SRS question: 残
now the question is, do you know how to use this kanji in a word or sentence?, if so, grade yourself accordingly. If you don’t quite recognize it, give yourself a bad score.

The thing is… now you have some vocabulary, there’s no need to associate kanji with keywords… you already know the kanji, so.. good grade!. (smoother and lazier SRS, and a lot faster)

Also, this is only good for people who wanna practice kanji recognition only… I dont give a crap about handwriting.. its useful to learn it better, but not worth the effort IMO 🙂

I started to increase my consumption of Japanese media, listening to Japanese music, watching the dramas, the variety shows, reading Japanese websites, etc. Being an English major, 100% AJATT-ing wasn’t possible, since I had to read texts in English, write essay in English and do research in English, But I certainly was using Japanese everyday. Again, I haven’t reached the point of 100% fluency, but I have had small victories. I finished RTK 1, I no longer need subtitles for anything that I watch in Japanese (well, barely anything, unless the vocabulary is full of jargon), and I can read manga, articles, etc. Once small victory I have had recently is listening to a podcast I began listening to when I decided to take on immersion. Before, I only understood words here and there. This was about last year. I listened to the same podcast recently and understood basically everything! There are times when I wonder, “why even bother?” and hoo boy have I fallen off regular vocabulary acquisition. But achieving victories like that inspires me to go on.

I get asked occasionally how to learn Japanese. I constantly answer “watch Japanese movies, anime and dramas. Read and listen to Japanese everyday. Constant exposure, if not 100% immersion is the key. But people never want to listen. I think they expect me to tell them the name of a textbook or some quick fix method. I recently heard someone say that they had temporarily put Japanese study on hold because “it’s too hard to learn by yourself.” It’s not! Who said language learning had to be a group activity? It’s something that is perfectly do-able on your own. Sigh. Anyway, I’ve ranted enough.

Since I made the decision to learn Japanese, I’ve been looking back at the way I learned English a lot. It’s actually rather difficult to remember how I did it, but I somehow did it, without the aid of classes and textbooks (well, I had English at school, but I never really studied for it and I hardly ever did homework). And I wanted to know how I could do it again, but with Japanese this time around.

Even though I don’t want to give up using English at home completely, which means I might not progress as fast as those who do take the plunge, I did just order my first completely Japanese video game – Final Fantasy X HD! This is going to be one hell of a ride, since my level of comprehension is still pretty low 😀

Oh, also – I am taking Japanese at my university. It’s not all bad, at least a few of the classes are with a native speaker who seems to greatly overestimate our ability to understand her and has switched from like 70% English 30% Japanese to 90% Japanese 10% English. And that’s good. I find myself understanding more than I expected, so it’s a nice little confidence boost. The kanji classes on the other hand are pretty bad, I mean c’mon, we spend 1.5h ‘working’ on a set of 12 kanji. I can learn 12 kanji in ~20 minutes! I certainly won’t remember them well until after a few weeks of SRSing and I won’t remember all readings but… neither will those who use the classroom method. The textbook also kinda sucks (suprise, suprise), for no reason other than the fact that it’s dreadfully boring. Yes, it covers all important grammar points, yes it has dialogues which show how those grammar structures might be used, but it’s just dull, completely unengaging and repetitive. Even the teachers repeatedly told us they think the book sucks, in which case I don’t understand why they won’t ditch it altogether.

I didn’t even know that it was AJATT method (or any other official method). ‘It learned it’ I didn’t learn anything. All I remember was that my 11 year old friend (who was slovakian) told me not to speak Polish to him or I’ll never learn English, and he was right. (Polish & Slovakian are very similar, speaking one you ALMOST speak the other.)

When I went to high school my ‘school spanish’ was mediocre. Because I am lazy, and didn’t like learning shopping lists. This was good because it shattered any of my perceptions about ‘being good at languages’.

You know, I remember we spent about a year preparing and memorizing this speech that we would be tested on. It was about what kind of holiday I prefer to go on.

Now, this pre-memorized, pre-checked speech felt good. It was IMPRESSIVE to those (who didn’t have an effin’ clue) around me. Like a good circus trick. I was ‘speaking spanish’. But heavens forbid you actually asked me something (other than ‘how old is your sister?’) I think the very fact that we say ‘Do you SPEAK Spanish’ distorts people’s reality of what a language is, and what it is for. You can speak, and not understand fluently, but you can’t understand fluently, and not speak. Understanding/being used to is what language ultimately comes down to.

A lot of people will feel like because they’re not learning stock ‘phrases’ every month that the method is not working.

This is normal.

However, although I know all this, I’m at AJATT BECAUSE I’m lazy. Because my circumstances aren’t forcing me into a corner. AJATT tells me it’s okay to be lazy, and that instead of trying to kill my character, I should just find ways of doing things that match my character, that there’s no need to beat myself up in the pursuit of the honorable pie in the sky that’s reserved for the ‘hard worker/dilligent blah blah’ and all those other words that turn me off.

ありがと Khatz.

My kanjis are already done, and I’m currently at around 7000 sentences|MCD’s. So that stuff can wait, I’m back off to playing some Tales of Destiny remake with my brother on the PS2. Ahhh you don’t know how awesome it feels do finally play those games I’ve always wanted to play. I actually don’t suck that much anymore, well I’m able to understand the main plot. (which actually doesn’t matter, ask my lil bro, even though he doesn’t understand sh*t what’s going on in the game, he’s still having a blast, but COME ON dawg, THAT battlesystem! :D)

-Amir