After two weeks away from Japanese, I now feel the urge to study again!
The last two weeks, I was more interested in other hobbies, and I have left my Japanese studies almost untouched. This break has been a good thing since I now feel a new motivation to learn Japanese.
So I will start with a one-week challenge to get back on track. I will transcribe a short Japanese text into French every day for seven days. I already started yesterday, and as I was both idle and motivated, I made two transcriptions:
- First I worked on an article from Mainichi. It had been weeks and weeks since I opened the Mainichi website…The article I chose was an easy one, about the idol industry in Japan and the lack of regulations, even when minors are involved.
- Then I worked on the novel 『こころ』by Soseki that I had also left untouched for a very long period of time. One chapter is only 2-3 pages long, so I transcribed a whole chapter. Except for one or two (or three) occurrences, I can transcribe it in French with confidence.
I am not exactly translating the text, I am just rewriting it in French, but I don’t care if I am far from the original version or if the result in French sounds strange. The point is only to show that I understood what I read and can explain it in my mother tongue. So I don’t spend time in the translation process and focus on understanding the text and looking up words.
I know that I will have a lot of time this week so I can complete this challenge. I will either pick a news article or work on two pages of a novel. I might also use Shigesato ITOI’s daily column on ほぼ日刊イトイ新聞. The idea is to use as different materials as possible to work on different writing styles.
I will also work more seriously on my Anki. Yesterday, I revised hundreds of cards using the custom study. I feel that, during these past two weeks, I have hit the “good” or “hard” button even if I didn’t quite recognise the words… just to get rid of it! This is why I wanted to go back to these cards and really try to remember them.
I’m all set for the week! I will be studying Anki seriously and do in-depth work on one text in Japanese per day!
About
I’m learning Japanese, Korean and Chinese to read mystery novels and play video games in these languages.
Learning languages has always been one of my favourite hobbies, but I’m not a social person, I don’t like to meet new people and make friends, this is just not me. I keep hearing that languages are meant for communication, that we have to actively use them, talk to people, etc. and for a long time, I thought I was weird to learn languages just for me, just to enjoy media, culture and entertainment in a foreign language, with absolutely zero interest in communicating with natives.
Now I don’t really care what people think, and this blog helped me a lot to stop doubting myself and just do what I enjoy doing.
is your retention rate for anki bad ?? ( You can check your retention rate by clicking on the graph icon and set duration to life of deck or 1 year. I hear 80% is good though it depends on the individual’s goals etc). If your retention rate is 80% or above it’s probably not worth fixing up those cards since you’ve been benefited enough from anki. I’ve decided earlier this year that I will minimize time spent fixing cards since it’s time-consuming and the benefits aren’t that significant compared to making new cards. So I try my best to not tweak cards because the time really adds up.
have you looked into adding words into anki efficiently a la plugins or programs? I use rikai-sama, wordquery, sanseido plugin (japnaese definitions). Recently I looked into a way to efficiently add cloze Korean cards using online translators (so-net, naver), readlang.com, libreoffice calc, wordquery, hanseido and I’m so glad I did.
Fixing/tweaking cards is satisfying but I realized it’s a never-ending process and takes up way too much time.
I think I misunderstood what you wrote. By revise do you mean doing your reviews ? I took it to mean that you were editing the cards
Haha yes, I meant review! It’s because we use the word ”revise” in French to say review, but I realise now that this usage is not common in English (might even be British English only). But I see what you mean with fixing cards because it’s something that I did a lot before. I was adding hints, context, explanations even, and as you say it took a lot of time. At the end, I think that instead of associating a Japanese word to an English equivalent, I was remembering it only via the panoply of hints I had added. In other words, I was associating the word with its Anki card instead of an English equivalent. Since I started a new deck, I keep it very simple. If I cannot remember a word I suspend the note. I even deleted some. Maybe I’ll come across the word later in a context that will help me to remember it!
omg i’m finally checking out natsum souseki. i was never interested in his books since it’s old so i assume it’s hard and i just have a long list of books to read anyway. i finally took the plunge and got a couple of his books?stories? from aozora bunko and loaded them on my kindle. I started with the cat book wagahai wa something something. i’m definitely glad i never bothered trying to read it when i started reading japanese novels. i do notice peope pushing themselves to read hard stuff like his stuff even though they struggling with novels as it is. i just don’t think that’s a good use of their time since theyre better off reading easier novels then going back to his novel. i feel like some people are just trying to to brag i read natsume souseki x months into japanese or it’s my 10th japanese novel… which is strange. maybe kokoro easier than the cat book.
i thought the cat book was a short story but it turns out it’s a huge book lol. I’m reading like 2 other books in Japanese so it will be a while until i finish it.
I tried to read Kokoro some time ago, and found it easier than expected, but it is also literary fiction and as a language learner, I really needed the story to makes me want to continue reading in spite of the language difficulty (like solving a good murder mystery). In the end, I gave up the book about one third through, and I don’t really feel like starting it again now.
People might wrongly think that the cat book is easy because it is told from the perspective of a cat? I agree that Soseki might be one of the worst authors to start with for language learners. I am pretty sure that a lot of people think that they cannot read in Japanese because they tried to read literary fiction instead of going for genre fiction and easier novels. I also think that most learners just don’t realise how easy authors like Keigo Higashino are to read in Japanese 🤷♀️
I don’t think that I could read the cat book to be honest, and I am sure that it would feel more like studying than reading…