So why is it a good idea to complete all n5/n4/n3 topics in two months? (my log)

Bunpro
#197

A little update:

Grammar
I finished n3 :partying_face:
It was super easy, at first I was going through 4 points a day, but then I was able to start adding up to 10 points a day, and even 15 sometimes a few times without spending too much time. There were not many ghosts, never more than 45. More than half of all points were known from reading or anime listening cards.

Compared to n5 and n4 it took me so little effort!

N5 with 126 points took me 50 hours
N4 with 177 points took me 95 hours
Almost all the way there were more than 70 ghosts.
N3 took me 44 hours while it has 219 points!

I can comprehend most texts, most problems with unknown words and long sentences, but except that grammar is no longer a problem.

Bunpro is the best!

Words
Well, nothing happens, I do not use anki for now.

Reading
I was reading 2 hours a day with almost no missed days.
Right now speed is 40w/m or ~95ch/m.
I’m reading through the 4th volume of Mushoku Tensei.
100k words of reading in the last 30 days.
It’s quite comfortable from a language perspective, but I want something less retarded to read. Also, I know the story which makes it a little bit unfair compared to stories I don’t know yet.

Listening
Didn’t do much, watched a few anime titles, last week returning to watching YouTube. Most stuff from learning channels is comprehensible, real YouTube is not yet (maybe I just don’t have any interesting content to watch)

Speaking
I was able to speak with some learners and even Japanese people a few times (5-6 hours in total) and it felt quite comfortable! I don’t stop every second to find a word or something like that. There were not too many topics, language learning, films, music (music was tough)

6 months of learning
Tomorrow will be 6 months since I started learning Japanese!

Generally, I’m ok with my results.
I had 725 hours of dedicated studying (-1 week I didn’t track yet)
A few hundred hours of watching.
Some hours of writing and speaking.

The best thing is that I am generally accustomed to the language, its sounds are not foreign to me anymore. Right now I can just learn words and for everything else input should be sufficient.

Plan
25.01 - 04.02 I’ll be visiting my friend, and I’m not willing to study too much. Maybe I’ll read for 1 or 2 hours to not lose shape but that’s all.

After my trip, I want to study all the on readings for jōyō kanji in pair with words related to them (words are optionally, but If I do not learn them, I want to learn more kanji per day), I feel it can be super hard but at the same time limitlessly efficient (at least for me) (there are 2400 on readings for them, a little bit more then one for kanji)

I’ll return from 4-5 hours a day to a challenging 6 hours and will try to accomplish it in 40-45 days.

I don’t even know if this is possible, but I’ll try my best. I will be writing kanji, creating pepper cards for them, learning them with anki, learning words for those kanji to improve retention. Maybe create audio with words to reinforce while cooking (ask GPT to create 60 n+1 sentences, and get audio with another ai and just listen over and over while doing stuff). Everything for good retention will work.

So yes, thanks for following my long, I’m glad there is such a calm and smart community!

7 Likes
#198

By the way, my friend asked me for an interview)
He just wanted to try how to ask questions, to get some experience, as well as my story was interesting to him, and this is what we have now: https://youtu.be/tq39HZg7-0g :kissing:
I’m glad my English is sufficient enough)
I’ll never forget the word “fasten” anymore :slightly_smiling_face:

#199

Not using anki at all or not learning new words in Anki?

#200

This month or so I was not using anki at all

#201

Oh wow, are you planning to go back and if so how are you going to deal with the backlog?

#202

Yes, I plan on going back to Anki, but I will start using to to help me learn kanji and learn words for those kanji.
I don’t have to deal with a backlog because I don’t think I can just start a new deck. I actually have 4 decks, 3 of them classic which all I gave up at some point, approximately 350 words in each. Forth deck has 1500 listening cards from anime mining. I can say with a confidence that most words I know are coming from reading and listening and not from Anki.

