May 4-8
Final Fantasy VII
Havenāt updated these last few days. Iāve been keeping up with FF7 and itās been going great, making more and more progress. Iām glad that the difficulty of the language hasnāt gone up overall even in plot development parts; itās really, really accessible. I just arrived in Rocket Town, about 30 ish hours in.
I also ended up getting the Zero Escape bundle @natarin ! Iām not sure when Iāll start it exactly, probably on a whim some random day, but I could manage to get Textractor working in advance so thatās nice. Thank you for mentioning game2text as well, I didnāt know what it was and itās amazing, I got it working with Anki already. I love that it automatically adds a picture on top of everything else, which is something that Textractor canāt do (I think?).
Also, Iāve been giving it some thought after the discussion last week, and this is how Iāll approach things from now on:
New plan
-
Iām dropping Houhou. I think part of what was contributing to the burnout was the WK-like SRS approach of having 4h and 8h steps before the 24h review. I just literally canāt be bothered to do that many frequent reviews any more. At this point I think those steps are just virtually useless to me, and itās so boring to finish a group of reviews only to see another group coming up later. Now, this is something that can be customised and edited very easily in the app files (even someone like me, I have very little coding knowledge), but thereās also something that bothers me and I donāt think can be changed, which is not having a max number of new words per day. Everything you add comes up later for reviews, and you have to stop adding words at some point if youāre aiming for a max number of words per day. This contributed to the urge I felt to stop doing any Japanese once I got 20 words.
-
Iām taking up Anki instead, for multiple different reasons. You can add as many words as you want, it will only give you up to the max number you set per day, so you can keep consuming more Japanese if you want. Another reason is that Iāve been researching tools for a bit again and theyāre seriously good. I donāt need to make my own cards other than editing a few things here and there if I need; Yomichan or game2text automatically add them for me with audio, context sentence, definition, pitch accent, etc, even pictures in the case of game2text. I knew these things existed but wow, now that Iām using them they save up so much time and effort. Also lastly, I donāt need to worry about reviews coming up later, because the number you see is the number you have that day, period. Once youāre done with that number, youāre done for the day. I donāt even think it matters at what time you do them or if you do them separately, as long as you do them theyāll all be counted the same at the end of the day. I also like that the review intervals automatically get longer or shorter depending on how well you remember (if you press easy, good or hard), and that cards still come up for reviews even long after 6 months (I personally never liked the concept of āburningā words, I can still forget words after that if I donāt see them for a long time), they can get multiple year intervals and I like that, especially if youāre aiming for a long-term deck. Probably not super useful to be honest, but still nice to have.
-
Iām swapping to a more immersion-based learning approach with less reliance on SRS. For this Iām going to discard the need to add any number of words altogether. I wonāt be aiming for X number of words a day any more, Iāll add as much or as little as I feel like, even if that means not adding anything for days or weeks. Iām hoping that most of my learning will come from consuming more and more Japanese as opposed to doing more and more reviews. Reviews will be secondary and purely supplementary.
-
Iām taking the leap to JP-JP cards exclusively. This is something I mentioned I was going to try a few weeks back and honestly Iām enjoying it more, and I think they are proving to be more effective. This goes with my previous point as well, since I only add words whose definition I can read and understand completely. For now I canāt add everything I come across because I donāt understand every definition, so it will also be good to get used to adding very few words. Iām hoping that gradually, as I learn more vocabulary and understand more definitions, Iāll be able to add more words if I want to. But since my approach will be based on immersion and not SRS, this doesnāt bother me at all. I will still be looking up words in English if I donāt understand them in Japanese, of course, like Iāve been doing all this time, but only JP-JP cards will make it to the Anki deck.