Sounds good! WaniKani is fun to use, but I dropped that too…>_< gotta get back to all these things lol

Hello! First time I post on the forum. I just finished Season 2 and am about to start with the first chapter of Season 3. I usually do about a chapter per day; I’d left the Season review for today expecting it to be a bunch of exercises but it was just reminiscing.

I’ve managed so far to not skip a single day of study. I warm up with the drag-n-drop kana exercise, followed by about a hundred “rights” in Real Kana to get ひらがな to stick. I’m getting three or 4 wrong there, between typos and missing the だくてん, but I’m pretty comfortable with it. It’s helped that I’ve tried to learn Japanese before, so I was somewhat familiar with ひらがな already. But I really like Textfugu’s approach, I’m farther with it than I’ve ever been before.

So after practicing that I run down the five Anki decks (Hiragana, Radicals, Kanji, Vocab and Sentences), which takes about half an hour. I have the most trouble with the reading of the kanji. The meaning is solid (the crazy stories with the radicals and how they’re used to build the kanji really help!), but since there’s very little practice with the おんよみ pronunciation, and they don’t have audio files, it doesn’t stick as well.

Some of the sentences feel like tongue-twisters, too. Especially the ones that alternate quickly between し and ち sounds. Words like わたしたち, for example. I also try to close my eyes, listen to the sentence and try to work out what was said to train my ears. I think some listening comprehension is missing, but perhaps more of that is worked into later Seasons?

I’m very happy with how quickly I’m learning vocabulary. I feel that’s one of the biggest hurdles when learning a language. You can learn the grammar quickly, but be unable to say anything because you don’t have the words you need. But there’s enough repetition with the sentences and vocabulary decks to get things to really stick. Anki is like magic, even if it feels like it takes forever some days.

I’ve also been keeping up with the language log, writing things down in Evernote. It helps to keep the studying from being too passive, forcing me to put into my own words the lessons on grammar. Even if I haven’t had much need to revisit past entries, just writing things down is a huge help.

Anyway, I’m very excited to keep going and actually be able to start making sentences beyond “is”, “isn’t”, “wasn’t” and “was”. I haven’t posted anything in Lang-8 yet because of that. Hopefully once I know a bit more I can use jisho.org to complement the vocabulary lessons when writing things on my own.

This hurts to say, but I want to be honest: I still haven’t made any progress…

I can give you all kinds of excuses of stuff that caused me to procrastinate, and stuff did happen, but these are just excuses. So let’s just say that I’ve failed. :’(

I plan to pick up to pace again soon, but I guess it’s pointless to make promises now. I will post again when I finished season 6.

Finished Season 2, well the practice page is missing so…

I had a little break due to exams and other school stuff. So the time I had went to WaniKani or clearing my head. I hope to keep up the pace and learn more grammar, it’s helping bit by bit.

Yeah! Finished season 3!

It’s been an interesting season. Let’s see what I can recall of what I saw.

There’s the verbs, to start. Being able to say more than “this is that” and variations on the theme is cool. I’m glad that we’ve only seen four conjugations so far, though I understand that there are more forms and such coming up. That’s going to be a pain to get through.

じょし (the particles) are still a bit confusing, but I am slowly warming up to them. The difference between は and が is subtle, but clear enough. に is fairly easy to use, so long as you remember not to stick を everywhere.

すき and きらい are also pretty simple to use. Those lessons went by quickly.

The sentence enders are going to take me a while, I’ll need to see more of them before I feel comfortable using them.

Overall, the Season went by pretty quickly. The katakana vocab keeps piling up with 20 new words every day still, but I have the japanese vocab well in hand. The verbs are a bit hard to recall, but that’s more due to not having many sentences that use them, or mnemonics or anything like that. They simply got dumped in two lists. As I see them show up again and again in future sentences and the vocab itself I should be able to recall them.

Looking forward to Season 4.

• This reply was modified 10 years, 9 months ago by  Kynnath.

Haha! I just finished Season 1, and now I’m finally to the paid for part of the program! XP

I studied Japanese during my last semester at my university, and most of the things in Season 1 (ひらがな and the “です” sentence structure) I had already covered. Though, I feel that TF has cemented them soooo much better! Plus, I learned how to use Anki and TONS of online resources for learning Japanese! <3

Ah~! I cannot wait to start learning kanji and radicals! V!