I like to try out various methods of study and learning. The more things I try out, the greater chance I have of finding things that works out for me. And the less time I spend wondering, “Should I try out this method?”
Some things don’t work out for me at all, and I stop them fairly quickly. Others work nicely, but I don’t have the desire to keep up with them. (I have to decide if it’s worth doing on a schedule, like WaniKani reviews, or dropping.) And there are things that work out really well (such as when I watched through most of Cure Dolly’s videos).
Here are my latest trials. It’s too soon to know how they’ll work out, but I expect I’ll write up on my progress later.
WaniKani: Passing all the Apprentice
I mostly review WaniKani via the Flaming Durtles app, using Anki mode. This means I don’t have to spend forever hunt-n-pecking at a smartphone screen to enter words in. Instead, I have pass/fail buttons to choose between.
I recently found there’s an option to show during a review a card’s stage (apprentice, guru, etc.) This is great because I’ve wondered what would happen if I just…“passed” all apprentice cards, whether I got them right or not.
At first, that sounds like a bad idea, doesn’t it? But I think it may have potential. Here are some of my anticipated pros and cons:
Potential Pros:
My apprentice count goes down. This results in fewer reviews per day. This allows me to do more lessons, which may result in learning new kanji and words at a faster pace. (It seems like I’m always looking up words while reading manga only to find their kanji is coming up in two or three more WK levels.)
Seeing my leeches less often may even have a soothing effect. (It could happen.)
Potential Cons:
I’ll seeing apprentice cards less often, which interferes with the SRS scheduling. (I’m not too worried, because if I fail them at guru, them simply drop back to apprentice. Most of these will be my long-time leeches.)
Taking the time to look at the stage listed above the card, to see whether it is apprentice or not will slow down my reviews, even if just by the tiniest bit. (But this might not be bad. In the past two days, I’ve actually done better on my apprentice cards, and I think it’s because I’m going a little slower.)
Migaku: Steadily Growing my Anki Deck
I was never interested in “AJAAT” and related “mass immersion” teachings. However, I’ve been interested in some of the methods behind the madness. Because of that, a while backI read through a lot of the Refold material, and I’ve also had my eye on the Migaku tools coming out.
Recently, I installed the Migaku MPV tool. This makes it easy to make Anki cards from subtitles. It’s nice, but I still had to manually seek out the “1T” sentences, those sentences where I know everything except for one word.
I decided to shuffle some of my monthly spending and hop into the $5 tier for Migaku’s Patreon. This gives me early access to their browser extension (which will eventually be released for free, but it’s in an early development stage right now).
What the browser extension does is it lets me track which words I know, which words I’m learning, and which are unknown. Once I’ve “trained” it on all the words I know, I can take a video with Japanese subtitles, and with the click of a button have it generate cards for all 1T sentences. (Unfortunately, most of the subtitles I have aren’t properly timed to the DVD’s I have, and it takes time to adjust them in Aegisub to be just right. Without correct timing, the screenshot and audio clip won’t be correct in Anki.)
Here’s creating a single Anki card:
I manually added the two items in the “Definitions” section (required two clicks total), but that portion can be automated as well (which is important when using the option to create all possible 1T cards.)
For these, I plan to do vocabulary cards. Front of the card shows the word, with no furigana. I can quiz myself on the reading, then move the mouse over the kanji (or tap on it on smartphone) to see the furigana reading. However, there’s no pass/fail for this. Instead, pass/fail is only on the meaning portion. Will that work for me? Will that not work for me? I’ll find out over time, and adjust if necessary.
Here’s the back of the card:
I may convert my hand-made manga sentence cards to match. Or at least use Migaku to add word audio clips to replace the TTS ones I’ve been using. Migaku’s Anki card creation tool will help me speed up creating new manga cards as well.
Reading: Something Alongside Manga
This one is tentative, but now that I have the Migaku Browser Extension, I’m able to tackle reading from another angle.
When I read through 「耳をすませば」, I enjoyed very much that many of the kanji I knew that were presented without furigana, but all the kanji I didn’t know did have furigana:
Using the Migaku Browser Extension, I get something like that, but with web pages. And, I can also use it for e-books since I already convert them to HTML pages to view in a browser. This way, I get furigana for kanji I don’t know yet, but not for kanji I do know.
It’s not without issue, though. It parses a lot of things incorrectly (such as 一人 as 一人). The tool’s still in early development, so I know it’ll improve over time. It comes down to whether I can tolerate parsing issues while trying out reading, or if I’d rather hold off on reading for now.
On the plus side for reading, I enjoyed the portion of the Conan movie novel preview that I read. I felt I could visualize most of it. I feel that’s very important for me to enjoy reading. (I have seen the movie, but that was a long time ago, so I remember almost nothing from it.)
