There are three words that can form a formidable opposition to learning: supposed, should, and discipline Maybe not the words you were expecting, but allow me to explain: When you’re “supposed” to maintain the “discipline” to do something everyday, what happens when you miss a day? It means you lack discipline. You didn’t do [...]
Feed Me Japanese
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What is an SRS, Really?
An interesting post over on the All Japanese All The Time blog, revisiting Spaced Repetition Systems, or SRS. Khatzumoto is making an observation about how certain knowledge makes its way into our long term memory that I would like to extend: Why do you remember your own name? Because your mother sat you down one [...]
What is the Purpose of Study?
First off, my apologies for falling behind in posting. I was doing some experimentation with learning Japanese. But it all relates to the question at hand. What is “study” for? This question isn’t unique to language learning, we could ask it for anything that takes years to learn. But it’s a question that, I think, [...]
Exile Catchy Best – Well Said.
Exile Catchy Best….Catchy….Catchy Best. In English that sounds absolutely horrible. No English pop group would dare put such a name on their album but there it is on a new best hits album from the J-Pop group Exile. Sometimes it seems like the Japanese are intentionally butchering English to make some crazy point. In Japanese, [...]
Keep It Moving
I ran across some interesting “rules” that accompany Ask Publishing’s Japanese Graded Readers: １．やさしいレベルから読む Start at an easy level ２．辞書を引かないで読む Read without using a dictionary ３．わからないところは飛ばして読む Skip any parts you don’t understand ４．進まなくなったらやめて、ほかの本を読む When you hit a bottleneck, stop. Read a different book. While I don’t think “rules” are necessary (and I do find it [...]
Who Cares About the Joyo Kanji?
A couple of thoughts on Kanji: From the Reviewing the Kanji Forums: I’m not quite finished [with Hesig's Remembering the Kanji], I need about a month to finish, but it bugs me when I see kanji like 俺 not in the first book. This kanji is extremely popular and should have been taught a lot [...]
What goes into an SRS?
From Nihongo Notes: If you read or hear anything in Japanese add it to Anki. Everything! Names, places, sentences, signs. Keep it up. Try not to miss a day or you will begin to forget the cards. You don’t want to end up with hundreds of cards to review as it will only demotivate you. [...]