Nihongo Journey

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.

Cardcount: 4652
Total Repcount: 26378
Retention: 92%

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.

Cardcount: 4419
Total Repcount: 24723
Retention: 92.1%

Up to 4419 Spaced Repetition System sentences now. Not quite 300 more this month because I spent a week working on some stuff for school but the progress is still steady. I feel like I’ll be able to increase my pace a little bit as far as adding goes. This is because I’ve decided to stop adding cards where I have to manually type everything out. I’ll only be using copy and pastable material for the new cards and just keep reading as something to do for fun on the site to increase exposure to the language.

I’ve also started using a new kind of SRS card called “cloze deletion.”  It’s basically the classic fill in the blank model but for SRS cards. For instanced you can leave out a particle and have to guess it from context. An example card might be 弱い_________お前だ！ and you have to guess the proper particle のは for this example. You can also make multiple cards from the same context and blank or “cloze” out a different part of it each time. This way you read the same material multiple times as well as have to actually produce some information rather than everything just being passive understanding. I think this small amount of production added to the deck will help cement grammar ideas and get you ready for speaking/writing in real life situations.

I’ve also taken to AJATT’s new idea of Critical Frequency. The basic idea is to keep in contact with your new language in small increments throughout the day if you have other things to do in your native language. For instance, if you’ve got a ton of school work to do, take 2 minutes out of each hour to watch a youtube video in your new language, take 2 minutes to do some flash cards, 2 minutes to do…etc. You get the idea.

Cardcount: 4147
Repcount: 23132
Retention: 92.2%

Well, I finally passed the 4000 sentence mark this month, so I’m 41.47% through the 10,000 sentence project now. I’m definitely not going to quit when I reach the 10,000 sentence mark, though. I’ll just keep reading and watching things as usual but the word additions will become less and less as I go through this process. That is to be expected since I’ll find fewer and fewer words and phrases I’m not familiar with as I go along.

Extensive reading: 多読　(tadoku)

I’ve been using extensive reading as my primary study tool lately. It’s the perfect way to explore new words and review your known words in new and fun ways. So far, I’ve finished the current 9 volumes of よつばと(yotsubato) series. Also, at the 4000 sentence mark, I can read manga such as ドラえもん (doraemon) fairly easily. Sometimes I can go three or four pages and know every word and reference. However, there are times when I’ll run into a page where I might not know 5 or 6 words. This is a good reminder that I’m only 40 percent of the way through this project so I can’t expect to know everything yet. These materials are good for me because I can keep up a decent reading pace but still challenge myself by learning new words and patterns while working through each chapter. Since there are around 40 volumes of Doraemon, it should give me a lot of material to work through to pick up new words if I don’t get bored with the series. If so, I’ll just move on to a different, more challenging title.