Stats:

• 2312 sentences
• 2329 vocab
• 309 kanji
• 910 hours (67.8 min/day)
• 806 days
• 264,871 reviews

Kanji

Less kanji then last report because I lowered my leech threshold to 4 and suspended anything less than that.  I started adding kanji a few weeks ago, so the number should go up again.

Sentences and Vocab

I stopped adding sentences at the same time as vocabulary.  Basically sentences are a lot easier than vocabulary getting hints from the context.  Consequently I don’t need to study sentences as frequently.  Since I stopped adding sentences, I’ve been able to add vocabulary cards much more quickly.  Once I get several hundred vocabulary, I’ll add sentences with an interval of 30 or so.  It worked so nicely when I did that before.

Understanding

Finally I feel like I’m getting somewhere practical where I could be able to actually use what I’ve learned some day.  I got some audio files of NHKeasy to play in the car.  Although I can’t follow along at speed, I feel like I recognize most of the words.  Same with some Japanese conversations but to a lesser degree.  Cramming vocabulary is looking to be less and less urgent now.  I need to figure out a way to start studying listening comprehension to be able to follow along at speed.  I feel like I could really make a quantum leap in understanding conversation if I study this effectively.

I noticed that the majority of my high interval cards have very few lapses.  The majority of my cards with several lapses have intervals under 30 days suggesting that the ones with lapses are destined to take a larger share of my time.  This is just a note (to myself mostly) that I just set my leech threshold to 5 from 7 and suspended all cards with 5 or more lapses.  I ended up suspending about 400 cards which breaks my heart, but my workload went down by 50 cards tomorrow, and 400 this month, so I’ll be able to replace the suspended cards with easier ones rather quickly.  I might even set my threshold lower if this works out as well as I think it will.

Edit:  My first day after suspending ~400 ‘leeches’ I had an extra half hour to learn new words.  Consequently, I was able to add 40 new cards the first day.  I spent a little more time time than normal yesterday, but I didn’t have to worry about getting killed with reviews today because my review total today was just average.

Some stats:

Cards with an interval over 1 month: 4740 total
0 lapses: 3242  <—-68.3% of my month+ interval cards have no lapses
1 lapse:  620
2 lapses: 328
3 lapses: 193
4 lapses: 133
5 lapses: 102
6 lapses: 93
>6 lapses: 29

all intervals: 6520 total
0 lapses: 3122
1 lapse:  881
2 lapses: 527
3 lapses: 346
4 lapses: 268
5 lapses: 197  <—these
6 lapses: 204  <— and these were suspended today
>6 lapses: 976 <—-these were already suspended leeches

Adding sentences has been the best thing I’ve done in my studies so far!  Since I’ve started adding sentences, my accuracy has kept going up and up – from low 80’s to mid 90’s.  Of course I’m still adding vocabulary cards, so I’ve effectively doubled the amount of cards to study and I was predicting that would slow me down a lot.  However, I’m actually adding more than ever!

Originally, I was adding 5 new vocabulary cards per hour of study and my workload was steadily increasing.  Now I’m adding the same 5 vocab plus 5 sentences and 5 kanji in the same amount of time and my daily workload is decreasing!  It’s still early to tell, but I may be able to increase the pace even more.

The faster pace has everything to do with my increased accuracy.  Not only because I have less to relearn, but I don’t feel like I need to cram using filtered decks anymore.  I’ve made a conscious effort to quit cramming and fill any remaining time with learning more new cards.  Additionally, I’ve increased my interval modifier from 100 to 130 with the goal of decreasing reviews and making time for more new cards.  It’s still early, but my accuracy hasn’t gone down at all with the higher interval modifier, so I’m considering increasing it to 150.  I’ll probably keep increasing it every few weeks until my accuracy gets closer to 80%.  That may not make a lot of sense until you consider that it’s a tradeoff between accuracy and learning new material.  Supermemo’s theory page suggests peak efficiency is between 70-80%.  I don’t think I could handle 70% accuracy so it’s also a tradeoff between pride and efficiency.

