Tuesday, January 10, 2006

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)