👻 Autumn's High Tech Study Log ✨ Learning Japanese at the speed of light with tech 🫨

[autumnalbees]

TL;DR I am very nerdy and use a research/experience based approach to learning. I am not afraid to get my hands dirty by writing code to optimise my learning. Follow along to see all the cool things I invent along the way

who am i

hi my name’s autumn! 26f from the UK. Autistic, coder and very very lazy. I am new here, been using Wanikani for 3 days!

I have been learning for 63 days so far, so I am still a newbie.

I have a 1700 duolingo streak, but I do not care about learning on there… the streak is just symbolic to me at this point as something I do no matter how bad or great my life is.

*my motivation"

for a long time i have been a big fan of anime, jpop and kpop. I’d like to visit japan one day too and i am having a lot of fun!

what i've done

• learnt hiragana (tofugu guide)
• katakana (although i still find it hard to read words, i plan to pratice this…)
• started an anki vocab deck, i really like JLAB as it talks about grammar, uses phrases some animes I have seen / want to watch, and it’s actually quite funny.
• Pimsleur - it is a bit of a bore but I find it very effective and fun

I also set up my own sentence mining workflow so I can grab words / sentences I see often and put them into anki

my anki workflow for sentence mining

• yomitan
• jp-mining-note
• jpdb freq dict (i love seeing how popular words are that i see)
• sharex for audio + screenshot
• i have mpv and mpvacious setup but i mostly use animelon. i dont really use any automation here either… i do use a texthooker but its not like my anki cards automatically create with sentence audio + screenshot, im too lazy to do that
• anki (fsrs, heatmap)

i have around 200 vocab / sentences in my anki deck over the last 2 months, which is pretty great for a newbie!

why wanikani?

so my sentence mine cards where audio + text → definition.

i figured its probably a good idea to also read japanese as well as listen (not my biggest priority, but still one haha).

I switched to text only on the front of my cards, and boy. I suck. Like a lot.

Cards which were previously very easy I had no idea what they were. Nani!? – What’st that?I said to the kanji on the front of my Nani card

Soo I thought I’d do some dedicated kanji study using wanikani to supplement this.

daily routine

• anki always - usually around 20 mins.
• wanikani - only been doing it for 3 days, but every time i learn some new kanji etc i write it out by hand 10 times and if it looks a bit awkward I just make a new mnemonic. For example “twice with only 8 members is yattsu!” (which just sounds like a rude word to me haha)
• i tend to immerse in the evening with anime, movies, music, youtube videos etc. not always but most evenings.

other things i do

• i have a pimsleur goal each week to reach level, i tend to do it 3/4 days a week. i love it but sometimes i am just not in the right headspace for it haha.
• i watch some youtube videos about the language
• Play hiragana forbidden speech, a video game about learning 250 words, all the hiragana, some grammar and also some cultural things (it’s also genuinely a fun game)

my goals

• n5 by summer
• CKA by March (a tech cert I am working towards)
• End of year: visit japan

tools I use

Sentence Mining

• https://migaku.com/ for most of my sentence mining
• For local videos I use MPV and MPVacious GitHub - Ajatt-Tools/mpvacious: Adds mpv keybindings to create Anki cards from movies and TV shows.
• Anki for flashcards / SRS
• My note-type is Home - jp-mining-note for local stuff but I use the Migaku note type if mining through Migaku
• To capture audio / video locally I use ShareX

Kanji

• Kanjigod
• Wanikani
• Kanji Koohii to find alternative mnemonics for kanji

tools I used

• Duolingo - Too slow
• Pimsleur - Like it a lot, but output is a bit awkward for me
• Japanese like a breeze - best starter Anki deck, I got to around 600 words before starting my own mining deck.

I plan to update this weekly hopefully haha

[taiyousea]

Welcome!! Making a study log is a great choice, my progress sped up significantly when I started recording my process while seeing in real-time what works for other people.

I hope you reach your goals this year! I look forward to your updates ^–^

[Shin]

Welcome, Autumn!! Best of luck with your studies, and looking forward to your progress!

