Language Journal: May 29 - 2018
Wow! It's hasn't been a full month yet since the last one. Though, it is pretty close I guess since the last language journal entry was the first of the month and we're only two days from the last day of the month now. But, it feels like a lot longer than that.
Some big changes in the time in between. I delete my Kanji deck and my Human Japanese decks. I was too over loaded with my other new decks and I have been done those decks for a very long time now. The Kanji I will see in vocab and grammar practices and the Human Japanese was all very basic and similarly pops up every where. So, I felt it was time to drop them to allow me to focus on, and accelerate my learning on my other decks.
I signed up for the new course from NihongoShark. Mostly for the decks, but I've also done some lessons and will probably check out more of them as well. The NihongoShark decks which you need to pay to get at are all quite good in my opinion. And what they offer is a part of the reason why I don't feel I need the Kanji decks any more.
Basically, since completing the Kanji deck, I've gotten FAR more value out of learning vocab. Knowing the meanings certainly helps. But, some of the meanings I only really started getting once I started seeing the Kanji in words. So, simply reading Japanese sentences with Kanji instead of Hiragana is an automatically helping me to ascribe a MUCH more appropriate meaning to the Kanji and also helping me to learn the readings for the Kanji.
The other part of the equation is that the decks trying to teach vocab words also include information about the meaning of the Kanji used. This helps reinforce the meaning when I forget, but more than that, it also adds new Kanji to my repertoire which weren't in the original Kanji deck. Where vocab isn't used, there is link which will open Jisho.org pre-filtered to all of the words in the card.
All of that being said, I wouldn't take back the time I spent on Kanji were I to do it all again. Firstly, knowing the meanings in advance helps in two ways; it can help you understand what a sentence is trying to say, even if you don't know the voicing of the characters and it also reinforces the memory of the words to know their meaning. Secondly, when I started, I couldn't tell one Kanji from the next. Doing the Kanji deck taught me to identify radicals and gave me a better understanding of how one Kanji varies from another.
It is hard to quantify or explain, but I'll try. Before I started with the Kanji deck I could look at 2 totally different Kanji. They may not have had any common elements. But, if they weren't side by side I could easily mistake one for the other. The visual equivalent of "it's all Greek to me". Now that I've finished the Kanji deck, if I do more than simply glaze over 2 new Kanji, I can usually figure out which is which later (as long as they aren't too similar). Even if the radicals have nothing to do with the meaning or both have similar meanings. The Kanji aren't just random scribbles to me anymore.
If I were willing to replace spending money with putting additional effort into my studies, I'll point out that I don't necessarily need to pay to get decks like these. I could add fields, and modify card templates and manually put this same information into other free decks, or ones I could make myself. I would also lose the native speaker loops. But, honestly, I've been listening to Japanese as a part of my studies for so long that the audio tracks aren't doing tons for me. It is rare now that the native speakers would pronounce something differently from my gut instincts (or at least, different from what I perceive, which is effectively the same).
I'm still doing the French learning as well. Right now it is at an even more relaxed pace than my Japanese. I have 1 Anki deck which I've reduced to 5 new cards a day, and I always pass myself on the cards, but give varying degrees of passing based on how well I understood the card content either from listening or reading. I think it is slowly paying off. But it would definitely be more effective if I were pushing myself harder on it.
I want to start pushing harder, but I made a mistake with my new Japanese decks. I was taking on 75 news cards a day. And keeping on top it was getting harder and harder. Deleting the Kanji and HJ decks helped scale back. I also reduced the new cards to I think 25 total now. But, I need to wait for the daily drudge to die back down before I start beating myself up with French. I also, probably, need a better deck or approach to the French learning. But, I'm interested to see how this plays out as I just have complete sentences with audio and the sentences can be quite complex.
This post is getting long fast. The last thing I think I wanted to point out is that something has changed. I've only just really noticed it and don't have words for it yet. But, my Japanese learning feels like it is moving on to the next level. Listening is coming MUCH more naturally. When I dabble in making a sentence it works out much better. Things are just clicking. The proof is in the Anki stats too. When I had 75 new cards a day, I was still maintaining 80%+ accuracy from day to day. I had almost quadrupled my new card intake, but from the standpoint of accuracy, I was barely slipping behind at all.
When I started learning Japanese it was much more like my French is now. If I looked at 20 cards I'd remember maybe 1-5 of them the next day, and I'd MAYBE be able to get 7-10 right from the previous day. If I dropped the number I could maybe improve the overall accuracy a bit but raising it would either make things worse or remain about the same. To get anywhere near 80% on 75 new cards a day... something is working.
