ダニーの日本語

Yesssss!  Exciting!  See that tracker to the right?  The one which shows how many Kanji I’ve covered in Heisig and how many there are to cover, in total?  Those are showing the same number!  That means I’ve FINISHED!  Yes!

OK, so, what does “finished” mean, exactly?  Well, I still have to review them every day, but I’ve done them all at least once, and I’ll no longer be adding new ones.  I suspect there’ll be a couple of weeks of fairly heavy reviews, since especially toward the end I was rushing through them a bit.  But that’s ok!  If there are any I haven’t learned properly, Anki will ensure that I review them more often and so have the opportunity to make sure I’ve really got them down.

What comes next?  Sentences.  I’ve been adding a few in drips and drabs over the past couple of weeks as I’ve been approaching the end of Heisig, but now I can really start going for it.  Right now I’m getting quite a lot of them from textbooks, since the grammar is pretty well-defined and the readings are given to you.  I want to move off textbooks and onto “real” Japanese sources as soon as possible though.  Once I’ve got some more sentences together I’ll post some of them up to give an example of the sorts of things I’m covering.

Exciting!

How many people could have predicted from my last post that this would happen?  Probably quite a few, I suspect.  The problem with “taking a break” is that you intend to do it for a couple of days or a week, but then that week becomes two weeks, which becomes a month, and before you know it you’ve lost all your drive.

There is a bright side.  I have at least managed to maintain my immersion environment throughout the month-and-a-half of my lapse in study.  I’ve been listening to the Yomiuri Shinbun podcast in the mornings, had Japanese music in my headphones during the day, and enjoyed various J-Dramas in the evenings to relax.

So it’s really just study of Kanji that I’ve been neglecting.  When did I start struggling to motivate myself to study Kanji?  When I stopped adding new Kanji.  Lesson number 1 learned in the Heisig phase therefore is: learn at least one new Kanji every day.  It’s the new Kanji, at least for me, that drove me to do it – the idea that at the end of this anki session, I will know more Kanji than I did before I started.  New Kanji were my reward for revising old ones.

Consolidating knowledge is important, and it is possible that I was covering too many Kanji each day to revise those which I’d already covered, but the solution to that is not to stop learning new Kanji altogether!  That way lies boredom, which inevitably leads to failure.  If you’re struggling with all the new Kanji, reduce it to 5-10 new ones per day; don’t cut them out altogether.

I have a new format, which has been going since Wednesday.  I get up early in the morning and study Kanji for two hours before work.  This has been a real success – my concentration is so much better at that time in the morning, and the time limit of two hours means that I usually use the whole two hours effectively.  It has the added bonus that by the time I get to work, I’m already awake and alert so that I can get down to work straight away.  Getting up in the mornings is hard… for a day or two.  After that it just becomes routine.  And routine is good.  Routine means you just do it.

I think my brain might melt.

I’ve had a good run recently, and learned a lot of new Kanji, but after a pretty lazy weekend my number of Anki reps has increased manyfold, and I’ve started to struggle to take them in.  A couple of days after learning them, they come up again and I find I’ve forgotten them utterly.

So, for now I’ve set my new cards per day to 0.  I’m going to spend a few days just doing reps, consolidating the 811 Kanji I’ve already covered.  When I feel ready again I’ll increase them.

It’s a shame, because I want to get them done with soon so that I can move onto sentences.  I’ve just made my first Amazon Japan order (more on that in a later post), so I’m really excited about getting that stuff, but really until I finish the Kanji I won’t be able to start reading anything.

Still, I think this is the correct decision.  Maybe I’ll set it to 1 new Kanji per day just so that I’m getting something done.  When I’m ready, I hope I’ll come back fresh and ready to learn!

Hooray!  Today I completed part 2 of Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji 1, hitting 508 Kanji.  That seemed like a reasonable enough landmark to note here, so here it is.

