Saturday, February 4, 2012

2012 language focuses

This is probably an ambitious listing.

Chinese
Read the two texts from Streamlined 3&4: Talks on Chinese Culture (205 pages) and A New Text for a Modern China (246 pages)

I'll probably go through the 1001 characters in the appendix of Talks and add the ones I don't already know to anki first.

My bottleneck in Chinese is characters and vocabulary, which I don't see any easy way of clearing without actual "studying".

Japanese
Kanji is one of my bottlenecks in Japanese as well. According to my anki deck, I "know" 1347 out of the 1945 [old] joyo kanji (a couple hundred more were added to the joyo list recently). I write "know" because even if I may know the meaning for them (from Chinese), I might not necessarily know the Japanese readings for them. For me, to know means to know at least one Japanese reading and meaning, and thus, be able to use it in some way in Japanese. Lack of kanji knowledge directly relates to not being able to read more of the books I want to read, so I need to get through the rest of the joyo kanji somehow. I don't have an answer to "how" yet.

First, "studying"...

Grammar: Dictionary of Intermediate Japanese Grammar

Kanji: Basic Kanji Book, Vol 2

Aren't these the same as last year? Yes, here's to doing more "studying" this year ^^;;

For listening and speaking, I'll continue to listen to the podcasts I've been enjoying and to attend the Japanese conversation group meetings.

Writing: twelve posts on lang-8, with at least one post every other month. I liked last year's focus, but here's something that should be attainable despite this year's load.

Reading: ten books. I've already finished two, albeit children's books (~grades 2-3), and I'm currently in the middle of HP 1 (long-ish) and キノの旅 (~7th-8th grade level?). Ten is a nice, challenging, but [hopefully] not unrealistic number.