Category: Learning

Changes to SRS

Previously I used to add sentences after  I’d done all my reps. Going through the articles one by one, whenever I came across an interesting sentence I would stop, copy it into the SRS, look up any unknown words, add them as the answer, press Add. And then and only then would I get back to the article. As you can see, this frequently hampered my speed of reading and my enjoyment of the articles. Plus I felt some sort of pressure, looking at the number of sentences added and thinking “I need to add 23 more to make up my quota for the day!” which further lessened my enjoyment.

So for the past couple of days I’ve switched up my way of doing things. I created a new Word document that I leave open all day. When I find a good sentence, I copy and paste it into the document and then just keep moving. No need to analyze, no need to look things up. If there’s a kanji I don’t understand I leave it for the next day, unless it gets in the way of my understanding. When all that’s done, when I open up my SRS the next day, before I do my reps – not after, because sometimes reps take forever and then I tend to get lazy – I add all the sentences one by one, looking up the words as I go. This has the added advantage of giving me an “extra” repetition since I’m seeing the sentence again after the previous day. It’s been working pretty great so far.

The hunt for good radio programs continues! And I haven’t been able to make myself watch any of the j-dramas I downloaded, because I really don’t like j-dramas! But I can watch them alright when I’m super-duper bored. I just haven’t had any of those days in quite a while, so I just keep stockpiling and stockpiling. And that’s all for today.

 

Still learning Japanese, yay.

I love it when I learn something worthwhile. Like I learned 喜怒哀楽(きどあいらく）not too long ago and now it’s showing up in just about every article I read. Like this one, about 6 lines down. When you first learn something sometimes it seems so rare and exotic, like “When am I ever going to see this word again?” so it’s always fun to realize it’s actually a common phrase, yay.

As for the rest of my Japanese studies, it’s going…well, I guess? I’m almost done with that interfering little Fire Emblem and this time I promise my next game will be in Japanese (sorry Grandia Extreme!). What I’m suffering from right now is a lack of things to read. I’ve grown tired of many of the things I used to like about Japanese culture like anime and manga so all I have left to read are videogame and music articles, and the occasional news item. I need to diversify, but nothing else interests me about Japan or the Japanese. Well, videogames and music will keep me occupied for the time being and then we’ll see where to go from there.

Video games

If you have to cheat, at least make it enjoyable cheating, right? I’d play Fire Emblem: Goddess of Dawn in Japanese if I could, but since all I have is the English version and an English Wii, no way am I going to deny myself my right to delicious rock-paper-scissors disguised as a strategy game. Part 1 is the most annoying part of any FE I’ve ever played to date but thankfully I’m almost done with. So long as I get to kill that stupid cheating Black Knight again in the end, I’m cool.

Still this doesn’t change the fact that I’m devoting a considerable amount of time to a game that is not furthering my studies of Japanese in any way, shape or form. So to counterbalance that, I’m also playing Rune Factory 2 on my DS. Actually I’ve been playing it fitfully for a while, but the restrictive nature of the Kyle parts has got me rather down. The second generation is better in terms of things to do, but the main character just isn’t a patch on cute little Kyle so it’s a bit of a dilemma. Why they couldn’t just skip the whole second generation thing and keep Kyle throughout I will never figure out.

So I’m enjoying the game, but am I learning anything? Quite a lot, actually. In the beginning I thought I’d take my DS over to the computer and enter sentences into the SRS as I played, but it’s a very tedious and slow process, not recommended in the least. So now I just play the game like I would any other. Occasionally a rather tricky kanji comes up and I note it down for future checking, but other than that I’m breezing through. It’s important to me to get my Japanese to the point where it feels just like English to me, and playing through games without constantly running to the dictionary is part of that for me. What I am thinking of doing, though, is seeing if I can find a script of the game, or at least a comprehensive FAQ in Japanese, and then ripping the sentences from there. I’ll get round to that…some day. And that’s all for today.

A further word on SRS

I just read one of the newer AJATT posts about sentence-entering in the SRS. I have to say, I don’t agree at all with his suggestion. And it’s fine not to agree. It’s the AJATT “approach” not a school of martial arts or anything, so I feel free to take what works and disregard the rest. The point made in the article is that excessively long sentences are not good for SRS entry and should thus be edited into shorter, more consumable forms. Come on, that’s just ridiculous. Is he trolling or something?

Long sentences are part and parcel of Japanese writing anywhere. If you choose to run away from them in your SRS you will only meet them again elsewhere, in real writing where they don’t pull any punches. Furthermore, if you come across a sentence you feel is too unwieldy for your current stage of learning, just don’t include it in your collection. Why emasculate it, thereby destroying its authenticity and power? If the writer meant to write「現代社会は『準備社会』だ。」then that’s exactly what he would have written, not「中村によると、我々の現代社会は『準備社会』だ。」, right? In short, this is one piece of advice I will be merrily ignoring as I go on my way towards Japanese fluency. Perhaps for easily-intimidated beginners it might be a good way to get started, but it just doesn’t work for me.

Nothing to update

Yaahhh, I was going to write a lot here today but all of a sudden I don’t really feel like it. I have a lot of material to go through that I have downloaded and need to watch. Basically I’m satisfied with my progress in reading Japanese and while I’m going to continue with my daily readings, I want to concentrate more on the listening comprehension and speaking ability. To that end I downloaded a lot of videos and radio programs that I was going to watch and review over the weekend, only my laptop decided to come down with a terminal case of Bad RAM over the weekend, freezing and stuttering pretty much every 5 minutes. So I’m going to have to delay things a little bit while I spring for new RAM (so not in my budget) or otherwise figure out how to watch my stuff.

And that’s all for today.