Edit: Read the first paragraph. Lots of people don't seem to have understood what this thread is about.

Okay, I know this sounds pretty strange but bear with me. The times when I really feel like I'm making progress are when I succeed at something I couldn't do before. I figured it might be a good idea to record when we fail at stuff so that later, when we feel like we aren't making any progress, we can check this thread and see how bad we were. I guess when you feel like you're not making progress would also be really good time to post here. It doesn't have to be an outright failure, just something that's difficult. I'd recommend you make your posts quite detailed, maybe even including numerical evidence (such as how long it took you to read x amount), so that you can tell you've improved even if it's still difficult.

Anyway, my recent milestone failure was my attempt to branch out in to variety shows. I'd been wanting to do it for a while, but thought it would be too dificult without subs. In his recent thread Zorlee linked to some London Hearts episodes with subs (for which I'm still greatful, despite the results), and I decided to dive in.

I first tried watching it without any subs and could barely pick out a few words, so I went back to the beggining and watched it with subs. I still had basically no idea what they were saying. There were lots of unknown words; they all spoke too quickly, often the speaker would have finished their sentence while I had still only read the first word (or even less), and when more more than one person spoke at once, which seemed to happen all the time, I couldn't seperate things out. I was just barely able to grasp the general topic of what they were talking about (ie. which of the panel members foriegn women would most like to marry), but very little of the actual details of the conversations. There were a few times when I felt I was hanging in and managing to follow along, but I don't think I got a single one of the jokes they made. (literally)

So I threw in the towel and decided to SRS it first. I found that even the i+0 sentences didn't make any sense to me, which might have been because they were out of order and out of context, but I study anime and drama that way without too much dificulty. I also found that I still couldn't follow the audio too. Even after multiple listenings I couldn't tell if the audio was even close to what was written for most of the sentences.

So thats my failure, feel free to post your own. Just to be clear, this thread isn't meant to turn in to a pity party; it's based on the assumption that you will improve so it's actually quite positive.

I haven't reviewed kanji seriously since late August because I've been going crazy trying to reach my research deadlines. There are over 1500 cards I need to review...

A friend of mine has just started learning Japanese, and the other day I was trying to explain the difference between は　and が to him. I couldn't do it. LOL. I have an intuitive sense of when to use either particle, and I usually pick the right one. But I still don't really understand why ... not to the point where I can explain it properly to someone else, anyway.

I can't remember when I said I'd be done with RTK and JFE, but whenever it was I missed the mark :-). I didn't study anything for 4 months or something, but now I'm back on track. Not perfect, but being much more consistent with my studying. Here's to all of our failures (which we will hopefully learn from!)

When I look back at my srs reps, I have honestly probably done close to half a million reps by now, maybe even a million. I have failed most of those reps but it's also a milestone all in the same time.

I feel that with learning Japanese there are so many balls to juggle at once that you're always going to drop one at times, and at the moment I've dropped the kanji ball to concentrate on reading. It should be okay to pick up again when the time is right (even if it's currently at 500 reviews

With regards to failure, I rented High Fidelity in Japanese and understood way less than I expected in the first 10 mins.... gonna try and work out why after 多読 has finished ><

failing about 50 cards out of 100

i think that there's something psychological about failing one card which makes you much more likely to fail the next, even if you would know the next one normally. similarly, winning streaks seem to make it easier to remember ones you'd otherwise forget. anyone else notice things like that?

Didn't do reviews for a month while on holidays. After the holidays, I spent two months on reviewing only (ie. no new items), so to get acceptable level of burden that would allow for adding new items.

for wa and ga difference just link him the tae kim's guide to grammar.

oh and i have the opposite problem the OP. I understand london hearts like 98-100% with subs and 95%-100% without subs so as much as i enjoy watching it like I know there aren't many words to learn from it but i do sometimes and that's nice. I don't find their talking fast whatsoever...... i think manzai or some of the weird gag people talk fast and say really random shit which makes it even more difficult to undersatnd... not to mention the lack of subs.

