[COMPLETED] Back to Basics: A 100 Day Study Log

Japanese
#55

I was about to say “I get this a lot too”, but I think in my case my comprehension genuinely is a lot less than it feels like it is at the time. I’ll watch an episode of something, read a summary of it and realise there were whole bits that I missed. It’s like that thread on the fog, I feel like I’m far from though it yet, but it sounds like rather you’re through it and are now aware of the sheer depth of details on the other side?

2 Likes
#56

51/100 days

  • 500 kanji production cards (465/500)
  • N2 vocab deck (594/1659)
  • [COMPLETED] Check Bunpro N5-N2 for weak grammar points
  • Read through the basic and intermediate editions of the Dictionary of Japanese Grammar and mine for detailed nuances that I am not firm on (started, need to work out how to track this easily…)
  • Read 15 books (5/15)
  • Maintain my mined vocab deck

Life, Immersion, etc

Again, no updates as nothing much of note has happened. Been slowly chipping away at the kanji. Since I only do 30 minutes (maximum) of SRS a day they are taking longer to get through than I thought so I may push up to 40 minutes a day for the next week or so to finish them off and move on.

Been doing 2-3 hours of listening a day and started to get back into reading this week, although no big numbers. It is about 11:30 now and I have the rest of the day free and I feel pretty good so I am gonna have a good crack at reading for the rest of the day although not sure what. Already did my SRS today, about an hour of listening and some random reading.

Recently speaking has begun to feel a bit more effortless (in some ways, in general it is still a struggle) and I am enjoying my output a lot more. Still, output is comfortably the hardest thing about Japanese for me and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

I think it depends heavily on my mood and general physical and mental state. At the beginning of this log I was feeling pretty good and was well rested so everything felt pretty smooth and then a few weeks ago I hit a patch of bad sleep and generally was mentally busy and not looking after myself well enough physically so my comprehension really felt bad although objectively it probably wasn’t vastly different. Now I am in a pretty good patch good again and everything feels a lot more transparent and effortless. As for “the fog”, when I was reading that thread I was wondering if I am still in it. I think in some domains or with some writers I absolutely am in the fog still, kind of fighting to put ideas together, although normally not at the sentence level but rather the paragraph or article level. That is assuming I can use a dictionary as well. For more familiar material I don’t feel in the fog anymore; I definitely don’t have that visceral resistance to reading that I had as a beginner. That is not to say it is on the same level as English or anything, not at all. Normally the things that give me pause are questions of why the writer said something one way and not another. For good quality writing I will often realise I am reading something technically good, with creative phrasing etc, but if you asked me to explain why it is good or why the writer chose that phrasing I would probably be stuck. My sense of the language still feels weak in that regard. I am very aware though that that is an advanced issue and will take thousands and thousands of hours of input to begin to iron out.

Currently reading:

  • 禎子の千羽鶴, 49,591
  • 海辺のカフカ（下）, 222,476
  • (Bunpro Book Club, Intermediate) スーパーカブ, 109,076
  • (Bunpro Book Club, Advanced) スター・ウォーズ４, 169,574

Completed (since the start of this challenge):

Lifetime completed (possibly incomplete list due to bad memory, in no particular order, excludes stalled and DNF’d books which are easily over 10 in number, excludes manga/articles/anything else):

6 Likes
#58

62/100 days

  • 500 kanji production cards (487/500)
  • N2 vocab deck (724/1659)
  • [COMPLETED] Check Bunpro N5-N2 for weak grammar points
  • Read through the basic and intermediate editions of the Dictionary of Japanese Grammar and mine for detailed nuances that I am not firm on (started, need to work out how to track this easily…)
  • Read 15 books (7/15)
  • Maintain my mined vocab deck

Life, Immersion, etc

Hello - long time no update. I got into two bad habits here I think. Firstly, I felt things were too boring to update most days. Secondly, in my downtime I have been playing Ghost of Tsushima instead of posting an update here…

As I have been slacking a tiny bit I would like to try and focus on this little project and post daily for the remaining days. I have some days where I am completely busy with social plans and I am sure life will throw up a few unexpected obstacles but for the most part there should be no reason why I can’t get a bit more serious for the remaining time. Anyway, as it has been a short while I thought I’d post a varied mega-update with some reviews, random thoughts on language learning, and perhaps a little bit of grammar chat (although I may run out of steam before that).

