Japanese 101

I’ve been going at Japanese a long time but I still come across things that make me go it seems so simple or short why don’t I get it still. so I collected those words, phrases, sentences so I can share them.

1) 運、これ実力なり

So this is a very short statement that a character said in a manga. I thought I have a fairly substantial intuition for Japanese so I’ve racking my brain thinking I can figure out what this shit means. Then I realized I can’t. I’ve come across 時は金なり and the nari here serves a role of emphasis and it’s based off the verb naru. I get that. But in this case the nouns that are involved don’t gel together lol so I got confused and I just couldn’t wrap my head around it so I went to chiebukuro as always. I got some fantastic answers in Japanese to explain this Japanese. Needlessly to say, though I understand what everyone wrote I can’t seem to remember their explanations lol.  I looked this up months ago and I remember nodding my head in agreement but as of right now I don’t recall any of the info.

たぶん、
「運も実力の内」という事です。
幸運が舞い込んでくるのも、その人に実力の一つだ、という意味です。

https://detail.chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/qa/question_detail/q13175307353?fr=chie_my_notice_que_limit

俺って、実力はあるのに、何でこんなに不遇なんだ！くそっ

こういう凡百の人間の平凡な疑問に対する回答です。

++

ローマの政治を詳しく分析したマキャベリも言っていますが、「運」というのは案外平等なものなのですよね。誰にもで幸運は訪れているのに、99％の人はそれを見逃すか、うまく対応が出来ないのでしょう。見逃す理由は、精神的な余裕が無かったり、先入観を持っていたり、どうせ私なんか・・・と投げやりだったり、親や教師からお前はロクな子じゃないと言い聞かせられて育ったとか、色々なパターンがあります。
金運に恵まれている人とか、私みたいに女運に恵まれている人は、やはりそれなりの心構えや美貌を持っているものです。頑張りましょう。

****
運を引き寄せるのは、
運を引き寄せる力を持っているのであって、
これは実力だ、という意味です

2) キリキリ　シクシク
ズキズキ　ジンジン　ムカムカ
胃が

So these are ALL GION that are used to describe different types of pain people may experience in their stomach. I’ve always that thought people who are fluent or good at speaking Japanese incorporate a lot of gion in their speech. I came across this collection of gion when I was watching Japanese TV and I thought wow it would be such a bitch if you had to translate this crap to English. I think at the time I wasn’t familiar with all these gion and only really got a few of them. But now I get all of them because I’ve come across all these gion used in various contexts. I think out of all the gion here the only one that I am not 100% sure of is シクシク. I specifically remember that you can cry シクシク like シクシクnaku and I learned this from yoshida on atustus yukai na nakamatachi which is a fantastic talk show. he used this to describe his baby crying softly for him lol. of course the シクシク here is used for a different context so it has a different meaning but I would guess that it would be mean that it would be a pain that is not intense based off my knowledge of that meaning of シクシク. I looked it up and I was right but it also says that the pain is persistent.

１ 声をひそめて弱々しく泣くさま。「子供がしくしく（と）泣く」
２ それほど激しくはないが、絶えず痛むさま。「腹がしくしくする」

omg this is face filler stuff right?? I don’t know how people go outside looking like this.

Korean 101 : part 3?

I think this is my 3rd post entitled Korean 101. I just share Korean words or sentences that I still don’t know or don’t understand yet they seem basic or common. I find it interesting how I can watch Korean variety/talk tv with lingoes dictionary and understand it 95 to 100% and still not know certain useful things.

The first thing is from a song from Hyorin’s solo album. the song is 꺼져

니가 내게 해줬던
그 말들
그딴 말들 다 필요 없어

뒤돌아보면 미쳤던 거지

The word I didn’t know was the one that’s underlined. The general meaning is clear from context but I definitely wouldn’t have figured out the nuance.

同じ「そんな」という意味ですが、
그딴の方は少し蔑んだ言い方です。

( Zico was saying exactly what I was thinking because people make various facial expressions unconsciously and the camera is going to catch all that. But for this rapper I swear I never saw him smile or laugh until that particular scene which is quite an accomplishment lol)

The following sentence was said by a rapper on SHOW ME THE MONEY 6. I think the situation was his performance/rapping didn’t go that well. So when I heard it I was kinda sure that it meant something “bad.” But then I saw the grammar somersaults (not not have, have) and thought I’m not so sure. I didn’t want to think about it so I asked someone on chiebukuro.

후련 한 감은 없지 않아 있어요.

１、후련 한（すっきりする、すかっとする）

２、감（感じ、気、気分）은

３、없지 않아 있어요.（直訳すれば少なからずある:否定の否定は 肯定でしょう？）

＊まとめ
すっかりする感じ（気分）がないものでもないんですよ
（むずかしです 笑い）

I included this in my korean 101 post because Japanese has constructions like this all the time but I don’t blink an eye and I comprehend it effortlessly and automatically. There’s nothing confusing about it for me.  But for some reason I haven’t come across this construction as much in Korean so I got intimidated and overwhelmed.

His obachan shirt is CUUUTE or maybe ugly.

musings regarding my recent Korean output

So I know a lot of language learners are obsessed with perfection almost to the point of irritation. no nobody gives a shit about how your handwriting improved for the katakana or the hanguel or whatever from writing it over and over or copying long ass passages of god knows what… perhaps you should put your time to better use. they just irritate me because in away they’re promoting awful learning methods and also seem oblivious or narrow-minded to other various methods of learning out there. my school of thought is I suffered at the hands of compulsory education with the mind-numbing, awful activities like work-sheets or copyings things etc etc…. why are you willing subjecting yourself to this torture on your free time? One of the biggest realizations I made when I was learning Japanese was that I was spending so much time learning about how to learn or various ways to learn or what are bad ways to learn despite years of compulsory conditioning trying to convince me that it’s effective. But I don’t regret spending that time learning about learning because I don’t want to waste any more time on shit and in the overall scheme of things you waste more time learning ineffectively by not learning about learning.

ANYWAYS recently I was outputting my Korean because I had to communicate with this korean person via email (by the way I see no appeal in “pen-pals” whatsoever… I am only communicating with someone if I have something to communicate to that specific person). I just wanted to communicate and deliver the information I wanted to deliver and I also wanted to get answers from this person. My attitude going into this is “ugh let’s just end this in the most painless, efficient way possible.” (I work full time, I have shit to do, it’s the just natural attitude for me to have)

In my view, it’s best to not give a shit and just do whatever is least painful and strenuous because that will lead to MORE output in volume compared to re-reading your sentences or clauses or using the dictinoary to look up crap you don’t have to or just stressing about it because you can’t write as eloquently as a native ( this is such a stupid and asinine and invalid worry. you should be asking yourself WHY WOULD I BE ABLE TO WROTE ELOQUENTLY seeing as you only spent x hours listening/reading/writing/speaking. i wish more people would read AJATT). Because I set this low standard for myself OF COMMUNICATION I did not waste my time looking up words in the dictinoary or re-reading and re-writing my sentences obsessively. I did do the final re-read just to make sure it made sense and my message would be understood by the receiving party. Ultimately I did “proof-read” albeit lazily and half-assedly and I later realized there were still typos when I sent it. But I did not care because my goal was communication and I knew despite whatever mistakes or typos or unnaturalnness or clunkiness of the sentence or fragment the person will understand what I’m saying. And I genuinely did not care if my Korean output seems worse than actually it is due to typos and lack of effort on my effort. There’s a level that you reach in the upper intermediate stage where you know your writing is full of mistakes and it’s unnatural but you know for sure that the native person will understand what you wrote ( I will link my only lang-8 entry that’s in Korean so you can get some idea of my ability to output but honestly depending what I want to output (writing an entry on lang-8 vs cmomunicating wtih someone via email is completely different) the shit can get real raw and terrible as any language learner knows ) . some of the stuff you can obsess over with writing well is so minor with respect to comprehension like the ㅅㅅㅅㅅ you put in to make sentences more formal and respectful. I just shoved the ㅅ shit in when I felt like it because this person’s isn’t going to get pissed at me for not using it when I shouldn’t have or not using it when I should have because he knows I’m not fluent in Korean and he should be able to tell my main goal is communication since he don’t speak fluent english.

So as we have our e-mail exchanges I start to give a shit unfortunately. I take this as a bad thing because I’m wasting time that could be put to better use and it’s just emails so it doesn’t matter if it’s not perfect since the only goal is communication. ALSO EVEN if I look up whatever my email will still have mistakes. what happened was I GOOGLED 오랫만 WITH QUOTES because I was unsure if it was correct or not and google says it’s a common mistake it’s actualy oreNNNN man. before I googled it I was thinking o-ret-man is correct and oreNNN is wrong or vice versa or they’re BOTH CORRECT. So after I did what I did I was kinda disappointed in myself for wasting my time googling. so then he responds and he opens his email with OREtttttT MAN so I feel even more irritated at myself wasting time on googling shit. it’s so minor, it don’t matter and he don’t even know if it’s incorrect or he knows but still wants to use it (I know that feeling). Hell I felt like using it and I should’ve just gone for it. You know what I’m gonna ask him about it… I only make a big deal of this because it will be if I get into this tunnel-vision mindset of obsessing over little shit and waste a gargantuan amount of time. It seems like it’s not a lot of time but it really adds up if you’re constantly obsessing over minuscule crap.

How I EFFICIENTLY learn Korean from reading

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1) I don’t like staring at the computer

2) I’ve been at learning Japanese for like 8 years so I’ve been obsessed with efficiency as of late and have let go of stuff that just sucks up time but doesn’t make a big impact. In other words I’m optimizing my use of anki as much as possible.

