Progress Update - Day 111 - Kanji Madness!

こんばんは。

Well, here I am on day 111 of learning Japanese! I've been working crazy hard on being able to recognize and know the English meanings of all the joyo kanji and it's been going well. I've still been doing some vocabulary on the side but not as much. I pretty much have eye strain all the time from looking at all the kanji characters so much. 

Right now I know about 2175 vocabulary words, so even though I've slowed down from the pace I had been doing I'm really happy with that.

As for the kanji, out of the 2136 joyo/common use kanji characters, I'm able to recognize about 1215 of them reliably. I test myself on them all constantly. I'm surprised my eyes haven't popped right out of my head!

When I started being really serious about learning the kanji back mid-November and decided to have faith in myself that I could remember them, a big part of that was buying and reading the Hacking Japanese Supercourse from NihongoShark.com. I re-read some of the book the other day and looked at the next section (the section for after you know the kanji characters) and it got me so excited that I have been working even harder. I really thought that it would get harder the further I got, but it's actually been getting easier. Even if you haven't studied the kanji radicals/components specifically like in my case, the characters make more and more sense as you move forward. 

I was on NHK News Easy last night and even though I didn't know all the words to a couple of articles, I was able to know exactly what was being talked about because I recognized the kanji. There have been a few things I've read recently that used some of the more "advanced" kanji characters that has made my learning so much easier. Seeing the characters in everyday use helps me remember them so much better.

Following the Hacking Japanese Supercourse recommendations of learning the kanji in about 97 days, I've been working hard toward my "deadline" of February 22. Since I've been finding it easier to remember the kanji and it's all coming together better the more time I put in, I will likely "finish" much before then, move ahead, and dive in to the vocabulary more than i had before.

I have been wanting to make a custom deck or course for quite a while since I don't like a lot of the ones out there I've come across, so I've been working on that as well. Once I can reliably recognize all the joyo kanji I want to really go for it on vocabulary. I've tried Anki. I've tried another Anki app that is a separate company, and a few other things. What seems to work best for me for whatever reason is Memrise. I know everyone just LOVES Anki but it just does not work for me. At all. It makes me feel so bored that I don't even want to bother with it. So I've been working on getting my own course set up for me and my husband on Memrise to use so that we can customize it to learn words that are more relevant to what we need. Fingers crossed!

Can't wait to see how things are going when I next update!

じゃまたね。