I’ve really slowed in the past few weeks, when it comes to learning new Kanji.  When I first started, forty Kanji per day was easy, because there were hardly any that needed reviewing.  Now I’m further in, I’m getting 70-90 reviews per day on top of any new ones!  Because of this, I’ve had to reduce the number of new Kanji Anki introduces each day to 20, though I can knock it up again over the weekend if I feel like I’m on a roll.

Inspired by Kanji Poster, I’ve put my targets where I can see them — on my desktop as the desktop wallpaper! I’ve arranged all 2,042 Kanji from RTK1 in the most optimal fashion for my 1440×900 resolution screen, and used a multi-layer image file so that I can easily mark off those I’ve learned. I may yet get the physical poster as well, but for now, this is quite a nice system. You can have a copy of my Kanji desktops, but if your screen hasn’t the same aspect ratio as mine, you may find that making your own is the best bet.

[caption id="attachment_49" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Inverse Colour Listing"][/caption]

Please note that in order to use the XCF file you will need The GIMP, Seashore, or something else that can read the GIMP’s native format.

I’ve also been improving my immersion environment recently.  I set up a Japanese PSN account so that I can download demos on my PlayStation 3 (acquiring funds for my PSN wallet is unfortunately a little trickier).  I’ve been browsing Amazon JP and adding all sorts of great stuff to my wishlist.  I can’t wait to send out for my first shipment!

I’ve also spent a while today reading AntiMoon, the site that inspired Khatzumoto’s All Japanese All The Time project, which in turn is what inspired mine.  Very good!  Lots of really interesting stuff on there.

Anyway, 18 days and 508 Kanji in isn’t bad going.  I don’t think I’ll be finished by February any more but that doesn’t matter – the important thing is to cover them all so that I can get onto actually reading stuff!

If you look to the right, at the top of the sidebar, you should see a new widget that is both exciting and attractive – a tracker to monitor my progress through Heisig’s two Kanji books, RTK1 and RTK3.  The strange numbering owes itself to the second book containing the same kanji as the first, but giving the readings – something which is not recommended in the AJATT system, where readings should be approached as they are encountered in the context of a sentence.

Anyway – yes – so – I thought a Heisig tracker would be a nice thing to have, and I couldn’t find one already out there, so I knocked something together this afternoon.  It doesn’t do anything clever (like get its values from Reviewing the Kanji, which would have been awesome, but I couldn’t find an API to let me get that information), it just adds two boxes to the admin page where you can enter the ID of the last Kanji you learned in Heisig, and it will write it up in your sidebar.  There are checkboxes to hide or display the individual works (RTK1 and RTK3).  That’s it.

Having stressed that it’s just been thrown together, isn’t very clever, and might require a bit of hacking to get it working with your particular WordPress theme, I’ll now make it available to all and sundry.  If you’d like a nifty Heisig tracker on your site, all you have to do is follow these instructions:-

• Download and unzip this PHP file.  This is the plugin itself.  It’s pretty simple, so you should be able to modify it to suit your needs if it comes to that.
• Upload it to your webspace in the folder wp-content/plugins.
• Go to the WordPress dashboard, and find the Plugins admin page.  This is the first item in the 「プラグイン」 menu if you’re using Japanese WordPress.
• Find “Didi’s Heisig Tracker” and click “Activate” to the right.  In Japanese this is 「使用する」.
• Now find the Widgets (ウィジェット) page, and you should see “Heisig Tracker” in there, ready to use.

Any troubles, leave a comment.  Enjoy!

As explained in my previous post, the method I am following to learn Japanese requires that you learn at least 2,042 Kanji before you even start to learn any actual Japanese.  I’m working at a rate of 40 Kanji per day at present, at which rate I should have finished RTK1 by the end of February.  I had thought, then, that because of this all the Japanese I am surrounding myself with would remain pretty much a mystery until then.

