My Core6k reviews today took 2 minutes (21 cards, reading each sentence aloud).

Well, in terms of milestones, I completed RTK 1 last summer before I went to 立命館大学 for a few weeks, and towards the start of the month, I found out I passed the JLPT N2. Plus, I ended up technically beating my first video game entirely in Japanese a bit before that, so I feel like I've made a good bit of progress.

[RawToast]

I completed the iTalki New Year's Language Challenge

That's 20 hours of Japanese lessons over Skype between January 15th - February 28th. So about 3 hours of lessons a week I had to do my last lesson whilst on holiday xD

RawToast Wrote:I completed the iTalki New Year's Language Challenge

That's 20 hours of Japanese lessons over Skype between January 15th - February 28th. So about 3 hours of lessons a week I had to do my last lesson whilst on holiday xD

How was it? I've heard a lot about this challenge but don't really know what it is.

I've only used JOI, so I don't really know how it compares to italki.

[RawToast]

ariariari Wrote:

RawToast Wrote:I completed the iTalki New Year's Language Challenge

How was it? I've heard a lot about this challenge but don't really know what it is.

I've only used JOI, so I don't really know how it compares to italki.

It's a pledge to complete 20 hours of paid lessons on iTalki. Essentially you put $10 down and 'win' $40 if you complete 20 or more hours of lessons. I had to take one lesson whilst on holiday, I really wanted my $10 back xD It can be expensive as completing the challenge will cost at least $100 (my cheapest tutor was $6 per hour, some charge ~$15).

It was a good idea to take part, since I don't get many opportunities to speak. I ended up trying lessons with 4 different teachers and booked most of the time with 2 teachers.

I just read my first NHK easy news article, start to finish, in Japanese:

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/k1001001...61000.html

I had been "reading" NHK news on and off for about a year. But could never make it thru a whole article, even with a dictionary. So I put it down for a while.

Added nearly 1000 new cards today, a new personal record. Previous max was ~600.

I finished all the Core 2000/6000 sentence packs.

Finished RTK awhile ago.

Finally understand Causative, Passive, Causative-Passive, and Honorific/Humble forms. I don't know why I found them confusing before, but they made a lot more sense the second time I tackled them.

Know at least 1300 words. (Better than 500 words.)

Finished Tae Kim Special, yay!

Now to go through lots of vocab. I don't expect to start KM2 points yet, but I may start earlier depending on the grammar difficulty of my reading material.

This is a funny kind of accidental milestone. My friend and I have been working through a Kanzen Master grammar book which we kind of vaguely assumed for some reason was N3. We don't really use grammar books as primary learning tools, so we just go through them as a sort of checklist and gap-filler. My friend knows well over half of what we encounter and I know most of it, though some things are new, and I can explain it to her as we go along where necessary. We try to conduct the entire session in Japanese, though I will occasionally use a little English for complex explanations where necessary.

Anyway, a little while ago we suddenly realized the book we are working on is actually (old) 2級. I am not sure why neither of us noticed before (though I am notoriously vague about practicalities) and I wouldn't like to say I am at 2級 level. I think our levels are rather all over the place as we haven't studied systematically. But it definitely felt like a cause for celebration!

Completed the final N2 mock exam in my book. I didn't quite pass (a few short on the total points), but I'm going to move on to the N1 stuff to see what happens.
(Too many) details here:
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...#pid219133

Seriously, it took me about an hour to compose that...
The above might be interesting to those of you wondering about the test (and another person's thoughts on it). Mock exams are great, because I already know what I'm going to hate about the actual exam!

I started using my Kindle Unlimited subscription to try and find really easy japanese children's books to read. I managed to read and understand two of them! Hooray for the reading level of a 5 year old and brightly colored pictures that explain both context and vocabulary.

It's not much of an achievement, but when you're starting over from three year break it's a bit of a rush.

Translated my first long and technically complex document.

http://www.koiki-kikan.jp/contents/20140926_rfc_01.pdf

Fun stuff. Never thought I'd use Japanese for this kind of stuff haha.

[Zgarbas]

So today I was sorting out some old pottery with some Japanese people. We find these Japanese style cups with a poem and a heian-cap wearing bloke drawn on it. The Japanese people get quite excited about it, since it's so classical and has a Heian poem on it. I have a look at it...
"This isn't older than Edo, the grammar isn't actually 古典”
We googled it, I was right. 17th century tanka. It felt oddly satisfying.

