Daisoujou's Study Log - Out putting out output

[Daisoujou]

To start with a quick health update: an MRI found narrowing in my vein so I’m being sent to a vascular surgeon in about a month and a half. I have some vindication that I have real arm problems, haha. Hopefully I can get that all sorted eventually. This finally rules out stuff like cancer as my blood clot cause so that’s nice.

Japanese continues to go really well, and I’m transitioning more and more into just doing things in the language without quite as much struggle. I default to playing some videogames that way now, after Tears of the Kingdom I’m doing Pikmin that way and despite some lookups, it’s no big struggle. I’m slowly speeding up and working into harder material, was just talking in the read every day thread about being pleased I managed about 9000 characters in an hour in an easier VN. It’s a long climb, but I’m seeing huge improvements from really doubling down recently, keeping myself going for probably over 3 hours at least every day and mining those 40 words per day. Matures have just started to return in small amounts, and so far so good there. Loving already having well over 1000 words in anki for having restarted not too long ago.

Listening is harder than reading still, but I’m working on it and it’s not the worst. I think I can keep up with the pace generally; it’s just either really rough delivery or not recognizing words that I’d probably know if I saw the kanji. I’ll keep going at it. Getting so much more comfortable doing Lost Judgment, thanks to the subtitles.

I got a little curious last night even and glanced at a few questions from each section (well, was too lazy for listening) on one of those official JLPT sample practice tests for the N1 and I think it looks pretty doable? I wouldn’t go out and go through the effort to take the real one until I’m super confident, but honestly, I could be roughly N1 level now unless I lucked into the easy questions. I read harder stuff every day. I’d almost like to do the full sample the way I did the N2 just to get the satisfaction of theoretically placing myself, but I feel too lazy for it right now so unless the inspiration strikes me, don’t expect it to actually happen.

Getting there.

[georgiapeaches]

This has to be one of the most inspirational study logs I’ve read! Your intro post has you reading low level Tadoku readers and working through Genki, and now you’re regularly reading content harder than an N1 paper?!
It makes me feel hopeful that I can get there one day too, thank you for sharing your journey!! (and I hope your arm recovers soon)

[Daisoujou]

Thank you so much! Yeah, it’s funny looking back on that opening post, haha. I always try to make a bunch of qualifiers clear – I obviously have more free time than most so the speed in days is due to throwing a whole lot of hours at it, went through WK close to full speed while doing all the other studying on the side, and barring a short health hiatus, it’s been very consistently daily. I’ve cut out a lot of things that I wanted to skip or push to later, like I can’t handwrite at all (no interest) and haven’t practiced speaking (will loop back to eventually). But still, yeah, super proud of my progress.

I do my best to spread the word around here that using native content, reading and the like really will do pretty much everything for you when you’re ready to fight through it. After Genki 2, other than WK (and anki for mined words from things I read), I did no actual direct study, just reading and listening. Admittedly even now I still always want tools on hand; I use a dictionary with everything I read, but you get comfortable with that stuff after a point and once you are, the level of stuff you can contend with raises really quickly if you keep trying to push it.

If there’s anything I can ever help with, I’m not the most qualified on these forums or anything, but I’d be happy to try.

[fallynleaf]

@Daisoujou

I obviously have more free time than most so the speed in days is due to throwing a whole lot of hours at it, went through WK close to full speed while doing all the other studying on the side, and barring a short health hiatus, it’s been very consistently daily. I’ve cut out a lot of things that I wanted to skip or push to later, like I can’t handwrite at all (no interest) and haven’t practiced speaking (will loop back to eventually). But still, yeah, super proud of my progress.

Haha yeah I think you probably put twice as much time as I do daily into this, and as a result are progressing about twice as fast as I am. We’re both about 2-2.5 years into this, and at the rate I’ve been going, I expect it to be like 2.5 more years before I’m N1!

I spend a lot of time engaging with Japanese daily that is not as productive as your study time haha because it’s stuff like listening to native media that’s still way above my level . I guess maybe if I dropped practicing Spanish and watching wrestling stuff I still can’t understand and learning translation and trying to output occasional Japanese on twitter, I’d catch up a bit faster, but, well, it is what it is at this point, haha.

