[Poem] What will not return

“What will not return” (03/07/2012)

I did not know that the departure –
my face reflecting on that muddy glass of the train,
sun shining, blue sky, drying my tears,
running down – would mean the end of the
happiness born between the two of us.

People hugging, crying, carrying their luggage,
into the train, the train, crammed, full, it’s very humid,
and slowly the windows gets misted up by all those
people breathing faster, in sadness to go away, back.
A small figure just starring at me behind the train’s door.

Like a seed planted the tree of happiness grew, branches, too
nourished by the North’s sun, the North’s heavy rain pouring.
Walking barefoot through those yellow fields and falling in love
upon the paths end in the woods, the tiny birds shouting for encore,
for more, for an everlasting green tree, symphony of summer.

What will not return, I realised at the stations platform,
train why did you leave? – You took away the colours of my life and now,
now, I’m blind and groping for something to hold on. It was the sun at
high noon, burning it into my skin, what will not return, yet was so beautiful
not to embark to a new shore, further, now.

Using example sentences actually more.. actively?

Ok, so I started using EBwin now and add along the go, while reviewing, “Notes” and “Sentences” for all my Rikai-sama added cards of my Misc.anki deck (4200 cards.. Adding everything manually is pain in the ass really and I hope Rikai-sama will get a major upgrade enabling the save function from different dictionaries, as well!) and the resulsts after a week are brilliant: I talked to a native and when I asked if she understood a very complicated sentence, I wasn’t sure of, she said that it sounds very natural and she understood everything. She said, my Japanese improved, which makes me feel very glad right now, as I know that this new decision was a good choice and step into the right direction towards fluency.

Eijiro/Kenkyusha are the best dictionaries, I think.
I don’t use monolinguals for various reasons; I simply need Jp->Eng with a translation I can keep in mind.

EBwin and the might of EPWING!!

是非このソフトを利用してみてください。もうすぐ及ぼす得影響はものすごくてびっくりするだろう！
※rutrackerを閲覧するなら、きっと何か役立つものを見つけるはずだけどさ・・・・・・。

お久しぶり

久しぶりに何も投稿していなかったので、更新をしたいんだよ。

＊現在の語彙の分量はほぼ９７００語。
＊リスニングがまだ悪い。
＊小説を読み始めたけど、残念ながら読了しなかった。
＊毎日、メールして友達とコミュニケーションしている。だが、Lang8の活動を控えることにしたんだ。

じゃあ～

Goals, resolutions

Started ‘learning’ Japanese after RtK1 on 08.01.2011.

Goals were:

* Get started and used to Anki. DONE!

* Finish of core6k before end of the year. DONE!

* 10k words all in all after 12 months. Nah, almost. I guess if I continue like this I will have about 8500 words in Anki by 08.01.2012.

* Writing on Lang8 and make friends. Greatly done! This is really fun and since Decembre as I have no exams any more, I write daily.

Goals for 2012:

* Reading and listening comprehension to 80%.

* Improving on particles (by reading, see above).

* Definitely 10k words, keeping Anki running, adding cards further with Rikai-sama.

* Skype in Japanese (voice-to-voice, no text-chat).

* Translating my poems and short-stories into Japanese by myself.

Japanese in a nutshell

Shove off, listening! Anyway, reaching slowly the 8300 cards mark in Anki I feel like all the people telling me it depends on the amount of vocabulary you know how much you understand lied on me in a way. I guess 8300 is already.. enough to understand at least parts, sentences, yet not everything (I know). But the point is, I just hear a massive amount of words my brain seemingly cannot process! I in fact do listen to Japanese (see podcast) while reviewing my anki cards, passively. I cannot listen actively yet without getting headaches from not understanding what they are saying; it’s as if I can’t comprehend Japanese. Long ago already I have gotten rid of the inner barrier telling me it’s an unlearnable language and so on, but it seems it comes up in my subconscious. Once a month I try listening to something I haven’t understood a month ago and I see no progress nor improvement so far: it is still the same mess/sea of words in my head.
Seemingly it also does not depend on grammar, as I’m reading “A Dictionary of Basic Japanese grammar” like a novel every now and then and revise what I’ve read and learnt sometimes. (All in all, I just want to get through it and work up the points I’ve missed so far before preceding with dealing with JLPT2 grammar more seriously and starting to read Japanese seriously, which I have never done.)
I feel like I am in a box, yeah. While doing anki, I listen to the podcast and that’s it. I have no problems producing own Japanese on lang-8 for example; I just write and get my mistakes corrected and if I do not understand why this is wrong, I simply ask and mostly understand. Most mistakes are naturally obvious, but everyone knows better after getting corrected it perfectly, right? So, writing Japanese is a lot of fun to me and I try to do so every day on Lang-8.
I find it hard not to understand what is being said, because that’s the way I brought my English to a – for me – high (enough) level. I caught up words I heard and understood from context and integrated them correctly into my own vocabulary..
I wonder what to do next. Perhaps I should really shove my anki deck and start from zero again? Putting more emphasis on listening?? I’m quite desperate at the moment and I wonder how YOU did it. Japanese sounds just so.. foreign to me. (not in its sound.. that sounds ‘natural’ to me, but the formation, use of vocab etc. that makes everything incomprehensible is foreign)

Making the impossible possible

As you see, I want to get stronger grammar skills in order to avoid beginner mistakes while writing at Lang-8 in future and in order to prepare more towards my first skype experience! I will read a bit every day and since I have no exams left until March, I will go through the “Basic” volume first, then the “Intermediate”. “Advanced” seems to be reserved for the JLPT N1 realm, though :)