CDR's Japanese and Portuguese Language Log

[CDR]

CDR's Japanese and Portuguese Language Log, 2024 Goal Update

Japanese Long Term Goal:
+365 to +500 hours of Japanese Study by December 31, 2024 : 0 / 365

365 hours is the min, 500 hours is the ideal.

My current target for my Japanese Level remains an N2 level:

Pre-Advanced Level: The ability to understand Japanese used in everyday situations, and in a variety of circumstances to a certain degree.

Reading
One is able to read materials written clearly on a variety of topics, such as articles and commentaries in newspapers and magazines as well as simple critiques, and comprehend their contents. One is also able to read written materials on general topics and follow their narratives as well as understand the intent of the writers.

Listening
One is able to comprehend orally presented materials such as coherent conversations and news reports, spoken at nearly natural speed in everyday situations as well as in a variety of settings, and is able to follow their ideas and comprehend their contents. One is also able to understand the relationships among the people involved and the essential points of the presented materials.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese-Language_Proficiency_Test?oldformat=true#Test_format

Focus in the Shorter Term:

My Trip is April 2024, I am firstly concerned about listening and secondly, speaking. Being able to speak is useless if I cannot understand what people are saying, so listening takes the higher priority.

The other category of concern is to finish (some) of the courses/books/challenges that I've already started, as I need to get better at doing this.

Lastly, my current thought is that I will attempt to study 500 hours for two years in a row, while writing the N2 at the end of 2025 . I haven't decided if I am going to attempt to write the JLPT N3 this year, again, I think the answer is no, but we will see.

Portuguese Long Term Goal:
After thinking about it for a bit, I thought it would be excellent to be C2 by my 35th Birthday. I am not in any particular rush, and I want Japanese to remain my main focus however, so I duct taped these goal together and called it a day:

350 Hours of listening/watching by December 2028
10000 pages of reading by December 2028

Shamelessly stolen from a post I saw from Cavesa, who suggested (in 2017!) this is around the numbers that worked for them to see big changes in their listening and reading skills. I added 50 extra hours to the listening. It doesn't particularly matter, I just wanted a goal as I attempt to make reading and listening/watching things in Portuguese a habit.
https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 319#p91046

For 2024
70 Hours of Listening by December 2024
2000 pages of Reading by December 2024 (if each book is 300 pages, that is 6.66 books... )

Short Term Goal
Working to integrate Portuguese more into my daily life in 2024 and carrying those habits into the future

[CDR]

And so 2024 has begun!

Jan 1
Japanese
Hours of Japanese Studied : 3 / 500 Hours Completed

Back in October, I thought it would be good to start working systematically through the JLPT levels again, since I hadn't studied in such a long time. Of course, I didn't have enough time to work through everything. I almost completed a bunch of N5 textbooks, before skipping to N3 textbooks because the test was getting close.

So, part one of my cleanup is to work through those textbooks one at a time and finish them. The other is to finally catch up on my Anki backlog, which I had already started working through in November/December and fell off due to COVID, I am back on it again.

• Complete Nihongo Challenge for JLPT N4 & N5 Kanji : 233 / 258 Pages Completed
• Eat away at your Anki Japanese Vocab Card Backlog : 865 / 2365 Backlogged Reviews Re-Integrated

Portuguese
Watched some Fantástico with my wife, but not enough to count.

[CDR]

Jan 2 2024

Japanese

Hours of Japanese Studied : 6 / 500 Hours Completed

Complete Nihongo Challenge for JLPT N4 & N5 Kanji Finished 02/Jan/2024 : 258 / 258 Pages Completed
Finished this textbook off, on to the next one

Complete Minna no Nihongo Listening Task I 25 : 78 / 101 MP3s Completed
This one gets bonus points, because listening is one of the skills I should be focusing on

Eat away at your Anki Japanese Vocab Card Backlog : 1136 / 2365 Backlogged Reviews Re-Integrated
I noticed there were a lot of duplicates in reviews in Anki, I took a look and found over a 1000 duplicates. So I cleaned them up. Probably a questionable use of time

Suspended cards aren't included in this backlog (over 300!). I decided to reset them all back to new cards, as it has been a long time since I worked with them, and many of them I remember giving me a hardtime. I moved all the grammar cards I could find out of the vocab deck as well. I know there are some JLPT questions remaining in the vocab deck, but they are quizzing on vocab anyways, so I will leave them for now.

