valkow's Study Log

Language Learning Logs
#1

Current state of affairs:

  1. I finished school at last (eleven years after my first projected graduation date, as a returning student)
  2. I’m going to aim for JLPT N1 in December
  3. I have lots more time to study with school done

Reading novels (currently 孤島の鬼), using anki every day, studying with 新完全マスター N1 books, aiming for at least 80% of my watching to be in Japanese without English involved at all, very belatedly working through RTK, trying to shore up my grammar skills… etc. I don’t know exactly what I’ll use this log for, but I enjoy thinking and writing about Japanese and Japanese study. よろしくお願いします！

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#2

Reading:

I finished 孤島の鬼, which was arduous but also fun. It was my first time reading something written pre-reforms. I definitely felt the difference, though unexpectedly what I found most difficult was catching on to differences in okurigana–I kept looking up words I already know and then cursing my foolish brain. The story itself was very enjoyable to read and I’m glad I persevered. I will definitely try more Edogawa Ranpo… at some point.

After that it felt like I blazed through とらドラ 3. I think it took me a week, which even for a light novel is better than I would’ve thought I could do. I really enjoyed #3, with (that one part in the pool) being my favorite thing to happen in the series so far.

Now I am reading 博士の愛した数式 and enjoying it, though of course I have to look up a ton of math-related terms, and then sometimes look up explanations for the English terms, too, since I haven’t taken a math class in many years.

Watching:

I believe I’m keeping up with my 80/20 ratio, though I’m too lazy to check currently. I will try to add it all up around the six-month mark to see if I need to make a push and even it out.

After a while of watching more anime than I ever have, and with Japanese subs, I am now on a raw drama kick. Up until now I have mostly watched mediocre (at best) dramas raw because I hate feeling that I’m missing things, but somehow I’ve been watching better stuff lately (which makes it sound like a natural progression due to listening comprehension improving when actually I don’t think it has that much [yet?] and I just ended up watching better stuff for other reasons). For example, I just spent a week tearing through Hajikoi, which is not a drama for many people (especially in this and the previous forum, perhaps? I have an impression of people not gravitating toward romcoms here), and which is not a super … ~quality~ drama, but it was one of the first times I watched a drama without subs of any kind and just plowed through it with nothing but enjoyment. I liked it so much I ripped the audio and have been listening to that, and somehow I understand even more of the audio alone than I did with video (!?), which is fun.

Other dramas I’m watching lately (slowly, while avoiding spoilers, as the mood strikes): ３年A組, ハケン占い師アタル, ふたりモノローグ (which I watch while pretending it is the show I actually wish it were), etc. Excited for what the new season will bring, though I’m still a ways away on catching up on what I’m watching from the last one. Does anything coming up look particularly good to anyone?

I am also keeping up with Arashi variety shows raw, as always. I’m so used to them that I sometimes forget there aren’t subtitles, because between context, familiarity, テロップ, and increased willingness to pause and go back to re-listen multiple times, I catch almost everything (other than in the segments where it’s a lot of talking by the guests I may or may not like about things I may or may not care as much about). I hope someday dramas feel as watchable raw as this.

N1 Study:

I got in a good week of study before going on a trip, so hopefully I will pick it up again smoothly now that I’m back. I’m using the 新完全マスター books, and so far I like them in this order: 語彙、漢字、読解、聴解、文法、which, not coincidentally, is the reverse order of how much I need them.

Study group started back up again this week, which will mean I at least get a bit of speaking in, plus writing kanji. Ah, which reminds me that I am also caught up on anki, including RTK… I am kind of halfhearted about it. I am only 259 in, only doing 5 new a day, and before this week was often not caught up… but I am already seeing some payoffs in differentiating between similar kanji, and I expect that will increase, so I will keep going at this plodding pace (because if I upped the pace I’d quit). With not that many to do a day (for me who is used to a lot in my other deck), I am enjoying it more than not, anyway. I do love kanji so very much.