Basically it's just too easy for me but I love watching it so it's like I know i should do something else more difficult to improve my japanese skills or like work on that other language (koreaN) . I read japanese books so I guess that's enough.

the thing with variety shows is all they use is daily conversation words/vocab/sentence structure etc and so once you get used it.. it's like really easy and then you can get as picky as you want with variety/talk shows cause lots of 'em.

my recent milestone failure is completely failing to keep up with news this month, i wanted to read it every day, but only kept it up for a week. i wanted to read 日経 and learn more about economics and the euro crisis, but every time i look at a page i just wanna go to sleep. i definately prefer things that introduce topics easily but with some depth like national geographic. I wish there was a magazine like that that concentrated on some other issues i'm interested in...

@splatted: i was looking at the guy who uploaded London Hearts with subs, and he also uploaded a program called "Lincoln" with subs too. I don't know if it's any easier, because i've never really watched either of them, but maybe give that a go too?

IceCream Wrote:my recent milestone failure is completely failing to keep up with news this month, i wanted to read it every day, but only kept it up for a week. i wanted to read 日経 and learn more about economics and the euro crisis, but every time i look at a page i just wanna go to sleep. i definately prefer things that introduce topics easily but with some depth like national geographic. I wish there was a magazine like that that concentrated on some other issues i'm interested in...

@splatted: i was looking at the guy who uploaded London Hearts with subs, and he also uploaded a program called "Lincoln" with subs too. I don't know if it's any easier, because i've never really watched either of them, but maybe give that a go too?

you could always read this: http://newsmanga.com/

I have another failure today that has nothing to do with Japanese. For some reason I felt like cutting my own hair....so tomorrow I will be going to a real hair salon. It did feel pretty liberating when I cut it, but it's too difficult to get everything even by myself, especially the back. Surprisingly, it actually doesn't look that bad. But I know it isn't completely even! Now I'm wondering, why did I think this would be fun? At least it's the weekend so I can get it touched up.

Along the course of these 2 years of learning Japanese, I've scrapped so much methods a long the way. I've noticed that failure is what success is all about

i bought the novel moshidora in february this year.

i started reading it, thinking that i could understand it well, but then i would just hit a point where i had no idea what was going on.

i would then back up to the very beginning and re-read it with the new knowledge i got from whatever i did (SRS, watching shows, etc.)

i think out of 280 pages, the farthest i got was page 90.
i'm back to page 15 again, on my 4th re-read. >_<;

at this point i might as well just watch the movie when it comes out on bluray in december...

kainzero Wrote:i bought the novel moshidora in february this year.

i started reading it, thinking that i could understand it well, but then i would just hit a point where i had no idea what was going on.

i would then back up to the very beginning and re-read it with the new knowledge i got from whatever i did (SRS, watching shows, etc.)

i think out of 280 pages, the farthest i got was page 90.
i'm back to page 15 again, on my 4th re-read. >_<;

at this point i might as well just watch the movie when it comes out on bluray in december...

reminds me of when I read rurouni kenshin manga books early this year. I seriously had trouble understand most of what came from there(used special vocab from that time period+phrases said during that time). Over time it started to make sense and become easy, same applies to the anime (watched it raw and had difficulties there but over time it become easier). Although transcribing it would be a challenge(which is why I will be doing that for my next transcription project right now!)

Recently I've been able to comprehend things such as pokemon, escaflowne, hotaru no hikari. So I fire up gundam thinking I'll understand it fairly well... It ended up sounding a little bit more comprehensible than the news, maybe less. Has a lot of military and technicaly type words, didn't realize til I played a gundam game.

