Learning Japanese From Zero

[ryanheise]

In my head, I knew all along that Japanese is a cat4 language and it is totally unfair to compare it to the easy cat1 languages, and that this was only to be expected all along, but I wasn't really prepared for it in my heart. It's hard not to give up at times like this. On the bright side, I'm sure my mood will once again shift, and as long as I keep going, I can't really fail anyway.

Yep, this is definitely normal. But keep it fun: http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/no-fun-no-good/

"So, have fun at learning Japanese. Because having fun won’t just be fun, but it will also ensure that you choose to do it again and again (repetition)."

[golyplot]

I think I sort of argued myself into discouragement that I wasn't even feeling before. One of the dangers of keeping a journal is that the mere act of composing reflections can reinforce negative thoughts and feelings. But either way, I decided it was for the best that I take a "break" for a few days.

I put "break" in quotes because I'll largely still be doing the same activities as before. I'll still be doing Wanikani and playing Japanese music while eating (since I might as well), but I'll focus on some of the non-Japanese stuff I've been neglecting and try to avoid stressing about it. In my experience, the best way to want to study a language is to avoid studying it. The grass is always greener on the other side. Or as Natasha St-Pier put it,

[golyplot]

This morning, Wanikani taught me 足りない (Not Enough). The explanation for that item pointed out that it is the negative form of the level 4 vocabulary 足りる (To Be Enough), which made me realize that a) that's one of the verb conjugation patterns I've been (mostly unsuccessfully) trying to learn and b) Wanikani is sneakily throwing verb conjugations into the vocab. So that was pretty cool to see.


Anyway, I just finished a 33 minute, 163 item monster review session after work, and I'm kind of exhausted. I think this is the first time where I've actually started to think I might not be able to make it through WK at full speed. Of course, part of the problem is that WK's design causes reviews to pile up at specific times, meaning I get a huge wall of reviews on Monday evenings and Friday mornings, and relatively little in between.

I had a high accuracy rate overall this session, but I did notably miss the radical Mustache (confusing it for What). Luckily, it was a radical for a previous level, so missing it won't delay my leveling at all, but it was still a huge shock to see that red flash, since (not counting the first couple days when I wasn't really trying), I've only missed a single radical review across all the levels and guru reviews to date. Then I missed a second radical, but I don't think it should really count since I put Home Village while WK only accepts Village. I got confused because the kanji for that radical (里) is Home Village (though WK apparently has Village as a synonym for it.

[golyplot]

I decided to finally end my "break" from Japanese today. I haven't posted in a while, but here's how things have been going:

Bunpro: I keep trying Bunpro and giving up in frustration, most recently on Friday. I think part of the problem is that it doesn't really teach anything by itself. I read that it was started by people who were using textbooks and wanted to practice what they were learning with the books, and that explains a lot.

Lingodeer: Lingodeer doesn't seem particularly helpful to me, but I've been slowly going through it anyway since I already paid for it and figure I might as well try to get my money's worth. Yesterday, I started the "Adjectives 1" and got stuck because the app froze whenever I tried to start the lesson. I eventually managed to fix it by going into settings and clearing all the cached data, so I can resume Lingodeer now. Shame it's so worthless, even without the bugs. Would it have killed them to put in a decent review system? Sometimes I wonder if the developers have even tried to use the app.

Wanikani: WK continues apace. It was cool learning about the pattern in the planet and weekday names. I never even realized that in Romance languages, the weekdays are named after the planets!

Yesterday, I decided to experiment with deliberately avoiding reviews from 5-7pm on Saturday in order to spread out the reviews on the following Monday evening and keep the "Monday evening review wall" more manageable. Although I don't think it's really necessary. I also decided that if I ever start feeling tired during a review session, I'll just stop and do the rest later, which also solves the problem.

I saw a comment somewhere that the true genius of WK is that it artificially limits how fast you can progress, and I definitely buy it (even if it was probably accidental on the developer's part). The fact that there is a limit to how quickly you can go through it strongly encourages everyone to try to go at max speed and do it consistently no matter what, since there's no "oh I can just make it up by doing extra reviews later" like there are for uncapped SRS systems. It certainly worked for me. I continued to spend much of my time on WK this week, despite otherwise taking a break from Japanese.

P.S. I discovered that if I maintain my current pace in WK and they don't change the levels again, I'll hit level 60 on Christmas morning. Talk about a great Christmas present!

[golyplot]

I have now officially learned every one of the grade 1 kanji! Woohoo! Now to wait another 10 weeks to finish the grade 2 kanji...



For the last week and a half, Wanikani has been surprisingly easy. I haven't had any really demoralizing review sessions since Feb 4th. I keep thinking, is this it? I've wondered in the past about whether I'll be able to keep up with WK towards the end when the review load is 2.5x what it is now, but now I'm more optimistic.

Edit: ...and of course as soon as I write that, I get hit with 58% on some kanji I should have remembered. I guess the real lesson there is that I need to put more effort into learning the items when going through the initial lessons. I've mostly been doing that, which is perhaps one of the reasons things have been going more smoothly lately, but on the last lesson I didn't bother and hence forgot half of it immediately. Talk about embarrassing.


Anyway, a couple days, I resumed reading the graded reader that ロータス posted here on the last page. I reached what I believe to be the end of the level 0 stories. It was heartening to realize that I'm now far enough that I can figure out the majority of what they say. The last story was about flower and colors and first covered red, yellow, green, white, and blue, all of which I've already learned from WK with the exception of midori/green, and then it got to purple, which I looked up and discovered wouldn't be covered in WK until level 49! So that was a little reminder of how far I still have to go, just in WK. It's easy to forget, since I already covered all of the most common kanji.

In case anyone is curious and too lazy to click on the link themselves, here's a sample of what the grade 0 Flowers and Colors story looks like.




As far as other things go, I think I'm beginning to recognize words more often when watching Sword Art Online or listening to music. I'm still lightyears away from actually understanding them, but it's nice to see progress. I do feel like it's going to take a long time to wrap my head around the grammar though, going by the example sentences I've seen on Tae Kim and Bunpro. It's just so alien to a western mind.

[crush]

I've found the Bunpo (not BunpRo) app helpful for a quick review of things, but i think they've started limiting the content available to people who haven't purchased it. I use it as a review, i'm not sure i'd use it as my main source for learning grammar though.

As for other grammar stuff, have you tried going through the Japanese Ammo absolute beginner playlist? Go through it from the start, even if the first videos seem a bit below your level. I found it really helpful. I'm currently on video 60. Before going through the videos i read through pretty much all of Tae Kim (which went in one eye and out the other). I did an Anki deck of the sentences from Tae Kim (or about half of it, anyway) to try to ram the content into my head as by the end of the course i felt like i was just drowning and wasting my time reading it. The Japanese Ammo videos cleared a lot of that up and while there's still a lot ahead, it's helped me trudge my way through immersion/sentence mining with Morphman.

Japanese is tough and like you i go back and forth between feeling encouraged and disheartened, but in the end it just comes down to being able to pull through and be consistent. My first (successful) second language was Spanish and that was even harder than Japanese despite it taking me a much shorter time to understand it because i wasn't sure that all of my effort (and i put way more effort into learning Spanish than i'm putting into Japanese, as i like you i'm also more interested in passive than active skills in Japanese) would actually take me anywhere, i wasn't sure if i'd ever be able to speak or even understand a second language. Now i know that it's possible and what seems insurmountable now will one day seem like the simplest concept in the world. So just keep that in mind, your mind will gradually get used to Japanese's quirky traits so don't get too wrapped up in one concept/area of the language.

[golyplot]

have you tried going through the Japanese Ammo absolute beginner playlist?

I keep meaning to, but never get around to it (other than the one video I watched a couple weeks ago). Part of the problem is I'm not sure where to start.

[crush]

have you tried going through the Japanese Ammo absolute beginner playlist?

I keep meaning to, but never get around to it (other than the one video I watched a couple weeks ago). Part of the problem is I'm not sure where to start.

I just used this playlist from her channel page and have been going in order:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... OfVXlTkr3N

[golyplot]

I decided that thanks to Lingodeer's lack of decent review options, I should take matters into my own hands and dump out the sentences and convert it into an Anki deck. However, I discovered that Lingodeer is obfuscated and there doesn't seem to be any easy way to dump the sentences. I also discovered in the process that the web version has NO review options at all, not even the disappointing review section that the Android app has. I already said that the web version of Lingodeer is so bad that it may as well not exist and seems to only have been made so they could claim they have one, and that was before I realized it was missing major features!

I also watched the first three Japanese Ammo videos in the playlist crush posted. I think it will take a while to get to the parts I haven't already learned, but the asides are still interesting.

P.S. I finally gave in and blocked notifications for the Lingodeer app. It's pretty scummy that the app spams you with notifications every day even if you have them turned off in the app settings. Now I just need to stop the Lyft app from spamming me.

[golyplot]

I managed to deduce the word kagami/mirror just from repeatedly seeing it in context while watching Peppa Pig this morning, so that seemed like a pretty cool milestone. I think I'm starting to get the hang of it.

My bunpro free trial expires today. I doubt I'll bother continuing with it, at least for a while.