#3

Feeling a real lack of motivation since my last post. I’m consoling myself that even when I’m not motivated, I still keep up with anki, and I watch dramas and variety all the time, and have at least been fitting in a little reading… so it’s not like I’m doing nothing, but I am in a definite slump. It feels like my listening is getting worse (surely not?! but it feels like it lately), and my reading comprehension isn’t going up, and oh yeah, I’m not studying for N1 and it’s not like I magically know all those grammar points that I don’t often see in the wild… I’m also feeling the loss of resources that comes with graduating. I am so glad to be done, but in school I had teachers… I was always learning whether I had the motivation to do so or not, and I had people to ask if I didn’t understand something. Now I feel like I’m in my own little learning bubble. It’s so easy only to do the things I find most enjoyable, which will only improve the things I’m already better at anyway.

Anyway, it’ll pass! I’m going to ignore the feelings of getting worse and keep doing what I’m doing until I have the motivation to do more.

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#4

I’m doing good in a lot of ways and still bad in others. No point worrying too much about it.

Today I kept track of what words I added to my anki deck, just to see how one day panned out. When I started my mining deck after finishing Core10k, I left new cards random for years, but in the past year or so I’ve tried to be more purposeful about which cards get seen sooner rather than later. I previously didn’t have so many new cards built up–that number exploded upward as soon as I started regularly reading stuff written for native speakers. After a while of that, I suspended all my new cards, so that it would only be the deliberately unsuspended cards that came up new. After months of this practice, I have 836 unsuspended new cards and 4,087 suspended new cards in my vocab deck. (Some of the latter are duplicates to be weeded out, but not a ton of them. [Most of my duplicates are staged in an otherwise unused deck.) (Other numbers, since why not: 18,089 Mature, 1,186 Young+Learn.) Over the past year I’ve added an average of 14.5 cards a day to this deck, and I only do 10 new cards a day, so I won’t run out any time soon. (This is a feeling I like.)

And go!

看過 and 恙虫病, both from news headlines. Suspended.
国威, from the title of a TV show. Suspended.
一酸化炭素, from a twitter with vocab lists. Not suspended–already know 二酸化炭素 and this won’t add much to the load, while hopefully adding to my instinctive understanding of how these two words are structured.
無名, from the title of a TV show. I had it in my deck already from my study abroad classes last year, so I added the example and unsuspended it.
責務, from the title of a TV show. I had it in my deck already from college classes as well as a pre-made N1 deck I’ve been mining, so I added the example and unsuspended it.
碑, from an old Arashi variety show. I had it in my deck already, but only from the aforementioned N1 deck. In the show they pronounced it ひ, in the N1 deck (which I’m mostly using to check for gaps, and which is not always reliable in terms of orthography and pronunciation, I have found) they had it as いしぶみ. I checked Ninjal and it came up as ひ. I checked furigana.info (another not always reliable source [in terms of what I want it to do, not in terms of what it actually does], but sometimes good for confirming things), and it said ひ 74.2%, いしぶみ 16.1%. Found a hinative answer that indicated いしぶみ is more frequent when the kanji is alone. Added the card with weblio definitions for both readings (ひ first, since that is what I heard it as in the show), plus a picture from google image search. Left it suspended for now.
もなか (最中), from the same show. Added it as kanji (even though I know I’ll probably never see it as kanji [because that way is what I find most fun]) with differentiation from さいちゅう, added a picture. Suspended for now.
誤審, from an article. Already in deck from another article, so added the example and unsuspended.
際物, from a different old Arashi variety show. Suspended.
安直, from the definition of 際物. Suspended. (Things from the definitions of other things are almost always suspended until I see them in the wild.)
いとま (暇) from a movie title, except when I checked my deck, it was not only already there, it was already on the same card as ひま; I must have added it later. When it comes due (in July), I will decide whether to make it a separate card. (Probably not unless I see it somewhere again at some point and don’t remember it.)
コチュジャン and 甜麺醤, from the same Arashi show. Added pictures. Suspended both.
気鋭, from the description of a movie. Suspended.

All in all, I added 10 new cards today and suspended nine of them, and I unsuspended three previously made cards. Might get another couple in before bed (I’ll probably finish another Arashi no Shukudai-kun episode, and maybe another Attack No.1 as well), but I’m about done with my vocab reviews for the day anyway, and will only have to do my kanji reviews before sleeping. (The sleepiness means I am a little less sharp for the kanji reviews but I enjoy doing those in bed, so oh well.)

