Vacations, more or less.

No, this is not a post to excuse myself for not using a SRS again. I'm still using it daily. I have not skipped a review since my last post. I'm just adding fewer cards.

5 days ago, my Haruhi Suzumiya novels arrived, and I'm reading the first volume. I'm doing 3-4 pages and watching/listening only 1 houre of japanese for day only. I'm only adding sentences for the words I want to know really baddly, so it means only 4-5 new sentences/day.

The great thing is: I'm doing fine!
I can read these novels without much effort, for laizure. And I'm loving them. The plot is really nice and all, but these novels have something that really impressed me:
The ultra long sentences it cointains. It is one thing that until now I ignored and I'm still not used to it, so it is gonna be great training.

Short pause and reacceleration

The listening the news project is somewhat halted. I'll go back to it soon enough.

I did not reviewed my sentences and RTK decks for 3 days. The following day, I had 500+ sentences to review, mainly from the mass adds from the hollydays. The RTK review was very small and it is back on track. The sentences review is probably gonna be back on track today. For 6 days I only added 3 sentences.

But I did not stopped with the fun stuff. I started a new experiment. I got Code Geass again, now with subtitles. It was not on purpose. It is harder to find raw series as soon as they get out of fashion.

So I started to watch them with the subs.

For my admiration the lyrics translation is not that great. There is even a mounstruous transcription mistake. Also I've seen many other mistakes in the series.

Well, what am I doing with subbed anime? I'm watching it slowly. I let it go while I get 100% of understanding. When I hear something I cannot figure out, I go back 10 secs and read the subs. Then I go back and hear it again. Most of the times I get that "click" and figure out the meaning of the word that I could not understand. Then I go back again and listen to it one more time.

Because of that, I can say that I understood 100% of the first 5 episode of Code Geass season 1. Yeah, it is cheatting. But hey, it gives me motivation!

The audio is also in the mp3. Only today I listened to episodes 1 to 5 two more times each.

Back online, for a few days

I'm back online, just until january 10th. My sentences deck suffered a lot from it, but it might have been for the good. I also could not listen to the day's news and it was boring to hear old stuff, so I had to fallback to good and old anime.

My anki stats are here:

The 2661 seen cards in this deck contain:

• 1748 total unique kanji.
• Jouyou: 1594 of 1945 (82.0%).
• Jinmeiyou: 33 of 287 (11.5%).
• 121 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: 591 of 939 (62.9%).

I know I'll have to throw some sentences out. I already threw some, so my kanji count will drop again. 

Christmas offline time

Ehe, christmas is only letting me connect to the internet a few hours a day, not everyday, only with a slow connection. I even feel like I'm turning into a normal person. 

No more news podcasts until january. But I'm not worried (anymore). I have some books to read and offline dictionaries (including one from the DS wich is pretty neat).

I'm also rewatching old favorite anime.

My sentence habits changed and so I was compelled to write them here. I'm doing this, just for a few days: I go to my anki unseen kanji list, select randomly a kanji, and then put it in the dictionary. After that I chose 2-3 words, preferably words that I already knew from listening, very simple words that contain the kanji meaning or words that I really wanned to know.

I did that yesterday and today. The result is that my joyo % jumped a bit wich is quite motivating.

The 2581 seen cards in this deck contain:

• 1687 total unique kanji.
• Jouyou: 1542 of 1945 (79.3%).
• Jinmeiyou: 33 of 287 (11.5%).
• 112 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: 168 of 181 (92.8%).
• JuniorHS: 551 of 939 (58.7%).

Isn't it great to see all these 100% ?

The News + The crisis

The crisis is affecting my vocabulary. Lately my vocabulary needs are turning to financial/preocupation related words. This is ruining my joyo count rate! These words keep using always the same kanjis time after time!

Joyo count:

The 2494 seen cards in this deck contain:

• 1630 total unique kanji.
• Jouyou: 1496 of 1945 (76.9%).
• Jinmeiyou: 31 of 287 (10.8%).
• 103 non-jouyou kanji.

Jouyou levels:

• Grade 1: 80 of 80 (100.0%).
• Grade 2: 159 of 160 (99.4%).
• Grade 3: 196 of 200 (98.0%).
• Grade 4: 186 of 200 (93.0%).
• Grade 5: 174 of 185 (94.1%).
• Grade 6: 167 of 181 (92.3%).
• JuniorHS: 534 of 939 (56.9%).

I should stop reading finantial news. It is also affecting my resolve.

Btw, tks for the comments. I started this blog so no one would doubt me when I speak about the timeframes. When I started explaining AJATT to my pals, they tought it was one more of these methods that promiss to teach you without effort.

As you realize, AJATT is all about effort.

Reading the News (2)

I'm far from understanding the news by audio sources. I'm doing it 2-3hours/day during weekdays. But it seems I need to listen to it more.

But I'm managing to get close to 100% understanding in from written material. Yes, it takes a while, I need the dictionary for it, but it is working.

And thanks to the news, my joyo count is raising quickly without extra effort again.

Reading and listening to the news is convincing me that the major obstacle of learning languages is vocabulary. It is simply a huge task. Way too many words. Grammar is not simple, but it fits for itself as you start to acquire more and more vocabulary. 

Learning a vocabulary of 10.000 words, 30 words/day, takes a lot of time. And during that time, you'll have plenty of time to practice the other aspects of the language.

Lastly, the joyo count for today:

The 2465 seen cards in this deck contain:

• 1615 total unique kanji.
• Jouyou: 1482 of 1945 (76.2%).
• Jinmeiyou: 31 of 287 (10.8%).
• 102 non-jouyou kanji.

Jouyou levels:

• Grade 1: 80  of 80  (100.0%).
• Grade 2: 159 of 160 (99.4%).
• Grade 3: 196 of 200 (98.0%).
• Grade 4: 186 of 200 (93.0%).
• Grade 5: 172 of 185 (93.0%).
• Grade 6: 165 of 181 (91.2%).
• JuniorHS: 524 of 939 (55.8%).

Why reading the news?

Over the last month I grew overconfident of japanese.

I'm already understanding a lot from anime/manga and that somehow made me think my japanese was already actually good.

The news put me in my place again. I'm just a beginner. I have tons to learn. And I cannot let my pace down in this critical time.

That was the first reason. The second reason is:
It is easier to come from nothing to being bad at something. Somehow languages look like creating a Diablo character (diablo the computer game). Going from lvl 1 to 10 is quick. Going from lvl 80 to 81 is a long way.

In anime, I'm already in 80%. It is hard to fight for every new 1% of understanding. And it is not that much motivating.

In the news, I'm lvl 1.

Starting from the beginning is painful, but everything is new. So everything I see will be contributing for my japanese.
Even if I only understand 10%, I like to think that these 10% are much more useful than the 80% from the anime.

The 80% from anime is pure confort. And confort is a dangerous thing.

I don't know if I made myself clear, but that's what I want to believe.

Btw, Phauna, thanks for the link for the kids news, it will be very useful.