Tenka

Amazingly enough, surfing the singles sites, I met a Japanese lady in this area. We dated for a couple weeks, and she gave me a wonderful present. A complete Japanese drama (soap opera) called Tenka. It's a really nice little story, about 30 hours long. It's really hard to understand, but at least I have some real Japanese TV to watch. Unfortunately, other than a few phrases, we didn't speak Japanese at all. What a waste.

The tutor is working out better this time. I'm still pretty awkward, but better than before. Classes consist of conversation, going over JFE and analyzing Tenka.

I don't know how much more of JFE I'll do before I go. I "learn" it, but it just doesn't sink in. There aren't enough hours in the day right now. I think I'm going to try to get through chapter 10 (of 27).

A Trip to Japan?

I've finished learning how to read my vocabulary. I've been sitting on my supermemo lately, and the reviews are getting nice and short. So I'm feeling pretty good about things. 

If I want to learn this language, I need to start using it. It's time to plan a trip to Japan. I'll go in September, which is 20 months after I started learning Japanese. What a terribly long time to wait for the first immersion experience. I'll have to remember not to wait like this in other languages.

Good preparation requires using my tutor again. I have to improve my conversation. The grammar I learned has to have helped a little. I need to learn more too.

So here is my new program:

1) Tutor

2) JFE

3) vocab/supermemo

Reaching a Reasonable Compromise

Things have gotten quite a bit better. 

I quit RTK2. I left the flashcards in supermemo, so I finished over half the book at least, and even though it was really slow, my effort wasn't a complete waste. I figure I lost about 100 hours by using a bad method, which is chump-change in this language.

I finshed feeding everything into supermemo, and just sat on it for a while. Reviews are usually around 90 minutes now.

I haven't started back on JFE yet.

So I needed to come to some sort of compromise regarding this language, since clearly I had a bunch of conflicting plans. First, no more time limit. The time limit was there to determine when I could start my next language, French. I'll start French as soon as I feel good about my Japanese, but won't worry about finishing my Japanese first. 

Second, no more feeding mass quantities of stuff into supermemo. It does nothing but bring me down. Also, everything I put in supermemo will now be pre-learned using lists for 4 days. This makes the reviews much shorter. Supermemo is now merely a long term memory aid for me.

Third, no more learning kanji readings in isolation. I've started learning to read the vocabulary that I already know the pronunciations of. This is quite easy, and gives me a solid anchor for the readings. I have about 3000 vocabulary words and sentences, and I've been doing 60 per day. It's really working - I feel like I'm finally learning to read!

Should I Quit?

This has been a frustrating 2 months. 

To start with, JFE is just too hard. I got up to chapter 7, and just quit. I might start it again later, but it's just too much right now. 

Supermemo is killing me. I've been slowly feeding all my stuff into it, and putting all my new stuff into it. I have RTK1, RTK2 and a massive vocabulary collection right now. I just started with it, and I'm almost up to 10,000 cards. Reviews are way too long - sometimes over 3 hours. If I had hair, I'd pull it out.

And worst of all, RTK2 just isn't working for me. From the beginning, I knew that I didn't want to do it per the book's recommendation, because that would require learning 2500 or so new words concurrently. So I decided to use a method similar to kanjitown. It worked great for the creator, but not for me. I'm forgetting stuff faster than I'm learning it. 

To summarize, I feel the members of my forum let me down, and I can't get this stuff under control. My new goal, of finishing Japanese by the end of this year, is clearly impossible. I'm putting in over 30 hrs per week, on top of working a normal job, and I feel like I'm spinning my wheels. Maybe I'll quit.

Supermemo, RTK2, Pimsleur, quitting my Tutor & JFE

My vocabulary list reviews were killing me, so I've started using this great flashcard program called Supermemo. It is the most efficient way to review vocabulary that I know of. When I do a flashcard, I grade the difficulty. The program remembers this, and shows the flashcard to me again based on how it easy it is. So difficult cards might get shown to me the next day, but easy cards might not be shown to me for months. This is much better than reviewing all of the vocabulary all of the time. I'm getting so much vocabulary (over 2000 words now) that it's almost impossible to review everything anyhow. But with supermemo, it's just a few minutes a day. Fantastic invention. On the downside, it's difficult to learn how to use it. It took me 30 hours to figure it out and get everything working the way I want it to. But it was worth the investment.

