That being said, I tried to maintain my Japanese study, even if I didn’t want to touch a lot of what I had to do with a ten foot pole. Some of my activities included the following:

• Manga Reading.

I’ve been reading manga for the first time in Japanese, and I enjoyed it a lot. It was a huge motivation booster, being able to read it, even if I couldn’t understand all of the words, I could understand the story as a whole. My next step will be to go back through it and look up the words that I didn’t understand.

• Anki

Last month I had 619 cards in my Anki deck. Now I have 441. I totally changed my focus in Anki from sentences to mainly Heisig with some vocab thrown in.

However, again, I have barely touched Anki in May. I plan on deleting all the vocab words from Anki and then just using it for Heisig for the time being.

• Drama Watching

In April I watched about 26 hours of Japanese tv. This month it was down, mainly due to it being the end of the university semester. I watched a total of 15 hours and 37 mins.

In May I really focused on listening and understanding. I tried to repeat out loud sentences. I am finding that I can understand more and more, with, again, vocabulary seeming to be the biggest problem I am having.

• Vocabulary

I am experimenting with many vocabulary acquiring methods at the moment. I’ll talk more about this as I explore more about this

Overall, not the best month, but not the worst month. For June, I’d love to focus a lot of Heisig and vocabulary building, as well as keeping up watching lots of TV for enjoyment and to practise my listening/speaking skills.

After about one year of studying Japanese, I tried. And surprised myself – I could do it!

Two Reasons Why Reading Manga Is Easy

• The Sentences are very short, to fit in the little dialogue bubble. So for the most part, someone with even a small amount of grammar knowledge will be able to read the sentences.
• There are pictures to help with meaning. Even you go through a page without understanding a word, often you can guess what was going on. Or you will later.

  For instance, in Sugar x Life, there was a page where she was watching TV and I thought she was thinking back on the two guys she just met. Well, she was, but it wasn’t til she ran into the boys again that I realised the boys had been on the TV at the time she was thinking about them, and they were singers/idols.

Two Reasons Why It Is Hard To Read Manga (For Me)

Others might not have these problems, but here is what was hard for me when reading manga for the first time.

• Kanji. While knowing kanji isn’t necessary because – at least in the manga I’m reading so far – they have furigana. So I know how to pronounce words, and sometimes I even learn a new kanji from knowing the word before. But often I think “If only I knew just a basic meaning about the kanji – even just an English key word from Heisig – then I would have an idea of the word’s meaning. Building slowly on my previous knowledge I’d be able to get more of an idea of meaning plus I’d probably be more likely to remember the word/kanji next time I encounter it.
• Vocab. I simply don’t know enough words. At the moment I am working on vocab building exercises. The more words I know the easier it will be to infer meaning of unknown words, especially with the aid of pictures.

 

So get reading some manga now! You may be surprised in how much you understand. It’s a huge confidence booster. And if you give it a go and find you can’t understand, do not worry. Just put the book down, and then try again in a month. You’ll have something fun to aim for!


]]> http://www.goddesscarlie.com/language/reading-manga-for-japanese-language-learning/feed/ 5 http://www.goddesscarlie.com/language/carlies-japanese-progress-march-2008/ http://www.goddesscarlie.com/language/carlies-japanese-progress-march-2008/#comments Sun, 06 Apr 2008 04:31:02 +0000 GoddessCarlie http://goddesscarlie.com/?p=291 We are well into April now, so it’s time for a March 2008 update on my Japanese progress.

On the 18th of March I started up a log of how many hours I watch Japanese tv/movies. I record what I watched and whether I was watching with subs, without, or it was just on as background noise. From the 18th-30th I watched 15 hours of Japanese TV. I find that I don’t watch it for days, but when I do I watch quite a few hours. It does average out to just over an hour a day. I haven’t really been watching any of the dramas from the current/previous season so perhaps this may be a-typical.

Anki
At the end of Feburary I started a new anki file. I now work on both vocab/grammar and Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji in the same deck. I currently have 576 cards. I have an overall retention rate of 73% with 87.1% on older cards.

Japanese for Everyone
At the moment I’m working through chapter 15 of JfE. Things are moving smoothly, I’m finding that I can move through this quickly now. I don’t know, at the moment I’ve got a bit of rhythm to what I’m doing.

An Integrated Approach To Intermediate Japanese by Akira Miura and Naomi Hanaoka McGloin
I just started this and I’m planning to move through this more slowly than JfE, but I’d like to do finish the book by the end of the year. I have started chapter two, but I’d like to go back and go through chapter one more thoroughly. I recently did a review of my first impressions on this textbook if you’d like to read.

Goals For April
April is going to be a busy month for me. I’m moving house, all my major assignments at uni are coming up, and I may have to look for a new job. Oh, and it’s my birthday too However, the next season’s dramas are beginning, something to look forward to, and I plan to keep working on my Japanese at a steady pace.

]]> http://www.goddesscarlie.com/language/carlies-japanese-progress-march-2008/feed/ 4 http://www.goddesscarlie.com/language/remembering-the-kanji/ http://www.goddesscarlie.com/language/remembering-the-kanji/#comments Tue, 27 Mar 2007 11:41:53 +0000 GoddessCarlie http://goddesscarlie.com/remembering-the-kanji/ Remembering the Kanji, a book by James W. Heisig, is just one of the many methods I use to… well, remember the Kanji.

I will talk about other methods some other time, but for now, let’s just talk about this method. I think it is fantastic. There are, however, some things I don’t agree with, only because it doesn’t suit my learning style.

You see, I like to do a bit of everything. Remember how I said I have many methods of studying Kanji. However, if you do Hesig’s method properly, his way is to learn all the characters with an English keyword, without knowing the ON and KUN readings. (If you don’t know what this means, I will talk about it in another post ) I can understand perfectly why he is saying this; in that many foreigners never learn the Kanji because there is so much information, so many of them. So he just strips them down to their simplest forms and you then learn how to read the kanji after you recognise them.

Which is all well and good, but I get bored. I think I learn more when I have more information. So I like to ix up my methods, learning both in context and with Heisig’s method.

More about Heisigs method. What he does is he doesn’t teach kanji from the most useful to the least. Instead, he teaches from the simplest and similar shapes to the more complex. What he does is breaks the kanji down into separate bits which he calls “primitives” and you string all the primitives in a particular kanji together and create a story. The story tells you how to draw the kanji itself as well as the keyword. You can get more information about this method from here, here. You can also download the first 100 pages (or maybe it’s characters, I forget ) from here. Try the method out for yourself, this pdf convinced me to buy the book.

And so, by the end of the book you should be able to recognise and write 2042 kanji, including all the Joyo Kanji. Yatta!

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