I was a complete beginner in Japanese just a year ago. Now I've finally mined 10.000 cards in Anki, I understand the written language fluently and paid 0$ for it.
 |
Just a year ago I've known nothing but kana, basic grammar and like 100 words of basic vocabulary. Now I fluently understand written Japanese even within some narrowly specialized topics. I mainly used anime, visual novels and texts from wikipedia or news that I found interesting. February, 2022. The first step was the very basic vocabulary - a pre-made Anki deck with about 1000 words. It was hard but harder was the realization it's absolutely not enough for understanding everything more than "konnichiwa" type of conversations. Japanese is too reliant on individual meanings of kanji - I knew words like 理解 but had no idea 理 represents the idea of logic and 解 the idea of understanding and was confused whenever I saw them together with other kanjis. Forgetting basic vocabulary after getting further is also not a rare occasion. 料理? Paid....what? After that I've discovered mpvacious + yomichan - it granted me the ability to watch videos and save vocabulary from it. Example of a card I create in 2-3 seconds: https://imgur.com/a/PdQA37r Wathing something was a real challenge. Sometimes I had to look up each word in a sentence, the enjoyment of watching an episode was greatly reduced by all these times I have to pause and look up something but still I was ok with it as the episodes were awesome by themselves. Choosing an anime that doesn't have lots of advanced vocabulary but is enjoyable at the same time is not easy. On average I've been mining and learning about 25-100 words per day (but for this post I've speedrunned ～400 cards for 3 days, lol, wouldn't recommend doing it again) and spending about 1,5h on it with the intervals of about 2 sec/a card with huge leaps representing the strong factor of procrastination I've been struggling with. The only thing that was pushing me further is the "dependency" on Anki and realizing if I skip a day I'll have to face Anki for 2+ hours the next day or if I stop it completely I'll eventually forget everything I was studying and hours of work will just vanish in space. It took me too much time to actually start reviewing daily though.. So my daily stats look like that: https://imgur.com/a/UMzzQq5 And what's awesome about knowing so much vocabulary is the fact that you actually start to have problems with finding unknown and yet useful vocabulary (I don't bother with terms I personally don't understand even in my native language or some old Japanese vocabulary I'll see again only once in a lifetime). I can watch an entire episode and get only 5-10 new cards from it, so getting 100 cards like previously takes really a lot of time. It's much more than I currently know in English. Although the main disadvantage is the fact that it's rather passive than active vocabulary. It might take me a lot of time to remember a word I've trained myself to instantly recognize. I've never written anything more than responses in a simple chat with random people from Japan, I have almost no experience in writing and speaking. Also the fact that I still struggle with understanding spoken Japanese bothers me a lot. Kanji matter too much in this language. You said kishou? Oh, you mean 気象? But we don't seem to talk about weather, so 気性? 徽章...? \looking up* oh..it was 希少..* The correct word just doesn't even float in my mind, so any tips for how to get through this? Other stats: https://imgur.com/a/pOmXS0F. -- But generally speaking, it was in awesome journey. Just realizing that you fluently understand the language that was completely alien for you just a year ago is amazing. I don't regret all hours spent on reviewing during school breaks, it was fun to immerse into another culture. I'll keep studying and probably pick another language when I'll feel ready for it [link] [comments] |
from Language Learning https://ift.tt/KEACTVt
via Learn Online English Speaking
Comments
Post a Comment