# Japanese

## Briefly

Current level: N2.

Mostly doing immersion.

My current workflow: read a novel, mine cards to Anki, do my Anki reviews. Sometimes watch YouTube in Japanese.


## How I'm learning now

I'm trying to read and watch things in Japanese, doing some JP learning club events and doing lessons with a tutor.

### Reading and mining

I found the beauty of web novels - they're fun, they're long and they're freely available. I haven't started the second one after Silent Witch, but I'm going to once I get back to full speed. with my learning.

Another thing that was very valuable was Yomitan and its newer dictionary Jitendex. I'm still using Jisho.org for regular lookups, but for words with several meanings and readings the table formatting of Jitendex is perfect. The best part is how there is zero configuration effort - just install the extension, install the dictionary, and everything is taken care of.

I didn't want to tinker with the card templates, but fortunately I got an almost free solution here. I'm using Aedict as my mobile dictionary, and it has an export to Anki feature. It uses its own card templates with more fields than the standard "kanji-reading-meaning". Turns out, this template works with Yomitan as well, so I could just select it and automatically fill my cards with more info.

Another thing was example sentences. There is a field "{sentence}" in Yomitan card templates, which includes the whole sentence and not just the selected word. So instead of using the sentences from Tatoeba, or in addition to using sentences from Tatoeba, in the case of Jitendex, I can save the context in which I saw the card.  
I was already mostly associating the original context with all the cards. How for example 咥える was Oshino Meme holding a cigarette in his mouth, or 哀愁 was from a vocaloid song. Now I didn't have to remember that myself.

It's kind of funny how I always tried to keep my setup minimal, and it's still kind of minimal. I see people who save screenshots, audio recordings, context, color coding and so on, and I'm impressed - "I could never do that!" But I'm turning into a person like that myself - I even managed to add pitch accent data to my cards. Originally I would even use Google Translate - just select a word, put it in the translator, and save the result as the answer to a card. Now it's a whole thing.

Well, I do have my minimal spirit still - if I'm on mobile, I still just use the Aedict export without anything fancier, I use the simplest template for my manual cards, and I don't update the old ones. This is often about reducting friction - if I have to work on my deck, I don't feel like reviewing my deck at all. And the opposite - if while reviewing my deck I feel too much friction, I don't feel like doing it, and it would have been better for me to update it and make the reviews more pleasant.

The manual cards I do are just to distinguish between similar kanji. 粋 and 枠. 穏 and 緩 and 暖. And some other examples, I should actually add more. Because I'm learning just words, without going into particular lines of each kanji, it's easy for me to mix them up.

### Listening and watching

I watch vtubers, including Japanese-speaking, so sometimes I can turn on a stream in the background and listen to something in Japanese while I'm playing a game or walking or doing something. I think vtuber streams are not a good example of what to listen to, but it's something I enjoy, so it doesn't feel as I'm spending effort, which partially makes up for the lack of complex new words. Though sometimes I watch a vtuber excitedly explain stuff about geology or impressionism, and at that point it's the opposite - too many new words.

For podcasts the one I sometimes listen to is Rebuild. It's conversations about modern tech industry, AI, new Apple devices, stuff like that.  I don't listen to it much though.

Lately I found a few edited playthroughs of Call of Cthulhu sessions, which felt like something new.

### Anki

Anki is the most important part. I'm not very consistent with my reviews, especially when I find something else I could be doing while commuting to work. But it's the main reason I keep remembering new words and establishing them in my vocabulary.

For me 20 new cards a day is too much. 10 is the sweet spot. I'm currently trying 20 because I got so many words from Silent Witch that the queue is huge, but I'm burning out with 20.

### Grammar

The key problem about grammar is that it's hard to find it. I just read along, and kinda understand everything, and the Yomitan hover doesn't pick up anything suspicious. But I could still be missing grammar topic I encounter.

One great thing about JMDict, and by extension Jitendex, is that they list grammar like words. Which means in many cases I can just use Anki to remember a new piece of rare grammar, which helps a lot.


## What I tried

(WIP)

The Refold/MIA way resonated with me, and I think it's efficient, but mostly immersion is fun.

### Kanji

I'm still not sure what my opinion on learning Kanji is. Refold says "learn to recognize them, but not all 2k, just 1.2k is enough, and then just read", which is what I did. But now I'm not really recognizing the kanji when reading, I mostly relearn them again, so maybe reading right away would have been fine as well.

### What I've consumed

* tons of vtuber streams
* The Girl Who Leapt Through Time
* Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear vol.1
* 神さまがまちガえる (God Bless the Mistaken) - vol.1-2
* Kino's Journey vol.1
* (In progress) Bakemonogatari
* (In progress) Stein's Gate (the game)
* (Dropped) Flying Witch
* (On hold) A Silent Voice (manga)
* Silent Witch (web novel)