3) my anki usage for Korean works because of my current level in Korean. I could not do this with Spanish fo sho.
I hate reading Korean sometimes. I only say this because I’m super used to reading Japanese and them Chinese characters. while for Korean words I know are hiding behind a mask until I look it up and go goddamnit that’s such a simple, obvious word. of course the upside to Korean is that it’s easier to type and look up stuff but then again sometimes trying to figure out the meaning that matches the word can be more of a pain in the ass compared to looking up a Japanese word with the Chinese characters in the word but that’s what chiebukuro and lang-8 are for when my analytical and critical thinking skills are lacking or when I don’t want to use them lol. that isn’t to say that my Korean reading is weak. I read fast because it’s inevitable with alphabets to get faster at reading them but alphabets don’t give me that effortless feel that I get when I read Japanese with the Chinese characters. the reading is automatic and effortless because the Chinese characters are so distinct looking.

4) I only read about topics that interest me. the generic advice of read news articles everyday is BULLSHIT. I’m sorry no one gives a shit about the news at least not as much as you unless you don’t even follow the advice you are saying. by the way the most important thing you need to notice is that the person who is spouting this nonsense is not even fluent in their target language. what is up with these assholes that are not even fluent giving advice that are shit.

5) I learn Korean using Japanese. once in a while I use Korean to learn Korean because I just got taken a site with Korean definitions instead of Japanese definitions when I clicked on a link in Google and I didn’t want to waste anymore time in Google since the definition made sense to me. ALSO I don’t have intentions of going monolingual dictionary at all. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel that way. for the most part I prefer to read Japanese because it’s more efficient because they use Chinese characters while Korean they don’t so you gotta really use your brain every f’in time and figure out which word they’re using based off the context at times (which is perfectly, fine, acceptable and effortless to Korean native speakers I’m sure. but I sure as hell am not subjecting myself to unnecessary mental somersaults)

the main reason I want to share this is for THE EFFICIENCY ASPECT. I hope to inspire people to stop being damn perfectionists because it will slow down the rate at which you learn the language. but seriously what is up with those people with the “language notebooks” it’s like their obsessed with their handwriting saying it looks ugly or pretty or improved. it’s like it’s inefficient.  IT’S SERIOUSLY ridiculously depressing how inefficient and ineffective the notebook stuff is especially if you handwrite all the definitions (even worse if you do example sentences from the dictionary or add the hanja) to the words you look up in a book or something and then NEVER Look at it again. talk about a time sink. i don’t know what possesses people to do this shit. it will not get you to fluency and it is not smart. i could never even get myself to do it because i see the futility in doing that like how will this serve me 5 years from now 10 years from now 6 months from now. these people are clearly not trying to become fluent or they refuse to see the errors in their ways in that there are better ways to go about it. clearly their goal is not fluency though they don’t seem to realize it.

First things first, I’ve been reading articles about hanja usage in Korean like mixed vs only hangeul and people’s thoughts on the advantages and disvatanges for both sides.

So I printed out a bunch of articles on my topic of interest. by a bunch I mean 180 pagesworth. I format that shit like boss on microsoft word! I went through half of it so far.

What I do is

1) I read it and circle words/grammar/anything with a red pen.
2) Then on a later day I type in all the words/grammar whatever (not the whole sentence) in a notepad file (I don’t type whole sentences or paste the sentences/paragraphs because then I’m spending a lot of time searching for my single word that I don’t know on the right side of naver translator which makes this shit REALLY INEFFICIENT ). sometimes i do take the sentence or the clause but usually i don’t because it’s not worth it.
3) I paste that into naver translator and translate Korean to Japanese.

“http://translate.naver.com/#/ko/en/

4) I read the sentence or the section of the article again with the definition in mind and finally comprehend the sentence/paragraph in its entirety. for the words where the TRANSLATOR fails me or I want a more detailed definition I just mark them to back to afterwards (put a star next it whatever **) because it’s more efficient that way. i mark that in the notepad rather than the naver because naver is finicky. also simplenote is probably better than notepad since it automatically saves but my computer has been rather stable lately so i’m not worried about stuff suddenly closing/crashing.

5) I look up the words in which the translator definition does not satisfy me on naver dictionary by searching all the words in the search bar. for example you can look up multiple words at the same time by putting spaces between them ie “겨워 대신”. You can do a lot like infinite??? but then it gets more difficult to read through so I usually do 5 words at most. I got really excited at this and I tried it on dic.yahoo.co.jp but it didn’t work 😦 but we have rikaisama for Japanese!

OR I use LINGOES dictionary WHICH HAS the korean/japanese naver dictinoary and it has the pop-up option. and i’ve configured it so that if I copy a korean word that is unknown the definition pops up in 30 pt font and I’m able to highlight the definition or multiple defintions and save them. Maybe I prefer this because there’s no internet required so there’s no lag involved.

6) for the stuff that fails naver translate I go to Google and do “word 意味は”” and then if that fails I ask on chiebukuro with a  ほにゃららってどういう意味ですか？　and  the whole sentence or the whole paragraph if I need too. sometimes I go directly to chiebukuro (sometimes lang-8) after naver dic fails me because I don’t like wasting time and I have a feeling that Google will fail me. by the way I don’t have to ever do this for Japanese… it’s really rare. usually the Japanese dictionary has my back. but seriously why does the korean dictionary refuse to carry korean grammar stuff.
7) I paste the stuff I get from Google/chiebukruo/Japanese blog into notepad
8) AT THIS POINT after having reading the sentence with the definition I have deleted any words I do not want to learn for whatever reason ( useless/not interested/too easy/ too obscure/etc/etc). I delete the words on NOTEPAD and NOT naver translate because naver translate is finicky and I do not want to waste my time. so I usually repaste my modified list of words into naver translate.

