Change of class

Not much to blog about of late. Mainly because I've been skipping Japanese classes and my Chinese teacher is ill, so studying has taken a bit of a backseat over the past couple of weeks. My employers have recently started offering free Japanese lessons to staff, which is good news—and means I can quit my other class, which I wasn't so happy with either, and was pretty expensive—so I'm in the process of getting out of the other school and waiting for my employer's classes to start.

The World Cup is taking up a fair amount of free time too. Will probably have that back pretty soon though—when England crash out and I don't have to wake up at 3am to watch their matches anymore.

First Chinese Lang-8 entry

Yesterday marked my first Chinese entry on the Lang-8 website. Until now I have used the site exclusively for Japanese, but I decided to test the water with my Chinese with a simple entry about a visit to the park on a nice sunny day. It was short, and simple... and still needed correcting. Am I depressed about this? Not at all. I'm happy that I feel confident enough to make an entry in Chinese and I feel I know what I need to do to improve—due to my experience learning Japanese. Learning both languages certainly seems like a tall order, and I'm not convinced myself that it's a sensible idea, but I still have plenty of motivation and I guess that's what is important. My theory goes that once you know how to learn a language yourself, (that being what works for you: a good method, and the path you need to take) then picking up other languages becomes easier—it certainly seems to be the case so far for me anyway. Here's the post, and the correction in red:

东京的公园
Tokyo Park

今天去东京的公园了。
今天去了东京的公园。
Today I went to a park in Tokyo.

天气很好。
The weather was good.

我喜欢坐在公园。
我喜欢坐在公园里。
I like to sit in the park.

Words and sentences

The majority of flashcards I use on the computer are single vocabulary words, but recently I've begun to add more sentences to my decks to supplement the vocabulary. This has helped a lot, and I'm finding that my retention rate of newer vocabulary is higher when it has an accompanying sentence. I think the context that this lends to the word helps to fix in place. Anyway, using Anki and the online dictionary, Tangorin, is a good combination for doing this. Exporting saved vocabulary from Tangorin to the Anki decks is a piece of cake - just set up an account with Tangorin and use the vocabulary lists.

Preparing for the future - speaking Japanese

Speaking to my friend last night, she told me that I sound like a foreigner when I speak Japanese. Bad news! I haven't paid much attention to pronunciation when speaking Japanese because when I started out, learning the pronunciation of the Japanese syllabary was pretty straightforward, so I think there was a tendency to imagine that I had it mastered it and ignore this aspect of communication.

Japanese pronunciation is much flatter than English. My pronunciation has a rising and falling intonation to it, so it doesn't feel natural to me to speak in a flat tone - it's something I have to concentrate on when I do it.

I was trying to think about speaking like a robot to make my pronunciation more Japanese, but you can take this too far - you don't want to talk through your nose and end up sounding like a Dalek, however tempting this may be.

Anyway, I was reminded of the Flight of the Conchords, and their song, The Humans are Dead. It's pretty funny.

Transitive and intransitive verbs

I can never remember these, and never bother to try. I get the feeling my Japanese would improve a lot if I made the effort. So here goes:

Transitive verbs are the verbs that take an object. As in 'I open the door', vs. 'The door opens'. Here 'open' is both transitive and intransitive in English, so easy to remember. But if we translate it to Japanese we have to use two different verbs: あける and あく。

So 'I open the door' becomes: 私はドーアを開ける。And 'the door opens' becomes ドーアが開く。 Notice that the transitive verb takes a を as the object marker, while the intransitive verb takes a が.

Now it's just a case of remembering all the variations - and there is no rule to help you do this. Here is a list of some transitive and intransitive verbs: