Learning Japanese From Zero

[golyplot]

Due to an inconveniently timed last minute meeting at work today along with excessive procrastination on my part, I didn’t complete my new kanji reviews until two hours later than usual, meaning that I’ll level up two hours later than usual next Saturday evening, which in turn means having to stay up two hours later than usual to the do the Apprentice reviews.

This means I’ll have to stay up well past midnight, which is going to suck. Ever since Thanksgiving, I’d been spending much of my free time playing Magic: The Gathering, which meant less time and attention to WK, as well as letting the reviews pile up more in general. It also meant that I often ended up not going to bed until later than usual and hence sleep deprivation issues. I decided to avoid MTG entirely at least until I hit level 60, but I’m only starting to get things back to normal. And now this. I’ll be staying up even later next Saturday than I have recently. Oh well. At least things will finally get back to normal next Sunday following my Magic-induced bender.

[devilyoudont]

Is it advisable to take a day off, finish it all 1 day later, but have your reviews due at less annoying hour?

[golyplot]

I finally managed to do a bit of Japanese today. Specifically, I watched an episode of K-On! and a Nihongo no Mori video.

Speaking of which, does anyone have suggestions for image hosting? Previously, I used imgur to host all the screenshots and images I posted here, but it seems that they've cracked down on that. Uploading images to imgur no longer results in a usable link. Luckily all the ones I already uploaded and posted in this thread are still viewable but they seem to have changed something to make them load really really slowly, presumably in order to discourage hotlinking.

[golyplot]

Yesterday, I spent some time trying to practice reading by reading the Youtube comments on Hanae's first Undertale video, which mostly consisted of pasting the comments into Jisho, puzzling over it for a while, looking up the words and grammar, still only getting a vague idea of the meaning, then putting it into Google Translate to find out what it really means.

There was one comment that was especially notable though

いや、全員○すとは限らん　　　　　俺は、糞花テレビ説を推奨するぜ！

No, not everyone is ○ I recommend the dung flower TV theory!

It used the kanji 糞, which is not on WK. It's very rare that I come across kanji I haven't seen before nowadays, thanks to WK. Of course, that doesn't mean I actually remember most of the kanji on WK, or can reliably distinguish them from the billion identical looking kanji, but it means that they seem familiar and when I look them up, I usually go "oh right, that's what it was".

The comment is also notable that I still can't make much sense of it, even with Google Translate. GT is surprisingly good in general though - I keep wondering if/when my Japanese skills will surpass that of GT.

----------

It's also interesting listening to podcasts and seeing when they hit "the COVID wall". Yesterday, I reached that with the Learn Japanese From Small Talk podcast. They had an episode with a long disclaimer beforehand explaining that it was recorded in advance and mentions things like going cherry blossom viewing that you shouldn't do/aren't allowed to do because of COVID.

----------

As for Wanikani, I survived reaching level 58, despite having to stay up past midnight to do the reviews. It wasn’t as bad as I expected because I came up with a trick - I went to bed early immediately after doing the lessons and then woke up about two hours later. That way I wasn’t sleepy at all when it came time to do the reviews later. Anyway, it's interesting how different things feel, now that I'm in the final week of the grind.

Also, my log of Wanikani review times over on the WK forums has now been going for over four weeks, so I figured it’s time to collect the statistics so far. I was shocked to discover that last week, for the first time, I was over 100 minutes every single day, and also averaged over two hours per day for the first time. It's a good thing that things will soon start going back down again.

Code: Select all

week 1: 126  78  91  86 133  96  85 total: 695 (avg 99)
week 2: 165  84  85  75 133  94  87 total: 723 (avg 103)
week 3: 142  98 100 110 155 112  93 total: 810 (avg 116)
week 4: 183 109 113 106 167 109 100 total: 887 (avg 127)
week 5: 160

[iguanamon]

... does anyone have suggestions for image hosting? ...

I have used postimages.org successfully. You might also try ImgBB.com.

[vonPeterhof]

There was one comment that was especially notable though

いや、全員○すとは限らん　　　　　俺は、糞花テレビ説を推奨するぜ！

No, not everyone is ○ I recommend the dung flower TV theory!

It used the kanji 糞, which is not on WK. It's very rare that I come across kanji I haven't seen before nowadays, thanks to WK. Of course, that doesn't mean I actually remember most of the kanji on WK, or can reliably distinguish them from the billion identical looking kanji, but it means that they seem familiar and when I look them up, I usually go "oh right, that's what it was".

The comment is also notable that I still can't make much sense of it, even with Google Translate. GT is surprisingly good in general though - I keep wondering if/when my Japanese skills will surpass that of GT.

Not really knowing the context I can guess that the ○ stands for the character 殺. 殺 and 死 are often censored by internet users (you might also see 死ね written as 4ね), although it's not always clear if it's done as a serious attempt to avoid raising death threat alarms or just in a tongue-in-cheek/memetic fashion.

[golyplot]

Tonight, I watched the first episode of season 3 of Carmen Sandiego in Japanese, although I could barely understand anything. I also continued watching K-On! I'm back in the phase where I'm frustrated at my lack of progress. It's a shame since K-On! used to be able to reliably cheer me up.

[golyplot]

I watched the next episode of Carmen Sandiego and K-On! today, and the later did bring a smile to my face. I've once again gone from being frustrated at how much I can't understand to being pleased with the bits I could understand.

I also spent half an hour this evening trying to read Yotsuba again, though I barely got farther than before. I did, however, discover that it is possible to select text in the manga and paste it into Jisho, so I was at least able to tell which kana were which, something I had a lot of trouble with on previous occasions due to the font. However, it was still a huge challenge because it takes a lot of practice to get used to reading vertically, and Yotsuba uses a lot of colloquialism and abbreviations of grammar.

[golyplot]

I spent quite a while (several hours) listening toignoring podcasts thanks to multiple hour+ shopping expeditions today in addition to the usual cooking, eating, and chores. I finished Learn Japanese with Small Talk and started catching up on Japanese with Noriko. I also caught up on 4989 American Life.

I also continued trying to read Yotsuba. I came across ブランコ, another katakana word with no resemblance to English. Apparently it comes from Portuguese. I also learned the word 月木 (Monday and Thursday). I think stuff like that illustrates how hard it can be to read, despite using mostly kana and furigana on all the kanji. Although probably the biggest challenge is all the weird sentence endings and random grammar stuff that seems to bear no resemblance to anything I've learned.

Also, I watched ep4 of K-On!, which has a scene where the characters make a game of trying to speak Kansai-ben. Unfortunately, my Japanese is nowhere near good enough to appreciate the difference.

[golyplot]

Last night, I finished catching up on Noriko and restarted it from the beginning once again. However, this time I'm skipping all the interview episodes. They tend to be much harder to follow due to poor audio quality and a speaker not deliberately talking to beginners like Noriko does in her normal episodes. Today, I finished watching Carmen Sandiego in Japanese and started Hilda season 2.