ANYWAYS, I paste the stuff in the LEFT SIDE OF naver translate into EXCEL

9) I paste the stuff in the RIGHT SIDE OF naver translate into excel.
10) REPLACE OR ADD to the entries of the RIGHTSIDE of naver translate with the stuff I got from Google/chiebukuro/Japanese blog WITH if I’m adding. BY THE WAY I DO NOT OBSESS OVER getting PERFECT or complete definitions over every word because that is a waste of time. anki is a tool. it should not be your only contact with the language and you really can’t know a word until you encounter it multiple times in the wild. hence I do not stress over PERFECTING my anki cards (that is a waste of time after a certain point). I only do this stuff with Google/chiebukruo because the dictionary fails me.
11) I select column D and paste =CONCATENATE(A1,11,B1,22,A1)
12) I copy column d, paste into notepad and replace 11 with : and 22 with : using control + h … I’m gonna start doing a1,11,b1,11,a1 so I just replace 11. I used to do

instead of : for the part between the definition and the cloze deletion blank.
13) blank out the random syllable of the Korean word on the left side by using * to blank out all the parts then using control + h to replace that with ____ for my blanks
14) add tags: article on the top of the notepad file so that they’re ALL tagged with article
15) import into anki with the card specifically formatted with 3 fields for cloze deletion blank, definition, whole word or sentence (it’s not often but sometimes I do get the whole sentence or phrase). that way I can edit card type/format whatever so that I get cloze deletion blank definition on the front and whole word on the back.

I feel very content that I’m able to go about it in an efficient way. Because of this I’ve been able to add like anywhere from 20-50 words to anki per week because I work full time and I like to do stuff I enjoy and minimize my use of anki. My expectations are that I won’t really notice much of a benefit from doing this until I add a few thousand words just because I’m not at that sweet intermediate stage where everyday you feel like you improve so much. Right now I’m at a point where I know the majority of the commonly used words which enables me to notice the less commonly used words and also allows those words leave more of an impression on my mind. This is just my assessment of my current situation with Korean based on my experience with Japanese. THe UPSIDE to this upper stage compared to the intermediate is that I will notice improvement from ignoring Korean/not doing stuff in korean. By that I will go weeks without watching/doing something in Korean then watch something or read something and I feel like my korean is somehow better in that certain concepts or words or whatever just makes more sense or is more automatically processed then before. the reason is there’s a digestion/processing thing that happens while i’m not even doing shit in that language. it’s a subconscious thing.  steve kaufman touched on this specific observation in language learning but i don’t know which youtube video it was.

Just sharing because I’ve been  learning Japanese for long and though I cannot take back all the time I “wasted” by doing stuff inefficiently etc I can learn from that and figure out ways to make stuff efficient from here on what. also i try not to think about it because it’s too depressing lol. by the way for japanese i use rikai-sama, excel, capture2text, microsoft word (holy shit control +h for ^p is MIND BLOWING!and i wish i knew about it sooner ), transcripts of japanese tv i linked on the side to be more efficient about it.

if you’re confused about my anki format here is an entry

https://choronghi.wordpress.com/2016/11/24/how-i-learn-korean-with-anki/

if somehow you can think of ways to optimize this process even more let me know. as far as I know there isn’t because there’s no pop-up korean dictionaries that’ll enable me to do this and this is the most efficient way to look up words.

I will post my KOREAN 101 post when I gather up a few more words that make me go why the hell don’t I know this yet.

Interesting Korean Article with AUDIO

They have the whole transcript of the audio!! It’s a goldmine for language learners. For me with my current level of Korean it doesn’t really matter if I have the audio or not but nonetheless I will definitely listen to this once I read this article and look up all the words. Plus I’m curious how calm and collected and composed everyone will be since sometimes debates get heated. One of my favorite things I love watching/listening to Japanese is people debating about something heatedly and the atmosphere gets tense and people start talking even faster and interrupt each other and start saying things that are kinda mean but in keigo etc etc lol… it’s just great entertainment and great for my Japanese learning.

The link to the interview is below. The topic is writing Korean using only hangeul VS writing Korean with hangeul and hanja mixed together. That’s a topic that’s really been of interest to me as as person who is learning Korean after Japanese (I’m still learning Japanese but  I am just saying it like this because I recommend learning one language at a time. I absolutely don’t see the point of learning 2 languages from scratch at the same time unless you love being inefficient!!! ). I’ve been able to find interesting articles to satisfy my curiosity in Japanese but there are articles that aren’t translated into Japanese for obvious reasons so I just had to read the Korean articles and discussions. This is the only one I found with audio so I felt that it was my duty as a fellow Korean learner to share in case anyone else finds this topic interesting. I personally have printed a lot of articles including this one to read… I’ve been looking up stuff using naver translate because that enables to generate anki cards in MCD format EFFICIENTLY.

http://www.nocutnews.co.kr/news/4590668#csidxd4064261da1b001b5a4543e4f382073

I will paste one little excerpt from this interview-y thing that totally resonated with me.

