Nihongo Journey

Because Kanji by themselves had been getting boring, I was just relying on my sentence deck and reading to give me my Kanji exposure. However, lately I’ve been seeing kanji I just feel are interesting for some particular reason…so I wanted to make a deck to memorize those better.

For example, I’ve been looking at some different bird kanji lately that all use the familiar 鳥 radical. I’ll make a card with the word in kana, then put a vivid story and mention some of the radicals that I’ve learned through Heisig or that I’ve just made up myself.

Anyway here are two example cards from the start of my new deck. First, “duck.”

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FRONT OF CARD:

カモ

The カモran up to me with a FLYSWATTER and hit me in the face.

ANSWER:

鴨　quackity quack quack

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See? Not only easy to do, but helps it stick in my memory like glue.  Next, “crane.”

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FRONT OF CARD:

ツル

The ツルwas stuffed into a TURKEY COOP and all hell broke loose as it escaped.

ANSWER:

鶴

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There you have it. I recommend sticking to Japanese keywords to do Kanji cards if you even have a upper-beginner’s level vocabulary. It’s best start using the Japanese words as much as humanly possible. Also, I’m making this a low-priority deck. My sentence deck will always come first as this one is just for extra practice and fun. I’ll only add cards when I find interesting Kanji.

• Cardcount: 2666
• Repcount: 14500
• Interval:
o Mean: 5.8 months
o SD: 7.8 months
o CV: 133.9%
o Median: 3 months
o Max: 4.4 years
• Coverage (non-new cards): 99.5%
• Retention: 94%

Well, another month of Japanese study has gone by. I’m closing in on the end of my junior year of University so there will be a lot to do. Hopefully I’ll have time to keep up a decent pace on my Japanese studies.

I decided to post my stats from my Spaced Repetition System this time. As I posted on twitter a while back, it’s cool to start seeing cards I added during my first month of Japanese study and how incredibly simple they were. One of these cards is shown at an interval of 4.4 years which means I’ll probably never see it again.

I’ve done 14500 sentence reps so far. I wonder what the average number of reps if for someone who has completed the 10,000 sentence project. If your SRS shows stats like this,(even if you haven’t completed it) feel free to post them in the comments as I find them quite interesting. If I divide the 14500 reps I’ve done by the number of 2666 cards have I have, it comes out roughly to 5.44 reps per card. So if I do 5.44 reps per 10,000 cards, I should end with roughly 54,400 reps. Yikes… however, it’ll probably be even more than that to know each card well enough to not have to review it for a couple years.

When learning foreign languages, we often look for parts of the new word which remind us of a word in our native language. This often comes in the form of cognates with relatively closely related languages. For instance, the English, “magnificent” goes together obviously with the Spanish, “magnifico.”Learning words like this is ridiculously easy. But what do we do when learning languages that aren’t related to our native language at all and thus have no cognates?

Find less obvious connections.

Let us take for example the Japanese word, 「かさねる」　“kasaneru,” which means to “stack; pile; repeat.” At first this looks like a challenge but as a native English speaker, we all know the Spanish word “casa” meaning house/home. This is found in the common expression “Mi casa es su casa,” or “My home is your home.”

All of a sudden, your mind has an anchor point on which to learn the meaning of the Japanese verb. For instance, you can think of “casas” or houses stacked on top of each other which is quite an odd image. Also if you know that “neru” means “to sleep” in Japanese, you can add that easily to your mental imagery to create houses sleeping upon one another. Quite quickly the word “kasaneru” becomes associated with “stacking” in your mind.

One more example of a word I learned just last week. 「たずねる」 “tazuneru,” which means “to ask, inquire, investigate.” This one was kind of tough but I eventually came up with using a mental image of the Tasmanian Devil spinning through a stack of papers investigating something.

These mnemonic devices are only to help you get the word initially into your head. Eventually the mnemonic device will fade into the ether and you’ll just know the word like any other word you know fluently. Also, the larger vocabulary in your native language or another language you have, the easier it will be for to come up with creative ways to remember the vocabulary of your new target language.

Please leave a comment with any mnemonic devices you’ve come up with to remember certain words.

While my Japanese progress this month has been a little slow, I’ve still been working steadily towards my goal. I’ve made it to sentence number 2440.

I’ve been reading some intermediate grammar books and picking out some good example sentences when I find them. There are some annoying aspects to this book I’m reading which include sentences on what not to do. I recommend not reading sentences like these because they only confuse you and waste time. Focus on the correct sentences only. They also aren’t clearly labeled so be careful of annoying sections like that when harvesting your example Japanese sentences.

I find it encouraging that a lot of grammar entries I’ve been reading, I already know from just doing normal sentence work. Most of the grammar you’ll find in Japanese is simply knowing how to use different particles to change the nuance of the thought. Once you get the hang of this, Japanese grammar isn’t as difficult as people say it is.

I’ve also been working on a project to increase my knowledge of Japanese vocabulary. This is because I think I’m actually over relying on the Kanji to know the meaning of a sentence. Therefore, I’ve been building a spreadsheet with words in hiragana/katakana only, and then on the other side of the paper an example sentence with kanji and everything that I can hide and check to see if I was right. I can also use this to try to remember what the kanji was from memory. I might post a tutorial on how to make a random vocabulary list like this in Excel. I plan to randomize the words every so often and just print out a page to take with me so I can work on it between classes and such.
がんばまりましょう