Japanese: day 1… Again?

I don’t know how many times this will happen, but I fell off the wagon almost straight away. But I guess new year’s resolutions exist for this exact situation!

Because of that, I’ll be considering New Year’s Day as japanese learning day 1 mk II!

Over Christmas I managed to get some gadets that should help, and with any luck (and a lot of determination, as usual), I’ll manage to get further this time! I have been keeping up with kanji reviews more or less but haven’t been adding many new kanji. But reviews are more important so I’ve not been too hard on myself for that!

Japanese – Day 1

Well, day 1 isn’t exactly accurate – this won’t be my first day learning Japanese, but it will be my first day taking it truly, truly seriously. I’ve finally gotten to the stage where I believe I will learn Japanese, rather than just thinking how cool it would be if I could.

Reconnected

Sooooo… it’s been a while since I was last able to make a post, due to my internet getting disconnecting. Along with web access, I lost access to all of my Japanese learning resources, because I didn’t save anything! Apart from my kanji, which I haven’t felt motivated enough to continue with (without a connection to everything else Japanese), everything I used was online.

But I plan to start posting in earnest now, now that my internet is back.

Anki’s ‘Cram’ feature

I’ve been using Anki to review kanji recently. After a while, though, leaving Anki with full control over which cards to test me on got kind of frustrating, so I did some searching and found out about the Cram feature. Basically, this feature let’s you select which cards to be tested on. So, if you know you are having trouble with a set of kanji, select them, choose Cram, and Anki will create a temporary deck for you to be tested on.

This is what I did. I use an Anki deck called ‘Heisig’s Remember the Kanji (RTK) 1+3’.

First, load Anki and open the deck you want to cram from. In my example, the Heisig based deck is the top option. Click ‘Open’ to open the deck. 

Learning Japanese

So, I’ve been learning Japanese for a while now. For a long time, I didn’t take it too seriously – I plodded along picking up a sentence here and there, buying a few reference-style books, and dreaming of one day watching One Piece RAWs without subtitles. I haven’t improved much, though, and until recently I hadn’t done much research into the ways that other people learn a new language. 

Winter in Japan, 2011

After being interested in Japan for years, I finally found the courage (and money) to go in February, 2011. The point of the trip was a) meet up with a friend I had made online and b) eat as much food as possible. I succeeded at both, luckily.