TL;DR: 3 reasons: ignoring the opportunity cost when far superior methods are present, misaligned actions with goals, and busywork as useful work.
My Definitions:
By taking notes I mean what you do during your own study sessions: creating notes by summarizing from the textbook, highlighting important parts on your notes, and review your notes later by re-reading. I don’t mean taking notes from your teacher or professor during class or lecture, summarizing what being is said.
Highlighting: in the literature, it means doing so on the textbook. In this article, I refer to highlighting on your notes.
Summarizing: rewriting from the textbook version to your own simplified version
I’ve pictured this scenario where a white person is walking around with a Japanese person and the white guy asks the Japanese guy what does that say and the thing they’re pointing to is scribble aka archaic writing.
Reading archaic writing is a skill that I never developed from just immersing in Japanese since I don’t read stuff written in the cursive writing etc. Sometimes I can figure it out and sometimes I’m like wtf? I remember pausing the screen while watching JIN when Nokaze or whoever would send letters to JIN and I’d be like how he does he read that scribble or I’d be able to read some of it. Luckily, he usually read the letter aloud in the narration etc so I didn’t have to read that to enjoy the show. Now that I think about it I’ve seen a lot of handwritten Japanese on Japanese tv shows since they always make people write letters and read them on the show. those are usually legible. I always get excited whenever I spot a mistake in handwritten Japanese lol. Check out my previous post for an exmplae
I later learned it’s not just hand-writing scribble; it’s olden japanese hand scribble. This was back in 2009 when d-addicts was a thing and I was watching the show with Japanese subtitles. I was thinking how unhelpful korean subtitles are for watching time period dramas as a Korean learner in that even if you watch with the korean subtitles they don’t help you understand the show when it comes to encounters with new words. English subs would be more helpful honestly in terms of whatever learning you can accomplish while watching a drama like a normal person (no pausing, rewinding, etc) and looking up zero things in the dictionary since my ears aren’t broken and I want to know what the words mean not how to spell them. This is a statement I’d never say about Japanese because of the inherent nature of its writing system. But in the end it doesn’t matter because I don’t watch Korean dramas since they’re unwatchable. This tangent is just a long-winded of saying that watching JIN with Japanese subtitles was an ABSOLUTE pleasure. J subs are a MUST for jidaigeki imo. I contemplated watching ryoma-den at one point because it was getting buzz and yoshida from black mayonnaise loved it but I never watched it but if I did I would watch j-subs.
I’ve mentioned before on a post about the finale of JIN season 2 about the behind the scenes scoop on the letter reading scene. The actor who plays Jin decided to read the letter for the FIRST time on the FIRST take so that he can give a genuine reaction while in character. All I thought while watching that scene is how does he read that shit lol. I was genuinely curious how well modern-day Japanese people can read the scribbles.
I was digging into this topic again because I read this on dokushometer
The person posted links to website that will teach you all that you need to know so you can learn to read Japanese that’s written in those specific styles and of course if you want to read old Japanese (edo era etc) you have to learn the traditional forms of kanji. This elicited the thought that learning Japanese is never-ending if you are obsessed with being super skillful or perfect in Japanese with even reading; I don’t feel like learning how to read that stuff because I don’t read that kinda stuff and I don’t have interest in shodou. I contemplated looking through it since i am into writing messy, quickly, taking shortcuts etc and i love getting tips. but i never took a deep dive look into it. though from the cursory look, I already do some of the truncating they do when I handwrite Japanese… it’s human nature to want to be lazy lol. Why write all the individual strokes when you can draw a wavy/squiggly line.
If you are dead set on perfection in every aspect of Japanese and go down all these rabbit holes like pitch accent or even reading all types of Japanese writing it’s never-ending…. at the end of the day you have to follow your heart do whatever interests you the most. for me that does not involve learning how to read cursive/archaic japanese. Time is precious and I have a lot of other more practical activities to use my time towards. Maybe I’ll change my mind in the future. w’knows
The post was aptly titled blast from the past like the YG post because it took me a very long time to post it and I never went back to click on the links from the chiebukuro answer. I have many interests and it’s just not one of them.