First, what have I been doing? I have been a bit lax on the SRS front, coming way under my 30 minute target on a couple of days where I was busy, but mostly just plodding forward. You can see my progress there from the checklist at the top. I need to crack on a bit with the DOJG but the kanji and vocab should be no sweat. I’ve been reading a little bit, enough to keep up with the book clubs and finish a couple of shorter novels, but most of my input has been youtube and then just chatting at work. I also have had some social bits and pieces in Japanese, the highlight of which was a BBQ with colleagues at which I chatted with a Japanese 3 year old for a bit. I like babies and small children in general but besides them being cute it was fascinating to see their level of language knowledge and their ability to mimic a few English words that their parents asked me to teach them.

I want to tidily finish up the goals for this challenge before the deadline so will be pushing to read more and drop my listening until I hit my targets. I believe the way the timing works out I should finish this challenge then have a week or so before the N2 and will try my best to just read every free second I have during that week as I am led to believe having a strong reading ability can essentially carry you through the JLPT.

Okay, let’s do some reviews. All contain something that could be considered a spoiler by someone so peruse at your own peril. I would say there are no spoilers or only light spoilers though.

哀しい予感 review

This is the second book I have read by the celebrated Yoshimoto Banana. The first I read was Kitchen. Kitchen was perhaps the third or fourth or fifth book I read in Japanese and although the vocabulary and grammar was probably around the right level and the length was forgivingly short I found myself finding the whole thing a bit murky and difficult. It was like looking at a painting through a translucent pane of glass. I could make out the large figures and broad strokes but had no clue about the finer details or technique. I was acutely aware of this fact and when I ended up finding such a well respected book to me quite average I of course assumed it was down to my inability to fully grasp what was meant to be good about it. Honestly, I found 哀しい予感 much the same. It is very straightforward with little specialist language, if any at all, and Yoshimoto prefers sparse and clear sentences to overly verbose stream of consciousness style writing. Despite this I felt like I never found my footing. This could be because 哀しい予感 is so-called literary fiction, meaning there are no tried and true genre cliches for me to cling to to make sense of what is happening, but I get on well enough with Murakami and my recent reading of 今村夏子’s むらさきのスカートの女 didn’t pose a large challenge either. Of course, there are plenty of writers who probably are just writing in a way I am not yet familiar enough with and I would guess that is what is happening in. What is surprising for me is that other learners claim Kitchen is an easy read. I suppose insofar as the dictionary doesn’t have to be reached for quite so often this is true but from the perspective of really appreciating the story and the writing I find it hard to believe. Anyway, for the moment I can say that Yoshimoto Banana is not my favourite writer but I will have another crack at her work when I feel I am ready.

世界から猫が消えたなら review

Somehow longer than it needs to be and still underdeveloped. Having said that, the writing is nice and simple and clips along at a good pace and one or two sections did cause me to pause and to consider some more existential questions although only ever in a very obvious and trite and superficial way. Felt like a story that just enumerated undeniable truisms but truisms are truisms for a reason so no harm in taking some time to think about them. The relationships with the cats were something that didn’t have as much impact for me as I think the author wanted them to have as although I like cats I don’t have the strong personal affinity for them that some people appear to.

Overall I would recommend this book to learners as I can’t see someone hating it even if they don’t love it. But equally I can also imagine some people really loving it. The Japanese is very approachable as well.

Moving onto random language learning related thoughts I’ve had recently.

Something I’ve noticed lately is that I will assume that I should understand 100% of something when having a conversation. I am not sure why or when I started having that attitude though as obviously it is not like I once understood 100% of Japanese and am trying to recover some lost ability. But that’s exactly how I behave sometimes. If I had to guess why it would be because I am more focused on communicating and less focused on the Japanese itself these days. Meaning normally I am not hung up on not understanding Japanese but just hung up on not understanding, full stop.

Lately I have been privy to more and more conversations where I am included in the in-group. A non-controversial example would be multiple conversations I have had where people are discussing other foreigners’ Japanese ability (or inability), unrelated to me.

Something that has been on my mind is that sometimes conversation has felt harder than normal with people are frequently talk with. At first I was a bit dejected and couldn’t work out why it was happening but I think, at least in part, the reason is because I have gotten better at speaking recently and people are willing to bring up harder topics or use harder words. I probably also am more comfortable bringing up harder topics myself now even if I know my vocabulary is too weak to get too far into the weeds with it.