This one is not in Japanese, but rather because of Japanese - I am studying on exchange in Norway right now and trying to learn Norwegian, without dropping Japanese of course. Now in Norwegian "ni" means 9, and this has been confusing ever since I came here. On the last class we had a test on numerals, where the teacher dictated numbers and we had to write them down in digits. She said "ni tjueen" (9.21, as in 9 kroner 21 øre). I immediately wrote that down as "￥20"

On a more relevant note, a few weeks ago I was at a party with some exchange students from Japan and local students of Japanese from the University of Oslo. I had been studying Japanese for about a year, but that was the first time I actually got to socialize in Japanese, and, needless to say, it was far from smooth. I could follow most of the conversations, but whenever I tried to say something myself it went like this:

Me: <Question in Japanese>
Other person: <Answer in Japanese, followed by another question>
Me: えぇ...? :/
Other person: <Repeat question> :|
Me: ......... :O
Other person: <Translate question into English>
<Everyone switches to English and the conversation goes on>

I have bunch of fails myself, but I am still quite happy with my progress as I haven't completely stop all together. XD

About 6 months ago, I stopped studying for a whole month of my SRS RTK studies. It was way too easy to let go, I started studying a lot less, and then began playing a lot more games. :S And before I knew it, I couldn't remember the last time I actually studied anything in Japanese, but after that short phase, I picked it right back up again.

I wanted to finish RTK1 in about 6 months, it took me a year. That was quite depressing, but I am glad I complete RTK. It has been my strongest point in Japanese.

I can't remember all of those stroke orders, and it's quite embarrassing writing in front of Japanese people, which happens way too often. :S

I thought I was going to start to understanding Japanese sentence structure, HA! I was so wrong, most of the Japanese people I talk to think I am using a translator. T.T

Lately, I haven't reviewed a new card in my SRS studies for the past two weeks, I think? And I still can't overcome the million words for open, close, Japanese counters, and Japanese days of the month [３日、５日、etc etc]

I also feel like my English is getting worse, or that it's been this bad along. *sigh*

Self-Taught
Finished RTK1 ~Lazy Kanji Mod V2 [Anki]
Currently studying JapneseCore Plus [Anki]
Studying Japanese for a year and 4 months and still counting
I have a huge test for my job coming up unrelated to Japanese altogether.

[Zgarbas]

I noticed that I can't even read one page of a novel without stumbling into unknown words, or just not getting it. (as in, if I break down each word and grammar point in the sentence I know what they are, but for some reason they refuse to get a meaning once I put them together). I've been practicing sentences for a while now so I assumed it would be better, but not considerably so =(...and this is an easy light novel, which makes it all the more frustrating.

It seems a lot of people have misunderstood what this thread is about. The idea is that you post the results of your attempt to do something as a way of recording your current Japanese level. Later, when you feel like you're not making progress, or at least not quickly enough, you can come back and try to do the same thing again. Comparing the results will show you how much you've improved and hopefully give you the motivation to throw yourself back in to studying.

That being said, if you still want to post about being behind in anki then that's absolutely fine, but it's also completely pointless.

I bought the novel もしドラ in February 2011. I attempted to read it without looking up too much, and if there was ever a time I was really confused I would re-read it from the beginning. My goal was to get it done before the movie came out for DVD.

I think I got to page 160 of 290 or something before giving up, and that was up until the movie came out in December 2011.

Maybe one day I'll come back...



...I just scrolled up and I saw my previous post talking about this. lol. Well, at least I got past page 90. =)

Not having "mastered" Japanese grammar by now, though I have made considerable headway and can understand a lot of what I read.

Retried that Gundam earlier today and though i still cant understand everything I can follow it much better. Time to anki it up i suppose

blackbrich Wrote:Retried that Gundam earlier today and though i still cant understand everything I can follow it much better. Time to anki it up i suppose

I wanted to reply to your previous post but didn't know if it would be relevant

I had the same experience, after watching some lighter stuff like Hikaru no Go or Azumanga I decided to try Gundam and was completely and utterly destroyed. Its like a completely different language... completely ruined my day and motivation.

But I'll keep coming back to that episode and eventually it will fall

More on topic: I made myself a promise this year I'd study all my leftover vocabulary from Anki (around 4.5k) and read 10k pages, so far I haven't done any of that and time is ticking