AND on a japanese 101 note I found out this year that PANSA means panther! I never looked it up and I think I even saw a bit of the commercial for black panther when i was watching hanseikai. I never gave a thought to the word PANSA until the london heart’s hliarious dokkiri on ogata when ogata said ko-yo-te. I’ve probably heard this word a couple hundred times if not thousands of times by now. Better late than NEver I guess.
On the topic of handwriting Japanese: I’m not into journaling but I do sporadically freewrite in Japanese. I scoff and roll my eyes at the silly blogs that tell people to read the news in their target language everyday or start a diary in the target language because everyone knows no one will keep that habit going for long unless they truly enjoy those activities. FOr me I don’t give a shit about the news in English and I also unsurprisingly don’t give a shit about the news in Korean and in Japanese especially the boring political articles. Occasionally I’ll read news articles that interesting ie scandals or if it’s about a topic I find interesting but I don’t go out of my way to buy a newspaper or visit the news websites daily etc. My freewriting activity is organic because I only do it if I feel like doing it. I don’t follow any schedule so the interval between entries could be days, months, or weeks. Every time I go to write, I’m amazed by the kanji I remember as well as the ones I don’t remember (sometimes I just blank out) since I’ve had problems with my heisig deck in the past which led to be stop doing it. Nowadays I only do kakitori cards since I combined some amazing pre-made decks.
So maybe a year or two ago I tried turning my spiral notebook sideways to write vertically in Japanese. I’ve written words or a sentence vertically before but I’ve never tried it for my freewriting. I noticed that writing Japanese vertically is easier and more practical. I never knew because I never tried it! I hate handwriting in general so I appreciate anything that lessens the burden. I’m not into buying expensive notebooks, stationary, pens, etc so I’m glad that I tried it and loved it. I write extremely messy and I plan to throw the notebok away after filling it so I have no interest spending money on nice notebooks. Writing Japanese has definitely help me hone in my skills in writing in my own sougyou-esque handwriting style.
The screenshot is one of my earlier attempts before I optimized it. I like having the translation under the Chinese and I like having an indent before the rhombus.
optimized example:
I’m using this to learn from a bizarre chinese cartoon so I can solidify my Chinese grammar skills. that just means I want to have less WTF does this shit mean moments which is when I come across sentences where I know all the hanzi but don’t understand the sentence. Using deepL because I don’t have english subs and getting incomprehensible input IS a waste of time and I’m acutely aware of the limitations and short-comings of translation programs since I ain’t monolingual and I don’t need to be getting knee-deep in the pop-up dictionary entry with 10+ meanings to be some pure, ascetic language learner when I’d rather just move the f on to the next line that interests me since deepL kicks ass. deepL > google as far as I can tell. BTW I’m not really watching the cartoon. I don’t have time to watch it so if I’m spending time with it’s gonna be quality time aka study time. If you break it down they’re not even talking half the time (make a condensed audio mp3 using subs2srs and filter out duplicates and lines shorter than 4 characters etc etc and it’s half the length of the video or les) not to mention this donghua is UGLY. I treat it like an audiobook and loop the audio by subtitle line endlessly on potplayer. For real audiobooks you can use workaudiobook. Speaking of audiobooks, books are way out of my league currently lol but I’m taking my baby steps. I need more grammar skillllls. I like going from most common/useful to less common which is dialogue-stuff that comes out of people’s mouths – > internet articles/sites about interesting topics -> books. it makes no sense to tackle books/internet articles when i can’t even deal with conversations.
I have set it up in potplayer so that
when I press alt number pad 7 it goes to the previous subtitle line and loops that subtitle,
when i press alt number pad 9 it goes to the next subtitle and loops that subtitle,
when i press altnumpad 5 or / it stops the looping,
it goes to the previous subtitle when i press alt numb pad 1,
it goes to the next subtitle line when i press alt num pad 3 line,
it copies the subtitle line on the screen when i press alt num 4 ( if you use a clipboard manager like copyq or ditto you can collect all the subtitle lines you copy etc etc).
I need the shortcut for stopping the loop because sometimes the shortcut for the next line/previous line don’t work if the timing of the subs overlap with each other. the beauty of potplayer that you can make the shortcuts GLOBAL which enables the shortcuts to be active even when potplayer isn’t the active window. I was considering captionpop.com for a hot for a second then i realized there’s no point since the chinese subs are off by 1 second for some of the eps and potplayer is SUPERIOR. you can’t even loop audio on captionpop,,, why not?? i had a similar set up with workaudiobook that i setup with autohotkey. global shortkeys are very convenient.
