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

[autumnalbees]

Thanks so so so much for this! Did you find writing your own guide to help you learn them? Maybe I should write my own

[NeoArcturus]

Yeah, it definitely helped me! Not sure if this kind of learning (or practicing, in your case) would help other people as well, though. Best thing to do is to try, I guess.

[soggyboy]

@autumnalbees

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.

Hey!
This is a little concerning to me. I worry that you’re taking on content that’s a bit too difficult as a beginner. Honestly, if you are struggling this hard with sentence mining, maybe you should not be sentence mining at this level. It might be a better idea to focus on learning beginner grammar and beginner vocabulary, and spend your immersion time just passively absorbing what you can without trying to understand everything.

[Jezzieangel]

I agree with Soggy here. Your brain can’t absorb the meanings of everything all at once, especially when the vocab is in sentences with grammar that’s unfamiliar to you. Of course that would be frustrating!

If there’s too many unknown things in one card, it’s normal not to be able to understand it.

You may find more success and better retention if you narrow down your focus for now. I like to make new cards in two ways:

• New grammar points using vocabulary and kanji I already know, so the focus is on the grammar.
• New vocabulary in sentence forms I already know, so that the focus is on the vocabulary.

Try to have only one unknown thing per card for a while. Yeah, it’ll feel too easy, but then you’ll realize that you recognize that thing ALL THE TIME and you no longer need the card.

Good luck, and go easy on yourself!

[autumnalbees]

Ha, I say “sentence mining” but it is much more like “vocab mining”. I have very few actual sentences, maybe 3 out of 1100 cards so far.

For Kanji in the vocab i am using https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1872210448 , so the actual flashcards are very minimal in terms of “new” knowledge (just vocab → english translation, and the kanji I should have already learnt), and it’s not entirely new knowledge becasue I did hear that word often enough to make a card out of it!

I think my stratergy is just to suspend leeches and move on

[polv]

Sometimes vocabularies can be remembered easily because of familiarity and having experienced enough context. Sometimes they can be guessed, so no need to try to remember the words, and sometimes even no need to look up. Sometimes, the meaning could be realized a few second later, not always immediately.

On the other hand, remembering vocabularies might be helpful; but there are still limits to how many can be done at a time. Say, a burst of energy, and then revising in a recovery time, like sleep. There are memorizing tricks, but then remembering might lack sufficient linguistic context.

There is goodness to both ways, but it’s probably better not to force the second way too much.

@autumnalbees

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.

Japanese children learn Kanji after knowing how to speak Japanese.

But then, you aren’t a child. There is some possibility of being more efficient than a child. (But no guarantee )

[autumnalbees]

Just remembered I should probably add Bunpro stats!

[autumnalbees]

• Read my first graded reader on Tadoku! Going to read some more over the coming week.
  青い – にほんごたどく

• Did some cram sessions on Bunpro, I know a bunch of things now… I think just need to pratice negation hehe. Hopefully reading will make this better

[autumnalbees]

Week 4

• Level up on Wanikani!!!

Anki is +20 mature cards from last week!

• I mined about 500 high freq vocabs not in my anki deck yet

  • From the migaku vocab freq list

• I downloaded a bunch of anime fonts and added them to a randomiser on Anki, it’s so much fun!

24 hours this week learning Japanese!

I am super tired today, so a short one. TL;DR - My japanese is getting better and I’d love to read some more

[autumnalbees]

Ok a lil update since I am awake now haha!!!

I was thinking Bunpro is too slow for me and I can go faster with better accuracy of remembering with other methods, so I read this neat lil book:

Google Docs

I think the method of using Anki (my darling) and sentence mining specific grammar would work quite well. It also allows me to make notes, suspend grammar points that are a bit weird etc.

Looking at other Youtubers, they have all used the grammar-in-anki method (although none talk about it. I can just see their decks when they open Anki haha)

I think suspension is something people don’t like. You can’t suspend Wanikani vocab. You can’t suspend Bunpro grammar points.

But to me, it’s more of a way of saying “this is taking up a lot of my time that I could use elsewhere. I’ll suspend this for now, and in a few months I’ll go back to it”.

Sometimes a card will take me 5 - 10 mins to remember and I’ll forget it the next day. No point in wracking my brain. I can just not learn that and move on. I’ll see it again in immersion, in reading, and maybe I’ll understand other things in the future which would help me understand this.

