On Tuesday I went for the 会話クラブ for the second time after two weeks and I felt that I understood much more than the previous time! The milestone is that they talked about things here, and our teacher, who's Japanese, gained some deep insight into the troubles of young adults in our society, the idea of human interaction and witnessing the understanding of people from across the globe, left me with an immense feeling of satisfaction, this is the reason why I'm learning languages, it's connecting with fellow humans and expanding my view of life.

The second things is; today for the first time I made a Skype call with a language learner, who's Japanese, and actually I wasn't practicing my Japanese, but only helping with Arabic, felt good

Just hit 1000 cards vocab cards the core deck. Took me 27 days, although would have been shorter if I didn't start so slow (like 10 a day for the first week). Now I'm doing about 60 per day. Good recall rate too, my weakest day was 96% (missed 10 out of 250 reviews).

It seems I unwittingly passed the 1000 mark in my core6k deck too. I can't boast the same retention though... Maybe I'm being too strict... でもさー....

egoplant Wrote:Just hit 1000 cards vocab cards the core deck. Took me 27 days, although would have been shorter if I didn't start so slow (like 10 a day for the first week). Now I'm doing about 60 per day. Good recall rate too, my weakest day was 96% (missed 10 out of 250 reviews).

Could you please elaborate on how you study?

Added the 20,000th vocab card to my deck today, the 21st of December 2012!

I know it's just an arbitrary number, but it seems like a milestone, especially when the same time last year the deck had around 10,000 vocab.

Finished my Core 6k deck yesterday. Took me about 14 months, but I had long periods where I didn't do any new cards (just to let the reviews calm down a bit).

undead_saif Wrote:

egoplant Wrote:Just hit 1000 cards vocab cards the core deck. Took me 27 days, although would have been shorter if I didn't start so slow (like 10 a day for the first week). Now I'm doing about 60 per day. Good recall rate too, my weakest day was 96% (missed 10 out of 250 reviews).

Could you please elaborate on how you study?

Kamikaze style reviews no doubt.

Finally in the tripple digit area. Only 999 Kanji left to go.

frony0 Wrote:

undead_saif Wrote:

egoplant Wrote:Just hit 1000 cards vocab cards the core deck. Took me 27 days, although would have been shorter if I didn't start so slow (like 10 a day for the first week). Now I'm doing about 60 per day. Good recall rate too, my weakest day was 96% (missed 10 out of 250 reviews).

Could you please elaborate on how you study?

Kamikaze style reviews no doubt.

What does that mean?

I slowed down over Christmas to about 30 cards a day because I hate doing reviews. But I still have a really high success rate. Today I got 5 out of 249 (~2%) wrong. So far I'm up to about 1600 cards. Another thing I should mention is I stopped doing them in order somewhat. Instead I made a separate kanji deck, unsuspended every on-reading kanji I knew from about the first 800 cards, and then went through the core deck and unsuspended other cards that contained those kanji, so I could make them stick. So recently, I just unlock 10-15 in order, add all the new kanji to my kanji deck, and then unsuspend a bunch of other cards that contain those kanji.

egoplant Wrote:

frony0 Wrote:Kamikaze style reviews no doubt.

What does that mean?

Implying that you were being more or less suicidal in your voracious adding of new cards

frony0 Wrote:

egoplant Wrote:

frony0 Wrote:Kamikaze style reviews no doubt.

What does that mean?

Implying that you were being more or less suicidal in your voracious adding of new cards

So you're saying that I'm going to fail?

Fail isnt a very objective word but there is a high likelihood of burnout at that rate. Reviews eventually level off at around 12 times your daily add. So if you're adding 50/day that's 600 reviews/day if you keep it up.

Listen, study however you like but this forum is full of threads following ppl doing several hundreds of reviews/day and one day they just disappear. Usually turns out they missed a day or two and, faced with 2,000/3,000+ reviews, couldn't deal any longer.

It's also maybe worth mentioning that this forum is full of ppl who have self-studied Japanese to fluency, and to my knowledge none of them were adding more than 35 cards/day (even that is a little crazy in the long term in my opinion... and the long term result is the only thing that anyone other than oneself actually cares about).

dtcamero Wrote:...and one day they just disappear.

怖い

Of course if you could maintain that pace, you would be a heathen god in my eyes. It's just so much more common that if done in the long term that kind of thing leads to death by reviews.

