My Yaruki （やる気）

I've noticed something over the past month or so that if i think about it daily I don't feel like I'm making an improvement but when i think back to around this time last month my ability in Japanese has already grown vastly for example I know my vocabulary has grown hugely hundreds and hundreds of new words in less that a month which i put mostly down to the great learning tools over at iknow and anki for my long term retention and the more i learn the easier it becomes to learn new words they just seem to stick better.

My understanding of grammer has vastly improved also this is probably more down to seeing 100s of sentences in context than it is me studying them on sites like tae kim , although i must admit that Japanese in Mangaland has helped alot in my understanding of things that i couldn't get my head around with sentences alone, oh and by the way i highly recommend Japanese in Mangaland even over tae kim for learning grammer as IMO it's much easier to understand and the sentences with manga context makes it even more enjoyable a read, one of very few textbooks I'd recommend.

So basicaly make sure you keep it up everyday no matter how tired/depressed/busy etc you are as most of us know that half of the time we are just being lazy you've always got time to do atleast something in your target language even if its just a quick 10 min timebox in your favourite SRS that will be 10 mins worth of knowledge that you have retained unlike if you did nothing at all, even for example earlie this week i had the worst headache that i've had in years I still managed atleast my reviews probably wasn't on my best form but atleast it got them done i would hate to see the reviews if i had left them although i did collapse in bed after that with some headache tables :D

Well after doing Japanese 'properly' for almost 2 months now I finally see what other people were talking about that languages are not hard to learn I think there are 3 key ingredients to learning any language nothing to do with intelligence or being in the country of the language your trying to learn. It's more down to time spent, effort and motivation if your missing any of those you will not learn the language at any sort of reasonable pase even if your surrounded by the language and nobody speaks your native language you will still not obtaine any sort of fluency unless you put those 3 things into practice.

This can be proven easily by the amount of foreigners that live in Japan for many years and can hardly read 平仮名　and can barely say anything past こんにちは / お元気ですか　etc they are missing atleast 1 of those things, if they have no motivation/interest they will not try to learn so there mind will just class what they see/hear as useless information no matter how much they are exposed to it.

Time spent is obviouse you can have all the motivation and effort in the world but if you only spend 1-2 hours a week its going to be a long time before you notice any improvement, you can pretty much gaurantee the person that spends 3-4 hours a day doing there chosen language will be much further ahead than the person doing 1-2 hours a week, this is often why classes dont work as some students will only do the language when they are in class (maybe a few hours a week) and don't spend time studying in there own time.

Last but not least 'effort' if you don't put the effort in e.g. keeping up with reviews, maintaining a language environment basicaly doing anything in your target language your not going to see much if any results, there's no excuse for "oh i fancy a brake from Japanese it'll be ok till tomorrow" that one day can easily turn into 2 days, 2 week, months and so on, you need to keep it up no matter what even if you just do your daily SRS reps even if your tired just do something in your target language keep putting the effort in.

Since i put these 3 things into action my Japanese has improved leaps and bounds compared to the years before when trying to learn, usually down to not putting in the effort daily (always taking that one little brake...), now that i put in daily effort I'm seeing huge improvements in less than 2 months.

So basically がんばって　(do your best)

Stats update.

Deck created: 1.7 months ago
Total number of cards: 643

Card counts
Mature cards: 64 (9.95%)
Young cards: 579 (90.05%)
Unseen cards: 0 (0.00%)

Correct answers
Mature cards: 100.0% (3 of 3)
Young cards: 79.1% (3067 of 3879)
First-seen cards: 80.7% (601 of 745)

The 643 seen cards in this deck contain:

• 466 total unique kanji.
• Jouyou: 457 of 1945 (23.5%).
• Jinmeiyou: 2 of 287 (0.7%).
• 7 non-jouyou kanji.

As many of you may know Anki (SRS) has recently been updated to include a timeboxing feature which i think is great, for those who don't know timeboxing is basically setting yourself an allocated amount of time i.e. 10 minutes and within this set time you do your reps, when you reach the end of the set time you stop and take a brake.

This can work wonders for efficiency and getting alot of reps done in a short amount of time probably the reason being is because you know you hav'nt got long and there's no "oh god this is going to take forever" which causes you to procrastinate and be distracted easily, your mind tends to work more efficiently and you get distracted much less when you brake it into smaller chunks.

So now that Anki has timeboxing built in you can set your 10 minutes or what ever you choose and hopefully be more efficient as the problem was before with me anyway is that i would set myself say 15-30 minutes to do reps and completly forget to check the time etc so ended up going way over, which is'nt exactly a bad thing if your in the right frame of mind.

So the next time your doing your daily reps try timeboxing to see if it improves your efficiency.

Stats Update.

The 515 seen cards in this deck contain:

• 359 total unique kanji.
• Jouyou: 352 of 1945 (18.1%).
• Jinmeiyou: 2 of 287 (0.7%).
• 5 non-jouyou kanji.

Over the last few days i have been toying with iknow going through the first step of the core 2000 series i've been collecting the sentences while going through the vocab lessons, yes i know the english translation are'nt entirly accurate so i try to break them down myself using the grammer i've learned so far, although aslong as you don't take there english translation too literaly there should'nt be too much problem using these its better than using just vocab cards on there own atleast.

Anyway back on topic after almost finishing the first 200 words on iknow i've noticed a common theme that any words i learn via iknow then input an example sentence into my SRS (Anki) stick like glue where as if i just choose an example sentence from a book like UBJG with a perticular word i'm trying to learn it often takes me much longer than ones i've learned while going through iknow this seems to hold true with words i already new before iknow they stick even better now.

This works for many obvious reasons your giving yourself more connections to the word through hearing a native speaker and in context via a sentence then with adding it to an SRS the spaced repitition helps it stick for the long term your giving your mind much more to associate with the word than just in context within a sentence, it's the same as if you heard the word spoken in a show that your watching you can pretty much guarantee that word will stick better than one you have only entered as a sentence and never heard anywere this is why the AJATT method works so well it speeds up the long term retention process.

So from what i've seen so far iknow is a great way to quickly up your vocab knowledge although not so great for grammer which as always tae kim's site is the place to go but as many people have said not to worry too much about grammer as there is'nt that much to learn in comparison to all the vocab.

Over the next few months i'll aim to complete the first series of 2000 words and give an update on how i think its helped.

Will give an Anki stats update at the end of the week but as a quick note for myself I'm just about to reach 400 sentences with a few vocab cards thrown in.