Aozora's Japanese Log

Continue or start your personal language log here, including logs for challenge participants
User avatar
Aozora
Orange Belt
Posts: 234
Joined: Mon Feb 22, 2016 3:46 pm
Location: Canada
Languages: English(N), Japanese (N2)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=17971
x 203

Aozora's Japanese Log

Postby Aozora » Sat Apr 09, 2022 10:23 pm

Hello! The last time I was active here was 2018, quite a while ago. I feel out of sorts being back, I've forgotten how things go here.

History: I have been studying Japanese for a very long time, off and on for years, reaching a plateau around N2-N1. I dabbled in other languages and was actively studying French along side Japanese for a while. I am putting French aside for the foreseeable future to focus only on Japanese. Around the end of 2018 I fell off with language studies as other things came up in my life. It's really humbling to see how much time went by without reaching my goals—I really need to buckle down and keep to things. Just loving the language doesn't give it to me for free.

At the start of 2022, I resumed my Japanese studies! I could feel that I'd gotten rusty, a lot of things slipping out of active memory. This in itself is a little overwhelming, thinking of how much review I'd need just to get back to where I left off. I decided to start off with reviewing kanji with Heisig's Remembering the Kanji, using the kanji koohii website for both study and reviews. In a few days I'll finish this goal, right now I'm at 1950/2200 kanji. This is actually a big achievement for me, because I always floundered with kanji, getting bogged down with one method and switching to another. I previously could read most of the kanji, but for my 2022 review I went all out and am doing full production reviews; writing every kanji from memory in SRS reviews. This has been pretty helpful at getting the kanji in my head at a deeper level.

My current action plan is to complete RTK and then start reading manga and books. I have a bunch of children's novels I probably talked about in my old log (please don't look for it), these are simple enough to read and have full furigana, so I think they'll be great for review. I will be listening to a lot of Japanese as well, usually I watch an anime series now and then, but I'll trying to increase my listening to a daily level. I'll assess later how much deliberate vocab study I want to do. As for grammar, I find it strange because I don't really feel like I'm lacking in grammar despite never learning the rest of N2 and N1 grammar points. I know a fair bit of N2, but I'm sure there's some stuff I'm missing. We'll see.
7 x
Super Challenge Books: 14 / 100
Super Challenge Films: 63 / 100

golyplot
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1726
Joined: Mon Jan 16, 2017 9:41 pm
Languages: Am. English (N), German, French, ASL (abandoned), Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Japanese (N2)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=12230
x 3404

Re: Aozora's Japanese Log

Postby golyplot » Sun Apr 10, 2022 1:32 am

Welcome back! It's always nice to see other Japanese logs here.

日本語を勉強している人が増えたらここは寂しくないそうになるかも知らない...
1 x

User avatar
Aozora
Orange Belt
Posts: 234
Joined: Mon Feb 22, 2016 3:46 pm
Location: Canada
Languages: English(N), Japanese (N2)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=17971
x 203

Re: Aozora's Japanese Log

Postby Aozora » Sun Apr 10, 2022 3:11 pm

I thought I'd go into how I'm doing kanji for RTK. First I write down some primitives from the book into a notebook. Then I add 25 kanji on kanji koohii at a time and start going through them in study mode, adding mnemonic stories and 1-3 Japanese words that use the kanji in kana (ideally words I already know well). The stories are often from the stories people share, changing primitive keywords as I like, and sometimes I adjust or change the story depends on how well it's working for me. A lot of the kanji I've just straight memorized the shapes and don't need a mnemonic, others are a bit tricky and I can't think of a story and just brute force it or come up with a story later. I write each kanji a couple times as I do this. Then it's just production reviews for the most part. On occasion I start to feel like I'm forgetting too many kanji from recent batches, and I'll do some extra recognition reviews.

golyplot, thank you!
3 x
Super Challenge Books: 14 / 100
Super Challenge Films: 63 / 100

User avatar
Aozora
Orange Belt
Posts: 234
Joined: Mon Feb 22, 2016 3:46 pm
Location: Canada
Languages: English(N), Japanese (N2)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=17971
x 203

Re: Aozora's Japanese Log

Postby Aozora » Thu Apr 14, 2022 2:51 pm

I did it! I completed RTK :D I still have reviews to keep up with of course, but I reached 2200 kanji on kanji koohii (2226 actually because of obscure kanji I added for the components). I was thinking I might start adding 5 kanji a day, then I can reach 3000 in about 6 months without interfering with other projects too much. Why 3000? Well, I was looking at statistics for light novels, and many light novel series had 2400-2700 unique kanji in them. So if I don't increase my kanji knowledge I'll still be running into non-joyo kanji fairly often. But I'll see how it goes, I'm not sure whether it's better to add new kanji as I encounter them or to just do 5 a day on kanji koohii.

