Summer Break Study Log

Japanese
#14

yeah its okay if you miss a few more cards than normal. just answering fast is all that matters really. if you normally answer in 8 seconds, then if you reduce by 3 seconds per card for 400 ish cards, thats 20 minutes saved. it makes life so much better. when you start adding your 50 daily cards those seconds will really add up

when i first started doing vocab, i would spend way too much time per card to make sure i had the highest chance of getting them all right, now i just farm cards as fast as possible

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#15

Day 3

Grammar: N4 121/177 - I was happy to see I only had 160 reviews to do even after I waited until the end of the day to do any. Overall it’s taking about two hours to do grammar regularly and I’d like to keep it that way.

Vocab: I’m finally finishing my backlog but will have to finish it up tomorrow. It looks like my initial goal of doing 1k reviews each of the first two days didn’t work out lol. In hindsight maybe I should have gotten rid of the backlog before starting everything else but oh well. 4 days isn’t too bad either. 500 a day is easier than 1k and leaves more time for reading too.

Reading: Reading Yotsubato was my favorite part of the day like always. It was relaxing and made me feel better after Demon Slayer made me cry lol. I’m thinking of making my pace half of a volume per day since I can go through it easy enough and want to make reading the majority of my study time. Plus if I read more, it’ll be even easier to do my vocab srs and make it go by faster.

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#16

Day 4

Grammar: N4 132/177 - I’m getting pretty close to the end of N4 and should finish this week. My vocabulary and kanji is beyond N4 so I’m excited to get my grammar up to that level too. My abysmal grammar holding me back was annoying lol.

Vocab: I’m finally free from that backlog and will hold back on vocab SRS for the next week as I said before. Half of the reviews, about 1k, is gonna come back so I don’t wany more on top of that.

Reading: I didn’t start a new Yotsubato volume (looking back at yesterday’s log I didn’t say it, but I finished the first volume yesterday) Instead I started a webnovel called 聖女？ いいえ、やったのはこっちのくまです！ ～可愛いもふもふくまさんと行く異世界浄化旅～ (why do they have such long names??) on syosetsu and then read through some of the Haruna’s Daily Diary thread. I did this because manga is just dialogue, and I wouldn’t be able to see words that are used outside of that. Also, the beginner book club is starting the Pokemon Special manga tomorrow and I’m excited to read with them for the first time. I noticed it’s only 1 chapter a week, but that’s fine. That way I can easily plop it into my schedule. I was gonna read ahead but realized I had plenty other things to read and wanted to stay on the same pace as everyone else so that I can read their questions and they can read mine without having to spoiler everything. I also switched my Animal Crossing to Japanese today. It was relatively easy besides when they started using a bunch of hiragana in certain places, then I’d have to focus and read what they were saying. I’m gonna know more insect and fish names in Japanese than I do in English lol.

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#17

Day 5

I’ve seen people have spreadsheets on the Japanese Learning subreddit that documented their hours put into certain tasks. After a long while, it’d be satisfying to see how long you’ve been working at reading for example. It also helps since you need a certain amount of hours of learning before you’re a certain level I’ve heard, so you can track your progress based on that too. I avoided making a sheet for myself since 1) I didn’t know how to use spreadsheets and 2) I wasn’t doing enough to warrant it. Now that I’m reading more, I want to track my reading especially but will go ahead and track my jpdb and Bunpro too.

Grammar: N4 142/177 - ～ない～はない (JLPT N4) | Bunpro is giving me the most trouble right now. When I see the translation it’s obvious but when I try to read it myself I’d mess it up. Like in the example sentence 私わたしに書かけない漢字かんじはない。, it means “There is no kanji that I cannot write.” but I read it as “I can’t write any kanji.” so I’ll have to practice this one specifically. I might put it in a cram section.

Vocab: I only did 100 reviews today to keep my reviews down and wait for the reviews from the backlog to disperse more. The ones that I got wrong are all coming back in a week so I’m gonna wait for them to pass, then will finally start doing my new cards. I’ll probably start on Monday.

