Tag: Japanese

A category for anything to do with Japanese. Mainly includes stuff I originally watched in Japanese. There may or may not be English versions available.

A word about SRS

SRS stands for Spaced Repetition System. I know what it is and why it’s useful for learning languages, so I don’t see the need
to go on about it. This blog is all about me, remember? But for anyone who wants to know more, I’ll link the AllJapaneseAlltheTime (AJATT) website post on the subject: What is an SRS?

I started the SRS thing around 1st May, planning to enter about 50 sentences a day so that I could hit the magical 10,000 mark (or close to it) by the end of 2008. Some days have been rough (i.e. I have been lazy) and some days have been awesome, hitting the goal and more. Yesterday I had my personal best of 77 sentences in 8 hours, made up almost entirely of sentences ripped from Dragonball wikis. To paraphrase Khatzumoto of AJATT, just because it’s fun doesn’t mean you’re not learning. When it’s something you want to read badly enough, no Great Wall of Kanji can keep you away.

The SRS system I’m currently using is Khatzumemo. I like it’s because it’s simple, it’s online and the interface isn’t cluttered. I hate cluttered stuff, and these buttons and functions and whizzbangs and doodads. All I want is a place to keep my sentences and the chance to review them at the right time. Having said that, it has a major drawback in that you can’t input audio sentences…(or can you, I haven’t tried) or pictures into it. For that purpose I’ve installed Anki on my laptop, but I haven’t gotten round to testing it yet. Also Khatzumemo seems to limit reps to 100 a day, regardless of how many you have left undone in your backlog. It’s also a bit annoying when you have a delay between clicking on your mark and moving on the next sentence. I’d rather have the statistical information be optional so I can access it when/if I want to, instead of forcing me to look at it every single time.

A picture speaks a thousand words, so here’s a screenshot of the current state of my sentence collection. 907 sentences in 7 weeks isn’t half bad, eh? Click to enlarge.

How do I pick which sentences to add to my SRS? Anything goes, really. With over 9000 words left to go before I hit my goal, I’m not particularly picky about getting “just the right” sort of sentence. I don’t even think there’s any such thing as “just the right” sentence. My criteria is simple: it should be grammatical Japanese. It should be natural Japanese, or as natural-feeling as I can tell. The kanji should be correct. For preference it shouldn’t be too long, but super-long sentences are also part of Japanese writing so I include them on occasion. It helps if I find the subject matter interesting (witness all the DB sentences) so that I can stand to read them over and over again as I learn.

When I come across a word/phrase/expression I don’t know, I look it up in two dictionaries simultaneously. First the Sanseido Web Dictionary, which has definitions in fairly simple Japanese, and then in Jim Breen’s WWWDJIC, which is English-Japanese. I check with the English meanings just to make sure I’m not getting confused by the J-definition, and also because Sanseido occasionally has unhelpful entries like this:
げきど 1 ［激怒］= 激しく怒ること.
It’s fine for me when I already know the meanings of the two separate kanji, but when I don’t it can get pretty annoying.

So that’s it for my SRS doings. In the mornings I do all my reps, and then I spend the rest of the day surfing the net for new entries to add while listening to music on the internet. My retention rate is 98.13%, 1927 reps done. I’m a bit Dragonballed-out today after yesterday’s marathon session, so I’m going to cut back on that today and spend the time going through Mainichi Daily’s game article archive. And that’s all for today!

Getting better every day

My waist hurts (!?) so I’ll make this post very short. Thanks to Dragonball I managed to make this weekend an 80% Japanese weekend. I removed one more English element from my life: reading magazines at the salon. Reading tabloids like Life & Style at the salon was one of my guilty pleasures in life, where I’d pretend I didn’t really care about Brangelina, I’m just so bored in the dryer I might as well… is what I kept telling myself. But that hour or two every Sunday can add up so I’m just cutting it out for good from now on. I replaced it with Dragonball, which made the time pass in a FLASH, and when I run out of Dragonball (I’m already on volume 31 of 34, since I’m reading the Kanzenban) I’ll start one of the other manga I’ve been keeping in a huge box in the corner since 2005.

And that’s enough for today.

Minor setback

Computer troubles got worse and worse until the machine eventually wouldn’t start up at all. It had to be taken away completely and fixed and I only just got it back. I have a computer and the internet at home, but I spend most of my time at work so not being able to use the machine kinda hurt.

