The concept is basically to import a text into LWT and attempt to read it to completion. Along the way, any words you don’t know can be tagged as unknown, looked up, and have a definition added. Words you tag are highlighted with different colors depending on how much trouble you decide you have with that word. This is an important feature as it tells your mind to focus on this word when you see it in another text. It reminds you that you’ve seen this word before and you should know it which causes you to think harder than you normally would to try to remember it. If you still can’t remember it, you simply mouse over the unknown word and you can see the definition you added for it. This “oh yeah” moment is usually enough to place is firmly in my “long-term-mid-termish” memory.

Once you tag all the words you don’t know, you simply go back to the top and click “all words” known for the remaining words and LWT learns that you known these words very well and won’t bother you with highlighting them for you any longer as never-before-seen words.

For further study, you can add words you’ve been having trouble with to a Spaced Repetition System like Anki for quick results or you can simply keep plowing through new texts in a tadoku-like fashion until you see them in some other context. I’m going to try experimenting with both styles and see what works best for me.

You can also add an audio file along with the text you are studying to work on your listening comprehension. I don’t really use this feature too often for Japanese as it limits the materials you can use to only things you find audio with a transcribed text. However, if you do happen to come across a great text with an audio clip available, it’s very useful.

Study Routine

1. Read a manga chapter. Take notes on new words or add them to your SRS program.

2. Watch the corresponding episode of the anime. (RAW of course)

• This allows you to better follow the story and listen for the vocab you learned from reading the same story.

3. Read a very short news article while taking notes on new words.

4. Watch any random Japanese youtube videos you happen to be subscribed to or you see in the side recommended videos bar.

5. Review notes or SRS cards only when you’re in the mood. This ensures you spend most of your study time pushing forward and staying motivated while at the same time getting some review in as well. It’s a compromise.

You can limit your note taking or SRS card making to only 5 words per chapter or news article. If you enjoy it or find something interesting, do more.

I think this plan can take you to the next level in your language studies if you stick to it regularly. The biggest chunk is manga, anime, and youtube videos to keep everything light and fun. The small news chunk helps slowly incorporate that part of the Japanese language into your understanding. We do this  because we’re working from the premise that if the average native Japanese person can understand the word, phrase, or material, then we need to be able to do so as well.

The strongest part of this plan is the combination of the manga and anime. When the anime isn’t in filler mode, it sticks very closely to the corresponding manga chapter(s). Use this to your advantage.

Let me preface this to say that I think using an SRS is one of the most efficient tools around for acquiring a language. If you’re new to Japanese or whatever foreign language you’re learning and you’re enjoying your progress with SRS, keep using it. It’s helped get me to the point I’m at now. I’ve used it almost every day for over 2 years and I’m finally ready to let it go. Below is basically what I’ve been doing for the past few weeks and I’ve noticed good vocabulary acquisition and stress-free learning since I don’t have that looming SRS number over my shoulder.

I’m also not claiming this to be a novel way of learning a language. It’s just input and some note taking but it’s how I’ve been doing it lately and I want to have a record of it.

Immersion

This is obvious to people in the community but some still don’t use it. Do something, anything, in Japanese. Lately, in addition to just reading random stuff I find online, I’ve been watching a ton of niconico douga videos.

One type of video that I’ve had a lot of success with is 実況プレイ vids. These are videos of people playing video games and with them narrating and joking around while playing. Just search for 実況　and the video game you want to see or check out this link for a niconico community which has a lot of play lists to various games they’ve done or are currently doing videos for. You need a nico account to watch videos there so just google how to make one if you can’t read Japanese well enough to figure it out yet.

Obviously, use whatever type of video, music, books, etc that you are interested in.

Combine listening, reading, writing, and a  little bit of speaking

• You’re listening to the narrators
• You’re reading the game text and comments
• You’re writing in your notebook
• You can shadow what the narrators are saying

The memory notebook

An oldschool, but still effective method of learning, is making a notebook in order to reflect on what you’ve learned. One of the main reasons I’m enjoying using this method of memorization is that related material tends to be clumped in meaningful ways.

There are so many jokes that you see in comments, things that the people talking say that you want to remember,inside jokes, etc that are so much fun to have a record of. Although I don’t really want to add them to my SRS anymore, I still want too keep a record of my favorite parts of my journey of learning the Japanese language. That’s  why I’ve started compiling this notebook of stuff even though all the stuff I’ve written since 2009 would probably fill up 10 notebooks… I haven’t really kept good records of all that.

