Pygospa's Study Log

pygospa · November 6, 2023, 6:40am

I just did my reviews (there’s a saying in Germany “The early bird get’s the worm” - it’s now 7am where I am at, and I did my reviews round about 6am

I afterwards took the time and updated my learning log calendar, i.e. this guy. As a small reminder: A bad day (no work at all) get’s an , an okey day (at least SRS done - which for now is just WaniKani reviews) get’s a , i.e. a space/nothing (because it is the minimum I should do) and a good day - for now - get’s a which means I added at least 10 new items to the SRS.

You might notice that I removed KaniWani/Kamesame. I was already considering this before my break, because it took quite some time, and keeping track with all my SRS reviews already felt hard. Also, while there where some Kanji and vocab that felt hard, there where also a lot of items that where quite easy - and still they filled up my queue, taking up valuable time. That’s why I’ve decided for myself that for now my most important focus should be being able to read and recognize Kanji and get back into a textbook (i.e. Genki 1 and 2). If I then still feel the need to learn the reverse, I can pick up Kamesame again, but maybe not link it to WaniKani but rather do one of the other lists (there is the possibility to pick up any 10 lessons from WaniKani (i.e. "WaniKani Vocab 31-40), as well as JLPT-Level lists, or the Top 10k words. After having a good grasp in the one direction, those lists might be more useful then now learning the reverse which is more time-consuming than valuable.

Two last things:

I wonder if this is the correct expression for ‘the previous months of 2023’: ２０２３年の先月. In my understanding, 先月 means last or previous month; but as there is no plural form in Japanese, it has to be seen by the context (which is all past months of 2023, so it should be correct)?
I wonder if I should move the post with my monthly calendar log into the first post. Being more of a web-forum guy it somehow feels weird to me, editing old posts once they are written. On the other hand, I always have to scroll through all my posts to finally find it. So maybe I should. What do you guys think? Sometimes I feel like “now that I know how these forums work and are ‘lived’ by the community I should start all over again”

And to at least have one picture in this post - my wallpaper got pretty pink this week, so the progress is becoming visible - even through the long break

–

PS: I also added some , because in Spooktober I also watched some movies in Japanes (with original sound and English subtitles); so I feel they count as listening exercise (even though there where just a few words I recognized - but I did recognize some! ). If you are interested, the movies I watched, where [links to Wikipedia if you want to know more]:

無常 (Mujō, aka ‘This Transient Life’ by Akio Jissoji from 1970)
リング (Ringu by Hideo Nakata from 1998)
リング2 (Ringu 2 by Hideo Nakata from 1999)
リング0 バースデイ (Ringu Zero: Bāsudei, aka Ring 0: Birthday by Norio Tsuruta from 2000)
らせん (Rasen, aka Spiral by Jōji Iida from 1998)
呪怨 (Juon, aka Ju-on: The Curse, by Takashi Shimizu from 2000)
呪怨2 (Juon 2, aka Ju-on: The Curse 2, by Takashi Shimizu from 2000)
呪怨 (Juon, aka Ju-on: The Grudge, by Takashi Shimizu from 2002)
呪怨: 白い老女 (Juon: Shiroi Rōjo, aka Ju-On: White Ghost by Ryuta Miyake from 2009)
呪怨: 黒い少女, (Juon: Kuroi Shōjo, aka Ju-On: Black Young Girl by Mari Asato from 2009)

pygospa · November 12, 2023, 11:03am

Another week is done, and I just updated my November table. And look, ! こんにちは、さん！This week I managed to reduce my Apprentice level items to ~20 Items, so ~100 items where reached Guru-level and a couple even Master-level. This of course made my daily review heatmap change color from a dark blue to a now nearly whitish color, so it’s time to tackle new things! I was contemplating also adding some Genki, but didn’t get around yet.

