I have my anki vocab deck set up so that it generates writing cards for me as well. It gives me the hiragana and the sentence for context, and I have to write the word in kanji (or sometimes it’s just a hiragana word, which really throws me off). I use a brush pen and paper for it, which adds some fun.
Handwriting has definitely helped me in my reading, but more than that it’s an aspect of the language and culture I don’t want to miss out on. I handwrite in my native language a lot too, which I understand isn’t true for many people so they feel okay skipping it when learning Japanese.
That’s really cool and it sounds like more well-rounded way to do it. I would try something similar but I feel like anki vocab takes me too much time so I focus on reading for now.
I just started writing kanji in the context of actual vocab now that I can write them directly into the dictionary search bar. It definitely has a different feel than just writing them in isolation.
It’s interesting that you mention hiragana words throwing you off. I haven’t practiced writing any kana since I first learned them and when I try to write an actual sentence the kana trips me up more than the kanji. I should probably just dump them into my deck so I can get the practice reps in.
Anyway, it’s great to see that someone else finds handwriting fun!
Nowadays ヲタク is running around enough that I won’t ever forget ヲ again. But I agree before the only time I had ever seen it in the wild was in a song that stylized its lyrics in all katakana.
I’ve heard quite a few people liked this one, though I haven’t read it personally, it does also get recommended a lot as well
I do, but all of my textbook study and Kanji practice is pen and notepad or writing Kanji I don’t know out on my iPad/ phone for figuring out the readings/ meanings. I also was writing letters quite frequently to Japanese Penpals and taking handwritten notes from my tutor lessons and language exchanges each week. I haven’t written much lately, just what I’ve needed for lessons, but I’ve gone through a fair number of note books while studying.
It took me a while to figure this out, though I’ve been using my tablet and phone rather than a laptop. I figured it out by mistake looking for something else just wish there was a way to use handwriting rather than typing for some of the apps when trying to look up words or I need to draw it in one app and transfer it to a second app for accurate reading/ meanings.
I knew it was a thing a while ago because I remember seeing a video about how some native adults forget how to write kanji because they all just use an IME for day to day. I just didn’t know at the time that it was possible for me to enable that on my computer.
In hindsight, me finding out three months in isn’t too bad. But if I could do it over again I’d learn how to use the IME immediately after learning kana.
There were so many times that I was fumbling around the dictionary and getting the readings wrong. Sometimes the furigana was too small to read, or my memory was wrong, or I was doing it based off audio and couldn’t get the syllables right. But I already knew how to write the kanji, so it felt like such an unnecessary technical barrier.
I don’t know how it works on mobile apps. But I’m on a windows machine and the IME pad lets you draw the kanji and when you pick the one you want it just puts directly into the active search bar/cursor. I wonder if mobile devices have a similar thing.
My tutor uses IME when she types stuff up during the lesson but I didn’t figure out that’s what it was until more recently when she started putting the document on the screen as she was typing lol.
Most of my apps I just use the built in Japanese Keyboard I downloaded (about 2 years into my studying ) so it shows kana buttons of the first Kana for each Hiragana like this:
Then you have to slide left, right, up or down to get the others from that set and there’s a button bottom left that changes so you can put dakuten and handakuten above the Hiragana that use those or reduce certain Hiragana for the small kana. My iPad has the same set up but a larger spread keyboard allows all the Hiragana to show and you slide left/ right etc to change to dakuten and handakuten or small kana.
The only apps I can write on screen that I have are google translate or kanji lookup, unless it’s the handwriting practice parts of “Drops” vocabulary app or “scripts” kana and kanji writing practice apps. There’s probably others but those are what I use.
Feeling really good about my progress lately and wanted to share.
Reading/Watching Update
For some reason just copying the page links doesn’t show correctly in the preview, so I’ll just write the titles. I wonder if it’s a bug with the forums or if I just don’t get it?
Continued reading ホリミヤ and ひとりぼっちの○○生活 at a leisurely pace.
Both seem good for my level. Kind of shocked at how dense ひとりぼっちの○○生活 feels sometimes. Maybe that is a 4-koma thing I am not used to?
I binged all 9 volumes of ぼくは麻理のなか last week.
It was probably the first time with a manga that I had the feeling of “I am not sure if this is good or if I even like this, but I don’t want to put it down”.
Despite being text sparse and easy dialogue, being able to read it so fast was a confidence boost. I felt I was getting into a flow state where I didn’t have to translate some parts, I just knew what they meant and moved on. I might have had a same-author comprehension boost because I previously read ハピネス.
I started くまクマ熊ベア this week and I am a little over two chapters in.
A lot more manageable than I thought it would be at my reading level.
I am really enjoying the text density and having to visualize what is going on in my mind rather than a manga panel. I think I am going to try and always keep a LN in the rotation going forward for that reason.
Anime:
I had less free time last week and tend to prioritize reading/writing over listening, so sadly not a lot of progress here.
Finished season 1 of ゆるゆり and slowly moving on to season 2. Feels great for my listening level, but I still miss things due to the fast paced nature of the show.
Started watching カノン last week. I feel like I am getting really good comprehension with this one so far and the vibes are great.
Progress Statistics
Throwing in some stats on my learning journey so I can look back on them.
Writing Practice:
I add Kanji when I see them frequently. My deck is about a 1000 kanji total now and has pretty decent coverage up to N3 level with a lot of N2 and N1 sprinkled in.
Number of Kanji practiced: 588
Current kanji I get strokes wrong the most often
院 痛 湯 落 農
Grammar:
I use Bunpro to practice grammar. I have it set to reading mode because I just want exposure and output testing feels unnecessary. It feels easy because I already have so much grammar exposure from reading manga.