A lot of the stuff I’d written before was repetition of kanji when I was in the Heisig phase of learning. Those notebooks also had doodles and notes from other subjects in them and I’ve thrown some of them away as I thought it was pointless to keep such scattered notes. However, now I’m starting to save my notes because I’m in the phase of going through basic fluency and beyond and I want to have a record of this.

How to create meaningful notes for learning Japanese

Use your notebook to group things in meaningful ways. The picture to the right is a sample page I wrote up from memory to demonstrate different styles of note taking. The colored boxes are around the different styles.
Red = Words containing other words. Here I used as an example, 水溜り　and 溜まる　Puddle and the verb for collect or accumulate. So puddle is literally “water accumulation.” Having these two right next to each other helps reenforce that connection in my mind so I learn both words much quicker.

Blue = Similar looking kanji. I like to compare similar looking kanji right next to each other as well. This helps me recognize how obvious the differences really are that you might not notice when just quickly reading over a paragraph.

Green = Synonyms or words with an almost identical meaning. This is a quick way to get monolingual meanings down in your notes. We want to make it as easy as possible.

Orange = Short monolingual definitions. Here we have the word オウム　which means parrot. For the definition I simply wrote 鳥の一種　which means “A type of bird.”  Since I created the notes, that’s all I need to recall the meaning.

Yellow = Interesting quotes or sentences you find. This one is from a recent Gaki no Tsukai special. It basically says “If your life has 10 hearts (like video game hearts or health) how many hearts would be left?”

The unboxed ones are just random words or really short snippets in the case of 傷んだ碁盤

Furigana modification: The notebook picture shows the furigana written directly below the kanji. The other day I decided to write the kana version of the words at the bottom of the page sort of like a word bank. This way you can test yourself reading the kanji without having the kana directly in your vision. If you forget, the answer is still conveniently found on the bottom of the page.

March was a slow month for me. I had to have surgery and I had been feeling bad for a long while before that so I haven’t added many new cards. I focused on maintaining what I had instead of learning a lot of new stuff. I just didn’t have the energy. Hopefully now that I feel better, I’ll be able to resume my 10 new cards a day pace starting in April.

Tadoku is here again. My goal is to beat my last score of  838 pages of Japanese read in one month. I think this is the best way to set a reading goal because it forces you to move forward and become faster and faster each time. Moving backwards or standing still should only happen when you reach the place you are with your native level language(s). Then it only becomes a balancing act between other forms of media/entertainment.

Where am I at so far? I’ll rate the 4 core skills of language with points 1 though 10. 1 would be a complete novice level and 10 would be native level fluency in that skill.

Reading: 7.5/10

Reading is definitely my strongest skill. This comes from the fact that I’m reading a ton of stuff online and doing SRS reviews.  I still have some work to go developing my vocabulary in certain areas. For instance, Japanese stories with lots of flowery language can sometimes be a challenge. It’s usually the paragraphs setting the mood and scene that are the most difficult. Just as in English literature, good authors like to show their deep vocabularies while painting a mental image of what’s going on in the book.

Listening: 7/10

Listening is my number one priority right now. I think it’s the most important skill for a language learner. I can take my time with reading and even look stuff up at my leisure. With listening however, it’s much more of a pain to pause what you’re watching and look up the words. If you’re talking with a person, they’d get annoyed pretty quickly if you couldn’t understand or asked them what every other word meant.

I also think listening is the most important skill because once I can pick out a word from audio, I pretty much know the word forever.

Speaking: 7/10

I’ve gotten a lot of practice speaking from always reading my SRS reviews aloud with as close to a native-like accent as possible. I need to get into more live conversations to improve my speed of recalling words on-the-fly.

Writing: 5/10

Writing is my weakest skill and it’s also the one I care least about. My main goals are passive understanding of the language and a bit of speaking. The only writing I do is on twitter as you only need short snippets and can bounce off of other speakers. I used to try to write long paragraphs but it was boring.

将来の目的　Future goals

My goals for this year include substantially deepening my vocabulary and getting my listening and reading comprehension up to 8.5/10.  I think this is definitely an achievable goal as I already have a broad base in the language to build on.

Fluency?

This will sound really vague but at the current moment, I would rate myself as passively fluent. I can watch and enjoy most television shows and movies in Japanese. I can enjoy reading most articles online (except politics/economics/specialist subjects I don’t really follow) and follow conversations on twitter fairly fluidly. There is a ton of room for improvement and it might take me a few years before pushing all of my skills into the 9.5/10 and up level which is my overall goal.

