kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5181 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese
| Message 897 of 1702 25 April 2013 at 8:37am | IP Logged |
Right now I can't wait for my class to end. I'll miss the people and what not but I am tired of it. I'm giving the SRS flashcard program built into Midori a try in place of my regular app. It's awfully easy to add words and kanji. Maybe too easy. I think I can import lists of words too but I haven't tried that. The only drawback seems to be no sound. It's something I can live with. Well it doesn't synch across devices. But it's so much easier to setup. I'm working on memorizing the common sounds for each kanji too in a separate kanji deck. I think it'll help vocabulary learning in the long run rather than just getting the kanji sounds by osmosis so to speak from learning vocabulary. The way I have the deck setup is to show the kanji meaning on side 1 and then side 2 has the kanji and the sounds and some example words. Midori handles that pretty well. And if I am curious I can pinch and open up the dictionary entry for even more info and example words and stuff. It's neat. I also test myself on drawing the kanji, but it seems remembering how to draw the kanji is easier than remembering all the sounds so I don't make myself draw it every time I test the card.
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kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5181 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese
| Message 898 of 1702 26 April 2013 at 1:59am | IP Logged |
Well it's (my) Friday. It's been a kind of a long week. I'm tired but today I'm noticing I'm focusing better on studying than I have in a while thanks to the speech contest. I guess I was right when I said it would take a week to get beyond it. Probably would have had the opposite effect if I'd have won heh. But whatever.
I'm flip flopping back to the SRS app I have, Flashcards Deluxe. I decided I liked the audio after all. But I'll be studying kanji using midori. It's so easy to cut and paste from the app into midori and then add new kanji to be studied and the kanji cards are really nice with example words on them and all. And my kanji card set in my SRS program didn't have any audio component anyway. I have 900 cards due. I'll probably get that up to date after the weekend but it seems like SO much right now O.o
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kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5181 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese
| Message 899 of 1702 26 April 2013 at 9:27pm | IP Logged |
Ok I'm dieting again. I really don't want to buy new clothes for weight gain.. Hope dieting doesn't make me
dumber. I'm plenty slow enough as it is :p.
Also looking into going a new phone.. Tmobile has the iPhone now finally. Samsung is coming out with an
awesome s4 phone.. Between the two I think apple has better support for Japanese but swiftkey is going to
support Japanese at some point and that would be a big boost to android. My big thing with apple is the
screen is smaller.. And for some unknown reason they don't wrap the text to the size of the screen like
android does. I you haven't used an android phone to browse the Internet you probably don't have any idea
what that means but you can pretty much zoom in on a website and not have to scroll left to right while you
rad and it really useful.
Anyway. I'm also thinking of redoing how I study vocab. I might want to switch to sentence decks
exclusively. I don't do well with having multiple decks to stay on top of. I was playing on
www.readthekanji.com and I really like the site now. It's better for the intermediate learner I think than the
beginner but to each his own. I was even thinking of dropping my SRS deck to use it exclusively. One thing I
would miss if I did that is listening to vocab while I ride my bike or go to the gym. My SRS app does an
awesome job with that. I can make it randomly play the cards with streak 1 or less. And I don't know that can
manually choose vocab to study. They have a paid version. I signed up. I see no difference from the free
version though. The same decks are available as far as I can tell - n1, n2, n3, n4, etc. I have it set to n3 and
higher at the moment.
The new text to speech voice I got for my desktop is also awesome.. Better than my SRS programs japanese
voice. I'm debating if I should take the effort to set it up to import it instead. It would be a pain.. I did it a while
back but forget what I did and it took a while to setup. Oh well. Will head home and think on this a bit.
There's also a lot to do for my class which ends in a couple weeks.
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kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5181 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese
| Message 900 of 1702 26 April 2013 at 11:07pm | IP Logged |
Went to t-mobile and looked at the iphone. The salesperson was really cute XD. But I didn't get it.. I tried typing on it and I'm sure I'd get used to it but swiftkey just is amazing at fixing what I write it's made my phone typing sloppy...
