Learning Japanese intensively

[xuechengfeng]

I'll note my progress for you guys.

There is a guy who teaches on the side at my school, and he will be teaching me Japanese 1 night a week for about 4 hours, and maybe 10 weeks.

I believe this will bring me to the intermediate level, so he says, and the advanced level will follow the next quarter.

It seems hard to comprehend I could be at a nice level after 10 weeks, but we'll see, for those of you who wish to do the same kind of learning.

[xuechengfeng]

Thursday got postposned 'til Tuesday, I'll be back to report.

[xuechengfeng]

aiya!

the guy either forgot or did not show today, i'm getting

Thursday or bust

[Jamie]

Looking forward to following your progress!

Jamie

[Guest Yau]

good luck, xuechengfeng~~

just add one point: the word ' intensively' should mean at least 5 hours a day, 5 days a week, by the notorious asian filled-duck education system.

[bhchao]

Ganbatte kudasai.

[xuechengfeng]

So I just completed my second class.

Basically what we've been doing is running through chapters, summarizing the grammar first. The next class we are going to work on the dialogues to begin to memorize vocab.

Covered a lot of particles: o, wa, ga, no, de, ni, and so on.

A lot of question words: what, where, how, who, how many

Skimmed through #'s, days, weeks, months, years.

Most of these 2 classes, however, have been focused on grammar and how to structure a sentence, and the hard part today came in the form of consonant and vowel verbs.

For example, changing the formal verb "ikimasu" to iku and then figuring out the negation of it by adding anai/nai. These things are a headache to me.

I think I have the grammar down, somewhat, and I'm looking forward to being able to get some vocabulary and conversation down.

I have pretty much mastered the hiragana, although he said I have time to work on it, and katakana isn't necessary until much later in the course.

We've pretty much covered all 12 chapters of Kanji this one book gave us, mainly because I know about 200-300 Hanzi. The problem will be remembering how to pronounce them in Japanese.

This is a very strange language.

[shibo77]

Yes, but when I finished memorising the hiraganas and checked online, almost everything was in katakana, and lots of hiragana are not used often. I also thought hiragana was easier to memorise than katakana...

-Shibo

[atitarev]

こんにちは。

僕も日本語と中国語を習う。難しいよ！中国語より日本語が上手だと思うけど、まだ下手だ。

名前はアナトリー(Anatoli)だ。

你好,我叫阿纳托利.

My Japanese is much better than my Chinese but I'd like to learn more.

Hello from Melbourne, Australia!

[jz87]

When I was taking intensive Japanese it was 10 hours a day 5 days a week. Plus hours of additional voluntary practice on weekends. I highly doubt you can become intermediate in 10 weeks of 4 hours per week. At my university you reach intermediate after either 2 years of standard Japanese (5 hours/week) or 1 year of intensive Japanese (40 hours/week). Even the state department admits that it takes on average 18 months of full time study to train native English speakers to working proficiency (not fluent, just workable). I highly doubt there's a shortcut to this.

[xuechengfeng]

this is the book i used

as well as this

I'm on my last class tomorrow, and it's not the pace I wanted to be at, but I think I was expecting way too much.

I've had this class between a life, a girlfriend, and work, so I guess I didn't dedicated as much time as I should have.

We have finished about all 40 lessons of grammar, so I basically understand how all the grammar works with the exception of those damn passive sentences, and relative clauses are kind of lost on me. Of the 40 lessons, I have about 10 of the vocabulary memorized. I can read most of the hiragana, but cannot write them all of the top of my head. Have not learned the katakana yet, and the 2nd book I listed we barely looked over because I know most of those kanji from Chinese. I will be fine in Japanese if I can dedicate more time to learning the vocabulary, and speaking more. The guy is letting me take the class again for free this upcoming quarter so I can get more speaking practice, which is good. Right now I'm going to start the Intensive Chinese courses, only these should work better because they are for 24 days straight I think for 4 hours a day.

The Ultimate Japanese book seems very practical to me, and I learned a lot more useful words and sentences from this class than I did in one year of university study of Chinese at my school. For example, my parents and girlfriend were blown away that I could say..

きのお私達わふどおさにゃと話益田。あぱあとお借り益田。しききんおはらい益田。

(the mixture of kanji/hiragana is probably butchered, but i said something like that)

[xuechengfeng]

oh, and by the way, some of the grammar he was teaching me from the Ultimate Japanese book was some of the same exact sentences from the 4th year Japanese books used at my university, so if I learn the vocab, I'll be set.

[skylee]

x, are you sure your sentence is correct?

"I will be fine in Japanese if I can dedicate more time to learning the vocabulary, and speaking more." So are most Japanese learners. BTW, I am really impressed that you have familiarized yourself with all the grammar.

Good luck.

[xuechengfeng]

LOL, yeah I suppose if anybody spent more time speaking and doing vocab, they would be OK.

I thought the sentence was correct, and so did the teacher, but maybe he's dumb?

I said the Kanji/hiragana mix may be wrong, what I was trying to say was..

Kinoo watashitachi wa fudoosan'ya to hanashimashita. Apaato o karimashita. Shikikin o haraimashita.

[Jamie]

Translation please??

[xuechengfeng]

Yesterday, We (my girlfriend & I) talked to a real estate agent. We rented an apartment, and paid the security deposit.

(which is what we actually did!)

[HashiriKata]

Corrected versions of what you wrote above (in both normal writing & hiragana). The grammar in it is essentially correct and I left it as it is:

昨日、私たちは不動産屋と話しました。アパートを借りました。敷金を払いました。

（きのう、わたしたちはふどうさんやとはなしました。アパートをかりました。しききんをはらいました。）

Regards,

HK

[ChouDoufu]

Are there any Chinese native speakers or non-natives who acquired a high level of Chinese and then studied Japanese?

It seems to me that most a large number of Chinese I've met who studied Japanese picked it up extremely quickly. Mostly because of characters, I guess. If I ever get around to picking up my japanese again, It'll be after I feel like my Chinese level has hit it's peak. Then I'll take my X000 characters and just work on mastering the yomigata's of those japanese words. Koreans who learn Japanese also have the advantage of a similar grammar..

[madizi]

I learned Japanese after Chinese. I had problems with pronunciation because all the time I wanted to read Kanjis with Chinese pronunciation. For example: I read a word 新聞, which is shinbun (newspaper) in Japanese, many times as xinwen.

Another problem was grammar. I was so accustomed to Chinese grammar that it was very hard for me to switch to different type of grammar.

But that was five years ago... I plan to learn again Japanese language. Hope that this time it will be easier.

[HashiriKata]

The problems madizi experience are normal, even if you're very good at both languages as they have also to do with language-switching. I suppose you'll be fine again after speaking for a while.

When one is weeker than the other, the stronger will always rush out first making it quite difficult to speak the other properly, especially when the word order between the 2 languages are so different (Japanese-Chinese). I find myself keep restarting/ rephrasing all the time because of this.