Week 5 - 8/5/23
Wanikani Level: 10 → 11
Minna no Nihongo Chapter: 11.5 → 12 / 25
よつばと！ Vol 1: 112 → 120 / 224
It’s been over a month now since I’ve upped my commitment to Japanese. Usually, a month is my stopping point when really honing in on things I like / want to do more of and when my self-sabotagey ways start popping out in every corner of my life which I am definitely feeling. Ever since getting sick last week I feel like I’ve uprooted a lot of personal progress from just even eating better and going to the gym which I’ve been really good about since the start of this year. Some shift happened and I think I need to fight back a little better. Maybe I make some checkboxes for that stuff too? o_o Fell off the planner route a bit too so maybe it’s all related. Little personal organizational refresh seems to be in order.
I did hit LEVEL 11 this week !! Super stoked about that. My second level up since doubling down and it feels correct. I think I have about a 2 week per-level trend going on right now. I think that’s… average? Maybe? Hopefully tbh.
Definitely dropped the ball on the textbook this week. Struggling to make time for it. Definitely a personal thing. I haven’t sat down with my pomodoro timer and steamrolled through chapters since the 2nd week which… feels bad man. But if I’m the problem then I guess I can’t complain too much. I did go through some of Sakubi though but I think a challenge here is me not saying “Well, I read sakubi, I don’t have to do the textbook” which… I did. 
Didn’t read as much which I need to fix because reading is definitely a major player here. I do think I found my vocab fix though. After fussing around with all my Anki decks I think I settled on Core 2k (shocker) on PC only and kinda am dismissing my phone from SRS duty. I also think this helps my brain association of SRS with my desktop for WK and Anki and to do it only there when I have to. I think the Core 2k (previously linked) has the best format, font sizing, and audio for my personal liking. Oddly finding the font change throwing me off which I think is good irl practice. Didn’t realize how Arial-esque WK is shown and having a more natural JP font in Anki is good practice. The one thing I’m hung up on with this deck is that furigana is only shown after I hit show which I might be able to change but I don’t know if I necessarily want to or SHOULD. I think what’s mainly throwing me off now is easy vocab that I know the kana of and that I haven’t reached my current WK level (ex: 低い, 仕事, etc — although I double-checked and I’ll learn these soon as I’m now level 11). Do I mark words as good or easy if I only know the kana or go strictly kanji or nothing? AND do I get the ‘Learning’ number down to zero every time I study Anki or just do the best I can? I’m a little strict and gladly mark things as ‘Hard’ as many times as I want but it won’t check if off until I mark the card as ‘Good’… what’s the call here? 
Also don’t know how to quantify Anki progress for this blog since the web app doesn’t have grades WHICH I found out is because AnkiWeb and AnkiApp are different things
In other news, I did work on my Coursera learning how to learn course again this week and did some reconfiguration so I guess I can claim it as another “personal project” — streaming. Long story short, I’ve dabbled in it a couple of times, I do marketing/social media for my work, it’s an experimental output for me to practice on myself, it never stuck, I’m trying it again, etc. NOW I do have to say this could very well be a delay tactic and self-sabotage but even I’m not 100% sure at this point. 
BUT I have been slowly adding more in my life as I’ve kind of solidified other things. Gym 3x a week 
, food tracking , Japanese , streaming? 
. I’m going to be more mindful and intentional with it and use it to also bang out some of these things that are filling my “other” categories. Drawabox, freeCodeCamp, and even some curated Coursera courses that I think now (with reflection) I can mesh better with the idea of streaming and not just have it flatline. Of course gaming too but intentional gaming. This time around I think I can fully do what I intended to do in the first place, which is getting better at content creation skills for my job career job thing.
The past 5 days I have definitely used a lot of mental space on recreating these ideas and configuring the intersection with all of this because my learning Japanese is also tied to it down the line. It’s just more of learning how to stay ahead of these ideas and be open to progress. And wow I’m ranting, so glad that no one’s reading this. 
Guess that’s all I gotta say?
If anyone is interested in me streaming I guess I could drop the @?
Will I be better at finishing MnN this week?
Will I crash and burn?
Find out next time on Dragon Ball Z !!
They tend to be at most like 100 or 200 level college course material, largely just introduction to x topic stuff. Useful for when you need it, but if you’ve already gone through enough college level courses the pace can be kinda slow to get to the stuff you actually want to know.
