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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.
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.
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…..
