Japanese Language Log

[genini1]

I have continued to chug along with my vocabulary studies at the expense of reading. The times that I did read there were often a decent number of words that I had learned from my focused studies although in one ironic case the word I learned from my N3 studies was 越える meaning to exceed or surpass, but was used in its other meaning to crossover, to pass over in regards to climbing over a mountain. It made sense when I looked at it, but for a moment was trying to figure out how to exceed a mountain before thinking I remembered wrong.

I also spent quite a bit of time watching netflix and specifically I've been watching a bunch of food shows. For some reason there are a lot of shows with the same format. A salaryman (or woman) spends five minutes at the office or traveling somewhere on business before going somewhere to eat and the rest of the show is about them eating there. Previously I had watched a few seasons of the Solitary Gourmet which was my first experience with this type of show, but now there's the Solitary Gourmet, Bullet Train Bistro, Sweet Tooth Salaryman, The Way of the Hot and Spicy, Boukyaku no Sachiko: Eating Makes her Forget, and there's probably a few more that I've forgotten. There's also quite a few that don't follow that specific format like a French Restaurant owner who solves mysteries, or a traveling coffee cart that fixes problems. Anyway I only watched Bullet Train Bistro (which was enjoyable) and a few other random episodes but it was fun.

[genini1]

My vocabulary studies have continued although I switched over to the iknow app from anki. When I first started learning Japanese it was the program I used to the most success. It comes preloaded with the top 6,000 words by frequency with example sentences that are read aloud. It also mixes up the words so that sometimes it's J-E and sometimes E-J and sometimes you have to type the word out. The biggest downside is that it's not free, but I've wasted a lot more on a lot worse language products (looking at you rosetta stone).

I know that I've mentioned it before in my posts, but one of the things I enjoy most about learning a language is seeing a word I've learned in the wild. In particular some of the words I learn through vocabulary lists don't seem very useful and I sort of skim over them. 綱 came up recently and was defined as 'thick rope'. I thought how often could that possibly come up to where it is in the top 5,000 words and the next day I find 手綱 in a book meaning reigns (for a horse) and managed read the pronunciation and meaning correctly because of it.

I've been doing about 45 minutes of vocabulary a day with most of the rest of my time spent reading. Recently I've been reading a few of the Kirby light novels including 'Kirby and the Dangerous Gourmet Mansion' and 'Kirby and the Big Panic in Gloomy Woods' which were both not bad for being light novels adapted from a video game. They use a lot of katakana though which really threw me off in the beginning. Otherwise I've been sort of flipping through my kindle collection and reading a bit here and there of various books. Amazon.jp had a big sale recently, but anything I was interested in was only on sale for like 10 yen off (about .10 USD) so I didn't bother.

Going forward I'm going to continue with the iknow app. I'm at 4250/6000 words so I'm hoping I can finish it by mid September. I'll also just continue to read more books to reinforce any knowledge.

[genini1]

It's been a little over a month since I posted an update and my studies have continued to progress. I went on a cruise for about a week which slowed my progress in Iknow, but I spent quite a bit of time reading by the pool or lounge. The utility of a kindle becomes really apparent when you can carry 100 books in something the size of your palm and download them on the fly.

I just hit 4950 words known on Iknow which is slower than I had hoped when I first started again back in May. At that point I was at 3,000 words known and I had hoped to finish the course in two months with three being the max. Today is day 100 and I've only learned 2,000 words which means I've averaged 20 words a day rather than the 30 I had originally planned for. If they were all totally unknown words I'd still be satisfied, but a large number of words are words that I had already learned through reading and only came up now like
争い (arasoi) meaning conflict/battle which comes up fairly often in the types of books I read. Or the words are things like
新人 (shinjin) meaning newcomer which combines the kanji for new and person and is a word I guessed without having the definition. Going forward I am going to make sure to do 30 words a day for the next month so that by the end of September I will be finished with the learning part of Iknow and can just do reviews.

[golyplot]

Be careful not to overload yourself. 30 unknown new words a day seems like a lot! Personally, I'm doing 17 new words a day on JPDB, and even that is a bit of a slog sometimes and I'll often try to add in some easier words to lighten the burden.

[genini1]

Be careful not to overload yourself. 30 unknown new words a day seems like a lot! Personally, I'm doing 17 new words a day on JPDB, and even that is a bit of a slog sometimes and I'll often try to add in some easier words to lighten the burden.

I appreciate those words. I aimed for 30, but I usually end up at 20 each day. At that rate I'll still learn almost 7,000 words a year which is a good rate I think. Once I finish with Iknow I'll probably start using JPDB too.

I've started keeping a little notebook with words I encounter that I've recently learned from iknow. It's not really useful for anything, but it's fun to see how useful the site is even at 5,000+ words. It's also surprising how many words I already know just from reading.
英雄 [えいゆう] meaning hero comes up a lot in my light novels and I think it may have even been one of the first hundred or two hundred words I learned. Similarly 制服 [せいふく] meaning a uniform comes up within like the first 10 pages of any school light novel and yet it's just coming up now.

