Language Journal: July 27th 2018
Busy month. I feel like I'm making a lot of progress again. And despite realizing how bad I can be in many situations I don' feel like I'm losing motivation any more. This is all feels like a pretty big deal.
Since my last journal on this less than a week ago I've started putting a lot of things into effect. Firstly, when I hit long cards I'm struggling with, I'm now putting in the effort to define smaller goals for the short term. Like getting a certain specific word, phrase or conjugation. It appears to be helping.
This has always been one of my biggest personal weaknesses with using Anki. I would look for decks which already offered what I wanted. And, in the earlier stages I succeeded in that often enough that I didn't have to put the extra effort in. Now, I'm a lot more fine with finding a deck which is just decent and tweaking the layout and adding my own data to it to make it more useful. And this process is definitely improving my retention.
My "Midnight Diner" deck was a perfect example. There were many cards with walls of text which I was totally lost on, virtually every time I saw them. Since I started focusing on specifics though, my retention on those parts of the cards is up around 90%. And, a lot of times when I can get those piece, I can make sense of the whole card as well. In some cases, I'm even already at the point where I'm adding more goals to the cards if there is enough content and enough I'm struggling with.
I also started doing this with the French deck I had. I decided, if the deck doesn't want to tell me what's important, I'll just look and decide for myself. I'm still VERY new at my French learning. And spending just 15-20 minutes a day looking at 15-30 sentences wasn't really yielding anything. Making it about the smaller pieces rather than the whole sentences I can now be a little more fair with myself. And I'm starting to get excited about that one as well.
Another thing I'm doing, and this might affect success rates going forward, is deleting cards. Primarily with the "Midnight Diner" deck. Some cards contain super basic one word sentences and things like that. I don't need a flash card to tell me the meaning of "そう".
The next step, of course, is making my own decks from scratch. I'm still waiting on my first box of manga. I'm suspecting it is lost in the ether and I'll never see it. So, my first box may be the one which is supposed to be my second.
I'll be starting with Manga probably. But, I will probably expand it to lyrics and hopefully I'll find some good resources for TV transcripts in Japanese.
Since my last journal on this less than a week ago I've started putting a lot of things into effect. Firstly, when I hit long cards I'm struggling with, I'm now putting in the effort to define smaller goals for the short term. Like getting a certain specific word, phrase or conjugation. It appears to be helping.
This has always been one of my biggest personal weaknesses with using Anki. I would look for decks which already offered what I wanted. And, in the earlier stages I succeeded in that often enough that I didn't have to put the extra effort in. Now, I'm a lot more fine with finding a deck which is just decent and tweaking the layout and adding my own data to it to make it more useful. And this process is definitely improving my retention.
My "Midnight Diner" deck was a perfect example. There were many cards with walls of text which I was totally lost on, virtually every time I saw them. Since I started focusing on specifics though, my retention on those parts of the cards is up around 90%. And, a lot of times when I can get those piece, I can make sense of the whole card as well. In some cases, I'm even already at the point where I'm adding more goals to the cards if there is enough content and enough I'm struggling with.
I also started doing this with the French deck I had. I decided, if the deck doesn't want to tell me what's important, I'll just look and decide for myself. I'm still VERY new at my French learning. And spending just 15-20 minutes a day looking at 15-30 sentences wasn't really yielding anything. Making it about the smaller pieces rather than the whole sentences I can now be a little more fair with myself. And I'm starting to get excited about that one as well.
Another thing I'm doing, and this might affect success rates going forward, is deleting cards. Primarily with the "Midnight Diner" deck. Some cards contain super basic one word sentences and things like that. I don't need a flash card to tell me the meaning of "そう".
The next step, of course, is making my own decks from scratch. I'm still waiting on my first box of manga. I'm suspecting it is lost in the ether and I'll never see it. So, my first box may be the one which is supposed to be my second.
I'll be starting with Manga probably. But, I will probably expand it to lyrics and hopefully I'll find some good resources for TV transcripts in Japanese.
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