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For sentence construction you need to jump on to Lang-8. I believe Koichi has you do this somewhere around where you currently are. It’s incredibly beneficial.
As for words, you need to come up with your own mnemonics for them. Check out this page:
http://www.academictips.org/memory/index.htmlAlso if the word is a noun, adjective, or verb it really helps to find a picture of it and start associating that word with that exact picture. Pictures create much stronger links than concepts do. The more dramatic the picture the better.
If your Anki is going out of control you need to either limit the number of new cards added each day, or stop adding new stuff for awhile all together. If you need to keep up a streak with studying the TextFugu text, allow yourself to count rereading portions, don’t force yourself to continue to new sections if you aren’t ready for them. That’s one of the major benefits of self study, you aren’t forced to go at someone else’s pace.
As a last bit of advice:
Haha, that video was hilarious, thank you! :’D
I’m using Lang-8 already ^^. Only thing I don’t like about it is that sometimes the people correcting change my sentences altogether, to something I can only assume I haven’t gone through yet on TextFugu, which can be a little frustrating. One time, I wrote “俺の名前はジョナスです” and it got corrected to “ジョナスといいます” and I couldn’t understand why or how that even works, but yeah…
Though, are they fine with you just typing a bunch of sentences with the exact same structure but with different nouns/verbs/adjectives? I know that sometimes you won’t get many corrections at all sometimes, if any. I try to help others with their Swedish/English, of course.
Lang-8 also worries me even now. What few entries I did write months back were correctted by several folks but the corrections tend to vary from each person. Some people make minor changes while others seem to turn my sentences upside down. Since my Japanese is still in the beginner stages any comments left are hard to understand.
For now I spend more time making corrections for people looking to learn English :) Once I get to a stage where I can string longer sentences together and talk about different subjects I’ll start making my own entries again.
Cheers for the link Aikibujin ^_^
Finally got done with season 3. Two main reasons it went slower. The amount of daily reviews on WaniKani has increased quite a bit, so that takes up more of my “Japanese time” each day. I also don’t want to get too ahead of myself–the ~50 most common verbs are slow to get solid in my mind, and I feel like things will be worse if I try to add too much on top of that yet.
That’s season 2 out of the way. It feels like a walk in the park compared to when I did it several months ago. Looks like this noodle brain of mine retained a lot more information than I thought. The whole experience felt like one giant review (Which is a good thing since the end of Season 2 still has no review!).
*Cracks Knuckles*
Bring on Season 3!
P.S: I’m loving WaniKani.
Ok, finished Season 4. You guys weren’t kidding that things get harder here.
My main problem was the amount of new vocab dropped on me. There were days that by the time I was trying to get past the last few words, with only two words remaining, I’d still manage to miss the meaning. Like say I had noisy and mean left (after going through a hundred words, missing about a third). I’d be so burned out that it would go “うるさい – I don’t remember, what is it? Ah, noisy. Again. いじわる – I don’t remember. Ah, mean. Again. うるさい – Ok, I JUST saw this… crap. I don’t remember. Noisy. Right. Remember, noisy. Again. いじわる – … … Come on! Why can’t I remember it! It’s only two freaking cards! I saw it ten seconds ago!”
It was frustrating.
The grammar itself went by well enough, but I was spending so much time on cards that I cut back to one or two pages per day rather than a whole chapter as I’d been doing up to Season 3. Mostly to keep from adding a lot more vocab. It took a while, and a lot of marking katakana vocab as easy so it wouldn’t clutter my deck, but I’ve managed to cut down from 100 to 60-70 vocab per day.
What I think added to the difficulty was that Season 4 has no practice pages, meaning no sentence cards. Seeing the vocab used in sentences, even simple ones, really helps me cement the meanings. I can work out what a word means from context, which helps solidify the connections in my brain so that it’s easier to identify the word when it comes up on its own. I did the exercises as they came up, but without cards to review them every day they don’t stick as powerfully. I’m planning on adding my own sentence cards during my next study session, now that I finished this season.
I posted to Lang-8! Got some corrections, though deciphering what the corrections mean will take a bit of effort, since they corrected me in Japanese :P Some of those are easy enough. For example, I posted with spaces since I was writing in ひらがな. I know that’s not the proper way to write, but I figured it would be easier to transmit what I intended to say. The corrections stripped away the spaces, so I guess my next post will not carry spaces.
I found that trying to write a post of my own was quite a challenge. I had first written it up in my native language (Spanish). When trying to translate, however, I had to strip the sentences down and keep making them simpler. Found I wasn’t certain how to say things like “A because B”, conjugating outside of present/future and past, etc. I imagine that will all come with time, but it was an illuminating experience.
Anyway, I’m still pumped to start Season 5, and write more sentence cards to add to anki.
That’s Season 3 finished. I found about 85% of that easy :)
That being said I’m hesitant to move on as the に and を particle have me a tad bit confused in terms of the correct time to use them. The sentence enders chapter was a wee bit strange as well but it’s clear that not every thing was meant to click right off the bat.
I think I’ll quickly review Season 3 just to double-check. I’ll likely make a separate thread about some questions I have about Season 3 because this is the first instance since my return to TextFugu where something has had me truly stumped.
But yesh, making progress, FEAR ME!
I’m not sure if I’ve posted yet about completing Season Three…but I have.
I’m a few chapters into Season Four, and YES IT GETS HARDER. But I’m enjoying it, no matter how difficult the vocab is becoming. I just slowed down the amount of new words, try to get to Anki whenever I can (time has been a difficult thing to come by lately) and keep working at it, even if I miss a few days. I’ve been especially focusing on verbs and the adjectives since that’s my weakest right now.
