Rhythm's Study Log

[rhythm2107]

Day 19 of Leveling Pause on Level 40
It’s funny…two days ago I wrote about how I’m changing the rules for my Old Anki Deck, to reduce the workload and that I will likely delete it towards end of March altogether. Well, I am deleting it right now.

My recent thoughts, and the kind words from Yandros and GolyBidof, helped me remember a little of how I was thinking at the very beginning, when I started this yearly plan of studying & working. The goal was to do it differently than before. Previously I would follow one path, firmly believe that I have to follow it in order to reach the finish line, and when I lost enjoyment for it in the later stages, I would still force myself to do it until burnout. I believe I need to do things differently to avoid burnout, and make the hard decisions of switching things up when necessary. Well, it’s necessary now. At first I thought that refreshing old kanji from Wanikani by re-doing them in Anki will be a great idea, after all I took a long 1 year+ break from studying Japanese, so most of these were long forgotten. I was actually positively surprised, how 30-40% kanji still stuck with me after 1 year break. I went through the deck and definitely remembered & retained a lot of them, but now that cards with 2 month intervals are coming back down, I am once again failing them and confusing them with visually similar ones.

Ultimately, I realized that studying kanji in isolation is not a great way to learn. It’s a great way to go over the material, so that when you encounter it while reading, it’s easier to look it up & retain & continue reading, than if you had to learn it in that moment. It doesn’t break the “flow” of reading that much, and therefore it’s more enjoyable. So isolation study has it perks, and definitely isn’t useless, but I genuinely believe you reach a “glass ceiling” with it, where eventually the effects of pounding over and over the same kanji in isolation are diminishing heavily.

I also firmly believe that if something gets boring, your brain just doesn’t “want” to remember the information anymore. Studying becomes a drag, information is not sticking, you learn slower and you feel like shit because you are doing worse. In the end, I have to ask myself the question: Do i want to just cross off days and be proud I was at it for X days? Or do I want to study Japanese in enjoyable and efficient way?

I think the answer is a balance of the two. Keeping up a habit is important, but enjoyment and efficiency are just as important, if not more so. Taking breaks when feeling burned out is also important, it’s part of the process and not “failing to meet your goals” or “slacking off”. It’s recharging batteries, and quite literally part of the process of studying. I need to keep reinforcing this way of thinking, and I honestly think this study log, putting things on paper is helping me adjust my mentality and learn a new, health way to study

I don’t enjoy Anki overall and isolation study in it, but Wanikani is gamified with levels, and the gamer inside me enjoys that. Bunpro is honestly quite lovely to use, and learning with context sentences feels really rewarding and enjoyable. So I think the goal is to: reduce isolation of Anki, keep Wanikani but maybe slow down, continue Bunpro at same pace and maybe add graded readers or some japanese TV shows with JP subtitles.

I removed the deck just now, it will free up around 15 minutes per day, most of which I will dedicate towards business. I might add graded readers on Bunpro soon, or increase the future Anki deck to go through it a little faster, as I would love to delete this one around end of April/early May too.

[rhythm2107]

I also decided to apply the same rules I applied to my Old Kanji Deck, to my Future Kanji Deck. So, now that I deleted the old one, I will periodically suspend cards in Future Deck that reach high interval, and bury cards that are heavy leeches and don’t stick through isolation in Anki alone.

Again, the Anki approach is just purely to “go over” the kanji. Some of them will be extremely easy and I’ll retain them likely forever (ex. 卵 is extremely distinct, 興 and 桜 as well are really easy for me). Some of them will be coming back repeatedly (ex. 嘆 has 9 lapses, 34 reviews already and I struggle with that one so hard).

Rules
Suspend: 3 Month Interval+
Bury: Lapses >= 4 & Reviews >= 20 & Interval < 1 Month

With those rules in mind, I just suspended 47 cards, and buried 11 cards.