Complete the Japanese Minimal Pair Deck https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1299714260 : 10 / 202 New Cards Seen

This is from the "new material" category. The difference between "びん" and "bean" is easy to hear when you listen to them one after the other, but was hard to handle in isolation.

Portuguese
From the CNN Brasil newsletter yesterday, I got news of the earthquake in Japan
https://www.cnnbrasil.com.br/internacional/japao-emite-alerta-de-tsunami-apos-terremoto-de-magnitude-74-atingir-pais
Today, it was two airplanes that crashed into each other in Tokyo

https://www.cnnbrasil.com.br/internacional/aviao-pega-fogo-no-japao-com-cerca-de-400-pessoas-a-bordo/?utm_source=cnn-brasil&utm_medium=newsletter-5-fatos&utm_campaign=internacional

The Pop Culture newsletter had a video about the top 5 pieces of good news from 2023

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZK9attUzS8

and a note that Steamboat Willie has finally entered the public domain!

[CDR]

I wonder which search engine bots are battering the server tonight, the 504s have been strong.

Jan 3 2024

Japanese
Hours of Japanese Studied : 7 / 500 Hours Completed

Puttered around the internet, not as much concentrated study got done. I had put on the schedule for today 1 hour of study, but I have no idea why. I was off and not working, so it should have been fine to do more. I managed an hour an 22 minutes

I was reading an article about how Manga and Doujinshi are published:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.10 ... 22-09919-9

It mentions a bunch of different websites. One of them Pixiv, which I've heard of before. I thought it was just artwork, but they have novels too. I found this one, where the author did very brief diary entries:

https://www.pixiv.net/novel/series/10254886

I've tried to read them intensively, I've only made it 5 "chapters" in. I thought this was a great sentence:

あんな奴[規制音][規制音][規制音]
[規制音][規制音]しまえばいいのに

Where [規制音] is a stand in for the 'beep' of a censor. 奴 in this case is a boy they mentioned disliking earlier ("クソ男生徒"), JMDict says 奴 is archaic, but it also says it is derogatory, which I think is clearly the use case here.

If we're collecting rude words, in the sentence before the author uses やがる which is "to have the nerve to". Probably all great words to terrify your language exchange partner with and jeopardize your exchange .

I was already aware of Syosetu, but after googling, I discovered Manho.jp and was looking through the short stories. I found someone's travel diary, the pages are quite short and each one has a photo
https://maho.jp/works/15591074771453125204

Eat away at your Anki Japanese Vocab Card Backlog : 1284 / 2365 Backlogged Reviews Re-Integrated
I've passed the half way mark

Complete the Japanese Minimal Pair Deck https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1299714260 : 20 / 202 New Cards Seen
Progress continues

Portuguese
Nada

[vonPeterhof]

奴 in this case is a boy they mentioned disliking earlier ("クソ男生徒"), JMDict says 奴 is archaic, but it also says it is derogatory, which I think is clearly the use case here.

I'm pretty sure that the "archaic" marker only applies to the reading やっこ, which I personally wasn't even aware of until just now. やつ is very much in current use, and it does come across as pretty rude, at least when used for people one isn't terribly familiar with.

[CDR]

Jan 4 2023

Japanese
Hours of Japanese Studied : 8 / 500 Hours Completed

More puttering, that article about Manga and Doujinshi also mentioned Manga Z, which is a website that gives legal free access to Manga.

I was trying to read this manga about cats, but didn't understand much of anything, I would probably have to do a lot of lookups, which is difficult because of the format.

https://www.mangaz.com/series/detail/172021

くま has their birthday on page 9? of the first volume and this subplot was the best I could come to understanding the gist of anything going on. The cats get words above them sometimes, it is typically simple stuff you might expect a cat to be thinking and those are easy to understand as well.

