Hey everyone! This will be my final wordpress blog post. Thank you so much for reading here over the years (though I know I’ve not always been active)! I wanted to try out a new space to share everything on, and write more frequently as well. You can find me over on Substack!
All my monthly check-ins will be happening over there, as well as some fun future posts going into more detail about my JLPT N1 journey coming soon(TM).
I’m not one to shy away from starting fresh, so I’m really looking forward to this change. My goal is to be way more consistent and clean, while having something I can look back to years from now and feel the gradual changes. I stopped writing in here for awhile due to my own self-consciousness getting in the way, but I think I’ve overcome that beast by now.
Thank you all once again for reading here! I hope to see some of you over on Substack!
August Check-in: Revivals
God this month has been long and short. Is this what adult life is now? Time just doing whatever it wants? It’s been hot as hell and I’m ready for autumn to arrive.
August immersion material was a bit diverse! Just a bit.
I finished 古書店街の橋姫 with the help of a friend at the start of the month. A lot of people really love it, and while it had a lot of moments I enjoyed, I don’t think I could recommend it in good faith to anyone. So glad I saw it all the way through though!
I also finished all of the main NO.6 series! This series really captivated me. I grew really attached to the characters. Last book had a bit of an underwhelming experience, but overall I’d definitely recommend the series. I plan on reading the beyond book one day, when I can get my hands on it!
I have returned to Final Fantasy XIV in full force!
My boyfriend and friends are playing again too, so I’m also no longer just playing around in Japanese either. I have a character I’ve been going through the story with, starting with Stormblood. I’ve played a lot of this game in Japanese, but not all of Stormblood yet, so it’s been fun re-experiencing everything. Heck, the last time I played in earnest I still wasn’t too far along in my JLPT N1 studies. I technically re-subscribed a couple months ago, but I didn’t really play too much until recently. I’m having a great time, and since I finished a visual novel and novel series this month, it’s been a nice break from my usual. Converting the character counts so far, I’m almost at 1,000 pages of just FFXIV text! I definitely recommend trying out this game with its robust free trial (soon covering the entire Stormblood expansion by the way!) just to expose yourself to tons of Japanese. You can play a lot of the game solo with NPCs so it’s not too bad. I can’t even imagine what my page count would look like if I talked to every single NPC, or if I was able to copy/paste every bit of text to count it. Genuinely, I don’t think you could ever run out of content!
In addition to the reading, I’ve also just been listening to a bunch of YouTube. I was watching a bit of anime this month as well, but it’s just harder for me to stay committed to a whole series.
I’ll pick up novel reading again soon, especially since a new book club pick for September has been announced! I’ve been wanting to read the 青春ブタ野郎 series for a bit, but needed something to bump it up closer to the top. I’m looking forward to trying it out after I get back from my trip!
It’s been 70 days since I started using Anki again! Feels like so much longer than that.
My morph count is fairly high, but I’ve only got just over 1,400 cards in my mining deck! Okay I say only, but at the very start of the month I apparently had 1,179. Still increasing at a decent pace!
I’ve been marking things in my sentence bank as known just so I can delete unnecessary cards and feel more “caught up” to my current level. I really slowed down on new cards the past couple of weeks. My heatmap lets me know the amount of cards I have due, and with my vacation starting in the next few days I just didn’t want to have a whole lot. I’m going to keep my streak alive at the very least, but I didn’t want to feel overwhelmed by cards while busy.
I still can’t help but keep that magical 10,000 sentences in the back of my head, so that’s definitely still an Anki goal of mine. But I very recently decided to start up something else based on 10,000 sentences. To sum it up quickly, it’s an AJATT journal!
Khatz talked about being able to understand every sentence you chose, and part of this included being able to write the sentence. I had a 10,000 sentences notebook started ages ago. Definitely over a decade ago. Unfortunately I don’t have it anymore, but I did decide to start up a new one! These won’t always be my Anki sentences, but I can definitely utilize my sentence bank for this since I’m still going through and finding words I know anyway. Anytime I see a fun sentence while immersing, I can pause and bring out the notebook too. It’s a goal of mine to eventually be able to write a lot of kanji without having to reference anything, so I hope this 10,000 written sentence journey can help me go far with that.
It feels a little silly, starting up a lot of things while so far into my journey. Part of me feels like I’m finally doing the things I always wanted to do before. Maybe I’ll decide it’s not for me anymore, but for now I’m enjoying every moment of this. I love writing, I love having notebooks and pens and utilizing them. So if this can help me become better at handwriting, I’ll be super appreciative. I’m still a bit sloppy currently hehe.
For what it’s worth, whether it’s my Anki reps or writing down sentences that aren’t going into Anki, I do always say them before and after writing. This is the first of four things Khatz mentions in the blog post linked above: “Read it in full, aloud, with kanji, no furigana”. I know he later goes on to not recommend the 10,000 sentence method, but I can’t help but be enamored by it and how he spoke of it early on. It’s 2023 and I’m living out late 00s and early 10s dreams. I do like how this gives me a bit more of a concrete goal to work towards too. I had still been feeling lost on that front.
I’ve got a somewhat busy few weeks ahead, and so my brain is currently everywhere and nowhere at once. I don’t really have too much to talk about this month, as things are pretty smooth sailing. I’m excited for next month’s check-in, if only because it’ll mean I’ve hopefully gone through all the stressful things I’ve needed to go through!
I hope you are all well, and doing things in ways that make you happy. Exploring and finding what works for you is one of the best parts about self-learning!
Sentence Mining and Sentence Banks
I’ve mentioned previously in a check-in post or two about how when using Anki, I’m sentence mining to make cards while also having a sentence bank deck. I’d like to go a bit more in-depth about what these things even are, how I utilize them, and why I love them!
Sentence mining is probably talked to death about in other places, but the very basic explanation of it is quite simple. When immersing, find a 1T (one target, also called i+1) sentence and add that into Anki. We look for a sentence we can understand except for one piece of information. Sometimes this bit of information is just a word, sometimes it’s grammar. Sometimes it’s a word you already know in one context, but you found a new context and it’s a bit confusing. As long as it’s one new piece of information in an otherwise easy to understand sentence, we can call that a 1T sentence. Some people may be comfortable with mining a sentence with more than one new piece of information, but I’ve found that to be unhelpful. I’ll tell you how I tackle those later.
I think it’s also important to not just mine any 1T sentence you come across. No no no! We must be picky. Only grab the ones that spark joy. We can use yomichan all day to look up new words and continue reading, that’s not an issue. Learning how to be selective in the sentences you choose to mine and review is important. Will this word be useful? Have I seen it a lot already? Is it just something cool I want to add to my own collection? There’s tons of reasons you may have that would make one sentence better to add than another. I have chosen not to mine things before just because I didn’t like the character talking at the time. I’m petty!
I spent the past two years doing basically just vocabulary cards via JPDB. So why the switch back to sentences?
Context. I love having context for all the words I choose to learn, and it’s even better if it’s from a piece of media I really love. SRS is something I’ll be doing daily for the foreseeable future, so I want to have as many personal touches as possible.
This context then creates a constant reminder of previous immersion material. At this point I’ve immersed in a lot of different media, so sometimes it can be easy to forget whatever book I read last March. Having these small reminders are a fun way to relive that experience of reading/watching/etc.
I also find that when focusing on monolingual definitions, having my own sentence in addition to whatever sentence the dictionary entry provides only helps me to remember those definitions better. When doing vocabulary only cards, I felt like I got a ton of kind of shallow knowledge in a short amount of time. It certainly helped, considering I was able to read a lot and pass the JLPT N1. But I want to be able to have a deeper understanding, and for me sentences help out a lot more with that goal.
That was a long answer, but in short “I just like them! teehee” is also how my heart feels.
Now on to sentence banks. My beloved.
I think britvsjapan has one of the best posts on sentence banks ever. I remember reading this years ago and immediately being hooked on the idea. I had already been making my own subs2srs decks, and also my own subtitles for video games to turn them into subs2srs decks, so this seemed like a great way to utilize those. I think I was otherwise just trying to go through all my decks…and not getting very far before restarting each time.
If you want to find some of the pre-made subs2srs decks that are out there, a google search for something like “japanese subs2srs decks” should make it a breeze. It’s sad that the blog is down, because I’d love to keep contributing, but oh well.
In addition to using subs2srs, you can also use that Youtube to Anki addon I shared in my last post to create cards from videos that have subtitles on YouTube. Sentence, audio, and picture is a powerful combination!
I recommend that you only add decks to your bank that you have familiarity with in some way. This way, you’re never super confused on the context of the card. So add anime you’ve seen, games you’ve played, YouTube videos you’ve actually watched.
I like to keep one deck called “Sentence Bank” that I organize with sub-decks. This is an incredibly useful feature of Anki.
This organization is fantastic for me. Just don’t ask me to open up those category sub-decks. That’s where things start to get a bit sloppy.
