Weekly Update #4
SRS
I’ve managed to stay consistent again! Reached Level 16 and I’m looking forward to knowing 600 Kanji! But I have to do more reviews than I’m used to because I constantly have more than 100 items in the Apprentice level, but until now I managed to not let them pile up. ところで my Anki App is dying, I’ve not reviewed a single item out of the Genki 1 and Genki 2 deck in 2 months and there are probably more than 700 reviews which I will definetely not finish because Anki is so tiring for me, everytime I use Anki for my Genki decks I get bored after 2 minutes and just want to quit anki. Migaku has also become significantly more difficult to manage, because I’ve created 2 more decks for Manga and Online News and I have to do about 200 reviews and 40 Lessons there everyday. My vocab count has also increased to 4150 words, at this stage, most netflix series show me a migaku comprehension score of 70-80%.
Fluyo
Yesterday I stumbled across a youtube video of a guy who created a language learning app, Its called Fluyo and released a couple days ago, so I gave it a try. It supports various languages, but its more like a Duolingo 2.0, it does have SRS and multiple pre-created decks for japanese, but everything is in kana, words are not being taught with Kanji which is a massive disappointment. The UI is pretty modern and the app is based on a game-like approach to language learning. Its basically playing pokemon but with vocab words, every user has their own dolphin and they grow bigger when you learn new vocab. Players can then engage in 1v1 pokemon inspired vocab battles in which you have to recall the learned words. There are social spaces called “Pods” in which users can gather and chat about a specific topic and even gain XP. I’ve chatted for a bit there yesterday and some people in there are Wanikani non-believers, they were argumenting that Kanji and readings cannot be learnt through mnemonics! I was absolutely terrified! But all that aside, its a very interesting way of learning languages, but it’s basically useless for me. It primarily teaches beginner vocab and it only uses kana, but it’s definitely worth trying for other languages!
Immersion
I’ve finally finished ルリドラゴン, I really enjoyed the story so I went right ahead and bought the second one. I’ve set myself the goal to read 1 weeks book club worth of manga every day and it has been going pretty well so far, I will now start reading カードキャプターさくら with Mokuro and Migaku. I’ve also been actively listening to Japanese music while delivering newspapers every weekend (the way I finance my massive japanese expenses), I can catch some phrases, but I only get the meaning of the song after checking the lyrics
My favorite songs so far:
I’ve also been able to keep up with the ダンジョン飯 Beginner Club, I really like the intro song, I’ve already watched it in english until episode 9 before so I expect it to get more difficult after episode 9. Netflix has finally released a new season of Squid Game, I watched the first one 2 years ago in english and I’m now watching the second season in Japanese with Japanese subs, really enjoying it so far! おすすめです!
Other Stuff
3 months ago, I signed up for the Pirate Software Game Jam and it starts in 11 days! I am not entirely sure wether I can participate because I’ve basically forgotten most of the stuff due to Japanese already. So I’ll have to try catching up now, I don’t know how that’s going to influence my japanese studies as catching up on game development is really time consuming. But I think I’ll participate even if I don’t know a lot of stuff, because not participating because of being afraid of not knowing enough isn’t good either, otherwise I will probably never participate because I would just be afraid of not being prepared enough. I’ve also been thinking about doing an exchange year to Japan during the second half of 11th grade, but it is very expensive and Japan is one of the most popular exchange places and you really have to be early to get a spot.
That was a lot of text and information! This log entry is probably the longest one yet, and also the most time consuming to write. I hope that I could give a good insight of the week without causing too much confusion! I’m looking forward to updating the log again next week! 読んでくれてありがとうね!