I still have a couple of words that pop up every time in apprentice and that really annoy me, that I somehow need to tackle:

先日 My longest “correct meaning” streak is 8, my current is 1. This one is really bothering me, and it has reached a point where I don’t even know the correct one anymore. It all started with knowing that the word isn’t “yesterday”, but rather a day that happend before this. “previous day”. Well, nope. “last day”… now sometimes I get “other day” right in my head and think - “no, wait, I get this wrong all the time, so the answer probably isn’t my first intuition - let’s think about this” And it get’s even worse:
先月 My inability to remember 先日 now stretches over to 先月 which I would normally only get wrong in reading, rather than meaning, because sometimes I am to fast and think it’s せんがつ instead of せんげつ. I always had the meaning correct. But now I start typing things like “previous month”
主人 100% correct meaning, 46% correct reading. Oh boy. しゅうじん is my favorite wrong reading for this one, but there are variants I tried out; ちゅうじん、しゅうにん、ちゅじん、ちゅにん. I don’t know why, but this one’s hard really hard for me.
主に I always remember that it’s not one of the chuu-variants from the one above, but rather something with an o-sound, and end up with something like おうに、みょうに、もうに。。。

There’s more, but these are the worst, I guess - or the most annoying ones. They all just feel too well in my apprentice area and won’t leave the party But yeah, let them stay as long as they want, I don’t care - we’re progressing with the lessons now. Everyday ~10 items, that’s the goal, for the next week.

On two days I had a work event (I usually work from home; since Corona this hasn’t changed), and I searched for something I could listen to on my phone (I am not used to this situation anymore I’m only outside with friends, or on times where nobody uses the public transportation and it is possible to grab a seat and read a book – but standing in rush-hours, not in the last 3 years, no sir). I found an interesting podcast named Japanisch/ドイツ語カフェ - Rike & Miyako by a Japan-enthusiast from Germany and a German language teacher from Japan. They have a conversation with one another, but the German person only speaks in German while the japanese Person only speaks in Japanese. They’ll sometimes summarize the answers from their partner in their language, but basically it’s just that. It’s pretty high level and I hardly understood any Japanese, but I still kept listening to it, just to get a feel for native language speakers in Japanese and trying to catch one or the other word that I can recognize. I’ll keep on listening to it, I guess, and I most definately cycle back to it, once I’ve reached an level where I can understand more than just one or another word. They started in 2022 and the podcast is still active (which isn’t true for most of the Japanese podcasts that I could find in my quick search), but it’s a rather slow-paced release - we are at episode 42, with round about 1 episode per month, and each of them with a length of round about 30 minutes. But hey, maybe this is interesting for some of you?

pygospa · November 19, 2023, 10:33am

毎日私は日本語を学ぶます。… if that is correct. But yeah, I had a really productive week (even without vacation). Last week I did all my reviews and brought them to 0 every single day, and this trend continued this week. Not a single day missed. Also, last week on Sunday I decided that it is time to pick up learning new items in 鰐わに蟹かに (oh yes, I finally also figured out what WaniKani is actually supposed to mean; well, I could have guessed it, but I didn’t, so I looked the entire thing up and couldn’t find anything, and then tried to separate it. AHA! Call me detective Crabigator! sorry… I’m a bit silly today…)… and – wow did I digress from this sentence – I continnued doing so every day this week as well. Which finally led me tooooooo LEVEL 6.

Well, I’m not sure whether to celebrate or to weep, because just then, Koichi himself mailed me (wow, he must be stalking me on WaniKani, or something…), and told me, that from now on, things are only going to get even harder. There goes the motivation, I guess… well, not entirely.

If WaniKani is getting harder, then I need to find something that’s easier. On Thursday I decided to pick up Genki 1 again, because Kanji is not everything, and I decided to start at level 1 again, and work my way through the book and workbook - should be easy and fast, for the first couple of days/weeks (hopefully). And to motivate me even further, I got myself a new ノート, because (I kid you not) before that I was using tear-off pads to take my notes, and they are… well not that permanent (my school days are over a while now).

