Hello Everyone! I decided to mix it up a bit for my studylogs (and change the title accordingly) 
While I think the weekly summary is nice, I do encounter quite a bit in the meantime and want to write this down. Reading back my week 3 post, I don’t know why I was so negative about my progress last week, even though I felt like I could have done more, the progress wasn’t that bad 
Adjectives
As written in the previous post I made the tables on paper and it allowed me to realize a few things. The first thing is that na-adjectives basically function as i-adjectives when in the negative form and changing it to the negative past. State of being is also very similar to na-adjectives with only one change in non-past positive form. I highlighted the things that allowed me to spot the patterns. I do have to be careful to not mix them up because they are so similar though.
| State of being | Positive | Negative |
|---|---|---|
| Non-past | だ | is | じゃない | is not |
| Past | だった | was | じゃなかった | was not |
| Na-adjectives | Positive | Negative |
| Non-past | な | じゃない |
| Past | だった | じゃなかった |
| i-adjectives | Positive | Negative |
| Non-past | い | くない |
| Past | かった | くなかった |
Graded readers / Reading immersion
I already went way past my goal of one L0 graded reader, I finished all the S-grade and 5 L0 readers. The first L0 was the most difficult, as I had to get used to reading the longer sentences that are not present in S-grade. Every reader I have to look up about 1 or 2 words/Kanji. I do feel like I make a lot of mistakes (and correcting it in 2 to 10 seconds later), in both Kanji readings and reading Hiragana/Katakana. While I can correct it without looking things up, I do not know if this will become a long term problem and therefore have to study the basics a bit more. As I can correct myself I’ll just blame dyslexia for the moment and carry on.
I started using the graded readers as small “time wasters”, which is why the amount of reading just shot up. Turns out I have quite a lot of moments I take out my phone when waiting, and instead of looking at technical news I can also read a bit of Japanese! I do still look at the technical news, but instead of going “Oh I’m bored”, I’ll go immediately to the graded readers.
I am also considering starting to read for the yotsuba-absolute-beginners-book-club. While quite a few threads have been started and it has been going on for a while, it looks to be alright to just start with the first one and ask questions in the corresponding thread. There is also a book-club that starts in Halloween and that is definitely a step up from what I am reading now. I may want to start that next month to decipher it (as the guide of Yotsuba mentioned the first books will be). I expect that my slower reading speed means I need the whole month for the first book though.
Updated goals of this week
The goals are mostly the same, with a few updates;
- I want to read 1 graded reader (L0) every day.
- I want to finish Nichijou, I am now at episode 19/26, which means about 2 episodes every day. I got a few series I want to rewatch, but that’s for next week!
- Maybe start the absolute beginner book club. I more than doubled my immersion plans this week so it is probably a good idea to see how this pans out first.
Everyone have a wonderful day and may you have fun engaging with Japanese! 