Japanese2000/2000 cards
Yesterday i officially finished Stage 1 of MIA! I had a couple leeches this week so it turned out that on Friday i had exactly 2000 cards, originally it should've been about 2004 or so. Now to talk a bit about my next plan of action:
Pitch AccentI can hear pitch accent being used but i have no real clue as to how it works beyond individual words. I've subscribed to Dogen's Patreon and have started watching their videos. When i get deeper into the course i suppose i'll have a better idea as to how to go about tackling pitch accent. I'm less concerned with speaking Japanese, but tonal languages are interesting to me and i'd like to have a solid understanding of how pitch accent works in Japanese. I think in the long run being able to follow the patterns in speech will help with my comprehension, we'll see.
Monolingual TransitionThis is a huge thing in Japanese language learning circles, i haven't seen it spoken about much at all outside of Japanese. Basically, the idea is to switch from using NL translations to using TL definitions of words. It's a bit infamous, i suppose because AJATT stressed its importance heavily from a very early stage. I think MIA has a more interesting gradual approach which i'm going to attempt. It's split into four "phases":
Phase 1:
Goal: 100 cards
- Take words you already know and look up their definitions.
- Look for i+1 sentences and add those to Anki.
- Add unknown words from definitions you can't understand to a list to learn later.
- Go through the list of words and create sentence cards for each using a search engine or example sentence database.
- Continue using bilingual definitions for your regular cards.
Phase 2:
Goal: Understand 75% of definitions
- Set i+1 cards aside from your immersion to make monolingual cards.
- If you understand the definition to the target word, add it directly.
- If there are new words in the definition, make bilingual cards (similar to Phase 1) for those words.
- If you're still unable to understand the definition, just make a bilingual card.
- If you can now understand the definition, suspend the original i+1 card for a few days so that you learn the new words first, then study the original i+1 card.
- Continue using bilingual dictionaries in your general immersion.
Phase 3:
Goal: Learn all cards with monolingual dictionaries
- Use the monolingual dictionary for all new cards.
- For new words in definitions, look those up in the monolingual dictionary (up to two levels).
- Experiment with using the monolingual dictionary in immersion as well (but not necessary).
Phase 4:
Goal: Use monolingual dictionary for 95% of all look-ups
- At the beginning, use monolingual dictionaries for look-ups when you have the energy.
- Gradually increase how much you use monolingual dictionaries outside of creating cards.
I've started the first phase, which is also the most straightforward. The idea is that dictionary definitions tend to use a base set of words that are often not common in daily life but used very frequently in definitions. Once you get familiar with this base vocabulary, it opens the doors to monolingual definitions, which give you a more accurate idea as to what a word means and gives you a better idea what contexts it's used in. I feel like Stage 2 is where the real work starts to kick in.
Other StuffI'm also going to be putting more effort into reading. Previously, most of my reading was from video games and the occasional manga (though i haven't touched those in a couple weeks). I've started reading the first Harry Potter ebook (ハリー・ポッターと賢者の石) which i picked up from Pottermore. I've been going through it slowly, i'm about 2/3rds of the way through the first chapter (after about 4 days of reading). It's tough, but i wasn't sure what books i could read that were fast-paced and whose stories i was familiar with, so... I haven't really read English books the past ten years or so and somehow i don't think there are as many Japanese translations of the Spanish and Catalan books i generally read.
If anyone has any suggestions for relatively simple books/light novels that have a quick pace, i'm all ears!MIA progressStage 1 (audio cards)
Recognition RTK -
1000 Kanji: Basic Grammar/Vocab -
Tango N5 + Tae Kim: Sentence Mining -
2000 Sentences: Stage 2 (reading cards)
Monolingual Transition: ☐
Monolingual Transition -
Phase 1: Monolingual Transition - Phase 2 ☐
Monolingual Transition - Phase 3 ☐
Monolingual Transition - Phase 4 ☐
Sentence Mining -
3000 Sentences: