Comments on: Learning Japanese = Playing a Video Game, Part 2

By: Hacking a language

Hacking a language — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 03:32:23 +0000

If 1 kanji= 1 level, im level 735 atm XD

By: ブライアン

ブライアン — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 10:17:35 +0000

Do yourself an immense favor and use the same tools — SRS, timeboxing, etc. — to manage your schoolwork. No more long study sessions, leave that to the SRS. Timebox your homework. Spend your new-found time playing with Japanese. 一石二鳥。

By: fangsryoga

fangsryoga — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 09:26:21 +0000

RTK 3 Word Poster for those of you who already finished RTK1!
now-off-to-china.blogspot.com/2011/12/remembering-kanji-3-poster.html

By: 魔法少女☆かなたん

魔法少女☆かなたん — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 16:16:38 +0000

My general rule for sentences is to try to enter sentences that can be read in less than 6 seconds. (For example, 年が明けてから一向に安くなる気配がありません。 – from a blog entry remarking on the high price of leafy green vegetables. This is a good length in my experience.) I have a few longer ones, but they have to be really worth it, otherwise it’s not fun. You can break bigger ones up if you know where to do it, which is easy once you start to get used to the grammar.

By: Kimura

Kimura — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 03:09:23 +0000

Also have Japanese on in the background when doing non-homework stuff on the computer, like gaming ^_^. Most games have a seperate volume control for just the music, so if you turn it off, you can have Japanese music playing in the background while still hearing the sfx (in most cases, the game must be in windowed mode, so if it’s fullscreen you won’t hear the music from the other window).
Just be careful about it if you’re playing a game that has voice chat (like Counter-Strike: Source). Sometimes, the Line In (microphone) and Stereo Mix (speakers) lines can get mixed up by the system, so instead of the others hearing your warnings about the spawncampers, they hear Japan-A-Radio at max volume (Source Engine games have had an issue lately where the outbound audio level (“Voice Transmit Volume”) is stuck at 100% even if you’ve disabled voice chat entirely).

By: Sholum

Sholum — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 02:17:41 +0000

Thanks! I’ll be sure to check them out!

By: rigabamboo

rigabamboo — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 00:26:37 +0000

Just keep Japanese audio on whenever you're at home or in transit, and maybe even try to squeeze a bit into your school day. Do Japanese anything during homework breaks. Do Japanese anything when you finish your homework.

By: マックス

マックス — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 00:21:45 +0000

How long should I be playing the games a day? Because fitting this in with school/homework/etc. could be hard.

By: Pingfa

Pingfa — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 20:08:03 +0000

Personally the flashcard system I use has the standard and a ‘Simple’ interface, the simple one shows 100 word cards on the same page; with this I can go through word cards very quickly. Don’t have to wait years for each word to load… japanese-flashcards.com (they also provide many other language options too; I’m using the Chinese equivalent, Chinese-course.com)
What I’m doing now is looking for sentences that don’t need to be there – sentence structures that don’t especially need to be worked on, but that have useful vocabulary; then I delete the sentence and simply add the word.
At some point I started added only sentences because I found words I had seen lots of times in the word cards simply weren’t sticking, I needed something to associate them too; besides this, one can’t learn cultural context through word cards; you can manage to figure everything by word cards, but you won’t really understand what it conveys to a native, what subtle implications it carries…
So, in the beginning at least, I recommend only using word cards for objective things like names of objects, places, creatures, etc For labels, basically. You will need sentences to associate subjective words with the right context, or you won’t really understand it.

Finally, here’s a tip: Early on in my SRSing days eyestrain became quite a bother for me. To combat this, I would write any new words or any words that could do with more reviewing onto a post-it. This was one of the best things I did. This way, I wasn’t tied to the computer and I could simply skim over the post-it at anytime; this made learning so much easier! I no longer felt the need to memorize, because often by the end of the day I would have looked over those words so many times I felt as though I’d known them for a while. This way I can also push back words a number of days back in the SRS that same day… because the post-it I’m carrying around with me assures I’ll be seeing them again many times before they appear in the SRS again. So use post-its. 😉

By: Monochrome

Monochrome — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 13:17:35 +0000

podcastrank.jp/ May help with finding science themed podcasts.
www.jstage.jst.go.jp/browse/ (Japan Science and Technology Information Aggregator)
jairo.nii.ac.jp/en/ (Japanese Institutional Repositories Online)
If you don’t have them already, more sciency stuff to read.

