Oh yeah I ‘acquired’ Rosetta Stone and didn’t like it at all. It’s only really decent for teaching phrases rather than learning how the language actually works.

I think there’s two stages to learning hiragana and katakana, first there’s being able to match them all up on a drag and drop exercise, then there’s being able to read them easily and at a good pace. I was able to learn hiragana and katakana within a few days but actually reading them fast took longer. I can’t read katakana quite as fast yet since I’ve had much less practice with it.

I can read hiragana as fast as the regular alphabet now. I’m gonna have to step up my katakana game, there’s about 3 characters that can sometimes trick me.

Yep any degree! I’m thinking of just ditching the idea of going to university, doing some part time work and going to Japan on my own in 2013 instead of paying the outrageous university fees. (around $60,000 here)

Might not be an option for all though, the US has a pretty poor visa option I think. It only gives you around 30 days to stay, or maybe it was 90 days I can’t really remember. Where as on work holiday visa (UK) some people have been living in Japan for years and just keep getting it extended.

I’m really not sure what I should do and it does stress me out sometimes.

If JET ceases to exist then it’s not that big a deal, I’m not going to go for it because of the lengthy app process, I’m just going to turn up in Japan and start applying for every job I see pretty much. English teachers are in high demand and a lady I spoke to that works at one of the largest ALT recruiting agencies told me it’ll be incredibly easy to find a job with a degree, of course some people are fortunate enough to get them without.

A school in Japan emailed me back saying my cover letter was fantastic but they needed somebody with prior experience. That was nice of them and pretty inspiring! I don’t have a degree yet so I’m more limited in what jobs I can apply to unfortunately. Still it’s nice to know JET isn’t the only option.

• This reply was modified 13 years ago by  Luke.

Can you link the deck? I’ll try it out and see if I get the same issue.

and eh, strawberry is pretty useful to know I would imagine, being one of the most common fruits and all.

I just finished ultimate verbs, I’m gonna spend the next 2 days just reviewing Anki decks, doing 150 cards each day on Read the Kanji and reading one of my books, then start ultimate adjectives on Monday which I should have done by Friday, it looks like there’s only around 200 on that list and I already know quite a lot of them.

I’ll probably start ultimate nouns the Monday after next and hopefully have that done the following Friday. I think when I finish all the ultimate lists I’m going to increase the amount of cards on Read the Kanji to 300 per day, I’m also going to finish off TextFugu. After that I’ll probably start making my own Anki decks with extra vocab and read the entirety of this sentence patterns book.

• This reply was modified 13 years ago by  Luke.
• This reply was modified 13 years ago by  Luke.

Got through another 30 words on the ultimate verbs list and did 200 reviews for that deck on Anki, only have around 50 words left now. Woohoo.

About to do another 150 cards on Read the Kanji then I’ll probably write a Lang-8 journal and retire to gaming for the rest of the evening. I didn’t sleep last night so I’m pretty exhausted and don’t feel like doing much more reading.

I bought lifetime because it’s a much better deal. I guess that goes towards why I don’t mind the current pace of updates, it has felt like I got my moneys worth already.