Japanese: Week 19

1693 suspended cards to go. Yeah, that’s an decrease of only about a hundred. I once again got distracted from enabling the cards by other projects. Oops.

On a more positive note, I acquired a collection of 8555 sentences in a shared deck for Anki, so I should be able to find sentences for a lot more words, now. The English translations that came with them seem a little suspect, unfortunately. I’ll have to try not to rely on them too much.

Also positive: I’m not having much trouble with the cards that I am enabling, and I’m blowing right through my daily reviews. Which, actually, is kind of bad since it means I haven’t been adding as many as I could have. Well, I knew that already.

Japanese: Week 18

Just a little to write today. 1804 suspended cards remain. I’ve been a little too conservative re-enabling them, but I was afraid of causing a repeat of my previous failure. I’ll try enabling them at a quicker rate in the coming week.

One tangential note: some time ago I bought a fountain pen, in large part to use during my Japanese practice. I’d previously been using some cheap gel pens, but a few quick estimates indicated that a fountain pen would be cheaper over time, and (I hoped) more comfortable to boot. I’ve been using it ever since, but tonight it ran out in the middle of a review session, so I grabbed a gel pen. The difference was amazing–the fountain pen was so much smoother and easier to write with. I’d quite forgotten how poorly other pens wrote since I’ve been using my fountain pen exclusively. So, a couple of dollars for a cheap fountain pen and eight dollars or so for a bottle of ink were a great investment, I think.

Japanese: Week 17

Week 17? It’s been seven months since week 16! What gives?

Well, as I mentioned in several of the previous weekly summaries, my flashcards were getting totally out of hand. Ultimately, I wasn’t even remotely capable of completing the necessary number of flashcards each day, despite spending nearly two hours a day doing nothing but flashcards. This pretty much discouraged me and, despite several attempts to clear the backlogged cards, I didn’t have much success. My Japanese study shifted away from using flashcards and towards just hoping I’d remember the things I read without any help. For those words and kanji I saw very frequently, this was fine. For the others (which were the bulk of them), I was getting nowhere. It ended up being a period of about six months where I learned less than I learned in the average week using Anki. Dark times. Given my general lack of progress, I’m just gong to call this week 17 and proceed from here.

So, I’ve spent the last week or so aggressively clearing my backlogged cards in Anki. I did this by suspending every card I failed, and just plowing on through until the queue was empty. This left me with a couple of thousand suspended cards and a much clearer conscience. I’m basically treating the suspended cards as though they’re new cards, and re-enabling them a few at a time so as to keep a reasonable work load. I hope I can finish with these fairly soon. I must say, it’s been pretty nice the last few days, being able to finish my daily reviews in a reasonable amount of time. It reminds me why I found this fun originally.

Doing this ruined my statistics, making them fairly useless as a measure of my progress, so no more stats-heavy summaries for now. Just one statistic: I currently have 1989 suspended cards. I imagine it’ll be a few weeks before I’ve got them cleared up, though it should be faster than if they were actually new cards. I’ve been mixing in a few actually new cards as well (currently, at a rate of five per day), just to keep myself entertained. I’m only adding new vocabulary, sentence, and fill-in-the-kanji cards for now, and I don’t think I’ll start adding kanji again until I’ve cleared my suspended cards. Still, even this slow progress promises to be more than I was managing without the help of Anki.

Well, enough reflection. Perhaps I’ll have something more useful to say next week.

Japanese: Week 16

Oops, I’m a little late with this one. Well, I’ve started working down my backlog, and added a bunch of new vocabulary cards. Hopefully I can get back to a regular schedule, including new kanji, by the end of next week. This little break from new kanji turned out to be way longer than expected, and I’m pretty disappointed that it did, but it shouldn’t be too much longer.

Japanese: Week 15

My other project has finally finished, so I can finally work on clearing my backlog. Also, I need to start adding more cards, soon, or I’ll fall rather behind schedule. I’ve added a few vocabulary cards over the last few weeks, and I’m currently acquiring more sentences that I can use eventually, but I’ve done very little new material, really.

If all goes well, I’ll probably post another update in the middle of this week.

Japanese: Week 14

Briefly: I’ve done only 5 new vocab and no kanji in the last week. The good news is that the project that’s been taking up so much of my time lately should be done in the next few days, so I’ll be able to spend more time on Japanese. I’ve still got a big backlog of reviews, which I need to try to clear over the next few days, if I can. If I’ve not done it by the time my other project finishes, I’ll certainly need to just spend a day clearing them out.

