Alright, y’all know what time it is. Here’s my update for the first half of March.
So two weeks ago, I decided to start seeing a tutor for conversing in Japanese.
Me absolutely gushing over how good of a tutor I found
I ended up trying out a few until I found one that somehow just fits me perfectly. She is so fun to communicate with, patient, and explains things well, and most importantly it doesn’t really feel like work when I’m studying with her. Most of our time is spent just chatting and then we sometimes go through material for vocab and grammar.
Somehow, it’s also the one tutor that doesn’t really speak English much. In fact our sessions are basically devoid of English.
Initially since I never really had an actual conversation in Japanese before I’ve paused a lot and were quite slow with my output, but she was very patient and attentive to whether I understood or not what was being said.
I quickly learnt a good way to communicate on these points with her and she manages to reexplain them well at a level that’s more comprehensible to me.
She highlighted from the beginning that my strongest point is perhaps my pronunciation. I don’t really have an accent in any of the languages I’m fluent in and I’m glad that it carries over to Japanese as well including somehow naturally picking up pitch accents (she corrects me on my pitch accent whenever I come across a word I’ve never seen before and that’s usually sufficient; she actually gets me to read passages of text to make sure).
I’ve progressed pretty quickly with her and no longer really pause when talking. At least not nearly as much as in the beginning.
She’s also helped me realize that the thing that matters the most to me is being able to talk with native speakers, so I’ve changed my priorities away from JLPT (since I never really cared about passing the exam anyway) as you have seen in my previous post.
Either way, how about the state of my progress and my reviews?
For the first half of March (1st to 15th), I averaged 288 reviews per day, with a minimum of 55 (7th March) and maximum of 513 (8th March).
I find it kinda fun how you can tell from my activity graphs when life gets in the way and I prioritize (and then apparently compensate for) my social life. Somehow I’m glad I manage to make good progress without sacrificing my social life either. I can’t say it’s really at all reduced since I got back into studying Japanese.
When it comes to the state of my decks, they’re not really much like what they used to be anymore as they now reflect my actual priorities closer:
I actually went through the “Miki Matsuraba - Stay With Me” deck as a priority at some point as well, and am planning on doing that for more actual Japanese media.
I can’t say I’ve even really got to touch the JLPT N4 decks much, and when they did fill up it was more as a consequence of me naturally prioritizing something else. For example, sure I am going over the Core 2k deck first instead, but I also write down all unfamiliar vocabulary and grammar I come across or end up having to look up to talk with my tutor (when I really want to say something but don’t know how I do a quick search and try to ram it into the conversation and she picks up on what I’m going for and corrects its use).
Somehow I end up with a good amount of terms from the additional (Axx) collections as well as unclassified vocabulary. It’s a shame I can’t track them as well as the terms that are present from JLPT N5 to N1, but oh well.
I wish Bunpro offered a way to see the progression for vocabulary present in the additional collections.
Considering that even as far as JLPT content goes I’m at roughly 700 “above JLPT N5” entries, somehow it seems that I’ve maintained a good pace that would have allowed me to finish N4 this month if it were still a priority (it’s not).
My accuracy hasn’t really suffered either. But I think it’s because I definitely spend more time on Japanese than I did last month. It doesn’t really feel much like work cause having actually conversations in Japanese is hyping me up so much I can’t see myself not working towards it even more.
As you may have noticed from my screenshots, I’m replacing the UI language for shit I use with Japanese. I’ve also installed a couple browser extensions to facilitate the process.
One is Rikaikun (if you hover over terms you don’t know it pops out the reading and definitions), and another is Furigana Maker (it adds furigana to kanji in your browser).
I’m also going through comprehensible input channels and podcasts as well as going through “Shadowing” books. I think that more than anything, these as well as manually inputting terms I want to use in Japanese into Bunpro will help me reach my goals.
As far as what I’m going to do for the next couple weeks:
I don’t think I can say anything as concrete as I did before regarding JLPT N4 completion or whatever, but I think it’s fair to set as a goal that I’ll try to add 700 more “above JLPT N5” entries like I did these last couple weeks.
I haven’t really set it as a metric before and it kinda just naturally happened, so it would be good if it also “naturally happens” again.
I think a big factor that prevents me from going through new vocabulary quicker is that I don’t really know enough kanji. I find that I spend more time revising and cramming these terms than I’d like because of it.
I don’t really enjoy doing that even if it’s nice when they sorta come out like magic as words in my head despite me not feeling like I consciously know them, so I’m going to do my best to go over as much kanji as I can even if it’s to the detriment of my progress in grammar and vocabulary.
Anyway that’s basically it. Gonna hard focus on kanji, and prioritize comprehensible input and shadowing to make sure I can do good progress on every new session I have with my tutor (I’ve already booked her for twice a week until the end of April).
The real problem is weeks having 7 days. Want to do something every second or third day? You are doomed to cycle through the days. Whoever decided to make the number of days in a week a prime really wanted to make sure you get a day of rest per week. I resorted to completely ignoring the date or day for personal things and only use it with other people now.