@autumnalbees

for a long time i have been a big fan of anime, jpop and kpop.

What jpop do you like to listen to if I may ask?

[autumnalbees]

thank youuu <3 <3

What jpop do you like to listen to if I may ask?

honestly Twice (kpop) sometimes do jpop songs and they have a jpop subgroup (misamo)

lots of anime but also some covers, like doja cat etc. i am really into this hyperpop artist rn https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aocYZAJ1RL0

[autumnalbees]

Week 1

Level 2 in Wanikani! I am going to take it a bit easy and not go overboard on lessons

Jitai
I really LOVE Jitai on wanikani Jitai (字体): The font randomizer that fits I think it makes so much sense and it’s very fun.

I found this anki addon to do the same and some more https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1476821676 , it works super well!! (fun fact: this works on all my cards. so now i have super weird non-japanese cards haha)

i could change this in the settings but maybe it’s good for me…

But hey! At least it’s fun fonts!

And now my cards have become a lil bit harder as I try to work out… What exactly is that supposed to be!

It is maybe working a bit too good.

Kanji God
My problem of “not knowing the kanji in my cards” might be solved by https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1872210448

I installed it, but the cards it makes are so ugly (in the code). They encode it as base64 for some reason?

Physically they are pretty

I am thinking the card type just unmarshals this base64 and handles it, it makes it harder for me to edit it manually lol. not sure if i want that?

Essentially what I want to do:

• make kanji anki cards from vocab cards i have mined (whether that’s look-a-head or just on the fly)
• ability to add custom stories
• know how to write it (important as i hand-write kanji)

This addon looks ahead to cards coming up (so if I see a card next week with a kanji, it will teach it to me now).

It also sees the kanji’s radicals & primitives and teaches me those first too, so I get like an order to my learning which is quite nice.

It also uses kanjii koohi stories which are always fun (some of their stories make me laugh out loud. 金 being a fat rich man who greedily takes up all the space under the umbrella, but he’s not really fat. He’s just hiding a lot of gold under his clothes)

It does seem to work good. 辛 is a kanji I see frequently (personally) but it’s lvl44 in wanikani, it wouldn’t make much sense for me to wait 1+ years to see that before learning it. My goals really are to build up a baseline vocab / kanji (through wk etc) but also specifically the stuff I enjoy I need to learn

My only complaint is the format is a bit weird (it being base64), and that Migaku are not in my good books for creating software then abandoning it for their VC-funded SRS-suite which isn’t very good. I do not look forward to the day this addon breaks forever (hopefully someone can & will maintain it though, as it is open source!)

Migaku

Migaku came out of the wood works with a cool update:

Migaku

Previously my yomitan / asb / sharex setup was a bit troublesome. This makes it SO much easier!

The only bad thing is that because I am awkward and do not use the Migaku SRS (but rather send to Anki) I cannot easily keep track of what words I know…

I wrote a python script to use ankiconnect to go through my mature cards and print the words (sometimes sentences) I know. I think Migaku parses words… It then puts it into “known words” into anki (by hand) and I can highlight words I know. Anyway, here’s the script:

import requests
import json

url = "http://localhost:8765"

# JLAB
# gets cards
payload = json.dumps({
  "action": "findCards",
  "version": 6,
  "params": {
    "query": "deck:\"Default::Jlab's beginner course::Part 1: Listening comprehension\" prop:ivl>21"
  }
})
headers = {
  'Content-Type': 'application/json'
}

response = requests.request("POST", url, headers=headers, data=payload)
resp_txt = response.json()
# list of card IDs
card_ids = resp_txt["result"]

# get cards
payload = json.dumps({
  "action": "cardsInfo",
  "version": 6,
  "params": {
    "cards": card_ids
  }
})
headers = {
  'Content-Type': 'application/json'
}

response = requests.request("POST", url, headers=headers, data=payload)
resp_txt = response.json()

words = []

for i in resp_txt["result"]:
    words.append(i["fields"]["Jlab-Kanji"]['value'])


