My Yaruki （やる気）

Well we all know the importance of backing up our decks who would like to lose there 1000+ cards? So thought I would do a quick rundown of ways to back up in anki.

Export

The first way is probably the simplest just the standard export "file - export" enter the deck you wish to backup select file and click export, choose the file format and the location to save to probably best to save to some external device just in case your machine goes kaput.

Also you can select if you want the backup to include scheduling info so you don't lose that precious spaced repetition

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Sync & Save

Probably the best way (although you should do both for added peace of mind) is the syncing a copy to anki's server this has the added advantage to that you can either do your daily sentences reps online or have your deck shared across multiple machines.

Select settings, preferences and the sync & save tab under Autosaving I find it best to set all the options as ticked you can adjust your settings to your personal preferences if you have a temperamental machine its probably best to set these to save often.

You will need to create yourself a free account to able to sync once you've done this enter your username and password and set your syncing options i prefer to sync on both open and close ans this will update any online reps or reps I've done on other machines before i start.



Note: If you need to download your deck to a new anki setup go to the options for sync & save add your sync details and choose to sync on open this will automatically download your decks to your new installation.

Pretty simple but a reference for anybody that might need to know.

Well thought its about time I did a stats update seen as its been a while been listening to a good amount of Japanese recently and adding trying to add as many sentences as I could even with such a busy last few weeks.

Not many new Kanji recently as have been adding a lot from Understanding Basic Japanese Grammer which lacks many new vocab.


Deck created: 3.8 months ago
Total number of cards: 1222

Card counts
Mature cards: 704 (57.61%)
Young cards: 498 (40.75%)
Unseen cards: 20 (1.64%)

Correct answers
Mature cards: 95.6% (391 of 409)
Young cards: 86.0% (8725 of 10143)
First-seen cards: 87.7% (1144 of 1304)

The 1222 seen cards in this deck contain:
767 total unique kanji.
Jouyou: 740 of 1945 (38.0%).
Jinmeiyou: 5 of 287 (1.7%).
22 non-jouyou kanji.

Jouyou levels:
Grade 1: 70 of 80 (87.5%).
Grade 2: 143 of 160 (89.4%).
Grade 3: 147 of 200 (73.5%).
Grade 4: 112 of 200 (56.0%).
Grade 5: 77 of 185 (41.6%).
Grade 6: 65 of 181 (35.9%).
JuniorHS: 126 of 939 (13.4%).

Well i often here people saying that its generally a bad idea to set yourself too many goals or resolutions whatever you want to call them, but in my opinion setting yourself many goals can actually be advantageous.

The general consensus on why setting more than a few goals for yourself at time is bad tends to be that you get over worked, burned out etc and end up completely giving up after only a short period of time, now if we look at two common examples of resolutions people set lets say smoking and losing weight pretty common as I'm sure you will agree people will often set these goals at the same time often at the new year, which they are both pretty big lifestyle changes giving up something that your body is so used to, thus why a lot of people find it difficult to complete both goals they would be better off setting only one and the other later. Obviously everybody varies and people with greater will power may be able to manage this.

Now onto why I think its a good idea to set many goals all at once say for example something like my own personal list I have keeping fit, learning a language and saving money to name but a few which many of these I set around the same time after hitting a stage of wanting to improve myself, so far I've managed to stick with these although I have dropped some along the way i.e. a while ago i set myself a goal to learn powershell scripting not hugely difficult but my interest waned and without even realizing it became a failed goal. There's also been a few others I set around the time of my self improvement phase which I've lost site of but all in all I've kept going strong.

To say I set myself around 10 goals or so of which I've only dropped around 3-4 of those over the last 5-6 months and the others are still going strong, I think I've done pretty well now if I had only set 1-2 goals which might have taken say 2-3 months to do for a short term goal with the possibility of one of those being dropped I don't think I would get as much self improvement in the time than I would with multiple goals so potentialy wasted time.

