Hi!
Some of you may already know this, but I'm moving to Japan in September. I'll be working there for at least ten months, but I'm hoping to extend my stay.
Anyway, I've been studying Japanese for a year now, and I'm pretty happy with my progress, if I may say so myself. BUT I have to make a serious change in how I study and how much time spent studying when I move to Japan.
The reason:
I've been studying Japanese pretty much full time this year, meaning I've spent at least 4-5 hours every day at Japanese studying (with immersion going on during the rest of the day), and lately 6-7 hours a day. Even though I've experienced great progress since I added my first sentence in Anki 10 months ago, I just can't keep up with adding 30+ sentences a day, and I really don't want to either. I won't have that much spare time, and if I do, I want to spend it with Japanese people and not with my Macbook.

However, I don't know the best way to deal with my studies when I move to Japan. I don't want to spend a lot of time behind my computer, I want to hang out with my Japanese friends to be, get some air and live in Japan. But I do want to study, at least a little bit, because I really don't want to lose that drive, that momentum.

What I've been doing up till now is very simple:
Find sentence I don't understand.
Learn it.
Enter into Anki.　
But this takes time, valuable time, especially at my current level (I'm currently mining a lot from novels such as こころ and 我輩は猫である) and doing 30 sentences can take everything from 3-6 hours. (That does not include time spent for 500+ reviews a day)

I'm thinking about doing maybe 10 new words a day when I'm in Japan.
What I see as possibilities to speed this up is to start using either pre-made sentences or stop using sentences and start inputing words only. I really don't like either, but I'm leaning towards just words, since I find things sticking more easily when I find the material myself.

What do you guys recommend me to do?
Quit studying all together? Start doing words only? Pre-made sentences? Keep doing what I do?
All feedback is appreciated!

Thank you so much!
Zorlee...

Quote:However, I don't know the best way to deal with my studies when I move to Japan. I don't want to spend a lot of time behind my computer, I want to hang out with my Japanese friends to be, get some air and live in Japan.

When it comes to learning a language, any task that uses that language IS studying the language. For most people "studying" evokes thoughts of hunching over textbooks or grammar references, and concentrated learning, but when it comes to language learning 'studying' is so, so much more. Hanging out with Japanese friends, experiencing the country, and living the language is a richer, more effective form of 'studying' than sitting in front of a laptop will ever be

I don't want to open up a can of worms by commenting on the sentence-mining method, but I truly feel that if 30 sentences of a book is taking you 3-6 hours, then you shouldn't be using that material as it is far too hard. In my mind it's the equivalent of giving an American child War and Peace rather than Captain Underpants and having him spend hours on a single page deciphering it word by word, rather than having him just blaze through material at his level which he can truly READ rather than DECIPHER. Progression through slowly increasing difficulty is the most effective form of learning as far as I am concerned.

You don't give a beginner violinist the score for Tchaikovsky's violin concerto and have him learn advanced bowing techniques, vibrato, and positions from it. You present him with material he CAN play, then when he does that well, introduce something harder, so forth and so on, until he finally reaches the level where he can play the music difficult pieces.

Same concept for language learning in my opinion.

But as for keeping up traditional studying methods, I think that vocabulary alone combined with learning from a grammar resource is the best combination ^_^

I think the most important thing you could do in Japan is hang out with Japanese people who speak Japanese (rather than English). You will be forced to learn the language that way and your listening will improve very swiftly. Also be sure to keep up your immersion when you are at home.
What I would do (am doing...) is limit yourself to one or two hours of 'traditional' studying (reveiwing and adding sentences) a day. For me, this is from 6-7 in the morning and from 10-11 at night. If you don't finish your reveiws in the that time, leave them for the next day. Don't add sentences if you don't have time.
The rest of the time, live your life in Japanese. Buy/borrow and read lots of books (for fun!), rent lots of movies (80 yen at Geo!), talk to your friends, etc.
But that is just my opinion.

In the end, it may be best to just do things that you like.

If you don't mind spending $60/year for a subscription, you
can subscribe to the Hiragana Times (http://www.hiraganatimes.com).

They have an electronic PDF version and send you a new password every month.
What's great about this magazine is that all articles are in English AND Japanese,
with furigana over all kanji.

Also, since it's a PDF, you can simply copy and paste text, instead of having to manually
type everything. So it definitely can save time.

Here's a sample page from the latest issue (the article is about emoticons, i.e. symbols like smiley faces on cell phones):

http://www.hiraganatimes.com/hp/magazine...e/p008.pdf

If you're lucky enough to have an iPad and bought the iAnnotate app ($10), you can highlight and add notes to PDFs. So you can use your finger to highlight sentences and add notes to them. Sync your PDFs in Itunes and highlight/add notes on your iPad.

iAnnotate Videos:

Of course, there's other Mac and PC software that can do the same thing (for example, the Preview application on Snow Leopard OSX).

Also, if you like japanese tv drama, you can download japanese scripts for the currently airing TV shows and study them. Really good for conversational Japanese. Personally, I convert the scripts into PDF and highlight interesting sentences that I come across.

I like both of these methods because (drama and hiragana times) because they are paperless.

Anyway, good luck with everything.

Of course you're gonna want to spend lots of time with as many Japanese as possible, join a club in which you have an interest and socialize plenty.

when you're not doing that I think straight will give you your best value for money time-wise. It's faster to find, faster to input (thx rikai-chan!) and much faster to review. Lots of people might say its the devil but they're wrong. I only recommend getting it from natural sources though, not from pre-made stuff.

@aijin: I think it depends on why it takes 3 - 6 hours whether its hard or easy. If it takes them 3 - 6 hours and they only get through like 5 pages because they were trying to work stuff out then it's too hard for themに決まってるじゃん

If it takes them 3 - 6 hours and they get through a few chapters of the book before they even found 30 or so sentences/words that they wanted to input then it's not too hard for them. In fact it's getting hard to find stuff they don't know! I kinda have this with the novel i'm reading atm, so on days when I want to add lots, in addition to reading a chapter i'll also read something that's more dense when it comes to unknown material.

btw, why does IceCream now have Aijin's avatar? weird...

chamcham Wrote:btw, why does IceCream now have Aijin's avatar? weird...

There was a joke about Aijin eating icecream or something in another thread a day or 2 ago I think, and someone made a joke about eating forum members. Someone then made a pic of Aijin eating IceCream's avatar. I think...

Thank you guys! =)

Well, the reason why it can take up to 5-6 hours, is that it's starting to get a bit hard finding sentences I actually want to mine / don't know yet. And sometimes, when reading really hard stuff, it just takes a while to look everything up. (I always use a mono-dic, and that usually works out, but sometimes it takes a while to really understand everything.)

Mezbup: This might just be me being stupid, but what do you mean with "straight"? Just words, no sentences? No?

And btw: Icecream! Don't stop using "!!!!!" It's the only way I can distinguish you from Aijin nowadays, hahaha!

上下

下上


愛はアイスで
アイスは愛で

未来は暗くて寒々しいのです

I tried doing vocabulary today, no sentences. It was fast, cheap, and not that dirty, haha.　
I'll try this for a couple of weeks, and see how it works out. I have 9000+ sentences already, so it'll hopefully turn out well.
I think I'm sold already - I have the evening free to play around in Japanese, a luxury I haven't had for quite some time. 行ってきま〜す！