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Hey, thanks for the slides, they look good! Also, thanks for introducing me to the YouTube channel, will definitely be adding it to my Japanese learning time :)
I didn’t know where to add this, I didn’t see it referenced elsewhere. But in the level 5 radical deck, the radical for run (走) which is shown properly in the radical page appears as a different kanji. I kind of fixed my card, so I can’t paste here what it looks like. I had to get the right kanji from google translate.
<div class=”d4p-bbt-quote-title”>Joel wrote:</div>
You’re not daft – there is a pattern. It’s just that 一人 and 二人 are not it, but Koichi never mentions that anywhere. Yes, curveballs come out of nowhere all over the place. Just wait until you start learning how to count days. =)Ah fantastic! I’m glad that’s been cleared up then :) And that I’m not the only person who finds this jarring!
I had the exact same reaction there XD
Ok, finished Season 4. You guys weren’t kidding that things get harder here.
My main problem was the amount of new vocab dropped on me. There were days that by the time I was trying to get past the last few words, with only two words remaining, I’d still manage to miss the meaning. Like say I had noisy and mean left (after going through a hundred words, missing about a third). I’d be so burned out that it would go “うるさい – I don’t remember, what is it? Ah, noisy. Again. いじわる – I don’t remember. Ah, mean. Again. うるさい – Ok, I JUST saw this… crap. I don’t remember. Noisy. Right. Remember, noisy. Again. いじわる – … … Come on! Why can’t I remember it! It’s only two freaking cards! I saw it ten seconds ago!”
It was frustrating.
The grammar itself went by well enough, but I was spending so much time on cards that I cut back to one or two pages per day rather than a whole chapter as I’d been doing up to Season 3. Mostly to keep from adding a lot more vocab. It took a while, and a lot of marking katakana vocab as easy so it wouldn’t clutter my deck, but I’ve managed to cut down from 100 to 60-70 vocab per day.
What I think added to the difficulty was that Season 4 has no practice pages, meaning no sentence cards. Seeing the vocab used in sentences, even simple ones, really helps me cement the meanings. I can work out what a word means from context, which helps solidify the connections in my brain so that it’s easier to identify the word when it comes up on its own. I did the exercises as they came up, but without cards to review them every day they don’t stick as powerfully. I’m planning on adding my own sentence cards during my next study session, now that I finished this season.
I posted to Lang-8! Got some corrections, though deciphering what the corrections mean will take a bit of effort, since they corrected me in Japanese :P Some of those are easy enough. For example, I posted with spaces since I was writing in ひらがな. I know that’s not the proper way to write, but I figured it would be easier to transmit what I intended to say. The corrections stripped away the spaces, so I guess my next post will not carry spaces.
I found that trying to write a post of my own was quite a challenge. I had first written it up in my native language (Spanish). When trying to translate, however, I had to strip the sentences down and keep making them simpler. Found I wasn’t certain how to say things like “A because B”, conjugating outside of present/future and past, etc. I imagine that will all come with time, but it was an illuminating experience.
Anyway, I’m still pumped to start Season 5, and write more sentence cards to add to anki.
Yeah! Finished season 3!
It’s been an interesting season. Let’s see what I can recall of what I saw.
There’s the verbs, to start. Being able to say more than “this is that” and variations on the theme is cool. I’m glad that we’ve only seen four conjugations so far, though I understand that there are more forms and such coming up. That’s going to be a pain to get through.
じょし (the particles) are still a bit confusing, but I am slowly warming up to them. The difference between は and が is subtle, but clear enough. に is fairly easy to use, so long as you remember not to stick を everywhere.
すき and きらい are also pretty simple to use. Those lessons went by quickly.
The sentence enders are going to take me a while, I’ll need to see more of them before I feel comfortable using them.
Overall, the Season went by pretty quickly. The katakana vocab keeps piling up with 20 new words every day still, but I have the japanese vocab well in hand. The verbs are a bit hard to recall, but that’s more due to not having many sentences that use them, or mnemonics or anything like that. They simply got dumped in two lists. As I see them show up again and again in future sentences and the vocab itself I should be able to recall them.
Looking forward to Season 4.
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This reply was modified 10 years, 2 months ago by
Kynnath.
Decided to keep them together with the rest of the vocab, actually. Since in Japanese text katakana will be mixed in, I figure it’s better to train myself to jump between the two than to study in katakana mode. It’s not like the cards take me long individually. It’s just that there’s so many of them :P
Ugh, I’m getting swamped with the katakana vocab. It throws 20 new words every day so far. Thankfully they’re just awful translations, so I can generally guess the meaning outright and then it sticks. But they take me longer than the actual Japanese because they’re so many.
I’m doing them every day. I used to do them right before studying a chapter on TextFugu, but with Season 3 they’re kind of piling up. Today I had 243 cards (took about 30 minutes), so after I did the cards I took a break and did the lesson later in the day. I have six decks (Hiragana, Katakana, Radicals, Kanji, Vocab and Sentences), and I run down them in that order. Vocab and Sentences are the ones growing the most.
In order to cut down on how much you need to review, you might want to mark the ones you feel are easy as “easy” instead of “good”. That way they get pushed farther back. I have only just started doing that. I hope it will help.
Hello! First time I post on the forum. I just finished Season 2 and am about to start with the first chapter of Season 3. I usually do about a chapter per day; I’d left the Season review for today expecting it to be a bunch of exercises but it was just reminiscing.
I’ve managed so far to not skip a single day of study. I warm up with the drag-n-drop kana exercise, followed by about a hundred “rights” in Real Kana to get ひらがな to stick. I’m getting three or 4 wrong there, between typos and missing the だくてん, but I’m pretty comfortable with it. It’s helped that I’ve tried to learn Japanese before, so I was somewhat familiar with ひらがな already. But I really like Textfugu’s approach, I’m farther with it than I’ve ever been before.
So after practicing that I run down the five Anki decks (Hiragana, Radicals, Kanji, Vocab and Sentences), which takes about half an hour. I have the most trouble with the reading of the kanji. The meaning is solid (the crazy stories with the radicals and how they’re used to build the kanji really help!), but since there’s very little practice with the おんよみ pronunciation, and they don’t have audio files, it doesn’t stick as well.
Some of the sentences feel like tongue-twisters, too. Especially the ones that alternate quickly between し and ち sounds. Words like わたしたち, for example. I also try to close my eyes, listen to the sentence and try to work out what was said to train my ears. I think some listening comprehension is missing, but perhaps more of that is worked into later Seasons?
I’m very happy with how quickly I’m learning vocabulary. I feel that’s one of the biggest hurdles when learning a language. You can learn the grammar quickly, but be unable to say anything because you don’t have the words you need. But there’s enough repetition with the sentences and vocabulary decks to get things to really stick. Anki is like magic, even if it feels like it takes forever some days.
I’ve also been keeping up with the language log, writing things down in Evernote. It helps to keep the studying from being too passive, forcing me to put into my own words the lessons on grammar. Even if I haven’t had much need to revisit past entries, just writing things down is a huge help.
Anyway, I’m very excited to keep going and actually be able to start making sentences beyond “is”, “isn’t”, “wasn’t” and “was”. I haven’t posted anything in Lang-8 yet because of that. Hopefully once I know a bit more I can use jisho.org to complement the vocabulary lessons when writing things on my own.
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This reply was modified 10 years, 2 months ago by
