11/27/12
The next couple of weeks are going to be difficult for me. I’m going to try to stay on top of my Japanese as much as possible, but with other obligations I may not have the time. Regardless! I will try my best to make sure my daily reviews are at zero by the time I go to bed every night.
With that, I’d like to write out exactly what I’ll be doing for Japanese.
- Stay on top of daily reviews (this one can be exceptionally hard sometimes)
- Add 20 new kanji to my RTK deck
- Add 10 new J-J sentences to my sentence deck
- Listen to Japanese podcasts/music throughout the day or whenever I want
It’s a pretty simple plan, and that’s the key for me right now. I want to make it so Japanese is considered my “break” from studying. It needs to be fairly easy and rewarding. Right now my J-J sentence deck is actually extremely rewarding, as difficult as it is. Because of the recursive nature of these monolingual cards (words on the answer side of some cards are the words on the question side of others), the general nuance of each word sticks with me a lot better. Something different that I do now is not worry too much about understanding the target word 100%. If I can get the general feeling right and then read and understand the definition (without any English help) that’s a pass. If I don’t know what the word means at all or have trouble with the definition I will either fail it or rate it hard (it’s all subjective after all).
Ultimately, what I want is to make my Japanese studying a habit again. It used to be I couldn’t go 30 minutes without some sort of Japanese-influenced book or movie or website. Now that there are a lot of other factors in my life, I’d like to condense that enjoyment down to something that won’t take very long and can be quantified.
Walter and Languages 