Cafetalk Shines Again

I meet with a Japanese tutor once a week via Skype, and this is all arranged (and paid for) through Cafetalk.  I have written before how I really got started on Cafetalk.  They were giving five free lessons to people who were willing to critique the lessons and write about it.  Given that I write a blog about learning Japanese, that made me a good candidate.

After my free lessons were over, I was so impressed with Cafetalk (and my tutor Makisan) that started purchasing the lessons.

The way Cafetalk works is that you buy points and then use the points to pay for lessons.

A few days ago, and for the first time, there was a glitch.  I purchased some points, the money was spent, but the purchased points didn’t show up in my point total on the website.  I waited a couple of days in to see it it would fix itself, but that didn’t happen.

Cafetalk has an online chat box.  I typed in a message and had a response with just a couple of minutes asking for more details.  I explained the problem, the person I was chatting with took a few minutes to check it out and then apologized and said it would be fixed and they would notify me by email.  I thanked them for the help and got another apology for the inconvenience.

Good customer service is priceless, and Cafetalk’s customer service is excellent.  I have been using it for nearly a year now, I think, and this is the first glitch I’ve ever encountered, and they acknowledged the mistake right away, ap0logized for it and are fixing it.

Very nice.

In short, Cafetalk is great.

And now, I have to get back to studying those passive verbs.

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Slow Day

It has been a slow day today, largely due to the many hours of sleep that I didn’t get last night.  Still, I did manage to tackle some homework this morning.

This chapter is all about the magic word なりました which you can use to describe a change of state, real or prospective.

That is, you can use it in the sense of “I sure can speak Japanese better now than I did before,” but you can also use it in the sense of, “If you study hard, you can learn to speak Japanese.”  In the first case, the change of state is something that has happened, but, in the second case, it has not happened, but it is a goal that you can reach.

That seems fairly straightforward…but it seems to be getting more and more complicated as I go.

One of the homework exercises is to look at pictures (someone talking, someone walking, someone riding a bike, etc) and to state at what age you learned how to do those things.  That’s a change of state – going from a lack of ability to having the ability, so…なりました。

Then I some negatives.  You went to Japanese.  What were some things you were unable to do while you were there.  Yeah…that isn’t really a change of state, is it?  But, still, なりました.

Well, if I wanted it to make sense, I wouldn’t be studying Japanese…even though Makisan, my Cafetalk tutor, insists that Japanese is かんたん.  And, let’s be honest, sometimes it is.

This just doesn’t happen to be one of those times.

Still, it’s fun.  Mind you, part of the lack of かんたんness (yes, I know, I know…) just might be connected to my lack of sleep.

If I wasn’t so tired, I would try to figure it out.

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Direct Object? No Object? Objections?

I am still looking for language exchange partners.  I went to a website and sent our eight or ten invitations.  So far I have gotten three responses.  The first one said:  Thank you for your message.

Okay.  Not helpful, but polite, I guess.

The second one was from a guy who was willing to at least exchange some emails.  Good, as far as it goes.  Hopefully we can meet up on Skype for some actual conversation, though.

The third was from a guy who sent me a long and completely accurate message in English.  This is actually disappointing to me.  I would rather talk with someone whose English is somewhat limited.  This gentleman doesn’t sound like he needs the slightest bit of help with English.

(Now, it could be that he writes English well but doesn’t speak it well, I suppose.  Such things have been known to happen.)

Now, in contradiction of what I just wrote, I also sent invitations to two people who are Japanese but are now living in the U.S.  Surely they don’t need a lot of help from some random guy on Skype since they can practice English all the livelong day.  I contacted them, though, just for the convenience of chatting with someone who is in my timezone.

Time will tell how it all works out.

This week it is Chapter 29 of みんなの日本語, which is mostly about transitive and intransitive verb forms and, also, some new uses for ていますand a few other little details.

The transitive vs intransitive things is complicated – a transitive verb requires a direct object (I opened the door) while an intransitive verb does not take a direct object (The door opened).

Wait…those are written exactly the same…

Well, yeah, in English.  Not so much in Japanese, but the changes are small:  開けます vs  開きます.  ke become ki.  Easy to see when written, perhaps less easy to hear, and there are a few other change patterns, depending on the verbs.

It sounds like something that it’s easy to get confused with, don’t you think?

Whew!

Well, my Cafetalk lesson isn’t until Saturday, so I’ve got time.

If you’ve made it all the way to the bottom of this post, perhaps you’d be willing to suffer just a bit more and answer a question.  If you are studying Japanese, what’s the most confusing thing about it to you so far>

Just curious.

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Cafetalk Update

I have made no secret of the fact (it would be kind of counterproductive to blog about something and then makes secrets of the facts, wouldn’t it?) that one of the best tools I have ever used for language learning is Cafetalk.

I don’t suppose that every tutor on Cafetalk is equally good, and I don’t suppose that every tutor is perfect for every student, so I imagine that you have to hunt around a bit.

If you check out the main page, you will see that they are giving people a chance to try out Japanese lessons for free.  (ただ – our favorite word).  If you’ve been thinking about trying it out, now is a great time.

Just to be clear, I don’t get anything from Cafetalk for mentioning it here on the blog.  I pay for my lessons just like anybody else, and I don’t earn anything from them for sending traffic their way.  It’s just that I have learned a ton from my Cafetalk lessons, and I figure you can to.  It took some of the frustration out of learning Japanese, because I have someone to go to with questions, to practice speaking with, and so on.

I got some free Cafetalk lessons which I blogged about, and I learned so much from them that I decided to continue with lessons even after they weren’t free anymore.

Speaking of lessons, my homework isn’t going to do itself, so I’d better get back to it.

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And Now…

Do you know what’s easy? Falling behind in your studies. I’m thinking about this because tomorrow is my Cafetalk lesson with Makisan, and my homework is sitting in front of me undone. (私の宿題が終わっていません。）This is not a tragedy. My wife is on night shift this month, so I’ll sit around and do my homework this evening, and I have studied the vocabulary and looked over the homework to make sure that I understand it, but it really ought to be done already. (On the plus side, I was ready with the sentence私の宿題が終わっていません which uses the grammatical form that is the topic of both the current and the previous chapter, so I guess that shows something good, right?)

I think that this is why it is so hard to learn a language on your own. If you have a scheduled class (even if it is only once a week) and tasks that you are expected to accomplish in preparation for that class, it provides a little outside motivation to keep you on track.

Do I wish that Cafetalk was free? Well, yeah. But, is Cafetalk worth the money? Definitely. For me, the simple proof is that I’m learning.

I have been looking for reading practice, but it’s really hard to find anything, so I have decided to bite the bullet and finally tackle Yotsubato!

Here’s a sample frame:

Yeah, I can’t read that.  If you can, I envy you, but I’ll get there.  I have the feeling that it is a little slangy in places, and I can see that it makes use of the informal verb tenses, which I haven’t actually learned yet, but I guess I”m about to get a crash course.

The feature of Yotsubato! (yes, the ! is actually part of the name) that some people like and some people hate is the furigana.  (Little hiragana that give you the reading of the Kanji).  Some people feel like they act like a crutch and slow down your learning.  Other people feel like they help stop your frustration level from rising so high that the top of your head explodes.

My personal feeling is that I am going to attempt to read Yotsubato! and that the furigana will be helpful to me at this stage of my learning.

Now, in fact, looking at the above panel, I can actually make sense our of it.  I am not getting every single word, but I think that I am getting the gist of it.  We’ll see.  I sent Makisan the first few pages and told her that I would like to work on it (continuing with みんなの日本語, of course – a structured introduction to grammar is too valuable a thing to let it go) and she was agreeable, so that’s what we’re going to do, and that starts tomorrow.

I chose Yotsubato! (are you tired of the ! yet?) because, aside from having furigana, it is basically a slice of every day life, so I think that the Japanese will be common phrases rather than discussions about how the hyperdrive is malfunctioning so the warp field can’t be generated and the space pirates are going to capture our heroes with a tractor beam, which is all fine and dandy (though not for our heroes, I suppose) but not terribly useful in day to day conversation.

Time to take a deep breath and dive in.

Wish me luck!

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Another Cafetalk Lesson

What a great lesson today on Cafetalk!  We’re going through the lyrics of the song Tsunami by Southern All Stars and working on Chapter 12 of みんなの日本語 which is all about those lovely adjectives.

Here’s on of those scheduling things, though.  Usually I do my lesson in the morning before work, but, today, I had to go into work early and do some things before breakfast.  Then I could take a break and have my lesson.  There are plenty of laptops around here, but none of them have cameras.  Usually I use my wife’s laptop, but, since she doesn’t have to go into work until later today, I couldn’t take that with me, so I found myself Skyping on a tablet.  Actually, it worked really well.  It isn’t so great for seeing typed messages while you chat, but you can’t have everything.  At least I got my lesson in!

Now it’s time to move on to Chapter 13, and the sentences and grammatical structures are getting more complicated.  One of the example sentences translates as “Because I have stomach ache, I don’t want to eat anything.”  Excellent!  (Well, not that he has a stomach ache, but the sentence structure, I mean.)

It was funny this morning.  Someone overheard me talking about learning Japanese and asked if I knew how to day “Good morning.”  Yes.  Yes, I do.  It was actually a little boost to think that I can do, in my own halting fashion, quite a bit more than that.

If you focus too much on what you don’t know, it gets depressing, so focus instead on what you do know.  See how much you’ve learned?  Now just keep going and the rest of it will come, too.

I told a friend today, “I’m proving you wrong.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“You told me that Japanese was impossible to learn, and I’m learning it.”

Presented with incontrovertible proof of just how wrong he was, he broke down and admitted that Japanese wasn’t as difficult as he had thought.

No, he did not.

Instead, he said, “Well, learning comes easy to you.”

*sigh*

Learning doesn’t come any easier to me than it does to you.  It’s that I am willing to put in the time every day, that’s all.

Now you do it.

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Cafetalk and Music

今朝私は午前５：４５におきました。７：００に日本語のレッスンありました、みんなの日本語の十課とTsunamiの歌詞を勉強しました。レッスンのあとで仕事へ行きました。雨が降っていました。今日とても忙しいです。

I had to get up way too early this morning. At 7:00am, I had my Japanese lesson through Cafetalk, which was, as always, really good. We worked on the lyrics to the song Tsunami, which is a really sad song, by the way, and then I asked some questions about Chapter 10.

One of the big features of Chapter 10 is above, below, in front of, in back of, to the right of, to the left of, inside of, outside of, near and between. That’s a lot of words, but the grammatical structure is the same for each of them, and it is the reverse of English. Instead of “on top of the TV” it is テレビの上に (the TV’s top on, more or less).

I was stumped by one exercise, though.  There was a picture of a set of shelves, with each shelf containing a different item.  In the example, you were asked where the stapler was.  The answer was:  したから ２だんめです.

I have to honest with you, this one stumped me totally.  した is the word for indication something is below something else…てーブルのした – underneath the table.  から I’m used to seeing as “from” as in, I have to work from 9 until 5 (９じから ５じまで).

Now, knowing that much, it should have obvious to me that したから means “from the bottom”, but it wasn’t.  I didn’t get it at all.  だんめ is a counter used for shelves.  したから ２だんめです therefore means that it is one the second shelf from the bottom.  If I changed it to うえから ２だんめです, that should be the second shelf from the top.

It actually makes perfect sense, but I had to have it explained to me.

Next week we will continue with the lyrics to Tsunami and it will be Chapter 11, but, as I write this, Christmas and New Year’s are coming up, and the first week of January is always exceptionally busy at work, so it will be a challenge to really get my studying in. This is where the motivation factor has to kick in.

I will get my studying in every day, even during the next couple of weeks.

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