[georgiapeaches]

Give yourself more credit!! Even with a lot of free time it can be hard to have the self discipline to study as much as you have! I can handwrite just fine but it has been a completely useless skill so far other than to make Japanese people say ‘Wow! You can write kanji!’ and occassionally filling out a form or something

I’ve just started focusing on native content and it’s like a whole different skill set! Without the comfort of my textbooks I feel exposed but I’ve also noticed a huge improvement in my ability so it’s worth it!

I really appreciate you offering some help! If you ever have any native media recommendations I’d love to hear them, I’m trying to get through as much content as I can so I am burning through my backlog lol

[georgiapeaches]

How often do you study?
I’m not really sure how much time I should be aiming for every day tbh

I’m a lurker on your プロレス thread because I love western pro wrestling but I haven’t had the confidence to make the jump to Japanese wrestling content yet! It seems really different from other media I’ve been trying to immerse with so right now it seems like an impossibly difficult mountain

[Daisoujou]

@fallynleaf

I guess maybe if I dropped practicing Spanish and watching wrestling stuff I still can’t understand and learning translation and trying to output occasional Japanese on twitter, I’d catch up a bit faster, but, well, it is what it is at this point, haha.

Hey, as long as you’re enjoying it! On one hand I’m doing so much work in studying Japanese that I look like someone who is disciplined or hard working or something but really I have just leveraged my extreme impatience so that I had to make myself reach this level as quickly as possible, haha.

@georgiapeaches

I can handwrite just fine but it has been a completely useless skill so far other than to make Japanese people say ‘Wow! You can write kanji!’

Well, only one of us could make those Youtube videos where we SHOCK NATIVES, unless I invest in a taser.

@georgiapeaches

I’ve just started focusing on native content and it’s like a whole different skill set! Without the comfort of my textbooks I feel exposed but I’ve also noticed a huge improvement in my ability so it’s worth it!

Yeah it’s so hard when you start out, but definitely worth it. As for recommendations – so I’ve read some novels as well, am reading one right now, but a lot of where I come from is videogames and visual novels. I actually started the visual novel club on these forums (and recently, the film one )! I think that’s a really good medium for learning for a variety of reasons; you can texthook for instant lookups, you often get voice over for listening practice, you can find ones with shorter sentences and more dialog focused to not have to read heavy literary stuff, etc. But they’re not for everyone, I know.

If you’re somewhat starting out, I dunno if games are your thing, but I’ve found stuff like Ace Attorney and recently Ghost Trick (so stuff written by Shu Takumi, heh) great for earlier reading because they have small text boxes so the lines are necessarily concise. They also tend to reach for kanji a little less often than writing words out in kana, but still use furigana-less kanji, so it might be good for your specific circumstances to pick up new kanji but not get bogged down in the many you don’t know.

[fallynleaf]

@georgiapeaches

How often do you study?
I’m not really sure how much time I should be aiming for every day tbh

I almost always spend at least a few hours on it every day, haha, though it’s hard to calculate out exactly how many, because I’m not sure a lot of it “counts”. Unlike Daisoujou, I do a mix of native media and textbook study, though my native media consumption is extremely different because it’s primarily stuff like pro wrestling shows, interviews, tweets, live chat comments during shows, etc.

It’s sort of a weird mixture of extreme extensive reading/listening where I sort of have to just let it wash over me without looking up everything, and then that’s also combined with extreme intensive reading/listening for some of it, which is what you see in the pro wrestling thread, haha, since I ended up having to very rapidly learn translation at the end of 2021…

Basically I totally skipped the “comprehensible input” stage and went right from maybe barely N5 to just diving entirely into the main native media I cared about. So overall, I’d say that I’m using my time much less productively because it’s a lot of struggling through something very difficult without great tools to navigate it, and then retroactively filling in a lot of the knowledge with textbook study, instead of choosing native media that’s easier for learners to work with, lol, like visual novels .