I think it’s the right way to go about it, I will see those kanji on Wanikani as well, and since that Anki deck is based on WK, if it doesn’t stick then it doesn’t stick. Failing it in two places will only increase my workload, and isn’t efficient.

Today’s decisions about Anki are my first actions towards moving from Anki & Isolation learning to Active Reading & Active Listening study instead.

Edit:
I just learned Anki unburies cards next day, so I will suspend the leeches instead as well, and give them a tag of “buried”.

[rhythm2107]

Last Update for Today
Before and after today’s backlog pile of 230 reviews. Some guru fell down increasing apprentice, but overall looks good to me.

I also did Bunpro, but whenever I take a break recently, I only do 1 additional point per day off instead of all 3 for each day. I feel like that would quickly overwhelm me, and I’d retain less of it. So today I did 4 points (3 for today, 1 for yesterday day’s off).

Doesn’t look that bad, especially now that my Wanikani is much smaller and Anki Old Deck was removed. I will still, most likely take a break around 120-130 grammar points for a week or so, as I imagine by then my ghosts will be around 25-30, assuming I keep up the pace.

[rhythm2107]

Day 21 of Leveling Pause on Level 40
Leveling pause… 完了!

After 21 long days, I’m back to leveling on Wanikani.

Next pause is on level 43, which is also the first fast level.
This 21 day pause on level 40 actually reduced my workload by a lot. My Enlightened passed 1000, a lot of Guru I went to II, so my daily reviews are usually around 110-120 now.

This is a picture before I picked up lessons.

Right now I’m expecting the break on 43 to be around 7-10 days, but I might delay it more if circumstances change.

Bunpro
Passed the 100 mark
Honestly that’s big, it truly feels like the finish line for N4 grammar is around the corner!

I was waiting for some grammar points to start giving me trouble, and here we are. The recent lessons introduced so many of very similar points like ように/ような, そうに/そうな, らしい, みたい. They all describe appearance or different degrees of certainty/formality. They’re the main source of Ghosts on Bunpro for me right now, and I’m struggling to figure out which one to use. And even in times where I figure out which one to use, I often forget that I need to add な/に depending on what’s following them. I’ll definitely need to spend an hour learning these through some other resources, to learn the differences and how to distinguish them.

That said, encountering a grammar point or a group of points that would give me trouble was bound to happen sooner or later. That’s what happened in N5, I had bookmarks which I had to reinforce later on. I did start N4 with harder points, to get them out of my way from the get go (ex. てくる, ていく, せる, れる). But it’s still surprising, that it took 80-90 grammar points since then, to encounter something that wouldn’t stick. Outside of watching the Game Gengo N4 grammar video and doing Bunpro, I didn’t supplement grammar lessons in any other way, so I think it’s going great so far.

Anki
With the Old Kanji Deck removed, the amount of workload reduced a lot.

Currently halfway through level 47 kanji on Anki, with 465 remaining. I also suspended 2-3 cards today for reaching interval of 3-4 months~ and 1-2 leeches. This “both-ends” approach, where I suspend highest performing and lowest performing feels great, it feels like I continue to make progress and am efficient about it, because I don’t waste time on leeches that clearly need a different approach.

I might consider increasing new cards in Future Kanji Deck to more, as it’s currently at 5 and previously was 8, even 12 once. But for now I’ll stick to 5, as I want to take it a bit easier with Japanese and focus more on business end.

Others
I also started a small reading habit, there’s an app called “Seasonal Calendar” that my partner is using. It gives you a small short story about something, often just a few sentences. It does teach quite a lot of advanced words though, including poetic words that are rare and don’t exist on Wanikani.

We started sitting down every day, reading them and deciphering them together, looking up the words we don’t know and it’s been really fun. This activity just again, reinforces my thinking that I need to mix it up and make it fun again, so learning doesn’t become a drag.