By: Sholum

Sholum — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 09:56:40 +0000

I find it hard to justify stopping early so I end up not doing it at all… bad, me! I think the problem I’m having though is that I can’t see the point where I can do the fun things; a lot of reading and watching sciency shows about astrophysics and the like (speaking of which, if any of y’all know where to find those kind of things in Japanese, do tell. Or if there are any science themed podcasts, those would be nice too. Maybe they have dubbed episodes of Cosmos, from back when they thought Pluto was a planet and there was no liquid water in our solar system other than on earth. I’ll have to look that up.)
Anyway, it’s always fun for me to recognize something while doing SRS, but it always gets depressing when I have absolutely no idea what I’m looking at several cards in a row, so that’s when I stop. Hopefully, in a couple of months, I’ll know enough kanji to start reading (with a dictionary of course) and start reaping the rewards of repetition.
Honestly, for me it’s hard to do a lot at once unless I really like it, for example, I could read for more than 24 hours with the only thing stopping me being the need for sleep. Other than that, I’m overly prone to being a three day monk (I’d three day monk with life if it were possible) so this is definitely good advice for me.

By: fangsryoga

fangsryoga — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 08:22:49 +0000

Here’s a free RTK 1 Word poster available for those of you who are too poor or impatient to buy the real thing.

now-off-to-china.blogspot.com/2011/11/remembering-kanji-1-poster.html

By: Pingfa

Pingfa — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 22:45:41 +0000

Ah, this came just at the right time! =-D

I used to be uber at SRSing. I was going through hundreds of flashcards a day (about 200 word reps, 100+ sentence reps, not including ones only added that day) and I didn’t tire of it. This is because whenever I felt I didn’t want to do it, I thought about what I did want to do. I didn’t have an answer, didn’t feel like doing anything particular. So I’d just go ahead and do SRS reps until I felt like doing something else.
SRSing is usually like procrastinating for me. Whenever I can’t think of what to do, I just go through some flashcards. If I really don’t feel like doing that anymore, I might watch some Mandarin TV. Basically, it’s like doing nothing.
For a time I felt too tired to do anything and would sit around thinking I’m too tired, I’ll just wait until I feel more enthusiastic and actually want to do something… wouldn’t happen. So I decided I would just keeping doing regardless; if I felt like doing nothing, I would do nothing in Chinese.

Anyhow, I went against Khatz’s advice and added quite a few long sentences, so recently my SRS has started to become a bit of a drag. The word cards I can go through in no time, but the sentences are so long it feels like they take forever to get through sometimes; I keep finding myself thinking that time could be spent reading books, manga, watching movies, goofing off – and here I am doing drills like a smuck!

So today I’m laying off the flashcards. I’ll want to do them again soon enough. If I don’t, they are getting deleted. If I need them, I’ll add them later. What’s the rush?

By: Caren

Caren — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 18:52:01 +0000

Indeed,
I find that I can only do maybe 20 srs a day. What can I say? I love it at first, but after that it feels like homework. So I just stop and move on to something else, like reading my children’s books or my (free) ipod touch ebooks. Then I can go on my kanji learning video game and play that for a while. I started sentence mining after about 1000 kanji instead of waiting to learn them all; I don’t like to keep waiting and with 1000 kanji I can still read my elementary school-targeted books and the sanseido dictionary with little problem. Hence why I’m still playing a game to learn the rest (about 1400 kanji learned now, ’bout 700 more to go).

Worse comes to worse, I can listen to (japanese) music.

Don’t get me wrong, part of me keeps saying “KEEP SRS-ING, you’ll never get there!” but I’m learning to ignore that. I’m very much prone to 3day monk and those other learning no-nos, so I have to be careful not to fall into my old habits back when I used to study japanese for 10 hours a day for a week- and then “take a break” for 6 months!