What’s next:

• I tried learning radicals seperately, but something about it I didn’t like.  I’ll just learn them as I do rtk lite.
• I’ve started adding kanji again because core by itself was getting boring.  Sprinkling in a little kanji makes it more interesting.  I’ve calculated that if I add 1 kanji for every core card, I’ll finish rtk lite and core at around the same time.  If current trends hold, I’ll be done in 430 days…but I’m hoping to pick up the pace a little.
• I’m planning on doing more reading when I run out of anki reviews.  I downloaded wakaru and japanese reader for iOS to help me read on my phone.
• I’ve also started listening to japanese pod101 in the car.  I like listening to audiobooks in the car, so I probably won’t do this every day, but I’ll alternate every few weeks between jpod101 and other things.

NHK EasyI read my first NHK Easy news article today and was able to follow along reasonably well.  I’ve tried reading a few articles before and couldn’t totally follow along.  I think the one I clicked today was probably one of the easier ones.  It was about the new iphone 6 and all of the people waiting in line to buy on the first day.  It helps that I already know the general outline of the story.

Sentence Recognition

After some suggestions on the koohii forum, I’ve decided to try speeding up my progress through core.  Previously I was doing clozed sentences along with vocab recognition, but I was running into a lot of cases where there were several words that meant the same thing and unnecessarily failing a lot of cards.  Now, I’m experimenting with simply doing sentence recognition.  Since my goal is to be able to understand written and spoken Japanese, this seems like great practice.  I’ll be missing out on production practice, but I don’t think that is as important right now as building passive vocabulary faster than before.  Actually I wish I’d thought of this before.  Hopefully it works out as well as I think it will.  I’ll certainly be able to add new cards faster.

Incremental Reading / Sentence Mining

I’ve been wanting to start adding real Japanese to my study, but haven’t figured out a good way to do it on the go from my phone, but I think I’ve found a good way.  I think I may have hit on a good method in incremental reading.  I’ll spare you the explanation of incremental reading (click the link if you want the to know what it is).  What I’ll be trying is taking an article or whatever, and splitting it into sentences.  Then I’ll add it to anki and “read” it sentence by sentence.  When I get to a sentence that gives me trouble, I’ll mark it and then rest I’ll delete.  Then I’ll be left with a some sentences for further study.

I finished Tae Kim Basic and Essential grammar last night so that’s where all the new sentences came from.  I’m really happy that I did Tae Kim.  I feel like most of the grammar used in core is easy now and a lot of grammar I catch on TV sounds familiar although I still can’t keep up with native speed.  I’ll save the last part of Tae Kim until later because it seems it is mostly special grammar that isn’t used as often.

Next steps:

I’m really interested in getting back to learning more vocabulary, so I’ll start adding new vocab in the next few days.  There were a few vocabulary words that I didn’t know in Tae Kim and Core, so I’m going to use cb’s word list duplicate remover to add the vocabulary that I haven’t studied and study that next.  That way, I’ll get the vocab reinforcement when I do sentence reviews.  Then I’ll start adding core vocabulary again.  I’ll be doing single words and clozed sentences J>E.

I’m in the process of figuring out how to get subs into subs2srs so that I can get some more exposure to real japanese.  I’m planning on running cb’s text analyzer, extracting the vocab, removing known words, and ankiing the unknown vocab.  Once I know all of the vocab, I’ll anki the dialog until I understand most of it and then I’ll watch the show.

I’m also considering memorizing kanji primitives.  There’s only ~250 of them I think and I already know a few of them so it shouldn’t take too long.  I will probably start rtk lite around the beginning of next year and I hope having the primitives firmly memorized will make kanji a little easier.

I finally caught up with my core sentences.  I suspended all the cards that had too many unknown words to figure out the meaning by context.  There were also some cards that were missing the information so I suspended them too.  I’m not sure what was going on with those.  No need to waste time being complete right now – there’s plenty other things to keep me busy.

Up next,  more Kim grammar to catch up with the nukemarine’s N3 curriculum.  Also, I’m hoping to do some reading via Lingocracy or Readlang.

I added another 500 sentences in the past 37 days – or about 13.5 added per day.  I plan on adding core sentences to catch me up to core vocab and then see about working my way through tae kim grammar.  I have another 500 core and 636 tae kim grammar cards, so it looks like at this rate I’ll be doing sentences for another 2.5 months if I go all the way through tae kim.  I want to get back to vocab, so I may not finish tae kim just yet, but I’ll probably do a few hundred more tae kim at least.