Some big changes in the time in between. I delete my Kanji deck and my Human Japanese decks. I was too over loaded with my other new decks and I have been done those decks for a very long time now. The Kanji I will see in vocab and grammar practices and the Human Japanese was all very basic and similarly pops up every where. So, I felt it was time to drop them to allow me to focus on, and accelerate my learning on my other decks.
I signed up for the new course from NihongoShark. Mostly for the decks, but I've also done some lessons and will probably check out more of them as well. The NihongoShark decks which you need to pay to get at are all quite good in my opinion. And what they offer is a part of the reason why I don't feel I need the Kanji decks any more.
Basically, since completing the Kanji deck, I've gotten FAR more value out of learning vocab. Knowing the meanings certainly helps. But, some of the meanings I only really started getting once I started seeing the Kanji in words. So, simply reading Japanese sentences with Kanji instead of Hiragana is an automatically helping me to ascribe a MUCH more appropriate meaning to the Kanji and also helping me to learn the readings for the Kanji.
The other part of the equation is that the decks trying to teach vocab words also include information about the meaning of the Kanji used. This helps reinforce the meaning when I forget, but more than that, it also adds new Kanji to my repertoire which weren't in the original Kanji deck. Where vocab isn't used, there is link which will open Jisho.org pre-filtered to all of the words in the card.
All of that being said, I wouldn't take back the time I spent on Kanji were I to do it all again. Firstly, knowing the meanings in advance helps in two ways; it can help you understand what a sentence is trying to say, even if you don't know the voicing of the characters and it also reinforces the memory of the words to know their meaning. Secondly, when I started, I couldn't tell one Kanji from the next. Doing the Kanji deck taught me to identify radicals and gave me a better understanding of how one Kanji varies from another.
It is hard to quantify or explain, but I'll try. Before I started with the Kanji deck I could look at 2 totally different Kanji. They may not have had any common elements. But, if they weren't side by side I could easily mistake one for the other. The visual equivalent of "it's all Greek to me". Now that I've finished the Kanji deck, if I do more than simply glaze over 2 new Kanji, I can usually figure out which is which later (as long as they aren't too similar). Even if the radicals have nothing to do with the meaning or both have similar meanings. The Kanji aren't just random scribbles to me anymore.
If I were willing to replace spending money with putting additional effort into my studies, I'll point out that I don't necessarily need to pay to get decks like these. I could add fields, and modify card templates and manually put this same information into other free decks, or ones I could make myself. I would also lose the native speaker loops. But, honestly, I've been listening to Japanese as a part of my studies for so long that the audio tracks aren't doing tons for me. It is rare now that the native speakers would pronounce something differently from my gut instincts (or at least, different from what I perceive, which is effectively the same).
I'm still doing the French learning as well. Right now it is at an even more relaxed pace than my Japanese. I have 1 Anki deck which I've reduced to 5 new cards a day, and I always pass myself on the cards, but give varying degrees of passing based on how well I understood the card content either from listening or reading. I think it is slowly paying off. But it would definitely be more effective if I were pushing myself harder on it.
I want to start pushing harder, but I made a mistake with my new Japanese decks. I was taking on 75 news cards a day. And keeping on top it was getting harder and harder. Deleting the Kanji and HJ decks helped scale back. I also reduced the new cards to I think 25 total now. But, I need to wait for the daily drudge to die back down before I start beating myself up with French. I also, probably, need a better deck or approach to the French learning. But, I'm interested to see how this plays out as I just have complete sentences with audio and the sentences can be quite complex.
This post is getting long fast. The last thing I think I wanted to point out is that something has changed. I've only just really noticed it and don't have words for it yet. But, my Japanese learning feels like it is moving on to the next level. Listening is coming MUCH more naturally. When I dabble in making a sentence it works out much better. Things are just clicking. The proof is in the Anki stats too. When I had 75 new cards a day, I was still maintaining 80%+ accuracy from day to day. I had almost quadrupled my new card intake, but from the standpoint of accuracy, I was barely slipping behind at all.
When I started learning Japanese it was much more like my French is now. If I looked at 20 cards I'd remember maybe 1-5 of them the next day, and I'd MAYBE be able to get 7-10 right from the previous day. If I dropped the number I could maybe improve the overall accuracy a bit but raising it would either make things worse or remain about the same. To get anywhere near 80% on 75 new cards a day... something is working.
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