@georgiapeaches

I’m a lurker on your プロレス thread because I love western pro wrestling but I haven’t had the confidence to make the jump to Japanese wrestling content yet! It seems really different from other media I’ve been trying to immerse with so right now it seems like an impossibly difficult mountain

Having seen your study log, you’re way, way further along than I am currently haha, and certainly further along than I was when I started with my amazing plan of “I’m going to follow DDT Pro Wrestling/Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling on my own without any official translation because I have no choice so it’s either do that or quit!” so I totally believe in your ability to watch Japanese wrestling content and get a fair amount out of it! Especially now that DDT and Pro Wrestling NOAH have some amount of official translation, and NJPW has loads of translation. And TJPW has me (and rodan) .

That thread has sort of ended up (by necessity) becoming the unofficial TJPW “book club”, lol, but don’t feel obligated to limit yourself to only TJPW if there’s other Japanese wrestling that appeals more to you! We do occasionally talk about other stuff on there, too, haha.

This year is honestly an amazing year for Japanese pro wrestling because there’s so much incredibly exciting stuff happening that felt totally impossible even just four years ago, but on the flipside it’s probably a bit confusing for new people, because there are so many crossovers…

[Vanilla]

@georgiapeaches

Even with a lot of free time it can be hard to have the self discipline to study as much as you have!

Very true. If having a lot of free time was all it took to be successful the world would be a very different place.

Keep up the great progress @Daisoujou

[georgiapeaches]

@Daisoujou

I’ve found stuff like Ace Attorney and recently Ghost Trick (so stuff written by Shu Takumi, heh)

Thank you so much for all of your suggestions! I have a Japanese copy of AA so it’s probably time to dust it off and tackle it!
Right now I’m doing things very analogue as I don’t have access to a computer that can use texthook or yomichan or anything like that, but if I remember correctly AA lets you pause/wait on dialogue so I can spend as long as I need searching for the right kanji lmao

@fallynleaf

I do a mix of native media and textbook study

Me too, I think it’s rewarding to have structure with a sense of progress (i.e. starting and finishing a chapter) and then swapping to native media and seeing that information in there is the best!

I love the ‘I have no choice so do it or quit!’ mentality, I think it’s great you have something to keep you motivated; it makes me want to start my own translation projects one day

[Daisoujou]

@georgiapeaches

Right now I’m doing things very analogue as I don’t have access to a computer that can use texthook or yomichan or anything like that, but if I remember correctly AA lets you pause/wait on dialogue so I can spend as long as I need searching for the right kanji lmao

Ahh yeah that makes things a lot more challenging; I’ve been tethered to the computer for most of the early stages of this but it allowed me to really punch above my weight with the quick lookups. Still, definitely doable, and AA does give you all the time you need. Having that makes a huge difference. Hope you have a good time! It was a reread; I’ve known and loved the series for years, but the first Ace Attorney was one of the first real native material things I read after a little manga.

Are you familiar with Natively, by the way? Good place to find things new stuff to try based on estimated difficulty.

[georgiapeaches]

Thank you!! Even if it’s slow, progress is progress so I don’t mind being snail mode for a while!

I do use Natively! This is mine! I’m still quite new to reading so it’s a pretty thin profile lol but it has been a lifesaver for finding the right material for my level!

[Daisoujou]

Two things I want to share. 1 is simply that the film club discord has been a pleasant place to chat about Japanese and just random stuff with nice people too, so if anyone who checks my study log has discord and is interested, the link is in the film club thread and you’re welcome to pop in

Also! I’ve been meaning to do it but putting it off forever, and I’ve finally made a list of the things I’ve read to completion in Japanese so far! I feel as though I’m forgetting some things, especially videogames, but there were a lot like Dragon Quest that I put some time into but didn’t finish, so I’m not counting them. Maybe I’ll think of something I need to add later on… not a bad list for starting from nothing a little over 2 years ago I think! Also to be clear this is native material only and excludes how I read almost all of the stories at the time on Satori Reader, a bunch of graded readers, etc.