For me, Godan-verbs are awkward and I would rather move on. I’ll see them in immersion, reading, anime, whatever multiple times. It’ll eventually stick, and maybe in a few months I can unsuspend them when I know them a bit better.

The counter argument I see is “you shouldn’t suspend anything as you’ll need it eventually”. This is often defeated by the counter-counter argument “suspension isn’t forever. It’s merely a case of reallocating time away from the hard things which burn you out to the easier things which you enjoy, until you feel strong enough to tackle them again”

I’m currently using Tae Kim’s, but:

• https://sakubi.neocities.org/
• DoJG main menu
• Learn Japanese – Tae Kim's Guide to Learning Japanese

Are my resources.

I have a massive list of japanese resources I store locally too which are helpful!

Migaku card type

So the default Migaku card type is nice, but I did 2 things to it…

Firstly I moved the audio around, since I am doing vocab mostly I now have the single word vocab audio first and then the sentence last.

I also added some notes to it which are generated by ChatGPT. Sometimes they are helpful, sometimes they state the obvious. It costs me nothing to add them, and I am only set to gain

migaku list

Migaku posted this video:

The best way to learn Japanese vocabulary

Which features an Excel spreadsheet of 12,000 Japanese vocab sorted by frequency across Netflix.

So I took the top 1500 and made it into a little local website so I can mine it lol.

I added around 600 words from this

Pitch accent

I noticed that the default Migaku note type has pitch accent. So I thought, why not learn it?

Turns out if I learn the basics and just exist knowing they exist, I would get them down pretty well. Dogen’s guide (above) is good!

I am using the Migaku pitch accent trainer https://pitch.migaku.io/

Reading

I need to get back into reading Todoku, as I’m doing a WK book club next week!

Kaishi

Recently Refold released Kaishi, which is a 1.5k vocab deck:

GitHub - donkuri/Kaishi: Kaishi 1.5k is a modern, modular Japanese Anki deck...

The pitch accent is questionable, but they do not use TTS which is exciting. This is now the latest in Anki newbie decks, joining the ranks of:

• Core 2k
• Core 2.3k
• Japanese like a breeze
• Core 6k
• Tango N5

As well as Kaishi, Migaku is releasing their deck this month. It’ll be in their own SRS, but it does look very good and fun. As well as vocab, it’ll also teach grammar!

[NeoArcturus]

@autumnalbees

I was thinking Bunpro is too slow for me

Is N5 and N4 in one month not fast enough?

[autumnalbees]

The problem is not how fast you can read all the rules but how many hours invested in that vs doing anything else.

You can read all the N5 rules in a single day from Tae Kim or something, and you probably don’t really need an SRS specifically for the rules as you can just see them in sentences from reading.

For me it’s a case of “I could spend a while doing lessons on Bunpro and then 30mins / 1 hour a day doing the SRS, or I could just read them all, make Anki cards out of specific grammar points I get stuck on, and then just reinforce grammar rules through reading”

There are actually quite a lot of people who agree with this approach of “do minimal SRS, just read stuff to get it into your head”. Same for vocab, you don’t really need an SRS system for vocab, kanji or anything if you just read enough as the reading will be the SRS!

How I learnt Norwegian on my own

This creator never touched an SRS in her life, but learnt all the vocab, grammar etc from just living in the language.

Of course, just because you don’t need it doesn’t mean you can’t want it. Learners are individual creatures, what works for one may not work for another. You will spend 1000+ hours in a language, so it’s okay to be a little inefficient.

I am just planning for the future with giving up Bunpro. For me, grammar points like “no” or “ni” (sorry windows jpn keyboard sucks, I refuse to use it lmao) come up so often you don’t need to put them into SRS. There are grammar points which are more awkward for me like conjugation, for that I can put it into an SRS.

Over the long-term I will save significant time and likely learn more by just reading.

Again, this is just works for me. There are people out there that don’t know Anki exists, that don’t have the time to code a custom card format, there are people who require SRS for everything, there are people who have never used an SRS before.

Learning is all about finding what works for you and doing that. And for me, I think adding yet-another 30min - 1 hour / day SRS session is just not it.

[autumnalbees]

Fun debugging story

If you are using the Migaku card type, some JPN dictionaries will insert brackets into the text.

<script>
if (document.querySelector('div.migaku-card.migaku-card-back')) {
    document.querySelector('div.migaku-card.migaku-card-back').innerText = document.querySelector('div.migaku-card.migaku-card-back').innerText.replace(/^Pron:.+$/gim, '');
}
</script>

I wrote this code to delete the Pron line, which contains the problem.