I didn’t let it affect me TOO much though. I finally got Mana Khemia out of the way (oh crap, I wanna play it again!) and can spend some time playing a Japanese game next. I have the Lucky Star and Suzumiya Haruhi games for PS2 but truth to tell, I don’t really like anime games. Also the glamour of those two anime have long since faded for me so I don’t particularly care to play with them. I might play an Atelier game, maybe, since I’m such a Gust fan.

I spend the downtime reading a lot of Japanese manga, working my way through my collection of manga that I bought long ago and never bothered to read. I read more Dragonball and also volume 1 and 2 of Azumanga Daioh. I notice my speed still isn’t too high when reading, even though I’ve been doing my reps and sentences. I get through the pages alright and I understand everything, it just takes a while to get through. I could finish one English volume in 15 minutes but it would take me about 2 or 3 hours to get through the same volume in Japanese. I should time myself one day.

All in all even with the delays I’m not doing too badly for myself. The search for proper spoken media still continues but I’m doing great when it comes to reading material and reading practice. And that’s all for today.

Computer troubles continue

I spent the whole weekend sleeping and playing Mana Khemia so there’s not much to tell about that. I found the time to watch 2006’s Kouhaku Utagassen, which was fun and mildly educational. Oh yeah, I also read some Dragonball (in Japanese). Every time I think I’ve gotten over that manga I pick up a volume and it’s like 1998 all over again . I think I’ll read the j-wiki on Dragonball while I’m at it.

Then on Monday I came back to my work computer to find it caput. First it would load but the internet was non-existent, then I fiddled with it for a while and all of a sudden Windows Explorer wouldn’t load any more! But somehow through Task Manager I managed to access Firefox, and here we are now. In my efforts to make sound work on the machine I ended up installing a lot of windows updates (silly me) and I’m positive they’re to blame for my current predicament. Currently systematically uninstalling them now. The moral of the story: leave well enough alone.

But still, since I have the internet I can still do my SRS reps and add items to it. I started about a month ago and I already have 776 entries in there. Way cool. I’ll see if I can make that over 1000 by the end of June. Ganbarimasu!

More Japanese learning adventures

Bitlord refuses to get along with my sound card and sound drivers… or rather they refuse to get along with just about any other program I try to run at the same time, so I had to sacrifice everything except Firefox and MSWord for the sake of my Japanese education.

Having discovered the source of my problems and solved it, I am now doing even better than ever. I read about 10 wikis yesterday of my favorite J-musicians, including 吉田拓郎 and 布施明, only to find out that the two don’t get along over some petty incident that happened over 30 years ago. Whoa, talk about holding a grudge!

I’m definitely seeing an increase in my speed and ease of reading of Japanese nowadays. This morning I opened up Mainchi Daily and browsed the front page for several seconds before it hit me that I was reading Japanese! It felt like reading BBC or something, lol. The nice thing about reading the news is that they tend to use the same phrases and expressions all the time. Once you learn those words it’s smooth sailing all the way. Anyway, seeing as I’m doing so well with my readings nowadays, I don’t see the need to list every page I read from now on. I’ll only make note of exceptionally interesting articles or things I might want to go back to one day. Today’s list will be the last.
ポルノグラフィティ
筋肉少女帯
吉幾三
藤あや子

Now back to the subject of internet radio and streaming, I’m currently testing out the stream recording possibilities of VLC player, a player I normally avoid but that has its uses in a pinch. So far it seems to be…sorta okay. At least it doesn’t mess up my computer’s functions like NCH Soundtap did. I’ve only tested it on radio stations so far, will test it on video streams once I actually find something I care to play.
I’ve tried out several of the stations from the site I posted last time, but most of them are either pure music stations (which is all good and nice but not what I really need) or don’t work or are just plain boring.
Bee Wave – They talk a lot and seem to be having lots of fun, but the quality is TERRIBLE. Hard to listen to at times.
FM 76.3 – Not bad, but works erratically.
MBS – 9 minutes of daily news, I’m not sure how often it’s updated.
Radio NHK Japan – I mentioned them in the last update. I notice they broadcast in other languages as well, but makes it annoying when you’re just sitting there waiting for them to get back to Japanese. In Japanese they’re the best news source though.
Radio Nikkei – Evidently aimed at the non-fluent. Most announcers talk at 1 word per minute, if that. And their programs are booooring. I like it.

That’s it for today’s update.