I’ve been back in Japan for 2 years and I feel a little ashamed to admit my language ability is only about half as good as it was the first time I lived in Japan for 5 years (until 2012). I forgot so much.
My listening is crap and my vocabulary is crap and so I’m trying my best to get it back to the level it was before where I could read books and understand most conversations. I could never understand TV news or movies and though I won’t be doing much of that, I’d like to at least be able to follow high level topics and grammar.
I got this book to beef up on adverbs which I always mix up and hardly every use. They’re not always necessary but they work like condiments on food, language is pretty bland without them.
The publisher, Ask, is hit or miss. I find that their books all function as supplements, and some have a lot of filler and very little substance per page but this one is alright and cheap enough and allows me to target a particular weak point.
I essentially use the book as a checklist of adverbs and a list of useful sentences. I’ll copy down my favorite sentences, the ones with unfamiliar words or words I’m not used to using and then I practice reading them fast and fluently.
Some examples:
今回の学生による不祥事は極めて遺憾です。
今年の就職活動は、長引く不況の影響で、相当厳しくなりそうだ。
This years job hunting is pretty tough due to the prolonged recession
「昨日のテストの点、あまり良くなかったら、次はうんと頑張らないとね」
If yesterday’s test scores weren’t good, you’ve got a fair amount of work to do.
いつも冷静なかれがあんな失敗をするなんて、よほど慌てたに違いない
He’s always cool headed so making such a big mistake, he must be quite flustered.
Quite, a fair amount of, pretty, extremely....these are all loose translations. It’s interesting, adverbs don’t seem to translate very well at all, at least not between Japanese and English. Nouns and verbs usually translate fairly well, adjectives can be more or less descriptive when translating, but adverbs get really wiggy because they have different common collocations so you use them with different verbs and patterns and situations.
It’s really hard to stay motivated to keep studying so I’ve invited my partner to study this with me. Her level is fairly low compared to mine but she picks things up quickly and recognizes a lot. I can explain lots of words in the sentence to her as I study and practice one or two.
I’ve made a list and we practice reading them and making sentence with the main word.
We’ve been doing 2-3 chapters a week for two weeks. Usually we study every 2-3 days for an hour. Hopefully we can keep it up.
Anyone else studying a language now?