[rhythm2107]

Small Update with Numbers
Been having a bit less time to write updates, but still doing my reviews & lessons. Bunpro is progressing nicely, but slowly starting to feel that the workload is getting out of hand. I’m literally at the beginning of that feeling, it’s still doable to maintain, but I might end up doing that short break after all. Maybe instead of 120~ points, I’ll do it around 130 or 140 for a week, and then finish the remaining 30, before taking a longer break.

I passed some things to Expert recently.

WK is progressing nicely as well, a lot of new vocab from yesterday that still didn’t stick though. I’m limited on time, so I’m not doing leech studies on WK for now, and considering that my second break at level 43 is around the corner, I don’t feel in rush to do them anyways. I’ll have time to solidify them, and workload shouldn’t get much bigger before 43.

As for Anki Future Deck, I increased the number of cards per day from 5 to 6 to speed it up slightly. The workload is managable, almost done with Level 47 kanji there.

I haven’t had the time to do the daily stories on Seasonal Calendar for 3 days now, but we screenshotted them and will do all of them today. It’s honestly a great way to learn and solidify things, for example つぼみ (flower bud) is a vocab that I didn’t know, but learned in a story few days ago, and it’s still stuck with me. Just one story and the vocab is stuck in my memory as if it’s Master on WK. We also saw a word ふるさと that we needed to translate, and funny enough the next day I got it on Wanikani.

Small situations like these really solidify some vocabs in my brain

[rhythm2107]

Level 42

Also, reached same amount of N4 points as N5. 51 to go

I picked up all the lessons all at once and my apprentice looks quite disastrous again. A lot of the vocab actually isn’t sticking for me, maybe because the higher level vocab is getting a little more complicated and unique.

Good thing the next break is on 43, so I’ll have a week~ to solidify things there.

[rhythm2107]

I’m getting a little overwhelmed with Bunpro right now. Some points aren’t sticking, and with 240~ Apprentice on Wanikani, and 40-50 reviews on Anki daily, seeing a 77 on Bunpro popping up tomorrow is a bit too much for me.

If i continued doing 3 points daily, I’d finish N4 in 17 days around 7th of April. I was supposed to take a short break around 140 points, but I’ll do it now. There’s a few points that I need to reinforce, especially that they have synonyms that I’m supposed to learn in future lessons, and it’s only going to get confusing if I don’t reinforce them now.

I’ll do a 3 day break for now, so won’t be learning any new points during the weekend and will resume on Monday. Might extend it if necessary, or do another 3 day break at 140-150 points.

[Zaichiki]

I don’t see it being mentioned in your study log, but do you use Fill-in for Bunpro grammar reviews? I also remember reaching a point of “too much stress” with it, especially with increasing amount of nuanced synonyms. For example, there are at least 15 ways of saying “even though”, several ways of saying “must”, “since”, “at/in/on” and so on.
I tried “reading+reveal and grade” mode, and ended up sticking with it. It reduced my stress level immensely, and in terms of reading and recognition I don’t think it is worse. I figured I’ll only internalize grammar through reading and immersion anyway, so there’s not much point in drilling it and stressing about it.
Maybe you should try it too and see if it works for you.

[rhythm2107]

Yeah, I use the fill in mode. Until your post I had no idea there is a different one that you can enable
I might give it a try soon, I often switch from standard to Anki mode on Wanikani (on Smouldering Durtles app). I also agree that most of the “brain gains” will come from reading. These 77 reviews looked overwhelming, but it was actually just a bunch of Seasoned 3 coming back to be pushed to Expert. I think it’s not really Bunpro that’s overwhelming me, but my life situation right now. I do a lot of japanese every day (Wanikani at 8 days per level, Anki 50 reviews daily, Bunpro 30 reviews daily, Daily 30 min reading), and my business broke down recently. I kinda screwed up too, and now find myself in a financial hole, or I’ll have to start borrowing money from my partner/family. I started applying to jobs to snatch some programming gig for stable income, while I rebuild my business or find something else. But that means preparing for interviews, refreshing theory, common questions, doing mock behavioral and solving some common technical questions given during interviews. All of which takes a lot of time. Four months ago I was in a situation where everything was good, and I was able to do japanese for 4-5 hours daily without any stress. But now I’m simply struggling to find time for it, and feeling overwhelmed in that sense. The same 70 reviews on Bunpro that’s scary now, would feel like nothing a month ago, because I had more time for things.

