I fail words -- devilyoudont's Japanese & Esperanto log

[devilyoudont]

Japanese:
Input:
Podcasts (4 hr 12min): ・メリケン!サックリドラマ! ・主に日本の歴史のことを話すラジオ・News in Slow Japanese・恋愛心理学♡知りたい！相手の気持ち ・都市伝説オカンとボクと、時々、イルミナティ
Gaming: ・ポケットモンスターLet's Go! ピカチュウ ・ゼルダの伝説 Breath of the Wild

Textbooks:
Imabi: Read thru the first 10 chapters

Output:
Diary: ・1 entry

SRS:
Made: 80 cards
Reviewed: 1401 cards

Favorite Kanji Etymology of the Week:


Esperanto:
Output:
Gaming: ・Vortludo
Chatrooms
Diary: ・1 entry

Struggles:
・I hit a major milestone in the kanji project, but in some sense it has drained some of my motivation. I guess being at the half way point forces me to realize how much more is left.
・Struggling with maintaining habits while hit with a series of low grade illnesses.
・General issues with depression lately.

Successes:
・Started listening to random episodes of the Tofugu podcast. This is in English, and I am not counting it as part of my study time, but they give lots of in depth information on topics I haven't much considered before.
・Giving someone else a link to Imabi for Classical Japanese made me realize I can learn a lot from this free resource especially in the Advanced section. However, I have practically no basis for understanding the advanced section as I never learned Japanese words for Japanese grammatical concepts. So I'm currently casually reading thru the entire course starting from Chapter 1. Obviously this is all a review for me, but I'm not using my normal study time on it so I don't mind a review.
・I have learned all of the kyoiku kanji.

There are 1006 kyoiku kanji. I've actually made cards for 1110 kanji in the course of this project because I move higher grade level kanji earlier in the list if they are used as a radical for a lower grade level kanji. I also grab kanji from the Heisig list which includes jinmeiyou kanji when those are used as a component of another kanji. Of the 1000ish kanji that remain, I estimate that I am already familiar with about 10% on some level thru exposure in reading. I may not be able to define these kanji, but my basic experience so far has been that I learn them much faster and make much fewer errors with them than the ones I am learning from scratch.

[devilyoudont]

Japanese:

Input:
Graded Reader: ・杜子春
Podcasts (3hr 25min): ・メリケン!サックリドラマ! ・主に日本の歴史のことを話すラジオ ・News in Slow Japanese・都市伝説オカンとボクと、時々、イルミナティ

Textbooks:
Imabi: Chapters 11 - 12

SRS:
Made: 66 cards
Revised: 33 cards
Reviewed: 848 cards

Favorite Kanji Etymology of the Week:


Esperanto:
Misc: Signed up for the September Esperanto-Sumoo

Output:
Chatrooms
Gaming: Vortludo

Struggles:
・Anki reviews are getting fairly high. Already gave up on completing anki for pronunciation flashcards. I flat refuse to give up on the kanji/etymology/keyword cards. As a result, no gaming this week.
・I find myself frustrated with the Heisig keywords a lot. Like, there are so many words within English, is it excusable to assign 秘 to secret and 密 to secrecy? Is it because these words share some kun-yomi? I dunno, there are so many synonyms for these words which would allow distinct keywords. I'm also constantly failing at keywords at times due to my own deficiencies as an English native. I learned how to read late, and so there are lots of pairs of words that trip me up in English, such as county 郡 and country 国 in writing. I don't have any trouble with these two in Japanese or in spoken English. Perhaps these flash cards will eventually solve this problem for me thru brute force. Other situations: I don't have a solid grasp of bestow 与 vs bequeath 遺 in English (other than as pretentious words for give), so I mix the keyword flashcards up. And then there are a handful of kanji which just have keywords which I do not understand the meaning of such as 旬 decameron (mentally subbing in my own keyword of 10 days) and supinate 臥 (still haven't worked out a plain English meaning of this despite referring to an English dictionary several times.)

Successes:
・I haven't missed a single day of study in a month.
・I have already have some knowledge of more secondary education kanji than I did grade 6 kanji for some reason.

[dicentra8]

I find myself frustrated with the Heisig keywords a lot. Like, there are so many words within English, is it excusable to assign 秘 to secret and 密 to secrecy?

