Pygospa's Study Log

[pygospa]

Introduction

みなさん、こんにちは！
私はピゴスパです。ドイツしゅっ人です。学生です。プログラマーしごとうします。ドイツ語と英語を話します。少しスペイン語とフランス語を分かります。日本語を学びます。

Okey, enough flexing with my rather bad 日本語 skills… to be honest, that’s about it. Not much, for the time I already invested - I especially miss vocabulary, but also advanced grammar, which is why I decided to start a study log, to focus my language work and be more accountable to a greater audience; but also to connect to fellow students. For my initial post I want to introduce myself (see above) and explain where I’m coming from and what I want to achieve here. Let’s get right to it:

Japanese? Why?!

That’s the question I face regularly when people learn that I pursue the language. Good question. To be honest, I am not the typical Japanese language learner. I never got into anime, I don’t read manga, I’ve never been to Japan, no one would ever dream of calling me “weeaboo”. I however got a bit into contact with parts of Japanese culture and philosophy: I have a 四きゅう in 柔術 (but had to stop a decade ago, when moving to a different town), and did some 居合道 (stopped for the same reason). I also find Japanese feudal history interesting, and I enjoy おすし and ラーメン, and am interested in Japanese Cinema (I am a huge movie buff and love international films in general).

The main reason however was that after high-school and after spending half a year in Spain (2007) I actually never picked up any language anymore; I am fluent in German and English and that’s it. This bugged me and I feel like becoming a “professional idiot” - so I decided to challenge myself with learning a new language. I wanted this language to be “exotic” - not yet another one of the Romance languages that all share basic grammar and loads of words and the Latin alphabet.

So I compiled a list of potentially interesting but also highly challenging languages...

• Arabic (lingua franca of the Arab world, I like Arab history and cultural history, I love the writing system)
• Chinese (with 1.2 billion speakers the most spoken language in the world)
• Korean (one of the most “useless” languages with “only” 80 million speakers [similar to Germany], but I love the Hangul script and they have produced soooo many good movies in the past)
• Russian (largest Slavic language)

But from all these Japanese turned out to be the most interesting to me from an interest in the country and it’s people, the cinematic world, and maybe also professionally as I have a degree with focus on AI and robotics. Plus, Japanese is said to be rather similar to Korean and learning and using Kanji gives me a small footing into Chinese as well - so if I ever get fluent with my Japanese, I might be picking up those languages with more ease in the far future? Who knows?

The Journey so far…

I set my mind on learning Japanese in 2016, started looking for resources and all told me to learn Hiragana and Katakana first, so I printed out trace sheets and learned my Kana in round about 2 months time using pure drilling. Hiragana was easier, but when Katakana came into the mix, it confused me mighty, and even today I feel uneasy with Katakana and need to look a few up. After learning the Kana I was a bit lost with all the different material on the internet but no structural way of learning, so I decided to visit a class; 6 months from 2017-2018, 2h per week, and it was a bad decision - the course was overcrowded, every second class you had one chance of saying a single sentence, so no practice in class. And everyone was super into Anime and Manga so I had a hard time connecting with the other students. Also, the teacher used the book J Bridge which we had to study with at home, and it’s weirdly structured and asks you to learn a weird amount of partly rather special vocabulary. There is no Kanji learning intended, yet the book uses them intensely and Furigana are really small.

Rather frustrated I didn’t learn much and had a longer break after the class. I think it was in 2019 that I discovered the audio course of Michel Thomas (I was listening to a podcast by Tim Ferriss and he broke down how he’d approach a new language, which is a more condensed way of what Michel Thomas does). While the other courses are rather old and a bit dated, the Japanese course is a modern one and really good - you get to talk in no time, you learn all the basic grammar and learn words and sentence constructs that allow you to easily talk; simple things like まいにち本をよみます、きょうはかのじょとえいがをみます。You get basic vocabulary, and basic sentence structure, you are shown how you can adapt this sentence to everything you might need. Lots of vocab that you already know (ビール、コーヒー、サンドイッチ), so you get talking and thinking in Japanese in no time. And this was something I really needed. I learned much more with that 2x 8h audio courses than in that half year of class with round about 52 hours.

Motivated by this experience I started reading different resources online again, and I also started rethinking the “don’t bother with Kanji” rule. I found a really interesting documentation on how to learn Japanese most efficient [really, check it out, it’ll be worth your while!], and - contrary to most resources I followed before (including the class I visited) - they suggested to learn Kanji as soon as possible (btw., Tofugu - the company behind Wanikani - does so, too), for a couple of reasons: You’ll never stop learning Kanji and learning them takes a long time - the sooner you start the easier it is later; also you build vocabulary with them; and you get to experience native Japanese texts (without furigana) faster. The documentation also suggested WaniKani as a resource, and so in spring of 2020 I started with WaniKani; I couldn’t wait, so I learned everything as soon as it was available, and after some days I was asked to do multiple hundred reviews a session and found myself in review hell, didn’t recall much and… well… I stopped, after some frustrating hours of reviews. Bad start, my bad. I hit reset on WaniKani in 2021 and tried again, and this time I was really good and enjoyed it a lot. But having a lot of problems in the Corona years I only managed to get to level 2 and then discontinued. During that time I also managed to get hold of a second hand げんき１ + workbook and mainly used it for further vocabulary work with Anki - using a method that does not translate the vocab but rather using personal images. I thought it was a good idea to get them in first, before working with the rest of the text, but since then I read some interesting “better approaches” (i.e. listen to the dialogue first and try to understand as much as possible, then listen to it with the Japanese text, and try to make sense of new words, then read the translation and read the dialogue aloud; this should engage you more with the text and allows you to better learn vocabulary - plus you can afterwards decide which of the vocab you really need to know to learn; and learn them in the example sentence not as a single word from the word list).

This year I restarted my WaniKani Journey and I am much faster than anticipated - for most Kanji I just needed a reminder and they climbed the SRS ladder in no time: A great testament for the method.

Means of Traveling

After all that I've done, here's what I plan to do:

1. Find more fellow learners: This will hopefully make me more focused and helps me stay motivated with Japanese; they say you are the average of the five people you interact with the most - none of my friends, family, etc. is into language learning, so I need to find them somewhere else; hopefully it’s you who kept on reading all of this?
2. Find a learning routine: My biggest enemy is “falling off the wagon”. Therefore I want to have a routine that I keep to. Currently it is WaniKani - it’s really fun to do, and I do my reviews and lessons in the morning before starting to work, and in the evening I try to catch up with further reviews. In the long run I will want to add more to these routines (once they become habits I cannot live without anymore ).
3. WaniKani: I want to continue using WaniKani and will buy a lifelong access at the next winter sale. WaniKani has helped me a lot - I learned vocabulary and recognize Kanji which allows me to deduce context - this even works with Chinese texts, and whenever this happens, I feel a sense of accomplishment and am motivated to go on.
4. Genki: As described above, I think I found a good way to work with this textbook: Start with listening comprehension and reading comprehension, while being fully aware that there is new things you don’t know - but activating your brain to try making sense of things will help recognizing things in the long run. Put the interesting vocab in Anki, using images and sentences instead of translations of single words. Then work through all the Grammar, one point at a time. Once done, do the exercises in the textbook the day after. When all the Grammar is done, you’d probably know the vocab as well, so you could work through the reading material at the back. And a week later cycle back to the exercises in the Workbook - taking advantage of the SRS method this way.
5. Writing: For me, writing is an essential part of language learning, so I want to work on my hand writing. Writing stuff down helps me to even further decompose Kanji into radicals, helps me to better recognize them later, but it’s also simply fun to write these beautiful characters. Currently I am not using any method, but I’ll want to do something here - probably Anki with stroke orders of Kanji I know in WaniKani?
6. Reading comprehension: I joined the 📚📚 Read every day challenge - Summer 2022 🏖 ☀ - #691 by pygospa to make it a daily habit to read something. And I started with the Graded Readers Lvl 0 (find it here Graded Readers and Parallel Texts "Book Club"), reading it the same way I described above for Genki. In the longrun I would love to be able to join the Absolute Beginners Book Club // Now reading: The Wolf of the Small Forest // Upcoming: Horimiya, but they suggest to have a level of JLPT N5/Genk 1 finished. Until then I’ll keep on reading Graded Readers, to make reading in Japanese a habit, gain speed in reading, and trying to make sense of stuff.
7. Listening comprehension: There is a club for it, which is great, they also collect material, so once I feel comfortable joining them, I’ll do that. For now I feel that I should stick to just a few new habits, and in the beginning for me as an self-teaching student I find reading that much more valuable; but I’ll join them eventually… 🔉 🎙 Listen Every Day Challenge (Summer Edition) 🏖
8. Movies: I own approximately 40 Japanese movies on blu-ray (from modern horror movies [Pulse, One Missed Call, Ring, Audition, Battle Royale] and gangster movies [Outrage trilogy, Hana-bi, Violent Cop] to family dramas [I wish, Like Father Like Son, After the Storm], to classics [Tokyo Story, Human Condition, Onibaba], etc. I seen most of them, but I’ll want to rewatch them more often to get some authentic Japanese dialogues and train my listening comprehension even further. Problaby part of the Extensive listening challenge 👂 (2022)
9. J-Bridge: I’ll give it a second chance, as an additional source for exercises that help on repetition, and with a head start I got after working through げんき１ and knowing more and more Kanji with WaniKani

… end of Journey?