Choosing your goals

How to choose your goals for the best retention this can be down to each persons willpower and motivation but a general idea is to keep them varied maybe have 1-2 that could be called major lifestyle change like not having a daily trip to Burger King order everything large and instead having a salad, then perhaps set the rest of your goals as mini ones i.e. get an extra half hours sleep a night and/or setting yourself long term self improvement goals like learning a language, saving for a holiday or improving your image the ones that don't take a huge change to your life just adding something extra.

So to cap it off, the next time your in a self improvement phase dont just choose one thing you want to change or add to your life try making yourself a list of ways you'd like to improve, change or to just expand your reality you'll be supprised with how much you can actually stick with.

Time for a quick review of my macbook now I've had it for a few days.

First up technical specifications

• 2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 3MB on-chip shared L2 cache running 1:1 with processor speed
• 1066MHz frontside bus
• 2GB (two 1GB SO-DIMMs) of 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM; two SO-DIMM slots support up to 4GB
• NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor with 256MB of DDR3 SDRAM shared with main memory³
• 160GB 5400-rpm Serial ATA hard disk drive⁴
• Weight 4.5 pounds
• thickness when closed 0.95"

Ports

• MagSafe power port
• Gigabit Ethernet port
• Two USB 2.0 ports (up to 480 Mbps)
• Mini DisplayPort
• Audio line in
• Audio line out
• Kensington lock slot

Comms

Built-in AirPort Extreme Wi-Fi wireless networking² (based on IEEE 802.11n draft specification); IEEE 802.11a/b/g compatible

Built-in Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR (Enhanced Data Rate)

Built-in 10/100/1000BASE-T Gigabit Ethernet (RJ-45 connector)

Obviously there are much more options like SSD and faster CPU etc but I just went with the standard setup.

Design

One of the most striking parts about the Macbook is the design they look excellent PC laptop designers really need to start taking notice on how to make a laptop look nice so many standard laptops look so darn fugly.




Very sleek aluminum body with a pretty looking Apple logo in the centre the lid opens and closes using the thumbscoope which apparantly they spent a lot of time designing :/. It does have a nice feel the lid closes nicely into place without the need for latches etc



Even the under side looks very sleek though there are no vents it barely gets hot even now as I type I have it rested on my bed and its only lukewarm compared to my Sony Vaio which mayaswell be on fire.


The screen is of the glossy kind very clear and bright one of the really nice innovations to the mac that they really need to bring to the PC are the gestures for example using 4 fingers by flicking them to the top of the pad automatically hides all open windows so you can quickly get to your desktop and flick backing down again brings them up so you can see all your windows spread out as in the image at the end of the post more examples are the pinch to zoom in and out and twisting 2 fingers to turn images to name a few.




The keyboard is the kind I love, always go for them if I have the option, the ones on the macbook are great have a nice responsive feel and are a smooth soft texture.









On the side you have the connections which include the magsafe power connection, 10/100/1000GB Ethernet, 2 USB ports, monitor connection and input/output audio ports these are probably one of the few things that let the macbook down is its lack of ports a few more USB and a firewire connection would have been nice.

On the other side you have a standard 8x slot-loading SuperDrive (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)

Apparently when all the little dots light up on the side it means you need to replace your battery a little feature but nice non the less.

Summary: Overall excellent and this is coming from a guy that's always been a PC user and for many years actually hated mac's but now I must say I've been converted they've come a long way since the days when I really disliked them and have trumped PC's in many ways even things as simple as the power cord are designed really nice with lots of love and attention, you can tell they actually want people to enjoy there macs in every way possible who else gives you a cloth to clean your screen.

I really should review the OS but that's a review in itself so that can wait for another day but for now here are a few images of my desktop.

Recently bought myself one of the new macbooks been wanting one for a while always preferred them there just so much nicer looking and great to use, grown bored of PC's over the years as I work with them everyday being a network technician, used to love customizing and building PC's but lost interest in that long ago, now that you can practically do everything you could on a PC there was nothing holding me back after only 2 days of use I've already fell in love with it not to mention that 2 friends have just bought one.