To fully live out my late 2010s learning Japanese dreams, I finally also installed Morphman. With the help of this guide and a friend, I was able to install it with little issues at all. I was always too afraid to install it before because I thought it was too big-brain for me to figure out. I should have given myself more credit.
So Morphman, combined with my sentence bank, is pretty cool. With JPDB, I got really used to seeing “Number Go Up!”, so I’m glad I can continue that by using this addon. It can read the Expression and Word fields in my Mining deck to see how many words I know, but for my Sentence Bank I let it tag cards based on how many new morphs are on the card. This way, when I go to search for a word in my bank, I can also organize it by tags, prioritizing 1T cards. We can also completely delete 0T and “short” cards, making sure I only have decent quality sentences to choose from. Doing this manually in the past sucked. I’d have hundreds and thousands of cards, with a solid third of them being pretty low quality, and I had to read each sentence to figure out which one I wanted. Having the Morphman tags really speeds up the process.
If you go the Morphman route, I recommend turning all your Sentence Bank cards into one note type. I make it different from my main mining deck note type, just because I don’t want tags added to those by Morphman.
This keeps everything pretty simple. Any new deck I would add into my Sentence Bank gets turned into the subs2srs copy note type. Then when a bank card graduates into a mining deck card, it gets turned into the Mining Japanese note type. No modifying needed. The 四字熟語 deck is one I do new words from sometimes, and I have it check the main word field and the definition field since it’s monolingual. This way all the new cards I get from there are comprehensible. I just do it for fun from time to time!
Morphman will show two numbers at the top of the Anki screen. K is your known morphs that are unique, and V are variant morphs – ones that are similar to other morphs you have. This isn’t too unlike JPDB’s non-redundant and redundant counts. Morphemes are just different from how JPDB counts words (anything with a dictionary entry, even ones that may be similar to each other).
So with all of that setup, I can see how many 1T cards are in my Sentence Bank. Now since I’m still “catching up” in Anki, some of these are probably actually 0T. But the goal is to just keep on mining and doing the new cards in my mining deck, and increase my known morphs over time to make it all be a bit more accurate. Basically, it’s a “problem” that will fix itself with more time.
I know there’s quite a few people that grew frustrated with Morphman, and even advise against using it. I think whatever people choose to do is valid, but I will say that I think Morphman still has a use even in 2023. I think most words/sentences you study should be ones you’ve first seen in immersion. But since you can use your Sentence Bank that’s been organized with Morphman to find a card for a word you just looked up while reading, that’ll have full audio and maybe even a cute picture too, I don’t see how that necessarily conflicts with that. The word is still there. It still exists in a context that should already be familiar to you because you’ve watched or listened to or played whatever deck you’re getting that card from. If anything now you have that bank card context in addition to the context you’re seeing it in while immersing. Extra stonks!
There’s also the use case of using a pre-made deck, like the 四字熟語 one above, that has monolingual definitions. I’m not too scared by them these days, but starting to transition into using more and more J-J definitions can be made much easier by utilizing a pre-made deck and organizing the definitions by easiest to understand. And it’s tailored to the words you’ve learned, not something that’s been curated by someone else. I know JALUP made their own monolingual Anki decks in the past that were supposed to build up on knowledge, but I think it’s cooler if you can tailor your experience to you. Lord help me I’ve certainly been tempted to make a dictionary deck that’s organized by my own words. The time needed to do that is what stops me, god bless. I have BL pirate isekai and dystopias to read dammit!
So I’ll show an example of a “Mining deck” card and what the “Sentence Bank” card looks like. Mining deck cards are the cards I actually study.
This was mined from a book. Audio is from either Yomichan or forvo. Expression field is the front of the card with the darker background, and the back of the card has four fields: Word, Definition, Image, and English. Image is basically just any media, so I put audio and a picture there. English is basically just any additional notes I want, including an English explanation as needed.
Here’s how a Sentence Bank card looks. A sight I do not usually see. Normally I just use the browser to find a sentence with the word, and then I turn it into a Mining deck card.
From here, I edit the fields manually with the information and styling I want.
I also get rid of the Morphman related tags. I just want the content tag to remain in my mining deck.
There we go! Now it looks like the rest of our mined cards. It’s cute and I love it. Once again, this template can be purchased from Noryeok’s shop! I added extra fields, but the styling is just so cool.
My sentence bank has especially saved my butt when reading 銀河英雄伝説. It’s definitely the hardest thing I’ve read so far, so there’s a lot of sentences with a lot of new words all the time. Because I have the anime deck for this in my bank, it’s so so so much easier to find 1T sentences for the words I look up. I’m going to be a space expert after this book, I can feel it!
It’s a bit different, and also way easier (even though the above is also easy!) to mine from something in my browser! I use AnkiConnect with Yomichan to instantly create cards right from the Yomichan popup. For any help on installing, I recommend this page.
Once your card format is configured, in the Anki section of the Yomichan settings page, we can really get things rolling. Here’s how mine looks.
My Expression field in my Mining deck is where I want the sentence to go. This is the sentence that contains the word I looked up. The Word field, on the back of my card, is where I will then see the word with furigana. The Definition field is one of the coolest parts. I’m a dictionary hoarder, so I get tons of definitions that pop up whenever I look up a word. The {selection-text} option means that only the definition I highlight will go into the Definition field. Just make sure it stays highlighted when you click the create card button! The final field I actually utilize is the Image field, where I put the audio. Yomichan does tend to have some decent, non-AI, audio so it always trys to pull from that first. It never pulls from a non-human voice source so I appreciate that.
Here’s what it looks like in practice!
I look up a word, and then pick the definition I want. I then click that larger green circle + button.
After clicking the green circle, a book icon will appear. I click that to go see the card that was just created.
Here’s what it looks like straight out of the box! I like to then color in the word on the front in the sentence, and clean up the definition slot a bit. If yomichan didn’t have good audio, I use the blue button to find audio from forvo.
If that fails, I go to Youglish and get my Share X record hotkey ready.
I know I’m a terribly unorganized writer, but I really want to mention how cool of a tool Youglish is. I shared above about the YouTube to Anki addon that automatically makes subs2srs style cards right within Anki. Youglish can help find good quality subtitles (as in, timed nicely, not auto-generated, etc) if you’re ever in need of something else to watch but don’t feel comfortable yet with no subtitles. Or, for making cards! I love making cards.
Okay so here’s the card all touched up!
And here’s how that would look when reviewing.
I’ve gotten so used to this process that it really only takes a few seconds. It’s not often I have to go out of my way for audio thankfully.
Another cool thing I can do in the Anki part of the Yomichan settings is add a tag for whatever I’m reading in the browser at the moment.
I’m choosing to be as organized as possible with Anki this time around, so it’s fun to add tags. I just change the tag after the “yomichan” one to be whatever I’m reading. This way I always know where my sentences came from!
I do utilize a lot of other Anki addons too.
I think my recent favorite has been FSRS4Anki. The new scheduling it gave me has been fantastic. It’s a bit closer to what I was doing in JPDB, as in not a lot of reviews per day. It seems to be targeting 80-90% retention, which is great because I was high 90s before starting to use it. This means that cards can have the next review time be more than a month from now. I’ll adjust over time if need be, but this has been wonderful. I don’t get a ton of reviews daily, and I can adjust my new card count based on however I feel, knowing the next day won’t be brutal.
I love these cards so much. Have I mentioned that already? Too bad, I love them! I wake up every day so excited to do my ~30 minutes of SRS a day. I made them from materials I enjoy, and therefore they have so much more meaning to me. I’m always a bit sad when people talk about how much they hate SRS. I think there’s ways to explore and make it more fun and meaningful, but it does require some prep work. As I’ve felt this year, any sort of barrier can turn me off. And it certainly turned me off of Anki in the past. I just finally feel like I found what works. At least for now! No idea what the future will hold.
To get a bit sappy, again, these cards really do feel like little treasures. Anki is the treasure chest that holds some of my most dear immersion memories. I think of all the decks I made in the past. From some Drama episodes to manually making video game decks, all of those cards are so dear to me. I remember the おひとりさま episode 1 deck was the first deck I fully completed, that I made! So any time I can utilize a card from there, I feel pretty happy. The Final Fantasy X deck I made while I just had a mac, audacity, aegisub, and a dream. Thankfully also had a script. I’m a bit bummed I couldn’t use subs2srs at the time, to actually have pictures, but I love that deck so much even if it’s just audio and sentences.
Some of you may recall an Instagram post I made laying out my love for Final Fantasy X. It was definitely the thing I latched on to as a teenager, and it really carried a lot of my learning momentum even into adulthood. Getting to include those cards in my SRS is amazing.
Final Fantasy XIV kind of turned into “the thing” for awhile, but I also made decks out of some of that game too!
Continuing to be sappy for a bit, as someone who has to deal with PTSD daily, I’m super grateful to have something I do every day be filled with positive memories. Memories of immersing, memories of making a deck. A constant reminder of all the cool things I can now do in Japanese! This constant positive loop kind of acts like a sort of meditation for me. I could never get quite the same feeling out of JPDB cards, even if I added a custom sentence. But I certainly can now!
