Sorry to hear about your uncle passing away. Hope you and your fam are ok.

As for your question. I think you should write up a schedule of when your going to be busy and plan around that for your Japanese study time. So say for exmaple, if you only have an hour free every evening, try and use that to do abit of studying. If you have a smartphone or ipod touch, download anki for that and import your decks so you can do some drills in your lunch break or on your way to college if you use the train, etc.

I’d try to avoid cramming as it’s not really that effective for remembering things long term. It’s ok for studying for a test and not needing to remember that information anymore afterwards, but your going to want to want to remember what you learn for years so even doing 1 hour a day is better than 3 hours one day and skipping two days.

Sorry for your loss too zelda :( . Hope you and your fam are doing ok.

What techniques are you using to learn and keep this information?

If you are brute forcing it into your brain through memorisation and recall etc, then it will leak out.

SRS are great for putting stuff in your brain, but without using that stuff to form more permanent links to the data it will eventually leak out.

You need to find ways to keep the information in your head.

A lot of people use mnemonic’s to add additional links to keep the stuff in their head (I’m not a fan of this as it often just creates junk associations, most I see just confuse the hell out of me, so isn’t always that useful in my opinion, but that said I do occasionally use them myself, natsu, means summer, its the start of the girls name natsume, which means coming of summer, similarly harume coming of spring, haru means spring. ) In my case I look for useful associations to keep stuff in my brain, or I guess ones I find amusing, like kasa, someone wants to borrow my umbrella, mi kasa su kasa bro, you know.

I like writing, and its really fun to write them fancy Japanese characters so I find writing stuff, making sentences etc. helps me make additional connections.

I like watching Japanese stuff, hearing stuff I learnt, used, makes it stick in my mind. I guess girls names helped me to learn Kanji and Kana. like i’ll never forget what river means, because its in a girls last name, and I’ll never forget what ma looks like because its in a girl name… (Uhhh I guess I like girls? Eh heh heh)

I also tend to do a bit of everything, rather than choosing one resource or the other.

I should also add the disclaimer that I’m lousy at Japanese, so the efficacy of these techniques is definitely questionable.

I think as a new learner its easy to get carried away and go full blast at learning, and then burn out, or get demoralised because your progress isn’t as high as your enthusiasm, maybe you could chillax your learning schedule, go back and re-learn what you already have, instead of loving and leaving it, romance it some, re-ireru it into your brain, but in a different way.

When I was younger, I found something interesting, I found that Maths was actually completely different than how I had learnt it, I had learned a bunch of rules and methods for taking something and turning it into something else, I ran like a computer, following algorithms, I had no understanding of Maths.

I eventually was taught a different way, which showed me that in reality all the disparate parts of maths I had been taught were actually connected, in-fact you can break maths down into some really simple rules, lets us call them axioms, knowing those axioms, it made maths so much easier.

Anyway my way of learning is about finding axioms, because from those the entirety of knowledge can be found, they imply the rest, instead of learning everything, learn the basics and then derive the rest.

• This reply was modified 12 years, 5 months ago by  vlgi.
• This reply was modified 12 years, 5 months ago by  vlgi.

^