Listening to recommendation of guys on the forum, I've decided to use RTK2 to learn my kanji readings. It's much less popular than RTK1, but I honestly don't know what else to do. I hope that supermemo will make it easier.

I've finally finished Pimsleur. I'll be forever grateful for the strong base and good pronunciation it gave me, but I'm really glad it's over. 

It is with great regret that I quit my tutor. I definitely made some progress with her help, but it was much slower going than with Thai. The simple reason - grammar. I need a lot more grammar before it will be worth my while to use her again.

So I've started JFE. It's much more difficult than JFBP, but it's supposed to be the best. 1 chapter in JFE covers at least 4 in JFBP. And there are 27 chapters, so I have my work cut out for me. Yikes.

Another difficult confession - I didn't learn the language in 1 year. I wanted to move on to French, but I don't feel nearly good enough about my Japanese to add another language now. My new goal is to finish it by the end of this year.

To summarize, my current program is:

1) RTK2

2) JFE

3) Vocabulary (supermemo)

A Japanese Forum, my tutor, JFBP and Pimsleur

I sort of miss working on Heisig, so I went surfing for reviews, to bask in my success a bit. This time I decided to do a google search, and I came across an amazing thread in a forum dedicated to learning Japanese. Last month I had no idea language learning forums existed, now I'm totally addicted. I can ask anything I want, and in a matter of hours a bunch of experts will give me my answer. This will revolutionize the way I study.

I started lessons with my tutor. Very difficult. It seems that I don't know enough of anything to converse with her. I can only get about 3 hrs per week too. This will be a challenge. But she is very dedicated, and I won't give up. Just like with Thai, there are too many new words to make a dent in them, so I'm just taking down a few and memorizing what I can. There has been some improvement, but I'm still struggling. And unlike Thai, grammar is a major problem. It made me finish JFBP quickly, but I'm still lacking a lot.

Finishing JFBP was a hard effort. Except for pronunciation, nothing is easy about this language. And about the time I finished it, according to the guys on the forum, I came to find out that it's not a very good book. It's poorly organized, doesn't go into enough detail on the stuff it covers, and doesn't cover very much. In addition, the vocabulary is more business oriented than general learning, so some of is isn't frequently used. Very disheartening. I learned about another book, which is supposed to be the best single text for the English speaking self learner. It's called Japanese for Everyone (JFE).

I'm pleased to say I finished Pimsleur 2. I'm working on Pimsleur 3, which is the last one. It's getting easier, and I can usually finish a lesson in 2 tries now. Without Pimsleur, my tutor work would be a total waste of time.

Finished RTK1

It's perhaps the hardest single intellectual effort I've made in my life, but I prevailed, and finished RTK1. I read dozens, maybe even hundreds, of reviews of this book. The reviews were overwhelmingly positive, but there were surprisingly few reviewers who actually finished the book. I get the feeling it's pretty rare, and now I can count myself amongst their ranks. I'm very pleased with myself!

The last couple months of RTK1 have been really hard. Adding 20 cards per day isn't too bad, but reviewing all the other cards has been really time consuming. I estimated that, by the end, I was spending 3 hrs per day on Heisig alone. That's the reason I stopped everything else, except for Pimsleur. 

Now I need to go back to my old program, but add something to fill in the huge void left by RTK1. I'm going to add a tutor. I only have about 1000 words of vocabulary, and I haven't tried to talk to anyone since I left Boeing in March. But this was the way I finally made my "breakthrough" in Thai. I had a tutor, with the instructions not to correct me unless she couldn't understand me. Every time she used a word I didn't know, I'd write it down, and memorize it before the next lesson. I was taking 5 one hour lessons per week.

The theory behind this was sound IMO. No corrections would ensure that there would be as few interruptions as possible, and I could get comfortable in the language quickly. Research has shown learners, as long as they are learning, and getting lots of correct comprehensible input, will correct themselves just as effectively as being beat up by a strict teacher. So no-corrections is a no-lose situation. With Thai, this seemed to be true for me.

The other issue, vocabulary learning, didn't work as well. There are so many new words at first. I have no idea how to deal with so many, or if it's even possible to learn so many so fast. So I ended up taking down only some of them, learning a portion of those, and being several days late on the remainders.

But the Thai tutor experience was very successful overall. I went from being a total mess of a beginner to being a solid intermediate in conversation in our 2 months together. I think it worked better than any other beginner program would work, short of living in Thailand.

So my new program will be

1) Tutor

2) Pimsleur

3) Vocabulary

4) JFBP