And my Sentence Bank deck is just filled with good memories, waiting to be invited to the Mining deck party. What will I end up picking next? What fun immersion memory awaits me next? Oh man, remember that time that I thought FMA:Brotherhood was super hard to understand in Japanese? Now it feels easy!
I started this blog initially with the goal of one day hitting 10,000 sentences in Anki. Since then, I’ve read over 120 books/manga. I’ve read web novels, played full video games in Japanese. I started my visual novel journey! I’ve watched tons of anime, drama, YouTube, streams. The V-tubers are great! I’ve listened to podcasts, news broadcasts, audiobooks! I’ve immersed so much from the second half of 2021 until now. I’ve probably read way more comprehensible sentences than I could ever actually review in Anki. I got that mass input! I passed the N1!
But there’s still something so enticing about that number when I think about it as a collection of memories. I have the confidence to immerse and do it daily. My anki cards are mostly focused on monolingual definitions wherever possible. But the thought of teenager me reading the AJATT blog and going “Wow! I dont know if I could ever do that, but I want to!” when reading about the 10,000 sentence method still remains. So if I end up hitting that number, I think it’ll be cool. And I’ll know I got it because of all the immersion I did.
So far, I’m at 1,179 cards in my Mining deck. I guess I’ll start keeping tabs on that just for shits and giggles!
It’s funny how sometimes life can come back full-circle, but this time I’ve got a way better attitude and that feeling of “I can do it!”. I have almost all of the same tools readily available to me, but now I’m using them in a way that’s meaningful to me instead of trying to directly emulate everything that other people did. It’s okay to explore! It’s okay to change my mind! It’s especially okay to delete things! That doesn’t mean I’m a failure, and should therefore stop until I feel I can do it “the right way”. The right way is the path forward, and that can look so different from person to person. I’m walking my path now, and it’s really nice! A bit of a bumpy road, and sometimes people don’t pick up their dog’s poop, but there’s still flowers and critters to observe on the side. Not to mention the act of walking forward feels good in and of itself.
I’m sure I’ll talk more about my process and thoughts on my process in the future, but I think this was all the bulk of it for now! It’s time to get back to reading and mining!
July Check-in: :)))
Okay so remember how I planned stuff last month? “Tee-hee, I’m going to read this and that and that one too! “
That got chucked out the window almost immediately. For one, I just wasn’t really feeling some of the reads. 戯言 and コップクラフト I may return to at one point, but for now they are just not for me. NO.6 really carried my reading enthusiasm this month, as I just finished volume 3 the other day.
Another reason things didn’t go according to plan was that I had some personal things spring up this month. My uncle was put into hospice after spending weeks in a lot of pain. It was a pretty slow death, but it did happen around 10 days ago now. I have a lot of mixed feelings on this. I’m sure many of you have very complicated family relationships as well, so perhaps you can understand a bit. My headspace was pretty much constantly occupied with a lot of thoughts that this ordeal was bringing up, and it became increasingly harder to focus. My dog was also having some issues (a reoccurring theme, but surgery would have been involved in this case). I’ve also been working on becoming healthier and so my brain was just constantly like ああああぁぁぁぁぁぁッ！with everything. I miss cheese!
As a result, I spent more of this month just watching stuff. Anime, YouTube, hell even tons of stuff in English. I read here and there, but I didn’t even do half of what I wanted to. Sorry fellow immersers, your girl was just struggling.
I think I’m mostly at peace with a lot of the thoughts that were in my head. I’ll be travelling this year to visit with family for the first time since 2021. That was definitely a huge year for me, thinking back on it. I had kind of just started studying in earnest again the last time I saw my family, for my grandfather’s memorial, and now I’ll be going back to visit with some of my dreams accomplished. Heck it was after that weird return from that trip that the Bed Bug Incident of Summer 2021 happened that got me hooked on JPDB for nearly two years. Please no bed bugs this time, I’m begging.
One thing I was not satisfied with is just how much time I spent online dicking around. I’d get myself wrapped up in stupid Discord bullshit just to not even feel good about it after, and my time genuinely felt wasted. Even if I wasn’t active in some, I was still lurking for no damn reason. I’m gonna miss a lot of people, but for now I left most of the servers I was previously in. If you know my discord username, you can always friend me and DM me! I always enjoy having good discussions with other learners.
Switching gears to SRS talk, things felt pretty good this month. I still have an unbroken SRS streak from July 1, 2021 to now, even if it’s now split between JPDB and Anki.
I played around with not using the JPD Breader this month, just because seeing all the new words sometimes tricked me into not knowing them. “New word, must look it up!”. I think if I knew I was going to switch to Anki, I probably would not have reset my JPDB reviews. So I did a few days of no Breader, and then I was like…don’t I have an old json review file I downloaded from JPDB? Sure enough I did, from the start of June. So not too long before I hit the reset button.
I fiddled with the json a bit so I could have just the words showing, and I imported that text into a new deck that I marked as “known” in JPDB. This way it won’t show up on the leaderboard or anything. I definitely still want me and my own progress to be somewhat hidden from leaderboards going forward, at the very least. Certainly don’t mind sharing here, because I own this place.
I’m only missing about 10,000 words from my final count, but at least now I can still utilize the Breader somewhat. It’s so good of a tool I’d hate to not be able to use it, but I’m glad I can turn it off whenever and still feel confident. So, I’m no longer bombarded with a bunch of “new word” visuals (okay well, that still depends on what I’m reading) and I can then add things to JPDB that I don’t necessarily want to review in Anki with just a click of a button.
The bulk of my SRS time has definitely been in Anki. I’m only 40 days in, so there’s still been some trial and error. At first, I was just mining everything and creating a backlog, thinking it would be fine. Readers, it was not fine! I hated it! So I straight up just deleted one thousand new mined cards and decided to only mine as many words as I knew I could get through in a day. This means I don’t have a set amount I do per day, and that’s kind of freeing.
I’ve gone through some decks that I’ve since deleted, so I think that added to my daily average/total review count, but here’s where I’m at so far. Morphman puts me at 3,346 unique morphs and 4,175 variations. It’ll take awhile to see that get anywhere close to my JPDB count I’m sure, if it even can due to how different they are.
I love sentence cards so much. I swear I’ll make a love letter post to them one day. I won’t deny that JPDB’s vocab cards gave me some pretty quick gains, but sentence cards will always have my heart.
Here’s what I’m actually mining from lately though!
Yup, still haven’t finished Kino. I intend to! But this month has been depressing enough, I didn’t want to add to it unnecessarily. I’ll also be starting NO.6 volume 4 next week!
Guin Saga has still been a slog, but thankfully starting something even harder than it has given me a brand new appreciation. “Wow, this isn’t as hard as I thought! Now that OTHER THING? That’s hard!!”. Of course, referring to 銀河英雄伝説. Sommmmebody recommended I read it, and since I’ve had my eye on it awhile I decided to give it a go. At this rate, if I do 2k characters a day, I’ll probably finish sometime next year! Whew!
Flesh & Blood was an unexpected pick up for sure! There’s tons of audio drama content in addition to all the novels, and so it’s just a treasure trove of immersion! BL pirate isekai? Sign me the fuck up. I’m moving through the novels a bit slowly, but I still tune into the audio content while I do things around the house. Often re-listening to the same parts just so I don’t miss anything! Beautiful, love it, 10/10. Some lore about me is that I was really, really into Tudor England in college. So there being some overlap with this series is an absolute chef’s kiss from me!
And of course, the latest volume of Bookworm. I’m going to savor it just because it’s my comfort series, so I’m only doing a chapter every other day or so. It’s nice feeling like I can rotate between tons of things again lately! NO.6 is still my main squeeze, but I enjoy everything on that list right now.
YouTube! YouTube has so much content…and also so much content that has subtitles! I found a nature/animal related channel recently that was really fun to make cards from using an addon that creates subs2srs style cards from YouTube right into Anki.
I’m also still watching anime on crunchyroll from time to time! A lot of these already have pre-made subs2srs decks out there, so I just add them to my sentence bank. I’ll go over how I utilize a sentence bank soon, I swear. I love it so much. But it may get too long-winded for a monthly check-in post.
Oh I must give a shout-out to 古書店街の橋姫 as well. I completely neglected to mention that visual novel in my previous check-in post, despite I think finishing the main route earlier in that month. I did do just a tiny bit of it this month!
I love that I can now create cute cards in Anki from visual novels too! I’ll want to finish the whole thing by the end of the year, but I’ve been putting it off in favor of other immersion materials. I’ll get back on the horse soon.
Am I forgetting anything? Probably. Months lately have felt simultaneously long and short. I just try to keep on moving forward, and sometimes a few things get temporarily left behind in my brain.