This is a difficult one - self management/improvement experts will tell you that you’ll need to write down your goals as SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound). For Japanese, my main reason for learning this language is to (a) have my brain be challenged in something totally different than I do every day, and (b) become fluent in another foreign language besides English. How do you measure this? Is JLPT any indicator for fluency? How can you time-bind it? Is fluency even achievable?

You see, these goals are bad goals, I’d need something like "by the end of year, I want to pass the JLPT N5. Problem with this: I am doing this entirely for leisure (relevance?), and when something else comes inbetween, everything else will take priority. Never will Japanese. So I don’t want to time-bind any goals (even though it might be a good idea) - at least not for now. Same is true for measurability. If I don’t have a time-bound goal, it doesn’t matter if I managed to move X items to Enlightened in WaniKani, each week, or if I met a certain page number on a book, etc. So the only thing left is specificity. Let’s try that:

List of goals

• I want to reach level 60 on WaniKani. Why? I want to learn those 2,136, or at least most of them, to become as fluent in reading as possible. WaniKani gives me 1,963 of those, and I love using it, so this is a no-brainer.
• I want to be able to watch my Japanese movies without subtitles
• I want to be able to keep up with the advanced book club
• I want to probably be able to reach JLPT N1. Why? I don’t need it for anything, and arguably it is a bad test for testing proficency. But it’ll give my learning efforts a direction, it’ll make progress measurable and visible and give myself anohter sense of acomplishment. Maybe this is just true for the first couple of Levels (N5, N4, N3)? That’s why the probably - I’ll reevaluate it later - but for now, JLPT N5 is the next big step, and it’ll force me to work through Genk 1 and finish WaniKani up to Level 16 (I guess?).
• I want to be able to converse with a Japanese person.

Will you follow me on my journey? I’ll irregularly post things here, that I’ve done, that I’ve achieved, or maybe even interesting new things that I’ve learned. And I hope to motivate you, if you follow along, and maybe we can also start discussing things? Feel free to leave me a comment here any time.

See you in the next one!

[polv]

I feel that longer time-bound goals have higher failure rates, and what comes next is investment – so, it is important to try hard, and in various ways.

Shorter term ones, like weekly, are easier to set and accomplish. (And perhaps already set if you attend a class.) So adapt accordingly.

At least that is how I feel about goal-setting.

Still, my beliefs did shift towards step-wise milestones (like textbooks or language proficiency levels) more recently. But stepwise also means either, adapt well, or try a lot.

[fallynleaf]

I think setting shorter term goals is an excellent idea!

Personally, I’ve had a lot of success with establishing a very regular WK schedule (I do the same number of lessons every day and level up every 12-14 days). It’s nice to have the WK levels as benchmarks of progress, and it also makes for a really convenient short-term deadline for other stuff I’m working on. I use each WK level as a deadline to get another lesson done in my textbook, for example. As a result, it keeps me constantly moving forward and feeling satisfied that I’m progressing.

Study logs are also great for this! I update mine whenever I level up and basically report on all of the things I got done during the level, and usually try to set some goals for the next couple weeks. Usually my goals are specific projects I want to work on that are doable at my current level and involve things that are interesting or exciting to me about Japanese right now: (creating a special Anki deck, studying a specific thing, finishing a chapter of manga or a wrestling show translation, sometimes even starting a new discussion on the forum, etc.).

The other things that have worked well for me are joining book clubs here on the forum, and joining the read every day challenge, and the listen every day challenge. The book clubs (there is an absolute beginners one!) and the challenge threads both give me deadlines with tangible tasks to do every day, which is helpful for keeping me on track. “Become fluent in Japanese” is a very hard goal, but “finish reading this volume of manga” is a very doable one.

Then after you’ve gotten a small foothold, you can do what I did and accidentally take on the responsibility of a huge, perpetually ongoing translation project when you are still a beginner . I’m not sure I’d actually recommend this to most people , but it sure is one way to get yourself constant practice and motivation to keep engaging with Japanese…

But definitely find the things that you love that are in the language, and let yourself celebrate all of the small victories along the way (study logs are also great for this!). It’s a very long journey, but if the journey itself is fun, you won’t want to stop .

[pygospa]

First week since I started my learning log, so time for an update. First of all, thank you for @polv and @fallynleaf for your feedback and input. This is highly appreciated. For me the main goal is also to set up some kind of habit that keeps me doing what I do. For WaniKani that already works pretty well. I’ll check WaniKani the first thing after starting my PC in the morning. Until last week I did a new Lesson every day (10 Items) and all my reviews. Then, whenever I think about it I check WK for any reviews, but at least in the evenings, before I switch off my PC, I’ll check one last time and do my reviews.

If I manage to stay with this routine there is no need for me to formulate any fancy goals. However, this’ll get a bit more complicated, as I have set my mind to wait till December to get a live-long subscription. I only have 22 more lessons, which I am now spreading out As long as I have reviews, I’ll wait with new stuff, and only start them, once I’ve run out of things for a day. Let’s see how this will go on.

I already have reached two mile-stones:

1. I have my first items in enlightened - which too me never happened before, so it’s a milestone for me (I know, I know, there’s Burned, which is much cooler - but I’ll get there, I promise! For now, let me have this ).

2. Today I reached my 30 days streak. This is especially cool, as I was on a short vacation the lasta days; thanks to smart phones and mobile internet these days that is no excuse for not doing your Kanji And if you believe those self-improvement gurus, 30 days streak means that a habit has been formed, so this is also quite nice.

Plus I’ve started reading in one of the book clubs. No not the absolute beginners one - I did take a look and I’d love to participate, but they recommend JLPT N5/Genki 1 knowledge, which I just don’t have yet, but also some of the Natively Levels of the books are quite high, which I find a bit scary to be honest (JLPT N5 should be 0-12, JLPT N4 13-19; the current book is on Natively level 22, and the next one near 30, which would already be considered N3 level - but I guess you’d have to have something challenging). But year, the ABBC is one of my goals, so I’ll work hard to get through Genk 1 - let’s see how long this will take me, but as soon as I feel a bit more confident, I’ll maybe pick up the easiest of the books they already read (probably 10 Minute Stories), and if I’m comfortable enough with that, I’ll join for a live reading.

Until then, however, I am reading the free Level 0 Graded Readers PDF that I’ve found here. I’ve already read through pages 1-171, so the chapters:

• 青い
• 赤さん
• よむ？？？
• たいへん！！
• 白い？黒い
• かまきり
• たまご
• 肉じゃが
• どうぞ どうも
• あつた！
• あれは何？
• すみません

Writing them all out it seems like quite a lot, wow. I had some great time with these, it’s fascinating and higly rewarding figuring out both: The meaning of things you don’t know, but even more so recognizing words, Kanji and Grammar you already know.

At next to no language knowledge this is pretty cool, however there are some chapters that need a re-read with a dictionary (as mentioned, using just having a 6.25" smart phone screen on the train is not the best way to be needing the PDF (wich isn’t OTRed) as well as a dictionary

For the last week I always read one chapter before bed time, plus a lot more when I was on the train. I hope to make this my next habit - at least a chapter every night. If you are interested in a more detailed progress report and thoughts on different chapters, you can follow my progress on my “home post” in the reading club:

Read every day challenge - Summer 2022

pygospa’s Home Post Hello everyone – I’m just a couple of days on this forum and already I am participating in my very first challenge here. Pew, quite some work to figure out how this works, but I think I’ve got this, now. It will be a hard one as I am a WaniKani Lvl 3 and worked through chapters 1 and 2 of げんき１ a while ago (need to re-read those, I fear), so don’t expect much from me. My goal is to make it a habit to think abou…

For the coming week I’ll focus on the formation on the reading habit, and I’ll also try to incorporate some Genki time as well, probably in the morning right before/after WaniKani. I’ll still need to figure out a pace and method for working through that book, but I’ll develop it while working through it, I guess So much for my week! How was yours?