My correct percentages for the week have been about average. My frequency numbers continue to improve: I’m at 30.5% and 19.3% known kanji and vocab. Not such a great improvement on the kanji side, but an extra 1.6% vocab, which is rather nice.

I look forward to posting a more impressive review next week.

Japanese: Week 13

Stats:

• Kanji: 642 total, 10 this week. This includes 142/200 grade 4 kanji.
• Vocab: 1130 total, 25 this week.
• At the end of 52 weeks, at this week’s rate, I’ll have seen 1032 kanji and 2105 vocabulary cards.
• Correct this week: Young, 80.8%; Mature, 93.8%.

Well, I’m still adding no new cards in order to reduce my daily review time, so the 52-week kanji and vocab numbers aren’t very impressive. The correct percentages are nice, though. I hope that by the end of next week, I’ll have started adding new kanji again, and things will be back on track. With any luck, I’ll have taken care of some of my other obligations by then.

I wasn’t entirely idle this week, though. I listened to the first five newbie and the first two beginner lessons from JapanesePod101. They’re pretty much too easy, but I guess still worth listening to.

Not much else to say. My frequency numbers continue to improve. This week, they are 30.2% and 17.7% known kanji and vocab, up from 28.3% and 17%.

Here’s to better things in the coming week.

Japanese: Week 12

Stats:

• Kanji: 632 total, 61 this week. This includes 133/200 grade 4 kanji.
• Vocab: 1105 total, 96 this week.
• At the end of 52 weeks, at this week’s rate, I’ll have seen 3072 kanji and 4945 vocabulary cards.
• Correct this week: Young, 74.2%; Mature, 93.6%.

Acceptable correct percentages this week. The bad news, though, is that I’m beginning to find it more and more difficult to complete my daily reviews. I spent slightly more time on reviews this week, though I actually had one fewer rep than last week. I am considering lowering my number of daily kanji once I’ve completed the kyouiku kanji: there are 407 of those to go, so it’ll take me another six weeks, roughly. I would hate to have to do that, but I fear I won’t keep up with my reviews if I have to do so many of them every day.

One other thing to note: I did only 61 kanji this week, rather than the usual 70. This is due to my doing a day of almost entirely vocab and sentences, since I felt those were easier, and I had not slept the night before. This didn’t reduce the number of reps I had to do (which makes me fear that they’ve not yet topped off), but it was valuable anyway: the sentences are much better for practicing recalling and writing kanji than just the ‘write the described kanji’ flashcards I’ve been doing.

An example ‘fill in the kanji’ card looks like:

Front: 漢字は中国からきました。

Back: 漢字は中国から来ました。

Presented the front side, I’m to rewrite the blue part using kanji–I should produce the blue part of the back side. I’ve chosen to include the okurigana with this, which I think is probably useful. Although, it’s my impression that sometimes certain of the kana are not written, and other times they are, apparently at the whim of the writer, so it may not be perfect. Of course, these cards don’t have me just converting single kanji–rather, I take a sentence card like “漢字は中国から来ました。”, and create cards for 漢字, 中国, and 来ました–which is to say, any word containing kanji. It’ll make a large number of cards, and include lots of duplication for common words, but I think that’s fine: if I know them well, I won’t see any particular card very often, and if the kanji are very common, it’ll be beneficial for me to know them very well indeed, so there’s no problem with seeing them repeatedly.

On to less pleasant news: I’ve fallen rather behind on reading my textbook. Since last week, I’ve completed only two grammar lessons and one writing lesson. I mean to begin making up for it this week–I should be able to do both a writing and a grammar lesson in a single day without much trouble, but I will probably still come in behind my target completion date.

Also bad: I’m still not capable of reading Sailor Moon without heavy reliance on a dictionary. This is in large part my fault, since I didn’t take the time to transcribe it and then extract the vocabulary I’d need to learn to be able to read it. Frankly, between the large amount of review time and certain other obligations, I have felt like if I wanted to actually get done everything I wanted to in my Japanese study, I’d have to completely give up on any free time, which I’d rather not do. Of course, I’d rather be able to quickly learn Japanese with no effort, but that’s also not happening. If things calm down a bit and I can get to transcribing Sailor Moon, I may be able to learn enough vocab to be able to read it fairly well within two weeks. I had hoped to be able to begin with it around this time, but it seems that it was not to be.

Well, let’s look at frequency. This week, my known kanji and word percentages, by frequency, are 28.3% and 17%, up from 26.5% and 16.3%, respectively. My seen percentages are more encouraging: 71% and 25.4%. I certainly have quite a bit to go, but it’s a bit of a morale boost to know that I have a fair chance of recognizing around three in four kanji I encounter, and I actually should recognize more than one in four.