I think the most important thing for me is that I just keep going. I used to be afraid of anything negative happening in life because I’d let it absolutely destroy the joy I felt towards other things. But immersion and learning Japanese in general has been a bit like a rock for me. It’s that thing I can get lost in even if I’m feeling kind of tired or down. It may not always be reading, but listening to or watching stuff. Tinkering with Anki to make sure the thing I do every day is exactly how I want it to be. There’s always more to learn, so I’m always excited to do something in Japanese every day. Even when I’m feeling sad.
See you next time folks, and hopefully I’m a bit less of a downer then!
Oh yeah I remember now. Tadoku is absolutely not for me anymore. Definitely just stopped participating early on. It served me well, but it does not spark joy anymore. Yeet!
June Check-in: New Game+
Another month of 2023 about to pass! How’s everyone doing so far this summer? I’m doing my best to stay cool.
Last month, I mentioned a bit about some of the changes I had been going through, and feeling a bit directionless still. I’m not sure about all of you, but I find it takes a lot of time and effort and raw thinking power to figure out why I feel uneasy about something. I had this nagging feeling like something I was doing was still wrong and off somehow, I just had no idea how to find it and fix it.
One day in the shower, an idea that I had joked about before came into my head and that was it. I had to see it through. I was going to reset all my JPDB review history.
This is where I was right before deleting it all. Certainly looks impressive, and because of this I was able to enter into most immersion material and feel comfortable.
Just the fact that I had above 90% coverage on most things in the database meant I really…didn’t need to focus on coverage anymore. It was what guided me so much the past nearly two years of using JPDB. The number climbing just didn’t feel as necessary anymore, especially when most of my actual decks of things I was reading were at 99% already.
So at first, I figured “Okay, reset review history and we’ll do a new strategy with JPDB!”. I had never used the “Never Forget” button before, opting to use “Easy” so my words would actually have a review history and my numbers would accurately show up on the site’s Leaderboard. If you ever wondered why JPDB didn’t count “Never forget” words in the Leaderboard, it’s because that’s too easy to cheat. Someone could mark whole decks as Never Forget just for fake internet points. Yes it’s sad, yes it happens, yes I let it shape how I reviewed in JPDB. But no more!
Never Forget button became my friend. I just would use the hotkey for it in the Breader and hit it while reading for words that I didn’t stumble on at all. I gave myself a limit of only 20 new cards to add per day, so basically I was just kind of starting over with reviews. The idea being that I could focus on cards that I actually needed to review and just yeet everything else with Never Forget.
I did that for like a week, but it still just didn’t feel right. I joked about the siren call of Anki permeating my brain. There is a pattern here. I joke about the things I actually want to be doing, apparently.
So I reset my review history again, consulted with my Anki Expert Friend, and set up Anki to my liking. Ruby has some of the most gorgeous Anki cards I’ve seen, so naturally I also went to where she got her template from: Noryeok’s Ko-Fi shop! I had to change it around a bit to fit my cards, but behold!
It took a lot of talking with the expert, finding add-ons, tinkering with things until I liked them…but I finally set up Anki how I would want it. This was the biggest hurdle for me using it before. I felt like I never had the brainpower to dedicate to figuring things out, so then I just wouldn’t. And then I couldn’t engage with my flashcards because I hated them and had negative feelings only. This thought pattern would carry into my immersion time and everything would just feel bad. I let a tool dictate how I felt and it was awful. This is why JPDB appealed to me so much, and why I continued to use it even after the bed bug incident resolved.
I still think JPDB is a fantastic tool for anyone who wants to immerse but feels like they don’t know enough yet to be comfortable. The decks are pre-made, all the card progress carries over into other decks, and you can see coverage based on vocabulary count. This made finding comprehensible immersion material way easier. I wouldn’t change anything I did the past two years for the world.
I beat the game. I set out to understand Japanese enough to be able to immerse in native materials, and I won. I did it. I’m not fluent in all situations by any means, but I have the confidence of entering most media knowing I can come out the other end unscathed. Even the hard ones like Guin Saga! I have all the knowledge I need now to be able to build up more knowledge. I will go further beyond! Thank you JPDB. I could not have done this without you alongside me. But now it’s time for a New Game+ Anki arc.
So why Anki? Why even continue SRSing?
Anki gives me so much freedom. Freedom to customize, freedom to add whatever piece of information and definitions I want. Freedom to learn more than 60k notes without having to pay extra. Freedom to create beautiful and meaningful cards to me. Freedom to tinker with singular cards. Freedom to see all my information with a single click! I’m glad I supported the JPDB patreon for so long, but I’m just not in a place where I can do it anymore. Even just 5 dollars a month. I can blame the U.S. healthcare system or my failure of a body, but regardless I just don’t have the cash. So even if it takes more initial setup, Anki gives me financial freedom too.
In some ways, I have “JPDB at home” with Morphman. Morphman seems to have fallen out of favor in recent years for most use-cases, but for me I just care about seeing a visual at all to show I’m making some progress. I have it check out the cards in my Sentence Bank to show me 0T and 1T cards. I delete the OT stuff and periodically browse through my 1T notes to see if there’s any I can mark as Known. I have a lot of “catching up” to do in Anki, so it would be cool to be able to see some sort of metric for my word/morpheme count.
I also use Morphman to check the 意味 field in the 四字熟語 deck, so any new cards I get from there are ones I should reasonably be able to understand the definition of. It’s a fun monolingual deck for learning yoji. Very well made, I’d definitely recommend it!
My main deck is my Mining one, of course. I just have Morphman check the Expression field for that, without tampering anything. I can have full sentence cards back! Using AnkiConnect while reading is so quick and easy. And with the power of ShareX I can also easily get audio and screenshots if I should so desire. Reading along with an audiobook now is way more fun if I can keep the sentence and the sentence audio.
Anki isn’t without its downsides either of course. The biggest one I can think of right now is that in order to keep some of these addons working, I cannot upgrade my Anki. So this means I can lose out on other really cool addons. But, if I ever decide some addons aren’t serving me anymore, I have the freedom to just switch things around without actually losing any of my progress. So it’s not even that big of a deal!
For what it’s worth, I’m still using the Breader while I read. I only have it show me “new” words. I still “Never Forget” while reading. But now I also “Never Forget” anything that I mine into Anki. Having the visual of new cards is great for finding i+1 sentences, and most of the time I still don’t have to look up everything even if it’s displayed as “new” anyway. But I do want to focus on having more monolingual cards in my Anki playthrough.
It may take a bit for my Anki known/variant count to catch up to my current JPDB one, but for now I’m mostly just enjoying the journey again. Still reading. Still playing video games. Still watching anime. In my New Game+ I’m just trying out a few different ways of tackling the SRS bosses!
For my ~actual~ immersion materials, I did finish a few things this month.
I played a lot of Pokemon Scarlet this month after abandoning it for several weeks. I finished the main story, saw the credits roll, and am now in post-game activities. I’ve also been playing Diablo IV with friends with the Japanese dub. It feels good not having to read the English when I can simply listen to the Japanese.
Crunchyroll has been my main source of watching material this month. I watched the newer Kino no Tabi anime, Irina: The Vampire Cosmonaut, The Case Files of Jeweler Richard, and currently am in the middle of Darling in the Franxx. My boyfriend and I sometimes watch Overlord together, but that’s in English so no immersion points for me there.
Did a bit of reading too!
I didn’t quite finish “a few” volumes of Guin Saga like I had hoped at the end of last month, but I am okay with this. It’s the hardest thing I’m reading currently and I really want to savor and learn from it. Most of these books were ones I had started previously and just kind of read sometimes, or were book club reads. I intend to mostly do book club reads next month as well, with a focus on Guin Saga for my own personal pick.
I also decided, to help me with my Guin Saga goal, that I’ll participate in the July Tadoku round and only log that series. I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about Tadoku, so I figured dipping my feet in just a wee bit again can help me realize what I actually want to do regarding it going forward. I have a feeling my original instinct to not want to track at all, even for Tadoku, will be correct though. Still, doesn’t hurt to try when I’m able to stop at any time. If you’re reading this and the July Tadoku is still on-going, come and join us in the reading only custom contest too!
I’m planning on reading the following next month, but as always I’m likely to deviate:
Volume 1 of the 心霊探偵八雲 series. The book club will be reading Volume 1 and 2, but I plan on doing 2 in August.
Volumes 1 and 2 of No. 6. The final goal will be to read them all. I’ve heard each volume is fairly short, but I’m not going to give myself a full time-frame to finish them all just yet.
Finish volume 3 of Kino, and then continue with this series whenever I’m in the mood. I love it so far, but sometimes it can be a bit too dark so I need to cleanse my palate with other reads. Goal of the book club was the first 6 volumes, but I may continue past it.
Volume 1 of コップクラフト. This was a last minute addition because I noticed Learn Natively was doing their first Light Novel book club. My intention is to keep pace with that club on this book, but we’ll see if I just end up finishing it ahead of time.
