The Study Log of a sloth

After reading some of the other study logs I felt like I should write one of my own.
My main goal is to see if I’m actually a sloth or if I’m just feeling like one :smiley:

About me / “goals”:
I’m not good at learning languages. When I had english in school (Its my secondary language) I sucked and I can’t even remeber how I magically learned it… Besides reading and just looking up every single word lol
So I will try to take it “easy” and just keep at it. That’s why there is no time limite or “goal” besides becoming good at it.
My main focuse is reading, listening comes second and I care little to none for the output part.

Kanji:
I love learning Kanji and I was already able to recognize N5 and N4 (and partly N3) before I even knew a single grammar point… So I stopped it for now, especially since a lot of people say that it is useless without the vocab.

Grammar:
I hated it before and I’m so glade I gave Bunpro a chance. I started 74 days ago and I’m still at N5. But I don’t believe I would have come this far without the website <3
grafik
4x Beginner; 23 Adept; 84 Seasond
Going slow with adding 3 new ones from time to time, when I feel like I understood the ones before. I studied 73 out of the 74 days and it’s always the first thing I do for studying.

Vocabulary:
First I tried to learn the vocabulary like the JLPT intends you to learn them… Oh boy that didn’t work out for me.
After watching some videos I realized that there are so many other ways and one I feel is “made for me”. Since I really love the Kanji themself I decided to work my way from one Kanji to the next and learn the vocabulary’s fitting to them.
Together with Bunpro I also decided to pick up anki (74 days ago) and have a 100% day streak.
I downloaded the popular “Core 2k/6k” and made a seperate deck for me to learn in. I picked all Vocabs without Kanji and put them in my active deck. After that I startet to add the ones with only the Kanji “電” in it (No combination with other Kanji!) then vocabs with the Kanji “電” and / or “円” in it… (and so on and so on)
It sounds a bit strange (especially since I can say stuff like “Milky Way” but not more command word) but I have a much easier time with it.

Right now I’m at 1206 card in my active deck.
Sadly I lost some time to reappraise the cards in the beginning (since not all cards are 100% “corretly”). I’m randomly adding more Kanji = more cards when I feel like I can spend more time in Anki to review. My desired retention is at 0,90 and I’m using FSRS.

Reading:
I joined the beginner book club here in Bunpro a few days ago and started to read my first Manga.
Pokemon Special - Page 57

Listening:
Tried to watch Netflix with jap sub/audio but I didn’t like it… I tried too hard to read and listen at the same time.
Now I’m listening to “Nihongo cion Teppei” on my way to work and back home. I like his way of talking and I’m at episode 296

Updates?
When I feel like it :sweat_smile: Maybe once a month or so…
Thanks for reading and suffering together <3

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Your next step should be evolving into a bunny. Then you can easily 日本語が上手になる :rabbit::+1:

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Thats definitly my endgoal for this journey :rabbit:

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I really felt it in my heart when you wrote that you love kanji and neglected grammar :joy: I was learning all 2141 常用漢字 from August 2023 until May this year and learnt about ~3 vocabs with each kanji. In July, I took the N2 test but I feel I might have failed and now I also learn grammar with bunpro. Currently the N2 stuff. Let’s keep it up, 頑張ってね:relaxed:

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nice to know I’m not the only one :grin: and inspiring :fire:

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I’m the same way with kanji and grammar lol. I learned to recognize 1.5k kanji before learning basic grammar. I’m glad I ran into Bunpro because my grammar would be forever stuck at N5 otherwise

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Welcome back, I hope you all had a productive month :relaxed:
For me I feel like knowing that someone might read this motivated me to try harder. So “I can show some results”. Personally I’m fine with the result I got this month.

Grammar:
N5 done :smiley: Starting slowly with N4. Not sure if I should pick up the pace… (at the moment I’m only learning one new grammar point each day) Sometimes more when I feel like I’m up for it.

grafik

Vocabulary:
Sorted by Kanji (JLPT-Level)
all N 5 Kanji / Hiragana / Katakana
94/168 N4 Kanji
3/? N1 Kanji

1206 Vocabs 16.07.24
1586 Vocabs total
380 new Vocabs

My goal was it to atleast reach 1500 vocabs total. So roughtly 10 new words for each day.
For the next month I wanna finish N4 (74 Kanji) and/or reach 2000 vocabs (roughly 14 each day).

Reading:

Manga:
Pokemon Special - Page xx - reading along with the book club
ひらやすみ - done
十三歳の誕生日、皇后になりました。【電子特別版】 -

ひらやすみ:
Some topics were too hard for me. But all in all I feel like it got easier to look up a lot of words without feeling burned out. Would I recommend this manga? Depends. There is no furigana and some stuff is written by hand (and tbh quite hard to read…). But the story itself is super cute and the characters are lovely. I will go back to this series when I become better in reading japanese. But for now I will try something different.