As a side note, because of Textfugu and WaniKani, when I looked at a manga chapter in actual Japanese today, I was able to recognize a few of the kanji, a few of the words written in hiragana, and all the words written in katakana except for one, enough that I became that much more motivated to learn Japanese. ^^ I even managed to figure out some of the grammar, lol.
Finished season 2 in my spare time here
While it doesn’t cover any grammar I haven’t read up on yet (And it might not ever until the big EtoEto update) there’s lots of good stuff in there that made reading it worth my time. I’ve got some new (basic lol) vocab words that I didn’t know and the sentences make for good easy reading practice compared to reading in the wild which is still really time consuming for me
Looking forward to season 3 and hoping I don’t finish season 8 before the update goes through =P
Haha, that video was hilarious, thank you! :’D
I’m using Lang-8 already ^^. Only thing I don’t like about it is that sometimes the people correcting change my sentences altogether, to something I can only assume I haven’t gone through yet on TextFugu, which can be a little frustrating. One time, I wrote “俺の名前はジョナスです” and it got corrected to “ジョナスといいます” and I couldn’t understand why or how that even works, but yeah…
Though, are they fine with you just typing a bunch of sentences with the exact same structure but with different nouns/verbs/adjectives? I know that sometimes you won’t get many corrections at all sometimes, if any. I try to help others with their Swedish/English, of course.
Likely when they completely flip stuff around that you write, it’s because that’s a more natural way of writing it.
So I would focus more on the ones that do tiny fixes instead, for now. Once you progress and start to understand the more complex fixes, then you’ll know you have the skill level to use them.
You’ll also have a written record of the more complex fixes that you can refer back to once you are skilled enough to understand them.
Keep up the good work everyone!
Finished season two just now.
Since I’m doing this at a leisurely tempo, it has taken me exactly a month to get to this point, but I’m not in a rush. So far I’ve not run into any major roadblocks, though I have had some trouble remembering certain things like the kun’yomi readings of certain kanji, some kanji vocab words, etc.
Anyways, onward to season three! ＼(^o^)／
I have finally gotten through Season Four. Oh, gah.
But I’m still enjoying this. I was actually able to write a bit about a Korean drama I watched yesterday called The Last Scandal that I have yet to finish. And the sentences made sense! I only got corrected on spelling and a couple of particles I forgot to add. Mostly, I’m glad I was able to write more than a sentence or two and still make sense. For now, I’m just practicing what I know as a way of making sure it sticks.
I still feel a little overwhelmed. I’m not sure if I’ll be going into Season Five this week, though the vocab might be useful. I want to make sure everything is solid before I do that, and I’m still having a little trouble with remembering a few of the verbs and some of the い adjectives.
The most frustrating part for me is that I can see a word in Anki or on Textfugu, remember its meaning in English, but when it comes time to take the English word and turn it into its Japanese equivalent, that’s when my mind goes blank. Should I be making an Anki deck with English words so I have to figure out the Japanese equivalent?
Anyway, in spite of that, I’m still having a great time with this. I’ve tried learning German, French, and Spanish, and none of them have been as much fun to learn as Japanese. Then again, none of those languages had manga as a motivator, either. ;)
After procrastinating for months, I’m finally caught up to where I left off, the last of Season 4. I feel overwhelmed but I’m sticking to it and it is definitely getting easier although I’m taking a lot more time per lesson now than at first. I’m excited! n_n
Finally finished Season 1! Only took me a record breaking 9 month or so! :D
I won’t blame it on the Anki instructions, which I’d call broken at this point, but others obviously overcame that hurdle, but it certainly was a factor. As far as “regular learning content” goes: I loved it. I hated the Passion List, and still fear it, but that was all, I love the personal and up-beat feel of the lessons, and the presentation is great, down to the quotes, which feel very well picked, and they generally add to it rather than distract despite being mainly garnish. Otherwise there is only small stuff, such as writing the hiragana chart in a “cleaner” font, and so on.
New: Until today I was sadly unaware of the existence of the lesson index! Making this more visible in the lessons would be an improvement in my opinion. I’m well aware that Textfugu is currently being re-written, and I guess it’s going to improve a great deal so I’m not sure how helpful this still is, so I finish here and see how new Textfugu will be.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxGRhd_iWuE
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.The most frustrating part for me is that I can see a word in Anki or on Textfugu, remember its meaning in English, but when it comes time to take the English word and turn it into its Japanese equivalent, that’s when my mind goes blank. Should I be making an Anki deck with English words so I have to figure out the Japanese equivalent?
In your case, yes you should.
The reason it is in Japanese and you come up with the English is because this only requires you to recognize the Japanese, rather than recall the Japanese. Recall is more difficult for the brain than recognition.
So the point of that is for you to learn a whole slew of Japanese at the recognition stage in a fairly quick time in order to get to the stage where you are comfortable reading native Japanese texts. At that point you will be reading so many common words that your brain will start to recall them as well as recognize them and it will happen fairly naturally. Then you would make English-> Japanese cards for any words that are uncommon or you are having problems with.
As a result you will get better quicker at reading and understanding Japanese, but it will take a lot longer to write and speak Japanese yourself.
In your case, since you are taking your sweet time with everything (nothing wrong with that) it would benefit you to go ahead and create reverse cards for the vocab you are learning, as you aren’t benefiting from the speed of the other method anyway, and this will allow you to have more confidence and a feeling of achievement, which you would be lacking otherwise.
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