Things learned from AIJ so far…

1. Books contain errors. Well, I knew that.
2. Reading even a paragraph or two of simple text written in all kana is way harder than it ought to be. Why couldn’t the book teach kanji? I understand that learning the kanji is a big effort, but a wall of kana is not learner-friendly either. Parsing “わたしはごごいちじにともだちのうちへいきました。” into “私は午後一時に友達の家へ行きました。” took me much longer than it ought to have. Also, shouldn’t 家 only be used for one’s own home? Maybe I misunderstood when I learned it. Either way, I will make a point of not learning sentences from this book.
3. Most of this book is annoying group activities, and the production activities (e.g. Ask your partner this question and have him respond. Switch.) aren’t helpful since I can’t be sure whether I’m answering them correctly and I don’t want to teach myself something that’s wrong. Production will have to come much later in my study, I fear.
4. Since I can’t really do most of the activities, and reading the provided sentences for those activities is quick, a chapter only takes about twenty minutes to read. Even if I take my time. I could finish this book tomorrow if all the remaining chapters are like chapter nine (no new words or grammar, just review-type activities).
5. The ability to read even the horribly contrived and annoyingly kana-only reading selections is still encouraging.

Adventures in Japanese: Progress

After some deliberation, I’ve decided to modify my method of using AIJ somewhat. Previously, I was only reading a chapter when I could also enter the vocab into Anki. Therefore, no room for the vocab in my schedule meant no progress in the textbook. This situation wasn’t good, since I need to complete the textbook to learn grammar. The new strategy: simply maintain two bookmarks, one denoting how far I’ve read, the other how far I’ve entered the vocab into Anki. Since the book provides translations of the sentences, I can get a reminder should I forget some word before it’s put into Anki, and this will allow me to proceed at a reasonable pace.

Another benefit of this method is that it should reduce the number of cards I replace (i.e. changing from a kana-only card entered from the book to a kanji+kana card entered from my dictionary/wherever else I get a word) by delaying vocabulary input. Since many of the common words that AIJ introduces are also coming up early in my ordinary study schedule, that means there are a number of words I already know by the time they appear in AIJ. This is an altogether satisfying situation.

As a result, I’ve now finished chapter six, which I had previously read half of, and also chapter seven. By ‘finished’ I mean only that I have read the chapters completely–I’ll need to review to ensure the grammar points are fixed in my memory. The next chapter is purely a review–tables containing the vocab and grammar and such from the previous seven chapters. This one I don’t expect to spend any real time on, since Anki is taking care of my vocab and the grammar instruction has been very sparse. I’ll look it over tomorrow, and then probably begin the next chapter, if all goes well.

One further change to my method I am considering: I may begin to take notes on  the grammar instruction from AIJ as I go, so I can find it when I want it. There’s no particular order to the book that I can discern–just occasionally there will be a box with some note about grammar, or an example of sentence structure. This makes finding them rather annoyingly difficult, at least without referring the the index, which I think does actually index these. Better, I guess, will be to keep my own notes on the subject.

A final note: I’ve been failing to get cards input in advance, so I’ve been entering each day’s new cards the same day I am to learn them. This tends to push back my beginning to study by some hours, until I’ve gotten around to entering them all, which is surely harmful. It also makes studying much more stressful since I need to fit the hour or so of study each day into a much smaller time period. I will try to make a point of entering tomorrow’s cards before I sleep tonight, and I hope to continue in that manner in the future.

Learning Japanese

Lately, I’ve been trying to learn Japanese. My proximate goal is to be able to read the first volume of Sailor Moon, which I judge to be a fairly easy target (indeed, I can understand perhaps half of it already, with a bit of dictionary use), since most of the kanji have furigana and it’s aimed at children. I’ve been through a few pieces of software trying to find a good one to help me memorize kanji and vocabulary. I was using Mnemosyne, but I’ve just switched to Anki, which has some better features for this purpose.

To aid me in my struggle, I’m using Adventures in Japanese 1 by Hiromi Peterson and Naomi Omizo. It’s aimed at high school students, so I’m rather less than satisfied with the grammatical rigour, and furthermore it’s full of pointless illustrations and group activities (Wow, so the word smile means a smiley face? Neat! Oh, so we should go around the class and have everyone say his name and grade level–in Japanese? That’ll be awesome the thirtieth time I hear it!), but it’s the best I’ve got right now. Actually, I do have a couple of other books which should be more useful (All About Particles and A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Sentence Patterns, both by Naoko Chino), but they aren’t precisely aimed at the beginner, so I’ll probably find them more useful once I’ve learned enough words to begin reading.

For now, I’m learning the kanji in order by year. Once I can begin reading a bit, I’ll mix this approach with adding the kanji I encounter, but I don’t imagine I’ll be up to reading anything but my textbook for a while yet. When I am ready, though, I should have a fair few things to read–I’m storing up likely candidates in Evernote; I’ve got various short stories and a translation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Since they’re electronic, looking up unfamiliar kanji should be easy, so I’ll be able to start on them a little sooner than if they were on paper.

I’m making decent progress, I guess. According to Anki, I’ve currently got memorized about a hundred vocabulary words and ten kanji, though that under-represents my actual vocabulary quite a bit (and my kanji knowledge a little, too). I’ll be through my textbook in a few weeks, probably. I’ve completed four of fifteen chapters, though the later chapters will probably take longer, it still probably won’t take much more than a day per chapter, on average. After that I’ve got to either continue my education strictly online, buy a better book, or use the mediocre books that the library has. Decisions, decisions.