Reading: Yotsubato is pretty easy to read right now, just takes a while since the grammar changes a bit to be more natural. It’s getting easier since I’m getting used to how they’re doing it. Reading the webnovel mentioned yesterday is a bit rougher but manageable. Picking a random chapter, I know about 90% of the unique words but many of the unique words I didn’t know only appear once so I don’t think I’ll bother learning them right now. Manga is easier for me to read but harder to look words up while webnovels are harder to read but easier to look words up so it kind of evens out. I prefer manga though, even if constantly switching tabs is a bother. After Yotsubato, I’m thinking of switching to Demon Slayer. I remember trying to read it 2 years and at least the first chapter wasn’t bad, so it should be even easier now (I hope)

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#18

Yeah, the double negatives are quite something initially.

For web novels, I would be lightly careful.
For one if you have seen the anime, the web novel version / story maybe quite different. Normally the anime is based on the light novel version. If there is a manga adaptation, there may be changes to the story beats to better fit the manga format.

Eg the web version of The rising of the shield hero / 盾の勇者の成り上がり is not as developed as the light novel. And there are a lot of side stories at the end on syosetsu.

The Wrong Way to Use Healing Magic / 治癒魔法の間違った使い方 are quite similar at the start and towards the middle diverge.

Congrats on nearly finishing N4!

#19

I didn’t realize that the web novel was different than the light novel, I thought it was just the same story in a different format so thanks for letting me know. In the future if I get the funds I might start getting the light novels instead

#20

Day 6

Grammar: N4 154/177 - Today all of a sudden I had 200 reviews instead of 100 when I woke up. Not sure how that happened since I did all my reviews before I went to bed. I guess the stars aligned against me today lol but I finished them before 12 pm as usual.

Reading: I’ve read the second half of the second Yotsubato volume today. It takes a while but easy to read so it wasn’t tiring for me, time flew surprisingly. I want to make a goal to finish all the Yotsubato volumes by the end of next month. So that would be a pace of half a volume per day assuming I skip a third of the days up to July 31. Which wont happen but I like to give myself lots wiggle room so there’s no stress. Then after that I’ll probably switch to webnovels.

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#21

Yeah when you’re doing 10 a day the reviews start reaching the 200+ per day pretty easy although it sucks you had 200 in the morning alone

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#22

Oof yeah lol, if that’s gonna be a normal thing I’ll prepare myself. I can see why people stay at lower points per day then especially if they aren’t using the Reading mode.

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#23

Day 7

I’m gonna post weekly each Wednesday, writing this is fun but I don’t have that much to say now that I have a schedule I settled for.

Grammar: N4 164/177 - I can’t help but feel like somethings wrong even though my reviews are easy. But maybe that’s just me feeling like I’m taking the easy way out after reading posts from people struggling with the Fill In mode. I didn’t feel the need to use the mode since I won’t want to write but now it’s bothering me. Hopefully reading a lot makes up for it. I see the grammar I review a lot while reading Yotsubato especially since it’s N5 - N4.

Reading: Reading a volume of Yotsubato takes about 6.5 hours right now. I could finish it before 4 pm, leaving lots of time for jpdb, Bunpro, and whatever else I want to do. But I still plan to keep my 1/2 volume pace since 6.5 hours seems exhausting to do every day. I still didn’t start the Pokemon manga for the beginner bookclub yet. I forgot about it already until I saw it on the top of my page lol. So I’ll read the chapter tomorrow + Yotsubato.

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#24

Week 2

Grammar: N3 69/219 - My free trial for Bunpro ended this morning so I’m buying the monthly subscription. I’m glad it’s cheap, I’m so poor :sob: I had some trouble with similar grammar points like ところが and ところで but after using the cram I’m doing fine. I was starting to think of my listening practice. I don’t plan on starting until next month but I found a channel called 日本語の森 that explains grammar in Japanese so I’ve decided to kill two birds with one stone and listen to him explain grammar I’ve already learned on Bunpro. Looking at my schedule I saw that if I didn’t do N1 during my summer break I won’t have it for the final month of my summer break. Depending on how I feel by August I might not do it and stick to reviews, but it only takes 2 hours and is quickest compared to everything else I do so not like I’ll be relaxing if I don’t do it lol. So probably not but maybe I’ll be sick of learning new grammar by then who knows.

