nice talk... One question, he mentioned he didn't have any money but then said he bootstrapped his first company ? How did he live for the first year or so. Would like to hear more about the challenges.
Regardless of hacks to make real progress you will need to spend a lot of time. Here's some quick tips...
1. Move most of your media consumption over to the new language. Movies/books/internet/twitter/etc..
2. Plan on an hour a day of active study
(can be 30mins morning/night).
And atleast an hour of non active study (listening to some dialogue, media consumption, etc)
3. Learning phrases is much more effective than learning words, although eventually you will need to do both
4. Learning by audio is much better than reading
atleast in the beginning
(for an advanced learner reading would make more sense to get more advanced content)
5. My suggestion is after you get 200 or so basic vocab and phrases down then make some short dialogues of things you want to know how to say / converse.
Get those translated or checked by a native (lang-8, etc). Create an audio recording of those and listen and repeat over and over every day till you have deeply learned them. They will become automatic and you will be "fluent" at those.
(The email field in the profile is "secret", for example it's used to get a new password. To share your email with the other users you must copy it in the about field of the profile.)
5000? I have close to 8000 in japanese and I consider myself still a beginner.
Native is at least 20000-25000.
As long as you are continuing to learn then 5000 is a nice start, but you are not going to read novels and speak about broad topics with that vocabulary.
Are we talking about vocabulary usage or recognition? Estimates vary, but the rough consensus for English seems to be that the educated native speaker recognizes around 15,000-25,000 words, but only uses around 5,000-8,000 in their own speech/writing.
The average vocabulary of the average person in their NATIVE TONGUE is just over 3500 words (it varies a lot from culture to culture).
The average vocabulary of a University Graduate in the Arts is 10-12000 words. In the sciences it varies greatly, chemistry, biology and medicine being the most demanding at >15,000.
Someone with a vocabulary of 20-25000 words would be highly educated or very well read, or an specialist in a field.
If you have a Japanese vocabulary of 8000 words, you already have a bigger vocabulary than 74.13% of the population (if you understand what that percentage represents, you already have a larger vocabulary than the majority of people).
I don't know where you got that idea from, but I took an online test for English (which is my native language) vocabulary, and found that I knew about 30000 words. And I wouldn't consider myself to be that unusual.
yep, i did. i found out that you go from $ to 0. And it's very hard to make the first .01 cent. But you will learn a lot, so take it as having fun for a year and learning more than you learned in Univ. and you will be ok.
Actually I wish our profession wasn't just 0 or big chance payout but had some in between too.
>Actually I wish our profession wasn't just 0 or big chance payout but had some in between too.
It's not. I mean, if you don't take on investors or debit, it's pretty easy to setup a sub-minimum wage business for yourself. I've set up more of those than I care to remember.
Now, getting yourself up to ramen profitable from that is a little more work, (I can live on $15/hr, but not on $5/hr) and getting yourself to opportunity cost profitable is a lot more work. But if you are bootstrapping, there is a whole continuum between zero and 'big payout'
I havent even taken up a job yet. But I envy Isc for the satisfaction he gets out of running Prgmr. Wow wondering how it feels to be like a hero running the most affordable vps services and getting all those thanks for supporting people at such low prices.
P.S: he also wrote a book on Xen which is in my ToRead list.
thank you for your kind words. Prgmr.com is, right now, somewhere between ramen profitable and opportunity cost profitable. My net worth, if my understanding of standard industry prices, is going up significantly faster than if I were to work a regular job, spend what I'm spending, and save the rest, but I'm still living on 1/4th to 1/3rd what I'd make as a SysAdmin elsewhere, so I feel like I'm on the right path, but I haven't arrived yet.
Probably learning a new language. Wanted to develop a JP site so after 2 years and lots of studying starting to get a handle on the lang, and having lots of fun doing it. Very rewarding so far.
Financially, probably China. Only problem is can't convert RMB -> USD so it's like monopoly money. Maybe one day can buy gold and send it over on a container vessel :)
Very interesting... I have a friend in china that produces steel beams for the comm. construction industry. I really have no idea about how to sell though so probably nothing I can do with it. Also, I think you need a import license from the govt. atleast for steel.
yea, I agree with remember the kanji by Heisig for kanji study and also lots of reading.
Anyone taking the JLPT this year ? I'm skipping jlpt3 this year and hoping for 2 in the future.
On a startup related note. This site http://www.japonin.com/ has a really nice interactive chat for teaching. Will really improve your speaking. Would be nice to see other languages taking off using a similar design.
Also seems the lots of new language related startups are doing quite well... lang-8, smartfm, and japanesepod101 to name a few.
There are a lot of really good resources popping up recently (to my chagrin ;) with a lot of good information to be had.
I do lament the lack of higher-level study materials though. Sites like Tae-Kim and studyJapanese, etc all seem to stop at passive form, with only a slight introduction to Keigo (about 3kyu or early 2kyu level)
I find very few sites that have enough materials to take their users past 1kyuu, which is one of the reasons why I started my site (and still need to get more content up there).
After taking 1kyuu, and starting to work at a Japanese company, I realized that 1kyuu is only the beginning. You really need a much higher level than that to fully participate in a Japanese work environment.
Which is why my next sites are set on the JTest (used to be the Jetro).
Although at Tae Kim's guide is CCL'd and there is copyright notice at the end of each of the posts... it seems a bit wrong to have them in separate posts like this. Why not just link to Tae Kim's guide outright, once?
Yup, it is my site, and yeah, I have always felt odd about the Tae Kim guides thing, but as they are CCL'd, I put them in there (of course with attributions!)
The main reasons they're there is:
a) they are an amazing source of information for Japanese students.
b) I'm currently in the process of creating testing and flashcard packs based around his methodology to supplement his site.
c) they filled up space while I started getting original content up. ;)
The articles section of my site were originally an "extra" feature, with the flashcards and testing information based on popular textbooks (without copyright infringing) was the main purpose of the site.
Essentially 'Here's a bunch of study materials based on the textbook you're currently using.'
Of course, as people sign up, and I get more feedback, that's been changing a lot. People are very interested in the testing features, but they also seem to want more articles than I originally anticipated. I'm currently in the process of releasing new articles, (like the Kanji one above), but you're right that having the Lesson articles in with the standard articles seems a bit strange. Perhaps I'll create a subcategory for textbook-based articles (like Tae Kim) and original articles.
Thanks for the advice!
I'm always looking for more feedback.
Thanks to all the opinions, advice (and complaints) from people, I've made the navigation for guests much easier, and also standardized the login and signup methods.
Next I need to decide if I'm going to allow comments for guests...
I'm doing the JLPT 2, but I average around 85% on the practice tests as of about a month ago, so I'm not worried about passing.
It'd be really nice to do the 1, but my scores on the practice tests were embarrassingly south of 50%, and I totally bombed the 1 last year, so I'm doing the 2 this year to at least have some sort of piece of paper that says I've got some Japanese ability.
For finding partners, you might also want to try http://language-exchanges.org/ -- it's not a for-pay site, and doesn't have experienced teachers, but I've found it to be a good way to connect up with people.
Lately just for fun I been working with unreal engine. You can do some really cool stuff quickly and customize in C++.
Now that VR is becoming in bigger and bigger might be marketable some day. That startup magicleap seems to be doing lot of stuff around this area.
Can pair unreal with houdini and do some python scripting / 3d math learning.