WaniKani Progress
I feel like no matter how many days go by, I can’t get my level 30 kanji out of Apprentice. I did get a few early on. And some more along the way. But at 16 days in, doing one or two kanji lessons per day, I’m at 25 kanji lessons done, yet only 13 of those have reached Guru. Here’s hoping I can get another 7 more to Guru on Wednesday or Thursday.
I’m trying to lean heavily into WaniKani’s mnemonics, but I just can’t remember all the parts to them, even when I’m re-reading the meaning and reading mnemonics for the same kanji on a nearly daily basis.
My overall Apprentice is staying around 50, which has been really nice. My Guru’s at 320, hopefully mostly thanks to new vocabulary words. I’m hoping not to see too many of those fall back into Apprentice. Daily reviews are ranging from about 80 to 125, and I’m hoping to keep that on the lower end.
My combined Apprentice and Guru leeches are sitting at 126. That’s a drop of 82 since two weeks ago, so that means I’m still somehow managing to get leeches to move on up. I wouldn’t be surprised if a third of my Apprentice kanji leeches right now were my level 30 kanji I’m trying to get to Guru.
Anki Progress
I’m still managing about 150 to 250 reviews per day in Anki. A lot of it is adding cards for kanji I already know (but want to get better at recognizing) and vocabulary cards for those kanji (also many I already know).
I’ve finally had some kanj and vocabulary cards start to auto-suspend as leeches. It’s no surprise that they’re also some of my lifelong WaniKani leeches. I’ll let them stay suspended, as I’m focusing on quantity right now.
I’m up to 621 kanji card in Anki, with 420 having reached the point where it’s three weeks or more between reviews.
かがみの孤城 Progress
I’ve been tackling this one from all angles.
I really want to be able to read it alongside the upcoming book club, even though they’ll be reading at Intermediate Book Club pace.
Different Formats
I went ahead and bought the manga, which I’d already read the first chapter via 試し読み preview recently. However, I currently don’t plan to read the second chapter until I’ve gotten caught up in reading the book.
I also decided to buy the audio book. It’s one of those fancy audio books with music and sound effects and different voice actors for each character. I’ve never heard of an audio book like this before, so it’s quite the experience.
I’ve been repeatedly listening to the first 20-minute “chapter” of it, which covers a portion of chapter one of the book, and I think about the first 12 pages of the manga.
Kanji Learning
I’m also pushing along on learning kanji from the book. The kanji I’ve added to Anki cover 80.7% of the overall kanji appearing in the book. If I factor in kanji I learned from WaniKani but haven’t added to Anki yet, that gives me 94.2% coverage.
At this point, I’m starting to focus on kanji per “book club week”. There are 538 kanji in week one’s reading, and I’ve added 294 of those to Anki so far. This gives me 244 more kanji to learn for week one’s material, but there’s no way I’ll learn them all in a month. Instead, I’m focusing on those that appear at least ten times in the book, and that I haven’t learned from WaniKani yet. That brings the list down to a more manageable 32 kanji to focus on learning in the next month.
(Pre) Reading Progress
I’ve been working through reading the first chapter of the book, hoping to reach the point of the end of the first chapter of the manga before the book club begins. I want a little bit of a buffer if I decide to read along with the book club.
Even with the kanji coverage that I currently have, reading is still a very slow experience, where it feels like I’m looking up every other word, and getting lost in longer sentences. I’ve read from it probably about five days, and have completed about 25% of what will be “week 1” of the book club. If I can find a way to make each week last 20 days, I may just be able to keep up pace with the group once it starts.
One nice thing is as I make more progress through reading, I pick up more and more re-listening to the first chapter of the audio book. But there’s still a lot that I’ve read, yet can’t pick out a single word of in the audio book. And the audio book goes at a nice slow pace, even.