Tag: learning tools

A lot of people find mnemonics helpful– things like the Remembering the Kanji or memory palace methodology where you come up with little stories for things to remember whatever you need to remember. Usually that doesn’t work well with me, because I find unless something sort of naturally comes to me, trying to purposely come up with a story results in me remembering the moment I thought to come up with the story, and nothing about what it was supposed to help me remember. Also it is just far too time-consuming, because I end up spending hours trying to come up with stories I’m going to either forget or that will make me forget what I’m trying to remember.

Mostly, I rely on my vague synaesthetic connections, which are some weird mix of colors and sensations I can’t describe very well, so they’re pretty useless to other people.

Occasionally, though, my brain actually does come up with silly mnemonics spontaneously on its own. Such is the case for 浅い【あさい】(asai), which means “shallow”. I’ve come to associate it with the açaí berry, pretty obviously for the similar pronunciation. I have no idea why that works for me, since there’s not really any actual link aside from pronunciation, and I don’t have a story to go with it to make it link. But somehow I’ve formed what seems to be a permanent link between the two that helps me remember the word.

I was reading a language-learning blog post yesterday that was talking about the importance of using the language from “day one”. To be honest I am not sure I can use that sort of learning approach unless I’m in an immersion situation and forced to come up with ways to communicate daily things, since I seem to have a lot of trouble coming up with things to say when I don’t have sufficient vocabulary otherwise. It would probably also help if I didn’t already find talking to people I don’t know to be kind of a headache and something I avoid. Not to mention I also tend avoid talking to people I know, because I’m a borderline hermit.

Anyway, despite my personal difficulties with employing this kind of learning-style most of the time, I do feel there’s merit to the idea that application matters a lot in terms of how quickly you’ll pick up a language. With the caveat that I haven’t looked up any data on how this applies to people in general, but I do find it true of myself that learn better by “doing” in general, and languages are no exception. But I think it’s kind of up to the individual to figure out how to do that and at what pace– faster isn’t necessarily better, depending on your end goal. This is all a tangent, though.

Still always think in English, and while I switch over somewhat when I am speaking Japanese, it’s an effort and takes a while for me to switch. And then I still end up half-thinking in English which I want to change. At this point I’m realizing I’m writing all my entries in English and thinking in English all the time not because I don’t have the words for it in Japanese, but just because it’s harder/slower in Japanese and I might get it wrong in Japanese, which well. Obviously.

On that note, I think now is the time I should actually start doing more posts on Lang-8. I started doing a 30 day meme a while ago, but I stopped because I found it impossible to figure out how to say some things I wanted to, but I’m thinking I should restart that on Lang-8.

In other news, not sure if I’m going to make even my measly, cut-down-from-the-half-challenge 25-book goal for the Super Challenge. I’m still only at 6 books, and I keep being too tired to read anything longer than a sentence or tiny paragraph. I did just install Yomichan to Anki and started trying to read HP, but in the first sentence alone I ended up with ten cards, so that was a bit hilarious. I’m not really sure how I want to pick out vocab I would like to add as cards yet, because I think it’s probably excessive to save all the words I don’t know completely. Several I could get the gist of from context, but added anyway because I knew I wouldn’t remember pronunciation or a particular nuance. I think maybe I should avoid doing that so I don’t have a million cards just from page 1, and then won’t study them because that’s too much.

Anyway, I’ve been avoiding doing my textbook pages, so I should probably just do that at this point.