I’ve been repeating episodes a LOT. The method I’ve been using is to look up all the words of an episode and repeat it over and over throughout the day. At first this was exciting as I was learning so many new words in such a short time, and as I generally don’t get bored I figured I could handle any amount of repetition. However, once I had learned a few episodes, it became a bit of a burden to maintain, having to routinely watch the same things for so long.

As I really wanted to assure the vocabulary I learned would stick, I kept repeating even after it was no longer stimulating. While repetition is important, so is quantity/variety of exposure – if you’re getting enough quantity you should be able to afford to leave some things behind (they’ll catch up with you soon enough).

Glad I read this article today. Brings me back to the basics – just show up. Simples.

YOU ROCK! LOVE ALL YOUR WRITING!!

Start with your dictionary. Look up what you’re interested in, find out the Japanese term for it. (Alternately, look it up on Wikipedia and use the sidebar to go to the equivalent Japanese article.) Take that term and google it. So, for example, I’m a guitarist. Searching ”ギター　ブログ” returns about 30 million hits. From there, it’s just a matter of sorting the wheat from the chaff.

As for not understanding it… well, that’s kind of the point. Let go of the need for 100% comprehension or you’re going to be very bored. Find a sentence you *almost* understand. Break it down, learn all the readings, learn what it means, and stick it in your SRS. Rinse, repeat. (If you truly don’t understand *anything*, you may need to do some easier stuff first. I just spent a month working through All About Particles — not the most interesting material, but I now can more easily learn the stuff I really *want* to learn.)

What I did was almost MANDATORY for me in order to retain the kanji the way that I can now. Every single kanji mnemonic HAD TO BE my own, otherwise it was useless. The whole point of a mnemonic is to associate what you see with a memory, and if the memory is “by the book” like the readings of Heisig’s representation in RTK, then it’s stupid to think that you can use his OWN visulization of that kanji in a way that will work for you.

It really wasn’t much more effort on my part to get this down and done. BUT, I did make flash cards ON PAPER that seemed to work much better than the SRS program at the time. To do this, you need to think like a boring art teacher thinks. You know what I’m talking about, like when thery ask a group or a class “What does this painting really mean to you?” Good question. The same thing applies to a kanji. Look at it and think, do you know of anything that you run into in everyday life or from a vivid memory that LOOKS like the kanji in question? If so, write down the situation that the “kanji” or “look alike memory” is in in plain english. Voila! You have your mnemonic for the kanji. It doesn’t even have to be very long, just so long as you can look at the kanji and remember the situation that your nmemonic describes.

Some kanji will just have to me REMEMBERED because there will be no mnemonic that you can possibly think of or come up with. I actually managed to come up with exactly 1841 personal mnemonic devices for my kanji. But it’s funny when you run into a kanji through your SRS that you somehow REMEMBER doesn’t have a mnemonic, your brain will seem to narrow it down in some magical way that you can remember even the NON-mnemonic kanji faster and more accurately. I dont know, but that is how it works for me.

If I was to add up the time it took me to write the mnemonics down for each kanji, I bet you it would probably end up being 1/16 of the total time of constant blank face memorization. It really paid off in the end.

Through my kanji learning journey, I started with trying Heisig’s mnemonics and it took me about 4 months to have a retention rate of around 700 kanji. But, with my new mnemonic flash cards, I had them written down on paper and entered into an SRS in about 2 months WITH a retention rate of about 1600 round and about.

So I think it paid off, let me know what you guys/Khatz think about this idea.

@Jenny: hmm. Well Jenny i was born bilingual. I know spanish/english. Even though spanish is my native language, i rarely spoke it except for at home. Therefore when i DID speak in spanish it had a very “foreign” accent to it. Now since i moved to the Dom. Rep. my spanish is very nice 🙂 , but my english suffered a bit with the accent.
So what i’m trying to say is if you speak 1 language more than the other, the accent of the one you speak more is bound to stick to the one you speak less. It’s NOTHING PERMANENT. You say you hardly do anything in your native language anymore; So since you speak and hear so much english that accent is going to be present in your native language.ONLY because your accustomed to speaking so much English. But if you ever start to speak in L1 more than english… Well that accent WILL disappear.Your fluency WILL return (if you’re any less fluent now than you were before). I’m sure of that. Regardless of what language you speak.