Lemmy's study log (and other funny things)

Japanese Language
21

Finished all my reviews for the day, so it’s time to make a new post.

Wanikani

I reached level 11 Wednesday, and overall it has been a very easy week. The vocabulary I’ve done until now was chill, and so were the radicals. The kanji was a bit more sticky, but after one or two errors and a self-study quiz, I got it all figured out. Radicals will level up tomorrow, and kanji will level up Tuesday, so I’ll probably have a bit of a backlog.

My only issue here is that I have 101 apprentices, and even after leveling up reviews, I end up with 80-90, so my lesson amount has been a bit more limiting. I’m not sure if I should slow down or keep this rhythm. I’ll decide as the week goes.

Still, all goals were accomplished, so I’m pretty happy.

Grammar

Been taking it quite slow, because my job is making me work the entire morning, so the motivation has been quite thin. I did two sessions, one for に and one for と, along with reviewing lesson 3 from Elementary Japanese. I’ll soon be moving to lesson four, which is where I remember stopping.

I made the “yes the two books are important” comment at the start for the lols, but I do wonder how useful it is to follow two different textbooks at the same time when I could just focus on Marugoto. On one hand, the order of EJ is different and teaches me things that Marugoto doesn’t touch on and I already made a lot of progress on the lessons I did, but on the other, I feel like I can just use supplementary sources for that. I’m not sure what to do.

Class
Today we finished the family chapter, and we learned numbers 1-99. WK helped here since it’s content I pretty much knew from scratch (other than some shortenings that happen for the ages on numbers ending in 1, 8, and 10 and the reading for 20 years old). The family topic has been an easy one too due to WK.

I haven’t done my homework yet, but that’s just because this weekend has been dedicated to resting, due to the whole “working all morning” situation. At least this week is the last, and then it’ll go back to normal, along with a holiday on Tuesday. My shoulders are all fucked up, I need the rest.

I’ll be making a goal post soon, but I kinda wanna restructure the grammar section. Having the grammar goals be 5 rigid options feels wrong, because sometimes I review other things which I feel like are contributing, but don’t count because it’s not in the list (e.g: me reviewing some terms for directions and places). I’ll have to think about it soon.

Drawing

Some more pokémon redesign doodles to cope. Torchic line and a test at Charizard. Also a little human drawing to test something

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22

Goals 1st - 7th

Wanikani

Do all reviews per day
Do 15-20 lessons per day when available (does not count if apprentices are +100)
Level up to level 12

Additionally, once I’m done with this level, I might review my burned items and see which ones I think I should review more. I don’t think all of them deserve to be there. Level up is possible so I’m adding it in

Self-study

Do 2 grammar topics this week

A bit more simple than last week, but I think this gives me freedom on what I can research. I don’t know what else to make a goal for this though LOL. I decided to keep going with Elementary Japanese but just as a secondary guideline on what to study next, and extra resources!

Class

Finish all my homework
Review chapters 1-4 for test
Review sayings and phrases I’m stuck on, practice speech

23

Tem um montão de Brasileiros aqui. :slight_smile: As aulas são online ou são ao vivo? Eu esqueci de como falamos person-to-person em Portugues (estou vivendo fora do Brasil já faz mais de 26 anos… :frowning:

24

Ao vivo! É muito bom, faço em um centro público de línguas aqui do estado. Eu acho que aprender japonês pelo português é mais fácil do que aprender pelo inglês, pena que não tem muito material fora do curso

25

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I leveled up this morning, but I’m uncertain if I should keep doing my 15-20 lesson routine. My gurus are super high, and if I keep going they’ll increase way faster than they get to master.

What do you guys think?

26

I’m not a good judge of guru volume, but if you have a high retention rate, and those guru start funneling into master, I wouldn’t expect it to hurt to keep at your current pace if it’s comfortable for you.

But I would keep an eye on stats if your review accuracy drops. Or if the daily review volume is getting too high. Those will both be signs to slow down a little and reorient yourself.

27

Makes sense! Right now my reviews go between 30-90, so I might take it a bit slower.

28

As long as apprentice don’t go above 140 and Guru above 600, you are fine. These ranges are a bit arbitrary but that was what worked for me.

29

Week 1st-7th summary

Wanikani
The good of wk is that is fairly easy to put 20-30 minutes to do some lessons, and reviews could be done as they come in 5 to 10 minutes, so it’s easy to follow through my goals even in my busiest weeks.

I leveled up this Friday and decided to keep my pace. Currently, the painful levels aren’t that painful for me, so as long as my Gurus are being kept in check, I don’t mind. Today I had +100 reviews with most of them being gurus, and my accuracy was really good (96%).

Here are some stats

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You can actually see my accuracy slowly climbing up, recovering from my +1k review pile with a lot of 50/60% reviews.

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My pace allows for 9-10 level-up days, which is crazy.

Grammar
Just didn’t have any time for lessons this week. Too much work, too tired. This week was the second and last with all morning shifts, but it was a lot harder than last week, so I couldn’t grab the motivation to pick up a book when I needed to continue working in the afternoon to finish stuff up. I’ll try to get back to pace this week.

Class
Yesterday was a review day. Next week there won’t be a class because the institute is going to prepare for Sunday’s exam. Don’t know what the exam is about, probably to get a spot for a job there.
On day 20 we’ll be having our test, which is separated into 4 parts: essay, writing, oral and audio. For our first test, the teacher let us take the essay paper home and then just deliver it on the 20th, but the rest will be in the institute.