Reading: I didn’t plan to but I just started reading 1 volume of Yotsubato per day. So far I’ve finished 4 volumes and it takes me 5 hours each more or less. The story isn’t very exciting but it’s cute enough that I want to keep going. I have started reading more on syosetsu though so that I don’t have to spend too long on the jpdb site. I’ve decided to change my summer goal to 300 hours of reading since the Yotsubato goal was too easy and I want to give myself a reason to continue reading about 5 hours a day like before.

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#25

Week 3

I didn’t realize I left this draft open all night and never posted it :{

Grammar: N3 119/219 - My reviews are staying surprisingly low so far, it doesn’t go past 150 unless I don’t do them for a day or something. More and more grammar points are getting similar so I plan to use the cram function.

Reading: I’m mostly using the breader instead of the jpdb site so lots of the words are still in the review queue since they don’t appear in what I read. I’m not too worried about them since if they don’t appear they’re not high on my pirority list. Still, I might set Sunday or Saturday off to just clear out the reviews I can’t get through reading since I don’t want to forget them. I haven’t finished reading Yotsubato and focused more on webnovels instead. It’s cute but I can’t use my breader with it so would rather using other media. So I might just read it to relax on Sundays since I don’t like to work too much on that day as Christian.

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#26

Week 4

I had a bad week so I didn’t do much besides reviews. I feel a lot better now, I even cleared my bug infested room lol. No more bed rotting :muscle:

Grammar: I just did reviews to maintain my schedule. Since I’m a week behind now I’ve decided to not do N1 the last month of my summer break since it’ll bleed into my first week of senior year. And I’d rather chill out before that happens so for my last month I’ll just consume a bunch of input and review. I’ll probably just add an N1 point when I encounter them instead of just doing 10 a day, but that’ll be after I get most of N2 to season 1 at least since I don’t want to do a bunch of reviews during the school year.

Reading: Luckily, though I haven’t done any new grammar points I still keep up with my reading. It helps that reading has been my favorite past time since I was in elementary school. But instead of webnovels, I was reading a lot of messages on Discord. I thought they’d be easier than webnovels since it’d be daily conversation but they end up talking about politics or a random celebrity I don’t know lol. Now I’m learning words like ‘vote’ and ‘election’ which isn’t too bad since I already know the kanji (I did isolated kanji study before this). They also have VC channels that I can join but unfortunately they aren’t that useful for me yet especially since people mumble. Now that I’m feeling better I’m gonna go back to webnovels

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#27

Week 5

I found a wasp in my house, I think the bugs are coming back for revenge ;(

Grammar: I changed the review mode to Overdue First, I didn’t realize there were different modes before. Now even if I don’t finish the reviews for the day I will at least finish the oldest ones.

Reading: I haven’t read as much this week. The webnovels I’m reading aren’t as interesting to me since it’s not like the ones I read in English. The books I usually read are historical nonfiction / historical nonfiction like Boys In The Boat or Grenade. But the books I read in Japanese are romance and isekais since the easiest rated books in jpdb were of those genres. I see now that it won’t work for me, so I’m gonna work on finding easier historical books. Also, I’ve found a VTuber named Korone that I love so I’ve been listening to Japanese more. But I haven’t put too much effort in it so it’s just passive listening.

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#28

Maybe Magic Tree House?マジック・ツリーハウス８ 古代オリンピックの奇跡

And browsing the children’s books section [児童文学・童話・絵本]I also found this World culture adventure series.

I haven’t read any historical fiction myself ですが

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#29

I dimly remember reading Magic Treehouse in elementary school now. Thanks, I’ll check them out this week

#30

Week 6

I’ve noticed more study logs lately, it’s fun to read them

Grammar: N3 149/219 - I’ve been watching some 日本語の森 and I enjoy listening to how the guy explains the grammar v how it’s explained on the site though sometimes I feel like it’s a bit different. But that’s also probably because he’s explaining in Japanese and I’m misunderstanding him. I’ve noticed more and more grammar is vocab or multiple previous grammar points smooshed together so it gets easier and easier as long as you have a good foundation.