Volumes 1 and 2 of the 戯言シリーズ. Goal is to eventually read them all this year.
And of course, Guin Saga. The more I read of this, the easier I know it will be. Just gotta keep on trucking.
When I think of where I was a year ago, I can’t help but feel pretty grateful for how far I’ve come. I’ve put in a lot of hard work and utilized a lot of different tools along the way, but most importantly is that I learned how to continue moving forward. I can’t say I’m an expert on that with other areas of my life, but I’m pleased to say that I’m in a good place with my favorite hobby despite all the ill-feelings I’ve harbored in the past.
I hope you all had a good June, but if you didn’t that’s okay too. Some months will just be like that. Let’s move towards better times together!
If you noticed I completely neglected to answer the “Why even continue SRSing?” question from earlier, it’s because I simply like it and hate having to justify it to people who ask huhu
May Check-in: Lacking direction or gaining freedom?!
Another May about to wrap-up! It was my birthday month so naturally I got some books.
I’ve already read 国境の南、太陽の西. In fact, it was the second book I read that I actually comprehended last year, following また、同じ夢を見ていた. It wasn’t one of my favorites by any means, but seeing it physically I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to own it. I’ll get to reading グラスホッパー eventually too, I swear!
This month has felt so weird. As I wrote in my last check-in post, I had been feeling really out of it with regards to tracking and Tadoku. A half-round of Tadoku went on at the start of the month and it felt super strange not participating at all. It was kind of fun to see how everyone else did though! I had cut back severely on the tracking, and convinced myself that my new reading spreadsheet was super lowkey and wouldn’t feel bad at all. Well, I ended up deleting that too.
So now I really am just using Learn Natively as a check-list for when I finish books. I don’t know my character count anymore, and honestly never truly knew my real count, and I think that last weight has been lifted. No logging anymore. No checking out on character counts. No more opening spreadsheets for any reason.
Because of this, I was feeling a bit of a lack of direction. Honestly, maybe I still am a little bit. It’s unsettling not really knowing where I want to be going from here. Obviously, I still want to read. I am still reading! I’ll talk about those materials a bit later. It’s just that for awhile the idea of reading as much as possible meant I was also learning way more in a shorter amount of time. I knew that each book I finished meant I’d get closer to some sort of goal. And the big goal last year was of course N1. In January it was winning another Tadoku while waiting for my JLPT results. March it was just…like I was on autopilot. Read read read read. That was the direction and I didn’t really question it.
But lacking a direction doesn’t have to be a bad thing. I don’t have to be stumped while wondering where to go. It just means that at any given moment I can choose to go in literally any direction! That mindset shift makes all the difference in the world to me. I don’t need to be working towards some huge goal all the time and feel like what I’m doing isn’t getting me there quicker. Today I get to read whatever I want! Maybe I’ll even be cheeky and watch something instead. The world is my oyster and I’m kind of hungry.
So yeah, definitely still reading! I ended up re-subbing to Final Fantasy XIV for a few months and I’m basically treating it like a VN while catching up on quests and re-watching old cutscenes. Someone made a tool that essentially puts all cutscene text into your clipboard, so I can really make it feel like a VN experience!
I also really wanted to read and finish a visual novel this year, and settled on 古書店街の橋姫. Having a friend read along as well has been great, because I get to talk about everything with her and gush about these boys. Visual novels are still slightly unfamiliar territory for me, so I’m grateful to not feel alone in this endeavor!
As for books, oh boy am I still reading a bunch. I mentioned last post that there was a book club going on for キノの旅 and 宝石商リチャード氏の謎鑑定. I read volume one of both, but definitely have gotten more into Kino! I’m currently stopped right before chapter four in volume two of that one. It even inspired me to watch the anime that’s on crunchyroll! I’m not much of an anime enjoyer, but I intend to use this subscription to the fullest.
I also finally finished Overlord volume one! It was one of the books I started awhile back that I was chipping away at slowly, maybe about 5,000 characters per session. This strategy was to ensure I was getting a lot of reading in across various sources. My current reads can be found here on Learn Natively. I decided I wouldn’t really “stop” reading anything ever, unless I really didn’t enjoy it. I’ll just get back to it at another time, or only read a little bit of it when the mood strikes.
My most exciting new read though has been グイン・サーガ. It’s a really long high fantasy series I’ve been wanting to read for awhile, but due to the cost it felt really out of reach. So a big shoutout to my pal ruby for making my dream come true! I started reading immediately. It’s a pretty difficult read, I won’t sugarcoat it. But I think it’s just at the point where it’s accessible for me to read, enjoy, and also grow my language ability. You better believe I’m reading all 130 volumes the original author wrote! Perhaps I have found a direction via this series afterall!
Honestly I’m pretty blessed to live in a time where I can read so many cool things at once. I know my current reads look a bit chaotic, but I love that I can just let my whims carry me day to day with this.
I’ve still been learning a ton of new vocabulary with all the reading I’ve been doing. I think this month was probably the most I was able to learn in a short period of time honestly.
My non-redundant count is up 4,038 from last month. WHAT?! My god. The jpdb browser reader is actually insane. I’m finding it so much easier to learn new cards while reading using it. I’m starting to wonder when I’ll actually feel punished by JPDB for all of these new cards, just because I really have not felt overwhelmed by reviews at all. Not like my retention is perfect either, it’s hovering at around 60%. But retention is also something I don’t care about since I’m still able to read comfortably regardless, and JPDB only shows a weekly snipped anyway.
I’ve been trying to add more monolingual definitions to my JPDB cards as well, thanks to feeling inspired by this post! I pretty much always use yomichan to check the definitions anyway, so it’s not that I was neglecting looking at Japanese definitions. But I’m glad I’m taking the time to digest them more. It’s even been another way I’ve been learning more new cards! There’s just this endless positive feedback loop when you utilize monolingual definitions.
All in all, things are actually pretty great. I did have the thought of “I feel like I have nothing to show this month!”…but that’s kind of the whole point. I don’t need to be parading every little thing I do each month anymore in order to keep going. I’ve still got my own momentum! Though admittedly, I do hope that I can share that I’ve finished at least a couple volumes of Guin Saga during June next check-in!
April Check-in: Reflection and change
Wow this year is flying. Hope everyone had a great April!
Let’s kick this off with my JPDB stats before I get into some of the deeper stuff.
I’m up quite a bit from last month! It’s been way easier to add new cards while reading thanks to the JPDB Browser Reader, but I was also in a weird mood to climb intervals and do more reviews this month so I ended up clearing out a lot of my Learning along the way. Of course I have since re-added to the pile, but I managed to get it down from around 1700 to nearly 450, which greatly boosted my total known non-redundant.
My April mining deck ended up being way more than last month’s! It was a great month for slowing down, reading harder things, and learning more.
Now let me talk more about how this month went, as it felt pretty different from others.
I had started this month by participating in an unofficial, custom Tadoku round for some casual reading. I think this may have been the catalyst I needed to start thinking about some things related to how I immerse and/or study and track that time.
By the middle of the month I had noticed I was really dreading doing any sort of updates. Not just to the Tadoku round, but also my own spreadsheets. I’d go to watch a video but then just not want to stop and start tracking the time for it, or input any info on whatever it was into my spreadsheet, and so I’d just not watch the thing. Same with reading. For awhile tracking time felt pretty easy because I always have a stopwatch on me, but I guess it was taking more out of me than I was realizing. It was an additional barrier to doing the thing, even if it was a relatively small one. I started resisting those barriers a lot!
To be clear, it didn’t really feel like I was burnt out on immersing, or anything Japanese-language related. I was a bit worried about that myself because of how much I was dreading looking at the Tadoku page or my own spreadsheets. I decided I would stop tracking anything time related and see how much of a difference that made.
The answer? A lot. A huge difference. It was like one weight got lifted off my shoulders. My listening spreadsheet got yote into the shadow realm and I deleted the CPM column on my reading spreadsheet. But I was still kind of feeling something bothering me. I was still dreading logging into Tadoku. I was still feeling bad about seeing how much I was doing per day and having that on display, even when I was doing pretty good.
I came to realize that doing so well in Tadokus lately has really skewed my perception on reading. I know, what a problem to have right? The annoying part about it though was that I’d constantly have, in the back of my mind, this idea revolving around tadoku points, or rather pages I guess. Like, “oh if I read this book I can get more pages in for the day because it’s easier! Oh but if I read this one I’m way too slow so I won’t get in as many pages…” It was like this constant nagging in my brain that I was not doing enough, and there were ways to do better. I hated it.
And so, Tadoku got cut too. I decided I was done with it. I don’t know what the future will hold, maybe my mindset will shift again and I’ll be in a better position to participate once more. But as far as the near future is concerned, I’m done.
The other weight got lifted off my shoulders after declaring this to myself. I deleted my old reading spreadsheet, which was really designed to be as easy to log into Tadoku as possible, and made a new one that’s just for my eyes. I still have some personal goals I’d like to keep up with, and if ttu’s bookmark ever fails me I’ll have a record of where I left off, but I’m going to start keeping my reading progress to myself for the most part.