Eat away at your Anki Japanese Vocab Card Backlog : 1394 / 2365 Backlogged Reviews Re-Integrated

I was reading Picaboo's log, and they mentioned that they've started to put vocab alone on cards, as the sentence gives them context clues and they don't analyze the Kanji as well. Last month I watched the interview with Jazzy, a learner of Japanese who became famous for getting a perfect score on the N1 after just a year and a bit of Japanese study, and he mentioned similarly that he changed his flashcards to be isolated words at some point for the same reason.

I've noticed this in the past. There are a number of cards where I only know the answer because of the rest of the sentence. I would sometimes let it go because it's easy. When I was making cards, I was pulling them in from the Core 6k deck I have, and they only have the word on the front, and I noticed that it was much easier to pick up patterns across multiple words as to the readings of each individual kanji. I am also under the impression that they are sticking in my memory better, as I am failing these style of cards less often. They require more effort at first, but I think it would be fine. Finally, I really liked the fact that they also note on the front the part of speech of the word (verb, noun etc), I also found that very helpful.

Complete the Japanese Minimal Pair Deck https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1299714260 : 30 / 202 New Cards Seen
Nothing to say, progress continues!

Portuguese
Last year I was listening to a podcast from Nexo Journal, and so I went to their website and subscribed to their newsletter as well, and then read my newsletters in PT today and listened to some of Nexo's nightly podcast.

---

Jan 5 2023
While the date above is the day I am talking about, typically I am writing these the next day. I wasn't able to access the forum yesterday (the 5th) because the 504s were very strong. I am on a night schedule, so was up all "night" by EST standards, and had 0 success getting on .

I finally managed to get in today (the 6th) but will I beat the 504s to manage to post this?!?! (I was actually shocked when the "post a reply" page finally loaded )

Thank you @vonPeterhof for pointing that out, I see I was looking at the wrong entry in the dictionary for 奴 .

Japanese
Hours of Japanese Studied : 10 / 500 Hours Completed
10 hours! Yahoo!!

Eat away at your Anki Japanese Vocab Card Backlog : 1394 / 2365 Backlogged Reviews Re-Integrated
I changed all my cards to the card type I mentioned yesterday, putting everything into a single card type also resulted in finding more duplicates, so the backlog decreased by 89 without me having to review them.

Then I tried to do my reviews. After the change, I noticed it is much more difficult, although the particular words I am seeing now are much newer, so I think I need to slow down how many I add from the backlog. I definitely added too many from the backlog today, as I was unable to finish all the reviews before the day was over, leading me to having to absorb some back into the backlog.

I will let it rest for a day or two before trying to add more. I also didn't do anything from the minimal pair deck because I was too consumed with the vocab. Overall, lesson learned,

I also read some of "Mangajin's Basic Japanese through Manga". An interesting supplement to regular studies, it uses scenes from Manga to explain words, but also culture, gestures, etc. I suspect it would be useful if you were interested in reading manga, but what do I know

Portuguese
Anki consumed a bit too much of my time, so I didn't get to fit in anything for Portuguese either.

[golyplot]

I noticed there were a lot of duplicates in reviews in Anki, I took a look and found over a 1000 duplicates. So I cleaned them up. Probably a questionable use of time

You wouldn't have this problem if you used JPDB instead of Anki.

[CDR]

Jan 6 2024
Japanese

@golyplot I've tried a few times, but it never sticks, I'll look into again

Hours of Japanese Studied : 12 / 500 Hours Completed

I read more of Managjin's Basic Japanese. Then, I spent about an hour reading アンと雪の女王 (Frozen, the Disney movie). It takes places after the first movie, though, it seems like it is just going to be a story about how Ana and Elsa goof off instead of being good monarchs.

