Project To-Ki-YO #2: Immersion and Kanji practice

Hello there... or should I say,
こにちは皆さん、元気ですか？
(Hello everyone, how are you doing?)

What I have been doing

A lot has happened over the past few months, I've tried quite a lot of ideas and methods to learning Japanese. I've installed an app called "Anki" to help me with Remembering the Kanji (RTK) and I've got to say: it's pretty effective for making me remember. I have also tried to immerse in numerous media, mainly NHK news (the BBC or CNN of Japan if I'm not mistaken), NHK's easy Japanese which I've done more recently. Surprisingly anime and video games played a very minimal part into this immersion process, for reasons I'll detail later.

Remembering the Kanji

Since last time I blogged about this, I finished going through every singe Kanji and then installed an SRS (spaced repetition software) software called "Anki" which was far more efficient. The way Anki functions is that it is a digital flashcard application where you recall the flashcard's awnser. I think I should have started using Anki earlier because I had to endure a load of August trying to come up with the stories for all the 2000 Kanji again as well as having to write stories for 1000 more (which I did not go through on my way back home), all of which I could have started much earlier. You honestly did not want to be there when I was writing the stories, I spent long hours trying to work on ~100 of them a day on top of the labuor-intensive process of drawing & animating the sprites for my latest game Bounty Hunter II as well as having younger siblings barging in to my room and making an absolute mess out of it. I have a few of these stories presented here in these pictures.

Around September 14th was when I finished writing most of the stories for the Kanji and I could finally focus on trying to consolidate them in my brain.

Once it came to the consolidation process, things were only a little easier since I've had to memorize the stories I've created (some of which I had forgotten after I created them) and draw them out accordingly. Some of these stories I've also had to polish too. I reduced the cards that I reviewed to 25 per day.

The way I use Anki is that I tend to often press "Again" for the ones I do not know and try to recall them via drawing them on paint with my graphics tablet (A Wacom Intuos), once I'm more certain with them I press "Hard" which takes the card off temporarily. This is quite a good strategy since I can focus on the harder cards and later on be able to actively recall the cards that I pressed "hard" on so I can eventually press "good" which takes them off permanently for the day.

Around November or this month I reduced the new cards to 8 per day, so I can give myself less of a workload as well as allowing me to still have energy to memorize older cards I have done in order to consolidate them well. This would straighten the forgetting curve and allow for a larger amount of retention.


















Immersion - Do's and Don'ts

I've tried many things like video games and anime, I don't think these are particularly good places to start since I've had difficulty understanding what they mean. Especially with video games, because if it is something like a game that is more action-oriented I have found myself skipping long dialogue so I can focus on the more core aspect of the gameplay. Visual novels can be an exception to this as the plot is pretty much the gameplay, although I haven't tried much of them - this will be something I'll try out in the near future.

In terms of anime although I have watched only Jojo's bizzare adventure: Stardust crusaders, Beyond the Boundary and Delightful Moomin Family. The reason why the amount of anime I watched was so low was that it does a very poor job of helping me understand the syntax of the language, everything feels a lot more complicated - sure it could help me pick up a word or two, but it did not give me a way to attain things like conjunction and or what is what in a sentence. I had the first two in Japanese subtitles so I could follow in with the Japanese, however when it came to understanding the language I often found myself pausing and rewinding so I can understand the sentence or use something like google translate to get a feel of what the characters were saying.

Although I did make some sentence cards out of them with Anki, the sentences still felt far too complicated for me to comprehend. The dialogue was slightly easier to follow in the Moomin anime since it is probably meant for a younger audience than most anime is (and I did not even have Japanese subtitles for that anime) but I still found myself constantly pausing the anime to transcribe what I've heard. I don't know about you but I'd rather listen to the anime and watch it throughout so I can actually understand the story rather than stopping and switch tasking.

Okay, so if anime/manga or video games are not a good place to start, then what is?
My answer would be learning simple sentences out of something like Tae Kim's grammar guide or listening to something like NHK Easy Japanese or news. The former I will discuss in the next section.
Easy Japanese gives very simple sentences and conversations and the people in the program go through all the particles (things like は, の and を), verbs and sentences, thus easing you into the Japanese learning process and giving some insight into speaking Japanese. News podcasts are also something I can just easily listen to passively, whilst I'm doing something else or doing nothing without extra stimuli like images.

I'm not saying that I'm against playing video games or watching a show to learn a new language - what I'm trying to say is that they are not a good way to starting out with learning a language due to their unstructured nature in terms of language learning. It's better to start with something more simple.

Sentence memorizing

I mentioned about Tae Kim's grammar guide not too long ago, let me explain to you why I think it's effective to starting out. It is because it is a grammar guide and you would expect simple sentences to appear out of a grammar guide. This makes it easier to learn sentences without any complications, plus they give you the Kanji with its readings, wait- I'll talk about readings because that is what I struggled on at first and why it is a waste of time to memorize every single one.

There usually are two basic readings Onyomi and Kunyomi, the former is from Chinese readings used in joined up Kanji whilst the latter is from Japanese readings which are in single Kanji. That seems simple enough, but I'm not done there - since there are also exceptions like Kanji for names, multiple Onyomi/Kunyomi readings and using them in different contexts so it is not always a matter of just Onyomi vs Kunyomi. I learned that I was just better off just memorizing them as they are in one big bulk i.e. 図書館 (Library) which is としょかん in Hiragana.

Anyway, with the sentences, my goal with the sentences is not to necessary understand them but to learn new words without having to look up the readings. It's worked rather well for me as I can recall a number of words I've learned whilst having say the sentences out loud.


Conclusion & future goals for Japanese

I have done quite a lot over the past few months since the last post, the main focus has been on trying to look at basic sentences, basic passive immersion and learning Kanji. I will continue on that for a bit longer until I reach a more intermediate fluency.

In the future I plan to try and learn more about the tenses and syntax of the language and shift the focus away from memorizing Kanji. I could even try to play a video game or watch something in Japanese.

That's all from me!
さよなら！