十三歳の誕生日、皇后になりました。【電子特別版】:
Bookwalker had a sale and I bought a bunch of random manga (with pretty cover). This is one of them… I didn’t read much but the story is kinda weird… More on that in the next post.

Found the “Immersion Log Let’s try something new!”-thread <3
NHK news web easy (NEWS WEB EASY) - I almost read every day atleast one article. I love that there is usually at least one “positiv” topic one. Like a little baby tiger or watching fish jump up a waterfall.

And the visual novel: “A kiss for the petals - remember how we met!”
I heard its sweet and short, thats why I picked this one… but I’m not sure if it is my cup of tea. So I have a hard time getting myself to read it.

Listening:
I wish I could say something else… But I had a hard time listening to someone talking in japanese while driving and my thoughts always drifted away.
I tired to listen to other podcasts than nihongoteppei but it seems like he is the only person I can understand when he speaks japanese. Maybe the others just talk to fast?
But at least I found 2x new yt channel I like to watch いろいろな日本語 and Daily Japanese with Naoko :heart:
Hopefully I can pull myself together for the next month.

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I think I would keep the balance at is is, so you don’t get burnt out. Like you said, if you feel like it, you can do more. :slight_smile: A challenge here in there is also important, too, to create growth and broaden your limits.

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I don’t think you need any advice, do you?

It’s a nice achievement!

Your resources/methods are grate and utd, you have a consistency.

I think going outside of home for 1 minute every morning helps drastically (but it’s just my case cos I’m sitting at home like it’s corona)

Anyway, good luck :+1:

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Thanks for the sweet words both of you <3

@homa
Well I need to walk 5 Minutes to my car if that counts :joy:

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The way you are learning vocab based on the kanji is almost exactly how one of my books teaches it. I love doing it that way to help reinforce my kanji readings. Even if I do get funny words I rarely use xD

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My favorite random word I learned pretty early on is 天の川 :heart:
Which book are you using?

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It is called Kanji in Context and it comes with two work books. I think I bought it in San Francisco Japan Town or in Japan itself. I don’t quite remember!

My favorite random one is still 海王星, sea king star (Neptune)

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I think premade decks is the way to go :thinking:

Or just hire a dev who will take a good deck with sound and sort cards by kanji/usage as you want

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I’m using the 2k/6k (something like that) premade one :blush: I’m way to ““lazy”” to make every single one from scratch, but I add words when I find new ones.
Anki has a filter option that I use to look for the new Kanji I wanna add :+1:

Mhh I think I will need to look if I find a cheap one somewhere. I don’t see myself spending 47€ on it :flushed: but thank you

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Ye, I use premade deck as well, not 2/6 but this one https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2141233552 . In our little community it considered better but not without flows of course.

But I was talking about sorting it by kanji, it can be done with script

loved that word as well, and then I learnt 銀河 🩵

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Ohh this one is so beautiful too😍

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This month was a strange one.
It started really well. The first two weeks I was pushing really hard and at the end of week two I already reached my goal to reach 2k words and even had finished almost all N4 Kanji-words + half of N4 grammar (even thou I wanted to go slow lol)
In week 3 I ditched the manga and vn I was reading (bc I couldn’t get myself to read them) and started a new vn and new manga. I finished the first chapter of the vn and 2 volumes (not chapters) of the manga in this one week!
And in week 4 I was basically the only one left at work and that hit me so hard (I was always completly death afterwards)… I had a really hard time trying to touch my reviews on anki/bunpro and almost didn’t do anything for my japanese journey at all…

So I feel pretty proud and sad at the same time :sweat_smile: well I guess next week will be a slow start getting back on my feet.
My main goal is to get the reviews down in anki. I use a “Desired retention” of 0,9 and FSRS. So the last few times I finished anki it took me over 30 min. Thats simply too long for vocab training.

A little question for all of you: How do you guys handle new vocab from immersion?
Tbh I just wanna add all new vocab (that have N5/N4 Kanji in them) into my anki flow but I find more new words than I wanna learn each day…
One day of vn produced 97 new Vocabs and I think it was like 45 Vocabs with N5/4 Kanji in it… 45 is just too much.

And now to the stats:

Grammar:
N4 half done, yay !
{61E9D12D-DACC-4DCD-B3AA-4ABD5E46284D}

Vocabulary:
Sorted by Kanji (JLPT-Level)
all N5/4 Kanji / Hiragana / Katakana

  • some other level

1586 Vocabs 15.08.24
2159 Vocabs total
573 new Vocabs

Reading:

Manga:
十三歳の誕生日、皇后になりました。【電子特別版】 - droped
Finished: 君ノ声 - Volume 1 and 2 (so roughly 400 Pages)

“A kiss for the petals - remember how we met!” - droped
“witch on the holy night” - Chapter 1 done and a bit more

Listening:
Finally back to listening during my drive to work. And a few videos on cijapanese as well as youtube. I feel like I’m slowly getting better (and I’m able to understand different ppl, not only teppei)

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