# Mining
# gets cards
payload = json.dumps({
  "action": "findCards",
  "version": 6,
  "params": {
    "query": "deck:\"Default::mining\" prop:ivl>21"
  }
})
headers = {
  'Content-Type': 'application/json'
}

response = requests.request("POST", url, headers=headers, data=payload)
resp_txt = response.json()
# list of card IDs
card_ids = resp_txt["result"]


payload = json.dumps({
  "action": "cardsInfo",
  "version": 6,
  "params": {
    "cards": card_ids
  }
})
headers = {
  'Content-Type': 'application/json'
}

response = requests.request("POST", url, headers=headers, data=payload)
resp_txt = response.json()


for i in resp_txt["result"]:
    try:
        words.append(i["fields"]["Key"]["value"])
    except error as e:
        print("failed to work on")
        print(i)

text = "\n".join(map(str, words))
print(text)

And for all cards (so I don’t add the same card twice. The plan is to use the above script to find i+1 content, and the below script to let any tools I am using know this word is in my queue and I do not need to re-add it to my queue )

import requests
import json
import re

url = "http://localhost:8765"

# JLAB
# gets cards
payload = json.dumps({
  "action": "findCards",
  "version": 6,
  "params": {
    "query": "deck:\"Default::Jlab's beginner course::Part 1: Listening comprehension\""
  }
})
headers = {
  'Content-Type': 'application/json'
}

response = requests.request("POST", url, headers=headers, data=payload)
resp_txt = response.json()
# list of card IDs
card_ids = resp_txt["result"]

# get cards
payload = json.dumps({
  "action": "cardsInfo",
  "version": 6,
  "params": {
    "cards": card_ids
  }
})
headers = {
  'Content-Type': 'application/json'
}

response = requests.request("POST", url, headers=headers, data=payload)
resp_txt = response.json()

words = []

for i in resp_txt["result"]:
    try:
        words.append(i["fields"]["Jlab-Kanji"]['value']).strip()
    except:
        continue


# Mining
# gets cards
payload = json.dumps({
  "action": "findCards",
  "version": 6,
  "params": {
    "query": "deck:\"Default::mining\""
  }
})
headers = {
  'Content-Type': 'application/json'
}

response = requests.request("POST", url, headers=headers, data=payload)
resp_txt = response.json()
# list of card IDs
card_ids = resp_txt["result"]


payload = json.dumps({
  "action": "cardsInfo",
  "version": 6,
  "params": {
    "cards": card_ids
  }
})
headers = {
  'Content-Type': 'application/json'
}

response = requests.request("POST", url, headers=headers, data=payload)
resp_txt = response.json()


for i in resp_txt["result"]:
    # try excepts handle all my note types
    try:
        w = (i["fields"]["Key"]["value"])
        words.append(w.strip())
    except:
        try:
            w = (i['fields']['Word']['value'])
            words.append(w.strip())
        except:
            word = i['fields']['Target Word']['value']
            cleaned_string = re.sub(r'\[.*?\]|\s', '', word)
            words.append(cleaned_string)

text = "\n".join(map(str, words))

with open('output.txt', 'w', encoding='utf-8') as f:
    f.write(text)

print("wrote to file")

It’s ugly, but it works! I have 282 words which are mature! That’s so many for me haha.

I have around 2000 words total, about 160 i have mined and the rest are from prebuilt decks.

Thoughts on Migaku so far

I think it’s probably the best immersion tool for people who don’t like to get down & dirty with their tools. For me personally it does not have features I like (Jitai!, Kanji God, fsrs etc) and being “locked in” into an ecosystem isn’t the best.

Even in this forum post I took advantage of how open Anki is to get a list of all words I know, where “know” is what I define rather than someone else.

