火曜日, 5月 08, 2007

Building a Japanese Environment

Over on Learning Rocks, my "professional" blog, I have been following the "personal learning environment" thread that has been going around blogs on the same subject.

There have been a few points of view, but the settled opinion of a PLE is the space you build yourself, online in the most part, to help you learn. With Learning Rocks, extensive use of Google reader on elearning blogs, joining in on Wikis and various other bits I do every day constitute my "PLE" with regards to elearning.

However, with Japanese it is proving more difficult. What I'm keen to try to do is find a community of other learners who blog about their experience of struggling with the language. This I seem unable to do. Tony's blog is a perfect example, for although he alludes to his learning and has blogged about it explicitly, it is a small part of his oeuvre. Tae Kim, whose Guide is one of my favourite learner resources, is an intermittent writer and at a very high level anyway.

I could rejoin the forums at JPod101, but I never found them as useful - they are not a place for reflective learning; newbie questions and boasting are the norm.

So, if you know of any blogs that add to the mix and discuss the pleasures of learning Japanese, please let me know and help me build my J-PLE.

2 件のコメント:

Tony さんのコメント...

Wow... things dont change do they!!

You still baffle me with your English, let alone Japanese!!!

What's 'oeuvre' mean buddy???

Glad your finding my bloggin' interesting though.. one thought I had recently - Language is learned at a VERY early age where your brain is soaking up everything. When we get to the early 30's, we have to activate the brain to learn. If we can somehow acknowledge this fact and turn off the 'logical' barriers we have put in place, anything we want to learn should sink in much easier.'.

Its kinda deep, but I'm saying don't 'sit down to study', take Japanese EVERYWHERE with you (manga, MP3's, newspapers (haha!) etc etc).. in any form that it can be in and don't 'study' it... enjoy it and accept it as part of your daily relaxation.

With that in mind, ANYTHING that is new should sink in, rather than be FORCED in.

Profound ne!

Dan さんのコメント...

It means "egg".

You're right though. Kids learn languages very quickly at a young age because they don't actually do anything else; games, TV, play, friends, dinnertime - it's all about learning the language to fit the situation. They have the fully immersive environment that you are suggesting. As adults, even when presented with that opportunity, such as when I was in Japan, we tend to avoid it simply because it is hard.

For my part, I know I am very poor at absorbing information purely from auditory senses - I learn Japanese very much better if I sit down to learn - hence my desire to get a Japanese PLE set up. For this reason, the months of listening to JPod101 had little effect unfortunately.