Another issue I thought about regarding tracking in general was the fact that I’ll never know my true numbers. I only started last summer, and prior to that I just had my previous Tadoku logs to go off of. But all I was really tracking was time spent and pages read from somewhere in the middle of 2022 to earlier this month. Not even a full year! I have so many years of previous off and on again learning that I never once tracked. So I’d never really know how much time I spent total. If anyone even asked me to ballpark it, I would have no idea! There’s just too much time that’s gone by to even remember a quarter of what I’ve done.
For what it’s worth, tracking was super important to me for awhile. So was Tadoku! Having a way to be accountable to myself and to show myself just how much progress I was making over time was incredibly valuable. Competing in a pretty low-risk way with other learners was super fun and got me to push myself more. I went from feeling like 50 pages a day was the highest mountain I could climb, to doing 50 pretty easily as a break from other things in life. And of course, all that extra reading I was pushed to do helped me in the end to eventually pass N1. Same with the tracking. It kept me consistent and aware. I guess I just outgrew it and was starting to feel those growing pains a bit.
So getting rid of all these things I was doing definitely has refreshed my mind! I started reading way more things at once, but only a little bit from each of them. Because of this, I’m not really finishing a whole lot of things as quickly as before, but it’s allowed me to try out things instead of having to wait. It’s also allowed me to learn way more words per day because I’m exposing myself to lots of different authors, writing styles, and topics. This has been a big reason why I’ve mined so many new words this month for sure. I may have read way less overall compared to other months, but I’ve also learned way more!
Wikipedia has been another way I’ve been getting reading in, I just completely stopped trying to track any character counts with that (I’m keeping my current tracker strictly for books/VNs) so I’ve been skimming and going down rabbit holes just like in English.
I also started my second ever visual novel, 古書店街の橋姫. I’m still not entirely used to the medium, and tend to get distracted with all the pauses after lines, but I’m having a blast with this. It should keep me occupied for awhile too with how I go about reading lately.
More book club reads start in May that I’m very excited for! キノの旅 and 宝石商リチャード氏の謎鑑定 are the picks this time. I’ve been enjoying every book club that that discord has offered so far, even if I’m not blitzing through them all, so I’m very eager to start up some new stuff! I’ve heard many good things about the Kino no Tabi series, but the Richard series is one that’s completely new to me. I may be naughty and break from my self-imposed rule of reading only a little bit of a lot of books per day for the first volumes of each of these!
As for some of my current reads, you can always check my Learn Natively page! I have no shame, so if it’s not on LN, I’ll usually add it so it shows up there. I only really update anymore if I’ve finished something or started something. I really want to keep my actual progress updates in terms of pages read per day to myself these days.
So with all of this going on, things are looking great. Way better than the start of the month. I’m glad I spent the time reflecting on what was making me feel weird instead of trying to just slam my head against the wall and continue how I had been. Goodbye, Tadoku! Still excited to cheer all the other Tadoku participants on though!
Time to slow down and start enjoying things again on my own!
March Check-in: Tadoku!
Phew, what a month this was! I’m writing this before Tadoku technically finishes, but I am so worn out already.
I beat my January score! I did not think I would be able to do that, but admittedly it’s all thanks to listening being added to official rounds. Otherwise, my reading only score would be 8,401.1. Still lots of pages and I’m very proud of all my reading. However, being able to listen to things while I did things around the apartment and still have it count towards fake internet points was pretty cool too.
I was extremely hesitant about listening being added to the official rounds at first. I really loved that every other month or so was another challenge to improve my reading skill. So like, if listening had to be added, I would have preferred that that skill had its own time frame too. Reading months and listening months, I guess. But together? It just seemed like too much to focus on, or perhaps only focusing on whatever one was easier for points.
Eventually I was like, “Okay, let’s just try it out first and see what it’s like”. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to try out something new, and maybe I would even like it more than I thought I would. And the latter was definitely true! It was so nice to be able to put something from YouTube on while I was doing the dishes and laundry, and still have it count for the fake internet points. It also meant that I could give my eyes more breaks and let my ears do more work. Coming from February where I was doing a lot of listening, I felt really prepared for even more listening this Tadoku round. I ended up with my second best month for it too!
That’s nearly double my previous second-best in November, so I’m really happy about it. Knowing that I was listening for fake internet points also made cleaning more exciting too, so I never really dreaded doing it anymore. At the very least, I think February and March combined gave me a new habit of listening more often that will be hard to quit. Really makes up for those sad twenty minutes I did all of January.
So, I guess I really do not mind Tadoku becoming a target language input competition. That being said, I know I can really only say this because tracking time has become second-nature to me. I have a watch with a stopwatch on it on me at all times, so pausing and restarting a timer is not something that bothers me. I also have plenty of reading material and listening material that is extremely comprehensible for me, so the only time I really need to pause is when I have to go do something while away from the computer. But, for me listening has been a constant stream for my whole dedicated listening time. I don’t need to pause to be like “what did they say?”. For people with a less developed listening skill, I could honestly see this as being annoying and too tedious to track for Tadoku. Especially if I had to constantly consider whether or not something was active listening. I always saw Tadoku as a way to slowly build up my reading skill, but I worry people may default to whatever one is less painful going forward instead of pushing themselves to find comprehensible material for reading or listening. At the end of the day though, that’s an individual decision and my worries shouldn’t really factor in, I think.
I’m still super excited about all that I read, as I’ve mentioned above. Looking at my Learn Natively page, it appears that I have finished 22 books this month. Wait, what?! I think that’s a new record for me. In January I read a lot of a web novel instead of individual books, so I technically read more characters. But as someone with a huge backlog of things she wants to read, getting through 22 books in a month is wonderful!
My two main goals at the start of the month was to finish two series I had been reading, Ascendance of a Bookworm and Hamefura. Hamefura was a lot shorter thankfully, but Bookworm was pretty hefty. Volumes were usually closer to 200k characters than not, and I had to finish through volume 31. I was also wanting to finish at least volume one of each of the book club picks in the 別次元図書館 discord. I managed to get through volume two of each of them! Definitely a fun time. I enjoyed being able to stop and write about what I was reading, especially during Tadoku, since I was quickly going through everything else.
I started losing energy for reading this last week of Tadoku, and so to really change things up I tried reading 10,000 characters of 10 different books in one day earlier this week. It was definitely inspired by the book 本は10冊同時に読め!, which I also finished this week. Though in that book it recommends having books in a few different areas of the house, and you read those books in those areas. For my own purposes, to get myself excited again, I came up with my own challenge.
It was probably one of my most exhilarating reading days this month honestly. I felt like I was at a buffet trying a little bit of everything. I tried some things I liked, somethings I had never tried yet, and some things that I think maybe I didn’t like so much anymore. It was after that day that I decided to drop the web novel Legend. At least for now. I’m just finding it pretty boring compared to more polished light novels. I picked up the 1日1ページ book again though, after dropping it months ago, and it felt way more fun this time around! Probably because I wasn’t pressuring myself to actually read a page a day from it to be “on schedule”.
It was fun reading a lot of different things at a lot of different difficulty levels, and it also helped me to figure out which things I wanted to continue with. I binged 夫のちんぽが入らない and let 薬屋のひとりごと sit for a bit. It was nice to try things out finally instead of being like “one day I’ll ready xyz”. I can read them whenever I want for however long I want! In a way it was a freeing experience.
After that day, I also started 月とライカと吸血姫 and Re:ゼロから始める異世界生活. Re:zero I thought would be fun because it’s another long series like Bookworm, and also an isekai. Having decided to drop Legend and having caught up to Bookworm, I was lacking an isekai. Only through chapter one so far, but really enjoying it. 月とライカ on the other hand, I finished pretty quickly. Turns out, I’m a huge fan of vampire astronauts. Space is just so cool. I was super intimidated by the vocabulary, in both, admittedly. But diving into them…it really wasn’t so bad. I have once again learned to always try things no matter what the perceived difficulty is.
Something else that made Tadoku reading a bit more fun this month has to do with JPDB, so I’ll switch over to some JPDB talk now.
It appears that I’m up by nearly 1,200 non-redundant words from last month’s check-in! This is not too surprising, because thanks to people having access to JPDB’s API, a JPDB Reader was born!
Thanks to Max’s JPDB Reader, I can now see new words while reading and even review them immediately, without having to leave my reading!
It can also show you words that are due and words that you have failed, so you can essentially just do all your JPDB reviews while reading. How incredible is that?! I’m still blown away by it. Genuinely, this is going to be changing how I view SRSing going forward. I still enjoy reviewing the normal way on JPDB, but if I can do the bulk of what I have while reading? Incredible. Magnificent. Truly groundbreaking. This definitely makes reading every day more enjoyable. I love the idea of killing two birds with one stone, so this tool is super powerful for that. It’s also a bit like a clicker game, where you click on all the purple (new cards for me!) to make the text all white again! Okay I don’t actually click on all the new cards because I want to still have manageable review counts, but lord is it tempting! Can you tell how much I love this thing?
