Two weeks in a row with an update on time. I’m on a roll.
WEEKLY BREAKDOWN
Monday
WaniKani | 184 reviews & 19 lessons
Renshuu | 87 vocab & 3 grammar
Genki | Chapter 5 Dialogue and Grammar
Tuesday
WaniKani | 72 reviews & 23 lessons
Renshuu | 83 vocab & 6 grammar
Genki | Tokini Andy Lesson 5
Wednesday
WaniKani | 160 reviews & 29 lessons
Renshuu | 97 vocab & 0 grammar
Genki | Rest Day
Thursday
WaniKani | 84 reviews & 0 lessons
Renshuu | 45 vocab & 3 grammar
Genki | Chapter 5 Practice Exercises
Friday
WaniKani | LEVEL UP | 127 reviews & 43 lessons
Renshuu | 74 vocab & 0 grammar
Genki | Chapter 5 Workbook Exercises
Saturday
WaniKani | 67 reviews & 30 lessons
Renshuu | Rest Day
Genki | Chapter 5 Reading and Writing Exercises
Sunday
WaniKani | 226 reviews & 0 lessons
Renshuu | 128 vocab & 6 grammar
Genki | Rest Day
WANIKANI | 920 reviews | 144 lessons
Another week, another WK level-up! With Level 9, I’m starting to encounter some kanji that I didn’t internalize as well since I let my WK practice lapse at around Level 11. I expect to get more reviews wrong as I move into “unfamiliar” territory. However, today I woke up to 170 and only got one wrong, so I’m certainly doing something right.
I also enlightened quite a few terms this week—all of Level 1 and some of Level 2. It’ll be a few months before I burn anything. Hopefully, by that point, I’ll have leveled up a few more times and have made decent progress through the Painful tier.
I think I’m on a good track to reach my goal of finishing Level 20 by the end of the year. I may have to do slightly more than 15 lessons a day to reach it, but I’ll definitely still be able to slow down from the very intense pace I’ve been going. I plan to try and calculate some more precise numbers once I get back from my trip. The goal is Level 20 and no higher (unless I’m consistently staying under 10 terms in the Recent Mistakes docket). I don’t want to push myself so hard that I burn out again.
RENSHUU | 514 vocab | 18 grammar
Vocab reviews on Renshuu are picking back up right now because I’m starting to reach level 10 (their version of burning) on quite a few terms. As of the past two months, the only vocab I’ve “learned” on Renshuu has been Genki stuff, so I’m sure in a few weeks, reviews will slow back down.
Speaking of Genki vocab… I think there are some real benefits to learning it a week in advance of working on the chapter, but man does it make the difficult ones that much more difficult. 連れて来る, 持って来る, and 降りる have all been giving me NO END of trouble. I think I finally managed to get ahold of 持って来る on Friday, but I’m still wrestling with the other two. I just have to go at them one at a time and accept that the other ones might just be wrong, or else I get them all jumbled in my head.
GENKI | Chapter 5
Chapter 5 felt less arduous than 3 & 4. Perhaps I’m getting used to conjugating. Or maybe adjectives are easier. Or double maybe the order I’m working through things really matters.
Up until now, I’ve been switching between reading through the Dialogue/Grammar sections first and then watching Tokini Andy’s lesson and vice versa. Mostly, I’ve let my schedule, energy, and mood determine which one I do first, but I think it’s more useful to approach it book first. Andy is teaching from the book, responding to things in the book, and filling in gaps that he sees in their method of teaching. He also does approach examples and dialogue in a more natural and sometimes more advanced way, so it helps to have the more formal and detailed (but easier to understand) Genki sentences rattling around in my head already.
Either way, I did much better on the exercises this week than I did last week. I’m definitely still hashing out my disagreements with particles, and that’s where a lot of the mistakes came in, but I expect that to be a long work in progress.
OTHER | Reading | Writing? | Listening
After the rousing success of last week’s reading… I have not done much of that this week. I’d love to be reading two to three graded readers a week, but I find that changing my schedule to habitualize new things is often very hard for me. [I’ve been trying since January to convince myself to watch one (1) movie a week, a thing that I enjoy doing, yet I’ve only watched about 15 movies this year.] So… we will try again next week, I suppose.
Now that I’m approaching some less familiar kanji in WK, I know I’ll need to work harder to memorize things. I thought a good way to do so would be to practice writing the kanji I’m learning. I learn best through intense, multisensory repetition, so I found an app called Ringotan that I was able to connect to my WK account. It just teaches you stroke order and lets you practice writing the kanji that you’ve learned. So far, it feels decent and lets me practice on the go in ways that I can’t if I’m using pen and paper. It sort of reminds me of being a kid and learning to write my cursive letters in a tray of sand… but there’s automatic feedback. It’s not as strict as some kanji writing apps probably are, but it was important to me that I focus on WK kanji specifically.
And finally! Listening… I’ve been taking a three mile walk every day. It takes a decent amount of time, and I figured why not use some of that for some passive learning. Enter Nihongo con Teppei and Japanese with Shun. Both are podcasts completely in Japanese for beginner language learners. They take pretty different approaches, but I’ve found myself listening to two episodes of each while I’m on my walk. Just from a few days of listening, it’s clear that I’m pretty far from being able to keep up with spoken Japanese at a natural speed, but having the vocabulary and sentence structures geared towards beginners means that I do at least understand some! I think a large part is just buffering. I’m able to understand a sentence but while I’m parsing that, another sentence or two happens, and my brain just can’t keep up yet. I’m sure this is just a natural part of language learning though. Understanding bits and pieces is better than nothing, anyway.