I also found some nice resources while browsing r/LearnJapanese. Shounen Jump has manga on youtube with voice acting.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC47AYU ... sT5LhpXjaw

Unlike anime there's more emphasis on the text which makes it easier to read along with the voices.
It's pretty good, I enjoyed this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNtBSyH-jcE

I also found a browser based ebook reader called ttu reader https://ttu-ebook.web.app/manage
You can just add an epub file and read the book in the browser with vertical text display and you can use pop-up dictionaries like rikaikun and yomichan. This is extra useful for me because I have at least one free ebook that I couldn't get to load on the ebook viewer I had, never mind pop-up dictionaries.

And this youtube channel is good for listening input https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8dWfy ... Fj6aFfQbFA
It's aimed at non-native speakers but it's still native content. I like the long form free chat ones, but also found the short videos with the script on screen helpful--somehow after listening to a couple I started thinking more in Japanese, thinking of how I'd reply in the comments or in conversation, I think because of the interactive conversational tone.
6 x
Super Challenge Books: 14 / 100
Super Challenge Films: 63 / 100

User avatar
Aozora
Orange Belt
Posts: 234
Joined: Mon Feb 22, 2016 3:46 pm
Location: Canada
Languages: English(N), Japanese (N2)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=17971
x 203

Re: Aozora's Japanese Log

Postby Aozora » Thu Apr 21, 2022 2:21 am

Small update, I'm started on rereading the children's novels I already own. The books are for 5th or 6th graders, generally, maybe 4th graders for some. I was worried I'd be rusty even with these, but it's easy, no problem at all. I had half hoped I could read through an entire book in a day, but my reading pace is too slow, even though I'm reading steadily. I'm just a slow reader in any language.

Even these books have kanji outside the joyo kanji, though. It's not a problem, but when I looked them up, some of them are not even in RTK 3. So I decided instead of doing RTK 3, I'll just add the non-joyo kanji that I encounter, if they look useful. Kanji koohii lets you add kanji outside of RTK1/3 so that works.

To handle vocab, I'm waffling between Anki, Memrise, and not using an SRS. I'm leaning towards Memrise at the moment, I like that it has a learning stage instead of immediately testing like Anki. I also prefer testing that requires me to do something, like write a kanji, pick a multiple choice answer, type the reading of a word. Needing to actively engage like that works better for me, while Anki's "rate how well you knew the answer 1 2 3 4" feels like pulling teeth.
4 x
Super Challenge Books: 14 / 100
Super Challenge Films: 63 / 100

User avatar
Aozora
Orange Belt
Posts: 234
Joined: Mon Feb 22, 2016 3:46 pm
Location: Canada
Languages: English(N), Japanese (N2)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=17971
x 203

Re: Aozora's Japanese Log

Postby Aozora » Thu Apr 28, 2022 1:15 am

I finished reading 2 of the children's novels (恐怖コレクター 1 and 2), and I'm hoping to finish a third before Super Challenge starts. The reason for that is these 3 books are for mid-elementary, and the text is larger and the pages are sparser than other books. I estimated that I'd need to count 2 pages of these books to equal 1 normal page. If I just get through them before the challenge, I don't need to worry about how many pages they should count as. Also it's a good warm up. Reading comprehension has been very good, definitely need something a little more advanced than these, though it's nice to not have many unknown words.

The next book 海色のANGEL, honestly, I'm not sure how it will go. Not only do I not remember what the book is about, I remember being confused while reading it last time.
2 x
Super Challenge Books: 14 / 100
Super Challenge Films: 63 / 100

User avatar
Aozora
Orange Belt
Posts: 234
Joined: Mon Feb 22, 2016 3:46 pm
Location: Canada
Languages: English(N), Japanese (N2)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=17971
x 203

Re: Aozora's Japanese Log

Postby Aozora » Fri May 06, 2022 1:15 am

Kanji reviews have been steadily 90-110 a day for weeks, but the end is in sight! Once daily reviews are down I'll start adding new kanji here and there. It's been great to keep up with the reviews and watch as the tough kanji become easy to remember and write.

