I’ve spent most of my day, as usual, studying. I multitask, sometimes, having a vlog up or something as I review vocab or kanji. It’s made my passive acquisition better, I think, or at least I can differentiate between words in the spoken language now better than I could before.

I’ve finally started in on the two Big Beasts (for me, personally. This is all for dramatic effect), conjugation and actual reading. The conjugation is more straightforward than I thought it would be, which is good news, but it’s also difficult for me to tell the difference between a Godan and an Ichidan verb, which is important because you conjugate them in different ways. I’ll probably need to read an in-depth article or something to explain it more thoroughly, like I did with on’yomi and kun’yomi.

I started “reading” today, although I think calling it “reading” is exceedingly generous. I got an app that has a small database of free reading materials (with more available with a subscription, of course), and I decided to start nice and easy with a fairy tale. It’s like 564 words, which is nice and short, and I started in on it thinking “Ha! No problem!” Wrong, bitch. You thought. I turned on the furigana, because my vocabulary is far too small to attempt reading almost anything without it, and still the first paragraph completely kicked my ass. The app (thankfully, god bless) includes a feature that lets you select words and it will pull up a little dictionary window with the various options for translation. I needed it for damn near every word in the sentence, and even then I still majorly fucked it up. I forgot that nouns can be both singular and plural and will read exactly the same, so when I read “むすこの六助と千吉もやっぱり仲良しでした,” I understood it as “the son’s six women and a thousand fortunes.” Which reads exactly as insane in context as is does out of it. The actual translation is “the sons, Rokusuke and Senyo, were also close friends.” I decided to quit on that first paragraph and come back for the second tomorrow so I have time to stew in my shame.

I’ve seen people on reddit talk about how slow reading is and how you have to spend time looking up literally every single thing and holy shit, they were right. They were so right. That one paragraph took me probably half an hour to get through, and it was short, only two or three sentences. I didn’t bother trying to mine for vocab because I already add several words a day to my mining deck and I’m not out here trying to get overwhelmed; I’m just practicing. My main goal with reading right now is to see conjugation and syntax in action, which are my main hurdles. I see both sides of the argument now; one side says you shouldn’t even try to read until you’re roughly N4/N3, and the other side says you should start reading immediately, because the more you read the easier it gets. And both of those make sense. I totally understand why someone would say trying to read at my current level is a waste of time, but I think I agree more with the idea that beginning right away is beneficial. I said in an earlier entry that the way I learned English grammar and syntax was through just reading a shit ton of books as a kid, and I truly think that’s the way to go here. If I read enough, I’ll start to pick up the rhythm. I don’t need to be able to map out the syntax of a Japanese sentence with all its linguistic terms; I just need to be able to feel what’s right and what’s wrong. I need the pattern recognition, but for something like this I have to feed my brain a lot of patterns before it’ll begin picking stuff up. That’s why I also listen so much. I almost always have a vlog, a show, or a podcast going, and I swear it does help. There are words I’ve started recognizing that I haven’t even looked up or added to my mining deck, but I know them when I hear them, and that’s part of the passive acquisition. Once I learn the definitions, the vocab will stick better, because I’m already used to the sound.

I mentioned in a previous entry that I’ve already finished the N5 and Kanken Level 10 kanji, and was pondering adding in Level 9, and then earlier today I was pistol-whipped with the reminder that, Mel, you fucking idiot, you have to learn how read the fucking kanji in context. You can’t just wander along your merry way knowing what they mean and that’s that. So tomorrow I’m going to start in on readings, and TokiniAndy’s kanji videos will be much more immediately helpful than the meaning lessons were, since I blasted through the meanings much more quickly using Anki. But in Andy’s kanji reading videos, he does 10 kanji at a time instead of five, and that’s plenty to learn per day, or even per couple of days.

I’m trying to pace myself to some degree, but it’s hard, honestly, when I blast through my lessons and then sit here at my desk like a lost dog, wondering what to do now. I suppose the better thing to do would be to just pull up some media and soak in it, and I do that to some degree or another throughout my day anyway, but it makes me feel better to be making (what feels like) tangible progress. That’s why I started the verb conjugation lessons on renshuu a couple of days ago. When I feel like I have a decent grasp on verb conjugation, I’ll move on to adjectives. I feel like if I try both at once then I’m going to mix up the rules, which is already easy to do because there aren’t just conjugations for the tense you’re using, but also whether you’re using the polite or casual register. So currently what I’m learning is polite non-past (ます) and polite past (ました), and a single toe dipped in polite non-past negative (ません). It felt more overwhelming before I noticed the conjugation pattern (take your う-sounds and make them い-sounds), which isn’t at all impressive, but I’ve been known to miss blaring patterns like this on occasion. At least it’s not just hard memorization like English (mostly).

Anyway. I’m not the linguistic genius I’d love to be, but I’m making solid progress (if you completely ignore how tripped up I get with あう/かう/かす). It’ll keep getting better day by day, I expect, but as it is now I feel more and more like an idiot every day. I keep getting a handle on something and then come across another impressively imposing hurdle right after. That’s probably just what it’s like learning a language from a completely different branch, but god, on my life I will make this get easier as I go. No giving up.

Tracking Heatmap

Historical Activity Visualization