🍃 Shenmue Tree - a Study "Lounge!" 🍂

Glad to hear you motivated :slight_smile:

I hope so… I am encountering some repeats here and there… still having to look them up though, which ichi.moe technically already does for me when I type in the sentence. If ichi.moe were not a thing, I reading would be way harder :sweat_smile:

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One thing to be wary of: don’t over-rely on ichi.moe.

Best is to try and parse the sentence yourself, use a dictionary for the words you don’t know, and use ichi.moe only for identifying grammar you’re not familiar with. Then look up that grammar and learn what it is and does, and try to recognise it without ichi.moe’s help from there on.

If that gets you absolutely nowhere, you may need to study a bit of basic grammar at the very least first. It’s more important for reading in that sense, because if you know all the grammar and no vocab you can read with just a dictionary, but if you know all the vocab and zero grammar you know what every word means (assuming it’s not conjugated) but you have no idea how anything relates to anything else.

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Ah okay! May take me a little longer to read like this, but it sounds worth it learning wise!

Yes, I know I need more Cure Dolly and all. I just got Mina no Nihongo in the mail today, but for some reason the workbook is going to arrive in over 2 weeks from now?? I also have my all about particles book for reference!

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I’ve had some successes today!

  • Many reviews with no SSQ leading up to them. Many failures and some icky leeches - the cool part is I don’t care as much as I thought I would! Just moving forward and doing my lessons and reviews is all that matters. I still have 46 level 6 & 7 vocab lessons to do, but I’m in no hurry!
  • I realized よつばと! actually does have page numbers :sweat_smile: (just on select pages).
  • I also discovered HOW to do my reviews on koohi.cafe! SO I added 75 more vocab from the first 17 pages of よつばと! and will be starting them as lessons soon. I love the ease of looking up vocab and instantly turning it into a flashcard, also with being able to add synonyms and notes from what page I encountered it!
  • I got the main textbook of Minna no Nihongo today, but since it’s all in Japanese and the study guide is arriving super late, we’ll see if I get into it just quite yet.
  • I have a よつばと! reading pal now! They are a few pages behind me, but I’m going to put Yotsuba on pause while they catch up :slight_smile: Meanwhile I will watch Cure Dolly and crack open my verbs and particles reference books!

Just an update for anyone who may stumble upon it :slight_smile:

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Much progress! Very impressive! :slight_smile:

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Thank you TokeruKonkoyo! :slight_smile:

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Well, having a weird start to my day so far, but staying on top of things. I just woke up from an hour long mid morning nap, and I’m not sure why my body / mind needed the rest as I slept well last night. I hate napping in general, so even allowing my eyes to close was like “noooo don’t do it” and then :sleeping:

Since really laying off the self-study quiz, my accuracy is wayyy down, which means my apprentice pile is nice and plump :laughing: I’m not too worried, though, I plan on spending quite a while at level 7 to make sure I can comfortably move on to level 8 when I do.

I have grammar notes well documented from Cure Dolly lesson 1-4, so I might move on to 5 today. I get so much from her, as I’m still new (and never cared about English grammar terminology) it takes me multiple times to watch them and each new one feels like I’m about to jump into a cold body of water :cold_face:

Excited about koohi.cafe too! Except my accuracy has been deplorable with the first 16 flash card lessons I’ve started. It just feels super neat to be documenting and challenging myself with the vocab I’m encountering in my first manga ever!

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Alright, well :sweat_smile:

I’m back to Torii from my second attempt at Koohi… and the reason seems silly but is simple.

I can read katakana totally fine, but since almost every kanji/vocab the Koohi dictionary adds is in katakana, even if it’s got hiragana attached, my brain can’t process the two at this point. I just realized this was a major issue because I’m like “why can’t I picture things in my head like I do on WK??” This is why! I am still a tad slower with katakana processing, sure, but the visual memory of kana is very important to me (at least at my level!). Rant over :slight_smile:

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Doing this kind of exercise once a day might help?

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Oh yes I’m sure this would definitely help some! I use an app on my phone that goes through all hiragana and katakana + dakuon + yoon as a speed quiz, and my best average is 1.5 seconds through all the 214 questions (that’s with stupid touch screen errors too :sweat_smile:

This seems a little different in that it combines katakana I don’t see together too often at this stage, so I will watch often for sure!