However, I LOVE how easy it is to use and how seamless it is compared to the other options out there. I am using it, but sending data to Anki instead

immersion this week

• suzume (eng subs)
• demon slayer (eng subs. Yes I finished the entire swordsmith arc in 1 night haha)
• Old Enough 1 episode (eng + jpn subs, sentence mining. the kids subs are built into the video so its a bit annoying, the narrator has his own proper soft-subs though!)
• My neighbor totoro (jpn + eng subs, sentence mined) but only like 20 mins
• shirokuma cafe episode 2 (jpn only, sentence mined)
• The way of the house husband episodes 1, 2 & 3 (jpn, sentence mined)

The way of the house husband is so very funny. It’s about an ex-Yakuza boss who becomes a househusband and takes it very seriously.

1. You learn a lot of words / vocab on everyday life as he’s a househusband. So he goes shopping, uses points cards, buys flowers, cleans etc.
2. It’s very funny because he’s an ex-Yakuza boss and sometimes takes it a bit seriously, or people fight him becuase of his background and he’s like “No! My green onions!”

What didn’t go so well
No pimsleur or CKA training this week

ToDo list for next week:

• Don’t study sentence mine cards, instead do 10 kanji / radicals a day for cards in my sentence mining. I think because it includes radicals I am a bit “behind” on my sentence mined cards, so to get up to speed I should just do kanji next week.
• This includes Wanikani too
• I have been doing a Katakana deck on Anki for a few weeks just to memorise them (as I found them a bit harder than Hiragana). I finish that next week!
• Sentence mine more, it’s so much fun!
• I should focus more on my job tbh. so I just think focus on anki + WK, and sentence mine if i have spare time!
• I use 2 card types in anki, can I reduce this to 1? Does it matter?

to explore

• My only problem is migaku not knowing what words i have already sentence mined… I can fix this by using their SRS, but I don’t wannnnaaaaa
• they have this weird thing where u can track words. so learning words (only through their srs) = yellow, green = known (through srs or through importing known words), and tracked = red (only used in the UI for now). I am thinking each type i make a flashcard i track it, and when i look at it and go “i know what that is” i move it to known… lmaooo
• Right now not much of a problem because of how few words I know. Will only be a problem in the future, and I am hoping some techniques will exist by then to handle this!

To review next week:

• Is kanji god actually working? There’s a lot of kanji and when I search them I can’t entirely find what cards they’re from. Might be because they’re radicals / used in other kanji? Need to keep an eye on this

Oh, and here’s some stats.

[taiyousea]

Wow, I love all the notes you’ve taken!! Congrats on your level-up ^–^

I’ve never heard of Migaku but that looks incredibly handy, I will definitely check it out.

[autumnalbees]

Haha thanks!! And yes, I have been using it quite a lot actually. My previous setup was more free but took maybe 15 seconds to make flashcards. Now I can do it in 1 click I make so many! And they go to Anki where I own my own vocab!!

[autumnalbees]

How to Learn Japanese (The ULTIMATE Guide)

I am very much in the “make your own flashcards and immerse” camp, following in the footsteps of Livakivi (although things like wanikani are ok to me, as I can export my data and i don’t mind paying for things that help me speed up)

[autumnalbees]

I have been thinking of what’s working and what’s not, and I think my plans are:

To keep

• Anki everyday
• Kanji god flashcard deck
• Wanikani
• Sentence mining anime

To bin

• Pimsleur. I love it, but I think i can go faster and I don’t really need output right now…
• Japanese like a breeze anki deck, purely for my own mining deck. I’ll just stop new cards and review older ones.

To try

• I know a bit of grammar, but I should builder a braoder base. I’ll book some time in 2 weeks to go through https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ojVS-KgDEg
• I will try Satori reader https://www.satorireader.com/
• https://crystalhuntersmanga.com/ I brought for like £2 so I’ll try finishing that too.
• NHK news article look nice, I’ll check them out!

Plan:

• Next week is Kanji week, minimal vocab stuff is preferable. I am aiming for around 100 kanji next week
• Sentence mining next week
• Afterwards I will try things out

TL;DR

• spam kanji next week so it stops holding me back
• anki everyday
• grammar in 1 day
  ^^ I don’t think I need bunpro for this. SRS for grammar seems silly to me (if it works for you, use it!) right now because I will get the benefits of a grammar SRS naturally by just reading everyday / immersing.

