small milestone

[piranha]

today i translated my first page of manga. and no, it wasn't one of the pages with a lot of "a...h" and "n...h". :) though it had only a minimum of kanji, since i know so few. i hadn't actually planned on it, but i got sucked into a story that has only had a chapter scanlated, whch ended on a cliffhanger, so i got my hands on the raw and tried to make sense of it. this bloody raw doesn't have furigana, so i am not planning to carry on with it; it'd frustrate me in no time. it took hours just to do three pages with very little actual text. but i resolved the cliffhanger and can now sleep well.

i'm glad i listened to so many drama CDs lately. knowing the sound of words even if i don't know how they're written really helps when translating -- i have to painstakingly sound out the kana syllable by syllable (yes, i move my lips), and then suddenly! it makes a phrase i know! なんでもない was the first one that gave me a "eureka" feeling.

this stage of foreign language acquisition is generally a royal pain because i don't recognize any patterns yet, and i am generally such a pattern matcher, and rely on it hugely for reading in all languages in which i am fluent, *sigh*. but to get the mere inkling of a pattern is a thrill.

i'm tickled a bright electric blue. :)

Comments

Re: language acquisition

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

Although, I have to admit, the Chinese people on the last trip were very entertained by me.

hey, whatever gets you in contact with the natives, if you don't mind being gawked at. :) i hate that, but admire it when people can just do it.

yeah, i've had the experience of learning some phrases well, and having sufficiently good pronunciation that natives would reply with rapid fire responses, and i'd just look dumbfounded. *heh*.

there's always some stuff that simply has to be learned by rote, but rote alone does IMO not do it, and overall, it's not a good method for a lot of aspects of a language (like grammar). i tend to use a mix; i'll learn verb conjugations by rote, but i also practice them in context, over and over and over. vocabulary i once learned a lot by rote, but not this time; i am learning what i come across instead. i am not sure yet whether this will work as well or better or worse; my subjective perception is that i am picking up a lot of connective tissue terms casually, but not quite enough otherwise.

Re: language acquisition

[huashan.livejournal.com]

I don't have a lot of choice about being gawked at...especially in a country where I'm nearly a foot taller and 250lbs heavier than the average person. heh That was almost always the first question anybody asked me when I was there, and I had two people say I was the largest human they'd ever seen in their lives.

Part of the problem I had with Japanese was that I was too rushed, I didn't have the time to just let stuff sink in and practice. Or at least I felt tht way. I think if I'd just done that I would like have done better in the classes and much better at learning the language.