Progress Update - Day 70

Konnichiwa!

Here I am at day 70 of learning Japanese! Part of me feels like throwing a little confetti up in the air to celebrate. I'll just imagine doing that and save myself the mess! ;)

I have purposely slowed down on my vocabulary learning a little bit so that I can make sure I'm remembering all that I've learned so far, and also focus a little more on kanji and grammar so I can actually use the vocabulary I've been learning. Funny thing is, I added up the approximate of where I'm at on vocabulary even with slowing down a little and I've still learned an average of about 20 words per day. I know approximately 1500 words. I've been learning more verbs, and also have learned some tool words like screwdriver, ladder, etc. I can also recognize about 200 kanji at this point. I'm trying to learn about 20 kanji per day. So far I've been meeting that goal pretty well. Yay for learning!

I've been practicing reading more with some e-books, regular books, and reading what I can on NHK News Easy. Through doing that I've realized I for sure need to focus more of my study time on kanji so that I can understand things better. It's very frustrating to want to read something and not be able to. I am a HUGE reading person so learning kanji now that I have the kana down is a big goal for me.

I've felt that the less kanji I know the more I'm held back. Feeling like I need to do a lot more studying of kanji, I downloaded Anki and came across NihongoShark.com's decks. I ended up downloading the Hacking Japanese book from NihongoShark.com and have been focusing on kanji a lot more. His philosophy is pretty much to learn all the joyo (regular use) kanji first thing so that not knowing kanji doesn't end up being a hurdle or making you feel like quitting.

I had already started using a new app, JLPT Self Study, the last couple of weeks to learn more vocabulary and recognize more kanji. I've found it really helpful so far. I like Anki, and that is what most people recommend (including NihongoShark's program) but learning on my desktop computer isn't what works best for me right now due to health constraints, so I've just continued using the JLPT app for now. I tried the Anki app on Android and didn't like it very much so far. I figure learning the kanji in an efficient manner and remembering them is what is most important, not how I go about doing that, so I will keep going as I have been so long as I am remembering the kanji. I like to switch up my studying frequently so I may end up using Anki after all. Time will tell.

I'm usually not an audio lesson type of person, but I've been thinking it over for a while anyway and caved on Thanksgiving Day and signed up for a premium membership on JapanesePod101.com. So even though I'm not normally geared for audio, with learning a language it has obvious benefits especially since I'm not learning in a classroom setting with a teacher. JapanesePod101 is kind of in my mind filling the teacher role as the podcasts feel like listening in a classroom.

Can't wait to see how I've progressed by my next update!

Ja mata!