**I should say… I am lazy, but in the sense that I minimise long-term work. I am more than happy to put in an extra few hours at the start if it means I do not have to put in 10+ hours later on. **

[autumnalbees]

Week 2 - Kanji Week!

This is how many flashcards I have sentence mined before the week starts!

I am only planning to do mostly kanji this week. I am having trouble going through my sentence mine cards because the Kanji trips me up so much. So I am planning to learn around 100 Kanji this week

Day 1:

• About 15 kanji from anki, 2 lessons from WK.
• WK is so hard haha. I am having trouble remembering similar vocab I should focus way more on these!

Immersion

• Pokemon concierege eps 3 & 4 (jp only sentce mined, so cute!!)
• Way of the househusband ep 4 (jpn only sentence mined)
• Thermae Romae Norvae ep 1 (jpn only sentence mined)
• Shirakuma Cafe episode 3 (jpn only sentence mined)

Day 2:
My company announced layoffs! Sad! Not sure if I’m affected yet.

My failure rate for Wanikani right now is quite high, and I’m at 24 in apprentice.

It is mostly vocab to be honest. A few leeches. I will not do any new WK lessons today just to squash the leeches. Maybe I will do a concentrated study quiz.

I do not want to do more lessons to add more fuel to the fire.

+10 anki kanji, so overall I am up maybe +30 kanji this week. The anki one’s aren’t so bad I have 70ish kanji left, so that’s around 14 a day!

Immersion

• My Neigbour Totoro (jpn only sentence mined)
• Way of house husband episode 5 (jpn only sentnece mine)
• Some NHK news (just a few sentences, sntc mined ofc)
• like 5 mins of shirokuma cafe (jpn only sntc mined)

It is pretty cool that I have been learning Japanese for just over 2 months and I can already watch anime and use it as a tool to learn

[taiyousea]

@autumnalbees

My company announced layoffs! Sad! Not sure if I’m affected yet.

Oh my gosh, that’s horrifying Fingers crossed that you remain unaffected and keep your position Seems this is happening everywhere right now, it’s so demoralizing

[autumnalbees]

Thank you! I do not think it’d be too bad if the severance package was good, but again that’s betting on a future I am uncertain about

Day 3 of Kanji week

• Wanikani - my leeches weren’t so hard anymore, so I have done some more lessons
  I will of course spend some time making sure I get them right.

Some of the radicals / kanji I have come across in Anki before, so it’s not too hard for me Did 3 lessons!

A lot in my apprentice box, will wait a bit for them to cool down before doing new lessons. It’s like a snowball. The more snow you add now, the more it balls later and it could overpower you. Better to take it slowly and monitor how the snowball builds to optimise my routine rather than do it all at once, burn out and never touch Wanikani again!

I reviewed them all a few hours later and I have many mistakes haha. It’s great, this learning thing. You just sorta bang your head against the wall until you remember, then you learn some new things and do it all over again!

question do I need to 100% a level to Guru before I move onto the next level? Or can a few leeches follow me around for a bit? How does leveling up work?

• My katakana deck has no new cards and over half are mature!
  

  
  
  I did this because I couldn’t read Katakana as fluently as I’d liked to be able to, so I thought I’d memorise each Katakana haha!

• Anki Kanji deck
  This is made up of the first few Kanji that appears in my sentence mining deck, including radicals and kanji that make up kanji.

I started at 128 and I am down to 79 now!

The idea is to spend this week catching up on Kanji, so next week I can go through my sentence mine cards and not be entirely lost. I found it was really hard for me to remember them because I didn’t know Kanji very well…

Other things

Valentines day! I worked out pretty hard in a 7am workout class, and later on I’m going axe throwing for Galentines day <3

Immersion

• Delicious in Dungeon ep 1 (jpn only sntc mined) - first like 5 mins haha.

