コメント: A very interesting video. I really agree with the idea of starting with an old style book that just acquaints you with the language, gives you a flavor before you invest a bunch of time or money.
Really interesting video. The seasonal model he’s talking about is similar to what I adopted for languages. So long as progress is maintained, even if it’s just continuing to review existing cards, you should be good to hold on to a lot of what you’ve achieve. It’s the all or nothing approach that kills your achievements.
コメント: I’ve passed halfway in Around the World in Eighty Day in French. Pretty crazy. It’s definitely getting easier as I read more, and my pages are regularly at 90-95% comprehension compared to 60-70% when I started.
コメント: Missed a few days posting. I’ve generally been taking a break from languages beyond my reviews, though didn’t do all of them each day. I’m caught up now for the return to work tomorrow.
コメント: Well I’ve definitely hit a motivational wall for the past week. But having been here before and recognizing the symptoms, I know not to take rash actions. Just try to continue the reviews, scale back a bit, and maintain across the board. The slump will pass and I’ll pick right back up without an intended garden to rehabilitate.
コメント: Definite lull in language learning interest for the past few weeks, driven by personal stuff that is making everything taxing. But I’m staying up with reviews which is my bare minimum goal, along with maintaining their daily update. I’m not feeding that lack of interest back into a foundational questioning of the value of language learning, so that’s an improvement.
I have reevaluated kanji writing though and ditched that for now. Maybe tomorrow I’ll have some interest in doing some input, but it’s already shaping up to be a busy day.
That’s definitely a good sign - it’s easy to study when it’s easy, but when things are difficult keeping engaged can be a challenge but a worthwhile one, and one to take pride in when you can do it.
コメント: Well my motivation slump is over. I ditched social media and news (I’ve done that many times before but fell back into it over the holidays). After 24 hours I saw a significant shift in my mental state and spontaneously wanted to return to reading material in French and Japanese. I also started exercising again lol. Interesting correlation.
So after experimenting with Migaku’s prepared decks for several languages, I’ve decided I don’t like that method of approaching a language. Essentially, Migaku has decks arranges by subjects for various languages (eg objects, places, relationships, math). Each deck contains common through specialized vocabulary, typically around 150 cards per deck give or take. I don’t find this productive, and you end up drilling some highly specialized words pretty earlier (eg I don’t need to know the Japanese word for quotient or the French word for cuttlefish). Additionally, none of these decks contain example sentences, so how am I to know whether a given kanji has a highly context-dependent meaning?
Wanikani’s method is far more effective: simply drill the most common ~6500 words in a manner organized with reference to their kanji. Each has an example sentence. You slowly build a large and meaningful vocabulary with relatively few specialized words, and you see your functional vocabulary rise weekly.
For European languages, I think the situation is far simpler. Starting with English cognates and grasping pronunciation and spelling conventions seems to get you 3000-5000 words pretty quickly (at least in Spanish, French, and Italian - I’m not sure about German yet). Meanwhile, you can work on the most common everyday words, which are easily provided in any reference book, or even online for free.
So given this, when I start German with Migaku I’m not going to bother with the prepared decks at all. They were a hindrance for French and Spanish, and I’ve ditched them for Japanese. When the time comes, I won’t bother with them for Chinese, though I’m definitely interested to see whether there are any effective resources out there analogous to WK for Chinese. If not, I can see it being really tough.