But this deleted too much! Even the image and audio was deleted!

I made the Div selector more specific:

<script>
if (document.querySelector('div.migaku-card-definitions.migaku-indented')) {
    const pronElement = document.querySelector('div.migaku-card-definitions.migaku-indented');
    pronElement.innerText = pronElement.innerText.replace(/^Pron:.+$/gim, ''); // Remove the line that starts with "Pron:"
}
</script>

And now it works!

It might be a good idea for me to fix this in the dictionary too using GitHub - ilius/pyglossary: A tool for converting dictionary files aka glossaries. Mainly to help use our offline glossaries in any Open Source dictionary we like on any modern operating system / device. , I think exploring custom making a dictionary would be so much fun!

[NeoArcturus]

@autumnalbees

sorry windows jpn keyboard sucks, I refuse to use it lmao

Perhaps this might help you. If you don’t use the QWERTZ layout, you’ll have to type something else than KBDGR.DLL

I had to do the same because the jpn keyboard layout sucked

[servette]

Just ran across your study log.

Although I have a lot more ‘history’ with studying Japanese than you do, I noticed that you have gathered links to lots and lots of interesting tools, many of which I have not encountered before.

So I will have to check them out in more detail. I will keep an eye on your study log from time to time to see what other cool stuff you will be adding…

[autumnalbees]

Week 5

For Non-English speakers, I am calling this a “job” as in a “task”. I cannot disclose much about it, so sorry if this wording is confusing. I feel like a task is too small, it’s more of a massive job I have been working on since November of last year finishing up!

Bad news: Work has been CHAOS! I had a job I started 10am last Sunday, and it finally finished on Wednesday. I took it in shifts with someone else. They slept, I stayed up to work. I slept, they stayed up to work.

Then on Thursday I had to wake up at 6am! To do another job.

Then today (Sunday) I had 2 massive jobs, but thankfully it went well.

Good news: I am going to FLORENCE! In a month! Lil holiday break. Maybe I’ll take a break from Japanese to learn some Italian (Although all I need is “Vino Della Casa”)

Pitch accent

This week I have been studying pitch accent.

Japanese is a pitch accented language and if you don’t learn this, you may sound a bit weird speaking to people… A lot of my setup already includes pitch accents, so I figured out I’d learn what those actually meant.

i am going through the Dogen pitch accent course. I have the Patreon one, so there’s like 100 videos lol.

It’s not super important, but if my vocab already has pitch and if I learn what that means now, it means in the future I’ll spend less time on it.

Here’s my pitch throughout the week:

I am definitely getting better!

Reading

This was the week I started reading… a lot!

I have a Mokuro’d version of all the Tadoku graded readers, so I have been going through them and making vocab cards when I see something new.

Sometimes I see something that looks like grammar, so I search all my grammar sites like:
https://sakubi.neocities.org/#being
https://djtguide.github.io/grammar/dojgmain.html

Table of Contents 目次

https://guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar/verbparticles

Here’s a little Google search I made for it:
https://www.google.com/search?q=%s+site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fsakubi.neocities.org+OR+site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fdjtguide.github.io+OR+https%3A%2F%2Fimabi.org%2F+OR+https%3A%2F%2Fguidetojapanese.org&sca_esv=d20e253f7d2c7101&rlz=1C1ONGR_en-GBGB1085GB1085&sxsrf=ACQVn09QDSXBPy7Hqt785QOx2tmRp2kd8w%3A1710087614547&ei=vt3tZbn4IJHQhbIP2bKncA&ved=0ahUKEwi5z7LmjOqEAxURaEEAHVnZCQ4Q4dUDCBA&uact=5&oq=に+site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fsakubi.neocities.org+OR+site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fdjtguide.github.io+OR+https%3A%2F%2Fimabi.org%2F+OR+https%3A%2F%2Fguidetojapanese.org&gs_lp=Egxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAifeOBqyBzaXRlOmh0dHBzOi8vc2FrdWJpLm5lb2NpdGllcy5vcmcgT1Igc2l0ZTpodHRwczovL2RqdGd1aWRlLmdpdGh1Yi5pbyBPUiBodHRwczovL2ltYWJpLm9yZy8gT1IgaHR0cHM6Ly9ndWlkZXRvamFwYW5lc2Uub3JnSABQAFgAcAB4AJABAJgBAKABAKoBALgBA8gBAPgBAvgBAZgCAKACAJgDAJIHAKAHAA&sclient=gws-wiz-serp

Or:
に site:https://sakubi.neocities.org OR site:https://djtguide.github.io OR https://imabi.org/ OR https://guidetojapanese.org

To search for Ni in all my grammar sites.

