Groot wrote:

That's a handy site, aphasiac.  It seems centered on the UK, though.  I wonder if there's something like that for those of us who live in the USA.

I think Craigslist.com is the American equivilent. But gumtree does have a dedicated "skill swap" board.

Also sharedtalk.com allows you to meet language partners either for text/voice chat or in real life - so maybe give that a try.

Finally found a place in Nagoya that sells spiced rum. This is huge.

On the downside I spent all day today trying to find a good bicycle that fits me/isn't made for dwarves and doesn't cost upwards of $2000. No luck. It seems that Japanese people only like extremely crappy 200kilo bicycles, or ridiculous pro level lighter than air bicycles that are still too small for me. I got to learn lots of cycling 専門用語 in the process at least.

Korean is finally starting to make sense (a little). I'd like to express my gratitude to Disney, Pixar and EAD Tokyo

nest0r wrote:

Evil_Dragon wrote:

Korean is finally starting to make sense (a little). I'd like to express my gratitude to Disney, Pixar and EAD Tokyo

Have you watched Aachi and Ssipak yet??? Best feature-length animation ever made.

Wow, this movie is actually for sale on amazon.de
I'll give it a try soon, thanks!

Woo, just reached 1000 seen facts in Anki for the first time, with a 93.7% pass rate so far.  I attribute my success to the cangy-sorted Core2k6k deck, as well as my discovery of the Learn plugin.  My previous attempts at working my way through a corpus like this have always petered out around the 500 mark, on account of wildly varying difficulty levels leading to the majority of cards turning into leeches, so this is pretty big for me.

Nukemarine wrote:

Mcjon, great job. Just for future reference, how long would you say it took you to go through the 1000 cards? Also how are you reviewing them?

It's been a month so far.  There were a few days in there where I got distracted by video games and didn't get to my reviews, but I've generally been shooting for 50 cards a day.  I've just been using the standard dictation model from your Core2k6k decks, so I assume you know how that's set up.

I study cards in groups of seven using the Learn plug-in for Anki.  During this initial learning phase, I just focus on being able to write the word in kanji given the sentence prompt.  When I'm done learning, I immediately do the initial reviews in my real deck for the seven cards I just studied.  For these initial reviews, I write out the entire sentence, mostly for the handwriting practice, but also because it seems to help me remember the vocabulary better over just writing the word again.  I don't timebox, but I tend to divide my focus between groups of seven.  I'll study one or two groups and get them into circulation, then take a short break and repeat.

When cards come up for review, I only write the target word.  Passing and failing are based solely on whether or not I can write it correctly and understand the meaning as it's used in the sentence.  If I do fail the review, then when it comes up again I write the entire sentence out, both to help solidify everything in my memory, and to act as an incentive not to fail too many cards.

It usually takes me about an hour and a half a day to get through reviews and new cards, but that's spread out through the day since I'm not making myself just grind through reps nonstop.  That would be awful.

And now that I think about it, I guess I have more than 1000 cards at this point, since I'm not including my grammar deck in that figure.  So, huh.  Extra celebration!

Went to a Japanese festival in London, it was soo awesome! Amazing weather, good stage show and tons of tasty food - I tried 2 flavours of Japanese ice-cream (green tea and red bean). Also met many new people and tried my Japanese on a few natives - I'm still terrible, but still tons of fun.

I seem to be blazing through my cards faster and doing a little more than usual. Japanese has become easier nowadays than a few months ago. (But I feel there still needs to be more huge improvements(I..e study grammar for all JLPT,etc/in general to help with understanding and then the speaking/writing aspect of Japanese. I need to get those skills up in running.

Last edited by ta12121 (2010 May 23, 9:12 pm)

I'm going to finish japanese for everyone by the end of next week, then I'll start immediately Core2000, then Core 6000, and this December I'm going to pass the JLPT2 exam (or whatever it's called now)

I've studied 30 kanji in two days- my first two days, and my first 30 kanji. 2012 to go ^_^

14666-sentence deck(all completed yea!!)
vocab deck-10,000 all compeleted, yea!
lastly is my production deck containing. 3857-cards all done.
first deck (which is the same amount of time I started learning japanese after RTK1+3. So that's 9.4 months.
Vocab deck=3.9 months
Production deck-1month(this I deleted my other deck cuz didn't like how i was just filling it up, but not with useful stuff. So I deleted it. I re-did RTK1+3 and added useful cards, like numbers,dates,counters,places,names,etc,etc. So that's my deck).

I honestly think I won't stop until I reach like 30,000 cards for each deck(that will make me satisfied) (Ironically my sentence deck I do feel right now, the ratio of srs is decreasing. So it's time to go into wayy more reading/production/immersion. With this I'm sure I can improve a lot)

(P.S. i'm going to start slowly working on my other deck that I just created, which is JLPT/grammar. Want to add 1 grammar point/1-3 sentence max. (Break it down/understand it,etc. Go from JLPT level 4-1 points. There are various sites out there to help with this. I intend to use them/add them to my srs. Once this deck is completed/down. I think I won't worry about JLPT stuff. I'd rather just keep improving in japanese)

Last edited by ta12121 (2010 May 31, 8:20 pm)

In my opinion Anki is better than reading for commuting. Reading is enjoyable so distractions aren't an issue, whereas reps are boring so it's good to do it in an environment where there is nothing else to do.

My current commute is far too short to do many reps though (only 8 mins).