그러면 한 가지 예만 듭시다. 어휘력이 상당히 떨어져서 상당히 외래어를 많이 쓰는데 제가 아주 답답하고 불쾌한 것은요. 바로 어제께도 뉴스에서 어떤 문제가 나오면 이슈라는 말 잘 써요. 당면문제, 시급한 현안 해도 될 것인데. 그 다음에 TF팀을 구성한다 그럽니다. TF라고 하는 걸 태스크포스라고 좀 더 분명하게 말하는 경우도 있는데 그것은 특별전담부서라고 하면 됩니다. 그러니까 점잖은 우리 말이 있는데도 불구하고 자꾸 외래어를 쓰고 하는 거는 우리말이 황폐화하고 있다는 증거예요.

원문보기:
http://www.nocutnews.co.kr/news/4590668#csidx0384ba9ef7c53588abf9a061eb1621c

There are some foreign words they use in Korean that I absolutely despise and “issue” is one of them! If I ever write in Korean and need to say issue I will definitely use one of the other words he suggested. BTW I wrote my very first lang-8 entry in Korean earlier this year out of necessity. I just had to ask for suggestions and of course nobody answered. I didn’t make much mistakes but the person was fixing all the spacing errors since I didn’t space anything lol.

INCORRECT Japanese

I just wanted to share some incorrect Japanese I came across while watching Japanese stuff. Of course I’ve heard these exact incorrect usages in other tv shows etc a long time ago… these are just the most recent instances I recall.

First one is from The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya (it really is not a movie. I mean that in a bad way. super long, boring and the “movie music” was so forced and out of place)

It was said by koizumi who is a high schooler and while I was watching I thought damn do any high schoolers talk like him? but anyways I do like listening to polite japanese and I love anime for the variety of Japanese speaking skills. It’s very fun.

he says
おやりになる
So the first thing I thought was since やる can mean to f*** it probably doesn’t work with keigo ever. I’ve come across a MC on a VERY popular japanese talk show use o yari ni naru. Also it reminded me of the first time BOA went on HEY HEY HEY and matsumoto hitoshi asks her why do you want to be a singer in Japan? and she answers yaritari kara and of course he responds with a I don’t think you should say that on tv. of course boa did not understand why he said that to her or she didn’t understand him because of the kansai-ben.

here’s the japanese explanation for why it’s wrong.
http://www.kamigaki.jp/blog/2015/02/27/52154733/

ですとか
I hear this from various talk variety shows. In short you’re supposed to use や instead…. it reeks of contradiction… desu is for polite situations while toka is for informal talking.

if you come across any suspicious Japanese that you suspect is incorrect I recommend googling with the words 正しい and you’ll probably get an answer.

Something that made me LOL hard

It’s from the same show that I had featured in this previous post

So what I found really funny was when misaki called takashi at 19:40.  I loved takahashi’s wtf reaction and how misaki never told him before the show or maybe they told her she can’t. i was disappointed that none of the other contestants used the phone lifeline since I’m sure if anyone else did it would’ve gotten down  in a similar fashion as misaki and takashi’s phone call did….. which ensured in HILARITY

I recently realized in the episode when they copied hoko-tate the  background music was from evangelion since I never saw that anime until recently (besides the availability of japanese subs and countless explanations online, there’s also the sara ni wakaru video which was super helpful.)

 

HOW TO USE LANG-8

Here’s my advice on how to use lang-8. You could say my views are pessimistic but I think they’re realistic and recognizing and accepting reality is necessary.

If you notice on my lang-8 my writing has improved a lot and on one of my entries this Japanese person had said you know I can’t say that your writing is wrong or right because you have your own writing style. Of course within that entry there were legitimate mistakes or parts where there was a more natural way to express something but there definitely were parts that supported what this person had said. ONE OBSERVATION that you can make is that lang-8 did not improve my writing. I did not religiously force myself to write entries into lang-8 every week or every month. there are some long stretches of blanks on lang-8 and i can tell you that i never EVER EVER EVER ANKIED anything i wrote on lang-8 whether it’s my writing or someone else’s correction of my writing.

i hate people who shit on input-based methods especially when they arrogantly criticize it based on their TINY AMOUNT OF INPUT. i phrase it this way because people don’t seem to understand A LOT OF INPUT. I AM Speaking from experience feeling frustrated being stuck at the intermediate or advanced plateau where i did spend a lot of time in japanese but I still had not passed this elusive “threshold”. also i had my personal circumstances that prevented me from spending time doing things i wanted to do including things in japanese.  it took me longer to reach this elusive threshold point. or maybe it was the mcd format that really made an impact. That was something that organically transpired from me finally coming to terms with the fact that i am wasting time on anki whether it’s making cards or doing them because the shit was not working.