Normally I would have gotten a typical “college block” (these are pretty famous in Germany, I guess)… but I thought to myself that I wanted it to be more of a learning diary, of sorts, and that for this purpose I wanted to have something nice, that motivates me even further, so I got an expensive Moleskine XL dotted notepad; and I spent some amount of time figuring out if there’s such a thing like a perfect pen for writing in Japanese (NO DON’T YOU OPEN A NEW TAB NOW! DON’T LOOK IT UP. IT’S A RABBIT HOLE THAT YOU WON’T GET OUT TOO SOON - you have been warned!), and so I also got myself a set of サラサクリップ・ジェルボールペン in インク色 “Vintage” (it’s the only one that was available with different colors). What makes me even more happy with my purchase, is that I could actually read all the Japanese on the front and understand it.

And so, beginning of Friday I was writing in my new ノート with my new サラサクリップ・ジェルボールペン. I decided to start with ひらがな and カタカナ again; I know all my Hiragana in reading, but I wanted to make sure that I was writing them correctly as well, so I did the drill exercises. For Katakana - not so much. And that was the reason I thought about going through my Kana once more to begin with, because it annoyed me, that I still get errors on WaniKani on vocabulary such as シアトル市, just because I cannot differenciate my ル from my ロ (and they don’t even look anything alike ). So I started with those “Drill exercises” on the workbook, to get the writing correct; plus I watched Japanese Calligrapher Takumi to get the pauses and fast movements right as well on Hiragana and Katakana while doing it. The next day I did the Reading/Wrting Exercises at the back of the Genki Textbook for Hiragana as a review exercise and did the “drill exercises” on the workbook for Katakana; this wasn’t as easy as I wished it to be, but I hope my brain now strengthened the connections here was well. Next day (which incidently is today) I did the Seth Clydesdale’s Excercises on Hiragana for further review, and did quite well except for one mistake on combos (しゅ is not じゅ). I also did the Textbook exercises for Katakana, and that worked out quite okey as well; and then I revised the Greetings part, which I am still quite good at. I reset my Anki status (haven’t used Anki in nearly a year, uff). And did all three card-types for all the Greetings (i.e. recognition, production and writing).

I also used my notebook to mark my progress on WaniKani and especially note the words that I’ve been doing wrong, and try to find either new mnemonics where the WaniKani mnemonics are not working for me, or help me to further visualizing them by drawing little images for them. This has been working really well, so far.

So next week I’ll start with the real work in Genki: Lesson 1. And continue with WaniKani and Anki, of course. One cool thing: I had my first couple of WaniKani Kanjis and Vocab (like 大学, 学ぶ, 毎日, etc.), where I actually don’t even need the WaniKani mnemonics, because I already know the vocabulary from Genki or other vocab work I did. Hopefully this will stack up even further, because it makes thinks so fast and easy ). I think I will rush through the first chapters and Anki items, until I hit resistance - let’s see where it’ll take us. I hope you also had a great and productive week and wish you all a happy and relaxing Sunday!

My notebook:

Proof of work

pygospa · November 20, 2023, 8:20am

2023年11月20日（月）

Anki + WaniKani reviews went well (moved 18 Items from apprentice to guru); two (common) mistakes of my:
1. Readings of 来 and 米; I have a new “mnemonic” for it: “米 to get the 来” does not make sense in the translation, but it does so in the reading! And the 米 comes first, because first you have the thing and then you can put the lid on it. Hopefully this will help me stop mixing those readings up.
1. 来る - I made a little sketch drawing with Darth Vader wearing “cool” sunglasses.
Seth Clydesdale: Did the カタカナ review, and well… while ひらがな was super easy, I had a score of only 95% while taking a minute longer; and this would be even harder if it wasn’t possible to eliminate possible answers with previous correctly answered Kana. Diacritical Katakana scored only 88%; Combos 90%. I’ll revise these more regularly; maybe I’ll also look for a smartphone app, or something…
I did the textbook exercise on greetings as a review exercise, 100%
I listened to the dialogues of lesson 1, and could understand and translate everything.
I added the first half of the vocabulary into Anki. Took some time, because I needed to figure out how exactly my template was working again, sort all the vocab, and update some of the cards, because whenever I know the Kanji I’d have the card use the Kanji, so I can focus on writing them. While learning I realized how important this is, because I messed up 先 (first I wrote down 去, then realizing that this was not the Kanji that needs to be in front of 先生, I corrected myself, but forgot the slide part of the gun radical).