Some other fun JPDB news is that there was just an update yesterday. There is now an Aozora Bunko section and a Non-fiction book section! Non-fiction especially is something I’ve wanted to see in the database for awhile. I love me some fiction, but I’d also like to be a more well-rounded reader someday. Having an extra boost by seeing coverage stats is going to be so much fun.
Though, despite all the excitement of all the new decks that were added, with the JPDB Reader I’m more inclined to just have decks I add new words to, as opposed to adding decks to my deck page so I have new cards. I can’t see me ever doing new cards the old way ever again, but only by using the reader to grade new cards as I’m reading something. Coverage stats will always be important for me, but I think I’ll be more interested in seeing how much I mine per month.
This technically started out as a JPDB-Connect deck, but I transitioned to using the Reader once it was released. Regardless, these are all cards I mined this month from reading. Come tomorrow I’ll make a new deck and delete this one (and add them to a deleted decks deck so I don’t lose them obviously!) and see how much I can do in April. There is a custom Tadoku contest for reading in April, so I’d like to still keep the ball rolling on that.
As I said above, how I treat SRS may change a bit going forward, but for now I just want to find an interval I can sit on that feels manageable but transition to doing most of my review time while reading. This may mean I lean more heavily into new cards for a bit as I won’t see too many reviews while reading, but I’m definitely fine with that. Since I’ll be reading anyway, I’ll be naturally reviewing! I’ll just be doing that without completely giving up SRSing, which is not something I’m wanting to do just yet.
All in all, this month felt both extremely long and extremely short at the same time. I feel like I accomplished a lot, and I’m definitely feeling tired from it! I’m probably going to just take it easy the next few days and start back up with reading in earnest on Monday. I’m looking forward to a more chill, in general, April before the next official Tadoku half-round in May!
February Check-in!
I always love a good post-Tadoku month! Even though February is the short kid in the family, I’m still grateful for how much I was able to fit in.
Listening!
Usually after a Tadoku month, I want to focus more on listening. Which I think is a great idea, but in practice I feel like I’ve been a bit lacking…up until this month! A small group of people wanted to put on their own target language listening challenge, and I decided to join in. As of right now, I have over 96 hours logged. I will definitely be hitting 100 before March.
What a difference compared to when I first started tracking my time! January…okay listen, January I was in Full Reading Mode. I think I more than made up for January in February. My previous high score was last November, which makes sense because I was going hard with everything in preparation for the JLPT.
Why was it so much easier this month? Definitely the idea of a challenge and having more content. I’m not much of a TV show or movie watcher, which meant most of what I would be watching would be on YouTube. I started out watching a ton of videos from Masuda Therapy, and then thought it would be cool to find a good Final Fantasy XIV streamer. I first started with Minami Nao, as I wanted to catch up on the latest FFXIV story and content.
I then thought it would be cool to watch someone play from the base game to current content, and found しめじ!! She’s really fun to watch because it seems like she’s brand new to MMOs in general. There ends up being lots of explanations needed from pals because of it, so it’s really interesting for immersion purposes. I’ve noticed myself copying what she says a lot. One of my favorite moments was during one of the first sadder parts of the FFXIV main scenario, and she called it the first 涙ポイント of the game. That’s a phrase that has now stuck with me!
I feel like these were my main listens so far this month, but because of all of this I have been getting more and more Japanese recommendations in my YouTube feed. Genuinely, I don’t think there’s any English left. I was able to find so many cool things related to books I like, Sailor Moon, video games, interesting news even. Not to mention cool interviews with voice actors and stuff. There’s just…so much! I feel like I’m set for life now.
Reading?
So compared to last month, I obviously did not read as much. That being said, it’s still the most I’ve read outside of a Tadoku month! I read 氷点 下, 本を守ろうとする猫の話, and finished the volumes of Bookworm and Hamefura that I started last month. I neglected the Legend web novel for the most part! I like that as a Tadoku snack more than anything, to be honest. I’m super excited for next month, as there will be a book club hosting ビブリア古書堂の事件手帖 and (oh yes, AND) 美しい彼. The book club has a pretty chill vibe to it, as you can start and stop whenever, but I think a few of us will be starting right away. I want to finish Bookworm and Hamefura to the best of my ability next month, but I’ll definitely be reading at least volume one of each of those book club picks. Info should be in the link posted above, so definitely join in and talk about the books with us! We don’t bite!
JPDB.
Whew, it’s been an interesting month for SRS. JPDB had a pretty awesome update this month. First, let’s look at where I’m at right now.
Non-redundant vocabulary increased by 3,509 this month! Post-Tadoku, I really like to go hard on learning new words from all the things I just read. My initial goal was to just exceed 36,000, but I am once again an overachiever. I think this may mean I need to start setting harder goals, or just stop caring about vocabulary goals at all. I think I’ve gotten into enough of a flow that I don’t need to try so hard to stay on track anymore.
I added in a bunch of decks of things that I want to try to read this year as well, so my Words count jumped up quite a bit too. I’m hoping to get a bit of progress on some of those decks, but otherwise I’ll just be adding words normally after a reading session.
So, I mentioned there was an update to JPDB this month. Part of that included more decks added, which is always awesome. However, Patrons have access to “Labs” features. Essentially, we can test out new things before they’re added into the site for everyone.
One of these things was the new scheduler. Let me tell you, it has been a wild ride. I’m on really long intervals, which in this case means less reviews at the cost of lower retention. I was kind of floating around before on the old scheduler’s longer intervals at above 70% retention. Pretty good for how long the intervals were and how many new cards I was adding! So I tried to just pick a new interval on the new scheduler that matched how many reviews per day I was getting on the old scheduler…and after a bit over a week, my retention dipped to 42%! FORTY. TWO. PERCENT. I saw the Lord and he said “What the fuck are you doing?”, so now I’m trying to climb back up to find an interval I feel safe at. This definitely means I probably won’t be adding any new cards until after next Tadoku as I sift through all these reviews and failed cards.
It’s definitely not the end of the world though! My SRS retention does not define my ability to consume Japanese at this point. With my numbers, I could forget 10,000 cards and still be able to read my isekai trash goodies. What this taught me though was that I definitely do care about my retention at a certain point, even if it means more reviews per day. I’d like to be a cool kid and just vibe in the 40s, but I hope to find my groove in the 70s again.
What’s interesting is that my short-term memory seems to be pretty good, but I had a lot of cards that I had passed previously that I maybe shouldn’t have graded so highly. It’s sometimes too easy to remember a word after reading it, and feel like I’m super confident I’ll know it for awhile. I’m going to be a bit more cautious in the future. But hey, at least I’m up from that 42 I saw!
Another thing that can be done in Labs is adjusting the fail timer. So if I fail a bunch of cards, they won’t pop up again in two minutes, but at whatever interval I want it to be. For now, I’m choosing an hour. It seems pretty decent, and it gives me time for my brain to relax before seeing the cards again.
All in all, really exciting changes. It hasn’t been too long, but I hope by next month I can see some real progress on my retention again.
On being an SRS lover (and sometimes fighter)
Since I’m talking about JPDB anyway, I figured I’d talk about my relationship, so to speak, with spaced repetition systems in general. A lot of these thoughts were sparked by two very lovely friends who both do their learning a bit different from me. One of them was concerned about whether or not they had to continue to use SRS, or if it was completely viable to just stop. That had reminded me of my own conundrum towards the end of 2022.
In short, I don’t think SRS is needed at all for language learning, but especially after a certain point. This friend is a baller and can already read a ton in Japanese, so them wanting to quit SRS to focus on other ways to enjoy the language seemed awesome! Fully support that decision, and I hope to hear from them on how it’s going in the future.
As for me, I think I always used some sort of SRS, even from the start. I would make my own flashcards…though granted it wasn’t a super smart system. Just me and my shoeboxes with a dream. I would carefully look at stroke order and write as neatly as possible on the front, and then scribble the reading and English on the back. And every day I’d look through them all, and place some of them in a shoebox that was for “extra attention”. When I got tired of all the physical flashcards, I did smart.fm/iKnow! (which I don’t think exists the way it did in the late 00s). From here my timeline is a bit fuzzy, as it was a long time ago, but I think I was trying out Anki and Memrise after iKnow, with more of a focus on Memrise. At the time, there were a ton of custom courses, and I made a lot for song lyrics. Prior to all of this, I definitely tried out supermemo after reading about it, but could never get into it. Anki became my main SRS off and on for several years before I landed on JPDB in 2021.
Friends, I don’t know why I never found my groove with Anki. Seeing other people have really cool set ups always makes me want to try and do something similar, but in the end I just don’t do it. I tend to get overwhelmed pretty easily if I’m not in the most perfect headspace, but I’m glad that if I ever need it Anki should always be around for me to come back to. I still keep all my subs2srs decks around to flick through from time to time, but I’m so glad I have JPDB as my main vocab SRS.
