Nandemonai's log (Mandarin, German, Tadoku)

[tuckamore]

- Shadowing intermediate-advance

Have you used this book/audio? How do you find it? I have the beginner volume and had used it a long time ago, but I didn't stick with it for very long. Recently, I've been considering going back to it again, but then, I've been wondering if the intermediate volume would be a better use of my time.

[Nandemonai]

You're the first person I've seen that has finished the deck. How did you find it? Did you feel that some grammar points had too many or too few sentences? Would you agree that the further you get, the less example sentences you need? And what about the order of the grammar points? Or maybe you have some general improvement suggestions? I don't plan to rework the deck, but it's still far from finished so it would be useful for the future.

I have another deck that has almost 1000 sentences, but it focuses on vocabulary, there are no notes about grammar. I haven't published it yet because right now the sentences are in the order I found them, not in the order of difficulty. Still, if you want it I can send it to you.

I really liked it, so thank you for that! To be honest, I also partially used it to learn vocabulary. I might not be a typical learned though, a lot of the grammar is similar enough to Japanese that even a minimal amount of grammar explanations would be sufficient. For me most explanations were enough. There was only one sentence I really had trouble with, but that was because of the length. "우리는 다섯 시 반에 시작하는 4회 표를 가지고 있었기 때문에 바로 들어갈 수 있었습니다." Is kinda long (for me, at this level) to put into Anki, as I can't read it within 5 or even 10 seconds. I ended up suspending that one until I finished the deck. The order seemed fine to me, but I don't remember the early stages all too well since it's been over a year since I started learning it. I think it accompanied TTMIK rather well, I ended up having the two of them reinforce each other rather well as you've got their examples sentences in your deck.

I also updated the deck to the latest version and got a 100 or so extra cards to learn in the next week. I'm interested in that sentence deck. I've been wanting to study more vocabulary but I haven't had the time to make a proper deck myself, so that'd be a huge help. I'm not really worried about the order as I can just pick and choose which sentences to learn every day. Once again, I'd like to thank you for all the time and effort you've put into this deck. It really shows!

[Nandemonai]

Have you used this book/audio? How do you find it? I have the beginner volume and had used it a long time ago, but I didn't stick with it for very long. Recently, I've been considering going back to it again, but then, I've been wondering if the intermediate volume would be a better use of my time.

I've done a couple lessons in this book, but never stuck with it either. The lessons that I did complete however did help with my pronunciation and pitch accent.

[Evita]

I really liked it, so thank you for that! To be honest, I also partially used it to learn vocabulary. I might not be a typical learned though, a lot of the grammar is similar enough to Japanese that even a minimal amount of grammar explanations would be sufficient. For me most explanations were enough. There was only one sentence I really had trouble with, but that was because of the length. "우리는 다섯 시 반에 시작하는 4회 표를 가지고 있었기 때문에 바로 들어갈 수 있었습니다." Is kinda long (for me, at this level) to put into Anki, as I can't read it within 5 or even 10 seconds. I ended up suspending that one until I finished the deck. The order seemed fine to me, but I don't remember the early stages all too well since it's been over a year since I started learning it. I think it accompanied TTMIK rather well, I ended up having the two of them reinforce each other rather well as you've got their examples sentences in your deck.

I also updated the deck to the latest version and got a 100 or so extra cards to learn in the next week. I'm interested in that sentence deck. I've been wanting to study more vocabulary but I haven't had the time to make a proper deck myself, so that'd be a huge help. I'm not really worried about the order as I can just pick and choose which sentences to learn every day. Once again, I'd like to thank you for all the time and effort you've put into this deck. It really shows!

You're welcome. I've uploaded the second deck here but I'll be deleting it again in a few days.

[Nandemonai]

You're welcome. I've uploaded the second deck here but I'll be deleting it again in a few days.

Thanks! I'll check it out after work.

[Nandemonai]

Wow, it's been four months since I last posted an update. Life has been very busy for me lately and sadly my language learning efforts have suffered from that. I realized I just don't have as much free time anymore to spend on learning languages, and that I'll have to make some hard decisions. Dealing with two languages in the beginner has doesn't seem realistic for me anymore, so I've decided to take a break from Mandarin for the next 1-2 years. I've also scrapped my plan for this year, and have decided to just stick to my reading goals in Japanese and Korean.

Target reading:
Japanese: 25/50 books, 23/50 manga volumes
Korean: 0/1 book, 0/10 manga volumes

I didn't read much in Japanese until the second half of March, when I went on a reading spree and caught up with my goals. Manga won't be a problem at all, I read enough of those without even trying.
I'm going to have to try to read more in Korean, as I haven't made any progress with that at all yet.

I also let Anki build up a huge backlog since January. I have now caught up with Japanese and am slowly catching up on my Korean backlog (~500 left). That will be cleared next week. I'm not sure when I'll be adding cards again for Korean, I might take a week or two to get comfortable with my current deck first and then decide how I'll tackle the language again.

My idea for Japanese is a lot more concrete. I've taken the J-CAT again last month, but the results were a bit disappointing. Overall my score dropped by 12 points, mostly in the vocabulary and grammar department.