I know anki/srs is not everyone’s cup of tea, but I actually really enjoy doing this kind of work, both the deck maintenance (in all its forms) and the reviews themselves. At least the way I end up doing it, the deck maintenance feels like an essential part of my anki study–I have to think carefully about words and what they mean and whether they’re important to know. For example, today as one of my new cards I learned 自重. The card had the automated Sanseido definition from the plug-in as じじゅう, while the definition I’d pasted in from Weblio had じちょう. I read each Japanese definition closely, then read the four example sentences (all from my kindle reading efforts) to see which definition matched up to which usage of 自重. Then I deleted the definition for じじゅう, because じちょう was clearly the correct choice for all four example sentences. Or, another example, sometimes the words I get from my kindle aren’t pulled correctly. I have a card waiting to be dealt with that has three example sentences. For each of the three, kindle decided the word in question was a conjugated form of 立つ. However, looking at each sentence closely, I see that the first one has 立ちいでる, the second has 立ち泳ぎ, and the third has, oh hey, 立ち泳ぎ again! Because I’m making these cards myself and organizing them myself, I end up reading definitions and sentences more closely than I do with pre-made cards. (Note: pre-made cards served me well for a long time and I am glad I used them, too.)

For me, I think setting things up so that I can do this maintenance not when it comes up, necessarily, but in an efficient way, preferably in a batch, when there is motivation to do so, means I don’t get demotivated by it. That false 立つ card, I ended up with about fifteen like it from my last batch import from kindle (of about 1,500 cards total). It takes a fair amount of time to sort those things out, and sometimes, honestly, I feel it isn’t worth the effort for what I’ll get from it and just delete them. But with these, I suspended them and gave them a certain tag, and when I feel like I have the patience to work through the confusion, I go to that tag and get one or a few done. When I’m reviewing, if a card’s definition seems insufficient, or if there is some other problem, I have a tag for that. When the mood strikes, I go to that tag and fix a few problem cards. I have a tag for duplicates, and I try to sort ten of those out per day. (I have a ton of duplicates because of kindle, and because I often want that example sentence from the second one I don’t just delete them right away.) Sorting through those duplicates helps me find the cards I want to prioritize, because I have looked them up and added them multiple times.

I don’t know that I’d find this work as meaningful if almost all the cards in question weren’t fully in Japanese. Also, if I didn’t simply enjoy this kind of thing, the organizing and tidying and preparing sort of thing, I don’t know that the results would be worth it. I’m not writing this out as a recommendation or anything–I just spend a lot of time with anki, so I end up thinking about stuff like this. :smiley:

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#5

Finally, finally finished 博士の愛した数式! I really enjoyed it while reading it, but am in a period of low motivation so could rarely get myself to open it up. I’m glad I persevered, because the ending made me especially happy.

To try to entice myself to read more, after this I’m going with the next Toradora.

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#6

Technical difficulties.

  1. Signed up for JCAT, never got confirmation email. (Complaining about this without doing anything did motivate me to email them.)

  2. My Yomichan with anki connect seems to have broken. Every word I hover over is grayed out both for kanji and reading despite, of course, many of them not being in my anki. I deleted and re-added the add-on to my anki, restarted my browser, etc. The fact that it still pops up means I continue using it while my (exaggerated) resentment slowly grows, thus complaining about this without doing anything about it did not give me the motivation to contact anyone.

  3. I put money into italki more than a year ago but found that my computer/internet gave me trouble while skyping. This is not a new issue and there are no updates, I’m just still grieving the lost practice and lost money. :smiley: (<- oh, is there a way to disable emoji?)

This post is fueled by the frustration of ongoing technical struggles in a non-Japanese-related area.

Everything else is the same! Slacking on some Japanese stuff, keeping up with others, watching lots and lots of raw and jp-subbed stuff per my 2019 goal. Still slowly going through RTK and am to 551. Toradora reading is fun.

#7

I really need to put this on the top of my stack. An Italki teacher recommended it to me years ago but I’ve never gotten around to it. Thanks for the motivation!

#8

Awesome! I hope you enjoy it.

#9

Giving the Tadoku test run a try. Based only on the last couple of days, it looks like I usually read no more than 3% of this book in a sitting, and translating that to pages read is about 8 pages, roughly taking 20 minutes. On a good day, I’ll do it twice, but I think I more often only do it once… I need to read more. This book, however, is going much more quickly than the last one, thank sparkle. I’m at 67% now. I already have my next book picked out, so hopefully I can read a bit more and push through the rest in not too much time.