I see JPDB very much as my immersion companion. My main focus is always on immersing, and then I can just collect words I looked up in JPDB. I can also skim the wordlist of something before immersing in it to prime myself, and half the time I end up learning something in the process!
I flirted with the idea of lessening my SRS so much that the act of reading/immersing alone would become my SRS. At the time, I really thought that would be what I wanted. People kept telling me at my word count I could just quit whenever and be fine. Yet I always hesitated to actually do that. It seems silly, but at the time I just did not realize that I genuinely like SRSing. I like reviewing vocabulary in my free moments. I like engaging with Japanese in such a low effort way when I’m tired or on the toilet. Honestly, especially when I’m on the toilet. Feels like I’m making essential time more productive instead of just a it being shitty experience I’m waiting for to end.
I love seeing the numbers go up. So coverages, word count, non-redundant word count, etc. I love seeing a card come up where I can remember what book it came from. “Ah yes, 石板, a friend since I started reading Bookworm, welcome back!” I even love when I fail a card, because it helps me to know what I still need to work on. What fun sentences can I find next time with that word? Any cool books that word is in that I could add to my reading list? I love the feeling of adding new cards after reading a bunch. It just seems like a living documentation of my immersion journey so far, that also supports my future immersion journeys too. It’s so corny, but I love SRSing with JPDB.
I could probably drop it and be fine, like people say. All that Japanese isn’t leaving my brain entirely anytime soon. But there’s so much more to learn, and I want my companion by my side as I do it. Maybe this will change, and I’ll gladly go with my own flow if it does. But I hope we can start being more open-minded about how other people continue to learn, and not place our own ideas of “finished” onto them.
I want people to feel the way I do about how I learn with what they use. If using JPDB makes someone feel bad? YEET. If doing Anki every day is tortuous? YEET. Wanikani? RTK? Memrise? YEET. Get rid of it and try something new. You’re not a failure for not being able to stick with something, it just means you haven’t found the right something. If you’re at a point where you can immerse and don’t want to do SRS? I will always support the decision to yeet those flashcards into the abyss.
I very much felt bogged down by the tools I was trying to use for years. It was a big reason on why I just stopped Japanese for so long. But there’s so many ways to get from point A to point B, and I wish I wasn’t so focused on what everyone else was doing with the idea that I had to imitate them to succeed. I love hearing about all the different ways people learn Japanese. Individual kanji study, with keywords? Definitely not for me. But seeing someone do that and progress is so cool! I want to hear all progress stories, not just the ones that look nice on Reddit.
Anyway. I’m an SRS lover and it’s time I admitted it. I may want to spend less time on it, but I know it’ll always have my back!
Next month begins another round of Tadoku. Just a normal round of Tadoku. Nothing weird or new, I’m sure.
… … …
I’ll give thoughts on that at the end of March!
January Check-in: Happy New Year!
Wow a new year! How exciting. ANYWAY I PASSED N1 LOL
It was brutal, and I am so grateful for the mock tests. A bit bummed about my reading score, but honestly I’m not going to let it get me down. I’ve been able to read for entertainment in my own time with good comprehension, so I won’t get hung up on struggling with some of these stiffer texts that are timed. I’m not someone who is motivated to get a higher test score, especially since I kind of hate taking tests. I will take this win with pride and continue about my life!
So now with that out of the way, what else did I do this month while waiting for test scores to be announced? In terms of Japanese, only one thing really…
Back to back Tadoku win! This was a huge deal for me because I really, really wanted to get through a lot of my longer series. I’m currently on volume 23 of 本好きの下剋上, volume 6 of 乙女ゲームの破滅フラグしかない悪役令嬢に転生してしまった…, and chapter 477 of レジェンド. I also started up a series I was eyeing up for a bit, スクラップド・プリンセス. I want to learn a bit more vocabulary from that last one before continuing on, so I’ll focus on that in February. I’m very happy with all the progress I made. レジェンド especially felt like I would never be able to catch up to it, but it’s looking more and more possible. I will be sad when I’m completely caught up to Bookworm, but I don’t want to slow down too much on that one. 乙女ゲームの破滅フラグ was fun because it was part of a read along in a discord server! It was nice to take notes while reading and see other people react to the same story.
As for JPDB, I’ve mostly just been in maintenance mode with it. Very few new cards, only reviews.
Here’s my current stats. Because of the December vocabulary speedrunning I did, I eventually had quite a few reviews this month. My “learning” count exceeded 1000 at one point, but I managed to get it back down. My daily reviews have been pretty easy to get through, but during Tadoku I didn’t focus on getting to 0 every day. It just kind of ended up happening because I had so few, and reading so much made everything easier.
My plans for next month will be to pre-learn enough vocabulary to get several decks to 99%. I found this the easiest way to speed-read while still maintaining information, and I’d like more things to read for the next Tadoku! I mined some vocab all month so I’ll probably go ahead and sort through those to see what I want to learn first, if anything. Otherwise, I’ll just go by frequency per deck. I have lots of series I want to start up, but haven’t quite decided on the order. So I figured I’ll just get as many of them as possible to 99% and go from there.
Incoming diary post.
The start of this month was kind of hard on me. It took me a long time to finally get to a point where I feel good about my skill level in Japanese. Not good enough to feel content and not grow, mind you. Being able to read things quickly and for long periods of time though, now that’s something that still amazes me that I can do. I have built up stamina and enough knowledge to be able to enjoy native content.
I’m a sensitive person, so having people making a few comments about me here and there, or like doubting my ability to understand what I’m reading, really hurt. And of course seeing my reading score being lower in my N1 score kind of fed into this. I just felt like I was spending the past one and a half years really working towards being good at Japanese, and it felt like once I reached that spot I had people being a bit sour to me. It wasn’t really something I anticipated, because usually when I had seen this happen to others it was because they got to this point in two years or less…as opposed to my now 17 years.
Even typing out that last number makes me reflexively cringe, and that’s something I’d like to work on. I didn’t track prior to last year, but I know in my heart I was not spending the hours on Japanese in those 15 years prior to getting my butt into gear. And yet somehow “I started Japanese 17 years ago and just now reached N1” still feels weird. It’s not like I want to brag to the world about my progress or anything, but I was in a place of virtually zero progress for years. I would see so many other people online get better and better, and I was just stuck. I would try searching for the magic thing that would make me better…and I avoided the easiest things: spending the time and making that time worthwhile. It sounds so simple and vague, but I really struggled with it for years.
Things finally clicked for me in 2021. Coming off that momentum, 2022 was huge for me. It felt like my progress was almost getting out of control. I just kept on reading, kept on learning new words, kept on listening, reviewed all the grammar I learned in 2021….and I just kept getting better. So much better I did not believe it. I felt like I was finally able to enjoy things in Japanese the same way I’ve been doing for years in English.
But then the comments would flow in like “how are you able to do that?”, “well you can only do that because of your circumstances”, “but are you actually understanding everything?”, “do you sleep?”. Lots of assumptions about my time, my personal life, and my abilities. And I’ll be honest y’all, it really hurt. I love cheering people on as they progress and I didn’t really expect any of these responses to my own progress/personal successes. I started to diminish myself even more so as to not make anyone feel bad. I started out this round of Tadoku only doing 30 minutes to 2 hours tops of reading, even if I did have more time. I didn’t want to make people feel bad. But by doing that, I was just making myself feel bad and stagnating my own progress.
Eventually I said fuck it, if people were going to say things anyway I might as well just go for it. And even then. Even fucking then. I was not spending all day reading. This isn’t some sort of humble brag that I got 11,000 Tadoku points without spending literally all of my time reading, it’s just what happens after doing this for so long. I read things with high coverage and I have actively been working on finding a reading speed that doesn’t decrease comprehension. Everything I’ve done has been a deliberate effort to quite literally get good and I’m tired of having to diminish that. I spent so. so. so long being bad at something I professed to love, so excuse me while I reap the benefits of this past year and a half!
It’s easy to compare yourself to others in anything, but I’ve noticed this a lot in language communities. Fact is, we do all have different circumstances, and none of those circumstances are anyone else’s business. You don’t have to diminish your successes just to make someone else feel better. I know I will still struggle with these feelings for a bit, but I’m glad I was able to push through some of them in order to further my own goals this month.
Tadoku has literally become part of my learning routine, and I don’t want to stop participating! I love the balls-to-the-wall reading month followed by learning words I saw while reading and listening more. It’s such a fun workflow for me. So many people read their eyes out this month and I’m so proud. I love watching the updates come in and seeing people create little rivalries that help push their reading to new heights. Genuinely it warms my heart. These are the feelings I want to take with me this year. No need to tear others down, and all the reason to lift people up.
All in all, a very productive month in terms of Japanese and also shifting my mindset. I’ll carry this momentum with me the rest of the year!
学ぶマンダ 