I’m not totally sure what’s going on because I have been doing almost no active study and only a bit of passive study (reading a few manga I’d already read before, talking to a friend for 5-10 minutes a day or less, going to tutoring sessions once a month or so, watching anime with subtitles), but my Japanese seems to have leveled up while I wasn’t paying attention. Which is hard to describe, but I’m just noticing it’s significantly easier to comprehend things, I’m relying less on using rikai or google translate for online navigation, if I see (smaller) blocks of Japanese, I’m much more likely to say “eh, it’ll take ten minutes to ‘read’” and do it than go “maybe later when I have more time”. It seems insignificant when I write it down, but internally it’s felt like I went through a magical transformation sequence.

Still require a lot more work on vocab, but I’ve been …not wanting to deal with any SRS, so not sure how that’ll go. I did finally get the Kindle Paperwhite to access a J-E dictionary without jumping through excessive hoops (when I did it that way it was overwritten when the Kindle updated), but I keep getting bored with HP when I have to read it slowly.

JLPT in the US finally has a testing center where I live this year, so I am for sure going to attempt the N3, though, vocab or no.

small psa

Not sure if anyone else has run into this before, but I set up my Amazon.com account to link to my Amazon.co.jp account a while back and put a Tenso address in to buy ebooks. I hadn’t really bought many books, just a couple of cheap children’s picture books, since my reading wasn’t really good enough to get through a novel without a dictionary, and I didn’t really realize that I could get a J-J or J-E dictionary on the Kindle app until today. So I bought the first HP off Pottermore in Japanese, but I linked Pottermore to my Amazon account to send it to the Kindle, and apparently that was a mistake. Well either that or buying a dictionary off the Amazon app store was, I’m not sure which part raised flags on my account.

Either way, shortly after the purchases, I got an email from Amazon telling me they needed to see government proof of my residence in Japan in order to continue buying Japanese ebooks. I’m pretty sure they can’t do anything about me buying HP off Pottermore, since those options are available in the Pottermore store seemingly regardless of region. But given I can’t provide proof of living in Japan, I’ve set my address on Amazon back to the US and won’t be able to get ebooks off there in the future unless I move, it looks like.

On the bright side, having an inline dictionary is pretty awesome. I think what’s actually most useful for me is really the pronunciation help– sometimes I can get the gist of the word via kanji, but if I don’t know how to say it it’ll never really be part of my vocabulary. So the inline dictionary often can help out there without breaking up ‘flow’ too much. Looking up anything via radicals takes so much time, it’s impossible to really read that way, and while the dictionary does still make for more pausing than strictly extensive reading, it’s easier to just check quickly and return to the text.

oops.

I haven’t posted here in forever. Basically I got a new job and have been kind of stressed out and tired lately and writing posts was kind of low priority, especially over taking the times I had enough focus to do anything besides vegetate to just study instead. So I’ve still been studying Japanese, though I’ve also been taking breaks and doing less than I was before, but I’m kind of slowly getting back into a new routine. This year my goals are (yet again!) to improve my reading– I picked up all of Trigun, and I’ve been reading those with enough comprehension to enjoy it at least, but I really want to read a novel by the end of the year. Even if it’s only a short, for-kids novel.

Not really sure what’s going on with the Super Challenge, last I heard there was a break before a new one started anyway, so I might check back soon and see if/when that’s starting up again to join. I didn’t really ‘win’ this last round– I did hit something close to 100 films, 50 hours of conversations, and something like 800 pages of reading and some writing, I’m not even sure how much of that. But I still felt pretty good with what I did accomplish.

I didn’t finish Core 2000 of iKnow yet either, but I’m really close? I doubt I’ll finish Core 3000 this year at the pace I’m going, but I should be able to get at least halfway through. I’m also almost introduced to all the N4 kanji via Read the Kanji, so that’s cool, too. Ideally I’ll get through N3 by the end of the year. I can work on that at work occasionally, when we end up in meetings where I don’t have to pay full attention. I’m also using Skritter sometimes when standing in line or whatnot, since I put it on my iPod. And getting close to finishing first-runthroughs of all the Japanesepod101 Lower Intermediate lessons. I’m debating whether or not I will actually listen again while not in the car to take advantage of the lesson notes, or if I’m just going to start on Intermediate. I kinda gave up on Anki for the moment. I feel like it could be a useful tool for me, but I have to learn how to best utilize it first, and right now it makes more sense to take that time to use other available tools instead.

Finally picked up the Beginner to Intermediate Shadowing book, which arrived today, and I’m hoping will help my speaking. I’ll probably write a review after I’ve used it for a while. Unit 1’s early sections are super simple– it really is for beginners. The book says the aim is to take three months practicing each unit, and there are five units so that would take you over a year normally. But I kind of expect Unit 1 to go by a bit faster than that for me, so I have a vague goal of trying to finish the book by December. Unit 4 and 5 say they are meant to be around N2 level, though, so we’ll see?

I’ve stopped doing sessions at JOI mostly because I don’t have time and I’m still doing sessions with my other tutor, though between us both canceling last minute for weather or work we only meet once or twice a month right now.

We met today, though, and did a set of N3 practice questions together, which was … enlightening, hah. I mean I was kind of about where I expected to be. I failed it, even though we went probably slower than I’d be able to afford to on the actual test, with a whopping 10 correct out of 23. Though in a lot of cases it was between two potential answers, and I picked the wrong one first and my tutor could see why I would think it would be the other one, so it’s good that I’m at least able to narrow it down on most of them rather than simply blindly guessing.

We’d gone through some of the same questions a year ago, and it’s really interesting to feel the difference in comprehension. I vaguely remembered a couple of the questions from before, but mostly didn’t remember anything about them, and still at least had 90% comprehension of the context sentences, even if I wasn’t certain about the answer.

It’s a little ridiculous that every year I end up thinking “Okay this year by the end of the year I should be able to read Harry Potter/pass the N3” and every year those things pass me by. But having actually done practice questions, I definitely see that I’m close to N3 level and there’s really no reason I won’t be at a level where it’d at least be worth to attempt the N3 by Nov/Dec unless I stop studying entirely.

Anyway, this is super long, apologies to anyone actually reading? I really need to learn to write shorter posts, but I kinda wanted to get a general “this is where I’m at with everything” out for myself.

thoughts?

Pondering whether doing just a week or two at a Japanese language school would actually be worth it. Or if even a month would be. I could probably convince work to let me do a WFH arrangement for a month (or two?), but the question is would it be enough of a bump to my learning to bother with the time and money, and I’m not really sure. I did notice improvement even just from watching TV and minimal contact with people the last time I went for a week plus. But I feel like given I’m in this ridiculous semi-intermediate stage, improvement doesn’t really happen as spectacularly or drastically as it did as a beginner, and it makes it seem like anything less than 3-6 months would be silly. But since I am no longer a student I don’t really have 3-6 months to spend doing something like that, whoops.

Has anyone done a really short stay with a school like GenkiJACS and thought it was worth it?

I suppose partly it’s hard to say if me taking a week or two off and just booking a hotel somewhere (mostly just to readjust my expectations so that I’m not thinking “I’m at home, so I can slack”) and multiple JOI lessons or something to make it a “study vacation” on my own wouldn’t be just as useful to me or something, and cheaper. I do have a week of vacation coming up next month that perhaps I’ll plan to do something like that for (at least for part of it… there are other things I need to get done while I have the time off) to see how it goes.