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I’m a newbie around here, so first off: hellooo world of TextFugu! Now that that’s out of the way, I was hoping some of you sea-sturdy TextFugu pirates could answer a green looking deck-scrubber’s question. I’m loving Japanese, and have been at it every minute of my free time for about 3 weeks now. Currently I’m halfway through season 4 learning about adjectives, and I still feel like I understand everything relatively well and, more importantly, I can do the exercises without too much difficulty.
However, the Anki-decks are seriously exploding in magnitude and the default time-settings of Anki are not enough to keep up with all the new material added every day. So, I force Anki to continue beyond these time-limitations and this seems to go rather well. However, I’m am noticing that my personal pace of understanding the grammer-parts of TextFugu is much faster than my personal ability to learn new vocabulary and Kanji through Anki.
Any advice on what I should do? I do not want to hurt my progress, and am especially loving all the quirky grammatical aspects of Japanese. Not that I don’t love learning new words and Kanji, but it’s mainly the grammar insights that keep me motivated. But I’m noticing that with the current lessons I don’t always immediately know the meaning of all the words (I know roughly 80% I’d guess), and so I have to interrupt my grammer learning by looking up a word. Should I suck it up and spend more time learning vocab and Kanji and perhaps practice some more old grammer (which is relatively boring) or continue this way and simply accept that I need to interrupt grammer learning now and then by having to look up words? What’s the TextFugu way?
Any help is greatly appreciated!
Everyone is different so there’s no right or wrong answer to determine if you’re going too fast or not. As a general rule, if you can retain all the information you’ve learnt without forgetting anything or as little as possible then your going at the right pace. As for Kanji and vocab, it’s important you do learn these as much as the grammar as they’re used in example sentences in chapters. When you hit Season 5, the vocab load increases so it’s best to get a grasp on it now before it gets more difficult. Everyone does eventually slow down in pace at some point. At the start everything is easy and you feel like your whizzing through the chapters, but that will change. Just remember it’s not a race. It’s much better to take your time and retain what you’ve learnt, then to skim through and try to finish as quickly as possible. It will only hamper your progress in the long run.
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This reply was modified 12 years, 2 months ago by
Hey thanks for your insights. I am indeed fearing that day when I’m suddenly not making progress as fast anymore (or at least, feel like I’m not), and perhaps that is why I am forcing myself to whizz through it at a high pace now. But, on the other hand, I do feel like I’m understanding all the grammer really well, and I tend to leisurely read through the grammer explanations, do all the exercises diligently and do not continue until I intuitively feel the grammer is starting to make sense. However, my brain simply cannot do the same with the Kanji and vocab added during the lessons. This is rogue learning for me (in addition to TextFugu’s awesome association techniques). As I said, the grammer is what mainly keeps me going motivation wise, and so perhaps for me personally TextFugu contains a bit too much vocab and Kanji relative to the grammar. I’ll probably find out during season 5 if what you say is true about the increase in vocab load. Until then I can delay this decision about slowing down on the grammar front in favour of learning more vocab, but I’m still wondering what the smartest thing will be once that day comes…..
It’s good you’ve got a good grasp on the grammar and understand it well but vocab and kanji are just as important. You can’t really neglect one in favour of the other. I know it’s a pain when you have to stop halfway through a chapter to learn some vocab, but in the end it’s essential.
Koichi has said vocab seems to be giving people the most trouble, so maybe he’s working on ways to ease it into the lessons rather than present us with big lists of it to learn right off the bat.
Perhaps it’s worth breaking the vocab into small chunks and doing a few words at a time.
Guess I’ll just have to learn taking the sour with the sweet. The nice thing with grammer is that you learn seemingly isolated chunks of knowledge; “Hey, I now understand how to conjugate verbs under such and so conditions!”, or “Look at me; I can totally use adverbs yo!”. With vocab and kanji, there is no end to it; it’s a slowly increasing drudge of neverending random words that would de-motivate even Tantalus…..with a pinch of a salt.
I remember from other languages that I loved doing themed vocab bursts. Then you can have the feeling of completion when suddenly you know the most important words for finding your way around a kitchen, or being able to name common animals (TextFugu has this to a very limited degree, like with names for family mambers, or with numbers, both of which I found much easier to learn because I could clearly see what I needed to learn in order to gain this bit of distinct lore: “I can talk about family now!”). Perhaps that would be a great addition for vocab learning: theme the lists and give people a sense of completion and a structural tool for phased learning: “this week I want to know all the vocab concerning Japanese tea-cermonies….to hell with the rest!”. This would be problematic with Kanji though, since they are already structured in manner of symbol-complexity.
I agree that the variety of vocab we learn is very varied and there’s no real order to it. In the end, all those words will be beneficial though. If fluency is your goal your going to need to learn thousands of words. Even some of the most advanced users on here are always encountering new words.
Personally I’ve been spending time getting the vocab learnt even if it means taking a couple of days off the grammar sections. As I said in another thread it’s nice to start hearing the words in songs and tv shows and know what they mean.
I have to agree with Neil on this one. I don’t proceed until I’m reasonably comfortable with the vocab presented in the lessons (I’ve just finished Season 2).
I recently started to watch anime in Japanese with no subtitles. To be honest, I have no idea what’s being said most of the time. I’d be completely clueless if it wasn’t an anime I’ve watched in the past in English. But, when I recognize a word that I learned in one of the vocab lists, it’s the most motivating thing ever! It makes me want to sit down and learn more vocabulary so I can figure out what’s really going on (although I find I have a limit to how much vocab I can learn in one day… pass the limit, and I have trouble distinguishing the new words, they all sound the same).
So I really recommend learning the vocab. Even if you understand the grammar, your Japanese abilities are going to be severely crippled if you don’t have a critical mass of vocab under your belt.
@Brian
I’ve just got to nouny verbs and it’s flipped the other way around, I’m seeing words I’ve heard a lot and recognise but only now know the meaning.
I tried the watching some Japanese thing. Sounds so obvious, but ever since I started learning Japanese, I haven’t done so yet. It was so much fun! I had no idea what they were saying 95% of the time, but I heard so many words I knew; that definitely motivated me, and now I’m so gonna sink my teeth into learning my vocab to make sure I understand even more next time. In fact, I’m learning a bit on the side as well with this booklet I have that contains a lot of vocab sorted by theme and is written in Dutch, which, being my native language, makes it a lot easier for me to learn.
@ Neil
It’s Nouny Adverbs. Yeah, they’re a crazy bunch of words.
That’s what you trying to type on an ipad, it took me about five goes what with the auto-correct.
Haha, tell me about it. Whenever I use one, I get frustrated by missing keys or pressing the wrong ones. Never happens to me on my Android phone though.
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This reply was modified 12 years, 2 months ago by
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