[pygospa]

明けましておめでとうございます!

I hope this is correct, I just fished it out of Google translate. In any case: Happy New Year. And seeing the last years progress, this year can only get better… I prognosed it, and so it happend:

@pygospa

My biggest enemy is “falling off the wagon”.

I don’t want to get into details and excuses - fact remains, that I slowly but surely stopped learning - which is sad because I even prepared a log entry for my first burned item that I was really happy about; but due to time restrains, I first didn’t log here anymore and then didn’t learn. Let’s hope this will be different in 2023.

In 2023, my main focus will be consistency. I think I have some good learning methods and some good ideas, the most important part is now sticking to it. At the moment I am still on vacation, but for next week when work starts again, I’ll plan the following for every day:

1. Don’t miss any SRS reviews - this is the most important goal and the one I’ll try to keep even when times are bad. I have a smartphone, I have a good internet connection and ISP, it should be possible to hit my reviews wherever I am. WaniKani works pretty well in the browser (though I am irritated that they don’t have a smartphone app one of the few sites that actually don’t have one), and for Anki I have the Android app and syncing between devices using their web service, which is a pretty neat thing. So on days that I am not on my computer at all, or travelling, etc. this should still be possible to keep. A 365 day review streak, that is the absolute minimum main goal I am committing to - even if it is just one item. And most of the days I am at home and at my computer anyways, so every break I can get from work and other stuff, I’d check the website and the Anki desktop app.

2. I will try to follow my learning routine every day - for this, I’d minimum need my phone, and the absolute minimum of my learning routine would be to learn 10 new Kanji on WaniKani (that’s my current setting for my batch size, and up to now I am happy with it - I might reduce it to 5 when things get harder, but being at level 4, this is still fine). So I’d also aim for 365 days of minimum learning 5-10 WaniKani items; however the ideal learning day routine will look as follows:

My planned daily learning routine for 2023

• I’d do my SRS reviews first (Anki and WaniKani)
• I’d pick up my Genki books and follow the approach I had laid out here, i.e. on a typical day I would always start with review which is 0-4 exercises: one from the Genki Textbook for the Grammar point I learned yesterday, one from Seth Clydsdale’s website for the Grammar point from the day before yesterday, and one from the Genki Workbook for the Grammar Point I learned last week; and maybe the reading or writing exercise from the last lesson. Then I’ll pick out something new from the book: Either a dialogue, or a Grammar point, and work through it. This might include watching the ToKini Andy video for this section, or looking up further examples (e.g. at Tae Kim’s), but that’s not necessary.
• Vocabulary work: Picking out the next ~10 items and add them to Anki. This will take some time, because I am using pictures instead of translations, I’d try to use short example sentences instead of single words and I’ll add sound recordings to the cards, wherever possible. But this is part of the initial learning progress, as I miss the mnemonics that WaniKani provides. I’ll never do them beforehand in batches, or anything. Any new item will get it’s card when it is due to be learned, and then it’ll go the typical SRS route.
• Learn 5/10 new Items on WaniKani

Hopefully, this all will be possible in a 1~1.5 hr window. To be the most efficient, I’d need to be at my desk and have my computer with me; if I don’t, creating Anki cards will not be possible and needs to be skipped. The rest can also be done with a smart phone and me carrying the books along. So this should also be possible during work travels (which I already have two upcomming in the next weeks), or vacations. And if it isn’t (e.g. festivals with campsites), I’ll reduce it to the 5-10 new Items on WaniKani.

And at least for the beginning, that’s it. While I got really excited about the Level 0 Graded Readers, and Everyday reading/writing/listening challenges, I feel that adding those (now) will become a bit overwhelming again, and this might throw me off the tracks again. I’ll try to get this routine done, and if it works for couple of weeks/months and I get board, I’ll add to it. This doesn’t mean that I won’t listen to anything, or I won’t be writing or reading. But as a daily challenge in my routine this is too early I guess. But we’ll see each other there again, some time this year, so don’t be sad

I have a third goal, that I want to reach, and I hope I will:

3. Take the test for JLPT N5 in the Summer. According to all the information I have, I’d learn all Kanji needed when I reach level 16 of WaniKani, though the last 6 levels each read 98.73% of Kanji (see screenshot below, source is wkstats.com), so I guess there is just a couple that only appear at level 16, and you know 98.73% of all Kanji needed at Level 10, which is already good enough. A level takes, in average something between 7-14 days, I am at beginning of level 4, so 7-13 Levels to go, i.e. between 7-14 and 26 weeks, which will put me at July this year. Also I have estimated, that working through Genki 1 should take something around 3 months (see quote below); and according to the sources, Genki 1 teaches you all you need for JLPT N5. So it is challenging but not unreasonable to reach the knowledge needed for JLPT N5 by summer, which would be perfect, because in the Summer they’ll always have the JLPT in Hamburg, which is a 2 hour drive, compared to Stuttgart (in the Winter) which is a 6 hour drive. Also, in Hamburg I have family I can stay with, in Stuttgart I’d need a hotel room.

Screenshot of wkstats.com

My estimation on how long it takes to finish Genki 1

@pygospa

Every lesson should take approximately one week (…). This will allow you to finish the book in 13 weeks, i.e. 3 months (plus whatever you need to remember and recall the last lessons)

So, that’s my 2023 Japanese learning New Years resolutions. Let’s see how it goes. I’ll try to keep this log up to date at least weekly, and with the next post I’ll show how the first week of this year went (I think I’ll keep my updates to Friday, that would fit quite well to my schedule).

[pygospa]

I’m back on track (hopefully)

I returned from my Holiday vacation on Dec. 28th, and on Dec. 29th, thinking about new years resolutions and what was good and bad about the last year, how my finances went, etc., I stumbled upon my savings account where I’ve been putting aside money for WaniKani lifetime. So I checked and saw, that there actually is a life time sale, and I happily joined in, so finally I am a LIFER as the welcome email called me I joined on 30th, but it took me yet another day, because the sheer amount of items was a bit terrifying, plus there where still lots of other things to do.

As my last session was Aug. 24th, I was considering resetting WaniKani once again, but couldn’t quite bring me to it, and so I decided to just start the reviews and see how it goes - resetting is possible anytime, undoing a reset however, irreversible (as far as I know?), so I’d thought: Let’s see how far I got. I was wowed away. I unforutnately didn’t think about screenshooting the New Items/Review secition (it was something around 300 Items to be reviewed), but I made a screenshot of the Apprentice → Burned items; which was just for me to have a feel if this will change to the better or worse, and if I should restart or not. Luckily I also clipped the heat map with it:

WaniKani stats from Dec. 31st

I did 66 reviews on Dec. 31st, just before celebrating Silvester, and I was sober enough on Jan. 1st for 20 additional reviews. On Jan. 2nd I failed and broke my 2 days streak, but since then I’ve been hitting it every day: 63 on Tuesday, 202 on Wednesday, 23 on Thursday, and 16 today. But what’s even better: That marathon on Wednesday night/Thursday morning made me finish all my reviews;

so since today I’ve been learning new items again. And now look at this progression:

WaniKani stats form today

I was absolutely irritated and positively surprised that after a 4 months break I could recall so many things. The burned count went from 2 to 104! That means I retained 102 items from Enlightened, which was at 120. Only 18 that went back in progression. Mastery was at 156, and after the reviews it shrinked to 4, while Enlightened rose to 99, so again, 99 additional items remembered, totaling it to 201 items that I did not lose, and only 57 additional that I “forgot”. Now I put forgot in quotations, because a lot of time, I did remember the word, but had problems getting the Kana right. E.g. for 小さい I’d type ちさい when it should have been ちいさい; or for 入力 I answered にゅうろく instead of にゅうりょく. That is of course wrong, and I won’t argue there; still for me it is close enough to show me that WaniKani and I really work perfectly together. I am really really happy for this, and I am happy buying my lifetime - even if I should reach level 60 in a years time, it’s worth the investment

There where just probably round about 5-10 items where I had no idea at all. Crazy.