Highly recommended and for the gamers out there its simple to set them up to duel boot with windows if need be so the next time your on the look out for a new laptop give a mac a try you'll be pleasantly surprised.

Will post a more in depth review shortly with pictures etc

Any readers mac users?

Well at the start of the year i set myself a few goals of achieving things or just improving myself in some way so were better to jot these down and see my progress over the year than on my blog so here go's.

Thought I would start a series of recommended JDrama's for those on the look out for something new to watch my first recommendation has to be the GTO live action it was one of the first JDrama I watched and still by far my favourite a great lead character who fills Onizuka's shoes almost perfectly and same for the supporting cast, some excellent scenes that make you laugh and cry not to mention the great music.

So overall an excellent watch oh... make sure to watch the movie too :D

link below for preview as embeding is disabled for it :(

GTO

Ever notice how when you read a lot in your native language your spelling and grammar tend to improve and every time you make a mistake and correct it you less frequently make that mistake again you've basically told your subconscious mind that this is correct and how it should be even without actively trying. Most of the time you don't even need to actively find and correct your mistakes as they will correct themselves the more you see them written correctly in context.

I wasn't sure were to start naturaly like a lot of people I looked for starter guides around the net and considered a Japanese course after much frustration and still no idea the best way to start I eventualy came across alljapaneseallthetime.com which really appealled to me and made a lot of sense especially when you relate it to how you actually learned your native language.

So I started not exactly as suggested as I learned all the Kana first using Remembering The Kana which for me was a great motivational boost if i could learn these 100 or so characters i could learn any 6 days later I had finished. Then onto the Kanji 4 months later after some struggle with myself taking brakes and procrastinating I had completed Remembering the Kanji with this came a realization that Japanese was possible to learn and that I could do it all I needed was to stick with it.

Now onto the sentences I've been going at them for 3 months or so now and have noticed great gains in my Japanese ability so far I can understand many simple sentences I can usually understand something out of most things I read and listen too and have moments of understanding all the time, although I'm a little dissapointed in myself as I have taken many brakes and slowed down always kept up with my reviews but still been slack unlike over christmas I powered through 100s of sentences in only 2 weeks I intend to get this moment back once my workload starts to calm down.

I'm hoping to gain a good amount of fluency by next year and I'm sure this is possible If i can just keep up a good pace and improve my immersion environment more the main battle is with myself I can be a terrible procrastinator at time although I've improved at this a lot in the past few months. I also have many more goals and resolutions I'm going to improve / stick with over the year which I will talk about in a future article.

For the past couple of weeks or so I've been mostly concentrating on learning vocabulary and almost completely ignored actively learning grammar which has involved me mining many +1 materials with new vocab words this has lead to an obvious increase in my vocab knowledge which in turn i can understand more from shows and written works than i could a month or so ago.

Now a lot of people may say that oh well you can understand more vocab but do you actually know what it means when used in context well the answer the majority of the time is yes for one all my vocab has been learned in context and without any real effort. I've picked up a load of grammar without actively studying it in a long time for example the other day i had a quick look through Japanese In MangaLand and to my surprise i understood a lot of the grammar it was trying to explain and this was from later in the book that I've never read, more proof that you don't have to actively study the grammar to become fluent but I do agree that it can speed up the process although i wouldn't worry too much about it concentrate more on vocab in context.

Then when you have some spare time or fancy a change go find a good source for grammar I highly recommend Japanese in Mangaland for this as its easy to understand and the manga examples help lots especially for someone like me up untill a few months ago didn't even know the difference between an adjective and a verb in my own language :P

So to sum up don't worry too much about not knowing what the conjugation of this and that is or what the gerund form is you'll pick up a lot without even realising and if your thirst for knowledge increases and you want to know more 'then' go find some grammar explanations.