We had no homework, so my goals will probably just be repeating the reviews I did and finishing the essay since I’d like to be done this week.

No drawing for this update, I didn’t have time lol

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Your progress with WK impressive me. I am moving very very slow haha

I like your drawings! When you have time I’d love to see more.
Maybe you’d like to join me in drawing (weird) griffins? I take any bird and almost any mammal (no hooves, that’d be a hippogriff,) and combine them. Usually I use the mammals body shape with the bird’s head + mammals ears, the bird’s feet for the front and the mammal’s feet for the back, plus the mammal’s tail. Sometimes I use random generators to help pick my species, last time I asked POLLs for ideas and got kangaroo rat + kiwi.

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Obviously no pressure, but I wanted to share the fun if you I’d like to join in.

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I don’t really have time for challenges like that, but I do appreciate the invite haha

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Goals 8th-14th

Wanikani

Do all reviews per day
Do 15-20 lessons per day when available (does not count if apprentices are +100)
Level up to level 13 (if actually possible)

Self-study

Do Marugoto (the one I use for my class) lesson 5 study in advance.
Study 2 grammar topics.

Class

Finish my essay
Review chapters 1-4 for test
Review words and phrases, practice speech

33

I promise I’m not dead. I’ll be updating this soon!

Also, apparently it’s been a year since I joined the community. Happy bday to me, I guess LOL

34

Happy cake day!

35

Alright update time

Here’s a basic timeline of these 22 days that I haven’t updated here:
The first week was spent studying for the test. Went pretty well btw! We’re expecting to get our grades this week
The second week… was me recovering LOL I got kinda burned out of Japanese. I decided to just focus on drawing and doing other things instead.

And the last 8 days were a mix of recovery and just trying new things. In this 2 week break, I realized that I may spend too much time on WK, where I don’t get energy for much else, Japanese or otherwise. While this may be fine for any other student, I’m a freelancer with bills to pay, and not having the energy to draw is a bit worrisome!
But even in the context of Japanese, I thought “hey, what if instead of spending so much time just with kanji, we take it back a notch, and start to spend more time with other points of the language? And maybe don’t overdo it to the point I’m too tired to draw?”

This thought was partially sparked by Bunpros update, which added a very good grammar guide to all its JPLT5 grammar points. So I decided to take the advantage of the free trial, which should end around the end of the year sale.

Right now I’m doing 2 grammar points a day, but I think I might start doing 1 a day instead. I’m also keeping my WK lesson goals per day to be 5-15, which is a more flexible range for me. I have a bad habit of always doing the max and burning out too fast, so pacing myself this way may help it. Reviews are done every day, and I try to not leave any for the next day either.

Don’t know if I’ll post a checklist goal for this week since it’s halfway over. Might instead just post around how I’m adapting to this new schedule. Here’s some art also. Despite working a week, I actually only really got wips done OTL. And some job art, but that’s under NDA

wuby

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36

This study log is the real ace of spades!

37

It’s Monday, so time for a normal update!

Wanikani
Started doing WK lessons again, at a smaller batch (5-15 per day). Didn’t do any today because I’m sick (same with Bunpro), but I got back on a decent routine. The lower lesson amount is helping me manage my items better and be less stressed.

Bunpro

For bunpro, I decided that 1-2 items per day are good enough, as grammar points can take a bit more time to write down and get used to. I’ve done 15 grammar items as of today, which I’m rather proud of. Quite a few are things I already knew, but the detailing is worth not skipping, and I’m reaching the part of N5 that I haven’t seen yet.

I have to say, using Bunpro has helped my grammar a lot already. Other than homework, I haven’t interacted much with it, so having something that reinforces it is really good.
I set my account so that my free trial would expire around the lifetime sale. I’m not sure if I want to go for it or just use it for a year to propel me to do actual reading afterwards. I’m leaning on lifetime, as having an edge on grammar seems really useful, and by the time I’m done with my N5 items, the N4 and possibly N3 explanation updates should be up.

Course

I aced my tests! Got 10/10 on all of them, which is stroking my ego a lot LOL. Saturday was mostly correcting the tests and homework, so we didn’t get a lot of new material. Just need to do homework and I’ll be set for this week.

No drawings for this update, just because it’s only been a couple of days since the last one.

38

Goals 6th - 13rd

WK
End the week with no reviews left
Do 30 lessons this week.
Study some of my leeches

Bunpro
End the week with no reviews left
Do 5 lessons this week
Figure out how the hell this site works

Japanese Course
Do homework
Check next week’s chapter to see if there’s anything I can do in advance.

39

Using this post to write down items/grammar points that I feel I’ll struggle with. Writing down helps memory I think

都合 (at one’s convenience) - the meaning is pretty hard to infer from the kanji, which I feel I’ll struggle with once I forget the mnemonic. I’ll just try to assign “joining” in a “metropolis” with the idea of big cities and metropolises being more convenient. Don’t even ask me about the circumstances meaning though, I got no clue how to remember that. つごう is a weird reading, but the mnemonic is working for now at least

様 (formal name title kanji) - You’d expect -sama to be an easy one to learn, from how common it is (not as common as -san, of course, but-), but I’ve barely seen this kanji around, and the meaning mnemonic is not doing it for me. It’s easy now, but I don’t know if I’ll remember it as time goes. I have no clue on what mnemonic to give it to make it easier either.

40

Yep, I totally relate, this one was (is?) a pain for me. My brain immediately flagged it as a weird one enough that I’m always vigilant about “that strange metropolis one that means convenience”… but then I spent a long time mixing it up with 都会. Don’t be like me!