Nihongo Journey

Cardcount: 3880
Repcount: 21390
Retention: 92.2%

Lately, I’ve been more aggressive with the grading of my cards. I think I’ve been to hard on my self when it comes to grading my cards in the past. I very rarely gave myself a perfect score on my cards even when I knew them fairly well. I have to keep reminding myself that the 10,000 sentence deck is for passive understanding and I shouldn’t grade myself badly if I feel I can’t output that word fluently yet. A lot of cards I know keep wasting my time and I should focus more on the brand new words that I encounter.
If any of you are interesting in trying the ajatt/10,000 sentence method I can say at this point in my learning, I’m over the rough part and can delve into much more interesting reading materials. The biggest obstacle in learning a foreign language is simply accumulating a massive enough vocabulary to not have to look up words every single sentence. When you get to the point of having about 2 new words a paragraph, it’s much more comfortable to deepen your knowledge and pick up words organically from context and their kanji.

School has started back up for me now so there will be less time throughout the day to devote to Japanese study. I’ll still get in my ~10 new sentences a day and do my sentence reps. I can also squeeze in time for watching Japanese youtube videos are reading something in Japanese when I’m waiting between my classes. I’m also keeping up with my “fun kanji deck” as it’s easy to do and I put no pressure on myself with getting  a certain number of cards there. Only when I’m in the mood or come across a new kanji I think is interesting do I add to it.

Cardcount: 3581

Repcount: 19473

Coverage (non-new cards): 99.8%

Retention: 92.3%

Current Japanese ability assessment:

My ability to understand Japanese has improved a ton. I’ve been working a lot on listening lately and I’ve really noticed the benefit. However, my output of the language is still badly lacking in skill. I’ve made a new experimental anki deck to see if I can improve my output. The basic idea of the deck is to put just a picture on the front that reminds me of a sentence or dialog that includes a specific grammar point.  This way I have to pull the sentence entirely from memory instead of just reading it passively. I’m hoping this will allow me to better call upon these grammar points when outputting the language in natural situations.

For Japanese learners wanting to improve their output skills quickly, spend a lot of time working on the “tara” form. Practice using it on all verbs until it becomes second nature. There are so many uses for the “tara” form and it will add some much needed complexity to your sentences.

I’m also finding that learning some sentences without full kanji is helpful for learning. Sometimes I know a word with the kanji, but if i see it somewhere written just in kana, i have no idea what it means. Because of this, I’ll try to mix in some random kanaized sentences to hit words from all different angles in order to best remember them no matter which form I happen to encounter them.

This month I’ve noticed I’ve finally gotten over a hump. I can now watch basic television shows without subtitles and read simple texts such as manga without much difficultly.  I can’t understand something like a psychological drama in Japanese yet, but it’s something definitely to strive for.

My upcoming goals will be to continue working on building a massive vocabulary to aid in comprehension of Japanese media. Also, listening comprehension of the words I’m learning will also be a priority.

*Cardcount: 3151
*Repcount: 17140
*Coverage (non-new cards): 99.9%
*Retention: 92.8%

I got more work done this month than last month due to being out of school.

A couple days before this post I decided to change the timing of my reviews to get more in. Instead of the 5 minute decremental timeboxing, I’m doing 10 minutes, then skip down to 5 minutes, 4, 3, then another 3, then I’m finished with sentence reviews for the day. It sounds a little complicated but now I get in 25 minutes of review time in instead of 15 which helps a lot. I tried a straight 10 minute decremental review but it was way too long for me to stay interested. It also takes a while to find good sentences to keep up with adding at least 10 a day. All in all, it’s probably about an hour a day dedicated just to SRS sentence work.

I’ve been watching a lot of videos on niconico douga as well. These are ideal for learning new vocabulary because there are comments scrolling across the video from japanese viewers. These comments are corresponding to the content you are watching so there is a lot of repeat usage so it sticks well into the memory. The comments going across the screen are distracting at first but I think they actually add a lot of entertainment value once you get used to them. You can also use them to work on increasing your reading speed because they are scrolling. I wish you could copy and paste the comments but they are done in flash. If anyone knows of a way to copy and paste from that site, it would be a big help. Especially because I don’t really feel like looking up kanji I don’t know manually.

*Cardcount: 2829
*Repcount: 15535
*Coverage (non-new cards): 99.6%
*Retention: 93.5%

This month was a tough one due to all the time I had to put into studying for my finals, but I still got a fair about of Japanese study done. I was able to keep up with my SRS reviews as well as add a handful of new Japanese sentences to my deck each day.I’ve implemented a new timeboxing system for getting through my reviews and it seems to be working well. Here’s my sentence review routine now:

I start with 5 minutes of reviews, then 4 minutes, 3 minutes. 2 minutes, 1 minute…done.

That adds up to around 15 minutes of time dedicated for sentence reviews, so I usually get like 55 reviews done each time. I read the sentence aloud, trying to mimic as much of an authentic Japanese accent as possible, while also trying to get the meaning and nuance behind it. I save my writing practice for my kanji deck I play around with on the side.