We’re almost to the halfway point of 2019! I keep track of all the things I watch (I like to keep records of stuff, and plus I sometimes forget what I’ve seen and what episode I’m on), and according to my list for 2019, so far I’ve finished three anime with jp-subs (Sukitte Ii na yo, Karakai Jouzu na Takagi-san, Hanebado), one drama with jp-subs (5-ji kara 9-ji made), one anime raw (Watashi ga Motete Dousunda), and eleven dramas raw (Kono Koi wa Tsumi na no ka, Yuube wa Otanoshimi Deshita ne, Konya, Katte ni Dakishimete mo Ii Desu ka, Hajimete Koi wo Shita Hi ni Yomu Hanashi, 3-nen A-gumi, 1 Page no Koi, Daisy Luck, Attack No. 1, Futari Monologue, Takane to Hana, Eerie). I also finished two dramas with English subtitles that I had started in 2018 (Long Vacation and Miss Sherlock). (I have also watched many other things but will focus on tv in this post.)

Given I don’t understand everything raw (and sometimes not even with jp-subs), nearly all of these were picked because I didn’t think I’d mind missing things. A few of them were truly bad (but still watchable [mostly]), and I honestly wouldn’t recommend those to anyone, lol. More often, I enjoyed them! Some of them I enjoyed while feeling just fine with missing things, because it was enjoyable without being super quality, and sometimes I wished I had subtitles and could get everything that was happening. I’m trying to get better at letting stuff like that go.

By far my favorite anime this half a year was Karakai Jouzu na Takagi-san, which also has fairly simple, everyday conversational Japanese that is often repeated, making it really good for my language learning purposes. In contrast, I did not care for Watashi ga Motete Dousunda, though I found it harmless and watchable. Several of the dramas were things I loved watching, but none so much as Hajimete Koi wo Shita Hi ni Yomu Hanashi. In terms of language learning, I also really enjoyed that there is a lot of studying in the drama itself, giving me interesting words and concepts to think about. In terms of dramas I didn’t enjoy, I can’t pick between Kono Koi wa Tsumi na no ka and 1 Page no Koi. The first was, to me, absolutely pointless, and the main character had no appeal for me whatsoever. The latter, dear lord, I could write a whole post about the sloppy writing, editing, overall plot, characterization… I feel like most of the drama was taken up by flashbacks repeated endlessly. While I am aiming for enjoyable but not quality dramas I can watch raw, these two missed low, while some of the others missed high (I really liked 3-nen A-gumi, and then was surprised by the level of enjoyment I ended up with while watching Daisy Luck [top prize for surprising enjoyment because my expectations were about as low as you can get] and Attack No.1 [I figured I’d enjoy this because I love volleyball and also sports stuff with female characters, but even then I didn’t expect to get sucked into it as much as I did]). Eerie didn’t hook me at the beginning, but it actually got really interesting, I think, and by the end I was completely sucked in (despite missing a lot in this one especially).

I am currently close to finished another drama with jp-subs (Watashi no Uchi ni wa, Nannimo nai, which I’m loving), and another one raw (Onzoshi Boys, which is honestly the perfect kind of drama for me to watch raw, #noregrets).

What is your favorite Japanese show you’ve seen this year, whenever it came out? I am always looking for new things to try. :heart:

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#10

Probably きのう何食べた？I’m also a big fan of 緊急取調室. Season 3 is wrapping up now.

#11

きのうなに食べた？is one I’ve been watching slowly, but I definitely need to move it off the back burner. I want to understand everything but also want to watch it raw for practice, so I’ve been struggling to find the right mood for it. The latter I’ve been seeing around–do I need to watch the first two seasons before jumping into the third? I love 天海祐希 (though it otherwise just seems like so many dudes).

#12

Not really - it’s very episodic. And yes, it’s largely a bunch of dudes like many detective dramas. But the cast are all really good.

If you want “not a bunch of dudes,” 白衣の戦士 is good, lighthearted fun.

#13

I am not unwilling to watch shows that are largely a bunch of dudes, it just doesn’t help them move up the list for watching. A recommendation does, though, so thank you!

Ah, I’ve seen that around as well! I couldn’t quite tell if it was something I would like or not, so maybe with this nudge I will give it a try.