It’s unfortunate, but I think there’s no other way than to re-arranging my goals for japanese this year. I almost completed my N4 goal anyways (stuck at 126 points, so 51 left). I was aiming for WK 60 in August/September, but maybe giving myself a leeway of “till end of the year” instead, and keeping up the habit of daily Japanese, but simply reducing it by like half from 1.5 to maybe 30-45 minutes is the play.

I run a Todoist project where I have everything to do organized, and I haven’t had this many tasks in a while. And none of them are negotiable, as in I can’t really cut them out, except Japanese. But cutting out Japanese completely is also something I don’t want to do, so here I am stuck in the “overwhelmed” stage. Reducing it to the minimum, at least until a job is landed, should probably do the trick.

[rhythm2107]

Following up on the post from yesterday, I decided to follow through with slowing down my Japanese temporarily. I don’t want to pause it, because I worked quite a lot to build up the habit.
Hopefully when things calm down I’ll be able to increase the pace again.

Changes

• Wanikani aiming for 10 days per level instead of 8 (or 60 by end of the year).
• Anki reduced daily kanji further from 3 to 0 (temporarily until things calm down)
• Bunpro reduced from 3 daily points to 1 points per 2 days (essentially 0.5 per day).
• Reading now optional, if I have time for it then I can do it, otherwise skip.

I will also likely take a longer pause on 43, planned for a 1 week~, but might do 2-3 instead to reduce my daily workload heavily before I pick it up again.

//Edit: I decided to reduce the Anki from 1 to 0 and Bunpro from 1 point per 2 days. So even more drastic reduction, but at least for the next 7-14 days, I do need it to be slower to catch up on other coding-related tasks.

[rhythm2107]

Level 43 reached, now it’s time to take it easy and push my cards to higher intervals while focusing on job search and side biz.

Current stats, to compare against future stats when I resume leveling.

Anki

Wanikani

Bunpro

[rhythm2107]

Short update to prevent thread from getting automatically locked due to being inactive. I am still learning Japanese and actively doing my reviews, although I did take a day off here and there. Had a small date with my partner in a coffee shop, doing N4 exams for fun and it wasn’t that bad. Much better than when we attempted the real N4 exam in 2022.

Wanikani is looking much better, although I have a lot of leeches on Apprentice that I just don’t have the time to learn right now, so I’m passively fighting with them. Gradually they are getting into my head.

I am also now suspending cards above 2 Months in Anki vs. 3 Months previously to speed up going through the deck in isolation.

Been learning 1 point per 2 days, so it moved slightly from 126 to 136. I’ll get there eventually

The job market is quite bad now, especially for developers. I’m studying, upskilling and refreshing things, to ensure that I’m one of top candidates right now. That “study plan” is around 1.5 - 2 months remaining, after that I plan to focus on getting referrals & networking while I shift my focus to trying to start some simple online businesses. One way or another I need financial stability, before I can go back to actively learning Japanese for more than 15-30 minutes daily.

I’m thinking positively though. Men of action are often favored by the goddess of good luck.

[rhythm2107]

Short update to prevent the thread from getting auto-locked due to inactivity. I paused Japanese completely around 2 weeks ago to focus on the financial side of things and job hunt for the time being. Things are going good though, been getting a lot of interviews in general, some with F100 companies and in stage 2 for some of them.

I’m hoping to return to Japanese once I secure a stable source of income, which I hope will be within the next 30-60 days.

[rhythm2107]

Quick update with numbers. I managed to land a good gig at a large corporation and starting as of June. This should be help me regain my financial stability and allow me to get back to doing Japanese again!

Been on WK Level 43 for 56 days now.