2017 May
Listening     72 (-5)
Vocabulary  53 (-5)
Grammar     59 (-6)
Reading       72 (+4)
Total            256 (-12)

Lately I've been mostly working on my listening and speaking, and I can really see the improvement I've made with those in my daily life.
Knowing this I've shifted my focus to improving my non-fiction related vocabulary and reviewing/activating the grammar points I've studied in the past. I'll add 3000-4000 words to Anki before the JLPT in December. I'd up the pace but I don't think I can keep up with the reviews if I do. For grammar I'll be using mostly the Shin Kanzen Master and JLPT drill books.

I've managed to get a small morning routine going of reading 15-30mins before heading into work, I might try to get some other stuff in as well if I manage to consistently get up earlier.

[Nandemonai]

Finally completed Remembering the Kanji 1 after being on it for five years! I didn't really do it the traditional way (Keyword -> kanji), but I'm very glad to finally have learned all of the (old) Joyo kanji in some way of another. There were always a couple of common characters that I didn't know that well yet, and having done the last 300 of RTK has covered some of them.



I have both the kanji and Japanese character on the front, and only the english keyword on the back. This results in much more manageable reviews, while still increasing my familiarity with those characters. My goal never was to write them by hand so it has accomplished its goal.

[Nandemonai]

Weekly (probably not gonna be weekly) update

Finished 新完全マスターN２読解 today, and got to day 23/30 in 日本語パワードリるN１ 文字・語彙.
I ended up getting 117/136 of the reading qeustions right, about 86.03%. Difficulty wise the reading section for N2 is no problem at all for me anymore, but I still have problems with staying concentrated or make dumb mistakes by not reading the question properly. I also kept all my answers and the correct answers in my spreadsheet to keep track of this data.

Reading-wise I underperformed in June. To reach my goal of 50 books in a year I'm supposed to read about 1250 pages a month (with an average of 300 pages per book). I only read 498 book pages, which is not even half. I noticed that I have a hard time getting into new series, and considerably slow down in the beginning of books because I'm just not into the story yet. Once I get past the halfway mark I get curious to how it'll end and I'll read the rest of the book in no time. Because of this it's rather hard to read one volume novels while keeping my goal in mind. As I still want to read such novels I've decided to change things up and go back to reading multiple books at the same time, and allow my motivation and interests to decide which books I want to take slower and which I want to finish ASAP. I've also put these books in different places. I have a book in a backpack, a couple next to bed, and one in the bathroom. I'm much more likely to pick up a book now and just read a couple pages while I'm in between some stuff.

Currently reading:
- ソードアート・オンライン ホープフル・チャント
- 告白 by 湊かなえ
- まおゆう魔王勇者 (1)
- いなくなれ、群青
- 俺の脳内選択肢が、学園ラブコメを全力で邪魔している (1) (literally trash, someone told me this was good but I'm not really enjoying it. it also feels kinda wrong to drop books once past the 100 page mark...)

I really enjoyed ビリギャル. It was very different from the other books I've read. It's kinda hard to explain. As this wasn't set in a fictional world it didn't have to spend any time explaining how everything works or build one. Instead it focussed on the characters and how Sayaka eventually made it into Keio. Pretty easy read that I'd recommend to everyone who are looking into reading their first novel.

Audible had a problem with charging my credit card, which resulted in my account being wiped... I kinda lost all bookmarks of where I was in my audiobooks and I'm not exactly motivated to figure those all out again. I'll look into it again later but this was a serious bummer.

Next weekend I'll be doing a N1 mock exam. I'll probably do one every month, to see if I'm making any progress. I don't think I'll be doing the 新完全マスターN１読解 right away. I think I'll get more out of it if I'll take a break of 1-2 months after finishing the N2 one. I might work on grammar next? Will see about that tomorrow.

That's it for this time, it's getting late here so I'm gonna head to bed.

[Sayonaroo]

So for the reading are you looking up anything or are you looking up nothing??


For me at one point I just wanted to increase my vocab because at the time I had outgrown talkvariety shows in the sense that I couldn't learn as much as I used to because watched and learned from them so much. I decided to read because I'm more likely to come across unknown words and grammar that's limited to written Japanese. At the time it was summer break from college so I had a lot of free time. I read at least 50 pages of a bunko a day (50 pages was. Big deal to me then and plus I was mining for stuff) and I handwrote all the words and sentences down in a notebook to look up to anki (I do not believe languages learning notebooks)
(smartphones weren't as common then and I sure didn't want to pay for it) and looked them up that day. I checked dokushometer and it looks like I read about 20 books that summer. Anyways the lack of the smartphone Meant I did not have a source of distraction though nowadays I use my smartphones camera to take pics because there are ocr programs ( but I don't generate anki cards only a regular basis so I have a huge pile of pictures files).

But anyways I think if I did without looking up anything I would've been so mad at myself because I wouldn't have learned nearly as much Japanese. At the time I thought there's no way im going to remeber or figure out stuff if I don't look it up or if I do it would take 10x longer or longer than if I did look it up. No pain, no gain. And anyways the most important thing to keep in mind is to read stuff that are genuinely enjoyable or worth reading or else you are wasting time.

[Nandemonai]

So for the reading are you looking up anything or are you looking up nothing??

I do a mix of the two. I'm not gonna look up every word, but if there's a word that keeps popping up and I still don't understand it well enough then I will look it up.

In ビリギャル I did look up every unknown word because there just weren't many. For me it's more important to keep the flow of reading going, because some books are really hard to read if you go through them too slowly. If I'd look up every unknown word then my motivation would most likely dwindle to zero and I wouldn't be reading at all. I aim for 100-200 new words per hard book, and 50-10 for easy ones.