MEDIAFIRE LINKs to potplayer INI and reg file that has my settings .
2. I paste the chinese text and the deepL translation here https://gillmeister-software.com/online-tools/text/merge-lists-line-by-line.aspx
I use ❖ as a prefix for the text. I add spaces before and after the rhombus so i get an indent. Never knew what to google to find this damn site and I don’t remember what I googled but thank god i found it
PINYIN READER https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pinyin-reader/hledmlpbeiablkglomlminfemnepgjlp
it works with the pop-up dictionaries like inkah, zhongwen, zhongzhong. the other pinyin extensions do not work with the pop-up dictionaries which makes them shit. the pinyin generated is not 100% accurate though. I realized I want this because I don’t want to be hovering over words just to get the pinyin (when I know the word means due to japanese/korean Or it’s a noun that deepl clearly translated correctly or the hanzi that make up the word are super logical and are literally screaming the meaning of the word at the top of their lungs). hovering the mouse over the word is burdensome lol. lessening the burden and saving time is important to me.
hmm this one seems promising. chinese words separator. it looks better than pinyin reader aesthetically. it inserts spaces so if it parses wrong you may be sol? it seems aware of the multiple parsing possibilities unlike zerotoheroreader. gotta use it and see. EDIT: I definitely prefer this to PINYIN READER and the spacing/parsing thing does not interfere with the pop-up dictionary 🙂
I tried this READER https://www.zerotohero.ca/en/zh/reader since it adds pinyin on top but I don’t like the pop-up dictionary. the pictures seem cool but half the time the picture is literally the damn characters and the pop-up is more cumbersome to get rid of compared to the chrome pop-up extensions. I just want to finish reading/consuming the text…. and the window gets in the way of that. though in the short time I did use it I happily noticed that it would say the noun is hsk 6 or hsk 7-9 ( the new one) but it was like hsk 1-2 to me since I already know the word in japanese. I was hopeful that this site would be useful since it takes less effort to hover over the words but the window doesn’t go away as easily as zhongzhong etc so it’s counterproductive. also if the herotozero reader parses incorrectly you’re f’ed because it inserts spaces between the parsing so zhongzhong/zhongwen/inkah won’t work even if you hover over the text.so I choose the chrome pop-up extensions over this.
On captionpop you press T to reveal translation, R to repeat, Up arrow for previous subtitle, Down arrow for next subtitle
captionpop extension – so this extension let’s you expediently go from youtube to the captionpop website to learn from the youtube video you’re on. I don’t care for that because I need my endless looping but I LOVE how it shows me which youtube vids have subtitles. Sometimes what happens is that I notice the video has the CC icon or I specifically search and filter for vids that have caption then I click on the video and the subtitles are NOT IN Mandarin. In those cases it’s usually English subtitles. This plugin says under the video listing in search/playlists/channel/everywhere what language the subtitles are in ie simplified chinese, english, french, arabic, no subtitles, etc.
Force custom font chrome extension – i have my undying love for 何尼玛-细体 常规. I think it’s also called heiti
I tend to make the deepL parallel text then publish it to the internet via simplenote.com/nimbusnote since chrome pop-up dictionary extensions suck and only works on real websites and not on .html files on the computer for whatever reason.
I’m sure I’ll reach a point where making parallel texts won’t be worth the effort but for now it’s worth it. I don’t care for “parallel” texts where the text are side by side.. that is WAY too much eye-darting and eye-fatigue-inducing for me.
I chose the Chinese cartoon because it’s bizarre, overdramatic, clear in the tones/pronunciation due to the voice acting, entertainment made for natives by natives, and at my level. ( the herotozero lists it under hsk3. Alls I know is that I am way past hsk1 and 2) I think it’s at an ideal level of difficulty plus I know Japanese and I have a popup dictionary etc. If there’s too little to learn I would notice and move onto something else unless the content is super compelling in which case I can bask in my near perfect comprehension. if there’s way too much to learn, or impossible or difficult, it’s not efficient. With my setup I constantly press num alt pad 9 once to go to the next line and 2 times to skip the line. I save a little time with the line skipping since parallel text tells me what the next subtitle line will be.
