ta12121 wrote:

Currently at 9786 sentences in my sentence deck. Feels good, almost to 10,000. Will be this week for sure.
In a few days, i'll post my update on my progress. I think i posted a thread about 5months into japanese, now it's been almost 8 months and damn have things improved.

How often do you delete and which cards if you do? And how much time approximately do you spend a day on your sentence deck? I´m close to finishing RTK.

jettyke wrote:

ta12121 wrote:

Currently at 9786 sentences in my sentence deck. Feels good, almost to 10,000. Will be this week for sure.
In a few days, i'll post my update on my progress. I think i posted a thread about 5months into japanese, now it's been almost 8 months and damn have things improved.

How often do you delete and which cards if you do? And how much time approximately do you spend a day on your sentence deck? I´m close to finishing RTK.

Well it varies, in the beginning I was all about adding a lot of cards a day. It started off with 40, then 50 then 100. But after a while the reviews keep rising higher. So I decided to wait until my reviews kept going down(so when it decreased I added some cards that were 10, some days 30-40). How much time do I spend on my sentence deck. Not much but you have to remember this is just for understanding/reading not for writing. I have another deck for production.

Last edited by ta12121 (2010 April 13, 8:30 pm)

My English deck in Anki only has about 5 sentances and 3 independant vocabulary words in it, and I seem to be doing all right at that...

Recent milestones:
* Began taking private lessons with a Japanese native tutor, focused mainly on production and comprehension
* Vocab deck reached 2700 cards
* Started reading manga and adding words from them, LOTS and LOTS of words
* Wrote a plugin to help adding audio to my new cards
* Made a habit of reading "A dictionary of basic Japanese grammar" during commute

I've reached over 10,000 sentences.(10,150 sentences to be exact) and feels like I've gone so far. I can read so much kanji, almost all joyo kanji and a bit more. In a month I'm pretty confident I'll know all of them and I can finally go onto my ultimate goal of 3000 kanji.

Currently have 5 decks at the moment(will be 4 soon, as I will merge it together soon)
1 10,000 standard deck, 1 vocab deck, 1 production deck, 1 kanji deck and another kanji deck. I will merge the kanji decks soon, so it will be easier to maintain in the future.

Last edited by ta12121 (2010 April 17, 3:37 pm)

Fuamnach wrote:

@ta12121: woah, that's amazing I swear I read somewhere else you saying that you started sentences only 7 months ago or something (at least I think it was you...). How many sentences are you doing a day? :0

Yea i did have a thread for my progress. I think I posted at what stage of japanese I was in 5 months. Now it being 7.9 months(my deck says 7.9 months) but it's basically 8 months. So basically in the beginning I used to add a lot. My reviews were piling up and it bugged me, so I eventually toned it down. But after a while I increased the load slower, by like adding 20-30 cards daily. Then it went to 50+ a day. But nowadays I only add sentences when my srs reviews aren't that big. The only deck I usual add 100 a day is my vocab deck. But same applies to that deck, when my reviews are lower I add 100 or so when I feel like it. My production deck I didn't add much, I will do a bit more in the summer.

I can feel myself fluent in terms of understanding/reading. I can't say 100%, as I'll just be lying to myself. But I can say 80%+ there. I understand drama's pretty easily now, music depends(but with lyrics yea I can understand 95% of it). anime is easy, manga is easy to read. News isn't hard anymore, but the only thing that's holding me back isn't japanese itself it's more vocab to certain topics they are talking about. Websites aren't hard to read at all, even news sites. So only thing I need more improvement on is speaking/writing which I'll be focusing on in the summer. Plus I'm planning on getting some novels to read this summer, and I'll try to increase how much japanese I read a day.

P.S. Anyone can learn Japanese but what a lot of people lack is dedication and convincing themselves they can master it.

Last edited by ta12121 (2010 April 17, 6:21 pm)

Asriel wrote:

@ta12121 :
I now can see why you can be so good in so short a time. Last time you posted was April 14, and now (I presume it's still the 17th in Canada) it's April 17th. So that's 3 days.

You added 364 sentences.
Me? I've added the rough equivalent of 0. I get by just fine in every day life here in Japan, but looking at those numbers, I can now realize why I don't feel myself improving.

How often to you passively listen to Japanese? I'm talking News, Drama, Tv, etc. Not music, because it's not "natural speaking." And by passive, I mean actually watching it (not just in the background) but not trying to pick out words that you don't know.

I listen to japanese everyday. A lot of the time I actually do watch drama's,read stuff online. Passively it varies, yes I do have background music of japanese stuff playing but as for picking out words I usual srs vocab and say it out load to myself so When I hear it in drama's,news,etc I can just understand what it means. Over the course of these months I've been able to switch my mind to adapting to japanese. What i mean by that is, I can understand japanese for japanese. No need for english. Sure I may add a lot of words and do a lot of sentences but with out immersion it wouldn't really have helped. I'm not too sure but I guess I can link to how much times I srs to how much I've been improving.

