Nihongo Journey

Today marks 2 years of daily Japanese study. ＼(o ｖ o)／

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.

Total sentence card count: 5105

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.

Cardcount: 4868

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.

Hey everyone,

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.