1103 on RTK1. Half way through.
Huzzah!

Pounded about 80 of them today to get there, I fear my reviews tomorrow.

My milestone achievement:  today I finished the last reading in the reader I've been working on for months:  An Introduction to Written Japanese by O'Neill and Yanada. This book was intended to be used in conjunction with Teach Yourself Japanese which I previously worked through.

Here's a snapshot of the very last page of the very last selection.  I'm so proud of myself...the sentences near the end got very long and convoluted yet I was able to puzzle them out!    They even threw in "respect language" and some obsolete kana spellings "in case the student encounters them in older books".


[url=http://s698.photobucket.com/user/mrjohn2/media/iwjtitlepage.jpg.html][/url]

I just finished reading a Japanese translation of Agatha Christie's "And then there were none". This is the first novel I read in Japanese. やった！

I met my new mother-in-law last night, and managed to hold a conversation with her in Japanese about child rearing, family, and life in America. Achievement unlocked!

Just tapped out a gigantic Line message to my tutor regarding my schedule. (I think this is what email is meant for, but why use a real keyboard when I can get frustrated at my phone's touchscreen and keyboard and kill my battery?)
It only took me around an hour to complete... (EDIT: that's actually not that bad, considering I obsess a lot over what I type; I've only recently gotten it down to a reasonable level in English, but doing so is also the cause of my occasionally weird English and excessive use of parentheses.)

On the bright side, it was more grammatically complex than what I usually type (I mostly added prepositional phrases, hopefully they didn't sound too unnatural), so it should be a good candidate for review when we next meet.

[Zgarbas]

My first milestone in Chinese (a double!)

I walked into the lab today and saw a colleague for the first time in the year, so I yelled out Happy New Year in Chinese. A nearby senpai overhead me, gave a startled look, and asked my colleague, in Chinese, 'Zgarbas can speak Chinese now?'. I started doing the Japanese 'いやいや、まだまだ gesture automatically while my colleague answered that 'she's trying hard'. As my senpai went back to her papers I realised that it was my first time understanding a conversation in the wild =). Yesterday I was surprised to catch a random sentence, as well ('where are you going'). Words cannot express what a huge breakthrough this is for me D:

Participated in a business Japanese speech contest!

Great job on the speech! How long did you have to prepare? Did you take a class specifically for business Japanese or was that something you worked on in your own time (maybe in preparation for this competition)?

Edit: Also, now that I'm thinking of it more, you just gave me a little inspiration on how I can practice my business Japanese in a way that is actually applicable to real life. Thanks.

(2016-02-27, 8:34 am)zx573 Wrote: Great job on the speech! How long did you have to prepare? Did you take a class specifically for business Japanese or was that something you worked on in your own time (maybe in preparation for this competition)?

Edit: Also, now that I'm thinking of it more, you just gave me a little inspiration on how I can practice my business Japanese in a way that is actually applicable to real life. Thanks.

Thanks so much! 

It took me around two weeks to prepare from coming up with a theme, writing it up, correcting the draft to then memorising as much of it as I could.

I'm a graduate student now and the Japanese classes I take are quite general. I do have experience working with Japanese companies though. For the contest, more so than on business Japanese I focussed on improving my intonation as much as possible. I did learn a few new useful phrases throughout the process, like the one from the intro （最善を尽くします - do my best).

A tough act to follow above, but I guess I just hit a milestone of sorts in that I now have over 42k active cards  

A large chunk of that is audio cards btw, not all vocab (also why the reviews are slow).
Edit: fixed image link

Just hit 45k active cards, still no end in sight. Also giving some stats addons a try.

(2016-06-19, 10:48 am)anotherjohn Wrote: Just hit 45k active cards, still no end in sight. Also giving some stats addons a try.

What's the Past Day Past Week Past Month add-on called on the add-on site? Are these all vocabulary notes or a mixture of different things? That's a lot if it's vocabulary alone. Either way it takes a lot of dedication to pull off stats like this so well done.

Thank you

Addons used:

Progress Graph

True Retention

Also that's mostly audio cards not pure vocab - cheating really  

Great work.  Won't you start running out of words to add soon?

(2016-06-19, 10:48 am)anotherjohn Wrote: Just hit 45k active cards, still no end in sight. Also giving some stats addons a try.

Don't you ever suspend stuff that you already know well enough? I can't see myself adding 45k cards, unless I start adding production cards as well (aside from RTK + new kanji). The rate at which you seem to be adding cards as well as the amount of stuff you have to review... that seems like a nightmare.