I'll wait on the S4 and see what it's like. I have a Note 2 so the reason to upgrade would be higher resolution and if I decided a smaller screen were better than the large Note 2's screen size. Oh. And I'm a little curious about this. The S4 is going to incorporate Swiftkey's prediction algorithm into the built in keyboard. I am pretty sure that Samsung has a Japanese keyboard included. So will it use the Swiftkey awesome algorithm for that although Swiftkey itself doesn't support Japanese? I'm thinking not. But even so.. just being able to quickly switch between English and Japanese and have awesome English input would be very nice. On my Note 2 I currently type English with Swiftkey and then switch to Smart Keyboard Pro for Japanese.. it requires a few swipes of the finger and is kind of annoying.
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kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5181 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese
| Message 901 of 1702 27 April 2013 at 8:38am | IP Logged |
I'm sticking with my SRS and the current deck I have. For now anyway. I have a lot of cards in there for the course - and a lot of others mixed in. It doesn't make sense to stop using it before the course ends and I think I like having control over what gets added. I'm adding tons of kanji to Midori's SRS internal flashcard thing though. As I review the cards after being so far behind, I can see how important knowing the sounds to the individual kanji is. If the sounds stick out then it makes it easier to remember the Japanese word for what I'm looking at. A lot easier.. even if I don't know all the sounds. Although if it's been a while knowing all the sounds would be good. Anyway, I used to be really happy with knowing the meaning of the kanji and being able to draw it but now I have learned the sounds to a few hundred kanji too and I am much more comfortable with those kanji than the rest even if I can draw them. So I think studying kanji sounds is pretty important. And a pain in the butt. But I'm doing it while relearning to draw a lot of the kanji which I enjoy so that makes it nice.. but very time consuming. I'm not sure when I'll catch up to knowing the sounds to all the vocab in the deck at the moment. I have over 2k words in this deck. Not all Jouyou kanji are represented by a long sight but it'll get there eventually.
I'm watching more and more anime w/o subtitles. I can understand a lot now and shows that involve regular daily stuff use easier vocab. Fantasy and sci fi stuff seems more challenging but it'll get there. I do miss a lot but I'm ok with it as I can follow the plot pretty well. I had started doing this a few weeks back but then started discussing a new anime with a classmate and she mentioned a specific line from a scene and I totally had no idea. Made me go back and rewatch the show w/subs. But class is ending so I won't have anyone to talk to anime with anyway so might as well turn off the subs I think.
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kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5181 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese
| Message 902 of 1702 27 April 2013 at 9:00am | IP Logged |
Oh, I went from 900 due to 480... I'll get more done tomorrow. I think the app saves the easier ones for
later.. Because it's mean. It would feel good to get caught up. I have homework to do though too.
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kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5181 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese
| Message 903 of 1702 28 April 2013 at 3:20am | IP Logged |
Got through the rest of the due cards in the SRS deck. Thank goodness. I'm exhausted. Also did the homework for Monday.. need to finish the chapter packet though which is due Wednesday O.o. 面倒くさい
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kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5181 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese
| Message 904 of 1702 28 April 2013 at 7:16am | IP Logged |
Added 25 words to the SRS deck. I was dating the additions and I haven't added any words in about 2 weeks.. wow. Which makes sense - my due cards were about 2 weeks behind. I'm thinking of adding a few more. I memorized the new ones without too much effort. I'm wondering how well I'll stay on top of the kanji deck I'm making. I'm thinking not so well since it doesn't have as direct an effect on improving my Japanese as the vocab deck does and I am getting the sounds for the kanji from the vocab deck too.. I'm trying to make myself go about studying differently. Before I'd see a group of kanji for a word and then think what is the English? And then based on that I'd try to think of the Japanese and if it weren't working then I'd try to remember the sounds for the kanji. Now I'm making myself sound out each kanji before I think of the English.
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