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#14

Anki-focused update!

anki-stats-2019-06-29%4000-19-41

I am continuing to work on getting my daily card number down. 299 for tomorrow is at least in the direction I want to go. (It used to be up around or over 500 every day.) Right now my goal is to get the far number, for 30 days out, down to 100. (I figure I can’t control so much what is coming in the short short term, but what I do every day can move the longer short term numbers down, so that is why I am keeping an eye on 30 days out. That said, I haven’t noticed it moving down yet… but I will persevere.)

Another thing I’ve been looking at for motivation is the Answer Buttons graph. For young and mature both, I want to be hitting 3 or 4 more often in order to get longer intervals going and fewer cards a day. Part of this is just that I am often doing cards while doing other things instead of focusing and thinking properly, so I am working to make sure I think about my answer before seeing if I got it right. That young rate of hitting 2, though, has not noticeably gone down, either. However, my correct answers on mature cards percentage has been staying around 90% for a long time, and that’s not something I want to lose in my quest to decrease my cards a bit more (aka if it’s really a 2, I’m not going to push 4).

The big spikes in Added are from syncing my Kindle. It feels like I am constantly encountering new words, but my day-to-day add rates are still going down–this is good! I think I am making real progress in growing my vocabulary. Every time I look at my mature cards (like today: 18,470!) I am filled with happiness. (Note: I am well aware that I have many many words left to learn, however.) A lot of the words I look up are already in anki, so I either review them if I should’ve known them already or bump them up for learning if they were suspended in “is this card worth learning sooner rather than later” limbo. I am really happy with my choice to suspend all my unlearned cards and then purposefully unsuspend ones I know I want to learn. I learn 10 new cards a day, and with each one I know they are things I want to learn at this point in my studying, and all are quality cards that help my understanding.

The real motivation for this post, however, is because I finally, finally, FINALLY caught up on dealing with duplicate cards. When I got started reading seriously on my Kindle, looking up so many new words and adding them all to anki meant I had a ton of duplicate cards. I could’ve deleted them all, and sometimes I did, but way more often I didn’t–I wanted to know what I’d seen more often so I could learn it sooner, and lots of times I also wanted that example sentence for my card. I kept all those not-ready-for-learning kindle cards in their own deck, and duplicates had their own tag, and I’ve been working through them steadily, just a little bit every day without making it a time-consuming thing, for about a year. At the largest point, I had over 5,000 duplicates, including both the kindle ones and the straggling ones I had from when I merged my Core10k deck with my mining deck. It feels like just last month that I still had 2,000 or so, but somehow! Somehow! Today! I finished the last one! I have NO DUPLICATES in my anki right now, and those unseen cards, all 1,002 of them, are cards I’ve seen multiple times in the wild and want to prioritize learning, all with example sentences and Japanese definitions. I still have a lot to do (again, in drips and drabs because I don’t want this to be a big part of my process [even though I’m sure it sounds like it is right now]) with stuff like things I’ve tagged as ‘add’ because they don’t have J-J definitions, and then (oh dear) all the unready kindle cards that weren’t duplicates… (checks) all 6,112 of them (!!), some of which are probably duplicates with different orthography (like I see one already: 一遍, which is in my kindle deck as いっぺん), but honestly I don’t care very much about those. If I need to prioritize them, I will see them out somewhere again and look them up again and find them in my anki and bring them out of the kindle deck and into the light of the main deck, in time. Anyway, yay for no duplicates, at last!

Finally, since I’m looking at all my anki business anyway, a look at some of my tags! When I add a card, I tag it with something letting me know (usually very vaguely) where it came from. For example, I’ve added 4,849 cards from Arashi things, 537 from my six weeks studying abroad, 2,060 from a book of idioms, 9,366 from my Kindle (noting, again, that about 6,000 of those are of dubious usefulness), 602 from pixiv, 1,315 from college, 3,446 from yomichan (often combined with another tag; also my yomichan is still not working and it’s driving me nuts), and 2,496 tagged ‘random,’ which can be a lot of things but is often used when I get words from dramas. Looking at this, I had no idea I added over a thousand words from my college classes. I think a lot of them were not from my main Japanese classes, but from the two reading classes I took. Both of those classes had me reading Japanese written for Japanese people, and as it was super focused close reading and we had to be prepared for every sentence, I looked up EVERYTHING. A lot of those words, I can still remember the context from the stories we were reading–they were all really weird stories, and I loved it.

