small diary / thought dump about my language learning process
15 JAN 2024 .gif)
[CH/JP] my red flag is reading kanji and hanzi in the first language that comes to my mind and then crying before Japanese exercises class because I don’t have a sense of reality anymore
[CH/JP] new characters pictures :-B
24 SEPT 2023 [JP] in my み era :P :O >.<"
23 SEPT 2023 [JP] did my written exam on the 8th. We weren’t many. I’m satisfied with pretty much everything but the mini essay. The prompt was “if I were two people” and I spent 90% of the time trying to think of an even remotely sensate answer. The grade wasn’t super great but oh well. When I got out of the classroom I checked my hinge profile and my professor’s son sent me a like. Wow. Then I did my oral exam on the 21st and it went surprisingly amazing. My favourite part, and my professor’s least favourite part, was when I pointed at the temples in a picture of Kyoto and said 古いビル. After the oral exam I had to go to my professor's office because he told me the way I write み is really ugly :/
[CH] lowering the bar to an A1 level here, but I bought a cute vintage glass pen and I really like how I wrote 生
20 AUG 2023 [JP] jesus
3 JUNE 2023 [CH] wrote some hanzi. The bigger picture doesn’t mean anything, they’re just snippets of a text. Rip 山 radical, you should have been one of the easiest ones to write
2 JUNE 2023 [JP] I like this wiggle I made. Don't mind the dot/点 yeeting itself out of the kanji
28 MAY 2023 [JP] showing my weird kanji mistakes to my native professor like tea leaves to a diviner
[JP] 寮 looks like a baby shogun doll omg :)
27 MAY 2023 [CH] Chinese motivational memes are my life
25 MAY 2023 [CH] wheeeeeeeeeeee
女大十一变女大十一变女大十一变女大十一变女大十一变女大十一变女大十一变大女变一十大女变一十大女变一十大女变一十大女变一十大女变一十
20 MAY 2023 [KR] took Korean for a semester to avoid history. I can now say at least something in the language of every single traditionally spaghetti friendly country in the world
17 DEC 2022 [CH] yesterday I did my Chinese II exam. Well half of it. If you want, you can do half of the whole exam in December instead of all of it in May or the summer dates. We weren’t many. In general terms, I did amazing. I understood everything immediately. For my professor I probably did decent. Which is fair enough, we’re in uni. What I mean by that is that even if you understand a sentence, even a very simple one, like 我肚子很难受, there is only one actually correct way to translate it. You could say “my stomach really hurts” but that’s not quite it because they didn’t use the verb “to hurt”. The literal translation would be “my stomach unbearably painful” and you have to find a way to make that into something that makes sense in your language without using other words, or at least not other specific words like a specific verb, like “to hurt”. At least this is what our professor wants from us.
.. and it makes me wonder if that’s the right approach to translation? Which is better, staying true to the words the speaker used or to the meaning you think they wanted to convey?
[JP] had a nightmare about the test I’ll have in January ^__^ it begins ^0^
[EN] new word: tinsel
9 DEC 2022 [CH] rage wrote all the charachters I still don't remember from HSK1/2. This was the cutest line. Yes I still don't know how to write "dumpling", I always forget the radical and write 交子 (｡•́︿•̀｡)
24 NOV 2022 [JP] they don’t know I write furigana on katakana words
21 NOV 2022 [JP] わたし
12 NOV 2022 [CH] someone wrote this by hand and posted it on 小红书 and I copied it, so there are a couple of characters I don't know and I have no idea if I wrote them correctly or not. Chinese is so fuzzy. You don't know a character and you're like yes well the upper left part means rice, moving on
30 OCT 2022 [CH] pikachu having a bad day
[JP] suddenly realised I can pronounce what's written on my Muji products. I looked at the candle I have on my desk since years and I was like oh wait. Friend texted me and said “oh I tried looking for Muji pens at Carrefour but they don’t sell them”. I wish Carrefour was that civilized
28 OCT 2022 [JP] yesterday morning I wrote these during our 8.30am lesson, who would have thought I was gonna be able to do civil things at such an early hour of the day
also on another day I wrote these while looking at the blackboard. They look somewhat cute, in a way...........
[edit] just noticed the わ. I'm so dumb
23 OCT 2022 [JP] I wasted like 5 minutes on the translation of a letter because it said "I work one day per year" and I kept rereading it because it sounded absurd, then I just left it there and went on and realised the person who was supposed to be writing the letter was santa :-/ I didn't expect this from a university textbook
22 OCT 2022 [CH] I tried to write a passage from Une Vie by 莫泊桑 aka Guy de Maupassant, I found it on 小红书. I wrote it four times: 1. as quickly as possible 2. my standard calligraphy (quick) 3. exam calligraphy (quick but trying to make it somewhat cute) and 4. focusing on each character.
I think my standard calligraphy looks better because it conceals all the un-harmonic errors I did in the other two. My native professor told us every character has its centre and all the strokes somehow relate to it. Yeah not mines.