So when I’m done with kanji readings I’ll just create a new deck, I’m ok with forgetting words, if I forget them, next time I see them they will be familiar and even if I add them to Anki again, I’ll learn them much faster

#203

Make sense. I can’t wait until I can read fluently enough that I can learn words from reading along rather than SRS supplementation. I only know about 4k words which is just not enough :weary: but someday, maybe in a few years :thinking:

1 Like
#204

I hope learning kanji readings will help me with that, because if I can not assume how the word sounds before looking it up, it almost doesn’t stick, but when I know kanji readings in it, it sticks in a few encounters.

#205

Hello everyone! It’s been a little over one month after my last update, but I’m back with my report as well as with some results.

I hade a nice rest from 22.01 to 06.02, have done only an hour or two of listening a day (anime&youtube) and a few volumes of manga that I bought earlier.

From 07.02 to 22.02 I had a challenge, 100 kanji on readings a day (usually on reading per kanji), and till this moment I have successfully learned 1400 kanji!

1461kanji
1461kanji1920×5376 1.81 MB

image
image1074×713 56.8 KB

I used RTK2 order to learn kanji grouped by radicals.
Total time spent with kanji this way is 68 hours, and I think it’ll take some more to finish reviews.

I can say that this is probably one of the most satisfactory things to go from “oh there is text” to “Wow I can read almost everything!”, I can not put enough emphasis on how great it feels when you can read the word, and only things you need to think about is the meaning and pronunciation (pitch, mostly), to remember word at the moment I need to see it a smaller number of times than earlier. I think it was worth my time for all the 100%! Remembering them was challenging, and I had a lot of strategies, and changed them, but in the end, the best one that worked for me was to set up loops for learning a word to “1m, 3m, 10m, 30m, 1.5h, 4h, 12h” so I have this card in “learning” for good 2-3 days until it bounces off my tongue in a few seconds.
It was a very interesting experience and if you have any questions about it I’ll answer them!

Except that I was reading 1-2 hours a day and even added 100 anki cards from mining, as well as watched a few anime episodes a day.

Right now in 8 months, my energy is fully recovered, and the average time for dedicated study is over 5.5 hours for 2 later weeks!

Next
From now on I’m going fully into sentence mining and will be trying to add 80 sentence cards a day, I hope making cards will take about 2 hours off immersion and I hope to go though those 80 cards + review in 4 more hours of anki. I know that I can do 50 this way because of my experience with listening cards and those 100 cards that I have added during my kanji studies, not sure about 80, but I will start with high ground as I always do to ensure. I really wont to do 80 a day…

So yes, this post is a bit random because I wanted to express my feelings rather than general situation and skills, but I will do that as well with summary later, or now if someone cares)

Btw the total hours of study are 798 hours of dedicated studies, about 30 hours for manga, and about 400 hours for anime and youtube.

4 Likes
#206

After I counted times and times again, I started to feel like from 24.07 to 24.02 is actually not 8 months, but rather only 7 :thinking:

#207

:+1:

#208

Technically only 5 since you are time traveling.

#209

My brain is not braining over this one :slightly_smiling_face:

#210

Great post! I am also studying 10 grammar points/day, 40 kanji or phrases a day.

1 Like
#211

Nice!
Good luck with your productive work

#212

Hi everyone, while I am in good shape, I decided to post an update.

Words

My previous plan was to add 80 words and do anki for 4 hours, but I got tired and demotivated from the impression that I did not learn words quite well as I wanted from only sentence cards, and on-yomi words written are not sticking at all, therefore I started adding cards with only kanji on the front, but left those 600 sentence cards as they are in the same deck. I also lowered the time that I spend on anki, now it’s 2 hours. Hard to say how it goes but I have I’;l be able to add 35-45 cards a day on average.

image
image1065×278 23.9 KB

image
image1067×802 59.7 KB

image
image1065×536 42 KB

Kanji

I stopped doing my deck with 1500 on-kanji readings and started mining unknown kanji together with vocab to the same deck and right now I have 123 of them there.