Today I took the bus somewhere, so I am all caught up on anki (main deck and RTK deck), and even learned ahead some in RTK (I’m at 727). This is doubly nice because it means when I go to bed, instead of pushing to get that last little bit of anki done before reading, I can read first and longer, hooray! I finished Toradora 4 and am now reading 十角館の殺人. I’m only 5% in but already really enjoying it. And, to tie it back to anki, there are lots of interesting-to-me words! For example, instead of 言う this author constantly uses 云う. I’ll add it to anki when I sync, and then the next time I read something where the author does that, I won’t falter in my reading.

In terms of watching, I finished Onzoshi Boys (practically tailor-made for raw drama watching), am still watching Kemono ni Narenai Watashitachi (which I think is pretty bad but I will probably still finish it for various reasons), and started Hakui no Senshi on gaiaslastlaugh’s recommendation–I am enjoying it! It is strangely easy to understand for a drama set in a hospital, which is great. (If I had tried to watch Black Pean without subs, for example, I would have drowned immediately, but this will work, I think.) I am finding the main two characters very charming. <3

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#15

Those are some sexy Anki stats :star_struck: I know that Anki is not everything, recognizing words is not the same as “knowing them” etc, etc, but I also can’t help but be happy when I look at the number of mature items. Some people are motivated by numbers I guess :sweat_smile:

Just wanted to share a tip since I’m also in the process of trying to lower my daily Anki load. I find it much easier to hit 3-4 on a card if I disable the “next due date” on the answer buttons. When I see that hitting “easy” or “normal” on a card will send it away for 10.4 months my brain panics and I start second-guessing myself, “maybe I don’t know it THAT well, I’ll just hit 2”. Getting rid of the next due date helped a bit with that. Maybe you’ve already disabled the option though. In that case, ignore this!

Another thing I tried (at least on the ios app, not sure if it’s available on the desktop client) is the auto-advance mode. You can set an interval of a few seconds after which Anki will automatically show the answer. I tried it for a while to lower the time I spend on reviews, I usually have an average of 9s/card and I set an auto-advance time of 6s/card which meant going through the decks much quicker and without getting distracted.
In the end, I stopped using this mode because it was a bit too intense for my tastes, but maybe it can work for other people.

I also got a kindle for language study some months ago and I need to create a workflow to get items into Anki but I keep procrastinating. After reading your log I feel motivated to start adding things from books I’m reading, although I’m a bit scared that I’ll get overwhelmed by reviews again :sweat_smile:

#16

Why thank you! I’ve been working hard on them for years, lol. I also know anki isn’t everything, but for me personally it has been a huge, huge part of my learning process, particularly for kanji, vocabulary, and learning to read. Different things work for different people–I find it magical that after years of doing anki, without studying phonetic components or anything in any purposeful way, yesterday I looked at a new-to-me kanji compound and had a good guess of how it’d be read. I was right (though of course sometimes I’m not), and the latter kanji, no matter how long I looked at it, was incomprehensible to me logically–I honestly couldn’t figure out WHAT about it made me sure it had to be read ち, and yet! Sometimes I can figure out those brain links and sometimes it’s a mystery, and I enjoy it both ways. : D Also, yes, there is a part of me motivated by numbers. I haven’t missed a day in anki in years, and that streak helps keep me going, especially.

I turned off the next due date a long time ago and it helped so much! I know you said to ignore your advice in that case, BUT it’s just such good advice, I want to second it. I do much much better without that sort of mental calculation working against me.

As for the auto-advance mode, that is a hard pass, fjdklafls. Unless I’m on the bus or lying down before bed, I am almost always doing anki while watching something. I have to be able to look back and forth and prioritize one over the other at any time, so for me personally auto-advance won’t work. What I need to do is not rush on the anki side, give the card a moment to sit in my brain before I hit space-bar. (Easier said than done sometimes.)

It’s a little bit of a pain to get stuff off the kindle into anki, for me! I’m sure there’s a better way than how I do it, but I do think my way has benefits that I value, too. Having everything automated is great, but working through the cards on my own, given that they’re entirely in Japanese, also helps my learning. Ah, the point is, though, that even though it’s a pain, it’s worth it in the end, I think. <3 (Depending, of course, on the question of whether SRS is worth it to a particular person or not!)

