Japanese:My proper study time this week was once again made up entirely of drilling kanji, but there's good news with this. I am finally good on the review queue which I had previously generated, which should hopefully open up more time for me to study on Lingq.
In terms of kanji study, it's frustrating to not be moving faster, but I feel like the slow pace is really helpful for me. On the one hand I can probably continue on this path indefinitely without any problems, but on the other I feel like if I just learned in some different way, I would know more than 65% of the kanji at this point.
Some kanji are easy for me... I have a mental dictionary entry for them already, and I just need to either make some minor correction or I need to attach it to a word I already know... For instance in kanji which were an issue this week: 線 is a character I already know the word for, and I also already know both of it's components. But I persistently write the left side incorrectly as the component in 原. It is the case that the component in both characters is an evolution of 泉, but 原 has experienced some divergent evolution resulting in it more closely resembling the oracle bone script than the others. Or, I needed to improve my cards for both 差 and 識... because the Heisig Keyword for 識 is discriminating which gets mixed up with the Japanese word I already know 差別. But, I also already know words like 知識 意識... so improving the card is just a matter of of giving myself a phonetic clue and associating what the kanji looks like to words I already know. 塚 was originally being confused for many kanji pronounced おか because of the keyword "hillock" until I found it is a totally different word つか so that card just needed a phonetic hint as well. (The おか variants which I know mostly from place names will have to wait until they turn up as leeches and I find some method of distinguishing them)
On the other hand, as I am entering the final 700ish kanji on the joyo list, there are more and more kanji that I have simply no connection to. I am consistently failing 庸... not only do I not know any words related to this kanji, but some of it's component pieces are from outside of the joyo list... meaning that the semantic portion of this kanji is just completely opaque to me. Knowing that 用 is phonetic tho, and that the pronunciation よう at least matches in Japanese is good to know tho.
In listening news, I am still watching tons of art streams on twitch... I am generally doing this while working from home, generally from 7am to noon when I don't have any conference calls. This is probably resulting in 3 hrs a day, 5 days a week which is a huge improvement for me in terms of how much I am immersing myself in the spoken language. My favorite right now is a vtuber named
Yuma. He streams drawing, games like pokemon, and his English practice. His channel has auto closed captioning and auto English subtitles, which isn't perfect, but it's useful if you lose track of what's going on.
And I'm also still doing Genshin Impact! This game is really great for me because I can kind of choose how much Japanese I want to engage with. For the past 2 days I've been going in hard core on the quests, doing lots of reading or listening and reading at the same time (main story is voice acted)... Or like, closer to election day, I just decided to chill the hell out and focus on exploration. Both valid, both providing some Japanese exposure... but one day I'm mainly only seeing the names of objects I pick up, and on another it's a whole story. Also, I don't generally play single player games, but because this is mostly single player, it literally is fine if I misunderstand something on the first try.
Esperanto:I started doing Nanowrimo but have made basically no progress. I don't believe I will finish in a month, but I am just happy to have started something.
I told a friend I wanted to start a twitch stream, and he said he wanted to join too. So that would be mostly in Esperanto if/when it happens. Our first try had to be aborted because I couldn't figure out how to get both of us on a stream.
As always did my normal activities including chatting and weekly pictionary.