September 20th
Satori Reader: Secret, episode 45.
Random words
- 待ちに待つ = まちにまつ to wait for a long time, to eagerly wait.
- おしゃれ = smartly dressed, stylish, dressed up.
- 膨れる = ふくれる to swell out, to expand, to inflate.
- つつく = to poke repeatedly and lightly (with one’s finger, a stick, etc).
I’ve noticed that I’m encountering words that I studied at some point in WK but don’t remember as well as I had expected (which is completely natural anyway). I think the reason for that is that the focus in WK was actually learning how to read and recognise the kanji in the vocabulary, and attaching some quick meaning to it. But having no context, there was no need to actually picture the situation in my head and know exactly what was happening, so I ended up forgetting the meaning of a lot of words.
However! What has stuck like fire has been the actual recognising of the kanji and their readings. I’m so grateful, because I know how to read stuff, and now it’s relatively easy to attach meaning to it, whereas before the struggle was actually knowing how to read a text, AND decipher its meaning. Now I can “almost” exclusively focus on dechipering the meaning and work on making sense of the syntax (even though I encounter new kanji fairly frequently).
On the other side, recalling the kanji and knowing how to write them is a different beast that I’ve been slowly working on for quite a long time already. Which is fun! But it will take a much longer time than solely recognising them. There’s probably no real need for it nowadays, but I just really like being able to write them too. I feel that it helps recognition a lot too.