Aozora's Log for Japanese and French

[Aozora]

Japanese

I'm behind on my Anki reviews. Since I used sentence cards it takes longer to review, and if I miss days it piles up. Which in turn makes me avoid reviewing. I listened to 5 hours of podcasts today, though.

I also started reading a new book, the last of the children's novels I bought in February/March. It's called 海色のANGEL, and I'm 95 pages in. It's pretty easy to read. I've reached 1000 pages now for the Super Challenge; at this rate I will reach my goal of 10,000 pages by the end of the Challenge.

[Aozora]

Japanese

I was inspired by the topic about notebooks and decided to use the fancy notebook which I bought a few months ago intending to use for Goldlists. Instead of Goldlists, what I'm going to do is find an article or text passage that has several new words, write the passage down by hand, highlight the new words, and write the definitions on the lower portion of the page. I will also write collocations from an Anki deck I found. Ideally I'll also skim over my old Goldlists and slowly internalize those words. I already did one article and 25 collocations today. I don't think I can manage more than that in a day. This was the article I chose, if anyone's curious http://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/html/2016062 ... 91000.html

My goal for Anki right now is to just hack away at my reviews and add new words as I feel ready.

In other news, I watched Koutetsujou no Kabaneri, and enjoyed it very much. I watched 10 episodes in one sitting and would have watched the rest too if it wasn't late.

French

French is still on the back of my mind. I'm thinking I want to use these resources (not including reading/watching/listening materials):

-My French textbook
-Assimil
-Lingvist + Anki deck of 5000 cards (with audio and one sentence example)

I don't think I need any more courses than what's listed. Maybe a grammar book in the future if I feel I need it. Perhaps I can manage both languages if I set different days for them. Say French on Tuesday and Thursday, and Japanese on the other days.

[Aozora]

Japanese

I worked on my notebook yesterday. I wrote out another 2 pages of article and 2 pages of collocations. Many of the collocations had new words so I made paper flash cards and drilled them. I cleared some more Anki reviews (I should be done with that today or tomorrow).

I did about 24 words in Memrise this morning. I just want to supplement my vocab a little more. It'd be nice if I saw those words in my reading and knew what they meant, instead of having to mark them down and type them into Anki later. If I could boost my vocab some more, reading more advanced native texts would be smoother. This is the Memrise course I'm using if anyone's curious http://www.memrise.com/course/253836/jlpt-n1-and-more/

[Aozora]

Japanese

I did 30 words in Memrise yesterday, and did two short articles for my notebook. There were 14 words I studied from the articles.
I read a few pages in the evening too. Almost cleared my Anki reviews too.

French

I decided to write grammar notes down from my textbook. I'm just focusing on the grammar. The textbook has a lot of in class speaking exercises throughout the lessons, plus a couple hundred new words per lesson, and I was getting bogged down by that before. I want to read the reading passages, but I'll come back to those later after I work on grammar and vocab more. I'm thinking about Assimil too, I'll see if I can fit it in.

I decided to use a couple Memrise course for my French vocab instead of the Anki deck. It has the same number of words (~5000), but I get way more audio repetition, and I like the learning phase of Memrise. I did about 55 words yesterday. Much of it is still reviewing stuff I'm familiar with.

[Aozora]

French

I've taken notes for 7 out of 14 chapters in my textbook. Things are going well, and I'm recalling vocab I used to know. I feel ready to read the reading passages from chapters 1-6 now. I've also been working steadily Memrise, I'm up to 245 items as of this post. Many of the cards so far are phrases or sentences. It's still mostly stuff I know or sort of know.

Japanese

I did some vocab in Memrise yesterday, and did my reading before bed. I'm 160 pages into 海色のANGEL. I had to return Princess Academy to the library because I was a slowpoke and didn't finish it soon enough. For some reason I slow down when it comes to library books. I had to cut back on my notebook writing because my wrist was tired from French note taking.

[Aozora]

Japanese

Over the past few days I studied 142 words in Memrise. I read a few articles and wrote 3 pages of article excerpts. I think I like Huffington Post Japan for finding things to read http://www.huffingtonpost.jp/ I also look on this site http://allabout.co.jp/bizskill/
I've looked at other websites too, but I think I'm more likely to find topics I'd like to read about on those two. I read a little more of my novel, I'm almost done, but I just haven't been leaving much time in the evening for reading.