[NeoArcturus]

Since you seem to have leeches: Have you tried @prouleau 's item inspector? I’ve been throwing this link around in the forum the entire day already bc I’m so happy that I was finally able to install it (basically, I just needed to restart my browser so that it was able to use the kanji stroke order font, but it appears like I was too stupid to find that out the first two times I tried installing it lol), but it might help you

[araigoshi]

@autumnalbees

question do I need to 100% a level to Guru before I move onto the next level? Or can a few leeches follow me around for a bit? How does leveling up work?

You need 90% of the kanji to have been at Guru 1 or higher to level up.

[autumnalbees]

day 4

So there is layoffs, and I could be impacted. Good news, I am not yet. Bad news - there is a consultation period and I will not know for 50 days

• anki
  +10 kanji in anki
• 3 lessons in WK
• some bunpro n5

immersion:

• way of the house husband (jpn only sentence mined)
• cowboy bebop but theres no jpn subs I’d need to find some haha.

day 5

• Anki +10 kanji
• +3 WK lessons
• • ~10 Bunpro lessons (only because I know the grammar already).

bunpro tip There are user scripts for that too! User scripts for bunpro.jp

I like the quizes on grammar, it’s good fun

immersion:

• way of the house husband ep 6? i think (jpn only sentence mined) - Still super funny.
• Blue period ep1 (jpn only sentence mined, first 20 mins) - I am LOVING This but I think I might have to watch with dual subs… Like, I love it so much I want to understand it rather than understand 20/30% of it.
• Elfen Lied episode 1 - I think as a kid I loved this because of the shock factor, but now-a-days its meh.
• shirokuma cafe ep 6 - still the best newbie anime imo, the story just doesn’t grip me.

[autumnalbees]

thank yoiuuu <34 i’ll check it out!!

[autumnalbees]

immersion

• Shirokuma cafe ep 7, sentence mined
• I discovered I can watch Japanese Netflix with a VPN
  This means I can watch effectively A LOT in Japanese.

What I’ve watched so far:

• Yu Gi Oh Dark side of Dimensions - only a lil bit
• Chibi Maruko-chan ep 991 [first half] (kids show, first thing that came up when I searched)
  ^^ This is very good for me, a lot of I+1 sentences

I love Shirokuma cafe too but it’s a bit boring…

Chibi Maruko-Chan is very funny in a way I can understand. She meets some people who are training for a marathon and they ask her if she wants to join. She proceeds to make the fakest coughing noises I have ever heard

I rewatched Krashen’s video too, probably the most influential lecture on language learning there is!

Stephen Krashen on Language Acquisition

[autumnalbees]

day 6

• +1 WK lesson
• Bunpro reviews
• WK reviews
• Anki Kanji +10 Kanji and reviews

Day 7
end of kanji week

• +10 anki kanji

• Wanikani reviews (100 in Guru!)
  

  
  
  and my stats:
  

• Bunpro reviews
  Turns out my grammar SUCKS and I need to pratice it more…
  
  Do I sense a grammar week?

• Sentence mined cards have doubled! I started with 300 last week, so this is almost 50 cards a day I added! 50 new words / cool sentences I didn’t know before. Fun!
  

  

So in total I have learnt 128 Kanji this week! A lot! But I did get the kickstart I wanted.

New routine:
Morning

• Study sentence mines, 10 new / day
• Study Kanji in Anki, 5 new / day (these come from sentence mines, so I should see the kanji before I see the mined vocab/sentence. Meaning they should be easier)
• Wanikani reviews
• Bunpro Reviews
• 1 new Wanikani lesson (will do more if the lesson consists of Kanji I learnt through Anki)
  Continue hand-writing every Kanji I come across and hand-writing the mneomics, making my own up if I can think of any better mneomics (this takes a while so 1 new lesson a day is a bit of stretch, but manageable)
• 2 new Bunpro lessons (Only if accuracy is high in my reviews, I don’t want to add more fuel to the fire)
• CureDolly grammar

evening

• watch anime & sentence mine :3
• WK reviews, but if I’m tired then like only 10 or so. It’s no biggie if I don’t do this

The idea is to do all the boring stuffi in the morning so the evening I can just relax and watch anime and call that studying haha!

[autumnalbees]

Week 3 of Study Log

Time spent

I started time tracking again using Toggl!