Probably it isn't just with Heisig keywords, I remember I had a similar problem with some english keywords that appear in several resources. I really don't understand why the choice of some of them. True I'm not an english native speaker but some of them are just, like you said, "pretentious words" and/or quite uncommon I think.

I'm also constantly failing at keywords at times due to my own deficiencies as an English native. I learned how to read late, and so there are lots of pairs of words that trip me up in English, such as county 郡 and country 国 in writing. I don't have any trouble with these two in Japanese or in spoken English. Perhaps these flash cards will eventually solve this problem for me thru brute force. Other situations: I don't have a solid grasp of bestow 与 vs bequeath 遺 in English (other than as pretentious words for give), so I mix the keyword flashcards up. And then there are a handful of kanji which just have keywords which I do not understand the meaning of such as 旬 decameron (mentally subbing in my own keyword of 10 days) and supinate 臥 (still haven't worked out a plain English meaning of this despite referring to an English dictionary several times.)

That makes me remember of being the one big reason why I started doing my own course (at the time I was still using Memrise for flashcards), with my own english keywords. A lot of those keywords meant almost nothing or didn't help me at all with the meaning, so I decided to choose my own that actually helped me. I actually went through the whole 1st grade ~ 6th grade. Just followed the 教育漢字 list from the Goo website, checked shared keywords and meanings that helped me remember it and the compounds. Silly me after a while studying and reviewing the whole course decided to delete it in less than 2 seconds. I still tried to start doing it again (this time using Anki) but gave up. It's a lot of work (for the second time)! Recently I've been using again the app - 小学生手書き漢字ドリル1026 - just to "write" kanji, since it's been a long while...

[devilyoudont]

That makes me remember of being the one big reason why I started doing my own course (at the time I was still using Memrise for flashcards), with my own english keywords. A lot of those keywords meant almost nothing or didn't help me at all with the meaning, so I decided to choose my own that actually helped me. I actually went through the whole 1st grade ~ 6th grade. Just followed the 教育漢字 list from the Goo website, checked shared keywords and meanings that helped me remember it and the compounds. Silly me after a while studying and reviewing the whole course decided to delete it in less than 2 seconds. I still tried to start doing it again (this time using Anki) but gave up. It's a lot of work (for the second time)! Recently I've been using again the app - 小学生手書き漢字ドリル1026 - just to "write" kanji, since it's been a long while...

This project is really showing me how making your own course is an incredibly beneficial exercise... however it is indeed an incredible amount of work.

[tuckamore]

I feel your pain! I wager that I flat out didn’t know or had a fuzzy understanding of >5% of the English keywords in RTK. I cannot remember specific examples right now, but in general, a lot of the botanical key words were meaningless to me. You’re also not alone on confusing country and county when reading. I may have been in university before I didn’t have to pause when reading to think about which was which anymore (and I was even in the advance reading group in elementary school).

I offer some suggestions below for your specific grievances. But if you were just venting and weren’t interested in any unsolicited suggestions, just ignore them.

I don’t know if this work-around would work for how you test yourself and have your cards set-up. But, in the case of 秘 and 密, to give myself a break, I would probably put 「ひみつ」のひ and 「ひみつ」のみつ along side the English keyword, if I knew the word 秘密 already. I resorted to this trick for all the cards that have some connection to ‘me’, ’self’, etc., which constantly tripped me up.

Would it help you to think of 遺 as ‘leaving something behind’, rather than ‘bequeath’? I think this kanji is usually used in the sense of inheritance, both genetically and worldly positions. Or, maybe ‘leaving something behind’ is just as abstract as ‘bequeath?

It may be easier to flat out replace the keyword word for 臥 with ‘lay face up’. I think there is another entry for ‘lay down’ and this is why the more obscure ‘supinate’ is used. If ‘lay down’ is not used as another entry, then I would just use the simpler ‘lay down’. (Supinate generally refers to rolling your foot or hand outward, and in everyday use it is usually heard in the context of your foot. The opposite is pronate, which might be more familiar? I’m not sure anatomists would agree, but I think supine (and not supinate) is normally used for laying on your back and I think this is the concept that he was going for.)

[devilyoudont]

I feel your pain! I wager that I flat out didn’t know or had a fuzzy understanding of >5% of the English keywords in RTK. I cannot remember specific examples right now, but in general, a lot of the botanical key words were meaningless to me. You’re also not alone on confusing country and county when reading. I may have been in university before I didn’t have to pause when reading to think about which was which anymore (and I was even in the advance reading group in elementary school).

