It’s been 60 days since my last report and I don’t even have 100 new vocabulary words to show for it.  I blame the holidays.

Fortunately I didn’t miss a day of reviews even though I was on a road trip, driving 8 hours on some days and skiing all day during others.  However there was one or two days where I didn’t fully finish my reviews, putting in only 5-10 minutes, but I didn’t get more than a day behind because I caught back up the next day.

Part of the reason it was easy to keep up with reviews is that I used the “review ahead” anki feature and set it for however many days until I got back from my trip.  So one day when I had some extra time, I studied about ~400 reviews, so for the rest of my trip my workload was only 20-40 reviews per day instead of the normal 100-150.

Overall I’m pretty disappointed by the small amount of progress, but I’m happy that I didn’t miss a day of study.

By this point, you should be able to read hiragana and understand a few hundred(400-600) Japanese vocabulary words.  Now it’s probably time to start to practice reading Japanese Sentences.

This is is really where everything comes together and very soon, you’ll begin to have some facility for communicating in Japanese.  This is the meat of the Japanese Sentence method and what you’ll spend most of your time doing from now on.  Previous steps have been useful getting you to this point, but this is where the real magic happens.

Just like training in sports where the best way to get better at your sport is to practice your sport,  the best way to get better at speaking and understanding Japanese Sentences is to… practice speaking and understanding Japanese Sentences.  As a bonus, of course, this will reinforce the vocabulary and kana that we have learned up until now AND you’ll be learning different grammar structures as you go.

Some sentences won’t make sense at first either because you won’t know all of the vocabulary, or because you don’t understand the grammar.  What I usually do is mark the card and proceed with more new cards.  Then I’ll go back about once a week (or so) and look up the vocabulary(yomichan) or grammar(tae kim or wikipedia) for all of the marked cards.  I suggest looking things up “as you go” from now on, instead of “studying” tae kim specifically, at least until you have gone through a few thousand cards.  Of course you can do it however you want, but I find it more efficient for me to learn by example how grammar works rather then study all of the rules and try to apply them.  There has been much written about this, so don’t take my word for it.  If I have a few extra minutes free after studying my sentences for the day, sometimes I’ll read a chapter or two of Tae Kim just to solidify what I already know, but most of my grammar is learned by example.

I was just listening to a podcast about the science and psychology of Golfing and Golf pro Phil Mickelson said a few things about directed practice that I think relate to developing a facility with a lot of things including learning Japanese.

First off, he said that he finds that he can only stay focused for about 45-50 minutes before he has to take a breather.  I find this to be true in my own studies and usually study for 20-30 minutes at a time, but spread many study sessions out throughout the day.  If I find myself with an hour block of study time, I usually find my mind wondering and getting less and less out of marginal additional time.  Mickelson has a putting green at his house where he can sneak out and practice for 10 or 15 minutes if he has some free time.  This not only allows him to make use of what otherwise would be unused time, which is powerful enough, but the time that he is spending is quality, focused time so even better.  I try to do the same thing when I am waiting for food at a restaurant, or getting an oil change, or waiting for my wife, I whip out my phone and sneak in a little practice.

Another interesting thing that Mickelson says is that he tries to stay intently focussed on what he is doing.  He says that he sees other players “practicing” all the time, but they don’t seem to be focused on what they are doing and, spend most of their time joking and socializing.  Unfocussed practice basically doesn’t count as practice.  Fortunately, since I do most of my studying on my phone, away from people and the internet, I don’t have too many disruptions.  But if I were studying at the computer, I’m sure I would have a lot of distractions and not get as much accomplished in the same amount of time.

This is also a good time to bring up that I don’t consider browsing japanese forums, reading websites, or adding cards to Anki to be study time.  The only activity I consider to be study time is the time I spend answering cards in Anki or reading Tae Kim’s Grammer Guide.  That’s it.

Mickelson also touches on the amount of time it takes to get good at something.  He said that he got interested in Golfing when he was three and a half and from then on, spent as much time as he could practicing and getting better.  This just gives more support for ideas like the 10,000 hours rule.

Edit:  I just read another interesting article about Kobe Bryant’s Directed Practice schedule.

I find that Anki does a very good job of scheduling cards that I’ve learned several days or weeks ago.  But if I was to rely on Anki’s default scheduling for new cards, I would hardly learn anything.  That’s where Filtered Decks come in.

I have my Anki new card limit set to zero, so that Anki doesn’t show me any new cards until I am ready.  Every morning when I wake up, I have 50-100 review cards waiting for me.  I usually try to finish up the reviews before breakfast and then I press “Custom Study” on the screen where it says I’ve finished my cards for today.  Then I press Increase today’s new card limit and add 5-7 new cards to the mix at a time.  If I want to add more than 7 cards, I still add them in chunks of 5-7 so I don’t get confused with too many new cards in short term memory at once.  Once I’ve learned all the new cards that I’d like to learn today, I eat breakfast and let the new information sink in a little.

After breakfast, I have a filtered deck set up that lets me study all of the cards that I failed to answer at least once in the past 2 days.  Presumably all of the new cards will be in this deck too since I wouldn’t have answered correctly the first time through.

To create a deck like this on iOS, click “Custom Study” and “Review Forgotten Cards”.  Change the number of days to “2” and then click “OK”.

Then click “Tools”  then “More” then “Study Options”.

Now switch “Reschedule cards…” to off.  Make sure Custom Steps is “1 10”.  and if you have more than one deck that you would like to review at once (eg kanji and vocab) delete everything in the search field other than “rated2:1”.With this deck, I can review all of the new cars and cards that I’m having trouble with.

Setting Custom steps to “1 10” will make me answer correctly twice in a row to a card before it is removed from the filtered deck.  This way all of the easier cards will be removed early on, leaving me with only the cards that I really need to concentrate on.

I try to go through this deck around 5 times by pressing “rebuild deck” throughout the day, trying to space my review sessions out as evenly as possible so hopefully by the end of the day, all of the missed cards and new cards are in long term memory.  By the time I do my reviews the next day, I’ll be able to answer correctly for most of the previous day’s new cards as well as the missed ones.

Sometimes, if I get too many cards in my filtered review deck,  I’ll add another filtered deck with the same settings, except I’ll change to rated:1:1  to study just today’s most “forgettable” cards.  If I still have too many cards in the deck, I change the limit to something like 15 or 30 and rebuild often.  But I always make sure to study the rated:2:1 deck a few times each day regardless.  I’ve found for my own studies, it is more efficient to study forgotten cards for two days.  I’ve done one day(ie rated:1:1), but I found the time saved was more than taken up by the amount of missed cards in subsequent days.

Please leave any questions in the comments or variations if you are having success with similar methods.

If you don’t have Anki yet, you can download it here.  Also consider downloading the iOS or Droid app to make use of waiting times throughout the day (they add up!).

You can download the Core 6000 deck here.  Double clicking the deck will add it in Anki.

Click “Browse” in Anki and then “Core 2000 and 6000…” in the left panel.

Click “Cards…” near the center of the window.

Then click the plus (“+”) in the upper right corner to add another card type.  And click “more” at the bottom and choose “Rename”.  Name it something like “Core Vocabulary Kana”.

Select everything in the Front template window and delete it.

Also delete everything int he Back Template window below <hr id=answer>.

Click “Add field” near the bottom and choose “VocabKana” and click “Ok”

Click “Add field” again and choose “VocabEnglish” and click “back” and “Ok”

Then you can close the card types window and the browser window and you’re ready to study vocab with Anki.