I tend to struggle the most with the simple words that show up everywhere with slightly different context. Things like 気 and よう being attached to a bunch of other words trip me up a lot more than the grammar that have a 1 to 1 mapping.
Current progress:
Vocab:
I have no current way to track this and I think that’s probably a good thing?
It seems impossible to track in the first place. There are so many words that are still loose ideas in my mind that haven’t been solidified yet, and there are a ton of words that I could piece together by combining other words.
Manga:
97 volumes read in Japanese so far
Excited to pass through 100 volumes soon. Constantly blown away by the learning effectiveness of just reading a lot of easy manga.
I probably won’t include stats like this too often, because I think the real magic happens when I just read stuff and let time pass. But I have a background with data analysis so it’s hard not to look at numbers sometimes.
Learning related question for the week:
Do you implement any progress tracking metrics (grammar, vocab, lookup data, JLPT stuff, etc.) in your language learning? Do you find them to be useful or an unnecessary obstacle?
Not really. The most I do is track my reading sessions on Natively. If I do more than that my brain tends to categorise that activity as “work” and I feel less motivated.
I agree with that mindset for sure. As a medium/long term goal, I want to get to a point where I can just enjoy stories in the language and not do any structured learning at all. But I think my current routine is helping me a lot with building up a foundation.
I used to be really into tracking various metrics (a few examples include detailed time splits for what I studied every day, joyo kanji progress, educational Youtube video progress), but I stopped once I reached a point in my life when physical and mental energy became super rare and premium currency. Now, something has to be directly related to one of my current goals for me to want to track it. Right now that’s just book progress and reading streak (number of days). Or, it’s something like Anki progress which is being logged automatically when I go through my deck.
For small things I do so as the whim strikes me and I abandon it as soon as I feel it doesn’t serve me.
For example, I’m doing a 50 hour listening challenge this month because I expect to have more free time and my listening hours have lagged. It pleases me to do so, so I do.
It does not please me to set aggressive goals every month, because that is stressful, so I don’t.
It’s ultimately serving my (reasonable for me I think) overall yearly goal of 300 listening hours. If I get that goal - great! If I don’t… Well, I’ll need to re-evaluate either my goals or my time use or both next year
So tldr - yes I set trackable goals because I like them, but if the goals are taking the fun out of learning or feel unreasonable, I don’t beat myself up over it.
Makes total sense. I have been lucky to have a lot of extra free time this summer but time management is still a constant struggle.
This makes me realize I probably should have worded the question to say “monitoring” instead of “implementing”, because pretty much all the stats I was sharing today were autogenerated from programs like Anki, Bunpro, and Natively. I don’t think I have the patience to manually log stuff like that.
Making fun and enjoyment the most important metric of all is a general life goal of mine so I really appreciate this mindset.
I’m also coming from a former journaling hobby where I tracked things by hand on purpose (as the current me shudders at the time and energy cost) so I tend to think manual and analog first, haha.
As a very data minded person, any hobby I have runs the risk of becoming a data science project if I’m not vigilant against it. I try to be really mindful of the idea that data not in service to anything is probably worse than not having the data, if logging and maintaining it isn’t free. Since I don’t use the data to make changes in my studying I try to spend minimal effort logging and maintaining my data.
That said, for Japanese I log the total time of finished audiobooks and I will grab the number of pages read and hours watched from Natively at the end of the month. I mostly am interested in looking at the amount of time I spend with Japanese in the year. Although I can’t be bothered to log how long I read for, so it’s already going to be a flawed number.
The only metric I really track is time spend learning. I don’t do anything fancy: I use Google Sheets to track what I did that day and how long I did it for. At the end of the month, I add up the time and that’s it! Seeing how long I spent on language learning monthly makes me feel good (or bad if I didn’t do much that month). I’ve thought about separating my activities by category (grammar, listening, reading, etc.) but I don’t want to. Maybe one day when I get bored enough or something.
For non-manga books I count look-ups of words and grammar combined if I am in the mood, and I am interested to see the all-in-all average number of look-ups/page of the whole book. Recently I also got interested in the percentage of zero-look-up pages of easier books.
I have some “benchmark series“ where I read one book of the series regularly to see whether I make some progress, under the assumption that books within the series are equally difficult.
And I promised myself to not try to read books around L40 before I am under 10 look-ups/page for books around L35. So far I managed to keep that promise.
Current ranges are: look-ups/page 2.1-10.8, zero-look-up page percentage 0.0-17.1.
Thinking a lot about how I structure my reading so that I can do as much as possible within the time constraints of life.
The main thing is that I need to be strategic in choosing what I read to keep the momentum going. Now that I am reading in the low level 20’s, I see that the leveling system is not nearly as linear as it initially felt and I should be careful with ratings on less popular stuff.
My old strategy of “read a lot at around the same level and then gradually move up” is starting to fall apart a bit due to varying difficulty.
I think next week I will mix in some easier manga to get some positive high volume input flowing again.
Reading:
くまクマ熊ベアー 1 - Steadily progressing and I am about 60% through. I am really enjoying the light novel experience and I think I am getting more language learning out of it than manga for right now, so I have shifted a lot of attention here. Excited to read other light novels in the future.
ポラリスは消えない - (2/3 vols complete) I should have dropped after vol 1 due to difficulty but the completionist in me kept going. The grammar is no problem, but the vocab difficulty feels debilitating at times. Very hard to get motivated to read but I only have half a volume left and the story is getting more interesting.
Not much else to log but felt like making a log anyways to document that things don’t always go smoothly.