What’s left to say? During the last week, I’ve switched from ‘review cards from largest interval’ to ‘review cards in random order’, so that I won’t have a big block of very hard cards at the end of the day. This way, they’re spread out throughout. It does make the first few sessions rather less easy, but I think that’s more than made up for by making the last few sessions less discouraging. I’ve also increased my session length from 10 to 12 minutes. The difference is small enough that I don’t really notice it while doing reviews, and I think it makes it a little easier to complete my reviews. I don’t think I’d want to increase it much more, though.

That pretty much sums it up. I hope to be able to keep up my current pace for at least the next six weeks, at which point I will probably slow down a bit to make it easier on myself. We’ll have to see how well I’m able to manage until then.

Japanese: Week 11

Stats:

• Kanji: 571 total, 70 this week. This includes all grade 3 kanji and 77/200 grade 4 kanji.
• Vocab: 1009 total, 91 this week.
• At the end of 52 weeks, at this week’s rate, I’ll have seen 3441 kanji and 4740 vocabulary cards.
• Correct this week: Young, 75.6%; Mature, 89.4%.

Mysterious. My young correct percentage is better this week, and my mature correct percentage worse. I did do very poorly a couple of days ago, owing, I think, to lack of sleep, which explains the bad weekly percentages. I’m still hoping to fix that.

I really am beginning to dislike having to do so very many cards every day, but I don’t want to do fewer new cards, which is the only practical way to reduce the number of reviews I have each day. I’ll have to try to come up with something, though, because if I continue having to do more than 90 minutes each day, I’m likely to give up, eventually.

On the bright side, I have (barely) been keeping up with reading Genki. I’ve read through lesson six in both sections, so I’m halfway through the book. It has now eclipsed the material covered in AIJ, so I’m looking forward to learning new things.

I’ve added a new type of card to my deck, though I’ve currently got only three examples of it: I take one of my sentence cards, and for each word written in kanji, I replace it (on the question side) by its reading, highlight it, and then I try to write the correct kanji. Studying kanji in context should, I hope, prove to be more beneficial than just writing the bare kanji, devoid of context. It should help me to remember vocabulary as well as the kanji themselves, which will be nice.

As for completion percentage by frequency: it stands at 26.5% of kanji (up from 23.3%) and 16.3% of words (up from 14.4%). A small increase, but significant. I spent 10.8 hours of study last week for that gain, bringing my review time up to 71.5 hours. I also spent about two hours on the six chapters of Genki, though I think the later chapters will take longer, as I begin to learn new things.

Japanese: Week 10

Stats:

• Kanji: 501 total, 70 this week. This includes 194/200 grade 3 kanji.
• Vocab: 918 total, 89 this week.
• At the end of 52 weeks, at this week’s rate, I’ll have seen 3441 kanji and 4656 vocabulary cards.
• Correct this week: Young, 73.2%; Mature, 95.1%.

Well, the correct percentages are back up a bit this week, which is nice. Also, I did about a hundred fewer reps this week compared to last week (2917 vs. 3008), so I guess that the reps did indeed level off–good, because I can continue like this. It’s more reps than I’d like to have to do, but it’s manageable: about 90 minutes a day.

I’m very nearly done with grade 3–I should finish tomorrow. I’ve actually already done 23 grade 4 kanji, so that’s a couple of days off the completion time for that one. Already I’m doing pretty well: according to the Japanese Extended plugin, I currently know 23.3% of kanji and 14.4% of words by frequency. Not too shabby.

Besides kanji and vocab study, I’ve also read six chapters of Genki–the first three lessons of both the dialogue and the writing sections. I hope to keep up at least that pace in the coming week.

My transcription of Sailor Moon has only progressed by one page. It really takes far too long typing with one hand. I have been considering whether it is really worth it to transcribe Sailor Moon, but I think it probably is: there are very many words that I don’t know and that I wouldn’t come across just doing my usual vocabulary study. But, if I don’t dedicate more time to transcribing it, then I will certainly not finish in the next two weeks, as I had hoped. I have about 35 pages yet to transcribe, so I need to do somewhat more than two pages per day just to finish that. Well, we’ll see how it goes.

I’ve yet to watch any more Let’s Learn Japanese, which I hope to change in the coming week. It doesn’t take very long to watch an episode, after all, and the listening practice is valuable. I’ve also not yet listened to the JapanesePod101 lessons. Same thing there: valuable listening practice, need to do it.

Enough. In summary, things seem to be going according to plan, though I need to work a little harder to keep it up.