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Showing posts with label L2 Reading Contest. Show all posts
Showing posts with label L2 Reading Contest. Show all posts

Friday, December 20, 2013

End of the 6 Week Challenge

The 6 week Challenge finished earlier than I expected. When I uploaded my hours for Saturday and Sunday on Sunday night, it was already over, so the last hours I needed to reach 150 hours were done but not added to the following graph.


You need to add 12 hours drama and 25 minutes anime and 5 hours reading to get to my total count which means I reached my goal probably one day too late but I still reached it! Yeah me!

Next time I'll be careful which day of the month the Challenge starts. I'm reading to start again on February 1st!



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Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Update on the 6 Week Challenge

November is the month of NaNoWriMo but it's also the month of the 6 Week Challenge. So far it has been 19 days, so I am almost at the middle of the challenge.

For my 6 Week Challenge, my goal is to study Japanese for at least 150 hours in 6 weeks. 
At the moment, I can't use earphone at work because I'm doing a lot of reading and working out math equation but it will soon change when I start programming, so my hour count didn't rise as quickly as usual. My hour count is mainly do to reading in the bus as I go and come back to work and watching anime. 

I will try to do a little bit more of Anki during the next 3 weeks. I think the problem was that I got bored with my deck but I have a new one (RTK2) which seems interesting. My total anki time for the 3 last weeks is the half of my boyfriends daily use, that's kind of ridiculous but he does anki while walking around to places while I only do it on computer. I can feel the technology power here.  On the other hand, I can read more books.

As I am not at 75 hours yet, I have about 35 hours to catch up. That should be doable.
  
 I'm happy because I managed to finish R.O.D. 1 and I'm now half way through R.O.D. 2.

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Friday, November 1, 2013

Result of October Challenges

I read more than expected. 
I'm so proud of myself actually. I had scaled the Read More Or Die Challenge on the previous 15 days RMOD challenge for which I just managed 100 pages. This time in October, I wanted to read 200 pages but I managed to read more than 300.
I finished ビブリア古書堂の事件手帖 and I started on Read Or Die. I don't know if I'm getting better or of ROD is easier to read but it seems I'm a bit faster. Of course I still don't understand everything but I'm getting there. If you want to ask why do you read things you don't understand without a dictionary, well 1) I can't bother checking stuff every minute especially that I do most of my reading in the bus. 2) You might want to have a look at this it might revolution what you always thought about reading. 

I also started a new anki deck which gives the readings in the RTK2 order. My boyfriend says that a lot of things are obsolete but it's always good for the yomi anyway so you might definitely want to try it. I personally think it's awesome!

This counter is showing the total page read since I started on novels seriously. 
 

On the other hand, I don't have any progress for Vampire Heart. but I might get to it sometimes next year eventually.
 
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Friday, October 18, 2013

The Japanese Project:One more step toward literacy


One of the thing when you arrive in a country where you don't understand (speak) the language is that you become illiterate. Of course you can still read your own language but you are illiterate in the language of the country. This is what happened to me when I first arrive in Japan. Despite training myself, even now when I arrive in the book shelves in a store I just look at the book blankly while in my country I could grasp interesting titles in one look. As I tend to read a lot, I have to say that this became really frustrating so I'm going to try a little bit more, a little bit harder (easier ;) ).


I'm currently undertaking the Read More Or Die challenge with a goal of 200 pages read in the month of October and few days ago I finished to read my first novel in Japanese!! Yeah, Me.
I will start the 6 week challenge again on November 1st.
I don't understand everything, far from it. To be honest, I don't even know what I understand because I read without translating. When my boyfriend makes me translate it goes ok but I feel like it's breaking my learning. So I'm just reading and going trough enormous amount of stuff that I only partially get but I can feel the progress. 


Anyway, all that to introduce my new reading material. I was offered the all series of Read Or Die for white day last year. And what better than Read Or Die to learn to read. I wonder how great I will be at Japanese when I'm done reading all this. The more I read the more I feel really weird inside of my head a bit like nothing (everything) is making sense anymore. I know this mean progress as it's the same feeling I have when watching 20+ hours of drama in a row. It's the getting-fluent feeling, it's fun and I love it.

