Japanese Language Learning Update

I finally returned Heisig to the library a couple of days ago.

I just couldn’t do it. It wasn’t that fun for me.

I made it up to 276 frames, and then I returned the book. I could have renewed it one last time, but I decided not to.

Bakumatsu Renka Shinsengumi DS Review: Part 1

I was going to take pictures with my camera, but I can’t because my brother is too busy playing Pokemon Platinum on my DS. He has been playing for 4 days straight now without sleep. Once you start, you gotta catch em all, I guess…

So, I’ll add pictures later. For now, I’ll just talk about what it’s like and the Japanese I have grasped from it, because it IS a text heavy game.

First of all, there are a lot of kudos to go around.

Lux Pain: Chapter 7, Searching for that Girl Revisited

Okay. I’m pretty bad at explaining things, and I thought it would be better if I actually consulted a walkthrough instead of haphazardly trying to remember the order I did things in.

With the help of Rikai and JWPCE, I was able to make a (really rough, and pretty crappy) translation of a Japanese walkthrough. I only did the portion where the seach starts for Yayoi, since the entire guide is..well, pretty long.

The wonderful guide is located here at Game Pukka, and no credit should go to me for any of the contents, since I would never have the patience to go through and explore the nuances of a game like that.

Hopefully this will help some people who are getting stuck at this point, and if there are still any questions, feel free to leave a comment.

And, ahead of time, I really apologize for the poor quality of the translation. It really doesn’t do the guide much justice, and there were a lot of lines I was unsure of. I’m really sorry—!!

Maybe there’s something to this Heisig junk after all.

Well, I put down Heisig and didn’t touch it for a while. Then, yesterday, on a whim, I decided to try reviewing my huge stack of failed cards and seeing how well I did. I remember how to write all of the kanji except 2 (One of them being “only”).

One thing I have to wonder though, is how useful this will be to me. Learning to write kanji from keywords It’s not as though I have a problem breaking apart kanji into shapes and components already.

Actually, I’m looking into “Let’s Learn Kanji” from Kodansha right now, and it seems to have most of the stuff that I want to learn, like names of radicals, radical locations, and how they relate to kanji.

Either way, I don’t think I can go through with Heisig at this point in time. No motivation, and I hate his tone of voice.

TK Guide Practice Part 2: Basic Particle Exercise

Basic Particle Exercises

Practicing from Tae Kim’s Guide; Part 1

To motivate myself to review, I thought that a blog would be good for practicing…since CLEARLY, nothing else will get me away from watching Kaiba videos.

犬だ。: Is dog.

猫じゃない。：Is not ｃａｔ．

魚だった。: Was fish.

鳥じゃなかった。: Wasn’t bird.

Okay. I think I got the hang of that. Simple sentences are best. Better to learn the basics than get overwhelmed and make mistakes doing complicated sentences.

社長萌え has been distracting me from studies.

What should I do? Every time I log onto my computer with good intentions of studying or using online resources, I end up drifting over to niconico and watching a bunch of Kaiba parodies.

I never watched Yu-Gi-Oh too closely during the Saturday morning cartoons. Mostly because I found it weird whenever Yami Yugi came out, and had his extremely commanding voice…as compared to regular Yugi’s timid voice.

I did find Kaiba interesting, if not psychotic. But I didn’t have the same fascination with him that I now have today.

It was only after seeing several very good parodies and learning more about Kaiba courtesy of Google and Wikipedia, that I began to like Kaiba.

Japanese Update

Another Update:

I spent Yesterday going through Tae Kim’s Guide to Japanese Grammar, and  doing the beginning exercises. I’m starting from the very beginning to make sure I really have a solid foundation. The declarative state and whatnot.

Before, it was hard for me to go through the guide because of all the grammatical terms, and because it quickly became intimidating with the kanji.

Heisig, Why Are Your Stories Such Crap?

I’m not going to sugarcoat it anymore. His stories are not “bland” or “hard to remember”. Some of them are really awful.

How awful?

“Don’t worry about coming up with a story for this character, because you’ll encounter it often enough. For now, just remember this word, okay?”

There’s Something About Heisig…

I’m on Frame 137, but like a bad child, I flipped ahead to see what kind of complex kanji I would learn. It’s a bad habit I have. When I would get a reading assignment in class, I would always flip ahead in the textbook to see how many more pages I had to go (Unless the textbook was full of corny jokes or praising about George Washington’s bald head, in which case I would be thoroughly engaged).

There are some potential problems I see with Heisig leaving you to come up with stories on your own later on.