I need to practice output to transfer more of my latent vocabulary into active vocabulary and of course to remove some mistakes.   I’m in no real rush as I’ve made the language a part of my daily life and I’m enjoying the process immensely.

This month I finally passed the halfway point in the 10,000 sentence project. It’s a good feeling to make such steady progress. I know some get tired of using an SRS system, but it really helps me from slipping backwards when I have to concentrate on school papers, tests, etc and don’t have as much time for Japanese. If I just do a few dozen reps, I keep my level of skill at least at a stand still.

Speaking of SRS, I’m finally completely on the Anki spaced repetition system. Thanks to Hadashi for helping me make the switch over from Surusu. Surusu is a great program, but it’s just not fast enough for me as it’s web-based.

The tadoku reading contest just ended. I finished in 22nd place out of 98 people with 838 total pages of Japanese read. Except for the first couple days of the contest, I just read normally and documented the things I read when I thought about it. This is the same thing I did last tadoku contest and my score then was 285 pages read. I think this signifies how much easier it is to read and to get through large amounts of text casually.

I also wanted to mention Kanjiguy’s new blog called Informal Language. He’s taking a bit of a different approach than me as he’s set the SRS adrift completely. It’s cool to see other language learners’ progress using different techniques as it lifts the overall knowledge of how we acquire language.

Total Repcount: 27789

Retention: 92.1%

Well, the year is finally at an end and thankfully I feel my Japanese getting stronger and stronger each month. My reading speed is increasing, my vocabulary is getting more extensive, and my listening skills are growing steadily as well since I implemented the media loop method.

I’ve been relying a lot more on immersion thanks to the media loop. I’m absorbing a lot of vocabulary from hearing the same contest multiple times and it’s a lot more fun too. I’m still keeping a core of SRS in my learning as it’s great to prevent regression in skill during times when immersion isn’t perfect due to school or some other factor.

I’m participating in the tadoku contest throughout the month of January 2011 to get in a ton of reading. I’m hoping to stay in the top 10 during this contest. Last contest I didn’t do as well as I liked but I think I’ve improved enough to put in a much better showing. I’ve also lined up a lot of new reading material in the form of blogs from native Japanese speakers. Speaking of which…

Also, please check out my post over at Amassing Words entitled Using blogs to skyrocket your foreign language ability . I think it will help you out if you sometimes have trouble expressing yourself fully in your new language.

I opened a new language blog called  Amassing Words.
The new blog will be for language discussion in general and I’m keeping this blog here just for Japanese language progress and techniques.

If anyone who follows this site wants to link to my new one, it would be much appreciated. The new blog will span several language topics from foreign language acquisition, to language pet peeves, to writing, etc…

I think polyglots-in-training will enjoy it.

For a while now, my listening comprehension has been lower than I would have liked in Japanese, so I decided to implement a better immersion plan.

★ Majority of listening comes from TV or movies.

I have a loop of Japanese television and movies always playing in the background now. I feel this is much better for listening comprehension than music or podcasts because you get more context from the video. The trick is to make sure you’ve watched it at least once before you put it in your loop of replayed content. This way your brain will recognize the content’s audio track and will be able to match it up with that previously seen visual context.

★Watch the content the first time with Japanese subs.

This one is a great tool to use if, like me, your reading comprehension is vastly superior to your listening comprehension. I only watch it the first time with Japanese subs. After that, I just rely on my memory to give context to the sound. I wouldn’t be watching the show again anyway as it’s just playing in the background in the loop I talked about earlier.

Make sure you don’t misunderstand and use English subs. Use Japanese subtitles. It might be better to say Japanese closed-captioning.

This way your listening is being built up like a snowball. The core content is being packed in repeatedly while every so often added loose, fresh snow on top to make it bigger (like an SRS system that’s always on.) Also, be sure to start your loop with a good amount of content to start with. I started my loop with about 30 media files that varied from 22 minutes to 3 hours each. If you just start with 2 things looping over and over, it could get boring very fast.

I’ve made some decent progress this month on a skill I have been lacking in… listening comprehension. I’ll keep this post short since I’ll be doing a follow up post detailing my method for improving listening comprehension. This will be especially useful for you if your reading skills are way better than listening.

One resource I think is great for intermediate to advanced language learners is quiz-style gameshows. They almost always have the question written on the screen and it’s a great language and cultural exercise to see if you can answer the questions. Also, since it’s in your language of study, you can rewatch the same show over and over until you know all the answers and probably pick up on something new each time. For japanese learners, just type in クイズ in google video or youtube and you’ll find a ton of content.