Anki stats update note: only issue with manually adding every sentences its taking forever to read 2000 lol really should have just imported all 2000 iknow sentences.

Deck created: 3.3 months ago
Total number of cards: 1115

Card counts
Mature cards: 560 (50.22%)
Young cards: 540 (48.43%)
Unseen cards: 15 (1.35%)

Correct answers
Mature cards: 96.4% (244 of 253)
Young cards: 85.4% (7691 of 9005)
First-seen cards: 86.7% (1042 of 1202)

The 1100 seen cards in this deck contain:

• 748 total unique kanji.
• Jouyou: 722 of 1945 (37.1%).
• Jinmeiyou: 5 of 287 (1.7%).
• 21 non-jouyou kanji.

Jouyou levels:

• Grade 1: 69 of 80 (86.3%).
• Grade 2: 143 of 160 (89.4%).
• Grade 3: 146 of 200 (73.0%).
• Grade 4: 109 of 200 (54.5%).
• Grade 5: 74 of 185 (40.0%).
• Grade 6: 62 of 181 (34.3%).
• JuniorHS: 119 of 939 (12.7%).

Personally i think some people don't realise how important it can be to exchange links to each others blogs there are many advantages and no reall drawbacks one of the main reasons can be to establish a community especially with like minded blogs for example blogs that write about language learning or there favourite TV series its a great help for your readers to find other great sites related to there interests we can all help each other receive more readers which I'm sure all of us would like otherwise what would be the point for the blog/site (unless you just use it as some sort of personal diary).

So if any blog/site owners would like to build there community and let there blog reach a wider audience so it can be enjoyed and help there readers find more great sites think about exchanging links with fellow blog/sites it only takes a few clicks :D

If you would like to exchange links with me feel free to leave a comment or send me an email tibul3 at gmail.com

Recently I've been thinking back to before I really started learning Japanese to a time when I thought that to learn a language you needed to be really smart or have it forced down your throat from a young age and also that other huge myth that a large amount of people (maybe the majority) still believe that you need to live in the country of the target language to reach any sort of fluency which i now know to be completly false and so does a growing number of language learners just checkout some more of the blogs on my blog list for some good examples.

As you can see I'm currently making some site changes decided to stick with blogger as my site host as wordpress blogger import was causing huge problems I've managed to find what i think is a nice looking template and fits the sort of things I like to write about etc so over the next day or so there might be the odd thing going weird or dissapearing but should all settle down shortly once I'm happy with everything :)

Well I thought that it was time I changed the name of the website as I plan to post about more than just my Japanese progress although thats going to be a big part of it but as I have many loves/ambissions changing the name of my site allows me to blog about much more including my love of Japanese culture (Anime, Manga, way of life etc) and daily life / self improvement.

Will also be moving the site to a new server shortly and migrating to wordpress as its just so much easier to find good templates.

While I'm at it an update on my current anki stats.

Deck created: 3.1 months ago
Total number of cards: 1069

Card counts
Mature cards: 496 (46.40%)
Young cards: 567 (53.04%)
Unseen cards: 6 (0.56%)

Correct answers
Mature cards: 96.1% (195 of 203)
Young cards: 85.3% (7211 of 8451)
First-seen cards: 86.4% (1006 of 1165)

The 1063 seen cards in this deck contain:

• 727 total unique kanji.
• Jouyou: 702 of 1945 (36.1%).
• Jinmeiyou: 5 of 287 (1.7%).
• 20 non-jouyou kanji.

Jouyou levels:

• Grade 1: 68 of 80 (85.0%).
• Grade 2: 140 of 160 (87.5%).
• Grade 3: 143 of 200 (71.5%).
• Grade 4: 107 of 200 (53.5%).
• Grade 5: 74 of 185 (40.0%).
• Grade 6: 58 of 181 (32.0%).
• JuniorHS: 112 of 939 (11.9%).