Thanks!
And congratulations to you as well on finishing the JLPT 2 list =)

I've finished most of my GRE prep, woohoo!

I firmly believe that in the Divine Comedy Dante just forgot to describe the 10th layer of hell, where the administrative asses responsible for incredibly time-consuming and absolutely meaningless exams are kept.

...yes I am bitter

Aijin Wrote:I've finished most of my GRE prep, woohoo!

I firmly believe that in the Divine Comedy Dante just forgot to describe the 10th layer of hell, where the administrative asses responsible for incredibly time-consuming and absolutely meaningless exams are kept.

...yes I am bitter

Any resources you would suggest?

Finally caught up and cleared my failed cards and reviews. I'm only at around 300, but with finishing college (UK, not USA) and looking for and starting a job I've been very sidetracked -- but now everything's slotted more into place I've had time to sort it out.

It's a silly, small achievement but I need motivation. I'm determined to do this.

I'm so jealous of you guys (just kidding I'm actually very happy for you), you actually read novels in Japanese, I so want to get to that level. I just got the first volume of Guin Saga, can't wait to actually becoming to being able to understand it.

Random milestone: my shelf of "books I have read in Japanese" is up to 25 volumes now.

Tykkylumi Wrote:Finally caught up and cleared my failed cards and reviews. I'm only at around 300, but with finishing college (UK, not USA) and looking for and starting a job I've been very sidetracked -- but now everything's slotted more into place I've had time to sort it out.

It's a silly, small achievement but I need motivation. I'm determined to do this.

you can do it XD. slow and steady wins this race .

Zorlee Wrote:11000!

WOHO!

And moving to Osaka in two weeks.

EVEN MORE WOHO!

Congrats! This is awesome!!
I did RTK1 2 years ago and are nowhere close to 10.000 yet
But I've been extremely busy the whole last year (full-time job and other commitments).

Have fun in Osaka. It's a great city!
What will you be doing there?

10000! 10000! 10000!
WOOHOO!!!

My Japanese vocab deck has reached 10000 words! And at the same time I finished the JLPT1 word list My deck now contains Core 6000, JLPT 4,3,2,1 wordlists and a whole bunch of words I added myself. (Also, for the people interested, I started my Core6000 deck 7 months ago)
Plus: 10025 seen cards in this deck contain 2168 total unique kanji!

Damn it, WHAT A MILESTONE
From here on, my 'structured' vocab learning will come to an end I guess (i.e. no more brute force wordlist learning). From here on I will only add words I encounter in the 'wild'.
The timing could not be more perfect, as I (too) will be leaving for Osaka in a couple of weeks and there I wasn't planning on spending the amount of time on Anki as I did recently

Zorlee and mezbup, also congrats with your 10000 milestone!
Also, thanks rachels for your amazing CorePLUS deck!

chochajin: Thank you very much! =) I'll be working as a volunteer in a church. Mainly as an assistant when it comes to English classes/clubs and music activities. Hopefully it'll be fun!!
kame3: CONGRATULATIONS!!!

Hi,
I am having a hard time increasing my vocabulary.
To those of you with 10k+ decks, could you please answer these questions:
1) do you study the words in isolation?
2) do you use sound files?
3) do you have kanji in the word(s) on the question side?
4) if the answer to 3 is yes, do you have trouble recognizing learned words when they appear without kanji (i.e spoken)?
5) if the answer to 3 is no, do you practice kanji production?
Thanks.

kame3, おめでとうございました！
That must have taken a lot of effort!
You studied with sentences (AJATT), right? ^__^

I switched my youtube account to Japanese a long time ago but I think it has finally paid off. I was watching a video about "喫茶店" and I read the comments. "客はキモイ！". Haha people are so mean.　ウケル！ Now I am able to read at least 50% of the comments. (Lot's of typos though :<)

Thanks Zorlee, thanks gyuujuice

No I didn't study with sentences or did AJATT (I just now remembered that AJATT had the 10000 sentences thing ).
To answer Sequa:

1) Yes, I study words in isolation. I did about 2/3 of KO2001 (recognition and production), but quit it, because I was getting tired of it. For me it became more and more inefficient to study whole sentences, because I knew about 90% of the elements in the sentences. That's why I decided it would be better and faster to learn grammar and vocab apart. This is why I cannot compare to Zorlee: I imagine that the amount of time you would have to spent to get to 10000 isolated words is nothing compared to the time to get to 10000 sentences.

2) No, I don't use sound files. Used them for KO2001, but took a lot of extra time. But this is not a principle choice, I just didn't know how to get the sound files at first and at the time I could have gotten them, I thought that it wouldn't help me much more. I already did 2/3 of KO2001 with sound, so I already had some feel for the language (hopefully with this I dodged the bullet magamo pointed out with his post here http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...#pid112306). O yeah, also when I 'answer' the card, I tend to say the answer out loud. I think this has helped me somewhat.