Of course ultimately you have to write a lot if you want to improve at writing so you can’t just rely on input but input is still a part of outputting.

so my advice for using lang-8 to improve your Japanese is to use lang-8 for it is. You can write something and gauge how correct or natural your Japanese is. Don’t try to memorize the corrections or add the corrections to anki. Why does anyone think that sounds like a good plan? It is a site where people correct your Japanese… depending on the individual’s level it could be anywhere from fixing minor mistakes to making something unintelligible into something intelligible. PLEASE do not waste YOUR TIME and other people’s time writing unintelligible giberish or bs shit like watashi ha honyara desu. nihongo wobenkyou siteimasu. anime ga suki desu. If you write about something boring and generic no one will want to read it. IF no one ends up correcting your entry you really can’t blame them. IF you can’t understand anything don’t bother outputting. You’re just better off inputting if you’re those people writing unintelligible entries. Once you can intput decently, find something you want to write about passionately and write about it. I submit entries to lang-8 sporadically but when I do it’s usually about a topic that I want to write about. It’s nice to see my old lang-8 entries and to see how good or bad my Japanese is. Sometimes I’m surprised I used a certain word or some obscure grammar thing I was into at the time due to the influence of JIN or something else.
What I attribute to my improved writing at lang-8 is a lot of input and output (talking to myself, writing) NOT trying to memorize lang-8 corrections by heart or word for word. input a lot, output a lot

ANOTHER tip is DO NOT USE THE DICTINOARY TO LOOK UP WORDS while you write. one reason is lang-8 is kind of a record of how much you grew so if you go out of your way to look up all these fancy words that you didn’t know then and you don’t know now to make your entry seem better than what your actual skills are it kinda defeats the purpose. plus it’s really obvious when people do that or use the thesaurus for thier native language. don’t have the motivation to show0off or whatever because you’re wasting time that could be put towards input. it’s a just poor use of your time.

I can understand looking up a word or two to write in your lang-8 (if a word is really necessary or if it’s on the tip of your tongue) but do not waste your time looking up countless words because you wont’ remember them. also i consider  5 years olds to be fluent in whatever language they speak natively because they’ve spent 5 unadulterated years with their language so even if their vocab isn’t huge they know how to use what they know really well like grammar or gion when it comes to japanese/korean children. you should be practicing what you know and try to maximize the possibilities. it’s not just about the number of words you know.

I loved what steve kaufman wrote in his latest blog entry. It’s kinda related to what I wrote about the futility in trying to consciously memorize corrections.
http://blog.thelinguist.com/learning-languages-is-a-subconscious-process

Vocabulary lists

VOCABULARY LISTS
Vocab lists seem so tempting because it seems so efficient sorta like premade like anki decks. Of premade decks I’ve only used the heisig one successfully which  I had to modify heavily to suit my needs.  It’s tempting to go math crazy and do the 20 words a day x 356 days in a year = 7120 words or some other variation but I’ve learned the hard way the futility in doing that with my experience of misusing anki while learning Japanese.

I’m just posting about this topic because I just happened to come across these blogs that are an amazing fit for me to generate the anki cards in MCD format.  These bloggers are sharing what they looked up on their blogs and they’re Japanese people learning Korean so this material is quite alluring to me.

http://uprive1.rssing.com/chan-2640801/all_p15.html
http://yokorea.blog.fc2.com/blog-entry-62.html
http://erirang.blogspot.com/

****
6000 intermediate
https://www.evernote.com/shard/s167/sh/5d3a9f85-afd6-4466-82e5-9286d5e8d985/bc45c355f8de111f624047f9f64317d9

6000 advanced
https://www.evernote.com/shard/s167/sh/5b206c6c-9772-4199-9d2a-7f58d816549e/11a60d02ccedd27630da31b7d8a8dc9d

So I had saved this huge ass list of the top 6,000 Korean words from a some wiki website into my evernote.  i had no intention of memorizing the list. I know how it may seem appealing for some hardworking rote-memorizing people but not to me. It just makes more sense to learn these words as you encounter them since they ARE SO GODDAMN COMMON AND USEFUL.  also you may think top 6,000 words are mad useful!! but trust me they most likely aren’t. you need to figure out what YOUR TOP 6,000 KOREAN WORDS ARE as in the top 6000 words that come up in the korean media you enjoy. Anyways I kept it to sorta gauge my growth in korean vocabulary. for example a lot  of the words  were  ha?  the(japanese ha) or like wuh?  from 2 years ago are now i know this shit. I’ll go “wow this shit is mad useful or i’ve seen it.” or i’ll be hardpresed to find words i have never seen or heard of.  never mind it was from 4 years ago! 2012!  If you still suck after 4 years you should reevaluate your methods and your goals.