Read Or Die is the story of girls who use their sticky paper abilities to protect the world from geniuses back for the dead. No need to say, most of these girls read a lot. :)

 
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Thursday, August 22, 2013

6 week Challenge and Read More Or Die

My crazy Japanese practice hours, read pages counting madness is back... and I was late for it...

The beginning of August  (August 1st) was a start of a new 6 weeks challenge period and Read More Or Die started on the 15th for 15 days only.
I registered only yesterday, better late than never and so from yesterday started the crazy counting again.


The plan is to read at least 100 pages of Japanese by the end of the month and with all the blog hop going on lately, I didn't define an hour count that I want to reach for the 6 (now 3) week challenge. I guess the main plan is just to improve my Japanese a little bit more over the next 3 weeks.

The Read More Or Die counter starts at 71 so I need to reach 171 at least by the 31st midnight.




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Friday, February 1, 2013

Read more or die : Reading contest.

Last night was the end of my reading Marathon. In January I participated to a contest call "Read more or die". This contest is organized several times a year by someone who realized that you can improve your foreign language skills dramatically just by reading more, reading something, anything, by participating to another contest of the kind himself.
The rules of this contest is to read as much as possible in up to three different foreign languages from the first of January until the 31th of January at midnight. To participate you just need a twitter account (that makes it easier) and to follow the rules.
I registered Japanese, German and English. I only read papers in English for most part or edited "Demon and fairy" (more on that coming soon), I didn't read anything in German (my german books were hiding in my boxes) but I read a lot of mangas (I finished 花よ男子, and started 花ざかりの君たちへ。)
I found out about this contest only on the 9th of January so I started already with an handicap but there is nothing to win in that contest except of course new awesome language skill. I decided to aim for being in the top 10% (that's a bit of a fullish goal though but I didn't know how much I could read) At the moment I register 10% meant to be at least 26th. At the end of the month it meant being 29th but I decided to still aim for the 26th position. I reached it last night but midnight coming in Japan faster than in any other country, I become 27th soon after.That's not too bad for a first time.

Here are my reading progresses.













Next time (in April) I intent to read at least 1000 pages (which is 5000 pages for mangas according to the rules) and only in Japanese. Normally that's more than achievable especially that I have 2 more months or insane reading to train.

Monday, April 12, 2010

Update on April's challenges

En français
So as I explained earlier I am participating to two contests for the month of April.
Now we are the 12 of April, already almost in the middle of the month so I think it's time to take a look at what I have actually been doing for those challenges. I probably should have written something about it a bit earlier, anyway, it's here now.

Script Frenzy


For Script Frenzy I am a bit behind at the moment. I was supposed to write 3.33 pages a day. Actually I went out a lot since the first of April and ended up with being 16 pages behind in the writing. However, I'm not the kind to let things get worse and worse and I manage to write 17 pages yesterday. So now I have a total of 33 pages. I'll surely reach 40 pages tonight to be right on tracks again.

As I promised in the announcement of this challenge, here is a little summary of the story so far : Vienna's Ghost

Arman has the particular ability to be able to travel in people's dreams. Some people like it as he can help them dream about what they want and some people don't. But Arman sleep really few at night and never dream himself.
Yurei is the family ghost. She is scaring people unwillingly until Arman finally manage to talk to her. What Arman doesn't know is that Yurei is secretly in love with her and that she is the girl who appeared in his very first dream the day before and that he is desperately trying to fine.

As I always slide some links to my next story in the one I'm writing, I hide a little wink to "Demon and fairy" in this one. I didn't write much on the novel.

International L2 Reading Contest

Here is the International L2 Reading Contest. I have seen some of the read pages number of some people and I was really impressed. I surely over estimated my abilities when I joined this contest. But the good point about it, even if I am sure that I will never make it to the top 5, is that it allows me to test my reading in Japanese and also to read different kind of material. I really intend to push the effort until the end of the month (never left anything half done.) and I'm also intending to continue reading as much as I can after the contest.


花ざかりの君たちへ (Hana Kimi)
 I read 20 pages of the manga. I don't really know how to count them though. Normally 10 pages read count for 1 page in the contest. But I read all pages three times (so maybe 6 pages).
The first time I just go with the knowledge of Japanese I have. That kind of give me a flavor. I'm almost done with Heisig's remembering the Kanji.

