Given that I’m actually off this week, I’m going to see if I can do this every day – assuming I do enough interesting things to write two sentences about! And I’m going to do it in Kanji as well.

Typing it up on the Blog is actually a little easier than doing it by hand, as it guesses the Kanji predictive text-style as I type the kana.  But I still have to recognise the right Kanji as they come up, and I plan to hand-write them as well, for practice.

So here’s today’s effort:

Today I went to Japanese Class by bus and subway.

Watashi wa kyou basu to chikatetsu de nihongo no kurassu ni ikimashita.

わたし　は　きょう　ばす　と　ちかてつ　で　にほんご　の　くらっす　に　いきました。

私は今日バスと地下鉄で日本語のクラッスに行きました。

I played computer games today from 4pm to 4:30pm.

Watashi wa kyou conpyuutaa geimu gogo yoji kara yojihan made asobimashita.

わたし　は　きょう　コンピューター　ゲーム　ごご　よじ　から　よじはん　まで　あそびました。

私は今日コンピューターゲーム午後四時から四時半まで遊びました。

Addendum:  I’m sure that I’d already changed the setting that stopped Japanese characters displaying properly.  I wonder if a recent WordPress update changed it back again.  I do hope it’s not retroactively broken previous posts

A braver person would label this section “What I will do”, but I’m not, so there! So basically this will be a place for me to put down some thoughts about what I could, should, and maybe will be doing in the future.

Kanji and Kana

Continue with the RTK reps, obviously. At some point, I should get RTK Vol. 3, which will give me another thousand kanji, specifically the remaining new Jouyou Kanji that were added in 2010.

The Kana decks now only give me one or two cards per week, so they’re no trouble.

What I really should be doing, however, is actually using Kanji and Kana. I get a bit of practice (especially with Kana) when I do the Tae Kim and Core Anki decks, but I don’t practice going from a Japanese word to the Kanji, or from a spoken sentence to the written one.

I also should try reading actual Japanese – there are raw Manga scans out there, and I have an iPod app that has daily news in Manga form. I do occasionally attempt to puzzle through what one says, but I usually give up fairly quickly. I also have a “Read Real Japanese” book with audio versions of all the texts; that’s definitely a resource I should be using.

Another avenue is finding Japanese subtitles to things, especially Japanese TV and film. It’s been shown that same-language subtitles help with literacy (assuming there’s some there to start with). I’ve found a few (all of Nihonjin no Shiranai Nihongo and some of JIN), but haven’t really made a point of regularly sitting down and watching.

Oh, and I should learn name and place-name Kanji at some point.

These are my ongoing Japanese learning actions.? Nice short section so everything all at once…

Kanji

I use Anki daily – more specifically, I use the iPhone app on my iPod touch. It’s really handy, especially as my daily commute has specific “dead” times – waiting for the bus, travelling on the Underground – where I can just get out the iPod and do some reps.

Usually I “write” the Kanji with a finger on a nearby surface – my other hand, the iPod, my leg – but when I’m doing reps at home (usually late on a non-work night because without the usual commute to do I forgot) I write them in a graph-paper exercise pad. Sometimes (mostly when I’m role-playing, for some reason) I get out the plain A5 pad from my jacket pocket and my brush pen and try some calligraphy.

I have some other decks in Anki, but RTK is still generating anywhere between 40 and 80 due cards each day, so I don’t often get enough time to do them.

Vocabulary and Grammar

I’m doing my daily Gradint “podcast”, so that’s five words / phrases per day.

When I get my Kanji reps done quickly, I try and do some of the Tae Kim grammar deck (much easier now that I’m learning the vocab via Gradint), as well as the Core2k/6k deck (also helped by Gradint). My Kana decks still occasionally throw up a card, so I do them when they appear.

Immersion

I’m listening to my Anime score playlist on my iPod, and occasionally remembering to listen to Japanese podcasts.

Next post: What I Could Be Doing – Kanji and Kana

In which I detail where I am at the moment with my Japanese studies.

This turned out to be a bit of a monster document, so I shall be splitting it up into bits.? The first section is going to be “What I Have Done”, then “What I Am Doing” and finally “What I Could Be Doing”. Each section will talk about “Kanji and Kana”, “Vocabulary and Grammar” and “Immersion”. I’ll be posting individual sections, subsections, or cramming lots of them together, depending on how I feel.

The State of the Education Address

What I Have Done

Kanji and Kana

Pretty much the first thing I did when I decided to learn Japanese was learn the Kana – the syllabic writing systems. I wrote posts about this here, here and here. I eventually moved from Mnemosyne to Anki, and I’m now pretty comfortable with them.

As for Kanji, In November last year, I finished Remembering The Kanji Volume 1, which means I can theoretically remember how to write 2042+ Kanji, given an English keyword. In practise, I have about an 80% retention rate, although which 80% varies from day to day.

The Reviewing the Kanji site was a godsend, with me stealing using community-submitted stories all over the place. Even when I didn’t use those stories directly, they certainly helped me with finding my own.

“Finishing” RTK really means that I have gone through each of those kanji at least once in my SRS program, Anki. A Spaced Repetition System (SRS), for those who haven’t been following my incessant bletherings on the subject, is a “smart” flashcard program. It does the normal flashcard thing of showing you a question and seeing if you know the answer, but it also handles scheduling the cards in some cunning way that optimises recall. So long as you do your daily “reps” – the cards up for “repetition” each day – everything should go deeper and deeper into your long-term memory.

From the stats Anki generates, I see that it took 14 months to get all the way through RTK, with a seven-month period in the middle where I did no Kanji reps at all. That was due to taking actual Japanese classes, using Anki to remember what I learnt, instead of the RTK deck. I now think that was a mistake – I should have put RTK first, and just made more time, doing cards from the lessons once the Kanji reps were done.

Next post: What I Have Done – Vocabulary and Grammar.

Kana chart August 21st 2009

Well, as of this morning, I can write out the entire Kana chart from memory!

This was done using Windows Journal on a Toshiba Tecra tablet PC, so it’s slightly rougher than even my usual scrawl, and I’ve sneakily not saved the grid pattern that made everything all neat and organised. We will call it even.

I also blanked on a couple of characters – including ones I thought I’d learned weeks ago! But they eventually dropped into my brain…

But yay!

Next week – Kanji! Of course, instead of a couple of hundred characters, I now have to memorise a couple of thousand… should only take me a few years!

My Kana handwriting, as of 19th August 2009

My kana (Hiragana and Katakana) handwriting as of Wednesday 19th 2009. I have managed to swap ら and り (third column from the left, top two characters), and I’ve only written the Katakana (bottom group) that I know so far.

These are charts of all the kana (well, minus the ones I don’t know), in the equivalent of alphabetical order. Down the right are the vowels – a, i, u, e, o. Then each column has the same vowel with a different consonent. So reading the top row right-to-left gets you: a, ka, sa, ta, na, ha, ma, ya, ra (or “ri”, given my lapse in concentration), and wa. And then there’s ん – “n” – all on it’s own at the end – it’s the only consonant that isn’t followed by a vowel.

I suppose this isn’t so bad, given I’ve only been at this for a month or so. But I do wish it looked a little prettier. And I hate the way my か and カ come out. Perhaps in time.