[genini1]

The end of September has come once again and I have missed my self-imposed deadline of finishing Iknow by today. I did however hit 5800/6000 words today so I should be able to have it completed with 10 days which is close enough that I don't mind it. The words are more often ones that I do not know (about 70%), but the remainder are words are can guess like 小川 combining the kanji for small and river to mean stream; brook or words like 木の葉 which means tree leaves. I could have guessed it just from the kanji, but it is also the name of a village in the popular anime Naruto so I already learned it there.

Being so near the end of this product naturally leads to ideas of where to go from here though. As a small test of my vocabulary I flipped through a few books to random pages and checked my vocabulary level and I was missing an average of 2-3 words per page which seems like an acceptable level of vocabulary at least for the moment. My grammar however did fail me on this pages. Quite often I could piece together an idea of what was said by vocabulary, but lacked the grammar skills to be sure of what I was reading. Or at the very least could not read it smoothly.

To that end I have decided to use the product bunpro which is a grammar learning and SRS website I found. I had previously used it, but ended up dropping it because I found the review inputs confusing. For example there are a number of grammar patterns to say 'but' and the SRS was not always clear about which one it was expecting. Part of the problem though was I didn't spend enough time actually learning the patterns though so I've decided to give it another shot. If it doesn't work this time then I will use Anki to fill up example sentences from bunpro and review that way.

[genini1]

Today I have finally finished the iknow course. Or at least I've gone through all of the words once. I still have to continue with the reviews in order to make sure I keep them in mind, but it's still a large accomplishment for me. According to the app I've spent 178 hours in total between new words and reviews to get to this point and right now I'm on a 145 day streak so I'm pretty happy. To celebrate my accomplishment I've booked a trip to Japan. Well realistically I've just always wanted to go and starting October 11th Japan is allowing tourists again, but the timing worked out to use it as an excuse to treat myself. So starting on November 1st I'll be in Japan for 3 weeks.

However since I've finished new vocabulary on iknow it's time to start a new program. I still want to continue to improve my vocabulary so I'm going to try JPDB which makes an SRS out of a bunch of animes and books and things. It's unfortunate that there is no way to transfer my words known in to it other than manually clicking I know, but it seems worth setting up. I'm thinking about starting with the Harry Potter books, but I'll have to see what all is on the site.

I went through all of the N4 grammar on Bunpro which didn't take long since I know most of it, but it did make me realize my production skills are very subpar. In particular I massively failed in the causative, passive, and suffering passive portions. I could read them with little problem, but actually trying to write them was beyond me. A few other grammar points presented me with problems, but 90% of N4 was just a quick review which was nice. Today I start with N3 grammar, but I'll have to take that slower. I'm hoping I can clear 10 grammar points a day which would take me 22 days for N3 and 21 days for N2. N1 is also on the site, but I'm more interested in getting through N2 and then reading in general rather than getting to the highest level.

[golyplot]

Where are you planning to go? I've been vaguely thinking about visiting Japan myself (maybe next spring), so I'll be eager to hear from you once you get back, and see what you recommend or don't recommend.

[genini1]

Where are you planning to go? I've been vaguely thinking about visiting Japan myself (maybe next spring), so I'll be eager to hear from you once you get back, and see what you recommend or don't recommend.

Right now I've got 12 days in Tokyo, 4 days in Osaka, and 4 days in Kyoto. There's an unlimited rail pass if you go to Japan that covers most trains which I got so my plan for a lot of those days is to take a day trip somewhere else maybe even stay overnight if I go somewhere kind of far like Sapporo. Hotel rates are super cheap right now in Japan so I don't mind double booking a night or two if it means not having to move luggage around as much.

[genini1]

One of the things I've come to realize is that sometimes I set far too ambitious goals even knowing they aren't going to work and for some reason am shocked when they don't. I wanted to do 10 new grammar points a day on bunpro, but I think I've only done 30 total over the past week. Learning new points can take awhile, but even more than that reviewing is taking longer than I expected. I think I average 30 seconds to a minute in doing a review which means that with about 70 reviews a day I am spending way longer than I wanted to on grammar. One of the biggest drags on review time is figuring out exactly which grammar point I am supposed to use. For example if the request is that I use 'while' I have to figure out if it's 間、ながら、うち、がてら、ちゅう、ているところ　and the correct particle for each. Then I have to read the sentence, conjugate correctly, and if I chose the wrong version type everything again. It's very time consuming, but it's also very helpful so I think I'll just set a time goal instead of a number of grammar points goal. If I can finish my reviews in under 30 minutes I'll learn new grammar points and if not I'll just push it off until the review count goes down.

Speaking of reviews my iknow reviews are still keeping at a similar pace to where I was before I finished adding new cards. I had hoped my review count would go down some, but I think I need another week or two before that really starts happening.

Lastly I've been using jpdb for the last week. I ended up deciding to try and learn vocabulary through Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear. My thinking was that I've read about 9 volumes so far so I should be at least peripherally aware of most of the vocabulary and so far I have been. I started with Volume two and so far I am at 1600 words known and 120 words unknown which is a pretty good rate to me. The entire book has about 3200 unique words so I will probably end up around 500-600 unknown words. The more general issue right now is where to stop at. If I learn every word in every volume that would be about 14,000 unique words which even if I am generous with which words I already know would make this project take about a year which is just far too long. Right now my plan is to continue learning 20 words a day until I hit 99% word coverage and then I'll move on to the next volume.