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’ve been studying JP using Anki (the deck that you use/d + filters) and the Genki textbook, should I drop the book and use Tae Kim’s grammar guide? What you think?
The Genki series is highly regarded by people who I respect, but I haven’t used them myself so I can’t make a recommendation one way or the other. I suggest giving both a try and see what you like best.
I should mention that I am rethinking filtered decks. I have stopped using filtered decks for a few weeks to se how it goes. I believe adding extra learning steps has been more efficient for me than the filtered decks, but it is too early to say. Thanks for your question and thanks for following my blog!