ロウェナの学習ログ・（Rowena's Study Log）

Rowena · October 10, 2021, 5:45am

Tomorrow I start the penultimate unit in my Basic Kanji Vol 2 book, so have decided to add a bit of the Vol 1 workbook (red in schedule) back into the mix and to finish that before embarking on Vol 2 workbook and Intermediate Kanji Vol 1.

I am amazed at how much easier I am finding reading this time around and have so far managed to read 3 pages a day; I’m just reading, no note-taking and am only looking stuff up when I really can’t make out what is going on. Many thanks to @ChristopherFritz for flying ahead and making vocab look-ups easier, and unlike with previous book-club rules, I love that you have included the kanji even when they don’t appear in the book (in grey, not black - very sensible) - it just helps everything meld better with WK and my book studies .

Next week’s plan:

ChristopherFritz · October 10, 2021, 6:08am

I was afraid it might go the other way around. Something like this:

“I’m level 39. I can handle most any kanji a children’s book can throw at me.”

*Opens book and struggles to find more than two kanji.*

I felt that helped me “visualize” the words, even though more than half of them are kanji I don’t know yet.

I wasn’t certain the best way to go about it, and was afraid gray might make them a bit difficult to read, so I upped the font size a smidgen to try and compensate. Hopefully it’s working out!

Out of curiosity, what do you get out of a book like this? (I don’t recall if you mentioned already.) Is it mostly reviewing kanji you’ve already learned from WaniKani? Are you learning any “new” kanji that you haven’t reached in WaniKani yet? Does it introduce you to more vocabulary words that use each kanji, versus WaniKani that focuses on just enough works to get the readings down?

Not that I’m looking to try out a kanji book. Just curious. On my end, I’ve been adding kanji and vocabulary for early WaniKani kanji to Anki for review. When you’ve been at WaniKani as long as I have, it’s easy to forget some of the “rarer” (for what I read) kanji along the way!

Rowena · October 10, 2021, 12:41pm

This, exactly! Except I’m finding thanks to WK that I am recognising more and more of them.

The kanji are in a different order to WK (probably closer to the order the Japanese themselves learn them), so sometimes I’ve seen it first in the books (bearing in mind I bought Basic Vol 1 in 1998… ) and sometimes first in WK.

The books also do have some different vocab, but I think even more usefully, there will be themes (‘in a hospital’, ‘at the train station’) which help transform the kanji from single item to be memorised to a part of a system, allowing itself to better slot itself into place in my brain.

I also think that the act of writing them out helps me notice differences in similar kanji better than just by looking at them (the different stroke order for the first 2 strokes of left 左 and right 右 for example).

Nearly… Today is my 4-year anniversary on the Forum, 2 days after my I-started-Wanikani anniversary

Rowena · October 11, 2021, 5:16am

Also, regarding the kanji book, once you get a bit further along, you start to get realia to work with:

Rowena · October 13, 2021, 11:41am

Tonight is the first time in at least 5 months that I have seen this number of reviews;

Screenshot 2021-10-13 193748

The plan is to get it there most every night from now on (I do have 171+ reviews arriving on Nov 1st, so I may allow myself a few days to tackle them).

Rowena · October 25, 2021, 12:42am

I’ve not quite kept up the 3-pages-a-day with the bookclub over the last week, but want to get back to it, especially as it would seem that Christopher has finished the book already! I should finish the first case on Sunday. I also intend to add some items to the vocab sheet from pages where I got stuck.

I am enjoying my new slower-while-still-progressing pace on WK; much better than my faster-but-need-to-take-breaks-when-life-happens pace

This week’s study plan:

ChristopherFritz · October 25, 2021, 12:50am

Not finished yet! I did go through the second case’s case part, and will ponder on it this week before finding out next weekend that I missed every single clue.

I kept this up until the last few pages of case two’s case part. It ran long enough that I got bored with adding entries, though… So it can use any extra words it can in case one day in the far future, someone happens upon it =D

marcecoll · October 25, 2021, 7:40am

Hello! Not something directly related to your log, but, what is this software? I’ve been looking for planning software lately, and I haven’t found anything I like.

Rowena · October 25, 2021, 7:54am

It’s MS OneNote, and a recent-ish update has made it even more user-friendly for the most part.

trunklayer · October 25, 2021, 7:54am

This is a great software, btw, I highly recommend it.

marcecoll · October 25, 2021, 10:36am

Oh, sorry, just saw it was on the original post too, don’t know how I missed that! Will check it out, it’s been ages since I’ve used OneNote.