Visual Novels

Ace Attorney 1
Summer Pockets: Reflection Blue
Flowers: Printemps
Loopers
9-Nine- 1-3
Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo
999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors

Videogames

Paper Mario
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective

Novels/collected stories

Zoo 1
Zoo 2
佐賀のがばいばあちゃん
スマホを落としただけなのに
コンビニ人間
殺人出産
告白

Short stories

雪女
人間椅子
夢十夜

Manga

それでも歩は寄せてくる - 3 volumes
よつばと！ - 12 volumes
猫ラーメン - 2 volumes
アオハライド - 3 volumes
ヤンキーショタとオタクおねえさん - 2 volumes
極主夫道 - 1 volume
あずまんが大王 - 3 volumes

In progress

硝子の塔の殺人 (novel)
Fatal Twelve (visual novel)
9-nine- 4 (visual novel)
Lost Judgment (videogame)
Pikmin 4 (videogame)
ぽんこつポン子 (manga)

[Daisoujou]

So, was talking about this in the read every day thread, but hopefully after posting this I’m going to go finish 硝子の塔の殺人! That’s a ~500 page book, with 271k characters, in 26 days. That in itself would be nice, but I’m still reading 40-50k characters in VNs each week for the clubs, and playing a little Pikmin and Lost Judgment on the side in Japanese. Things are going well. While I have a long way to go, I can feel such encouraging things finally. Say, the ways that sometimes I can just go for a bit without a lookup finally. Or, something I thought about last night with this Pikmin text (getting screenshots off the switch is unreasonably annoying so it’s a photo of a screen sorry):

There’s not anything specifically difficult about 惑星環境調査団 at all, it’s easy enough to pick apart, but I remember complaining about struggling with big kanji blobs like that when I was newer. A lot of that was about dredging up the readings/meanings individually, and yeah there’s furigana, but it made me think specifically about how much faster even if this furigana wasn’t here that I can identify some common kanji like these. It’s edging closer to instant, which is really nice.

On the anki side, my premonition has been at least half true so far. Having reviewed about 100 matures, I’m looking at this:

75% isn’t the greatest thing. I test both meaning and reading and it’s the reading tripping me up a lot more often. I want to say I think it’ll improve a bit because I was particularly hard on myself early on with the sort of words I was encountering, so many new kanji to me with kunyomi readings, or weird exception readings of kanji I know, etc. But even if it doesn’t, I’m sure I talked about this at some point, but to reiterate my personal approach to anki:

I’m mining 40 words every day. Currently that just equates to ~165 reviews in the morning, and even when I review all of my mined words for the day on top of those, I’m sitting under half an hour spent. I expect review counts to get a bit larger, but that’s going to be easily within my comfort level still. It’s so low impact for my personal schedule that it’s just no problem. Given that, I just wanna slam more and more encounters with these words. I commonly hear online “we can only memorize X pieces of information per day,” which sounds untrue to me but I can’t say that’s my area of expertise, or the more reasonable and general “study fewer words for better retention.” The thing is though, If I even just maintain the accuracy I have right now, despite the ones falling through the cracks, I am essentially retaining more words per day than your average person attempts to learn. I dunno if it’s the best way, but it’s worked for me this far. It’s not a perspective I come across as often when it comes to Anki (maybe cause people want to minimize their time with it, which is fair enough) so there you go.

[AzusaChan]

@Daisoujou

That’s a ~500 page book, with 271k characters, in 26 days. That in itself would be nice, but I’m still reading 40-50k characters in VNs each week for the clubs, and playing a little Pikmin and Lost Judgment on the side in Japanese.

That’s really impressive! I’m not sure how many hours you spend each day reading but it sounds like your reading speeding is improving a lot. I should probably get more aggressive with anki myself to help with reading speed.

@Daisoujou

The thing is though, If I even just maintain the accuracy I have right now, despite the ones falling through the cracks, I am essentially retaining more words per day than your average person attempts to learn. I dunno if it’s the best way, but it’s worked for me this far.

Yeah, I think if you have the time and can manage that workload, its a very effective strategy in the long run. I think most people probably don’t mention it since they try to avoid getting burnt out so they do lower workloads. I met some guy before who has been averaging 670 reviews per day over a 2 year period which is kind of insane to me but his Japanese is incredibly good because of it. It sounds like it’s working out great for you too

[Daisoujou]

@AzusaChan

That’s really impressive! I’m not sure how many hours you spend each day reading but it sounds like your reading speeding is improving a lot. I should probably get more aggressive with anki myself to help with reading speed.