Added an online leaderboard to my Android kanji puzzle game. Found out that people actually play the game. Happy! (Hey, it's a milestone, and it's related to Japanese.)

fzort Wrote:Added an online leaderboard to my Android kanji puzzle game. Found out that people actually play the game. Happy! (Hey, it's a milestone, and it's related to Japanese.)

That looks really cool. I'm downloading it next time I go to a place with wifi

mezbup Wrote:Translated my first long and technically complex document.

http://www.koiki-kikan.jp/contents/20140926_rfc_01.pdf

Fun stuff. Never thought I'd use Japanese for this kind of stuff haha.

Awesome!

I had the realization today that I still love learning Japanese, 5 years into the game.
To me that is a huge

Today I had plans to meet an online friend in Sangenjaya. We met one of her other online friends from Canada. I went in fearing that her other friend would turn out to speak fluent Japanese, and I'd be unable to keep up. It turned out the other friend spoke no Japanese, and my Japanese friend spoke no English, so I had to serve as a translator! It was a pretty cool experience.

I've realized lately that I have a whole life - friends, a relationship - hat are built on my speaking Japanese. I count that as a pretty sweet achievement.

Good job, gaiaslastlaugh! I went to Japan two years ago for a study abroad class and did a lot of translating for my classmates. Granted, I was a beginner at the time, but I can understand, at least somewhat, what a cool experience that is.

Well, I joined the main site back in September of last year. Since then, I've completed RTK volumes one and two and the first 5,000 words of the Core 6K. I no longer study RTK2, but it was a great way to transition away from Heisig's keywords into reading actual Japanese. Signal primitives are a great help.

The Core deck has been a blessing. It's taken me seventy-seven days and around 250 hours to reach 5,000 words, but my improvement has been remarkable. I still watch anime with subs, but it's exhilarating to hear all the vocabulary I now recognize. On top of that, I've learned a few new things about Japanese grammar from reading all the sentences.

In any case, I've decided to slow down on the amount of new cards I add per a day in favor of diving into some native material. Wish me luck

This note to self has been on the table before, but here it is again: NEVER STOP REVIEWING

Two weeks back I had about 1200 old stacked kanjis waiting for review because I've been on a loong break from studying Japanese. Today, I got them down to 500. Yay! Trying to get them to 0 within the next two weeks.

It's not particularily hard - many of those bastards were quite mature with over 2-year intervals so I've still got them. However, like a half of those are only moderately mature and I've just simply forgotten them. Can't help it. They come rushing back immediately after turning the cards obviously, but they are going to be a super boring job to get up to mature again starting from 1d intervals.

I dreamt one night about how happy I would be right now if I had reviewed for the past 6 months. My life would be so easy.

There. I repeat: Don't stop reviewing One day will be the day that it only takes a minute to review your RtK deck. No fun doing this all over.

* And nice job TurtleBear! I've finally gotten into Core6k too and it's such a good feeling when you constantly recognize new learnt words around you :p

Well, I don't know how much of a "milestone" it is, but I won a Japanese speech contest at my university tonight. Granted, my university's Japanese program isn't terribly large, but it still felt good that all my hard work/nervous desperation paid off.

Been in a little slump recently without reading or listening much. But I just passed the 30k word mark in anki. I've read abt. 50 light novels and was listening to news regularly before the slump.

Started playing FFXII in Japanese the other day; I was surprised how easy I found it, despite the setting. Had some trouble with the bits that expanded on the history of the world, but I usually have trouble with fantasy histories in English too (of course, good writing usually makes this irrelevant, so long as you remember the basics). I also missed an objective cue in a cut-scene, but, thankfully, there's an objective reminder in the menu (and the people in town will say relevant things).
I can no longer complain about the English dubs of FF games, because the Japanese one is almost as bad in this one... And I still can't get used to the art style: everyone's face and nose looks too round and squashed.

Also, I watched most of the second season of 狼と香辛料 with J-subs only. Understood most of it, until they started talking about forcing someone to take a loss at the exchange, but again, I couldn't follow those kinds of things well when I watched the first season with English subs, so I don't mind.

In both cases, I understood enough to follow the plot (and directions in the game). Of course, in both cases, visual cues, design, and common sense did a lot of the work for me.

I recently started watching Anime with Japanese subs and dropped the subs for a few slice of life shows completely. And I'm really surprised of how much I am able to understand. I only noticed that my vocabulary is kinda lacking but I'm working on it. My next goal will be to being able to watch other things than SoL. But my reading though needs a lot of work.