Hello everyone!
This is a soft continuation from my previous post, which was a summary from the past 1.5 years, see My 1.5 year journey from start to finishing lvl 5 . I feel like I am experimenting quite a lot and I think it is nice to share this experience (and to be able to look at it back later). As always if you have questions or a nice post/hearth is very appreciated! May my posts motivate you to continue on your own pace and have fun learning! 
Experimenting with immersion
I did not really go in depth last time what I am doing with immersion, so this feels like a good opportunity to do that. I do not know if I am doing immersion “right”, but it is enjoyable and that accounts for a lot I think. I started doing 2 things regularly and one on/off;
- Playing games in Japanese, focused on games that have subs and dubs in Japanese.
- Watching anime with Japanese subs
- Reading The Tile World Chronicles with a translator next to me.
Playing games was quite a surreal experience for me, as I felt a nostalgic feeling about a game I never played. I started playing “OctoPath traveler”, and the nostalgic feeling was enjoying the game, but having no idea what is going on. While very fun I had quite some difficulties with the large amount of text and custom font, so I opted to set it aside for now and play “WitchSpring R” first, which seems to be easier in its dialog and less text heavy. The Kanji knowledge I so far have made it quite a puzzle, one of the nice moments recently was that I saw 作 character and realized I had to go to the crafting menu. 
In the last 1.5 weeks I rewatched “Vinland Saga” (both seasons), at the start I felt like I understood nothing, trying to grab one word every few sentences. Currently I feel like I sometimes get the “vibe” they go with, but not being able to explain exactly. I also feel like I am getting words more reliable, around 1 or 2 vocab every sentence. Some of these vocabs are audio only as well, because I am not at the stage where these are presented to me in WaniKani. The next anime I started is “Jojo’s Adventure”, which so far is a blast to watch! I also want to watch “Demon Slayer”, but Netflix does not show me the option for the Japanese dubs 
I feel not confident enough yet to do it Japanese dub only, maybe as the next one!
The tile world chronicle I tried reading with a plugin and really search for every part in the sentence. While I suspect I learn a lot from it, and the story is nice, it feels like quite a drag to do. Progress in the story is slow, so I am not sure what I am going to do with this. I suspect this story is just a bit above my current level to process it at a decent speed. I think I’ll look more into graded readers, but the children stories I tried do not really motivate me too much unfortunately, there is likely a good middle somewhere. 
Trying to increase success rate by experimenting with KaniWani
As described in my previous post; I am an incredible slow learner. Even with 3 items a day I was by default around the 80% success rate, which means an item has a chance of progressing of like 64%, which is not a lot. Most failures are from Kanji → Reading, and this is where my experimenting with KaniWani comes into play. This seems to fill in my weak spot, going from Meaning → Reading/Kanji, while needing to reproduce the reading from memory. After almost a week of usage I can say it seems to help! This is the first time I got a weekly average above 85%, which means the load in the long term should go down as well, and hopefully being able to up the pace, but that is not something I will do for now.
Experimenting with grammar
This honestly is kind of a painful one for me. When learning in high-school, English grammar was always my weakest point, regularly failing on it in tests. Names for certain types of grammar never stuck. It was around 5 years after that I starting thinking in English and finally was being able to see what things actually mean. I was doing immersion without thinking too much about it (playing games, watching movies, series etc). That said I think basic grammar is something I need to be able to process sentences, therefore my experimentation.
My first experimentation was with https://yoku.bi, however while the explanation is clear I would loose it immediately an hour later. So about a week later I decided to try another method, this time https://guidetojapanese.org. This feels a lot better for me! I do feel like I’d like some more exercises, but they do seem to build on top of each-other. I tried searching for exercises/books but could not really find one that aligns well or has good reviews. If someone has something for that I would really appreciate it! I think recommendations from someone who went through the same is a lot better than the generic reviews etc.
Wrapping up this week
This post came out quite a bit longer than I expected 
I think I want to try to make this a weekly thing, however the next one will probably be 1.5 week away due to having more time in the weekends. My current schedule/goal is the following;
- Every day do WaniKani unlocking 3 items, and then KaniWani as an company tool.
- Once very 1 out of 3 days doing the Tae Kim’s Guide, the other days looking for the grammar in the immersion or doing tests for that grammer point.
- Every day before sleeping at least 1 anime episode, and more if I want to throughout the day.
- Playing “WitchSpring R”, not really a schedule and just doing it whenever I want to.
Thank you all for reading and have a wonderful day! Feedback and comments are always appreciated! May you have fun learning Japanese!
Maarten
Last week was a bit of a rollercoaster privately, I might share details later on in a private log instead but don’t know yet. I managed to do reviews every day, but not all the things I planned this week panned out as I wanted.
よつばと! -yotsuba-absolute-beginners-book-club-home-thread