An interesting topic I have been thinking about recently is the idea of educational satiation. In short, we tend to have some point where we are satisfied with the amount we have learnt about something and then feel no need to pursue it much further. For most people with most topics this satiation point comes pretty quickly and even for educated people there is normally a relatively early point where people stop trying to learn (around the level of a undergraduate degree). I wonder how this concept applies to language learning and how the barrier to entry for Japanese changes thing. For example, we can perhaps assume most hobbiest language learners would their satiation point at around B2 level. However for Japanese the amount of effort required to hit that point (for English native speakers) is pretty massive, probably thousands of hours. So you end up in an interesting position where people will never hit that satiation point and maintain a kind of hunger for the language despite the fact that their goal is realistically just an intermediate level of ablility. Of course lots of people probably hit that satiation point way before that but I do wonder about the difficulty of hitting that satation point versus the strength of the hunger.

Okay, I am going to stop here today as I have things I want to get on with but hopefully this mega update made up for my lack of posts recently. I do intend to get stuck into this a bit more although I think I need to just post even if I am busy and have nothing interesting to say.

Anyway, thanks for reading!

Currently reading:

  • 禎子の千羽鶴, 49,591
  • 海辺のカフカ（下）, 222,476
  • (Bunpro Book Club, Intermediate) スーパーカブ, 109,076
  • (Bunpro Book Club, Advanced) スター・ウォーズ４, 169,574

Completed (since the start of this challenge):

Lifetime completed (possibly incomplete list due to bad memory, in no particular order, excludes stalled and DNF’d books which are easily over 10 in number, excludes manga/articles/anything else):

6 Likes
#59

I dunno about anyone else, but this thread is reminding me just how quickly 100 days can pass by! :flushed:

6 Likes
#60

Mini-update:

Had a good day at work and did lots of chatting and listening, including a speech competition. I also read a bunch of news articles for something work related. I then wasted away a few hours replying to messages and stuff once I got home so am yet to do any focused book reading and I’d like to spend an hour or so on that now. I wanna post an update daily, as mentioned in the previous post, but don’t want to have to stop reading later to do it so today this is all there will be!

It’s scaring me a little bit myself. It’s becoming a useful exercise is appreciating my daily life a bit more though, precisely because of how fast time flies by.

4 Likes
#61

Mini-update:

Busy day today with some volunteering thing earlier today and now I’m off out to see a friend so although I’m getting a lot of natural input today I’m not getting closer on the reading! Tomorrow is totally free so other than doing some chores I should be all good to hunker down and read.

4 Likes
#62

Stealth Mini-update:

It’s 05:30 now and I just woke up. Forgot to update last night as I actually I ended up on the phone with various people back in the UK for some hours and then went to sleep. My mind was elsewhere. Full length update this evening I think. Weekdays are weirdly easier to do updates on than the weekend just because I have a routine.

4 Likes
#63

Yet another mini one:

Naturally as soon as I thought I had some clear days and announced I’d be starting daily updates again anything and everything in my life not related to Japanese decided to get busy. Assuming nothing else comes up then tomorrow will be a longer update. Basically this past weekend I was quite socially busy and then chores and talking with people back in the UK ate up a lot more time than I expected (seems to happen monthly so I should expect it by now). Today I had some unexpected overtime and work was very busy - you know one of those days where you get to work and then you seem to blink and the whole day has gone. I managed to squeeze in an hour of SRS though. My normal system is 30 minutes a day but I’ve realised I’m terrible at doing that on weekends as I’m out of routine. One fix is to improve my weekend routine and the other is to just take the weekends off. I find it tricky to get any sort of focused input in at work outside of days when the students aren’t in so I thought I’d try out doing 45-60 minutes of SRS on workdays and taking the weekends off so I can be guilt free.

As for input today, various real life bits and pieces but only about an hour of dedicated listening and half an hour or so of reading so far this evening. I’m gonna try get on with some reading in a minute but reckon I’ll get sleepy and pack it in quite quickly anyway. Tomorrow looks to be a little busy at work but all clear after so we’ll see… I’m optimistic (or perhaps just foolish).

5 Likes
#64

66/100 days

  • 500 kanji production cards (489/500)
  • N2 vocab deck (959/1659)
  • [COMPLETED] Check Bunpro N5-N2 for weak grammar points
  • Read through the basic and intermediate editions of the Dictionary of Japanese Grammar and mine for detailed nuances that I am not firm on (started, need to work out how to track this easily…)
  • Read 15 books (7/15)
  • Maintain my mined vocab deck

Life, Immersion, etc

As mentioned yesterday I was a bit busier than I thought I’d be, just a mixture of things coming together. Second day of doing an hour of SRS on workdays and it is going well. I am optimistic about cracking on with everything, so long as I am a bit protective of my time from now on, although the coming weekend is completely rammed so is effectively going to have to be written off for Japanese.

