Yup, “all or nothing attitude” is what lead to burn outs, not “slow but steady pace”.
I mean I’ll do reviews, I want to continue with Bunpro after that challenge.
I’m thinking about reading “Harry poter and methods of rationally” translation, as it read it some time ago and I know what to expect from it, very interesting book in my opinion
Can you send me a message about this book? I’ve never heard of it
It’s super interesting to see what is and isn’t sticking for you. I used to find vocabulary harder than kanji as well, until I started doing kanji a different way and now it’s harder but I understand it better.
I do think everything gets easier after your comprehension of Japanese as a language goes up. So even if you have to slow down now and just do the reviews until they become reasonable and you can restart learning new words, you can take this time to increase your comprehension and try to really take in nuance. Focusing on comprehension and nuance really helped me, and now vocabulary, kanji, and grammar make a lot more sense which makes them easier for me to memorize. I can’t say if it’ll be the same for you since you seem to be better at memorization in general, but if you’re doing immersion anyway, it should be an easy thing to focus on.
Incidentally, I also do a lot more output than you, but I can’t say for sure how well it works other than, when a Japanese friend corrects you directly, it’s easier to rememeber.
Thanks for the update. I’m still very invested in your path.
Thanks a lot)
I think output is necessary, because it makes brain recall grammar and words in real time, so I’m starting with that as well!
Fun to see someone else going hard with grammar!I started less than a month ago and I’m half way through N4, might go a bit faster. For details I’m not new to japanese in the slightest but I’ve been dreadfully neglecting grammar and I figured it was my barrier to understanding. Good luck to you and hope we both reach where we want to be!
Thanks! I wish you good luck as well!
How much time you spend everyday?
Gosh I don’t really keep track but probably an hour or two with Bunpro and satori reader combined
Not bad!
Have you done a lot of reading&listening before?
I’ve finished a ton of podcasts and actually all of satori reader. Finished a couple mangas but they’ve all led me to the conclusion of I… don’t really understand what I’m hearing or listening. So I figured my method learning French, which was just learning as many words as possible and let the grammar seep in… does not work
I guess it worked to some extent if you go this fast through topics here!
I guess how many hours you’ve spend learning words, listening, reading?
I’m trying to measure everything)
I’ve been learning for just about 4 years now. I’ll be honest I haven’t really tracked time at all, for like my first year I was obsessed with “oh if I know all the kanji then I’ll know everything!” as if it was when I was learning mandarin…
After that I tried really hard to do genki but only got a quarter through. After that basically did nothing for two years. So yeah I don’t have a good time guess sorry
2009& 2015 studied Genki in class, with CD and paper workbook - 11.2 days (calculated from number of credits)
2021 studied Joyo with kanjiDamage in anki- 13.2 days
2022&2023 reading reviews with Japanese definitions in Jalup app (now gone ) -19.2 days
2024 bunpro and tried to increase immersion (hence my ‘immersion’ study log thread) unfortionately I don’t know how to find cumulative time in bunpro app and don’t know how much time I spent immersing this year. It feels alot less- maybe 7 days?
You mean 1 day == 24 hours?
yeah, that’s how anki counts my time in the app.
Hi everyone! I finally got some time and power of will to make an update!
These few weeks were not the best but were not too bad either.
Grammar
Finished n4 10 days ago and right now doing 1 hour/day closing ghosts.
Kanji
Were doing 45 minutes/day and missing some days, haven’t moved forward, maybe 40 kanji or so.
Words
Have been doing 30 minutes/day since the time of the last update. Stats are getting better every day and the average amount of added cards has grown to 15 per hour this week!
I’m adding only cards I am quite familiar with from text, mostly if I can recognize it with furigana on maybe I know one kanji in it, I know that I’ll encounter it, or I can remember the first letter of this word, also it should be in the top 2-3k.
Reading
This was the main part for the last 10 days!
I’ve been doing 2.5-3 hours/day reading https://fanficfanfic.tumblr.com/toc. It was painful at the start and now painful as well, but I’m able to understand most sentences and read with a speed of 15-18 while using furigana (I generate it with lingq.com, which really helps to “print” the reading of the word in mind, or something like that).
Listening
I think I did about 8-10 hours of concentrated listening in this period but I’m not sure, I should definitely track it as well. Shun is very understandable as well as some other YouTubers for beginners. And yet, I don’t think it’s possible to have 80-90% understanding while cooking, most of the time I’m losing the main point very quickly, I guess I need to wait a little bit more.
Summing up
In total during these 21 days I’ve spent 90 hours learning which is pretty much 4.25 hours/day. Not the best results, and I hope fixing them with my scedulre. Also 5 days were just not on point because of me traveling for a bit.
The interesting thing is that I think a lot about methods of studying, more than studying, much more.
There are 3 interesting I’ve been thinking about during the last week.
- App that connects to my Anki deck with words and finds content with the best amount of learning words per pice of content, as well as it track how much times I’ve seen this word and what is my recent retention on it, as finds content based on it as well.
- Learn words where I know at least on kanji reading, so I can learn 会話 then, 会社 then 社員, 店員 etc. (I just asked GPT to give me this, I guess we can automate it to some point, or maybe use some websites), so ye, can be pretty effective and I may start using this method as well.
- Make text model write me content with words I learn. So ye, basically like 1 app but for generated content. It can be beneficial because I can setup a topic and let it choose needed words from my anki deck as well as make text easy.
Tomorrow I meet my mentor and will discuss my plan for next weekend, but probably it’s not changing much.
Thanks for reading
I’ve done 3 before, it didn’t go well at the time, but thdt was before 4o released (whenever that was) so maybe it’s better now. Just double check that it’s actually generating things that make sense.
How did it go when you were trying?
I’ve heard that it’s ok at Japanese nowadays, but if I decide to create an app like that (or script) I’ll check it
It seemed to me that it was understanding Japanese as a translation of English, rather than it’s own language. It was especially bad with words that have multiple meanings in Japanese where English only has one.
So an example would be the time it told me a story where a rabbit wanted to fly but it can’t because it’s not a bird, so in the end, a frog flew away with it…
…
Because 飛ぶ…
…
It was a very enlightening mistake for me and it scared me off using AI generated fiction, because I didn’t want to mistakenly learn something bad.
I will say, at the time, I did send it to my friends and we had a good laugh about how rabbits can’t fly but frogs can. 笑 it even had a moral at the end which was something about using your friends (the frog) to achieve your dreams (flying) 笑.
Luckily, it was a mistake where even someone in N5 could perfectly understand how it happened, but yeah I just… I dunno. I’ve played around with some of the more modern open source ones and their Japanese is still hot garbage, but I’m willing to grant that GPT 4o or 5 might be better now, I’m just staying away from it for now and learning more vocab so I can read more native content instead.
Apologies for my long-winded response.
Ye, that’s funny)
The first option should be the most optimal, but I guess app like that will take time to make it can be quite consuming while running