I think i'll post my srs stats soon, but i did notice how much reps I do is pretty high(in total for these 8 months). I try to watch a lot of subtitle stuff or in general anything in japanese.

I guess since I srs a lot of kanji within context/vocab. I can point out and read a lot of them now. This has helped me grasp japanese better.

Last edited by ta12121 (2010 April 17, 11:19 pm)

Hmmm. Majority of the stuff I listen to is Japanese, expect when I have to go to school,work or go out with my gf(she's Chinese). So the days when I only have school work I listen to japanese for 80% of the day(This varies, but basically whenever I get a chance I listen, so using my video/mp3 player helps in this throughout the day when I have to go to school). Also I don't actively search all the words I don't know from watching news,drama's. But what I do is srs a lot of vocab I don't know. I've noticed that a lot of the vocab/compounds have similar readings but different meanings. I do have to listen to english stuff like when talking to people and stuff. But aside from that almost all my media I listen to is japanese. I srs for 1 hour a day usually and rest I usual read and listen to japanese. I try to listen/watch japanese stuff all the time, whenever I get the chance basically.

Basically what I do is this. Before I go to school I finish my srs reps within 1 hour. I listen to stuff while doing this, anything in japanese. I take the bus to school(usual takes 30-40mins to get to school), i'm listening/watching japanese stuff. Go to my classes, then I have 1 hour break between my other class, listen more. When it's time to go home, listen more. I usual print out stuff to read on the bus, so it helps me stay with the immersion factor. I come home do my work,more immersion again and sleep.

I always watch stuff for pleasure, this never feels like work to me. I always enjoy japanese, even more now since I can understand a whole lot. I don't think i'm good in japanese just yet, but my improvement has helped me realized all I have to do is keep this up. I'm thinking of changing some things, like write 2-3 journals a day in japanese or something so I can get practice in writing. But as for speaking not too sure, need to get a language exchange partner or something. I do have a friend here that's japanese, but he's busy and goes to school(not same one) so don't have time to talk to him always.

Last edited by ta12121 (2010 April 17, 11:42 pm)

Well, it's not really a milestone, but I'm at number 700 on RtK, and started doing sentences (at 40 right now).
I hope I come here soon to say "I've finished RtK" and "I'm at x000 sentences".

ta12121 wrote:

BlueFinger wrote:

Well, it's not really a milestone, but I'm at number 700 on RtK, and started doing sentences (at 40 right now).
I hope I come here soon to say "I've finished RtK" and "I'm at x000 sentences".

Don't worry, you'll be at x000 sentences soon. Time seriously fly's by nowadays. I still can't believe it's already been 8 months of me learning japanese(not including the 3 months of rtk).

I've completed 1 year of "trying to learn japanese", now I finally got at the "actually learning japanese" phase.
Thanks for the motivation, I think I'm finally doing the right thing after all.

I just passed 1,500 kanji in RTK 1.

I'd like to start sentences too, but I have no idea where to start.  I guess I'm inclined toward using either KO2001 or Core2000 (not sure which, or even how they are different).  Does one just type each sentence one encounters into Anki, even the very beginning sentences?

@ta12121: Thanks for your advice I can see from your response to Asriel the difference between you and me. It's consistency. I have a bad tendency to not add or srs for days on end when there is really no need to (I don't even get that many reviews!) getting caught up in how little I know and wanting to know everything NOW The main message I'm getting from you is to just keep going at it everyday, moving forward at a steady rate and hopefully in half a year or so I can look back and realize a lot has actually happened

Fuamnach wrote:

@ta12121: Thanks for your advice I can see from your response to Asriel the difference between you and me. It's consistency. I have a bad tendency to not add or srs for days on end when there is really no need to (I don't even get that many reviews!) getting caught up in how little I know and wanting to know everything NOW The main message I'm getting from you is to just keep going at it everyday, moving forward at a steady rate and hopefully in half a year or so I can look back and realize a lot has actually happened

Yea that's pretty much it. Keep going, add a steady amount daily but if you feel the reviews are building up. Take a break from adding cards. But one thing i recommend is rate it accordingly. No need to give yourself a hard rating for every card(I used to do this, not anymore as it will just create more cards for me to do). Now, since school's finished for me, I can finally do more work on my japanese. I basically srs for 1 hour a day. I have 5 decks at the moment. But yea I always do srs daily and keep an immersion environment. I try watch/read Japanese daily as it helps my japanese improve.

I think in the beginning it's hard because you don't know much and you may feel you're not improving or getting better in japanese. It's always like that in the beginning of the language. It takes time to become better. I look back to the 8 months now and say It was worth that time I put into learning. Now since I know how to srs more effectively and know how the srs works. I can increment it to my japanese writing that I want to do daily aside from my reviews.