New Year’s Challenge: Progress Report #004

Hi, guys! So as I’m a little late on this post (apologies), I guess it’s probably better if we just dive straight in. I hope you’re all having a great Monday!

Time period covered: 10.02.2016-19.02.2015

So, as usual, my goals from the last update:

• Finish five more Easy Japanese lessons. – Uh yeah, I didn’t manage this. I finished one lesson and I did all but listen to the audio for the next; and then I fell off the bandwagon. It’s not that I’m lacking motivation just for Japanese – I’m still finding it difficult to get into a studying mindset for any of my languages, and I’m not quite sure what’s wrong. I’m going to lower this goal for the next ten days and see if I can get out of this slump.
• Write five sentences in Japanese and put them on lang-8 for correction. – Yes, I did this! Finally! I now have five sentences I can use in Japanese (you can read them here) and – embarrassingly, I wrote こんにちは wrong. That wa/ha thing is messing me up still when it comes to typing…
• Find and follow five Twitter accounts that tweet in Japanese. – I didn’t do this; I just completely forgot about it. I am following a few already (JapanesePod101, Self Taught Japanese, and Tofugu, to name a few) but I’m going to search for some more this week.
• Find and follow five Instagram accounts that are about Japanese. – Yes, I did this! I got a comment on the last post that gave me some advice and since then I’ve had Japanese-learning accounts pop up in my recommendations. It’s really cool because Instagram is usually used to teach words or short phrases, so I can note them down for later. (Reminder: I have a new Instagram under the name xuexisprachen!)
• See if I can find an audio-based course to use as reinforcement. – I did have a look for this, but it kind of got abandoned. However, I found these sites/articles: Japanese Audio Flashcard Lessons and 9 Awesome Japanese Podcasts for Accelerating Your Learning. I have not used the audio courses/podcasts recommended, but the articles look like good starting points. This article also looks promising in general: 100 Excellent Language Lessons on YouTube; I don’t use YouTube for language learning that often, but this seems to provide a good starting point for exploring that more.

Something pretty cool did happen this last ten days though – after I wrote the last post and talked about how I wanted to include the “multi-track” approach in my learning, I went looking for some real Japanese. I ended up back on the NHK World website as they have an area for easy news. I had a look at the headlines and then I took one and spent some time (no longer than 20 minutes, I don’t think) working out what it said and how it all fit together.

And I did it! I got some new words and I read my first real sentence, yay!

So, what are my goals for the next 10 (well, eight) days?

• Finish up to Easy Japanese lesson 12 (so the end of lesson 10, lessons 11 and 12).
• Find and follow five Twitter accounts that tweet in Japanese.
• Find and begin using an audio/video course for Japanese (aka YouTube counts).
• Clock a study time of at least 20 mins a day (so 2h40 total).
• Take some time to refresh the hiragana and katakana alphabets.

And the links for today:

• JapanesePod101 (Twitter)
• Self Taught Japanese (Twitter)
• Tofugu (Twitter)
• Japanese Audio Flashcard Lessons
• 9 Awesome Japanese Podcasts for Accelerating Your Learning
• 100 Excellent Language Lessons on YouTube

Let me know how your learning is getting on! And if you know of any Twitter accounts that I’d find useful, let me know those too please! 😀