~~I did not pick up new items for WaniKani, though; maybe I can get to it in my lunch break, but now I am up for work…~~ … a break came earlier than expected; picked up the missing vocabulary for level 5, and as they where pretty easy I also learned the first 16 Radicals for Level 6. Only four more radicals missing (and usually I’d like to do them in one go), but then I’d also pull in some new Kanji and I think that would be too much. Some of the radicals already look pretty wild…

Akashelia · November 20, 2023, 11:43am

Wow loving your handwriting!
Keep it up

pygospa · November 20, 2023, 2:09pm

Oh, thank you very much I am actually overcritical with my handwriting, and feel like my Kana and Kanji look really horrible But I am trying to have them look as nice as possible

kinza · November 20, 2023, 8:50pm

Agreed, your handwriting’s really aesthetically pleasing. Handwriting Japanese isn’t something I’ve considered a goal before (except I enjoy writing the date every morning when I journal) but reviewing your posts inspired me to try earlier! I drilled hiragana today in my ノート too… I found あ omegahard and they all ended up looking like raisins

pygospa · November 21, 2023, 8:26am

Thank you very much

I am happy to have inspired you It actually never really was a goal of mine in the sense that I wanted to have a nice handwriting; but I wanted to be able to write Hiragana and Katakana, though, because for me it helps me a lot if I can write things down by hand. Whenever I hit an learning item somewhere, that will not get even into my short term memory it helps me if I can write it down. And I didn’t want to use romanji because everyone warns you about using them… and knowing myself – if I learn something wrong from the get-go I’ll never be able to correct it – I paid extra attention to how to do the strokes (not so much how it looks, though).

… but… since I started with Kanji (which is what I wanted to put off as long as possible when I started my Japanese language journey), I found all these Japanese Kalligraphy videos and they are really relaxing to watch, and I often find myself thinking: It would be really nice if I could do this However writing Kanji is more of a side-goal and not something I spend too much time on (and I wouldn’t advice you to search this on YouTube, because - it’s a rabbit hole ).
For me WaniKani is all about recognizing, reading and understanding the meaning, to get a strong and solid foundation for the language, and hopefully being able to soon start reading original material and immerse myself into the language. But for fun I pay attention to how to write the Kanji, once they appear in Genki (there they have a much slower pace and hopefully I already know all of the Kanji from WaniKani before the get presented in Genki) or if I already know the Hiragana vocabulary in Kanji from WaniKana, and add them to Anki to test my writing. There is a cool plugin in Anki that will automatically fetch the stroke order for Kanji, and while on my PC I’ll just write them into my notebook, but on the go you can also just scribble them onto the screen of the smartphone app, which is pretty neat

Last small tip: When I started writing Hiragana I actually used some trace sheets. You can find them online to print out, and then you already have the line that you can follow. Seems weird (like being back in Kindergarden ), but it helped me a lot to get a feel about how to move the pen. For me - the hardest Kana, that always looks kind of off is ふ, followed by え I guess… Somehow it never looks like when you see others writing え. And I realized that I have a lot of (unwanted) variance in how my お and れ look

pygospa · November 22, 2023, 12:08am

２０２３年１１月２１日（火）

Today was not the best day - woke up with a horrible headache, that wouldn’t stop until I had to work so I called in sick, and slept some more. Then I wanted to do some Japanese, but somehow did not get myself to it (and procrastinated a bit on this forum). I had another sleep session, and now I spent the last ~2 hours catching up with Anki and WaniKani. Did just my reviews (and just in time), no new stuff. But I did them; even with delay - Anki and WaniKani is at 0 and both streaks (20 days on WK and 3 on Anki) weren’t broken. Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

pygospa · December 1, 2023, 12:39am

２０２３年１１月３０日（木）

It’s been a while since my last study log, but today I have to do one, because we’re at the end of the month. So I first want to look back to the last 9 days, and then look back at the entire month, plus make some plans for the next month.

