Japanese Language Journal: November 6th
It has only been about a week since the last one, but it is a new month and I have finished all of the new cards in the deck. With all of this in tow and a bit of anime watching this weekend I "feel" like I'm making progress.
While it is probably just a combination of luck and being partly in my head, feeling like I'm making progress is important.
The "luck" part is assuming I just happened to be watching anime which closely aligned with what I had already learned. And the "in my head" being the assumption that my ability to understand to the level I did is something which happened very recently. The truth is probably not quite that way. For instance, while the amount of language I understood when I focused this past week was substantially above what I understood in the past, there was a decent spattering of both relatively new words to my vocabulary and ones I had known for quite a while with most being older vocab.
But, on the other hand, one thing I'm noticing is that as vocabulary grows, comprehension grows disproportionately faster (at least as this stage). One or two new words can be the difference between totally lost in a sentence or pulling it all together.
It makes a HUGE difference to be able to actually know where one word ends and another begins. It makes an even bigger difference to know what most of the words mean and have a story and imagery for context. One of the things I noticed happening both in my Anki decks and in Anime is that words I had forgotten or was struggling with, would suddenly jump into my mind if there was sufficient context. Again, you need to know where the word boundaries are and be able to understand enough of the remainder of the sentence. But, it is one of the most gratifying things when it happens (for me at least). It is the sort of feeling I had when I was younger and still learning new words in English.
Learning a second language is super weird. I watch my 3 year old daughter learning. Her English is much better than my Japanese, but I can pick out a number of areas where I think I would be much better if we could compare them directly. But I love it.
Speaking of my daughter, I think, in hindsight, learning a language is one of the best random, superfluous decisions I ever made. If you've ever been tempted to learn a new language and you have a baby, I can't recommend any better a time. As gratifying as my own journey has been, it has been made even more gratifying watching my daughter learning to speak and having some measure of understanding of just how amazing it is. It is also helps put a lot of their common mistakes into proper context and teaches a ton of appreciation and acceptance :) I can't really fully explain the experience. All I can say is, if I woke up tomorrow and had forgotten everything, I wouldn't think it had been a waste.
I know it sounds crazy to add learning a language to the mix when raising a baby. I never felt like I didn't have enough time in a day until I had a child. I'm not going to argue. Those who aren't interested won't find or make the time. I know the time exists. I went through it. My daughter is 3 now and my wife currently looks after her during the day and I still only find room for half an hour to an hour each day. Truth is, if I wanted to, I could probably make/find more time. I find or make time for what I think is sustainable. From there, I just need to keep with it. Depending on how much time you have, you may need to adjust your learning methodology. For instance, using just flashcards, I almost feel like 30-60 minutes a day is the bare minimum as there isn't a ton of context and there is a lot of repetition.
Anyways, back to the progress... my daily study in Anki is dropping. I'm down to about 300 review cards a day. As a result I already started studying random selections from the completed decks even before I finished the last decks new cards. I'll probably delete the Human Japanese deck soon. It was a great, simple starter deck. Especially since it coincided with the content from the app. But, that simplicity is now it's bane.
I still run across a card here or there in that deck which stumps me for a bit, or even ones (single word ones) which I don't get. But they are rare at this point and probably 2/3 of the times I fail to get a word it is actually because the deck shows everything in Hiragana, even when it is something almost always shown in Kanji and when I'm shown the answer I slap my head because I actually knew it. As your vocab grows you focus less and less on pronunciation and focus more on writing (Kanji) for written or context for audio. This is because the bat shit crazy amounts of words that have the exact same or stupidly similar pronunciation.
If you're using a structured training course, you won't hit much of this. But once you step outside of that you'll hit it like crazy. For instance, while both sweets and rain seem to be common topics in Japanese training, most avoid using both because they are both pronounced "あめ", but they have totally different kanji, namely candy is "飴" and rain is "雨". So, when I just see "あめ" I usually guess whatever comes to mind first with no thought of the other.
So, yeah, at this stage of the game, it feels like Human Japanese is holding me back more than helping. Especially since the Anki deck doesn't even use Kanji where the intermediate course would have. I have felt this way for a while though, so maybe I won't. Hard part is, there are some words I legitimately forget even in that deck. And these Kanji related misses can be helpful as well. I really should see "あめ" and think both "candy" and "rain". Of course, the part which doesn't help is that Japanese often call candies お菓子 or おかし which often gets translated as sweets.
This is totally off topic, but, I suspect that in Japan they likely use お菓子 more like we use the word "candy" and 飴 more like we use "sweets". One of the interesting things about learning about language is noticing how some decisions seem arbitrary when it comes to translations. There are even cases where not everyone necessarily agrees on a translation.