I’ve seen people say stuff like this and I genuinely don’t understand, could you explain? For me, no matter how many new cards I add to my deck, I only learn 10 new cards a day, so it is irrelevant to my workload whether I add 1 new card or 1,000. Are you in a place where you have no new cards a day, so adding any will up your reviews? Or is it that if you have new cards, you always learn them right away??

#17

July 1st marks the halfway point of my annual goal for my watching to be 80% in Japanese alone (be it dramas, movies, variety shows, whatever). I’ve been keeping track of my watching on bubbletimer.

Checking in on my stats after six months:

Japanese things with no subtitles at all: 69%
Japanese things with Japanese subtitles: 14%

Japanese things with English subtitles: 2%
Things in English: 15%

Thus, unbesmirched Japanese comes to 83%, and so far I am succeeding in my goal!

Keeping track like this shows me how much tv (etc) I watch… I was a little embarrassed to put it in hours instead of percentages, haha. Though actually, I don’t know how I compare against the average person. Maybe I watch a normal amount…? Anyway, 83 to 85% of my watching counts as studying, too, and besides, I enjoy it. : D (I had to google it to see where my numbers stack up, and I am actually way under the reported national average [no matter which figure I chose], which makes no sense to me at all. But I guess I won’t worry about it, then!)

In other news, I am really, really enjoying my current book! There was a long section describing a strange house (the 十角館 of the title), and at first I was really struggling, but after looking up one key word (等脚台形), suddenly I could start to picture it, and I went back and read everything through again to the point that now I think I could give a diagram of the house. It made me feel accomplished to keep at it until I understood. The other parts haven’t been as hard, though as usual I read slowly enough (and my brain is not as good at latching onto Japanese names as ones it’s more familiar with [and even worse, most of these are カタカナ nicknames]) that it’s hard for me to remember who is who. ポウ、エラリイ、カー、アガサ、オルツィ、ヴァン、uhhhh, I am missing a dude… ah, ルルウ! I spend a lot of time thinking to myself, okay, ポウ is big and カー is little, エラリイ talks a lot, ヴァン is the one who set up the house and don’t forget he has a fever… etc. I’ve gotten to a point where I’ve met some other characters who don’t go by nicknames and it’s such a relief. 河南 is much harder to mix up! Anyway, like I said, I am really enjoying this book. I can’t wait to see what happens next. <3

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#18

I usually limit daily new cards but I tend to set a limit per deck and over the last year my deck count has reached improbable numbers. Depending on what I’m focusing on I’ll stop myself from adding new cards to some decks and focus on others.
My Japanese Vocabulary deck has been on hold for the past year, but I’m reading a couple of books on the Kindle and there are a lot of words that I looked up, so the temptation is strong…
I burned out recently and I decided to stop adding cards completely until the reviews get more manageable, so I’m thinking carefully about what I should focus on next.

My case is a bit specific, but more generally I think people like to study the words they encounter as soon as possible so that the memory of that word is still fresh.
I know I did this when I first studied Japanese and was in my extensive reading phase, I ended up studying up to 80-100 words/day for a couple of weeks. Although of course, I wasn’t creating detailed cards as you are (I just used rikai-sama). And yes, Anki kicked my butt after that :sweat_smile:

P.s. thanks for mentioning bubbletimer, I was looking for something like that. I’m gonna give it a try later. Congrats on the 80% goal!

#19

Interesting! Thank you for the explanation. <3 I hope bubbletimer works for you, too!

#20

「事件の真相が分ったって云うのかい」 守須が驚いて訊き直すと、江南は、ああ、と呟いてグラスの水割りを撃た。

Here is a sentence from the book I am currently reading. I get everything until the end–that’s うつ, right? Why is it 撃た instead of 撃った? And… what does it mean? 河南 is making drinks for himself and one other person. When he 撃つs the drink, is he drinking it himself, or passing it to his friend, or? In the previous sentence he says to his friend, 酒、出来ましたよ, so he’s not still making the drinks–unless he made his friend’s and then started his own? It’s frustrating that I don’t think anything at all complicated is going on here, and yet I don’t get it~