Last week wasn’t my best - at least in regards to my expectations and plans. As I already wrote, I had two days of horrible headache, and so I only did my reviews in the SRS and review exercises in Genki. But especially on the second day I was really bad - for instance, I did my WaniKani reviews, and had under 70% correct. This was really frustrating, but also shows, that maybe some days you should just take a break, especially if you are not able to work (I called in sick). I did not even manage to do all the reviews, but I did a couple. Thursday was the first day that I was starting to feel better, and I catched up with all my reviews, but did not manage to do anything new for Genki. This week was a bit harder as well - back at work, and there was a lot to do, so again, it was really hard managing everything, and in the end, I did not manage more than the SRS-Reviews (yesterday and today). However, my reviews where getting better again, up to over 90%, so in the end, all in all it wasn’t too bad, even though I had a rather depressing moment, where I was questioning my Japanese progress. It’s was also a bit frustrating that I am still hanging on level 6; according to wkstats I have a average Level-up time of 9 days, which is already a bit slower than the average 7-days everyone’s talking about, but this time I am already on 12 days, and I still have items that will not level up anytime soon; e.g. 活 and 亡 are still on Apprentice level 2, with next review up in 8 hours. So I’ll probably stay in Level 6 the next 2-3 days? Given that I don’t mess up some Kanji.

Looking back at the entire month, I am actually pretty happy. I got back into Japanese with WaniKani on Oct. 27th, and had a huge pile of reviews, that I managed to get to zero in 11 days (with just two breakes); I’ve been doing new lessons every day since, and I managed to keep up with all my streaks:

Reviews with WaniKani: 28/29 days – so the day after tomorrow my last streak from August will be broken.
New Items with WaniKani: 9/9 days – here I am already on my best streak; and it’s a bit unfair, as I could have had streak back to Nov. 12th, but on Nov. 21st I just didn’t have any new lessons. Well, what can you do?
Anki Vocabulary + Grammar sentences – 12/17. Six more days and this one will also be broken. Neat.

I also finished the first Lesson of Genki, including the reading/writing section, and all exercises in the workbook, plus the exercises on Seth Clydesdales website. I wished that I had finished Lesson 2 by now as well, but well. Maybe till the End of the week.

And I did some listening, by watching movies in Japanese (with subtitles):

呪怨白い老女
呪怨黒い少女
(The Grudge)
(The Grudge 2)
And listening to a podcast.

I also participated in a listening party for a new release of the Japanese sampler Get your Genki on bandcamp. This was really fun, as there where even some Japanese artist in the chat, and besides listening to the Japanese music we talked a lot about Japanese culture; one of the other participants was a music journalist for AVO Magazine - a magazine that covers Japanese music, so I am also having some new stuff to listen to.

Since having my notebook, I also started logging a bit more things, like for instance, the WaniKani numbers. I started with it Nov. 18th, and I noted down:

	Apprentice	Guru	Master	Expert
１１月１８日	85	213	130	238
１１月３０日	102	331	177	289

This means, I learned 233 new items this month, and I manage to recall (and thereby move) 51 items to Expert level, 47 items to Master level and 118 items to Guru level, which is pretty decent, I guess? The heatmap tells me, that I had (overall) 72 learning sessions, and learned 899 items. That’s pretty neat as well! I already know 97.5% of the Grade 1 Joyo Kanji, 87% of what I need to know for JLPT N5, and be at 28% of the 500 most frequent Kanji and should be able to understand 45% of NHK Easy.

All in all I would say it was a really good month. Here is the final overview:

So… next month then, huh? With Christmas on the way, this is probably one of the more challenging times. Luckily for me, I’ll be only working till Dec. 13th (maybe even only till Dec. 12th, because I still have 9 hours of overtime left), and then my next working day will be Jan. 15th. A lot of free time and besides some time with the family over Christmas, there isn’t much planned and we’re not going on vacation or anything (I just need to take my vacation days otherwise I’ll loose them).

