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Summer_Roll Japanese TAC ’13 Team Sakura桜

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Summer_Roll
Newbie
United States
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Joined 4076 days ago

8 posts - 8 votes
Speaks: English*
Studies: Japanese

 
 Message 1 of 11
30 January 2013 at 7:38pm | IP Logged 
Background: I'm an unemployed college graduate and thought that it would be fun to learn japanese this year. I
have tried to go through RTK (remembering the kanji) before and have never finished it. I currently have around
200 kanji in Anki and will be adding them as fast as is fun.

I'm going to try to keep this as a fun thing and not really put any pressure on myself. Japanese level up
(japaneselevelup.com) does a really good job of outlining how one can look at language learning the same way one
looks at a video game. This is the approach I'm going to be taking this year and I really want to see if I can take
something that is traditionally looked at as difficult and painful, and turn it into something I do to relax and enjoy
myself.

Depending on how everything goes this year I might see about taking the JLPT 2 in December. This is a bit of a
reach, but who knows what might happen.

In the next post I will detail a bit more specifically what my current language learning philosophy is and how I plan
to learn over the next year.

Edited by Summer_Roll on 30 January 2013 at 10:11pm

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Summer_Roll
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United States
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Joined 4076 days ago

8 posts - 8 votes
Speaks: English*
Studies: Japanese

 
 Message 2 of 11
31 January 2013 at 10:14pm | IP Logged 
(These are my beliefs prior to doing any sort of personal language learning and are formed 100% on the various
things that I have read online. They might change.)

I will revisit this post when I finally get the ability to post links. I'd like to add links to different articles and videos
that have influenced my thinking, and flesh this out more fully.

I guess the most foundational belief I have is that language learning is not a creative process. I believe it is primarily
learning how to imitate a native speaker. This affects the way I am planning on learning because I will have zero
focus on writing or speaking for a very long time.

I think that when you attempt to speak or write too early, you don't have the knowledge to express yourself in the
same way a native would. This is important to me because I want to take my japanese to a very high level
eventually.

This also means that I am going to be focusing minimally on grammar initially. Without enough sentence references
built up in my head, I don't think that grammar is going to help me construct natural sounding sentences. I know
that in English I use my knowledge of grammar as a conscious "checker" that activates after my mind has already
generated a spontaneous potential sentence. My guess is that ultimately the same thing has to begin to happen in
your L2 if you want to be fluent.

So... with that in mind... my tentative plan is to complete RTK lite, then complete the core 6k while finishing up RTK
at a slower pace, and then explore some of the premade subs2srs decks available online.

100% of my studying is going to take place inside of Anki for at least a few months.

At some point I am going to be switching to J-J cards. Japanese Level Up recommends around the 1,000th sentence,
so I will start to try around then, possibly going back and starting with the sentences that I have already learned in
Anki.

Oh, also I am going to be trying to have all of my cards contain audio. Right now the plan is to create 2 cards for
each sentence, one that goes from Kanji to kana/audio, and one that goes from audio to definitions/translation.

Edited by Summer_Roll on 01 February 2013 at 4:11pm

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Summer_Roll
Newbie
United States
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Joined 4076 days ago

8 posts - 8 votes
Speaks: English*
Studies: Japanese

 
 Message 3 of 11
31 January 2013 at 10:15pm | IP Logged 
Place holder for progress updates.
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Summer_Roll
Newbie
United States
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Joined 4076 days ago

8 posts - 8 votes
Speaks: English*
Studies: Japanese

 
 Message 4 of 11
01 February 2013 at 3:47pm | IP Logged 
Place holder for useful links.

Edited by Summer_Roll on 01 February 2013 at 4:13pm

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Summer_Roll
Newbie
United States
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Joined 4076 days ago

8 posts - 8 votes
Speaks: English*
Studies: Japanese

 
 Message 5 of 11
01 February 2013 at 4:13pm | IP Logged 
I reviewed about 170 cards in Anki today. I had to catch up on the reviews that I'd missed over the last few days.

I find that one of my biggest struggles is remembering the order of the radicals in the kanji. I think when I make my
stories in the future I will try to take this into account so that I stop failing kanji for such a dumb reason.

I bought an ipad recently and reviewing cards in it is AMAZING. My recommendations are to activate "show swipe
zones" in the settings and to make it so the right side of the screen can be tapped to choose your answer. I have it
so that the upper right portion of the screen answers "easy", the middle right answers "good", the bottom right
answers "hard", and the entire left portion answers "again". If you hold the ipad in portrait mode, this means you
won't have to move your hands at all to be able to flip the card and to provide a difficulty. I hate using the buttons at
the bottom to answer, and this really "greases" the process.

I also have swipe up to "mark" the card. I use this so that I can go back to cards I had trouble with. For example I
am marking the cards I am failing because of radical order. This way I can find them later and try to come up with a
mnemonic to remember them without interrupting my review flow.

I am also using swipe down to "bury" a card. If I am really struggling with a card and I just keep failing it that
session, I "bury" it so that it won't come up this session, but will come up again next session. I use this if I don't
think that I need to come up with a new mnemonic, and that the card will simply stick after a bit of time.

And then I have swipe right to "mark and bury" and swipe left to "undo", in case I accidentally answered.
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g-bod
Diglot
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United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name
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1485 posts - 2002 votes 
Speaks: English*, Japanese
Studies: French, German

 
 Message 6 of 11
02 February 2013 at 4:21pm | IP Logged 
Welcome to the team!

I look forward to following your progress in Japanese.
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Summer_Roll
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United States
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Joined 4076 days ago

8 posts - 8 votes
Speaks: English*
Studies: Japanese

 
 Message 7 of 11
03 February 2013 at 4:28pm | IP Logged 
Thanks, g-bod.

Today and yesterday I did 42 reviews total. I will probably try to add 30-50 new kanji today.

These are kanji that I learned a few years back, so they aren't that difficult to relearn.

Apparently I average about 7 reviews per minute, or 420 reviews per hour. This is a pretty important metric I think,
which I will have to watch especially when I begin to add audio to my cards. If a sentence requires 10 seconds to
listen to, I can imagine my review rate dropping to 3 or fewer cards per minute, or 180 cards per hour. I obviously
have limited time I can put into learning japanese, so if the audio makes the cards take too long, I might have to
adjust if I want to be able to cover a decent amount of vocabulary this year.

Thankfully, I don't have to worry about that until I finish RTK lite though.
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Takato
Tetraglot
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HungaryRegistered users can see my Skype Name
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249 posts - 276 votes 
Speaks: Hungarian*, EnglishB2, GermanB2, Japanese

 
 Message 8 of 11
25 February 2013 at 3:31am | IP Logged 
Summer_Roll wrote:
I'm going to try to keep this as a fun thing and not really put any pressure on myself. [...] one can look at language learning the same way one looks at a video game. This is the approach I'm going to be taking this year and I really want to see if I can take something that is traditionally looked at as difficult and painful, and turn it into something I do to relax and enjoy myself.

It'll be interesting to see how you go like this. Good luck!

Summer_Roll wrote:
I find that one of my biggest struggles is remembering the order of the radicals in the kanji. I think when I make my stories in the future I will try to take this into account so that I stop failing kanji for such a dumb reason.

Interesting struggle! Could you show me an example? I think after you can recognize a certain amount of kanji, when you write it the wrong way it just doesn't seem to be right.
But then maybe you'll show me something made up of 4 radicals, I don't know. I'm really intrigued.


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