I’ve noticed that I catch a few more words here and there on Japanese TV.  I’m still not able to follow along thigh.  I also read an  NHK Easy article and I could just barely follow along and get the gist of what they were talking about.  I plan on starting to read this on a semi regular basis – maybe one article per week or two.  I’ll run it though the glossing function on jdic so I have the vocabulary handy.

Added another 300+ sentences including tae kim basic.  I believe that’s 22/day and I have another ~500 to add.  So if I keep this pace, I can catch sentences up with vocab in under a month.

After that:

I re-read nukemarine’s suggested guide and realized that if I do another 500 tae kim sentences and 600 kanji, I’ll be at around the JLPT N3 level.  I’m not sure about the Kanji yet, but I believe I will progress further into Tae Kim Grammar once I catch up with my core sentences.  I might even filter some Tae Kim in along with the core sentences or at least pre-read the lessons.

As far as kanji goes , I hesitate to spend time studying kanji because it won’t make me any better at speaking or listening.  However, I have begun to understand that once I get into studying native material, being able to read kanji will allow me to study a much larger variety of Japanese media.  Tentatively I am considering at least memorizing the 200 some odd primitives to make kanji easier once I get back to it.

And speaking of native material, I am planning on practicing on NHK Easy News rather soon.  I just went over there and realized that I can’t follow along too well.  But I think it would be a good exercise to spend some time looking up all the unknown vocab and practice reading until I can understand a whole article and the video.  I think it’s important to keep challenging myself and move on from sentences to paragraphs.  It’ll also be good to do something a little more fun and useful.

Also:

I’m also considering playing around with a few different mnemonic methods to see if I can increase my speed a little.  I’ve heard some good things about memrise.com, memory palaces and also keywords.  Considering giving one or all a try for a month each and see if there’s any noticeable difference.

Yikes! It looks like I only learned 4 new words in the fast 2 months!  However I’ve been adding 5 new words per day…  So what gives?

Leeches

About a week ago I noticed that there were a few words that I had seen a bunch of times and should be leeches.  I investigated and found that there were a bunch of cards well past the 7 lapse leech threshold so I suspended them all.  I wish I had written down how many I suspended, so I’d have an idea how far that set my count back.  I just hope getting the leeches out of the way leaves me with more time to study the easier to remember cards.

More Adjustments

I’ve also limited my 1 and 2 day cram decks to 70 reps, so cards with anything over that will probably turn into a leech.  I should probably drop this filter or adjust my leech limit, but I haven’t, so I’ve ended up suspending a bunch of cards and only have a net add of 4 in the past 28 days.

My Evolving Lesson Plan

I have been feeling for some time that I’ve been learning vocabulary just to learn vocab and that my time would be better spent studying other aspects of Japanese communication.  So I’ve decided to learn about 200 more(basically so it’s an even 2500) and then put vocab on hold.  Instead, I’ll be studying sentences.  I’ve already started adding a few sentences while keeping up with 5 vocab per day.  I’ll probably add a few more sentences each day for the next month or so until my vocal stands at 2500 and then maybe 1 vocab and however many sentences I can keep up with for the long term.  I’ve done sentences in the past, so I know that I can keep up with a lot more sentences per day then vocab, because I already know the vocab in one direction at least.

Studying the sentences helps reinforce what I’ve already learned and helps me remember the vocab in both directions (English to Japanese and vice versa).  It also helps me getting used to the way words are put together in Japanese.  I’ve written before that I feel studying grammar when first starting out is a mistake, and grammar is best learned by getting as much exposure to comprehensible Japanese as possible – at least at the beginning which is where I still am.

Anyway, in less than 2 months,  I expect to be doing maybe 10 sentences and 1 vocab per day until I’ve caught my sentences up with my vocab.  By that time, I expect that I will be able to follow along with  Japanese TV and children’s books with some difficulty but finally being able to put what I’ve learnt to some limited use.  Hopefully things work out as I expect they will.

Still trudging doggedly along at a glacial pace of 5.4 new vocabulary words per day.  I’ll have the vocabulary of a 3rd grader in a few short years.  I should rename this website to something tortoise related.