Feed Me Japanese

I’ve never been a fan of tests or reviews for the simple reason that they are rarely used to move you forward.

Did poorly on a test because you had difficulty understanding the material? That’s nice, the class will be moving on now.

Reviews, Tests, Quizzes and the like are typically used to determine what you know. That’s backwards. Tests should be used to isolate what you don’t know.

What do you have difficulty grasping? What takes you longer to learn? If the objective is to obtain full understanding of some concept or idea, who cares what questions you got right? We need to work on what you got wrong.

This isn’t about getting cute little stars on your paper or currying favor with a professor because of your diligence - This is about learning.

And with Japanese there is a lot to learn and while most of it will be learned though listening and reading, we nudge ourselves forward by reviewing Kanji and Sentences.

But we don’t want the typical review. We don’t want to arrive at the end of the review with a correct list to be happy about and an incorrect list of more work to do.

If a review can determine what we don’t know, then it can help us learn it. A test can evaluate and teach.

When we only use a review to measure what we know, all we get is a snapshot of our “knowledge”. But if we use a review to measure what we don’t know we can leverage that information right now to move our “knowledge” forward.

Said another way, we should know more at the end of the review than we did at the beginning.

And when the review is done, all the reviewing is done. No additional studying, dictionary mining or grammar hacking. Just watch your JDrama, enjoy your anime, listen to your podcast, or read your book or manga - Because that’s where the real learning occurs.