I offer some suggestions below for your specific grievances. But if you were just venting and weren’t interested in any unsolicited suggestions, just ignore them.

I don’t know if this work-around would work for how you test yourself and have your cards set-up. But, in the case of 秘 and 密, to give myself a break, I would probably put 「ひみつ」のひ and 「ひみつ」のみつ along side the English keyword, if I knew the word 秘密 already. I resorted to this trick for all the cards that have some connection to ‘me’, ’self’, etc., which constantly tripped me up.

Would it help you to think of 遺 as ‘leaving something behind’, rather than ‘bequeath’? I think this kanji is usually used in the sense of inheritance, both genetically and worldly positions. Or, maybe ‘leaving something behind’ is just as abstract as ‘bequeath?

It may be easier to flat out replace the keyword word for 臥 with ‘lay face up’. I think there is another entry for ‘lay down’ and this is why the more obscure ‘supinate’ is used. If ‘lay down’ is not used as another entry, then I would just use the simpler ‘lay down’. (Supinate generally refers to rolling your foot or hand outward, and in everyday use it is usually heard in the context of your foot. The opposite is pronate, which might be more familiar? I’m not sure anatomists would agree, but I think supine (and not supinate) is normally used for laying on your back and I think this is the concept that he was going for.)

OMG these are all incredibly great ideas. I was mainly venting, but I'm definitely gonna give them all a shot. And thanks for the easier definitions of bequeath and supinate.

[devilyoudont]

Japanese:
Input:
Podcasts (1hr 58min): ・メリケン!サックリドラマ!・恋愛心理学♡知りたい！相手の気持ち ・都市伝説オカンとボクと、時々、イルミナティ ・JLPT stories

SRS:
Made: 67 cards
Reviewed: 353 cards

Esperanto:
Gaming: Vortludo

So stuff is just going badly.

My workplace has decided to ban headphones, which is just a huge problem for me, because I was getting close to listening to an hour of Japanese daily at work. I was allowing this to be the majority of my input/fun time with Japanese and using my free time to focus on flash cards. I need to maintain some level of input, so I will need to make some sacrifices either in terms of flash cards or something else in my life. up to 15 days every month, I spend 10 hours a day at this awful job. I am already using my commute (a little over an hour a day) towards Japanese study.

I've been told that they will allow us to have a radio at our desk... But given that I'm not sure how long this policy will last, and I'm actively trying to get a different job for a myriad of reasons prior to this, I'm not sure about making an investment in a CD player and audio books on CD just in order to piss off the coworkers who sit around me.

We took our lizard to the vet for what appeared to be a mild illness, but he was diagnosed with early stages of an aggressive and terminal cancer. This disease apparently only started appearing in Bearded Dragons a few years ago. He is only 3 years old, and a species that lives into the early teenage years if properly cared for. We have made the decision that we will euthanize him, as the symptoms are quite horrifying as this disease progresses, and it is expected to progress quickly.

I've gave myself permission to more or less take a break this week, and since I'm not doing any flashcard preparation today, that break is going to extend to next Sunday. I need to allow myself some time here, but I don't want to get too far off track, so I will reevaluate on Saturday if I'm ready to take up my self imposed responsibilities again.

This hasn't actually been the worst year of my life or something, but it's probably been the most consistently awful. I am very proud of myself for continuing to stick with my goals thru this.

[MorkTheFiddle]

You have my sympathy about your job and my condolences for your lizard. Hard to let a pet go, I know.

[IronMike]

Sorry to hear about your lizard. Please post pictures if/when you feel you can. We had to put our dog down in January and it was rough for a few weeks, but posting pictures of him here and on FB have helped.

[devilyoudont]

My goal for this week is just to start Japanese again. Something every day, doesn't matter what.

I failed the Sumoo. Just couldn't do it.

But, things are generally looking up. It looks like I'll be transferring to a dept which hopefully does not require as much overtime, and is a raise to boot. This isn't finalized yet, but everything is looking good.

We decided we'll try to get another lizard in the spring. We aren't quite ready yet, but it's also painful to have his terrarium remain empty.

Here are some pictures of Rhodan. He was a good boy.