Speak of the devil, here’s my worst nightmare realized

Has anyone reached proficiency through self-study outside of Korea? from Korean

In my case by the time i reached 3000 cards in anki ( i didn’t anki for the first 3 or 6 months because i do not want to waste my time learning super common/useful words… that’s just stupid) I was  understanding talk variety shwos anywhere from 80 to 100% (depending on the show and how much I look up). it’s not about the number of cards…

BTW memorizing all the words in this 6000 word list will not enable you to watch korean dramas without subtitles ( just looking through this list and thinking of all the words that i know on this list and all the words i know that i encounter that are not on this list… by encounter I mean strictly talk/variety shows). it’s literally the tip of the iceberg (all the awesome kickass words are obviously not in this list… not to mention korea is obsessed with trends so it feels like they invent 100 news words and that of that 90% die the next year, rinse and repeat.  I’m just guessing here because I don’t keep up with that since I don’t watch korean dramas or korean shows on a consistent basis. in fact I’m chasing after random eps of shows that aired a few years ago or a fewdays ago or a few months ago… even with japanese I’ve read over 120 books and recently I looked up a few words from this new book I’m reading and I’m like woah these are some cool words why didn’t I hear about them sooner. this shit is never ending but at the same time I love how there’s so many awesome words out there that i do not know about. this applies to english as well OF COURSE). there’s so much vocab to know for korean dramas (even more for the saguk dramas) since as everyone knows the characters talk so much and they always drag out the dialogue and the scenes. literally every single character in korean dramas are chatterboxes. it’s a lot of vocab. well that level is fluency… in other words watching korean dramas without subtitles. I do know people who are Korean and fluent in Korean who watch it and understand/catch everything so that is what fluency is… for comprehension in my opinion anyway. I don’t like Korean dramas anyway so this doesn’t bother me but sometimes I like gauging my Korean by watching some clip of a korean drama to see my lack of vocabulary or my full comprehension if lightening strikes. sometimes it happens.

However as much as I find anking with mcd format to be effective for learning Korean at my Korean level (vocab, grammar, hours spent on Korean, etc) I can’t bring myself to use the material on these blogs to generate anki cards.  It is intriguing to sorta gauge my level or rather see how much I don’t know from scrolling through these blogs.

I’ve been mostly getting words and whatnot for my anki deck from Korean that come out of people’s mouths on Korean TV and sometimes words on the screen that aren’t said ( I usually only do this if  I feel really tempted because the word seems super easy to remember if it has no bacchim or I feel that  I can associate something with the sound with the bacchim whether or not it is of sino-korean origin to remember the meaning). Partly that’s due to lack of motivation because I do not want to learn useless Korean. Maybe if you’re obsessed and driven to become fluent in Korean ASAP then maybe you have the urge to look up anything and everything but looking at it in the overall scheme of things that’s not an efficient way to go on about that.

The fact that I got something from a Korean show from a Korean person’s mouth imparts that word or grammar etc so much more value versus some word list with words that people think are useful based on their experiences with the English counterpart of those words or whatever variation of this. People just express things differently on a fundamental level depending on the language.

So anyways, some of the blogs that I linked did mine real Korean from a Korean article etc etc which imparts value on the list they share. However though it raises the value of the list in my eyes I personally didn’t read that article so I have no personal connection to any of those words and therefore no conviction that those words are useful. I won’t believe it unless I actually see it being used. But also I won’t force myself to read an article just so I can easily generate anki cards. I’ll only read the article if it interests me.

This site http://uprive1.rssing.com/chan-2640801/all_p15.html reminds me of textbooks. I am tempted for a second to learn from it but then the next second I realize there’s way too much awesome kickass tv show episodes of korean talk/variety shows to be watched. When it comes down to it, no matter what textbook it is, textbooks will never be more fun then native media. The whole point of textbooks is so you can stop using it and learn from Native material ASAP. If you think textbooks are fun you’ll probably faint from the shock of how much more interesting native material is. I see no problem using textbooks in the beginning stages but some people are like hey you got recs for intermediate/advanced? I’m thinking to myself do you want to learn korean for the sake of learning korean? how embarrassing.

If I had to choose between anking too much and anking too little I would choose anking too little. I think anking too much is worse because it’s proof that you are wasting your time that could be spent living your life doing things you enjoy whether it’s language learning related or not. To put a new perspective on it, I imagine what I would be doing if I were fluent in Korean and/or raised in Korea. The answer is not me reading from a textbook to improve my Korean. The answer would be I would be watching the exact same shows I’m watching now except I wouldn’t be looking up anything because I already know all those words and their nuances and their multiple meanings and the literal / figurative meanings of all the Korean because I’m fluent in Korean. I’d probably be multitasking like washing dishes while listening to it etc etc because it’s so effortless. I’m watching the show because I enjoy it. I don’t try to force myself to like a show or pretend that I like it or pretend that I like it or enjoy it more than I do just so I can find something to do in Korean…. I’m sure some people try AJATT and kinda think they’re doing it but they’re really not if they have to lie to  themselves that they enjoy doing something or enjoy it more than they actually do.