Now on the other hand, my Anki did not go well at all, and so after getting a lot of words I could not recall at all, I reset the whole thing. Anki I am using for my Genki work, and I only started it after finishing all my WaniKani reviews.

Anki stats from today

So this week I only had two of my days that are going according to plan, i.e. have the reviews and learning new stuff. And even though it’s not a challenge, I started at Lesson 1 with Genki, i.e. one day of dialogue work (and though the first Dialogue was easy, I was struggeling a bit with the second one, figuring out what アリゾナだいがく or にねんせい was. I figured it out eventually but I had to hear it a couple of times. Vocab and Grammar was fairly easy so I did double the work in 2 days and am already finish with the chapter, lesson-wise; however I still have all the exercises to do, but that can also be done in parallel with lesson 2.

Hopefully the streaks will hold on, I have some timers set for when I have my next upcomming reviews, and I’ll probably add another learning session each evening for the next 3 days, where I am still on vacation.

Let’s see how this goes - I hope you had a good start into your years as well; let’s make 2023 perfect

[pygospa]

私は日本語を書きます。

That bold printed Kanji is the only Kanji of the Kanji you need to know for the JLPT N5 level, that is missing after reaching WaniKani Level 10, and it is introduced in Level 16. If you pull this in earlier, then you’d know all Kanji you need for the JLPT N5 after reaching Level 10. So for me that’s just 6 more WaniKani Levels to goooo

So how was my week? In a way both, really great, and also a bit frustrating. There where days when I was making good progress, and others where I’d just flunk everything. I need to learn early in the day, and that’s not always possible for me, so a couple of days I had to do it in the evening. Doing reviews was really fun and productive during transit in the bus, however as I am now nearly 100% remotely working from home, this hardly ever happens anymore.

Still, all in all I think I can be proud of myself. WaniKani lists a 11 day streak, Anki a 9 day streak, i.e. I haven’t missed a single day since picking my studying Japanese up again, and that was the most minimal goal I wanted to reach.

WaniKani had it’s up’s and downs. Some of the new items I learned, didn’t want to stick at all, probably because it’s not a good idea to learn something new after a 10 hour workday. On the other hand on those days also the reviews didn’t goo as smoothly as wanted. Still I reduced my Lessons count from 85 (last week) to 31 this week, and while Master, Enlightened and Burned did not change at all, the Apprentice column went from 19 to 40, and the Guru from 111 to 160; so more then double the items got to Guru than to Apprentice. I however suspect that starting Level 5 will probably still take me more than next week. There’s still 31 new lessons, plus two Kanji that are not yet available due to flunking the radicals, and as nearly none of the Kanji are passed, all the Vocabluary is still waiting to be activated. And while they should be faster and easier, it’s still 110 items in waiting before being able to start Level 5.

WaniKani stats

Anki this is strongly coupled with Genki work, however, as this is a separate tool, I’ll treat it separately here as well. As I already had all cards ready-made, I just copied the deck into a new one (named Bin), removed all cards from My Genki Deck, and then started moving cards from Bin back to My Genki Deck, so that I had a “handable” amount of cards.

For the cards I am using a template I found somewhere online (I don’t remember where exactly, unfortunately), that will create multiple cards from one template, i.e. a card for reproducing the word, a card for the kanji and kana spellings, a card for the definition, etc. It also has some scripts integrated, that fetch me stroke order images, and a pitch diagram, and it has fields to add an audio recording that will be played automatically.

Instead of using translations I tried out using images for the back side. My initial thinking was to make these images as private as possible, to have a stronger memory impulse when seeing and learning them, but somehow I ended up doing rather random images I found on google, as it is rather hard to find personal images of things like りゅうがく, or アジアけんきゅう, or だいがくいんせい.

In the end, however, the goal is to have sentences instead of words, so as soon as I feel comfortable to form more sentences that I can relate to my personal life containing the vocabulary that is new, I’ll use that.

I also somehow made the mistake of including everything, so I relearned even things I already am pretty fluently in - at first I didn’t think about it, and just copied my old cards - once I realized it, I even thought it was a good idea, as it will evolve fast, and come back later when I might have forgotten it. But in the end, I just clogged my reviews with a lot of cards that are, e.g. just numbers, that I am pretty familiar with. Once realizing that, I cut a couple of cards, e.g. I had also made cards for all the time recordings available, so いちじ、にじ、にじはん、etc. I cut that to just the exceptions from the rule, e.g. よじ、しちじ、くじ.

In the end, with Greetings vocabulary, the Lesson 1 vocabulary, Lesson 1 additional vocabulary, exercise recordings that wheren’t part of the vocabulary, and example sentences for the grammar points with gaps in it for the gramatical constructs (e.g. せんこうは__です__。ー コンピュータサイエンスです。), I processed 435 cards the last week. Much more than I planed, but again, this includes the multiplication for having cards shown with front or back, and asking for the Kanji and Kana readings (where applicable). So each vocaubulary will have 3-4 cards, which will reduce this number to about 110-150 actual items. Which seems much, but given that this is mostly a re-learning, I think the pace is okey. Still I am a bit worried about the reviews though, because they might pile up and then clog new things and hinder progression. But it’s always possible to remove items from Anki, so let’s just see how it works.

One annoyance with this approach of having 3-4 cards per word, is that the randomization isn’t the best. So sometimes, I’ll get the definition, then some other items, then the word, some other items and then some spelling, which is ideal. But it could also happen that I’d be asked for the spelling, and after hitting next, be asked for the definition which I just saw. I tried to figure out if there is any way in Anki to supress this, but couldn’t find any. So I guess the only way to change this, is to create the cards with the template, but then manually set the due-date or ordering. I think I’ll even go a step further (because this is probably even easier): I’ll keep the “bin” deck as my “staging” area, i.e. I’ll add new cards to the bin deck, to generate all 3-4 different cards, and then move them on a day-by-day basis to the actual Genki deck. This way I can ask for all definitions first, then for all reproductions the next day, and so on. I’ll keep you posted.

Anki stats

Card example using the template

Genki I think I am most disappointed with my Genki progression. I just finished the first chapter, and it took me the entire week. I would have loved to finish the first chapter in half the time. But well… I did all the vocab, all the Grammar, all the exercises in the workbook and the book itself - I did them the way I layed it out - except for the workbook which I did not wait until this week; however I did not do the online exercises from Seth Clydesdale, as I layed out in my plan. I’ll probably start with them today, and use them as the second week recap exercises instead. I also watched the first video of TokiniAndy, but I don’t think it added much - except for weird new vocabulary, that I’d probably not need anyhow. But it’s nice for a recap, so probably I’ll consult them whenever I need it for understanding, but the rest of the time I’d probably just watch it as a whole once I’m finished with a chapter (or maybe even in the end, to refresh everything, once I’m through with the book).

I also signed up for Kanshudo, which - as TokiniAndy - was a suggestion to my Genki study proposal, but did not do anything on that site yet. Probably something for this week as well; I generally liked the page (with the exception of the paywall for some items).

For today, I’ll listen to the Dialog for Lesson 2 and start with the first couple of vocabs. I already did my reviews, and also new Items on WaniKani, so just the Genki work left for today. So let’s see how next week goes…

So, how was your week?

[pygospa]

I guess this is the typical going for 80% of the new years resolutions… I managed to stay on track until round about February, even hit level 5; I still had a draft post and screenshots I made for the status update. Then life happened - once more - and things got pushed aside until they weren’t pushable no more, i.e. with every day that passed (after a 2-3 week involuntary break), the pile of reviews got so big (and most of the new items so forgotten) that the only thing that made sense was a restart; not only on WaniKani but also on Anki (and with Anik at least I’ve tried to pick up the reviews, but that was already quite frustrating - and then doing WaniKani and having the same frustration with just the first couple of items… ). I am happy that I’ve decided to go for a life-time plan with WaniKani

Feels really bad, and even worse to openly admit it openly (but hey, if you’d pay attention you’d seen it anyways). But it doesn’t help looking back - just look forward and try your best for the next run.

I just reset my status last week Friday, and kept doing my reviews and lessons for the last couple of days (though there was a one-day-off break due to waiting time), but progression is fast, my knowledge of the early lessons still really good; yesterday I hit level 2, just after four days. I recon to be at level 3 by the end of the week, and then let’s see how much I will still remember of levels 3 and 4. I’ll concentrate on Wanikani for the beginning; and pick up Genki only after I got a routine in WaniKani.