It seems to be the visual memory I sometimes rely on for the kana, I think, at my low level. At first I didn’t really notice that Koohi did this, but I kept saying “why is ジャク” so much harder to remember than じゃく? This could just be a simple thing for me to get used to, and ultimately be great katakana practice, but it was definitely stifling me more with the vocab I input myself, than even Torii does with the vocab it introduces to me :laughing:

Thank you for your help! :slight_smile:

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Because it looks like more like ヅァワ than じゃく looks like づぁわ, perhaps?

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Yes, that is possible! Anything is a possibility! I still love the koohi setup for creating flashcards, but I’m still like ??? about their choice to make most everything katakana, sometimes showing hiragana far below in a less common usage or something.

So, for now, the elusive flash card search continues, and I am back to Torii! (which I kind of like).

PS. @Beyond_Sleepy - did you get instructions from seanblue yet about adding Anki flashcards effectively and efficiently? (I thought that it was you that asked him, I could be wrong!)

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I asked Vanilla (about 15-ish posts up), who said they were traveling at the moment and would have to look up some old scripts before they could explain how to do it.

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Ah that’s who it was! I thought it was seanblue and that’s why I couldn’t find it. My apologies!

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I just have to document and share a moment of personal joy from the community today :smiley:

For those of you who don’t know, I had recently created a sushi-turned-Japanese cuisine appreciation thread (because when I’m not learning Japanese, I’m cooking it :laughing:)

We have some wonderful regulars so far, sharing tips and tricks and all that fun stuff.

TODAY, the legendary @saibaneko made their first batch of sushi rice vinegar based off of the recipe I had shared… and this was the great honor subsequently bestowed upon me!

If I ever make this into production, saibaneko gets all the gratuities for the label creation :upside_down_face: :joy:

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I recall a while back you mentioned wanting to watch some (preferably Japanese) cooking when we were discussing VTubers - and I was recently reminded of ayamy.

She’s the character illustrator for one of the Hololive girls, Yozora Mel, and she does some streams herself, including fairly regular cooking streams with recipes ranging from hamburgers to sukiyaki to waffles to mapo tofu, so maybe that’ll be right up your alley. Looks like most of her cooking videos are Japanese food!

She’s Korean, but she mostly speaks Japanese and (somewhat broken) English, so it’s decent listening practice as well. Also when she’s talking about boyfriends, that’s her way of referring to her viewers… don’t question it, just smile and nod :rofl:

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HAHAHA okay this sounds great! I will check her out for sure, but I need a break from YouTube at the moment… I just spent well over an hour watching lesson 6 of Cure Dolly because there was SO much information. I think she should have broken it down into multiple videos… but I took 2 pages of reference notes which is why it took me so long. Thank you for ayame! Perhaps you should post her in the cooking thread so I don’t forget either :roll_eyes:

Good to hear from you yamitenshi! I feel like it’s been a few days!! :laughing:

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A little morning update post, my brain is tired :tired_face:

Cure Dolly lesson 6 was insanity, especially because I take pretty lengthy notes so I can reference them without having to watch her video all over again if I don’t want to. It took me well over an hour to get through 6 and a half minutes of her video, and the first half of that mostly went over my head…

I’ve done pretty good on all my reviews today, knocking my apprentice pile down by 10 with a bunch more reviews to do today. I’d like to do some of my remaining vocab lessons but who knows when I’ll be up for it.

I did do all 40 of my Torii reviews, and I did way better than I expected! I’d say perhaps 80-85%, which is wayyy up from yesterday.

So, the day moves along, and we’ll see what it holds from here!

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Okay, I noticed something today after I had put off doing vocab lessons for the first time since starting…

The words I was struggling with the most up until that point, were also words associated with other vocab that I had not done the lesson for yet. For me, many times, the association with other words helps me learn the on’ and kun’ readings since it creates more exposure. For example:

作 vocab for me was (and still is) rough… but I was introduced to more 作 vocab today that was easier because I could associate it with what I had learned before. 直 has been the same way.

So my question is: has anyone else experienced this by putting off vocab lessons? It now makes me fearful that putting them off for too long hinders my learning of kanji / vocab / 'on & 'kun quite a bit…

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Yes, one shouldn’t ideally put off vocab lessons for too long, otherwise you might start forgetting the kanji readings and not enforce them via vocab items.

To enhance the enforcing effect itself, you can add extra useful vocab to your other SRS system of choice. What has helped me personally is adding longer compounds which contain smaller compounds I had problems with.

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