French

I'm up to 299 words in Memrise. A large portion of the earlier lessons are phrases, so I'm not learning as much pure vocab as I'd like, but at the same time the phrases are helpful to learn. I'm on Chapter 8 in my textbook for grammar. I also took out Easy French Reader from the library and read the first few chapters. It was indeed easy! I'm sure I took this book out before in the past, but it must have been before my University course because I remember struggling a lot with it. The language gets more complex as it goes, so I look forward to reading more.

[Aozora]

Japanese

I added ~50 words in Memrise. I can tell the words I've been learning in the deck are from the news... Maybe I should read around some news articles and consolidate some of this. News isn't really my cup of tea, but I figure if I can understand it in English I should get to the point where I can understand it in Japanese. I finished reading 海色のANGEL. It ended on a cliffhanger. I don't think I'll read the sequel, though, since I didn't really like how the plot shifted about two thirds in. I think I'm done with 6th grade novels for now, except for a couple titles I think I'll enjoy.

French

I took notes for Chapter 10 of my textbook today. I'm getting into material that I really can't remember. Towards the end of my university course, there was less time for review, so my memories didn't last well. I don't even know which was the last chapter we studied (we didn't make it to the last chapter). I did ~45 words in Memrise. I also sampled some French dubbed cartoons/anime. I thought maybe I could watch Pokemon in French, but Ash's French voice actor sounds just terrible. I'd like to watch Card Captor Sakura in French, but I may only be able to find a few episodes online. If anyone knows any good resources, I'd be glad to hear them.


As for how much vocab I've been doing everyday... all I have to say is I'm not looking forward to the reviews snowballing I try to do my reviews throughout the day. I had less work last week and so I ramped up my study time.

[Aozora]

It occurred to me that the movies I own on DVD might have French dubbing... and most of them do! Including a couple anime films. This is a pretty nice find because not only do I already own these movies, but I also know I enjoy them. I'll probably still put off watching them until I improve my language skills some more (Assimil + lots of reading with audio).

Japanese
I did 70 words in Memrise. I listened to some NHK news on youtube. I also did 25 collocations in my notebook. I found a Japanese audio book for The Time Machine, along with the Japanese and English texts. The audiobook is about 5 hours long and I'd like to do some loose LR with it. I haven't read it in English before, so I'll start with L1 text and L2 audio, then do L2/L2 as many times as I find it enjoyable. Not sure when I'll start, but at least I collected my resources.
Audio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AXl662mA00
English text http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35?msg=welcome_stranger
Japanese text http://www.genpaku.org/timemachine/timemachinej.html

French

Didn't get anything done today except Memrise reviews.

[Aozora]

Japanese

I did 190 words in Memrise between the 13th and today. I set a goal to learn 2000 words one way or another this month. When I'm short on time, Memrise is the quickest way. I was busy/tired yesterday and the day before, so I didn't get anything done except the vocab. I found the source of the vocab from the Memrise course I'm using, it's Shin Kanzen Master N1 Goi. The book has Japanese definitions for the words, and most of the words have at least a short example of usage. I'm going to take a look through it and better my understanding for the harder words. Oh, I did do some listening. My reading and listening/watching get logged on my Super Challenge page http://sc2016-17.language-learners.org/ ... e=Anonamul

French

No work done here. I was looking at the word selection in the Memrise courses I had chosen, and I thought it was really off. It also repeats words here and there. I looked around and found the Memrise version of the 5000 words frequency deck I had in Anki. I think I'll use it instead from now on.

[Aozora]

So the French 5000 word Memrise deck isn't working out for me so far. The other French Memrise course (there were 3, I was on the first one) I was using was a no-typing course, just recognition. It was very quick and took about 5 minutes to go through 10-15 words. This 5000 word course adapted from the Anki deck requires typing, which really slows me down. I kept forgetting the spelling, making typos, etc, plus it's very particular about what the correct answer is. For example, you have to type "un/une ministre" and "un ministre" won't do. On top of that the audio is less consistent and doesn't match the words enough for typing (audio says "service" but I need to type "un service"). I could use the Anki deck... but I really wanted the Memrise learning stage, easy reviews, game-ified progression bars and word counts...

On one hand, maybe I could get used to the typing? I do typing for all my Japanese Memrise courses after all. Or maybe the other three no-typing Memrise courses aren't so bad and I should keep using them? Maybe Anki is the better option?