With all that free time, I think it is realistic to aim a bit higher: I hope to be able to finish Genki 1 Lesson 5 by the end of the year. But I’ll aim a bit higher and try to manage to get to Lesson 6. I’ll also should be able to get at least to Level 9 of WaniKani in the next four weeks; so I’ll try to get to Level 10. I also want to up my game in Listening comprehension. I like the idea of immersing into the language as soon as possible; I’ll focus further on movies and music, because besides their language content they also bring additional enjoyment (pictures/sound), which makes it easier to consume, compared to e.g. with podcasts or YouTube videos which I still have a pretty hard time with. I’ve heard that you could try to actively immerse yourself with Genk1 and/or Genki2 knowledge and/or WaniKani Level 10. So that’s my aim; when I reach this level, I’ll take a deeper and more serious look into immersive techniques and resources.

So, that’s it for my review and preview. I hope you all had a good last month and wish you all a productive next month - and of course a wonderful Christmas season, if applicable.

pygospa · December 3, 2023, 6:13pm

２０２３年１2月3日（日）

So, I’ve already done a review on Thursday, which means there is not much to tell on a Sunday; but still, I feel pretty great. I’ve been hitting all my reviews, I’ve also worked on Genki every day, so today I finished chapter 2 (I have all the vocabs in Anki and am pretty okey for the most parts - there is one or the other where I sometimes missspell a word, like ~~ゆうびんこく~~ instead of ゆうびんきょく, but I don’t sweat those too much; I have all the Grammar points checked and in Anki and doing good with them, and I started with the first couple exercises - of course these will “drag behind” because I am only doing them a day after to see if I can still recall everything - so in this regard I will be still working on chapter 2, but not for new content); tomorrow I’ll pick up chapter 3.

And also today, I finally leveled up to Level 7. This feels incredible. I’ve come further than I ever had (the last two times ), and I feel like retention rate is pretty decent as well - today I managed to get a lot of Items from Guru to Master (103, 326 → 85, 353), and from Master to Enlightened (213, 289 → 189, 308); and then I did a second session and turned another batch of Masters to Enlightend (353, 189 → 349, 192). So to sum up, my final count is: 86, 349, 192, 308 – for me the most important number is the Apprentice one which is again under 100 items; I like to keep that one as low as possible, but I also want to be fast with progressing to new items, so this is always a difficult number for me

So I feel pretty happy and good about my progress. Today I started out with a time tracking app, to see how much time I spent with what. According to this app, I spent 3hrs and 40 Minutes with Japanese today, 1,5 hours learning new things, and 2 hours reviewing. I also tagged different resources I used, and according to this, I spent 1h50m with Genki, 50 Minutes with Anki and 1 hour with WaniKani. However, I feel like I did mess up a bit, because from Genki some X minutes need to be subtracted, as I spent those creating new cards for Anki (from Genki), and while doing Anki cards I got distracted twice; also the creation of cards, while being part of the learning process takes up quite some time that has nothing to do with learning, directly (I cut out audio snippets from the Genki CD with Audacity, and look for images [to use instead of translations]); so next week I’ll try to log this process separately as well.

I’m pretty confident that I can reach my goals for the final sprint of the year in WaniKani, because it’s just 3 more levels, on four more weeks; as for Genki, we’ll have to see. But in 2 weeks my 冬休み will start, so I can basically spent the rest of the year ~4 hours a day learning Japanese (and it felt quite good, today), so this could be possible

Oh, and one last thing - today when finishing with Japanese, I looked at my notebook and thought to myself: Wow, you’ve progressed. This time I am pretty happy with my handwriting - I feel that the daily practice is finally showing; also I am already on page 29 ; that’s already 15% of my ノート filled! Need to get a new one, soon

And to all of you, who read this far: I wish you all a merry first advent (if that’s something you celebrate?)

日	月	火	水	木	金	土