There exists a great empire; here, now, within my head. Glistening buttresses buttered with aeons of sunlight; offset walls etched with the graffiti of lovers, political statements and a milieu of moon-borne stains and echos of the whispered goings-on of the people in the night; sweeping gardens strewn with a litter of aged soils and withering crops; decaying buildings housing the libraries replete with knowledge. All this, thine empire, thine empire of English. A lingual landscape brought to life by blood, experience, fear, failure, love, hate and all notions between.

Yet here is stands, corrupt. Though what stands can be torn asunder. The is no man free from the whims of time, and there is a new scent in the wind. Somewhere distant, foreign, there are limbs low in their stance pregnant with fruit. My people yearn to taste its flesh. They want change. I can bring this change, though not alone.

We will tear this great empire down and rejoice in a new found ignorance- and the opportunity to discover an entire new world. We will salvage the remnants of our empire and seek shelter while a new world is being built. We will- we are.

This Empire of English has lost it ranks and we all stand naked. Smiling. I am not building an empire; we are in this together creating the foundations of a new world, a new age.

ろしくおねがいします。


~~~~~~~~
I have just started this journey towards creating a new Japanese world within my head. It has been a yearning for most of my short lifetime. Both hiragana and katakana are effectively memorised, though my reading speed is slow (due to lack of vocabulary), but will increase in time. The kanji are entirely new, this is going into the third day of RTK, and with the aid of Anki, I have around 158 out of the 200 I have studied, pretty much down pat. It is simply one of the most exciting and frightening things I have started in my life.

It is a queer feeling I cannot describe, though it makes me want to climb a mountain and scream at the top of my lungs: "I'm coming for you, new world!"

(I hope introductory posts are OK- sorry if this is the wrong place for it)

uisukii Wrote:(I hope introductory posts are OK- sorry if this is the wrong place for it)

It's fine. I have no idea what you just said, but I wish you good luck.

It's definitely exciting. You'll find that demystifying this writing certainly feels like gaining access to a new world. No need to build your own. We all know how frightening it can be being at the bottom of that giant kanji mountain, but it's very much climbable, as most of us here can attest.

In time, their newness will wear off and they will be as regular to your life as anything else. Keep up your pace, and you'll be well on your way.

Oh, and I like English. Screw you.

I assume the your first paragraph is a metaphor for your English ability (the empire being your brain), and then you segue into discussing the immersion method of Japanese acquisition (using no English to pursue the foreign "fruit" that is Japanese). *Shrug*

Anyway, welcome. Best of luck with that beast called RtK. :3

*laughs*

The metaphorical story seemed pretty straight forward to me- another reason for a long time my first tongue has been a source of frustration as opposed to communication.

The only scary thing at the moment is just how real everything really is. The Japanese language has been for a very long time placed in the corner of my brain, tied somewhere up between the mesolimbic and mesocortical pathway- or the reward/pleasure area. As a very guilt ridden individual with related esteem issues, it always felt as though indulging myself into the Japanese language was something I shouldn't be doing or at least not tell anyone about. Though breaking it into these little steps, or stages, the indulgence becomes smaller and less of a mental object. Kind of like Lego blocks and making a castle (or a spaceship- whatever kids are building these days out of Legos): the pieces slowly come together, one brick at a time and while the overall image of what is going to be built is there on the box, while you are putting it all together, you are forced to focus individual brick-to-brick connections.

Anki is great for keeping the connections tightly pushed together. At the moment I'm actually really looking forward being able to slowly remove the English keyword scaffolding surround each kanji for the Japanese coat of paint to give it some colour. Though what makes me laugh stupidly is how fun- actually fun- it is going to be studying verb stems; discovering natural readings in sentence contexts, etc.

If only I started this years ago. I've own pitbulls in the past: some of the sweetest dogs out of the many breeds I grew up with. A lot like the kanji: sure, they've got teeth and are hairy beasts, but with a little love and respect, at least at the moment, all they really want to do is play, run, and curl up next to the hearth in your neocortex.

＾＿＾

hahaha ***best introduction ever***!!! where can i buy your book? ；）

through building a new empire, i think you also come to relearn the beauty and elegance of the old one. So don't forget to look behind you as you run forwards towards your new world

keep us updated on how it's going!!!