Thank you! I should probably properly time it sometime, but I am definitely spending some hours across all the stuff I’m doing. This book has been a pretty smooth read once I got over the initial hump, but I’d still say I’m relatively slow. What’s really changed is my reading stamina; I don’t really get tired and sloppy from it like I used to. Well, maybe Fatal Twelve is bringing that back a bit at the moment, but still. And yeah I’m definitely seeing gains running into the things I do in Anki in my reading elsewhere already.

@AzusaChan

Yeah, I think if you have the time and can manage that workload, its a very effective strategy in the long run. I think most people probably don’t mention it since they try to avoid getting burnt out so they do lower workloads. I met some guy before who has been averaging 670 reviews per day over a 2 year period which is kind of insane to me but his Japanese is incredibly good because of it. It sounds like it’s working out great for you too

Oh that 670 is wild. Maybe when I was doing WK together with Anki I was around 400 reviews or something in a day sometimes across them both? So I’ve been pretty intense about it before haha. I can’t deny considering if I wanted to go over 40 occasionally now even, but I at least haven’t taken that plunge yet.

Mentioned before how I kinda had to manage how much I said because I didn’t want well meaning people to warn me about burning out, haha. No one knows how impatient I am; it’s always been true that my only burn out risk has been from wondering why I’m not good enough yet.

[polv]

@Daisoujou

I commonly hear online “we can only memorize X pieces of information per day,” which sounds untrue to me but I can’t say that’s my area of expertise, or the more reasonable and general “study fewer words for better retention.”

I don’t know the truth to this really, but X new words aren’t really separate from each other. They usually come with guess and hints especially if context is added, and many are already half known.

I suspect that effectiveness is steep in the beginning and less steep afterwards, probably not to the point of plateauing; but may worth doing something else.

I still have memory tricks, like keywords, mnemonics and imagination, from the time I did WaniKani before, but didn’t try to use those nowadays. At least in the past, they can make X pieces remembering better, or more Kanji components. So a bigger and more detailed X. Well, not adding anymore context though. Just ensuring the memory.

[Daisoujou]

@polv

I don’t know the truth to this really, but X new words aren’t really separate from each other. They usually come with guess and hints especially if context is added, and many are already half known.

Yeah definitely, there’s a ton of nuance to this. Part of it is also recognizing that as far as “learn” I’m only counting if I recognize a word in writing, which is different from recognizing it in speaking, and very different from producing it myself. I just trust the first leads to the latter, which has held true, just much much slower. And I can tell through all the connections I already have that memorizing words is easier and I only occasionally break out any technique to bring to mind the sound, too, same as you.

I’m lucky I have a ton of time to read/listen as well or I wouldn’t be doing it like this, it definitely needs to be balanced, and as much as I think anki works as a good shortcut to learning faster, real language use has to be the main activity. I’m just clawing for those extra bits of effectiveness because now I need to learn those less common things.

[fallynleaf]

@Daisoujou

Mentioned before how I kinda had to manage how much I said because I didn’t want well meaning people to warn me about burning out, haha. No one knows how impatient I am; it’s always been true that my only burn out risk has been from wondering why I’m not good enough yet.

Considering your experiences at the end of last year, I did have the impulse to warn you about starting back up with 40 a day immediately, haha, but I figured that nothing I could say would be more effective than your own experiences. At this point, you’ll know better than anyone else if you’re making a mistake or not, and well even if you do, you’ve come back from it before, so you don’t strike me as someone especially in danger of burning out and quitting forever.

[Daisoujou]

Yeah I appreciate it, haha. I mean at that point I was just generally stressed from life things and needed to give myself a little period of as much freedom as I could from… effort, haha, a little bit of self sabotage to relax. I figure from my perspective if I do or don’t drop anki again at some point the amount isn’t truly going to matter; it’ll be outside circumstances again. Might as well use it to the fullest until then.