3) Yes, the more Kanji the better I try to always put the kanji for a word on the question side, unless it is not commonly used. When one kanji has multiple readings/meanings, I put 'not XXX' on the YYY card and 'not YYY' on the XXX card, where XXX and YYY can be different readings or meanings. For me, words with kanji are often easier than only hiragana words (unless it is 承る )

4) Yes, obviously. My 10000 deck has taken me further in terms of reading comprehension, but listening comprehension is still lacking. This also has to do with homophones. However, it has only been a few times when I heard a word, thought I didn't know it and it turned out that I already learned it. But imo improving your listening works better when you know the words and you have to distinguish or recall them, instead of not knowing any words at all

(5) btw I don't practice Kanji production)

In summary, I'm still quite poor at Japanese, but I'd like to think I have a basis now where I can build on.

When I reached 9500 (approx) sentences, I moved to isolated words.
I've done KO2001 + mining random stuff. All recognition (except like 500 sentences from KO2001 production, but this took so much time that I stopped adding cards. Still do the reviews though).
Now I do words only, and love it. I feel I learn words better this way, since I don't have the sentences to lean on. But I did like sentences as well, it internalized a lot of grammar, and made reading much easier.
I recommend both. Starting out with a bunch of sentences, then doing words after a while.
I can say that words are more "economic" in terms of speed. It takes a lot of time finding, understanding and entering 30 sentences. It could take me 4-6 hours to find sentences I REALLY wanted to mine during the last part of the "sentence-phase". Usually because I understood a lot of what I was reading, and didn't want to enter sentences that I didn't like. However, doing 30 words takes about an hour, 30 min. if I'm in the zone
And reviewing words is SO much faster.

Not much of a milestone compared to Zorlee or Kame, but I finished processing the drama Around 40 episode 1 (almost 2 months, ughh). Guess that completes my self described Intermediate Step 1 of 4 (Core 2k plus First 1000 of 6k; Tae Kim plus first 200 of KM2; 8 hours of dramas).

It's funny, in Africa I had much more time to study. These months coming back to Japan, I pretty much just did upkeep reviews only. Still, it demonstrates the benefits of SRS in that you can keep an "holding pattern" in your learning and step right back into it without losing much.

Anyway, now onto Intermediate Step 2 of 4.

"Holding pattern", that's a good term for it. Almost makes it sound dignified.

Woot! Passed JLPT2 with 76%! Stoked as. Only took 2 years! Going for N1 in December.

I bought some cheese.

*About to make comment about how you are insane*

*remember that you mentioned that you have done RtK before*

*exhale*

reached the 1 year and 1 month mark (not counting RTK1+3 which took 2-3 months). I feel like I'm not a noob anymore. Learning has been fun/interesting all these months. Feels like all the immersion/reading I'm doing is paying off,even some grammar study through context worked well. I now have that confidence that fluency is definitely possible, I don't really care whether or not it will take 2+ years to achieve, I will achieve it! People say 3-5 years is a good estimate to get fluent(solid level of fluency). Which sounds right to me but just having the feeling that one can achieve fluency is astonishing (no matter what people say about you learning)

P.S. I will make another thread(in another 2 months), as I'm trying to keep a consistent 5 month gap for a progress report on my learning japanese so far. Hopefully this time around I can motivate people to keep learning

Got a phone from 阪南市市役所 and understood what was going on, even though he used 2 minutes on apologizing for calling me.
I love Osaka.

omg, that totally reminds me of when I was at my homestay's house alone. They explicitly told me to pick up the phone if it rings, but they were sure it wouldn't.

Guess what, it did. And I picked up and the lady on the phone said my host brothers name. I said "いない。". Then she said my host sisters name. "いない。" Then she asked me who I was and I said ”留学生、ザックです。" Then she laughed and apologized and I said "すみません" and she hung up.

Pretty much after that I was like やった!!!! all around the house because I succeeded in the most easy phone conversation ever.
also she told my host mom I sounded Japanese .

Anywho, long story rambling over. Congratulations man, I'm glad you're having a good time in 日本。

Finished my first Visual Novel in Japanese! That's 2 video games completed in good old JP. Think I learned about ~400-500 words from it.

The game I played was Air (PSP) and when I first started it it was really tough for me because grammar wise it can be quite tricky and it uses plenty of rare kanji and obscure words. Near the end I was still picking up lots of new vocab but I found I don't have to translate it, I can just listen to/read it at normal speed and understand it

Can't wait to play Kanon on PSP now!

I passed N1!
I had 71% so it looks like I would still barely pass even if the passing mark was not lowered.

I learned about Anki & RTK about 14 months ago from this forum and I must admit that it made my learning SO much more efficient. Before that I've been struggling for years and was progressing very slowly. The last year & half was insane.

Funny trivia: my combined deck (vocab+sentences) has just a little bit over 10000 items

The worst (and best thing at the same time) is that there are still loads of things to learn...

My most recent milestones:

Last week I learned my 500th Kanji via the Heisig Method. Yay!
Today I'm learning my 559th.

I've got a long way to go, I know. But I only discovered this site today. So far, I've mostly just used flashcards.