Reading&Listening&mining

For mining I was doing basically everything at this point. Anime, explanations of words’ differences, Minecraft videos, but recently I decided that I’ll start mining mainly フェルミ漫画大学 I think every knows it. It takes about 45 minutes

Talking about youtube I have great news! I started comprehending a lot of it!
For example, in the span of the last 4 days, I was consistently watching above mentioned フェルミ漫画大学 and I can listen to it and comprehend so I feel lost quite rarely, approximately once in a few episodes. It’s also fully about self-improvement so I feel a bit more motivated. This one is not counted into learning time, but I feel like at this level, progress from this type of listening is piling up a lot.
For some not unknown reasons, my listening is so much further than reading.

I have to learn JS, react, next so I started https://ja.javascript.info/ and it’s quite simple (I know some basics so it can be just on the start), but very slow. So this one is going to be free voluntary reading.

I also started doing about 30-45 minutes of reading on LingQ without mining to concentrate on text and not on the task where I have to understand the usefulness of the word + I’m not reading at all if it’s a video, but there should be some if I do anki with kanji.

Grammar

I’m not doing any grammar but still paying a subscription, I guess it’s a membership fee)

Overall impression

As you can see I dropped time from 6 hours at the beginning to 3.5 hours now, and I’m quite satisfied with it.
The reason is that 6 hours is too much when you have things to do. I decided that I’ll do 3 hours a day and if I miss it won’t be a big problem because I’ll do overtime on the next day. I think it’s the most rational thing for now because I won’t corner myself all the time with the result of 4 hours a day at the end (like I have right now, avg time was 4 hours after the first 7 months). Other things to do is I want to learn Italian, and learn js and start working on some MVPs.

That’s all, thanks for a read and I’ll make a new post later!

5 Likes
#213

Yeah, that’s what I did as well. I still have days where the stars align and I get more done but I found it disappointing when I couldn’t hit my targets, so I lowered the ceiling a bit :rofl:

Also burnout is very much a thing! If I have too many ‘good days’ it seems to come back to bite me later.

2 Likes
#214

3.5 hours seems really manageable. It seems to me like you are not really struggling with your time currently, but with your methods, is this correct? You went full into one method that seemed like the best idea for you, but now it’s not really a good fit for you. While reducing time and volume could be a remedie, so could switching it up and trying new methods of learning. Maybe before commiting fully to a new method and pour hours into it, you could try a few methods half-heartedly to see which one fits you the most?

In any case, you are still on your language learning path amd that’s a win!

It seems like you also want to do a lot of other time-consuming things, so reducing your hours is probably a good call. I love myself some time-consuming hobbies too, sometimes I speedrun one and just switch between them whenever I feel like it, sometimes I’m being consistent with all of them, giving every hobby a bunch of hours a week. What’s your current plan, there?

1 Like
#215

Well, time is a bigger a much problem for me, I spend a lot of time somewhere, but can’t say where does it go after that 🥲

I guess I’ve tried most methods out there, and I think it makes almost no harm to switch them whenever o want, as long as time dedicated to study stays the same, it’s probably same result, at least it’s what I felt while changing methods (or rather) their combination. The problem with Anki for example is when I do kanji on the front it seams other variations is better, when I do sentence cards it seems that word doesn’t stick at all, or when I do audio sentence I don’t learn kanji. Btw I fixed this one for now just by making stuffing everything in one deck and it seems like working.

I totally agree!

I don’t really know that it’s best choice for me.
I don’t feel like I can focus on more then one thing at a time. I gave up trying to learn Italian for now and just trying to learn JavaScript, but I haven’t spend even a few hours on it yet. I’ll try to return to writing on paper checklist of what I want to do, and if so, usually it was finishing with me giving up on that and studying late at night just to close what I have to 😶‍🌫️
Anyhow, 3 hours is ok so I don’t stay latter then 1am so I’m glad even if I can’t do other things

#216

Me: Reducing Japanese time and trying to concentrate on a few things
My anki cards for some reason:

IMG_4583
IMG_45831920×1440 88.3 KB