IceCream Wrote:hahaha ***best introduction ever***!!! where can i buy your book? ；）

I also like that the title of this thread sounds like the name of a metal song/album.

Anyone care to write a metal song about learning Japanese? I only write folk-ish and blues songs, and somehow I think the 'High Fail Percentage Blues' wouldn't really work.

IceCream Wrote:through building a new empire, i think you also come to relearn the beauty and elegance of the old one. So don't forget to look behind you as you run forwards towards your new world

Using the old constructs as material- you've got to salvage what you can! ^_^ I'll say one thing: the more I understand Japanese the more I understand why it is so difficult to learn English.

Quote:keep us updated on how it's going!!!

Up to frame 426 in RTK1. Anywhere between 75 and 150 frames studied a day. Pretty comfortable with it. It's a little unnerving how there seems to be a run of 50 or so frames which seem to not want to fit into your head, only to push on with another 50, struggle with them and realize in the process you remember those older ones with little effort. Actually enjoy revising far more than learning new kanji. Spent over three hours revising without realizing the time in passing. It's like an addiction. Very much looking forward to finishing off the book and starting to revising daily and slowly removing the English keywords with Nihongo.

I initially thought this post was about an incompatibility problem between Anki 2 and the AnkiEmperor plug-in.

Norman Wrote:I initially thought this post was about an incompatibility problem between Anki 2 and the AnkiEmperor plug-in.

Lmao. That's what I thought too.

Congrats on your ridiculously fast speed! It's a good thing you like reviewing as much as learning new kanji, cause at that rate they're gunna PILE UP!! You sure seem to know what you've gotten yourself into though! If only I had your vigor and vivacity. Where does it come from!?!?

henryw Wrote:If only I had your vigor and vivacity. Where does it come from!?!?

From a deep-seated yearning to be, and simply to be. For various person reasons this state of being has a strong emotional link to certain things which, getting used to a Japanese thinking brain is one of said things which help construct an environment in which certain unspoken of reasons are able to come about without any conscious input. It is very personal; my 'road towards the inner north'; to want something so bad it comes to oneself in the long silence of night like a flame, burning, burning. To try and reach and hold the flame is asking to be burnt, a foolish act I have played out for much of my life.

A simple change (after years of contemplation, ignorance, fear) in state of mind has taken away the unconscious movement towards the flame. Instead, I am reaching about the empty darkness, slowly becoming familiar with the shapes, textures and means of moving around the space without the need for directly taking to the flame's light. Like driving along a winding dark road: another car comes speeding in the opposite direction, its headlight blinding. Focus on the headlights will surely lead to a collision; having to start again without momentum, without inertia. Instead, focus on the road lines, the boundary between the divide, the road ahead and your place in the moment. It is all too easy to focus on distractions, but they only get in the way of what we really want and where we want to be.


The personal, actual motives behind my change in attitude would make little sense and lack significance without context, context which, like most personal events, have to be at least experienced in some personal manner to be understood. So I won't bore with the details.

...currently on frame 600 and looking forward to sinking into a nice hot bath of kanji and settle till they warm my bones. ＾＿＾

600!? You're a monster! And still have time to update us with lengthy posts. Wow I've got to get off the internet and back to kanji because you are putting me to shame! *focus*...

henryw Wrote:600!? You're a monster! And still have time to update us with lengthy posts. Wow I've got to get off the internet and back to kanji because you are putting me to shame! *focus*...

To be fair I've only learned 600. There are still around 50 or so kanji out of them which seem to evade my SRS reviews multiple times before I get it. Reviewing it fun, filling up pages of grid paper makes it seem like I've done a lot more study than I actually have. The main problem is that before I notice, hours pass, leaving less time to learn and review new kanji.

First World problems, lol.

Quick update: 800 kanji. To be fair, I've probably forgotten most of the last 200. Nothing a few reviews in Anki can't fix... a few thousand maybe. Easier to review kanji, even if only seen/read through/draw/written down, than learn new primitives.

uisukii Wrote:800 kanji.

O_O Impressive! Are you finding that your stories are sticking at such a pace or are the strokes starting to drill in your head at this point?