Let’s go, second half of 2023. Hope you’re all doing better than I did!

[soggyboy]

Welcome back! I don’t think there’s any shame in taking a break and trying again. I also think at the beginner level it’s important to not try and do too many things at once and get burnt out.

Also, for what it’s worth, I’m working on Genki as well (starting chapter 7) and I spent sooooo long on the first few chapters (i’m talking months and months), but once I had gotten through them, I felt it was much faster and easier to progress. The more of a foundation you have in a language, the easier it is to build on it. It’s getting over the absolute beginner hill that’s been the most difficult for me.

I also have already started the ABBC at my level and found that it’s difficult but not impossible, and interacting with native material and seeing what it’s like to read it has actually made me more motivated to learn, not less.

Also, have you seen the new Japanese film club thread? (-:

[pygospa]

Thank you for your kind words and suggestions. Also, thanks a lot for mentioning the Japanese Film Club - I hadn’t seen that yet, but I will most definitely take a look. A while ago, for my introduction I compiled a list of movies in my introduction thread; I’ve got quite a number of Japanese movies on blu-ray in my collection and can most definitely participate in bringing in some suggestions - I’ve seen that currently you’re watching カタクリ家の幸福; that’s actually a movie I’ve been circling around for a while now - it was on sale twice on blu-ray and I was considering it, but in the end didn’t have the courage to pick it up, as it looks quite strange - maybe this is the kick I need to finally watching that movie

[fallynleaf]

@pygospa

Feels really bad, and even worse to openly admit it openly (but hey, if you’d pay attention you’d seen it anyways). But it doesn’t help looking back - just look forward and try your best for the next run.

Hey, what’s important is that you came back! Most people who fall off of it once don’t make it that far .

I think you’ll recover what you knew pretty quickly, and I’m sure that this next attempt will go smoother!

[pygospa]

Today’s Saturday, I reset my status last Friday, that means a week is over; how have I done? So far, so good, I’d say.

As stated, I planed to first just stay on WaniKani and get some kind of routine back with it. I started WaniKani every morning after waking up, did all my reviews and put on a timer for the upcoming reviews of the day. I also did basically all the lessons as soon as they became available, and it was pretty straight forward and easy to do (keeping in mind, that I’ve already been there). So today morning at 1am, before I went to bed, I managed to get to Level 3. All the while managing to keeping a nearly 100% accuracy.

That changed mainly due to today morning; I first did my lessons (40 of them), and already there I realized that I wasn’t too concentrated - but doing lessons and the quiz doesn’t do you much bad… then however, when doing my reviews afterwards I made a lot of stupid mistakes (like switching around ~日 and ~月 readings and/or meanings). And maybe this is also the time to start slowing things down again. I mean, I reset my Level 5 for a reason (i.e., not recalling any of the Level 5/Level 4 items, and not being sure if that would also be true for Levels 3-1); as soon as I recognize the pace is not working out anymore because I don’t remember things, I need to slow down to a more natural pensum; this is my plan:

Doing all my reviews as soon as they pop up, whenever possible (i.e. during the day I’ll set the timer for days I am at home [being able to work from home since 2020, this is a luxury I have]), and learning 10 new items a day, right in the morning.

I also found out that the heat map partially stopped working and found the reason here on the forums. That’s a shame, even though I get it. I know there is this local storage solution, but I guess my paranoid settings deleted all the progress (whenever I close my browser all info saved gets deleted - and yes, the stats show that for the last 2 days I didn’t shut down my PC - had some heavy calculations running during the night ).

And I somehow stumbled upon this thread, and got caught up with point 3: “The Wanikani’s sibling that you need to meet” - actually haven’t read through the rest of it. The point made, that got me thinking is this:

@jprspereira

Wanikani […] merely focus on recognition, which is quite an easier process than recall.
[…]
However, it begs the question: what about vocabulary? If recognition basically represents our passive vocab and recall represents our active one, shouldn’t we also worry about recall for vocabulary acquisition? How are we supposed to remember them while speaking/writing?
[…]
The best time to start with it is right together with Wanikani.

There is a lot of truth in this, and I was eager to try it out, so I did and tried out KaniWani with the first lesson (it’s pretty nice that you can actually lock the lessons manually); and even the first lesson where I have 100% accuracy in WaniKani and manage to go through really fast, was rather slow and difficult. In the end, I just made two mistakes, but for each item I had to think about the solution probably in 3-4 times longer than on WaniKani plus the mistakes showed me, something even more interesting:

First I typed in 工 for artificial; then I remembered that this is actually construction and artificial is man-made; so I typed in 工人, which is obviously wrong as well - and then I started guessing: 口人？Only then did I realize that the order was wrong; 人工, of course. When I see it, I automatically hear the voice of the audio on WaniKani pronouncing it in my head; so the recognition works really well. But recalling it? Not so much, I guess… After getting 人工 wrong, I also got 人口 wrong, using 人々 instead.

Now I am wondering, if I should incorporate this into my learning schedule as well, and if I should really do it right away, to further strengthen my Kanji knowledge. As the post suggests, it’s a question of goals; do I just want to be able to recognize, or do I also want to produce? If I go through my initial list of goals, 3 out of 4 goals (I listed 5 but actually, the first are focused on recognition (fluent reading, watching movies, JLPT) are actually recognition goals; not recalling. The last however is:

@pygospa

I want to be able to converse with a Japanese person.

For me, it always feels like I only train my recognition and never my recalling; I learned French for a couple of years, and also Spanish; both some years/decades ago. Both used to be somewhere between the A2-B1 according to CEFR (never tested it, but that’s what the classes worked towards, and that’s how I would have assessed myself at that time). Today I manage to speak just a hand full of sentences, and these take really long to form and are riddled with small Grammatical errors. But I am always surprised, when I then get some text or hear to some audio and manage to understand much more than I would have expected - I just cannot reproduce or create it. For a while that was true for my English as well. For me, personally, I do not feel like knowing a language, unless I am also able to speak it; to converse with someone else. On the other hand, I don’t need this knowledge for most of what I would like to do, and I don’t have any chance of speaking or writing Japanese, as I don’t have any Japanese friends to practice with.

So incorporating KaniWani makes sense. However, on the down side this would be a third SRS that I need to track; I feel like this could be getting a bit much in the long run. To reiterate my plans:

1. WaniKani: Do my reviews as soon as they become available (at least twice a day, at the start and the end) + learn 10 new items (or maybe reduce it to five, later on).
2. Genki: Do review exercises for past sub-chapters of a lesson, learn one new sub-chapter (either a dialog or reading exercise (I’ll use them for listening + reading comprehension) or a grammar point), and add 10 new vocabulary items (plus possible example sentences for the grammar points) to Anki.
3. KaniWani: 10 more items???

Feels like I’ll be spending 2+ hours a day - most of it for SRS reviews - if I want to keep up that pensum - and I am not sure if I can (always) make time for this. Hm… What to do?

First off, I’ll probably stick (at least) another week to just WaniKani; next week I am working regularly again (this week I had just one day, and the rest off). And then, when I feel more comfortable (and also start learning new things again that I haven’t seen before), I’ll add one of the two others… and maybe even both… in the end: Even though it was much more difficult, it was also kinda fun, doing KaniWani.

[fallynleaf]

@pygospa

Feels like I’ll be spending 2+ hours a day - most of it for SRS reviews - if I want to keep up that pensum - and I am not sure if I can (always) make time for this. Hm… What to do?

For what it’s worth, I did WK + KaniWani + Anki (for Minna no Nihongo vocab) all the way to level 60, and it was doable, and I do think I benefited from all three, though it does add extra time. I’d say I probably spent an hour to an hour and a half on SRS each day (maybe a little more for the last month or so of WK, since my review counts were higher).

But yeah, I also never missed a single day of doing my reviews, which kept things from ballooning out of control. So it really was an hour, minimum, every single day for over two years. That is definitely a commitment, and it’s not one that everyone is able to make. You’ll have to decide for yourself if the benefits of practicing recall are worth adding the extra work.

[pygospa]

A bit later than usual, but therefore I’ve got something worth while to report: Level up! While the forum still shows me at level 3, I’ve actually just today reached level 4.

