Japanese progress

I really can’t believe it’s been 4 and a half months since my last post, time has been going way to quick for me recently. Anyway, I thought a good way to get myself back into blogging would be to do a progress update on my Japanese.

In my last post I mentioned how I wanted to continue reviewing rtk and making sure I cleared all the ones I failed – around 600 at that point. I managed to reduce this to 400 left but then made the decision to stop altogether. The purpose of rtk is to learn to recognise individual kanji and how to differentiate them so you don’t have to worry when learning readings. At this point I kind of felt I had benefited as much as I could have from it and going any further would just waste time – so I stopped.

This now freed up lot’s of time to work on actually learning Japanese. Over the past four months I have been experimenting with a lot of different methods. All of which are various forms of anki decks. Probably my favourite is just working on individual vocab as opposed to sentences. My method involves going through various form of Japanese media (manga, websites, song lyrics, video games etc.) And when I come across a word I want to know I look up the reading and definition in my DS dictionary then stick it into anki. My current anki deck stands at around 500 cards although I have had a couple of other decks which I deleted a long with many individual cards deleted, so those 500 are not the only things I’ve done other the past few months.

I do see several flaws in this method however and think I can understand how sentences might be more beneficial at this stage. When I first started out I tried sentences but they can be fairly intimidating when you barely know anything. Now that I have a bit of vocab down I reckon I can probably manage sentences now.

In terms of an immersion environment music is currently my main interest. My favourite band at the moment is -　     サカナクション I got their new album kikUUiki in the post a couple of day ago and can’t stop listening to it.

This is a track from the album – the video for it is pretty cool. I fully recommend their other albums too. A couple of other bands I’ve been into recently are base ball bear and monobright.

As for gaming I only have one Japanese PS3 game so far which is デモンズソウル. The good/bad thing about this game is all the audio is in English – this means I can fully understand the story and there are a lot of kanji to look up so all is good. I also created a Japanese PSN acount so have downloaded a few demos from there which is pretty good.

よつばと is still my favourite manga in terms of Japanese practice as I’m finding I can understand more and more of it.

Anyway, that should be enough of an update for now. I am going to try to keep up with regular posts from now on but I wont make any promises as I know what I’m like…

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