Freedom from the SRS and the dictionary

Today I realised someting nice.
If a card is scheduled for more than 6 months, it might as well as be erased.
Plain normal reading will give you more exposure than your SRS deck. And this exposure will be of better quality.

I'm also changing my strategy for reading and SRSing:
* I'll try not using a dictionary anymore.
* I'm not adding adding cards for vocabulary that I can figure out from context.
* I'll add to the SRS sentences for the words that I had to look up.

Actually I was doing this already before writing this post. I was reading this text:
http://news.tbs.co.jp/newseye/tbs_newseye4072374.html
The only word I looked up was 殺到. The rest I could figure out.

Early rising

I'm not an early riser. But I can imagine some of the benefits it would bring me. 

I live in the south of brasil, in a city called Sao Jose, but my job is in Florianopolis, which is an island. I have to cross the bridge everyday to get there. The bridge is the only access to the island, so there is a lot of traffic, specially from 7:00 am to 8:30 and from 17:00 to 19:30. My goal is to totally bypass that.

I'm waking up one hour earlier each day, until I get to 5:00 am. I'll cross the bridge around 6:00 am and 16:00.

Btw, the picture is the view from my window, that mass of land in the horizon is Florianopolis.

Anki stats

Just for the records, the last anki stats: 258 joyo kanji to go.

The 2955 seen cards in this deck contain:

• 1877 total unique kanji.
• Jouyou: 1687 of 1945 (86.7%).
• Jinmeiyou: 41 of 287 (14.3%).
• 149 non-jouyou kanji.

Jouyou levels:

• Grade 1: 80  of 80  (100.0%).
• Grade 2: 160 of 160 (100.0%).
• Grade 3: 200 of 200 (100.0%).
• Grade 4: 199 of 200 (99.5%).
• Grade 5: 185 of 185 (100.0%).
• Grade 6: 180 of 181 (99.4%).
• JuniorHS: 683 of 939 (72.7%).

Japanese Progress Report

Today while watching the episode 19 of Tales of the Abyss, I realized I was not chocking on unknown vocabulary anymore. 

I'm finally starting to get that native feel of vocabulary, where you only need to listen the word once to "get it". Like when you hear a new word in English and think "ah, this must be that", without looking it up. I had already experienced that many times while reading, sometimes while listening, but now it's turning into something usual.

Nevertheless, I'm feeling great about it.

Learning french from the perspective of a portuguese/english bilingue

I started listening to lots of French today. One might try and do the same expecting to get the same results. For that, I'll leave here a disclaimer.

At the time, I can speak and listen both english and portuguese at native level. This gives me a huge advantage for learning French. I have an impression that 95% of French vocabulary is cognate or with English or Portuguese. The grammar has a lot in common with both languages and pronunciation has a lot in common with Portuguese.

If one starts to learn French only knowing English, he might have much more troble with vocabulary and pronunciation than me. So be more carefull.

Prerequisites for learning a language

When I first started this blog, I thought that anyone, at any age, could learn a new language. After this long year, I realized there actually are some requirements.

1) The habit of reading.

If you don't normally read in your own language, you will not be able to read in a foreign one. Reading gives great opportunity to learn new words while having fun.

2) You must enjoy listening to something.

Music is not the best. In my experiente, the best are dialogues. I strongly recommend shows like South Park. It's almost only made of dialogues and its fun. Also it gives you opportunity to learn words that you'd normaly won't learn from books. Hahaha.

HJHFATT

HJHFATT stands for half japanese, half french all the time.

I just happened to get southpark completely dubbed in French and I'm simply too curious to not enjoy it.

I plan to start it half time tomorrow.

Kanji statistics

The 2917 seen cards in this deck contain:

• 1863 total unique kanji.
• Jouyou: 1676 of 1945 (86.2%).
• Jinmeiyou: 41 of 287 (14.3%).
• 146 non-jouyou kanji.

Jouyou levels:

• Grade 1: 80  of 80  (100.0%).
• Grade 2: 160 of 160 (100.0%).
• Grade 3: 200 of 200 (100.0%).
• Grade 4: 198 of 200 (99.0%).
• Grade 5: 185 of 185 (100.0%).
• Grade 6: 180 of 181 (99.4%).
• JuniorHS: 673 of 939 (71.7%).

Hehe, nice way to ruin your new year's resolutions. ^_^