Well, today, an exciting thing happened!  I was browsing the internet looking for a client to play Go (囲碁), whose Kanji I haven’t learned, but which I can vaguely recognise if I see them.  I used the IME to type it into Japanese Google and thus began my search.  At only 292 Kanji learned, I wasn’t expecting to recognise anything much, but could find my way around using mostly pictures and happy in the knowledge that most download links seem to be written in katakana (ダウンロード).

連珠

It was with great surprise, then, that I saw a word composed entirely of Kanji that I had already encountered in Heisig!  I immediately activated rikaichan and found out that the word is pronounced 「れんじゅ」, and is a board game which involves moving around differently-coloured beads.  Coming from Heisig’s keywords of take along and pearl, of course, this makes perfect sense.

So, there you have it!  My first actual word, which I can now read and write in Kanji.  And just imagine – when I’ve completed the Jōyō Kanji, this will happen all the time!

I’m not much one for resolutions. Giving up chocolate, or drinking, or playing karaoke games for a year seems to me to serve little purpose. If I ever did find myself doing any of those things to excess I wouldn’t want to wait until January 1st to do something about it.  So I don’t generally bother with making a resolution at new year.

Projects, on the other hand, are something else.  I love a good project.  Planning everything out, deciding what I should do – the sillier or more extreme the better!  At the end of last year, I first tried to write a novel in a month, and later completed an album in 24 hours with some friends.

It is in this spirit that I have decided this year to begin a new project, specifically to try and gain some proficiency in Japanese within twelve months.  The vagueness of this definition is intentional.  I do not want to set a task that is totally unreasonable and unattainable, but at the same time I would like to reach as far as I can.

In order to strive for this target, I will mostly be following the method put forward by Khatzumoto in his website, All Japanese All The Time.  He attained fluency (a somewhat more impressive level of mastery than “some proficiency”) in eighteen months using this method, so I hope to have got some way toward that by the end of the year.

There are some ways in which I am not following Khatzumoto to the letter; in some cases going directly against his advice.  For the most part, this is just an attachment I have to my stuff, and I may pay for it later – we shall see.  For the sake of clarification, here are some of the areas where I will and won’t be following Khatzumoto’s method:

• I will avoid English-language media as far as is possible.  I have deleted all non-japanese music from my iPod, and written to National Geographic asking them to change my subscription to Japanese (!).
• I will use Japanese for any configurable electronic device I’m using (for example, the MacBook I am typing on now is running a Japanese OS X).
• I will sell or otherwise get rid of non-Japanese DVDs and Blu-Ray discs that I own.  I’ve been meaning to have a clearout in a long time anyway.
• I will pack up all my books and CDs in a friend’s attic for the course of the year.  Khatzumoto warns against just “packing things away”, and suggests that they be sold to remove completely any chance of having a moment of nostalgic weakness and unpacking them all.  However, the fact that they will be in someone else’s house should help ward against that…
• I will not neglect my English friends in my efforts to learn Japanese.  Luckily for me, two of my closest friends here in Brighton are both learning Japanese at the same time, so I shouldn’t have to.

That’s about it.  So, the basic gist of it is: I won’t be listening to any English music or reading English books or watching English films (unless they’re Japanese-dubbed).  At all.  A fairly tall order!

So, apart from that, there must be some method, right?  Indeed, there must.  I could listen to all the J-Pop I wanted and never pick up a word.  So, I am first going through the Kanji using Heisig’s mnemonic technique to get some “feeling” for the word in English.  This is so that when I begin studying actual Japanese, I will at least be literate.  And, of course, by cutting out English books I have forced myself into a temporary illiteracy, which for me as an avid reader is quite an horrific state of affairs.  This is hugely motivating – I can’t wait to finish the Kanji, stock up on Japanese books and magazines, and start learning how to read!

The method as Khatzumoto sees it is to learn 2,000-3,000 Kanji, and then move onto learning entire sentences – not words out of context but full sentences.  He recommends learning 10,000 of these.

And so, my journey begins with Heisig and the Kanji.  I will post occasionally when things of interest occur or when I pass a significant milestone.  Wish me luck!