I have a custom search engine in Chrome to search across all of those grammar sites, so when I type “grammar {particle}” it’ll find it.

Then I read the description and find sentences to mine with the grammar. I have found this to help me A LOT!

Here’s an example grammar card. The colours are pitch accent.

Front is the sentence:

The idea is that I read the sentence to understand what the Japanese is. It’s okay to not be a 1-for-1 translation, but for the more astute learners you’ll notice the No on the end.

Now the back:

I have a sentence audio + word audio from Migaku automatically, and an example sentence too.

The gramar explanation is from one of the grammar sites I mined.

The cards are much harder and longer than my normal cards, however I only do 5 of them a day and I only mine things which I don’t understand. So in my reading if I see the same grammar over and over again, I won’t mine it.

If I see something once or twice and it trips me up, I mine it.

Now, what did I read?

I’m currently reading a level 8 graded reader!

Migaku card fmt edits

I edited the Migaku card format to have sentences on the front.

There are 2 things I want to do (and other people do too)

1. Highlight the word in the sentence. Our current hack we’re working on is to find the word in the sentence by looping through it, and then highlighting it with Bold HTML blocks. Problem is the word has pitch accent data, so it’s messing it up a lil…
2. smaller sentences

Migaku can generate example sentences of words that aren’t the sentence you mined from. Sometimes the sentence you mined is like 10+ words long, and you just want a smaller one… So I’m going to write some code to compare sizes of the example sentence vs the mined sentence and choose the smaller one.

3. I also want to use a custom dict… A lot of japanese dicts have IPA pronounication in them. You likely don’t notice this, but it’s affecting mine (and others code). We’re going to maintain an IPA-free dict I think

Migaku and Mokuro

Migaku does not work with Mokuro reader very well… It breaks… A lot…

It’s okay, you can either use Yomitan or read Mokuro’d HTML files locally. I opted to read them locally and then just do screenshots by hand

TOGGL

Again, I did a lot of work stuff this week. So only 15 hours! 4 hours of Anki, 3 hours 30 of pitch accent, 3 hours of wanikani, 2 hours 30 of reading and only 1 hour of grammar (cause it collapses into Anki, the 1 hour is dedicated reading of grammar)

I do not think next week will be any kinder to me. However the JLPT n5 application opens up next week I think, so I’ll apply for that.

Focus for next week

• Anki
• Wanikani
• READ!

My personal life is chaos, so long as I do reviews everyday that will be a success. I do not need to level up WK / do more cards in Anki, I don’t want to drown in both Japanese and my work life

[autumnalbees]

I do have a bunch of links!

I think because I am not afraid to get my hands dirty people tend to send me a bunch of things in beta / testing / requires manual work, so I just collect a bunch of stuff. Here’s all my links so far but they’re super personalised to me so i dont know if it’ll help you

Japanese

Getting Started

• Krashen on language input https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiTsduRreug

• Learn Japanese easy https://animecards.site/learningjapanese/

• Book on acquiring Japanese https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LH82FjsCqCgp6-TFqUcS_EB15V7sx7O1VCjREp6Lexw/edit

• 日本 Resources - Google Sheets Migaku resource list

• Target language YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MadpZEBFHIc

• Lazy Mining Guide (probably follow this) Setup: Anki - Lazy Guide

• How I learnt Norweigan (very very very good. applied to ALL languages)

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWQYqcFX8JE

• Ojiman is good! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_M-0kAlogw&list=PLTGwxYYu8He-OYfgudK0odx1_LsgGAPGy&index=5

• Japanese is cumulative

• Optimize your Anki – You’re Overtesting Yourself on too few cards. (New Simplified Method 8.14.18) – vladsperspective

Sentence Mining

• Lazy guide to sentence mining (follow) https://xelieu.github.io/jp-lazy-guide/setupAnki/

• MPV player guide https://anacreondjt.gitlab.io/docs/mpvscript/

• Voracious video player https://voracious.app/

• The moe way https://learnjapanese.moe/

• https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/language-reactor/hoombieeljmmljlkjmnheibnpciblicm?hl=en with yomichan and Netflix (Migaku replaces this)

