After the holidays and returning from Japan is as good of a time as any to reformulate my study plan.  I need to catch back up, but once I do, I plan to:

1. gradually phase out RTK in preference of words
2. continue survival japanese
3. restart jpod 101 dialogs
4. restart jpod101 vocabulary
5. start useful knowledge deck

1.  For the past several months I have been making zero progress on my RTK deck.  My workload is the same as several months ago and my number of mature cards has actually gone down.  I could just keep plugging away or change my anki settings, but I think improvement will be marginal.  So I’ve decided to suspend kanji, starting with the most difficult and replace them with words containing the suspended kanji.  Ideally, I will replace each suspended kanji with 3 commonly used words when available.

2.  I’m about 100 into a deck of around 500 survival phrases, place names, menu items and other things useful for operating in Japan.  I’d like them to be fully internalized next time I go to Japan, so I might as well keep studying them now.

3.  I think studying the dialogs have made the largest improvement in my Japanese ablity, so I’d like to continue studying them.  I think I have about 6 months left if I add 2 per day.

4.  Knowing more vocabulary simply improves the efficacy of the dialogs and the dialogs reinforce the vocabulary.  so why not do them in tandem..?

5.  This isnt Japanese related, but I’m putting it here because it’s an anki deck I’m starting.  It’s just a deck of things I’d like to know.  A lot of them are things I don’t necessarily need to memorize, but want to read again periodically – like quotes or lifeProTips.  I’ll put these on long intervals and press good every time because I only need an occasional reminder.  I might eventually add some Japanese geography and history stuff in this deck or one like it.

I’m writing this from Hanada airport in the departure lobby having just spent 8 days in Japan. This is the first time I can actually say that I understood more than a token word or phrase here or there.

This time, I could get the gist of menus, informational placards, and signs if I read them very slowly and carefully. Announcements are still mostly too fast, but roughly half the time I could get the gist of what they were trying to convey if I put a lot of effort decoding everything they were saying.

As last time, characters and words caught my eye everywhere and I would know them or at least know that they were familiar. I couldn’t even turn the recognition switch off and go back to the days when Japanese text was simply meaningless texture. Japanese text is looking more and more familiar to me now. I’d say it looks vaguely as familiar as looking at French where I may not understand but the characters don’t look foreign anymore. And as with French, I can look at Japanese text and decode much of it if I go slow and concentrate.

I feel like next time I come, I will be able to interact much more confidently and easily.

It’s a new year so I thought it would be a good idea to write up a new lesson plan.  I’m not sure what I want to work on after I finish Japanese Pod 101 Beginner Season 1.  I’ll probably continue with Season 2, but I’m adding a few other things that I’m thinking of to the list.  My main priority is not too much vocabulary to the exclusion of reading and listening.

This is just a note to myself.  Since I’m getting close to finishing japanese pod101 beginner season 1 I’m wondering if I should continue with the beginner seasons.  From a quick look, there are 3535 vocabulary words for the remaining beginner seasons (including lower and upper beginner, but not absolute beginner).  From scrolling through the list, a rough guess would be that I know about half of those words. So if I want to finish the jpod101 beginner series, I’d need to study very roughly 1769 vocabulary words.  Or roughly the rest of the year studying Jpod 101 beginner.

On the good side, I believe finishing the beginner series will give me a very good basis for understanding a lot of things.  For instance easier manga

If you don’t know much about the history of Japan, here’s an amusingly irreverent video that will get you up to speed in 9 minutes.

For a much more serious in-depth history, I recommend the History of Japan Podcast.

I was reading something today which mentioned phonetic radicals.  What’s that?

“The right side is usually what’s known as the “phonetic compound.” This portion has a specific reading attached to it. If you see this phonetic compound, you can sometimes guess the reading of the kanji. Sometimes by learning one phonetic compound’s reading you can know how to read six or seven other kanji that contain it.”

Apparently 67% of kanji have phonetic radicals, so it would be very useful to learn them.

Click for full version

Emk on the how to learn any language forum posted this humorous diagram of the Apollo 5 rocket “explained using the 10 hundred words people use most often”.  How much can you communicate with such a limited vocabulary?  Surprisingly much.