A bit slower than I anticipated, to be honest; WK stats puts me at 9 days; which is okey, I guess - I had some vocabulary left over from lesson 2, when I switched over to level 3, and I wasn’t too quick in picking up all the radicals which was probably a mistake. Those radicals are fairly easy, they don’t come with readings, and basically you try to connect the meaning just to the look of the radical; whereas everywhere else you need to identify the number of radicals, then remember the story that connects them, and then only are you able to produce the meaning + think about the other story for the reading(s). So even though quite easy and without many mistakes, I had to wait quite a while for new lessons to happen, because I didn’t burn the radicals, which led in delays for the Kanji learning.

So for the future I’ll try to pick up all Radicals at once, or in two batches if there are just too many (not more than that though), that are on the same day.

On the plus side, adding WaniKani as exception to my strict “cookie deletion on browser restart” finally shows all my past reviews; 6 days too late, but still - 12/12 (which should actually be 18/18) is quite a good outcome that I am really happy with; and I think I always did lessons when they where available, so I am happy with that progression as well.

So in all, even though it took me 9 days, I am happy with my progress and especially with my error rates according to WK Stats. I also started working on KaniWani - I couldn’t keep away, even though it does not have the same priority and I don’t do it every day the same way I do WaniKani. In the beginning it was quite fun and I enjoyed it - I also feel that it helps with WaniKani as well, adding another “path” in the brain to the things you’ve already started learning.

However, when progressing, I got more and more fed up, due to all the vocabulary with the same translation. Like girl - when you see this, which one would you pick? 女子？女の子？少女？What about woman? 女？女人？女の人？This is really frustrating, cause you need to enter the correct word; so I’ve started to create a list (the only hint you have are the additional words, e.g. “girl 1” has “woman” as second meaning; “girl 2” has “young girl, lady, woman”; and “girl 3” has “young lady”. This at least gives you a way to differentiate, but still it’s no fun; and looking it up from a list feels like cheating. So I am not sure how far KaniWani and I will go; depends on the next vocabulary.

In other news, I found a way to motivate me even further by changing my wallpaper using http://wkw.natural20design.com/ – I guess you all know this site already, but just in case you don’t: This will create a wallpaper with Kanji in the ordering you like best, and the colors you choose. The Kanji will change their color according to their level; I’ve themed my computer according to the dracula color theme, so I used that color palette, and changed it so that unseen is barely visible from the background; and then it will change from gray over blue to red, according to the journey from Apprentice to Burned.

I also decided to group the Kanji according to the JLPT levels, because one of my goals is to take those tests - this way I can see whenever I’ve reached another level - Kanji wise. On the other hand I am also interested in seeing how many of the most frequent Kanji I know; so inside the groups I ordered them that way. Looks quite good, and I cant wait to see the first Kanji turning red.

If you own a Windows or Mac, there’s a script that will automatically update on changes; there is nothing available for Linux, so I had to write my own; but it’s quite easy: I opted for a systemd’s timer unit (which is the equivalent to Init V’s cronjobs), i.e. under ~/.config/systemd/user/ I created two scripts, one for downloading a new wallpaper (wallpaper.service) and setting it as the new wallpaper, and a second one that is run as a timer (wallpaper.timer) every hour and calls the first script. The first script needs the API Key from WaniKani (the cutout from the screenshot below), and of course, depending on your desktop environment what comes after the download will probably be different to my setup (I use pure i3 on an Xorg, and change my wallpaper with the programm feh).

Just install the script with systemctl --user enable wallpaper.timer and from then on,on every hour the script will check for a new wallpaper and replace your old one with the new. If you want to try this yourself on your Linux machine and get stuck anywhere feel free to drop me a line and I’ll try to help with details. For me it works like a charm, and it’s fun to see it change every time you’ve finished some reviews. Another source of motivation, if you need it.

Last but not least, I listened to some Japanese music, and I tried reading along; I started buying Japanese music a while ago, when I stumbled upon this German label on Bandcamp called Get Your Genki; who in 2018 started releasing a compilation MC every now and then; from Bands that you’d usually not get out here. I’ve already found some cool bands, and one that I really liked, even got a single released with Get Your Genki. They are called ク​ス​リ​ノ​リ​ス​ク, and unfortnuately they already seem to have disbanded - which makes my copy of their one and only single so much more special; if you are interested, you can listen to their music via bandcamp: クスリノリスク - 1. Single | Get your Genki. And it was really fun following the text while reading along - even though I could only read the Kana and not the Kanji - it felt really good, and I’ll try to do some more active listening.

Do you know any good japanese Bands worth giving a listen to? Especially similar to ク​ス​リ​ノ​リ​ス​ク? Any tip is welcome

Let’s see what the next week will bring - I’m on a festival that coming weekend, but I’ll try to at least do all my daily reviews. And the week after I’d probably start picking up Genki again.

[pygospa]

My 2023.5 progression

Template

YEAR年MONTH月

日	月	火	水	木	金	土

２０２３年の先月

2023年7月

Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat	Sun

2023年8月

Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat	Sun

2023年9月

Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat	Sun

2023年10月

Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat	Sun

2023年11月

日	月	火	水	木	金	土

２０２３年１２月

日	月	火	水	木	金	土

Legend

• SRS Review fail: If any SRS review did not get done, this will be the only emoji for that day
• Genki Vol 1: One new Item
• WaniKani: All new Radicals or 10 new Kanji or 10+ new Vocab
• KaniWani: All new Lessons
• Anki: 10 new Items (Vocab or Grammar point)
• Listening: Some form of conscious listening activity
• Reading: Some form of conscious reading activity

I stumbled upon this new learning log, and saw this template, and shamelessly stole it (well I’ve seen these before - even used them - in the reading clubs, but it didn’t occur to me to use it for my learning log as well ) and made it my own, by extending it (also with consideration for the future).

My goal is to keep this up to date - if possible even daily - so this is my new “sticky” goto post. On the one hand this is more visual and more easily to grasp than writing paragraphs of text, and on the other hand I can keep my ~weekly log entries a bit shorter and focus on the interesting stuff. As I said, I also made it my own, by reflecting on my goals and what my main focus should be:

In-depth explanation of the Legend

So, you are in fact interested in a more in-depth reasoning for why I chose what I chose? Here you go (this is probably me reading this some weeks in the future, because I forgot my initial thoughts and goals ); this list is sorted in priority, i.e. not all icons can and will be shown in the

• : This might be considered the most controversial thing in my log, but for me a day where I do all new items in WaniKani and KaniWani, work on three chapter of Genki, add 50 vocabs to Anki and do reading and listening exercises will still be a failed day if I skip any of my SRS repetitions, and in this case I do not get to brag about any of the other things I did that day. This might seem harsh, but it will be in tune with my yearly goals I did in January (a minimum of 365 days of reviews - which I already broke, but let’s update this to 164 days then [i.e. 11 days in July + 153 remaining days in the year from August to December]), and put an emphasis on the problem I have with consistency. Over the last months/years I came to the realization (far to late in my life) that SRS is not only a pretty decent tool that allows maximum efficiency with learning – not maximum speed, sure. But being able to remember things in the long-run with just a couple of times reviewing them (to get an Item burned on WaniKani you’ll see it 8 times; after 6 times you’re remembering your stuff already for a month) is something that seems insane to me – during school and university I used to be the guy that started learning for the exams a couple of weeks before, spending every waking hour (and a couple of hours that I should have rather been sleeping); in that time I’d probably see all my cards and notes 10-20 times to hammer it into my brain, and in the end retention wasn’t half as good. But for this to work you really need to hit your review times – timing is the most important thing for this to work (at least according to theory, but my limited experience already shows me that this is probably also holding up for me individually in practice as well). And this is true for all SRS systems, not just WaniKani. Whenever I add another SRS system (like Anki), hitting this goal means reviewing all the SRSs – no exceptions. Well – I am not quite sure what to make of KaniWani yet, so I’d probably have that as my very first exception just for now. Why? Firstly, it basically is an addition to WaniKani, rather than its own system, and as such it not only ties in to WaniKanis SRS, but also screws it up a bit, by actually showing you all the items twice – even if it is just in reverse. And I’m not quite sure yet, what to make of this. Secondly, I am already stumbling on problems that I don’t quite like. Having 4x “Girl” and guessing which one it could be is no fun – learning by heart, when KaniWani adds which additional translations in unique combinations to the vocabulary (girl, young lady, lady, woman) is in my eyes stupid and a waste of time, and writing them out on a sheet of paper to having lye around next to me, then recalling all possible girls and then looking up which one the system wants, feels like to much hassle for me. So maybe I’d ditch KaniWani again, maybe for good, maybe just replace it with another solution that works better? It is this uncertainty that makes me not wanting to commit to KaniWani (or another reverse system) to the list of separate SRS that all need to be done to not get an . But as soon as I commit to a system, it’ll be in that SRS list as well. So my main focus is that this icon is never shown - and if nothing else is shown, it’s still a good day, because I at least did my reviews.

