This blog has laid dormant for a few months. The reason is that I've gone ahead and begun to learn Japanese hardcore, following the general ideas presented at All Japanese All The Time (AJATT). I'm starting to feel confident about my progress, and I've begun to make a few changes to suit my needs. And I feel like writing about it.
So, currently I'm working on Heisig's Remembering the Kanji 1. (Currently sitting at 752 cards in my Anki deck; 25 of which are not yet active -- more on that later.) I've made a few attempts at changing up the card structure, but I'm finding that Keyword + Mnemonic on the front and Kanji on the back is the best for me. Keyword only tends to force me to use visual memory rather than the mnemonic -- which is fine for, say, 女, but not so much for 憂 or 愛. I am finding that even with the story on the front, I don't tend to need the mnemonic to recall mature kanji that I find in my reading. So that's good.
Regarding SRSing, I noticed (thanks to Anki's graphing feature) that I had a tendency to add a crapload of kanji all at once (generally around 40-50 in one day) and then not add any new cards for several days afterwords. This is not very efficient, and was also not very fun. But I have found a solution: I have capped my new card count to 20 per day; if I have more than that, they roll over and show up the next day. This is very useful; it gives me a concrete goal to reach each day for new cards (I want the "new total" to be at least 20 at the end of the day) and also allows me to add extra cards without the massive load of new card reviews that make me burn out and stop adding. This past week has been a solid 20 new cards a day; 140 for the week. Both my stats for cards added and new cards seen are up. So I'm calling this a success.
My immersion is less of a success story. While I listen to a great deal of J-rock, and watch a lot of (raw) anime, I still don't reach anywhere near 100% immersion on a daily basis. Not even close: generally closer to 60%. Not necessarily because I'm listening to English instead, but because I'm not listening to *anything*. I suspect some more music-hunting may be in order.
On the other hand, I do quite a bit of "reading". While it's somewhat frustrating to try to read when you only know a third of the basic kanji (and most non-manga materials use even more kanji than the that), it is still satisfying when you do actually understand something. Also, some sources are just so damn fun I don't care if I understand everything or not; currently for me this is リトルバスターズ. Visual novels are awesome -- lots of text, and you can generally get the gist of what's going on from visuals and the tone of dialogue.
Finally, I've decided to make yet another adjustment to the AJATT system. Khatz often says (rather forcibly) that one needs to know the kanji before beginning to study sentences. On the whole, I agree with him -- kanji contain all the meaning of the Japanese language, not knowing kanji is illiteracy. His warnings seem to be framed as "don't do kanji 'on the side.'" However, I see no issue in learning sentences to which I already know the kanji, so long as the kanji remain the primary focus. (Case in point: the first sentence I added to Anki: "妹の名前は高坂桐乃。" -- from the 俺の妹 light novels. I know every kanji in this sentence.) Since I have the time available, and don't want to charge through RTK too fast (and jeopardize my retention of the kanji), I think this will be a good exercise. At the very least, seeing kanji I know in the context of sentences on a regular basis will enhance my memory of them (reducing failure rates in my kanji deck and letting me focus on the newer kanji). We shall see.
Will probably post again in the New Year. じゃね。