I studied 25 hours this week. 50% of my time was spent sentence mining / watching anime.

21% (6 hours) was on grammar.

10% (2 hours) on Anki.

1 hour 30 on Wanikani

I am writing this on Saturday, I expect to do some grammar today but I am also going out partying tonight so maybe not so much tomorrow!

Sentence Mining

I started going through my sentence mined cards. The kanji week definitely helped, but it still feels like such a struggle. I am bashing my head so hard against the vocab I have collected, trying to remember it.

It’s annoying, but it’s necessary.

I think “what if my brain just can’t learn Japanese?”

But then you look up stats. Japanese children take 1 year to learn 80 Kanji, and I did that in just a few days last week haha.

I do feel like quitting, I feel so frustrated. But I can’t stop. Future me would be so dissapointed in myself.

I am doing 5 new cards a day.

A lot of my vocab are Kanji, and sometimes I have a vocab card with only Kanji and its very hard for me to read, and the Kanji is so complex. Makes me want to rip my hair out!

I found some sentences on Jisho and put them in, it helps a lot.

The Kanji suffering will continue, but on the bright side there are people 1 or 2 years ahead of me who regret sentence mining without Kanji. I guess right now it is painful, but in the future it will be worth it?

I am thinking of upping this to 10 new cards a day next week.

Also worried that 99% of my sentence mined cards are vocab, and I have a lot of issues with them being Kanji-fied. I am hoping it will be better in the future!

Grammar

This week I realised my grammar was… bad!

I started using Bunpro and going through Curedolly. It’s working quite well, actually. It is also frustrating and I bang my head against a wall almost daily… But I am starting to recgonise grammar

I brought a Bunpro subscription too!

I am hoping that by joining some bookclubs my grammar will become better.

My accuracy is not great. I just can’t conjugate ru-verbs / Godan verbs. Everything else is ok though I am hoping more practice would help, maybe read up more and maybe even just start conjugating verbs for fun!

Maybe I should do some conjugation pratice like Japanese Conjugation Practice Review , or buy Genki and do the stuff in that?

And I feel like my grammar is ok for reading. I read “no” and know that means possession, but to be able to write this myself and decide to use no? It’s a bit awkward.

I really feel so very frustrated with my learning right now. But I’ve just got to remember, kids do not learn as fast as this. Most adults give up. I’ve just got to break through!

Immersion

This week I watched…

• Yu-Gi-Oh! Dark Dimension - I loved YuGiOh as a kid so this was super fun to watch.
• Chibi Maruko - Japanese kids show, I know a lot of the words. It’s fun to watch!
• Way of the house husband - A class in this forum post.
• Mira Nikki - This is way above my level, but I am loving watching it so I watch it anyway. There’s some words, sentences I know.
• Death note - one of my faves, I have rewatched it a lot in English. Excited to get through it in Japanese!

Reading

I set up lingua-cafe-home which is a webapp to read books and make Anki cards from them. It’s like a mix of Kindle (managing your library, seeing books etc) and Mokuro (looking up words, Anki-fying them etc).

I can’t read books yet, so it’s not super useful to me. But it’s fun!

Speaking of Mokuro, I set that up too. GitHub - kha-white/mokuro: Read Japanese manga inside browser with selectable text. to read manga that I buy, this looks great and I am already liking the idea!

I am also exploring visual novels.

Wanikani

Hoping to level up this weekend!

Jitai fun?

I was informed of this 54gb torrent of Anime fonts VERY LARGE COLLECTION OF ANIME FONTS :: Nyaa

Every font ever used in anime.

Jitai is an addon that randomises the font in Wanikani.

I am thinking of trying to play around and make it use a random font from this collection. On the one hand, it’d be so cool to use actual fonts used in anime subtitles. 54gb is a lot! The fonts would likely never repeat haha!

On the other hand, this is obviously just a nerdy project and some fun for me I guess.