• Same setup as above but automatic ani melon

• Get audio in Yomitan

• * https://github.com/themoeway/local-audio-yomichan

Vocab

• Japanese Peppa pig is actually quite good lol https://www.youtube.com/c/%E3%83%9A%E3%83%83%E3%83%91%E3%83%94%E3%83%83%E3%82%B0/videos

• I LOVE these Anki decks

• SRS decks for tv shows etc

• https://www.mediafire.com/folder/h3c999hbd9r6m/subs2srs_decks

• My Files

Youtubers i like

• Misa Ammo https://www.youtube.com/@JapaneseAmmowithMisa

Grammar

• Japanese Grammar videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSvH9vH60Ig&list=PLg9uYxuZf8x_A-vcqqyOFZu06WlhnypWj&index=1

• Cure dolly notes https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XpuXerkGU8waJ4DPDNJA4bGeqOvM-csXjTe57iHARHc/edit

Wanikani Addons

• GitHub - marciska/Jitai: The font randomizer that fits ← my love

Anime

• https://jpdb.io/ - ratings of anime difficulty

• Liverpool based anime (I live here)

• Crunchyroll logo

Video Games

• Top video games https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_QrcROWKmA&t=2132s

• Learn Japanese with video games https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OT5l4_erQpo

Youtube

• Comprehensible Youtube Reddit - Dive into anything

Reading

• LinguaCafe GitHub - simjanos-dev/LinguaCafe: LinguaCafe is a self-hosted software that helps language learners read foreign languages. - reading books etc with support for Anki

• Satori reader - graded readers

• Linq - Krashen but for reading Login - LingQ

• Browse Popular Japanese Books, Movies & TV Shows | Natively

Kanji

• Kanji testing website (pitch accent etc) https://uroninja.com/

• mochi mochi kanji is a cool app for kanji

Dump of random things

• Japanese learning flow chart https://morg.systems/58465ab9

• Zipf’s law in Kanji https://reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/ehn4w4/oc_visualizing_zipfs_law_in_japanese_kanji/

• https://www.wanikani.com/ is good for kanji

• Kanesame for opposite https://www.kamesame.com/app/login

• Community scripts for wanikani The New And Improved List Of API and Third Party Apps

• Dashboard | Bunpro for grammar! I really like the quizzes, the explanations aren’t so good though… Use curedolly imo

• GameGengo top 60 games to play to learn Japanese Game Gengo Top 60 Switch Games - Google Sheets

• Hiragana forbidden speech - Great game to learn basic Japanese https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKPv3rWIKIU

• Easiest anime to watch Animelon Analysis v0.1 - Google Sheets

• List of game scripts (eng / jpn scripts for games you can play) Jo-Mako's Japanese Spreadsheet - Google Sheets

• Accquiring Japanese Easiyl Japanese Resources - Google Docs

• My fave japanese learning youtuber https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KygsjMUj_C0&t=565s

• http://migaku.com/ absolute best app for sentence mining!!!

• Qiita is japanese programming like Dev.to

• https://migaku.com/ Migaku my love

• Catalog of 800gb of manga with OCR’d text you can use Yomitan to look up Index of /manga/

• Mokuro reader you can integrate Anki with. Doesn’t work so well for Migaku https://reader.mokuro.app/

• Migaku frequency list Japanese Netflix Frequency List - Google Sheets

• Dogen pitch accent https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxMXdmBM9wPvsySiMoBzgh8d68xqKz1YP

• Pitch accent tests (the best) コツ

Other languages

Dreaming Spanish: Learn with Comprehensible Input

• seth-js on github has yomichan dicts for other languages

• dictionariez is yomichan for other languages

PS: There are resources I cannot entirely share due to legality. For me they are legal, for others they might not be. This list is cleaned up of those. An example is I have a link to a lot of anime fonts to use in Jitai (which I setup), but font downloading may be copyright infringement in your country.

Also, the WK forums wouldn’t let me post the link

[autumnalbees]

Yes apologies @servette it appears the forums have butchered some of my links. Maybe I’ll clean it up and post to my blog

[autumnalbees]

Completely forgot to post my stats innit

[autumnalbees]

:3	Day 1	Day 2	Day 3	Day 4	Day 5	Day 6	Day 7
Anki
Wanikani
Read
Grammar textbook
Anime

Finally made one of those tables everyone has! I do Anki / Wanikani everyday, I will read too.

Perhaps I’ll start posting the stuff I’m reading here too!

Also I am going to hit 100 days of learning Japanese tomorrow!