I read last week’s Star Wars chapter and have been reading the second volume of Bookworm. Hopefully I’ll polish that off tomorrow and then finish up some diddy book before the weekend.

FInishing the remaining N2 vocab should be no problem so I think I am going to finish that up with the hour of SRS on workdays thing and then once it is finished I will use the spare time to focus on the DOJG. If I really get a move on then I can feasibly blast through Shin-Kanzen Master N2 (Grammar) as well although we’ll see about that.

Had a long and interesting chat with one of the English teachers at work about the kind of friction between the fact that language learning to a high level is a lifelong pursuit but also that sometimes you want to focus on getting a lot better a lot fast in a relatively short period of time (1-3 years). Now I’ve been learning for a couple of years I am a lot more patient than before but also I am much more aware of how much better I could be if I spent more time on studying.

There was some really heavy rain today so I had to walk to work instead of riding my bike and it was a bit hot and miserable. Gonna go have a litte read after posting this and get into a good mindset for tomorrow.

Thanks for reading!

Currently reading:

  • 禎子の千羽鶴, 49,591
  • 海辺のカフカ（下）, 222,476
  • (Bunpro Book Club, Intermediate) スーパーカブ, 109,076
  • (Bunpro Book Club, Advanced) スター・ウォーズ４, 169,574

Completed (since the start of this challenge):

Lifetime completed (possibly incomplete list due to bad memory, in no particular order, excludes stalled and DNF’d books which are easily over 10 in number, excludes manga/articles/anything else):

4 Likes
#65

Mini one:

Did my hour of SRS at work. Had a pretty good day although the neighbour is watching TV at a very loud volume so I ended up doing listening after work up until around now. They only do this about one evening every two or three weeks so not enough to be a big nuisance but it does mean I can’t read a book in my living room so a bit annoying. Gonna try read now though - hopefully it should be smooth.

5 Likes
#66

68/100 days

  • 500 kanji production cards (491/500)
  • N2 vocab deck (1159/1659)
  • [COMPLETED] Check Bunpro N5-N2 for weak grammar points
  • Read through the basic and intermediate editions of the Dictionary of Japanese Grammar and mine for detailed nuances that I am not firm on (started, need to work out how to track this easily…)
  • Read 15 books (7/15)
  • Maintain my mined vocab deck

Life, Immersion, etc

Had a good day at work and who knew but it turns out doing an hour of SRS a day makes ripping through new cards pretty easy. I am interested to see how many reviews build up over the weekend though. Reading has been slower than I would have wanted however that is just a result of me not putting the time in. The coming weekend, including tomorrow after work, is going to be busy so although I will try to read I have no idea how much will get done (getting my excuses in there now for that). After this weekend I have left my social calendar a bit more open on purpose and am pretty optimistic about either finishing everything off with a week or so to spare or if it looks like that is going to happen then I may break out some longer books to try and fill the time a bit more evenly. Or maybe start the shinkanzenmaster book. Regardless, lots of the books I have been reading are fairly short, partly due to the nature of easy books being shorter, and I’d like to balance things with some longer books if I have the time.

I am already thinking too far ahead about what my next challenge will be. This one has taught me some things but one thing that has felt missing is a specific focus as it is quite general. I don’t have the personalty nor want to go hard on just one thing but I think having a specific theme besides my general studies might be interesting. E.g., “world history” and I consume what I want as usual but also every other book is a history book and I would try to watch more history related stuff etc. If you have any good ideas for a 50-250 day study challenge or something then let me know anyway.

That’s it for today - expect some low effort updates this coming weekend!

Currently reading:

  • 禎子の千羽鶴, 49,591
  • 海辺のカフカ（下）, 222,476
  • (Bunpro Book Club, Intermediate) スーパーカブ, 109,076
  • (Bunpro Book Club, Advanced) スター・ウォーズ４, 169,574

Completed (since the start of this challenge):

Lifetime completed (possibly incomplete list due to bad memory, in no particular order, excludes stalled and DNF’d books which are easily over 10 in number, excludes manga/articles/anything else):

5 Likes
#67

Low effort update 1/3:

Went to work. Came home. Going out soon.

3 Likes
#68

Low effort update 2+3/3:

Had a good weekend! Very little Japanese though. Next week is the 文化祭 so looking forward to that.

