square, and "woody".

    But really, it's not harder than learning the nouns themselves if you ask me. There are of course endless amounts of general rules that you can apply, but there are also a lot of exceptions to these rules, so they're not really rules either... They're just generalizations.

    Another thing to take into account is that, Milk for example, is fem. because it comes from a cow (which is female). Cheese however, (der käse) is male, so that is an exception.

    I don't quite remember all the endings and which ones are connected with which gender, but I'm sure you already know all those...

  16. Well, even if this app is "free", Rosetta Stone is a service that charges a lot for it's services. I do not wish to try this free app, because I have a strong feeling it will mainly be used to make people buy their services.

    And with that being said, I do not think any language learning service is worth that amount of money. I mean seriously... That's a LOT of money. I understand if you're going to pay X amount of dollars to learn the kanji in a fancy way (uh... WaniKani) but this really feels like throwing money into the lake.

    What's the point of this "free" app anyway? What does it offer that we cannot find elsewhere in a better/completely free format?

  17. I agree with the previous speaker. Learning random words out of nowhere is of course a strategy that will teach you new words effectively, but if you are already fluent in english: I'd suggest just looking for more advanced types of literature. As in, books that will most likely contain words that you have not encountered before.

    There are of course endless amounts of words, and it's more or less impossible to know every word there is (I suppose it's possible... But with slangs and internet terms and all these things, I find it rather questionable) - but reading books surely makes your vocabulary bigger.

    Besides, you usually learn new words mostly by using them. There is not much point in knowing advanced and fancy words, when they are never used. If you are studying at college and advanced terms are somewhat common, of course it will be useful to learn a lot of those. But I don't think you should run off trying to learn a bunch of advanced terms, just because you heard them once. They may or may not be words you will never encounter again.

  18. Sometimes creative writing can be really tough, simply because the people trying to write has no clue what to write. It's not that they don't know how to express themselves in words/lacking language skills, it's rather that they're not very creative thinking, or they just don't know what to write overall.

    A good idea to make them write would of course be to try to give them very easy questions to answer, and maybe several options. A question that one person would find easy to answer and write a lot about, might not work as well for another person. So if the focus is to get them to write something completely on their own, give them a few options as of what to write.

  19. Translation subtitles are never very accurate, atleast not compared to the original language. The translation is what you could call, the translators interpretation of the sentence/part being translated. One could argue that one word will always translate to the same word no matter who you ask, but this is really not the case, and this is why one translation can be so extremely different from another.

    And this is not just the case with English translations. I've read countless amounts of books translated into Swedish, or seen english movies with Swedish subtitles... And a lot of the time, the translations were bad or didn't really convey the same feelings/thoughts as the original language did.

    Of course, if you do not understand the language being spoken or written, there is no other option, and all translations aren't neccesairly bad: but the original is always better. And I'm definately not saying that you cannot enjoy a translated work... It's rather so that, if you have the option to watch or read the original material without any translations: there is no reason not to do that.

  20. Do you mean "fair" instead of "fare"?

    Honestly, I don't really know. I would argue that you definitely do not need a techer to learn a foreign language. Most of us can do great without the help of a teacher, even if a teacher might be good to have at times.

    A "fair" rate for a freelancing teacher would probably be somewhere between 10-15 dollars per hour from the teachers perspective. But to demand such a price, you should probably be pretty good at teaching... It may not sound like a lot of money, but I wouldn't be surprised if natives which cannot really help much at all with learning would demand such a price just because it would be somewhat close to a regular-job wage.

    A more fair price would probably be between 5-10$ per hour, if the teacher in question doesn't have a very good reputation/is new that is.

    But as I said, I don't think anyone really needs a teacher... So in a way, I think it's a bit wasted money to pay a teacher like that. I suppose it might be useful at times, but I think you're better off self studying to be honest, and finding a studying partner online (if you want to practise speaking/need help/etc - you can help each other out!)

  21. Well, this is a very subjective question, of course!

    I think that the best motivator would be enjoyment in the present, and usefulness in the future. As in, no matter how good of a motivator you have, it's nothing compared to how much easier things are if you enjoy learning the language right now. If you are only learning to reach the goal, and constantly trying to motivate you with "it'll be useful later on" but it's insanely boring at the present, not much will actually help or work.

    Personally I study mostly because I like the culture and I enjoy learning the language. But my goal is as I've mentioend countless amoutns of times: to understand japanese entertainment (manga, anime, drama, literature, visual novels... and so on). To some that may be a bad reason for learning a language, but since I am so passionate about these mediums, to me it's the best reason in the world. I'm not sure if I use this as a motivator however.

  22. Oh yeah, I'm sure that this happens to all of us. The biggest problem for me I think... Is people who misinterpret things inentionally.

    I didn't say a naughty word, but they intepret my words as naughty because they want to. And I have to say that, there's nothing more annoying but when you're trying to argue with someone, and they arne't taking you seriously. Even if you said a word wrong, it just makes me even angrier if someone laughs at me. I would probably start laughing myself too, but that would also make me even angrier... Because it would just be a sign that even I wasn't taking myself seriously.

    Not good...  :emo:

  23. I've tried this before, but I've never had a dedicated partner enough to make anything out of it...

    I had a penpal in germany once, but at first it took several months for the other person to answer, and eventually the other person just stopped answering. It was a good way of learning, but unfortunately... There was that.

    I'm certain that it's a useful method if you have a dedicated partner, but it really demands that you have a dedicated partner... And that you're dedicated yourself too, of course.

  24. Registration is and always was the proper way to say this word. People may make this mistake because of they are trying to apply the suffix "-ation" to the word register in the way it may work with some other words.

    I definately think this is the case with "registeration". I too have never heard of this misspelling before, but now that you mention it, it sounds very logical that someone who just learned the word "register" would figure that the general suffix -ation would be added to that word aswell. Because, well... If you have a weak memory and your english isn't too good, "registeration" does sound somewhat simlar to "registration".

  25. As far as english exams goes, I'm usually pretty confident that I will get a very good score on it. I feel very confident that I'm good in english, and even though I expected not to get a very good score in English this year... According to my teacher I'm goign to get an A or a B.

    So yeah, as long as it's a general english exam that I have studied for and everything, I feel very confident that I will make it. There have of course been times in the past where I haven't studied enough, and I knew that even before the exam started, but that didn't happen too often...

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