henryw Wrote:

uisukii Wrote:800 kanji.

O_O Impressive! Are you finding that your stories are sticking at such a pace or are the strokes starting to drill in your head at this point?

There are a few kanji with rather abstract keywords in which I finding the primitives floating around my head often become frustrating. A large amount of the stories have fallen away and I seem to remember the primitives with maybe a word or a short grammatically correct phrase which helps parse in my brain, recalling the associated kanji.

Though I'm not overwhelmingly worried about forgetting a lot of kanji at the moment. The sheer amount of reviewing in Anki has already shown to help more or less force the image of a few troublesome keywords and associated kanji (I'm looking at you, "song"). Even with a sieve like memory Anki does the work for me, all I need to do is put in the time.


Speaking of which, seems like a good time for some reviewing now.

Another update:


... just finished reviewing frame 1000 for the first time in Anki. I have 442 reviews due tomorrow, and it's not due to missing any reviews. Some of these keywords seem comically apt, while most of them seem like unwarranted obfuscations. Oh well.

Another update: just finished reviewing the 1300th frame in Anki. The past 100 frames were actually a lot less foreboding than the few hundred prior.

uisukii Wrote:Another update: just finished reviewing the 1300th frame in Anki. The past 100 frames were actually a lot less foreboding than the few hundred prior.

So you're aiming to finish RTK in two weeks?

undead_saif Wrote:

uisukii Wrote:Another update: just finished reviewing the 1300th frame in Anki. The past 100 frames were actually a lot less foreboding than the few hundred prior.

So you're aiming to finish RTK in two weeks?

More or less. It's only the first phrase of what I'm doing and the sooner it is "done", the more flexibility I have with the rest.

Done. Now about seven days of reviewing before I start the next phase. My brain is full of strange shapes. Damn you Heisig, you crazy bastard, you.

You crazy bastard you said you'd do it and you went and did it! Congrats!

That's really good work. Well done. Now the hard part starts

Nice blog, by the way.

henryw Wrote:You crazy bastard you said you'd do it and you went and did it! Congrats!

There is still about three years left of reviewing, stripping away English keywords and seeing kanji as they really are: Chinese squiggles with Japanese sounding "keywords".

Going to settle into a few sentences next, going the basic but effective optimized route of Tae Kim's Japanese grammar guide in Anki, then through the optimized core deck I've been reading about here and there. Basically aiming for about 10,000 sentences to be "reviewed" and "understood" (whatever that really means) by the 10th of April next year. That should provide a decent base for enjoying Japanese the way I want to.

Before I started all this madness, I told myself that within the 5 years I would become "fluent" in Japanese. 5 years of intensive study is apparently some conservative number for "functional fluency". Well, I don't want functional anymore. I don't function properly as it is in this English brain. Blah, function is overrated- I'm creating a monster. An insatiable beast of a man who eats Japanese phonemes for breakfast and drinks Japanese ビール while howling incomprehensible 俳句 at the うさぎ on the moon. The craziest bastard you've ever heard, だろう？


Well, at least this is what would happen if the process were serialized in 少年 マンガ. A healthy dose of insanity eases the process of learning to crawl all over again, lol

（＾＿＾）ー自”自ー（＾＿＾）

netsplitter Wrote:That's really good work. Well done. Now the hard part starts

Nice blog, by the way.

Hard or not doesn't matter, the fact that it's waaay more fun than RTK automatically makes it easier than RTK!

uisukii Wrote:Going to settle into a few sentences next, going the basic but effective optimized route of Tae Kim's Japanese grammar guide in Anki, then through the optimized core deck I've been reading about here and there. Basically aiming for about 10,000 sentences to be "reviewed" and "understood" (whatever that really means) by the 10th of April next year. That should provide a decent base for enjoying Japanese the way I want to.

This is the route I've been walking for less than two weeks, so it will be a good challenge to push my progress! You will easily surpass me and my 2 hours of Japanese everyday, but whatever!

undead_saif Wrote:me and my 2 hours of Japanese everyday

Probably more than most people do who pay an arm and leg to study Japanese- and I bet your learning is optimised for the Japanese language and not tests about the Japanese language.