• : The single book represents my main learning textbook, so the source where I get my additional vocabulary, reading and writing exercises, and all the Grammar work, and hopefully (depending on the book, I guess) also listening comprehension. I own a copy of Genki Vol. 1, which will be my first text book; when I switch to Genki Vol. 2 I’ll also switch the book’s color to . You might recall that I also own a copy of J-Bridge which I didn’t like as a beginners book and discontinued usage, but I might pick it up, once I’m through with the Genkis. If I do, I’ll switch to ; I have no idea what textbook will come after that - I’ve recently stumbled upon Quartet which to some is the best book to follow up with Genki, that seems intriguing (and it looks light pinkish, so probably I’ll be using then)… so you’ll see according to the book color where I am at - but I’d be rotating soon as there aren’t so many book-colors available (a pity ). Regardless the cover, however, I expect this to be in the diary as often as possible. Ideally, we’ll see it daily, because this is the main source for me to learn the language in a structured and progressive way.

• : I’ve read somewhere that 10 Items is a good number of Items to learn at once. This is also the default setting on WaniKani – so they probably think so, too? – and as long as I am only using WaniKani, it is a pace that I am able to keep up with. So having 10 items was my initial goal for WaniKani, regardless of the type of items – and I wanted to reduce it, once I add additional SRS systems, so that it stays at 10 in total. But now I’ve come to question this a bit; learning a Kanji will consist of (1) deconstructing the radicals, (2) combining them in a story to remember including the meaning, (3) attaching to it another story to also learn the readings and (4) learn the Kana writing. That is quite some mental work, and often I realize that when I don’t recall a Kanji, it’s mostly because I didn’t pay too much attention to one of these points [i.e. in (1) I didn’t realize the drop, and then I get presented with a similar Kanji without the drop and mix things up, or in (2) and or (3) I didn’t pay enough time envisioning the story, which is why it’s not getting back to me, or (4) I screw up things like 十日 with とうか instead of とおか]. Especially (4) is a regular problem for me, so limiting myself to 10 items seems reasonable here. But what about with Vocabulary? Sometimes you get presented with 10 words that are pretty hard: 下手, 一人, 二人, etc. are irregular in reading and require you to do the same as with the Kanji. Other times you get something like: 一台, 二台, 三台, … up to 10. Feels like learning one word… well not even, because I already know the readings of the individual Kanjis as well. Limiting myself to 10 items in such cases feels like intentionally holding back, and artificially slowing down the progress. In these cases I’ll want a bit more flexibility. Do I have round about 10 new items that feel hard to remember, due to meaning, reading or both? Then I’ll stick to the 10. But if there’s a lot of “you already know the reading - nice” items in the Vocabulary, I’ll add another bunch – and I’ll repeat this process until I feel I am at around 10 hard ones that really need mental work. And now, last but not least, the Radicals. It was during my re-doing of the Levels 1-3 and especially Level 3 that I realized two things: First, radicals are actually not that hard. They consist of just one thing - seeing the name of the radical in the drawing of it. That’s hardly any mental work. And second, spreading them over days just hurts your progression. In Level 3 I had days with no new lessons because I needed to wait on my Kanji to get unlocked that where waiting for radicals that I got through the system with 100% correctness and where I felt that I was wasting time having to wait on them. I mean sure, this is facilitated by (a) the fact that I am redoing lessons and (b) the fact that in the early lessons you get pretty easy radicals like “hat”, “toe”, “ground”, “treasure”, etc. But I peeked ahead and I think for the first 10 lessons this will stay this easy, and beginning with level 14, there won’t even be 10 radicals anymore. So this rule of doing all radicals at once only needs focus for the first 13 levels anyway and than comes naturally. One important last note: Due to the splitting off SRS reviews into its own icon (or rather lack of icon), the crabigator gets only shown, if there’s a lesson for me to do. Which might not always be the case. I expect the crabigator to join the party as often as possible, but not having a crabigator around might not mean that I was lazy that day, but maybe there was no lesson to do; and even if there was - more important than trying to get in new stuff is being consistent with the reviews, and in the long-run being more consistent in learning the language (i.e. using the workbook) than just learning Kanji - even though using WaniKani is (at least to me) much more fun than working with the book

• : Nothing much to say about this one that I haven’t said already. I think the recalling vs reproduction argument against WaniKani is a valid one and that WaniKani needs supplementation, if reproduction is as important to you as recalling. It is also quite fun, and it does help with solidifying WaniKani as well. And I do love the effort and work that someone put into KaniWani – but there are downsides, so I am not sure if I want to keep up with this, I am not sure if I want another service instead (but I’ll for sure try them), and if it will become an integral part of my journey. We’ll see. In the end, same applies to the upside down face as to the crabigator: Not seeing the world upside down a day is not bad thing - might be there weren’t any lessons, might be I could just concentrate on reviews - once I’ve committed a reverse-system to my learning routine, it will contribute to the daily by preventing that review-

• : This will represent input to the SRS system, more specifically to the SRS system that isn’t already filled by WaniKani or KaniWani (or alternative); basically that’s just Anki, which I’ll be using for everything else; I’ve adapted the “example sentences over single words” mentality, and with it, I’ll try to both, learn vocabulary (i.e. 私の＿＿はピゴスパです。Is quite obviously referring to the missing word for “name” without learning a 1-to-1 translation of the word and all the while also learning the word in the context of a common sentence in a common usage, making it easier to recall things as they get interconnected with each other), as well as Grammatical ideas (i.e. 私はラーメン＿＿食べます。to learn the object marker -の). And to further help the brain remembering things (giving more context), I’ll also add images, and if I’ve got them: recordings. This makes creating the cards quite time-consuming, so it is totally fine not to do this every day; it might also be that there is a day with no cards needed to be created (though I doubt this, especially in the beginning). And even though it is in the end the main tool to actually make the things from the workbook (and possibly other sources) stick, I think that actually doing the work (mostly exercises and text/listening work) is in the long run a bit more important than creating Anki cards [vocab can also be learned by observing them in the texts, and with WaniKani as well, grammar points are also learned (and revised) with the exercises, etc.]; might be that this will change in the future and swap places with WaniKani, but for now I am most happy with this order - I think I’ll re-evaluate this, once I reach level 10 on WaniKani.

• & : I feel these are both on the same level and absolutely similar in the way I understand this. It is conscious reading or listening - unconscious reading is a bit difficult, but unconscious listening would be putting on a CD that runs in the background, whereas conscious listening would be paying attention, trying to understand words, shadowing the things I hear (for pronunciation, etc.), reading the lyrics while hearing, singing along, mining vocabulary, etc. Same goes for books. Both, reading and listening is probably quite important, and also part of immersion, and they can happen anywhere (reading something online, like news, adverts, blogs, etc. - maybe even here on the forum, or subtitles in Japanese; listening to a podcast, watching a movie, YouTube, music, etc.). Priority should be higher, but especially in the beginning this is not something where I will get most value out of - this is why I’d put it this low - hopefully with reaching level 20 on WaniKani, Genki 1+2 and JLPT N5 + N4, this will shift fundamentally and these two become more important. But for now, I think it is reasonable. And again, this is additional reading - I won’t count reading/listening in Genki (because it’s already covered by Genki) or WaniKani, etc.

By the way, regarding all the new icons - next week or the week after (at latest) I’ll be starting with Genki Vol. 1 (), which will also pull in Anki (), so expect them to show up at least in the last row from August, Listening is something that could always appear somewhere, and reading at latest somewhere towards the end of the year - the graded readers are accessible right from the start and where fun to do, but real reading stuff (absolute beginners reading club?) is probably only really doable with at least JLPT5, so probably by the end of year (depending on my speed).