Will maybe start a Log too

Rowena · November 7, 2021, 2:07am

Didn’t get much done at all last week and even had WK on VM for much of the week; with all the odd stuff that keeps cropping up, I’m struggling a bit to find a rhythm and form some sort of new routine, but one thing I do know is that I should be hinging it all off my WK SRS routine / Study schedule, not dropping WK at the first bit of overwhelm.

I have been watching CureDolly’s Japanese from Scratch playlist, which ChristoperFritz kindly linked to in the upcoming bookclub thread, but I have formally added it to my plan below.

Rowena · November 7, 2021, 3:52am

And my reward for getting stuck back into my studies is…

Elizabella · November 8, 2021, 6:33pm

This is tough? I finally had to admit defeat and put myself on VM because life kept exploding. It has been a few weeks and not going to lie, I didn’t realize how much time I was spending on WK until I stopped doing it. And I’m not sure how I feel about that. “That” being a sense of freedom and relief that I don’t have reviews that need to be zero-d out everyday.

Which is not to say that I am tabling my studies- I continue to do other stuff as well- but maybe I need to figure out how to fit a day’s worth of reviews into only 30 minutes a day.

Rowena · November 12, 2021, 12:12pm

For me the issue has been procrastinating on some non-Japanese tasks to do with my separation/divorce, and some of my stress/anxiety-related ticks have been cropping up again. That procrastinating then spilled over into my Japanese studies.

I was forthright about it all with my therapist last week and committed to getting two of the longest-put-off items done before I see him again, and the lesser things have been swept up in the growing tide of productivity.

I do agree with you about the freedom of not having that SRS commitment everyday, usually multiple times a day, though, totally! I loved Kitsun.io but do not foresee using it again until WK reviews are down to once a day (a month or so past finishing lvl 60 lessons, perhaps).

With me being back to being a student from end of February, I figured I’d need to be studying daily anyway, so a bit of WK in there won’t make much of a difference

How are your studies going?

Oh, and speaking of my being more productive, I can finally post one of these again:

Rowena · November 15, 2021, 2:07am

I’ve decided to ditch my regular text book routine while I work my way through the Japanese from Scratch video playlist (thanks again Christopher for linking to it), but will add in the kanji workbook since most of the exercises are fairly short.

I had forgotten just how prolific the questions/answers can be at the beginning of a new book/manga series - waking up to 42 new posts is making me slightly uneasy (i.e. ) , but at least the pace for the first 4 weeks is half that of the rest of the book.

Current week’s plan:

ChristopherFritz · November 15, 2021, 2:34am

Be careful when going back. After Cure Dolly, reading a text book my result in mental strain as you ponder, “Why would they ever try and explain this Japanese grammar it by using that English grammar?” Hopefully your text book isn’t that one that results in that!

Book Club Comments

The one aspect of book clubs I haven’t yet found a good workaround for is avoiding conversation about pages I haven’t read yet. For now, I bookmark things to get back to later, but it’s still cumbersome. (Although there is the thing I’m testing in the third post on week one’s thread, that I haven’t mentioned to anyone yet.)

I’m curious to see how the amount of discussion changes by then. We have effectively 30 first-time readers. Some will probably drop off in the first few weeks (unfortunately), but I imagine the people who post multiple questions each week will be more likely to stick with it. The most basic questions should mostly be out of the way after the first month, so hopefully the transition to full chapters per week goes smoothly.

My biggest worry is that in an attempt to keep the pace from being too fast at the start, it may end up feeling too slow. Hopefully there’s enough comments throughout the week that it keeps lively!

Rowena · November 15, 2021, 4:10am

They will be like that - the one series was all ～ます・～です until the latter half of the second Basic volume, and the other is the Genki series. I’ll worry less about how they teach it and use them more for the exercises, and can always refer back to CureDolly if I start getting confused

Rowena · January 11, 2022, 12:26am

Hello @Imtryingjapanese! You closed your topic so I couldn’t reply there but am instead using my study thread to say that your situation is quite unusual and I think many of us would be very interested to follow if you were to write a thread about your experience as a high school student in Japan.

I taught in a Buddhist high school for my last year there, so I personally would love to read about the other side of the coin.

All the best!

Imtryingjapanese · January 11, 2022, 7:44am

I’ll make a proper post about it all later!