Here it is on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.co.jp/%E3%82%A2%E3%83%8A%E3%81%A8%E9%9B%AA%E3%81%AE%E5%A5%B3%E7%8E%8B-%E6%84%9B%E3%81%95%E3%82%8C%E3%82%8B%E3%82%A8%E3%83%AB%E3%82%B5%E5%A5%B3%E7%8E%8B-%E8%A7%92%E5%B7%9D%E3%81%A4%E3%81%B0%E3%81%95%E6%96%87%E5%BA%AB-%E3%82%A8%E3%83%AA%E3%82%AB%E3%83%BB%E3%83%87%E3%82%A4%E3%83%93%E3%83%83%E3%83%89/dp/4046314907

There is lots I don't know, but I am surprised by how much I do know (which, if we're being honest, is not much , but it still seems like a lot ). Or alternatively, how much is knowable just by looking up unknown words. It has made me feel a bit better about my progress.

I've been reading a few different books on the politics and history of Japan. One of the books talked about "ノーパンしゃぶしゃぶ" which is a type of restaurant that was the centre of a political scandal in the 90s. Finance Ministry bureaucrats attend one of these establishments in 98, and it got in the news.

When I read about this the first time, it sent chills down my spine. I used to work in PR, I left the field because this is exactly the kind of situation I didn't want to be responsible for trying to do damage control on. Okay, well, this exact situation didn't come to mind, but you get the idea :

I tried looking it up more and... This type of restaurant was (before media pressure) "not considered" an adult entertainment establishment (by the ministry), and so their food and drinks could be claimed as expenses. They needed a 領収書 a "simplified receipt with a blank line to be filled out with the customer's name (used specifically for claiming expenses)"

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/Receipt_JPY.jpg

An employee of the restaurant was interviewed and reported that the government employees "一心不乱に見ている". They were watching intently/wholeheartedly/with undivided attention. That's a quote made for media coverage!

[*] Eat away at your Anki Japanese Vocab Card Backlog : 1548 / 2365 Backlogged Reviews Re-Integrated
I figured out my Anki was out of date, by about 1 year, I updated to the latest version, and to the new (to me) v3 scheduler. Back a year ago when I moved back to my Desktop, I installed Fedora, and at the time, the Anki version available in dnf/flatpak or whatever was broken, so I installed it directly from the website and proceeded to forget about needing to keep it up-to-date manually . I suspect I must have silenced the update notifications at some point. The new version is looking more modern, and it now matches the dark mode theme of the rest of my desktop. 10/10 I would recommend keeping your software up to date.

Just kept up with my current reviews after the overflow yesterday .

[*] Complete the Japanese Minimal Pair Deck https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1299714260 : 60 / 202 New Cards Seen

These go very quickly, so I did some extra ones today to make up for missing yesterday.

Portuguese
Watched stuff on Instagram with my wife, that's about it

[CDR]

Jan 7 2024

Japanese
Hours of Japanese Studied : 14 / 500 Hours Completed

I spent about an hour messing with JPDB. I've tried it in the past, I think my main problem is that the amount of work to go through JPDB's particular system of Kanji/Vocab learning just to get back to where I am with my current Anki deck is large. In my hour of work, I didn't make much of a dent.

I think it would be useful if I had a particular text I wanted to generate a deck of, I would probably be more tolerant of building up the kanji/vocab in this case.

Eat away at your Anki Japanese Vocab Card Backlog : 1548 / 2365 Backlogged Reviews Re-Integrated
I continue to play keep up with current reviews

Complete the Japanese Minimal Pair Deck https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1299714260 : 70 / 202 New Cards Seen
Another 10 started


Portguese
My parents got us a new, much larger, TV, so we tested it out with Fantástico this evening. This evenings programming has made me want to increase the intensity of my Portuguese studies. We'll see what I end up doing.

[golyplot]

It helps if you aggressively use the "never forget" and "blacklist" options (you can press K and B respectively as a shortcut). Personally, I blacklist anything that is more like grammar than vocab, or where there's multiple words with the same spelling (especially single-kanji words) or if it is a misparse, or occasionally if I get frustrated at a leech, etc.

Also note that you can paste in your own text and it will create a deck for you from that text.