Well it's been about 38 days and I think 30-50 new cards per day is a good pace for me. My highest point was 80+ per day, but that isn't realistic for the long term. So far I still haven't broken 300 reviews per day. I do about ~3/40/50/2 again/hard/good/easy (just a guess since my stats are messed up from cram decks, but the "again" percentage is accurate since I check that every day). For my kanji deck it's pretty much 5/10/70/15. I don't really care about the deck as much, and they are super easy since I know a lot of vocab for each one.

I see, cool!

Ok I'm going to give an update (I signed up with immersion classes and I'm back for another semester of school with it).

The class itself wasn't hard but it's trying to teach you via only in JPN to JPN with the aid of visuals, audio,pictures, kana/kanji, using gestures to get the point across (but still only in JPN to JPN) and take notes in JPN and reply back only in JPN).

Now it sounds good and all but I noticed that the course itself isn't hard and I understood almost everything (two words slipped by me but he explained it and I got it instantly (hate when stuff is written in kana lol). This course has taught me that I actually know then I give myself credit (the immersion I did years back really helped me out). Now I know what to do and I'm planning and putting the effort to get things done.

Focus on production style activities (thanks to the Internet this isn't bad). Get daily speaking practice online if you can, do language exchange (starting doing this recently again). Focus srs learning on grammar, production style cards, JLPT material (because I know I will have to take it again but I know why I screwed up). Basically I'm giving myself to get to my goals (I have this odd feeling my goals will switch yet again and the cycle continues....). Basically I'm using the srs less and less but I still try to add 5-15 cards per day (again, it's oriented for me to fill those gaps and get going more)

I only went to one class, so there are still lots left but I will see how it goes. I'll give it more chances but so far, this is my first impression.

What do you guys think I should do?

After 3 years and one month living in Japan, I finally got stopped and gaijin carded by the police.

kitakitsune Wrote:After 3 years and one month living in Japan, I finally got stopped and gaijin carded by the police.

Did you get checked at the train station? I got checked while on holiday in Japan a month ago and I don't even look foreign.

Yep at the train station. The cop's explanation of why they stopped me made absolutely no sense. Something about how lots of people (criminals?) come to the train station and how I looked like I was on "yasumi". Yea okay, it was 1:30 pm, I haven't shaved in a while, and I have an obvious cold. My new job doesn't start until next week...just because I'm not working at the time and look like shit doesn't mean you have reason to card me...

Anyway it was only 3 minutes of my time. No big deal. I was actually laughing about it. Getting carded is one of the gaijin stereotypes and it was my first time. If it happens again I'm going to be a dick about the whole thing and copy down the cop's info and make a complaint.

1500 words!

My first comment in Forum c:

I reached frame 1000 on New Year's Eve, and took a WEEK to reach the 1100th :/
I found out the Forum is such a wonderful place and couldn't stop myself from spending half of my Japanese-study time reading every random post I come across ^^
Honestly, I've hanged out in Forum this week more than I have done in the past 3 months (please don't tell me I'm taking too much time to finish RTK1, I already know :'( )

I've set a deadline, by March 1st, I will have finished it, and I'll post that here

*Bon courage* to everyone !

psychopatate Wrote:My first comment in Forum c:

I reached frame 1000 on New Year's Eve, and took a WEEK to reach the 1100th :/
I found out the Forum is such a wonderful place and couldn't stop myself from spending half of my Japanese-study time reading every random post I come across ^^
Honestly, I've hanged out in Forum this week more than I have done in the past 3 months (please don't tell me I'm taking too much time to finish RTK1, I already know :'( )

I've set a deadline, by March 1st, I will have finished it, and I'll post that here

*Bon courage* to everyone !

Welcome! And good luck!

Thanks ^^

2500 sentences in my Anki deck. With a retention rate of about 90% I think I'm doing quite well. Can't really add too much during term time; the last I want to do is wake up to 300 due cards. :p

And good luck to all young padawans fighting through RtK. (Protip: add a Japanese keyword if you know a Japanese word using that kanji. 秘 and 密 might be a pain in the ass due to the similar keywords, but you can add ひ密 and 秘みつ to show which kanji Heisig wants by "secret" or "secrecy".)

Not Japanese related, but Japan related:

I finally visited all 47 Japanese prefectures! ^_^
Going to post about ALL of them in my blog.

The last prefecture (the 47th) was Okinawa.