There is also this much smaller 2gb font collection Japanese Fonts :: Nyaa , I think I will try this. I think it’d add a lot of fun and help me learn if I use actual fonts used in anime

I know there are maybe CORS issues, I am not too sure. I’d have to look into how Jitai works technically to do this

The code appears to use both google fonts and local fonts:

Code

let font_pool = {

“Hiragino-Kaku-Gothic-Pro” : {full_font_name: “Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro, ヒラギノ角ゴ Pro W3”, display_name: “Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro”, url: ‘local’, recommended: false},

“Hiragino-Maru-Gothic-Pro” : {full_font_name: “Hiragino Maru Gothic Pro, ヒラギノ丸ゴ Pro W3”, display_name: “Hiragino Maru Gothic Pro”, url: ‘local’, recommended: false},

“Hiragino-Mincho-Pro” : {full_font_name: “Hiragino Mincho Pro, ヒラギノ明朝 Pro W3”, display_name: “Hiragino Mincho Pro”, url: ‘local’, recommended: false},

// Default Windows fonts

“Meiryo” : {full_font_name: “Meiryo, メイリオ”, display_name: “Meiryo”, url: ‘local’, recommended: false},

“MS-PGothic” : {full_font_name: “MS PGothic, ＭＳ Ｐゴシック, MS Gothic, ＭＳ ゴック”, display_name: “MS Gothic”, url: ‘local’, recommended: false},

“MS-PMincho” : {full_font_name: “MS PMincho, ＭＳ Ｐ明朝, MS Mincho, ＭＳ 明朝”, display_name: “MS Mincho”, url: ‘local’, recommended: false},

“Yu-Gothic” : {full_font_name: “Yu Gothic, YuGothic”, display_name: “Yu Gothic”, url: ‘local’, recommended: false},

“Yu-Mincho” : {full_font_name: “Yu Mincho, YuMincho”, display_name: “Yu Mincho”, url: ‘local’, recommended: false},

// GoogleFonts

“Zen-Kurenaido” : {full_font_name: “Zen Kurenaido”, display_name: “Zen Kurenaido”, url: ‘https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Zen+Kurenaido&subset=japanese’, recommended: false},

}

I asked in the main thread:

Jitai (字体): The font randomizer that fits

Hey! I have a custom Windows font I want to add. is it a case of adding it to the JSON object? let font_pool = { ? Like one of these? // Default Windows fonts "Meiryo" : {full_font_name: "Meiryo, メイリオ", display_name: "Meiryo", url: 'local', recommended: false},

But reading the code, you add the fonts you have locally and the code iterates over them and then chooses a random one to show.

Something to note is that it looks like it processes the fonts before showing them. If you have 54gb of fonts… this will take a while…. 2gb may be pushing it… Will let you know!

Some of the fonts are super small. Like <1 mb. Loading these they only appear to have numbers, so I have removed these.

A lot of fonts other people use tend to be around 5mb. I am worried that using a smaller font will not have all the characters in them.

Migaku Fun

This week Migaku added a very cool feature.

Migaku

You can now hover over a word, a pop-up dictionary will show and if you press “q” Migaku will automatically make an Anki card for you! This is such a cool feature, I love it SO much!

On top of this I’ve been using Migaku with Mokuro (kinda). It scans the entre manga and says “you will understand 20% of words here, also there’s 3 sentences you should mine because they’re I+1 sentences” which is so cool!

I just brought a subscription. I think Migaku are one of the game changers for language learning.

Book clubs

• I plan to join the Island visual novel ISLAND 🏝 (Visual Novel Book Club) // Starts March 1st! - #15 by Akashelia club
• And also Granny Girl! 老女的少女ひなたちゃん・Little Granny Girl Hinata-chan 👩‍👧 ー Starting March 9th (Absolute Beginner Book Club)

I am thinking of reading Granny Girl now in advanced.

[NeoArcturus]

@autumnalbees

I just can’t conjugate ru-verbs / Godan verbs.

Perhaps this might help you? It definitely helped me, so it might be worth giving it a shot. (Would have never thought that I’d be able to bring that up again lol, I thought that I was the only one that had problems with memorizing the different conjugations)