As for reading, I'm on 海色のANGEL and it's going well.
You do not have the required permissions to view the files attached to this post.
2 x
Super Challenge Books: 14 / 100
Super Challenge Films: 63 / 100

User avatar
Aozora
Orange Belt
Posts: 234
Joined: Mon Feb 22, 2016 3:46 pm
Location: Canada
Languages: English(N), Japanese (N2)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=17971
x 203

Re: Aozora's Japanese Log

Postby Aozora » Sat May 07, 2022 3:40 pm

I finished 海色のANGEL, and I had completely forgotten the story was not complete T_T Very annoying to get to the end with so much of the story unresolved. The first time I read this book, I had marked the words I didn't know, so this time around I prestudied those words in Memrise (I did that with the other books, and will do that as much as I can). Despite that there were a lot of words I hadn't marked that I didn't know either. I started looking up those words part way through reading, and I'll add them to Memrise too.

I also found a Japanese youtube channel that puts on little skits for vocab, I guess for students. They've got over 500 of these and some of them are pretty funny. I found it while looking up 駄々こねる trying to get a better sense of the meaning.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hh-HKXlBZR0
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... 9_YCEYFvzF

Next up for rereading is オンライン! vol 1 and 2.
3 x
Super Challenge Books: 14 / 100
Super Challenge Films: 63 / 100

User avatar
Aozora
Orange Belt
Posts: 234
Joined: Mon Feb 22, 2016 3:46 pm
Location: Canada
Languages: English(N), Japanese (N2)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=17971
x 203

Re: Aozora's Japanese Log

Postby Aozora » Tue May 24, 2022 3:58 pm

Well, I'm only 40 pages into オンライン! I went a while without reading anything, because I was partly thinking I might take a "break" and read something online instead of the paperbacks I planned to reread. Yesterday I started reading a web novel/e-book I'd had my eyes on for a while, and I'm really enjoying it, I think I ended up reading for around 6 hours because I just didn't want to stop. I realized how much of a difference it makes to read the particular genres I like over the more general fiction (I mean, it's all light novel anime stuff, but) I've been reading. Honestly the language wasn't difficult at all, maybe just by chance of the novel I picked out. Being able to use a pop-up dictionary takes care of any unknown words and I can easily add them to Memrise.

The issue is I'm not really sure how many pages to log for e-books and web novels because I don't have a page count/there are no pages. I can't find out how many characters it would be per page. The e-book I'm reading does have a paper version which amazon tells me is 207 pages, but, books always have pages here and there without text, so I can't just take that page count for the Super Challenge.

Edit: I forgot to mention I've been watching anime for listening. I started watching Monster because I heard it's a masterpiece, and it's pretty good so far. I somehow didn't expect it to be 74 episodes long, I'm so used to 12-26 episode series.
4 x
Super Challenge Books: 14 / 100
Super Challenge Films: 63 / 100

User avatar
Aozora
Orange Belt
Posts: 234
Joined: Mon Feb 22, 2016 3:46 pm
Location: Canada
Languages: English(N), Japanese (N2)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=17971
x 203

Re: Aozora's Japanese Log

Postby Aozora » Sat May 28, 2022 3:53 pm

I was hearing how Japanese high schoolers and adults know about 50,000 words. I ended up browsing an English frequency list of 60,000 for comparison, and yeah, I know a lot of words in the 40-60k range, definitely know most of the 20-30k words. I also noticed some words I know were not on the list. Some of the words I didn't know were clearly medical terms, not sure where the words were taken from, but overall my take away is I really do need a ton of words. All that language learning discussion about what coverage you have with 5000, 10,000 etc words I'm just not going to think about anymore. I've already been doing this, but if I encounter a word I don't know, I'll just add it to my deck (or whatever I'm using) and not worry about how common it is at all. I'm pretty amped up to learn more vocab now.

I also found a fun youtube channel, they talk about learning English but really it's all in Japanese
https://www.youtube.com/c/KevinsEnglish ... %8E/videos
2 x
Super Challenge Books: 14 / 100
Super Challenge Films: 63 / 100


Return to “Language logs”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: Google [Bot] and 2 guests