[fallynleaf]

Regarding KaniWani, what I ended up doing with it is just adding synonyms pretty liberally and not worrying too much about it. If the prompt it gives me is identical or nearly so (like if some of the English glosses overlap), I’ll add the word as a synonym. It means my recall coverage on those words isn’t as great, because often I’ll gravitate toward one of the synonyms and reinforce that one way more than the rest, but I feel like it’s not a big enough issue to worry too much over.

I only really aim for gaining an approximate understanding of the word with SRS anyway. It’ll take lots of exposure to the word in context before I develop a real understanding of how it’s actually used. So I prioritize ease and painlessness of doing SRS reviews over being a stickler for details that I don’t think are best learned in an SRS environment anyway.

[pygospa]

２０２３年８月１５日です、time for the review of the last week. That week was complicated and busy; I had a very busy Wednesday and Thursday, and a days of from Friday to Monday, due to this years M’Era Luna Festival. But that didn’t let me stop doing my reviews, and even lessons, as you can see in my updated calendar view. As I was doing my reviews on the smartphone, I had to add them manually, so I made a lot of screenshots to remember how many reviews I did – and just in case someone says: “Pic or didn’t happen”: I’ve got you covered

(Me in our tent on the festival location, doing my reviews and lessons!)

I didn’t do anything else, though (i.e. KaniWani), and I didn’t pay the best of attentions on my lessons. One of them (不) was not included in the session where I learned all the other remaining Kanji, so that one will hold me back on leveling, now. Which is a shame, but even gets worse because once I realized (I think it was in a break between to concerts), I did another lesson, but it didn’t stick well, so I made a mistake on it two times now -.- This will let me level up the earliest in 2 day, on Thursday.

This might also explain my Reading accuracy getting worse; it dropped ~2%. But hey, I only had such a high value here due to my reset anyways, and it would be a bad sign if my accuracy was still that good (i.e. then I could have probably just kept on doing my reviews).

On the plus side, I’ve got my first Mastery level items; 23 of 25 radicals of level 1 (I unfortunately screwed up 九 [my fingers where to fast, typing kiu which became きう and I only saw the mistake in the same second I pressed Enter -.- ], and 七 [after learning 匕 and not paying attention when I was presented with 七 thinking it was another of the Apprentice reviews for spoon -.-]). But more important than that, my first 14 Kanji are also in master (I don’t remember when, why and how I screwed up the Kanjis 七, 二, and 八 which are still in Guru, but I painfully remember that yesterday I mistook 力 for 刀, which got then bumped back to Apprentice. Shame. Japanese has a lot of these “false friends”, and you need to pay attention to every detail and double check before hitting enter).

Still I am pretty happy with my total of 37主 levels and looking forward to the next items, because it makes my background even more colorful! There’s now a friendly purple between all the shades of grey and blue

My plans for this week:

1. Level up to level 5.
2. Get more Items into Mastery (a lot of Vocabulary on Level 1, as well as the Radicals and Kanji on level 2 will get their next reviews on Thursday or Saturday, so I expect a lot of purple ).
3. Try out an alternative to KaniWani; I will keep on using KaniWani, just in case I end up liking it better, but meanwhile I’d also like to check out KameSame, which is unfortunately not open source, but other than that seems pretty active in development and interaction and has a bunch of interesting features (most important - as KW it can be linked with WK; but other than that it handles the problem of same-meaning Kanji more gracefully, has audio support, etc. – and could be used even beyond WaniKani with curated lists of additional vocabulary, etc.). Hopefully at the end of this week I will have one system I want to keep using, and then I’ll try using both of them without missing any reviews and evaluate if and how this could fit into my schedule.

That’s it for this week - see you on ~Sunday

[soggyboy]

@pygospa

I painfully remember that yesterday I mistook 力 for 刀

Lmfao I’m around the same level and I do this like every other day. I think I did the spoon/seven mistake too because I always forget older items will come back up in the SRS and am expecting reviews of recent stuff only.

[pygospa]

今日は２０２３年８月２１日です：Update time! I had a really slow week, this week, unfortunately. I did all my reviews, daily, and I also did work with kamesame (and dropped kaniwani); but I overdid it with kamesame; I added 200 items just from the get-go, and then of course my reviews got filled up and took much longer than I expected. So while I did do some WaniKani lessons, I did far less then I would have liked. Only two days; enough though to get another level up; now I am at level 5, but if I get the forum profile counting, this probably will update to 5 after finishing level 5; which is totally fine as well - just feels a bit weird that those two numbers are different.

Kamesame is really fun to use; I don’t quite get the level circle thing, but the stars is a nice touch, and the inbox zero counter is really cool. I also like the already included statistics, though there could be more info; but I love how vocab with same translation are handled - you don’t get an error, and you are reminded once it comes up again, that it’s not the one you already entered. If both are in your review, it will even tell you: “Well, we actually looked for a different vocab, but as both of them are on review, we’ll count this for the other one”. That’s pretty smart.

Something else I learned through kamesame: 単語を入力して下さい。This sentence actually only contains one Kanji I didn’t know before: 単；however shamefully I have to admit that at first I didn’t get 入力 due to the added して. And I also didn’t see 下さい in the mix, initially. It took quite some time, until I saw it. So reading is definitely something that will need some more practice. I didn’t have 語 in Wanikani yet but still know it as language, so including the context I could deduce the meaning. Besides words, we also get 漢字を入力して下さい and that one puzzled me more; 字 I would have thought means something like learning/studying, etc. But then again - the devil is in the details: That’s actually 学. Once more the realization that especially in Japanese the details matter a lot. 漢字 actually means Kanji, so yeah. Now this makes sense as well.

I had another unexpected encounter with Japanese: I watched the movie Archive – which is quite a nice movie; an English one, but apparently it plays in Japan (which you don’t get to see anything of, so it could be anywhere), so every now and then there is a Japanese word hidden. I found 出口 on the helicopter doors, and also 人工知能 = じんこうちのう = Artificial Intelligence - a word that’s actually pretty important to me. I of course didn’t know 知能, but given that it is a word in a movie about robots, I deduced that it must mean artificial intelligence, and was right It’s not much, but seeing these Kanji out in the open and recognizing them, recalling their meaning and being able to deduce the rest from context is a really fun and motivating experience, and this is kicking in much earlier, than I expected. I had another of these experiences a while ago; when watching a Chinese movie Cliff Walkers; in it, you could see a shield over a public sink, including the Kanji “用水” (and something else). I paused at that moment and said: “Hey, I don’t know any Chinese, but these two Kanji mean ‘use water’ - not sure why it’s used as a label for a sink, though” - a second later the subtitles said “preserve water”. So not exactly the meaning, but still; being able to get something like this out of a movie - and a Chinese one in particular - that felt pretty cool.

So yeah, even though I didn’t have much effort in learning new things, I hit all my reviews in WaniKani and I am now slowing down on KameSame, so reviews will become easier to handle, and I hope that this week every day there will be maybe 10 more WaniKani and 20 more KameSame, just to catch up (I am still on a 137 items-gap between WaniKani and KameSame and I really like to close that gap. Just for completion sake, here are the stats:

[pygospa]

私は生きています！But yeah, I had a break… again the only positive about it, is, that it wasn’t my fault and totally out of my hand (personal healt reasons). The not so positive: I could have had less off days. But returning to Wanikani after a 10 days absence is daunting. I tried, mid of September, but yeah… didn’t get far. And the rest of September and October is on me On the plus side, however: I finally had the chance to take a week of from work, and instead of リラックスします I did some 日本語を学ぶます.

Nearly 600 reviews, I tried to tackle ~100 every day, and today I finally managed to break even, so to speak. No more reviews.

Goal for next week: Start to make it a habbit again every morning before work (as I did the time before) and before I start new lessons I will keep on just doing reviews for a couple more days, because while some words I retained quite well, there where a couple of items that my brain was completely blank on and that also didn’t cut it a second (or third) review.

But speaking of words well retained:

Can I have at least a small celebration for my Enlightened items count? I started off with 0 Items, and ended today with 238 items! Unfortnuately also Apprentice has become larger, without me doing any new items, so a couple of words have slided down as well. But over all I think the numbers look all right

• Apprentice 102 → 116
• Guru 213 → 111
• Master 271 → 121
• Enlightend 0 → 238

Just in case you are curious; my first enlightened Item was the “Drop” radical, then came 円 as kanji and finally 人口 as vocabulary.

I’ll try to focus next week on the reviews, with a special focus on relearning all the items I constantly made wrong the last few days, and then I re-evaluate the goals for the last couple of weeks of this year.