When it comes down to it the number of anki cards I have or the percentage of mature cards is not an accurate measure of my Korean abilities. Ultimately it comes down to the amount of time I spent doing STUFF IN Korean while actively trying to figure out what I don’t understand or don’t know. Anki helps so much with making time I spent with Korean to be that much more fruitful and efficient with acquiring Korean vocab /grammar.  I don’t have time to be watching Korean TV all day because I work full-time and I have other stuff I want to do that may not be in Korean. Why should I miss out on amazing stuff like Breaking Bad? Or God Tongue? Though I’m not able to spend a lot of time on Korean on a consistent basis (daily is ideal right?) due to time restraints and my volition that wants to do other things anki allows me to maximize whatever time I spent with the Korean show etc. I’ve never felt like I’ve moved backwards in Korean or even stagnant to be honest. The reason is that sometimes even if you don’t do something in Korean for let’s say 3 months, you still have Korean running through your brain that’s being digested. It’s some kind of delayed processing. I do still do anki on a daily basis or sometimes less frequently. It’s so strange how I feel like my Korean improved in certain ways despite cutting contact for x weeks or months. I’ve experienced this with Japanese as well in the past due to unfortunate circumstances.  It was invigorating to hear other language learners talk about this EXPERIENCE on an episode on  language mastery  podcast. http://l2mastery.com/show/

you know I think the only possible way for my Korean to be stagnant or go backwards is if all I did was textbooks or cramming wordlists.  I think to realize my efforts are for nil would be so devastating and disheartening AFTER x weeks or months despite torturing myself for x hours.  One of the many reasons why I learned Korean after Japanese was that I did not want to waste my time with learning Korean. I equate stagnation and going backwards as wasting time. Learning in this order (with the foundation/scaffolding that is hanja and Japanese grammar) and using anki has ensured that I never feel like I’m going backwards with Korean. It’s just impossible. I never understood how people could motivate themselves to learn a language using methods that could possibly lead to stagnation or going backwards if they slacked or not get in contact with the language for x weeks or months.

holy crap.

I’m not the type of person to share stuff like sharing haul photos of Japanese books ( it’s only meaningful if you actually read the books you hauled) or my handwritten Japanese writing but I thought this was interesting to share since I’ve been going at Japanese for so long.

holy crap I still have this notebook where I use to work on remember the kanji. I’m not the type of person to keep everything like those frightening hoarders on TV. A good rule of thumb is to throw shit away if you haven’t used it or worn it etc in over a year. If anything I would love to be a danshari expert like SAKAI MASATO. He loves throwing crap away.

SO I’m surprised by the fact that i was able to fill up a whole page in such a neat manner. Writing so that the letters fit between the lines is a big deal to me because I’m lazy and I hate writing stuff by hand. It’s evidenced by the messier picture. Of course there are worse pages but 3 pics are enough for this blog post. Coincidentally I also found little entries I wrote in Japanese which is cool (entries where i just wrote something in japanese without looking up how to write x word on the computer because that’s pointless… might as well type it on the computer then) because I’m like oh I was able to do this then. I would think this notebook is from 2008 or 2009 maybe 2010. For  remember the kanji reviews I usually wrote it anywhere and everywhere and then threw the paper away. nowadays I do kakitori reviews on anki because I eventually had to convert the cards over since I can read Japanese and it’s nonsensical for me to stick with the original format of key word + whatever.

So anyways if you just look at this notebook I look like I”m super hardcore and dedicated to Japanese learning right? at least to some random person who doesn’t know Japanese. It looks intimidating lol. If you look closely you’ll notice I’m not just copying the chinese character OVER AND OVER AND OVER OVER AND OVER AGAIN which is a strategy that is very much emphasized and used in Korea probably even now for learning hanja ( those poor kids). It’s great that the emphasize working hard but stupid learning methods are stupid and wasting people’s time and energy that could be put to better use. I was doing remember the kanji where you remember the story and write the kanji. Of course I didn’t fill up the whole page in one day though it would be easily done if all you did is copy the same character over and over again which is just stupid since it’s not effective.

I think I started remember the kanji in 2008 or 2007 and I used anki and it’s 2016 and I”m still using anki and i converted most of it to kakitori and i average 10 cards a day? But the thing is writing by hand isn’t that important nowadays for any language, not just japanese, so I try to not put excessive time into my heisig deck so I don’t go out of my way to add more cards unles I come across some word that i really want to know how to write by hand. Sometimes I want to learn to write a certain word just because I want to not necessarily because it’s useful or common. I still haven’t broken down and drilled the japanese surname/first name anki deck. I don’t care!!! I’ll literally read a japanese novel and for x character they’ll put the furigana on the name the first instance and then the next time i read the book and get to the next instance of that person’s name i don’t know what that person’s name is though I recognize the kanji or the meanig of the kanji and i keep reading and if they do not repeat furigana again  i finish the book not knowing their name. if they repeat the furigana then i might remember it at that point or remember it for a little while and then forget it again. I don’t think it’s too bad because even if i don’t know the reading, I do recognize the kanji and or the meaning of it. I just don’t see the point of me putting effort into name readings. words are more important to me. most of the japanese names I can read are probably names I learned from talk/variety shows because they have so many people on the shows.

rather than writing, I think my time is put to better use reading or listening! I am just apersonthat hates writing stuff by hand whether it’s english or korean or japanese. I just hate writing… the physical movements with my hand are just so demanding for me. But I still want to know how to write Japanese so I’m glad I stuck with it!