Reading: I’ve started doing isolated kanji study again. I said at the beginning I wouldn’t be doing that but I realized that knowing the kanji before the vocabulary helps a lot with reading / learning vocab. And I just like kanji a lot lol. I already know what a lot of them mean but I’ll be going through to learn 1 common reading for each. I was going to start listening study next week for the final month of summer break, but once I’ve checked different novels and realized how much I still couldn’t read, I’ve decided to only focus on reading this summer break again. I’ve been reading people’s posts here in the Bunpro forums, especially Chihiro’s. I don’t know a lot of the words but the grammar is easier than the novels I try to read at least. It makes me think of reading Japanese posts in other forum sites too, I’ve heard that LINE and 5ch are popular so I might try to look at them. I already do that with French, I read a lot of Reddit posts and plug the vocabulary into Anki, but I know that Reddit isn’t nearly as popular in Japan.

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#31

Week 7

Short post since nothing much changed this week besides finding a new reading source. And apparently I have a school assignment due two weeks before school actually starts, don’t know why they like torturing me like this :pensive:

Grammar: N3 189/219 - Reviews rn are going smoothly. Though sometimes I’d have to pull up the pages of two grammar points to pin down the differences between them, especially the ones with ところ in them. Besides that, though it takes a while certain days, I’m trying to stay on top.

Reading: I wasn’t able to figure out how to use LINE but I found the Japanese version of Quora instead. I was looking for a Reddit alternative and it’s the closest I’ve found. I’ve been lagging behind in vocabulary since I’ve hardly been adding new words while reading, so I plan to read a bunch of pages on Quora about topics I’m interested in and mining vocabulary related to it.

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#32

Week 8

Grammar: N3 has been finished and I’m starting N2. A lot of the grammar is vocabulary rn so that’s good, it’s easier for me. Grammar was the goal of this study log (the other ones I don’t care much if I reach) so I’m glad I’m making good progress to finish N2 by the end of summer break. It makes me feel like I didn’t waste my time this break, though just relaxing is good too of course.

Reading: I’ve learned it’s hard for me to read if I don’t already know the vast majority of the words. It’s better to read harder stuff but I end up getting tired too quickly. Too bad since that’s how you learn the most efficiently, but it’s not like I’m in any rush anyways. Quora is still my favorite site to read in the case of Japanese. But I’m still having trouble parsing sentences, even if I recognize the individual grammar points within them. Like on Quora, one question was 両親が低学歴でその子供に高い教育を与えたからといって賢くなるものなのですか？ and I couldn’t understand it at all though it became more obvious after I translated it. But that’ll just come with practice, so I don’t mind. I like my grammar rn so I’m gonna try to spend more time on jpdb to learn more vocabulary, though I don’t really enjoy it.

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#33

Week 9

Grammar: I’ve started enjoying watching grammar videos more. I used to rely on articles but I found that watching videos make the points stick a lot better, especially the ones from 日本語の森. I guess it’s because I have to think about it more carefully since it’s in Japanese. They’re even more useful now that the grammar points are more challenging for me. Before, they were words I recognized or grammar I’ve already learned before and mixed up. That’s still happening now but I’m noticing more and more that are just new. I’ll have to focus more this week.

Reading: I found a site called Aozora that is an archive of Japanese books in the public domain. But it’s hard for me to navigate and since in order to be in the public domain, the book has to be pretty old, the language in there is apparently pretty outdated. I’m still curious about the books there though so I plan to check reddit posts to learn more about it. I also found a resource called Bunsuke’s Newsletter. I’ve already subscribed to it but have been using the site to read ahead. It gives an exerpt of a book / short story for you to read and includes a vocabulary list and even a grammar list. Now that I think about it, I remember seeing it years ago but could hardly read and left it for later. It’s probably deep in my bookmarks somewhere now lol. It looks useful and can help me find new books that I can try, but the excerpts are so short (a few scentences) that I can’t really gauge whether or not I’m interested in the book. I would prefer the first chapter but I understand that since the book is paid, he can’t show too much. Either way, it’s a good way to get in a tiny bit of daily reading practice. I’ll probably need it once I get back to school, since I’ll have to focus on French again and can probably only do my reviews for a while.