Skip to main content

Learning Japanese - having more fun

おはようございます! I’ve been offline lately because I’ve been:
A) working on my book
B) being stuck on my book
C) praying a lot about my book
D) switching to a new book to write to try to jumpstart my creativity again
E) (re)learning Japanese in my spare time

The Japanese part has been inconsistent because, well, it can be boring. But I found a way to make it more fun!

My listening comprehension for my Japanese is not very good, so I watched Japanese anime with English subtitles. Crunchyroll has a ton you can watch with only their free membership.

Lately, to take my listening practice to the next level, I started helping out with a coffee hour gathering put on by the Japanese language congregation at my church once a month. Okay, so Japanese ladies from Japan speak REALLY REALLY FAST! But it’s good practice to learn the actual speed people talk. I don’t understand most of what they say yet … Also, my vocabulary isn’t very large so many times I won’t understand because I don’t know the word or phrase.

But it’s good for me to force myself to speak Japanese even if I’m pretty sure I’m grammatically incorrect. I have to just do it! and ignore my embarrassment or self-consciousness. I tell myself that I don’t have to be perfect. Most of the Japanese ladies realize I’m learning Japanese and they don’t mind my bad grammar, and the important thing is that they can understand what I’m trying to say.

For the past week or two I’ve been experimenting with different online resources to try to make learning Japanese more fun. I joined the LearnJapanese subReddit group but many of the conversations are just too high a level for me yet. However, it’s a good place for me to ask questions (I got a quick answer for my question about how to pronounce the symbols you often see on Japanese novel titles).

What got me really excited was an app I discovered a few days ago, HelloTalk. It’s a social media app specifically for people learning other languages. When you create your profile, you indicate what country you’re living in, what your native language is, what language you’re trying to learn, and your proficiency level in that language, and those four stats are all shown on your profile in HelloTalk.

Then the app specifically filters the social media posts so that you can choose to see (a) people who speak the language you’re trying to learn (for me, Japanese speakers), or (b) people like you who are trying to learn the new language you’ve indicated (for me, English speakers learning Japanese). The posts from (a) are sometimes in Japanese, sometimes in English or another language that the users are trying to learn.

As an English speaker, I can help other users because the app allows you to actually correct someone’s English in their post. Likewise, Japanese speakers can correct the Japanese in my posts.

You can also randomly send a message (through the app) to other users to do a foreign language exchange chat and get to know them. I haven’t done that yet, and I probably would only do that with women users and not men users, just to feel safe. Some aspects and etiquette of foreign language exchange chatting are explained in this Youtube video.

So far, I’ve been trying to read the posts from Japanese users. Sometimes the posts use more vocabulary and kanji than I understand, but sometimes they’re readable and I only have to look up a few words. HelloTalk also has a really nice feature where you can tap on a word and it’ll translate it for you in the app, but the free accounts are only limited to a few translations a day. You can instead look up unfamiliar words in a free online dictionary like Jisho.org but if you don’t know the pronounciation of the kanji, then you have to try to look it up by radicals.

You can also follow users you interact with and choose to see only the posts of the people you follow. It’s been a nice way to get to know other users through their posts.

I was pretty burned out on Facebook and I haven’t been on social media at all for the past year, but HelloTalk suddenly made me excited to be on social media again! I forced myself to respond to posts in Japanese, and to comment on other users’ posts in Japanese when I could. The nice thing is that I can stop and look up a vocabulary word before typing it in. I’ve used a lot more Japanese in the past few days than I have in several months of learning it. It really helps to be forced to recall the grammar I’ve learned and figure out what to use.

If you’re on HelloTalk, please email me to let me know! I’ll send you my HelloTalk ID.

Comments

Popular Posts

Toilet seat cover

Captain’s Log, Supplemental Update August 2008: I wrote up the pattern for this with "improvements"! Here's the link to my No Cold Bums toilet seat cover ! Okay, remember a few days ago I was complaining about the cold toilet seat in my bathroom? Well, I decided to knit a seat cover. Not a lid cover, but a seat cover. I went online and couldn’t find anything for the seat, just one pattern for the lid by Feminitz.com . However, I took her pattern for the inside edge of the lid cover and modified it to make a seat cover. Here it is! It’s really ugly stitch-wise because originally I made it too small and had to extend it a couple inches on each side. I figured I’d be the one staring at it, so who cared if the extension wasn’t perfectly invisible? I used acrylic yarn since, well, that’s what I had, and also because it’s easy to wash. I’ll probably have to wash this cover every week or so, but it’s easy to take off—I made ties which you can see near the back of the seat. And...

I sold to Steeple Hill!

Captain's Log, Supplemental Remember that romantic suspense proposal I blogged about earlier? Well, it just sold to Steeple Hill’s Love Inspired Suspense line! I am so jazzed! I am beyond jazzed! The story’s working title is Sinister Spa The story's title is Deadly Intent and here’s a blurb (but it’s probably not what will appear on the back of the book): Massage therapist Naomi Grant could use a massage herself. With her father at home recovering from a stroke, Naomi is put in charge of the family’s elite day spa in Sonoma county. The new responsibilities sit awkwardly on her shoulders, and things only get worse when handsome Dr. Devon Knightley breezes into the spa, demanding to see one of the female clients. And the woman is found dead in Naomi’s massage room. Suddenly, Naomi is a suspect and her family’s spa is shut down. How could God let this awful thing happen? Devon only needed to see his ex-wife about a family necklace she still hadn’t returned, but when she dies and...

I got my cover!

Captain’s Log, Supplemental Blog book giveaway: To enter, go to the blog links below and post a comment there. Eyes of Elisha by Brandilyn Collins Tangerine by Marilynn Griffith I GOT MY COVER!!!! What do you guys think?

Excerpt - A HUNDRED YEARS OF HAPPINESS by Nicole Seitz

Captain's Log, Stardate 03.05.2009 Update: Sorry, this giveaway is closed. A Hundred Years of Happiness by Nicole Seitz A beautiful young woman. An American soldier. A war-torn country. Nearly forty years of silence. Now, two daughters search for the truth they hope will set them free and the elusive peace their parents have never found. In the South Carolina Lowcountry, a young mother named Katherine Ann is struggling to help her tempestuous father, by plunging into a world of secrets he never talks about. A fry cook named Lisa is trying desperately to reach her grieving Vietnamese mother, who has never fully adjusted to life in the States. And somewhere far away, a lost soul named Ernest is drifting, treading water, searching for what he lost on a long-ago mountain. They're all longing for connection. For the war that touched them to finally end. For their hundred years of happiness at long last to begin. From the beloved author of The Spirit of Sweetgrass...

Cover Reveal + New Logo for Year of the Dog, a Mahina Security Novel

A New Look for Year of the Dog (and a Behind-the-Scenes Oops!) What do a dog trainer, a security expert, and a nearly-naked book cover have in common? Let me explain. 😅 Year of the Dog is the first book in my Christian romantic suspense series, Mahina Security, set in beautiful (and sometimes dangerous) Hawaii. It features quirky humor, family tensions, sweet romance, and a mystery involving a missing person—and it’s now available to read in the Christian suspense anthology, Danger in the Shadows , on Kindle Unlimited ! But before that happened, I had a bit of a cover mishap… While creating the ebook cover, I realized that the original stock photo made my heroine look, well, completely nekkid. 😳 She’s actually wearing a tube top in the image, but when I cropped it for the ebook, the top disappeared—leaving her looking very PG-13. To fix it, I did some Canva magic on a strappy top from another image and stuck it onto the model (so she’s decent now). But when I resize...