Anki looks like this:

And Bunpro:

It will probably still take 2 weeks or so to adjust to the new routines and get back to daily Japanese, but I’m glad things are moving forward and that things are getting better.

[hrudey]

@rhythm2107

Quick update with numbers. I managed to land a good gig at a large corporation and starting as of June. This should be help me regain my financial stability and allow me to get back to doing Japanese again!

Congratulations! Getting life in order is an important prerequisite to doing anything, so hopefully you’ll be in a great place to focus on Japanese soon.

[GolyBidoof]

@hrudey

Getting life in order is an important prerequisite to doing anything, so hopefully you’ll be in a great place to focus on Japanese soon.

also the opposite, great distraction from anything japanese-study related xddddd

Proud of you Rhythm though! Hope that your job ends up being rewarding and that you’ll ace it C:

[rhythm2107]

Quick update again, after 78 days on level 43, I have finally pushed through and leveled to 44.
I am now on fast levels, meaning that each level could in theory be completed in 3½ days. That said, I will have to take it slow for now and probably level once per 10-15 days until my job situation stabilizes.

I’m mostly a Python & TypeScript dev, and I was put into a more Infra role with K8s, Golang, Terraform, Helm etc. It’s a tech stack that I have never used and more on the DevOps side, which is something I have next to no experience in. The company is giving me time to learn, and it’s honestly a good deal for me too, as I always wanted to go towards that direction. I want to meet their expectations to ensure my contract gets extended, so I’ll be dedicating most of my time to upskilling and learning the product we’re working with.

I’m doing daily japanese here and there, but I won’t be adding new cards in Anki or resuming new grammar in Bunpro yet. For now the only thing that’s moving forward is Wanikani, and at a very slow pace. Below some screens with updated numbers:

Hoping that upskilling part won’t take me long, as I’m dedicating time after hours & some of weekends too. Optimistically, I’d love to be comfortable at work after 1.5-2 months and slow it down to just the 40h weekly → get back to Japanese for real

[YandrosTheSane]

DevOps enthusiast !

@rhythm2107

I’m mostly a Python & TypeScript dev, and I was put into a more Infra role with K8s, Golang, Terraform, Helm etc. It’s a tech stack that I have never used and more on the DevOps side, which is something I have next to no experience in. The company is giving me time to learn, and it’s honestly a good deal for me too, as I always wanted to go towards that direction. I want to meet their expectations to ensure my contract gets extended, so I’ll be dedicating most of my time to upskilling and learning the product we’re working with.

Adding terraform/AWS/devOps to my stack was the best professional move I have done in the last 7 years . Small advice, chatGPT is rather good to learn it for simple examples (it does make mistakes for the complicated stuff but points you in the right direction).
Do you already have some CI/CD knowledge ?
When you have the full chain the world is your oyster !
I hope you’ll have fun learning this field !

[rhythm2107]

Thank you, haha I haven’t used CI/CD before, only watched some videos on Github Actions a few times as I planned using it in one of my projects, but didn’t. My primary assignment is to learn Kubernetes and Go, as a lot of code extending the operator is written in Go. I’m trying to take it one step at a time, and yeah I’ll give ChatGPT a try for sure. I’m using AI a lot already in one way or another, even now using it to generate Anki cards for some of the theory I’m learning around K8s

I’m guessing you were on both the SWE and DevOps side then, how is WLB on DevOps side? I sometimes wonder if being responsible for infrastructure means more on-hands and more work in the long term.

[YandrosTheSane]

If by WLB you mean Work Life Balance it’s a mixed bag… for me it has meant a lot more work for a few years (5~ish), Ops was something I had to acquire painfully to prevent team deficiencies (like you I come from a typescript background). But after finally being proficient enough on the whole chain the greatest change has been going freelance 3 years ago and having a lot more control on with whom I’m working (having all those skills makes you pretty valuable on the market) thus for the last year I’m having a way better balance overall (even if it’s sometimes it’s still problematic…).