While it is probably just a combination of luck and being partly in my head, feeling like I'm making progress is important.
The "luck" part is assuming I just happened to be watching anime which closely aligned with what I had already learned. And the "in my head" being the assumption that my ability to understand to the level I did is something which happened very recently. The truth is probably not quite that way. For instance, while the amount of language I understood when I focused this past week was substantially above what I understood in the past, there was a decent spattering of both relatively new words to my vocabulary and ones I had known for quite a while with most being older vocab.
But, on the other hand, one thing I'm noticing is that as vocabulary grows, comprehension grows disproportionately faster (at least as this stage). One or two new words can be the difference between totally lost in a sentence or pulling it all together.
It makes a HUGE difference to be able to actually know where one word ends and another begins. It makes an even bigger difference to know what most of the words mean and have a story and imagery for context. One of the things I noticed happening both in my Anki decks and in Anime is that words I had forgotten or was struggling with, would suddenly jump into my mind if there was sufficient context. Again, you need to know where the word boundaries are and be able to understand enough of the remainder of the sentence. But, it is one of the most gratifying things when it happens (for me at least). It is the sort of feeling I had when I was younger and still learning new words in English.
Learning a second language is super weird. I watch my 3 year old daughter learning. Her English is much better than my Japanese, but I can pick out a number of areas where I think I would be much better if we could compare them directly. But I love it.
Speaking of my daughter, I think, in hindsight, learning a language is one of the best random, superfluous decisions I ever made. If you've ever been tempted to learn a new language and you have a baby, I can't recommend any better a time. As gratifying as my own journey has been, it has been made even more gratifying watching my daughter learning to speak and having some measure of understanding of just how amazing it is. It is also helps put a lot of their common mistakes into proper context and teaches a ton of appreciation and acceptance :) I can't really fully explain the experience. All I can say is, if I woke up tomorrow and had forgotten everything, I wouldn't think it had been a waste.
I know it sounds crazy to add learning a language to the mix when raising a baby. I never felt like I didn't have enough time in a day until I had a child. I'm not going to argue. Those who aren't interested won't find or make the time. I know the time exists. I went through it. My daughter is 3 now and my wife currently looks after her during the day and I still only find room for half an hour to an hour each day. Truth is, if I wanted to, I could probably make/find more time. I find or make time for what I think is sustainable. From there, I just need to keep with it. Depending on how much time you have, you may need to adjust your learning methodology. For instance, using just flashcards, I almost feel like 30-60 minutes a day is the bare minimum as there isn't a ton of context and there is a lot of repetition.
Anyways, back to the progress... my daily study in Anki is dropping. I'm down to about 300 review cards a day. As a result I already started studying random selections from the completed decks even before I finished the last decks new cards. I'll probably delete the Human Japanese deck soon. It was a great, simple starter deck. Especially since it coincided with the content from the app. But, that simplicity is now it's bane.
I still run across a card here or there in that deck which stumps me for a bit, or even ones (single word ones) which I don't get. But they are rare at this point and probably 2/3 of the times I fail to get a word it is actually because the deck shows everything in Hiragana, even when it is something almost always shown in Kanji and when I'm shown the answer I slap my head because I actually knew it. As your vocab grows you focus less and less on pronunciation and focus more on writing (Kanji) for written or context for audio. This is because the bat shit crazy amounts of words that have the exact same or stupidly similar pronunciation.
If you're using a structured training course, you won't hit much of this. But once you step outside of that you'll hit it like crazy. For instance, while both sweets and rain seem to be common topics in Japanese training, most avoid using both because they are both pronounced "あめ", but they have totally different kanji, namely candy is "飴" and rain is "雨". So, when I just see "あめ" I usually guess whatever comes to mind first with no thought of the other.
So, yeah, at this stage of the game, it feels like Human Japanese is holding me back more than helping. Especially since the Anki deck doesn't even use Kanji where the intermediate course would have. I have felt this way for a while though, so maybe I won't. Hard part is, there are some words I legitimately forget even in that deck. And these Kanji related misses can be helpful as well. I really should see "あめ" and think both "candy" and "rain". Of course, the part which doesn't help is that Japanese often call candies お菓子 or おかし which often gets translated as sweets.
This is totally off topic, but, I suspect that in Japan they likely use お菓子 more like we use the word "candy" and 飴 more like we use "sweets". One of the interesting things about learning about language is noticing how some decisions seem arbitrary when it comes to translations. There are even cases where not everyone necessarily agrees on a translation.
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