But if I can write the characters fine when I have the meaning and if I can recognize a kanji that I know, getting the meaning of it coming to my mind is not that easy.
So here is where the second reading of the page comes into place, I look up all the kanjis for which the meaning didn't strike me and sometimes write them down.
The third reading allows me to actually fix things with the hiragana and katakana and to make sure that I understand what I read.
That may seem a slow process and it's actually slow but that's also a lot of fun and that also showed me that I can understand more than I thought I was.


あのときの王子くん
I read two chapters of the little prince with the audio (audio books list). That's about 7 pages. These I read several times too, that depends of the sentences really. I like to have the audio with me because the hiragana tend to really really kill me. It's way more difficult to understand than with the kanjis.

I also read the equivalent of five pages on wikipedia about different topics. Basically, when I'm looking for something I will check the Japanese pages as well. I find it very convenient as I spend a lot of time on the computer. So each time I need a small break I will end up there.

And I read 6 pages of pure kana for the Japanese test for registration and placement into Japanese classes. I was already laughing when the girl put the paper in front of me. I had learned the hiragana the night before and I had told her so. I asked for something written in Japanese but she told me that that was the test I was supposed to take. I failed at it 7/58. Hopefully my supervisor wasn't really happy with the time table and decided that I will take the classes in fall instead. I can't tell how happy I am. I live with people who actually took this class at beginner level last semester and my Japanese is not worse that theirs so I really think that 10.5 hours in this class would really be a waste of time for me. I know kanjis, I'll know kana better in no time and I'm listening to Japanese all the time, I don't think a class would do more than to force me to say something my brain refuse to say at the moment. I already noticed that I'm able to say some complicated things when something apparently simple is totally alien to me. People ask me how I can know something complicated when I don't know something easy. Or also how I can know kanjis if I don't know kana. I don't know that's just the way it is at the moment.

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

April's challenges

En français
So the month of April is coming and it's going to be really really busy. I intend to participate to two contests that I will describe in this post and I also intend to continue writing my third novel "Demon and fairy".
So what are those new challenges I'm giving to myself and what are they all about ?
The first one is Script Frenzy and the second is the International L2 Reading Contest.

Script Frenzy

For Script Frenzy I will write 100 pages movie script. I already prepare my story, meaning by that I know the beginning in the end. It will be a love ghost story. We will find some of the characters present in "Demon Soul" and "Attic mirror" as some part of the story will be taking place in the usual house where the previous characters and the new one live.
I'm not planing on giving you the script in pieces. Script seems to be a lot different to write than a novel as they need a lot of formatting. I'm not really sure I will be able to cut it into scenes and to finish the story in just 100 pages. So I will probably write it all and edit it before giving you a chance to read it. How ever I will tell you how things are going regularly and if i managed to write my weekly 25 pages, something like that as well as little summary of the story.

International L2 Reading Contest

For the International L2 Reading Contest I will read as much pages in Japanese as possible. You can read in any foreign language as you want but as I'm currently living in Japan and learning Japanese, I think it's a great opportunity to improve. I don't think I will make it in the first 5 to win however as my knowledge of the Japanese writing system is not yet optimum. If everything goes as planed I should be able to finish Heisig RTK in 12 days, also I forgot all the kana I already learned and will need to go back to it. But I still can hope, I'm a polyphasic after all so it's at time like that that it can make things turn out to my advantage.

What do I intend to read ?

Harry Potter in Japanese

I have it as a printed book so that will help when I get tired for reading on screen. Also I'm way slower at reading on screen. Another advantage is that the Kanjis have furigana the first time they appear which will help me get through learning their pronunciation.

花ざかりの君たちへ (Hana Kimi)
Reading manga with a lot of picture is going to help me increasing the number of pages faster (I still need to read 10 pages of manga to have it counted as 1 page of normal text)
Also that will help me relax a little from page of text where I won't seem to be understanding anything at first.

あのときの王子くん
I will read the little prince as an audio book (audio books list). The text is written for children and then full of hiragana which worries me a little. But having the audio as well will help be go through it and learn the kanas more easily, or so I hope.


ジーキル博士とハイド氏の怪事件
I'm not too sure about that one I think I need a book with more kanji to be able to read by meaning more than by sound. It also comes from the same audio books list. So I think this one is going to be good for that, however I can still find something different in the list. Another good point about it is that I already read it in English so that will help a bit.