Anyway, I think the only actually wrong character is in the second picture (standard calligraphy), the chatacter before the last one on the first row, 么 (那么好). I can’t imagine a native writing it like that, because that shape is extremely similar to 纟which is the radical of “silk”. But I assume it’s comprehensible as 那么好 is such a common construct (“so beautiful/good”).
16 OCT 2022 [JP] I’m practicing with a pen with a thicker tip. I think I prefer the thinner one, but this is ok too.
8 OCT 2022 [CH/JP] got these in the mail! I was inspired by a video on 小红书. My initial idea was writing Chinese characters with them, but I need to practice to get there. So far I only like 1 hiragana of the gazillion Japanese words I wrote lol :-B
4 OCT 2022 [JP] are u really studying Japanese if you don’t leave three meters of space between each grammatical element in a sentence
[JP again] also, last week we had our first lesson of the semester. The professor seemed more chaotic than usual, I think he’s happy to be in a classroom again :’) his lesson, however, felt like someone was reading a grammar book written by Joyce on hallucinogens. I can’t believe someone older than 5 can be constantly hyper for 1h30. My notes make sense, for the most part, anyway. No idea how, but they do
30 SEPT 2022 [CH] I will never write such a perfect 哥哥 in my whole life ever again. I peaked and it's all downhill from here. I can't believe it happened on a random piece of paper while exercising and not on an exam :(
+ cute 腿
9 SEPT 2022 [JP/CH] best 学 of my whole career + other somewhat good kanji
[JP] on my Japanese textbook there’s literally this in the vocab section: あ = ah (you say this when you realise something). I'm so glad they're teaching us basic human interaction too ^_^
29 AGO 2022 [JP] I don’t know why but this sentence took the last braincell I had and ran away with it - 私の友達はティラミスファンです
27 AGO 2022 [JP] I like my handriwting here, I think
the せ is hard. I can't stop writing it as the Chinese 也 which I also write in a very crappy way, so it's like an error inside of an error. Whatever
23 AGO 2022 [JP]
12 APR 2022 [ALL] Benjamin Affleck, Answered 6 years ago -
[…]However This isn't the best way to go about learning a language. You should always go with your gut on which culture, people, and places you are most interested in
[CH] a week ago I had lunch with my Chinese teacher. It was so amazing and I actually spoke in Chinese for the whole time. I had no idea I could do that. Like yeah, I can talk to a professor or express what's on my mind, but free conversation is so much more confusing. woah
[JP] I love my Japanese professor more than I love the language itself. good man
3 FEB 2022 [ALL] Jenny311
Location: London SW1P 2QB
Posted January 3, 2008 at 04:29 PM
Translation should not be done word by word, but meaning bu meaning.
user Jenny311 truly spitting words of wisdom
2 JAN 2022 [CH] turns out 华人 is written like that and not like 花人, and that Chinese people don't consider themselves as "flower people" :-(
28 DEC 2021
[CH] yesterday I started the free Chinese culture course made by a Chinese uni I mentioned earlier on this log. I can’t believe a university is willing to give out knowledge for free, but here we are. We're gonna have a 1h lesson every day for the next two weeks. This is my first time joining an international language learning class, there are so many different accents! I think I’ve only heard native Chinese and Chinese spoken with my country’s accent before this, it's so interesting. Also, there’s a dude whose name is literally “PhD [name]”, absolute king.
24 NOV 2021
[CH] today I learnt these two very cool words: 亟 - urgent and 疗 - treat/cure/therapy. 疗 is especially cool because it's composed by the illness radical and the character 了 which is the "particle of completed action"! :^))
9 NOV 2021
[CH] today we had to make a presentation about 一次精彩的旅行, a wonderful trip. I was extremely pessimist about the whole thing, as I said this new course is extremely hard for me, but I somehow did it in a kind of decent way? I think. And the best part is that I actually understood my teacher’s questions, for once, lol. So I’m very happy, but I still think I need a teacher/person to make conversation with.
I also applied to an online Chinese culture course made by a Chinese university! It was free!
[JP] OK, this isn't really about my language learning progress, but today I texted a guy from my uni on whatsapp; I never met him irl (just through a whatsapp group) and I asked him if he knew the Japanese professor (he doesn't study Japanese) and he said he never saw him irl but saw a lot of memes of him going around whatsapp LMAO. What a king
24 OCT 2021
[JP] I wrote this during a hiragana lesson. I thought it sounded like a nice name for a small cat. If I google it, a lot of pictures of a frail looking brown tent show up. I have no idea why
22 OCT 2021
[CH] honestly this new Chinese course (this semester’s level is HSK5) is kinda taking a toll on my life expectancy lmao. I’ve never struggled so much with Chinese, ever. But the weird thing is that I don’t think I’ve ever loved it this much? Haha lol. I mean, the more I do, the more I love it and the more I feel disgusted by the amount of things I don’t know and don’t understand
♡( •ॢ◡-ॢ)✧˖° ♡ 
[JP] my Japanese professor is the most chaotic good individual I've ever met in my entire life and I'm kind of addicted to his energy
20 OCT 2021
[CH] "时暧暧其将罢兮，结幽兰而延伫" - verse from 離騷 by 屈原