3 Likes
#69

Good Luck with finishing N2 Vocab, there is still lots of time!
Regarding Shin-Kanzen Master N2 Grammar, if you just do mostly the questions (lightly looking back at the grammar), you can blast through it quite quickly.

At least in my case, I went through the first section (20 or so pages), really quickly - 2 hours or so. I try to make it more like a mock exam. After checking my answers, normally then I look back at the explanations. Though it depends.

Just realized that you read 世界から猫が消えたなら, glad that you found some enjoyment…

More spoiler-y thoughts

I like that fact that it was quite “floaty” not really something to think too much about, second chances, not taking things for granted, how things can be quite inter-connected and time is quite precious… My parents constantly remind me that time is not infinite ( :smiley: )

Probably the book made quite an impression on me as I bought it initially in 2015!!! Bought it again in 2018 as I lost my copy while moving and finally was able to read it in Japanese in 2020. I normally go for light novels, so currently its the only novel that I have read in Japanese haha.

You are right that it was quite dragged on though. I probably value quite high how relaxing / easy it was to read yet its a “novel” (which may not be a good thing haha).

2 Likes
#70

Mini-ish one:

Quite tired after the weekend and today has flown by. Finished up the second volume of Bookworm and I think I will probably just finish reading the last 50-60k characters of Star Wars next as I find it hard to read just one chapter a week as the flow breaks too much for me, especially as I know what is gonna happen. That is actually why I have been stalled for so long on Kafka, as I read it some years ago in English and have low motivation to read the ending again.

The vocab is relatively trivial so I am not too worried about it. For reference Anki has a stat called “knowledge acquisition rate” which is how many cards are memorised per hour. For my kanji deck the number is 24.5, for my vocab mining deck the number is 68.5, for the N2 deck the number is 166.8. I have a backlog still from the weekend but it should be cleared tomorrow and I would imagine the remaining 500ish cards will be added by the end of this week or the middle of next week at the latest. There are some words I don’t know in the deck but the majority are easy or words I have seen a bunch of times already so quite low friction.

I would guess each page would take me 5-10 minutes (including time checking answers and correcting things) so I am ballpark expecting it to take 15-35 hours to finish. I could be totally wrong here though. It heavily depends how hard I find the questions. I am not sure if I will finish it within the time limit of this challenge but I’ll probably want to get through it before the JLPT test date.

I think more cosy novels definitely have value but during this 100 day thing I have been reading a lot of cosy or easier things and it perhaps is taking a toll （笑）I think if I had been only reading very difficult things and then read that book my rating would likely have been slightly higher.

3 Likes
#71

Whatever happens, good luck. I am quite confident you will probably finish the main part of N2 grammar book on time.

Probably its natural that you have gone for a lot of easy books… I would have done the same as its easier to finish within a limited time.

2 Likes
#72

Mini one again:

I think I forgot to update yesterday. Today was a little busier than I expected. The morning was expected 文化祭 stuff but the afternoon ended up being lots of unexpected although simple work. I only manged do do about 20 minutes of anki because of that(!) so I’m hoping to slowly make up for the lost time the rest of this week. I ended up reading less than I’d have liked (15-20k characters so far today). Tomorrow will be a little busy (second day of 文化祭 and I have some marking to do) but if I guard my time I should be able to comfortably do my SRS and I have after work clear for reading. I want to do lots of socialising with other teachers tomorrow so that’s gonna take precedent over SRS if it comes to that - that’s basically what happened today.

2 Likes
#73

Mini one but because I’m using my phone to upload a picture:

“Work” was fun. Did my SRS. Gonna start reading in a minute.

I bought a bunch of old books at the 文化祭, 50円 each. Unfortunately mostly they’re too tricky to read without a dictionary but I’ll probably have a crack at some of them after this back to basics thing is over. The one exception is 1リットルの涙 as I can probably get away with extensively reading that without leaning on a dictionary (which is why I bought it). I am aware that normally people post pictures of all the manga they’ve bought so maybe I should post my manga some other time but hopefully someone who sees this also finds my new old books interesting…

1000087997
10000879971280×720 155 KB

6 Likes
#74

Indeed I do. I do love old used books and all these look sooo nice, they look even nicer displayed on top of a tatami. There is even a study of logic by Hegel! (The one about the intellectual history of Japan in wartime looks quite interesting though not within my grasp.)

3 Likes
#75

That’s just my floor!

Today: 病休 (´；ω；`)ｳｩｩ I won’t do SRS, gonna try reading but it will be slow going.

3 Likes