I believe in learning in a logical order of learning from easier stuff to more difficult stuff and learning from stuff that’s made by natives for natives. I want to focus on conversational stuff since i gotta learn from the most common to the least common stuff. So I assume a cartoon that a 8 year old?? Understands 100% or nearly 100% would be a good source to learn mandarin from. They use so much chengyu/4 letter hanzi words that aren’t idioms or maybe that’s just how Chinese is. At least 10-30 chengyu / 4 character hanzi word that’s not Chengyu per ep ! How many do you need to know to understand most convos?? They definitely use more 4 character words than korean/Japanese which isn’t surprising
screenshots of chrome + zhongzhong? zhongwen? + chinese words separator + potplayer ( i barely look at potplayer since i treat the cartoon like an audiobook and i’m using a black and white eink computer screen anyway..) + force custom font extension ( i love how it affects zhongzhong/zhongwen too!) . Good fonts make all the difference! Also I love how you can display simplified and traditional characters when you hover over the word using zhongzzhong/zhongwen. It’s really helpful for recognizing and connecting the character to the Japanese equivalent because otherwise I would treat it like a new character lolz.
At first I was apprehensive about continuing this study/exposure/comprehensible input method because the audio for the lines would loop so much since it’s on an infinite loop until i tell it to stop looping or go to the next line. Part of it was due to my shoddy chinese grammar skills and part of it was me not not having decided what I wanted to get out of this. As for the former that fixed itself after x eps.. .I don’t remember the exact number (maybe 10? 5? no idea) but the line rarely loops more than 5 times nowadays. It was a combination of getting my comprehensible input, getting used to the show/chinese etc and the hsk 1-6 grammar deck etc etc.
As for the latter, at first I wasn’t sure what I want to get out of the line before I pressed NEXT LINE aka alt num 9. Questions like should I relisten to see if I can hear the tones ? ( I’m saying HEAR not MEMORIZE or REMEMBER) or relisten to see if I can really hear the pinyin sounds clearly? Or should I just press next as soon as I comprehend the sentence or improve my comprehension of it whether it be from deepL or from the pop-up dictionary. so if I want to strive for perfection and aim to relisten for the pinyin, tones, meaning, effortless comprehension, etc etc for each line it’s gonna take longer since i gotta keep the audio looping but benefits don’t outweigh the downsides. For example even if I paid attention to the tones I ain’t gonna remember them… simple as that. even if i make a concerted effort to remember the meaning of the word or to pay attention to the meaning of each character that make up the word (since i know japanese) it doesn’t guarantee i’ll remember shit since I’m gonna remember them when I hear them x number of times in multiple contexts… end of story. So I decided to focus on comprehension and understanding and ignore the re-listening just for the sake of pinyin/tones unless i felt particularly compelled for a specific word or phrase which never happens. I also have to remember that I’m going to make a subs2srs deck at the end anyway…
here’s some chinese soft-subbed (that is the KEY WORD) kiddie cartoons that are great for learning since they mostly have short lines! Just providing more options beyond softsubbed peppa the pig on youtube: i can’t learn from these cartoons because they’re too easy though I wish knew about these options when I was a beginner! By easy I mean the ratio of unknown/known is not ideal. I definitely don’t know every single word in the cartoon but it’s not worth learning from the cartoon because it’s too easy. I can tell it’s not at my level. hmm or maybe not… since learning from mandarin subs of american movies with matching softsubs is probably more fun and less frustrating ? (beause you got the english subs and dubs are always going to be easier than something that was originally mandarin. some of them are kids movie so it’s as easy as it’s gonna get). Speaking of dubs I thought it was unintentionally HILARIOUS how they call tenma-sensei denma-sun-seng in the korean dub of monster. It’s all the more hilarious because they say his name OFTEN on the show. It’s literally impossible to take the show seriously with them saying denma every 10 seconds if you know Japanese because it’s just funny. In this case they really should’ve kept it as TENMA or just change everyone’s Japanese names to Korean names. I thought it was funny when they called hermione hermi in the mandarin but this denma thing is hilarious.
I absolutely love technology and how you can increase efficiency by combining everything together. I’m all about avoiding manually clicking, pasting 5 billion times!! My main motivation for posting this is to spread the word about autohotkey which enables me to break from using anki 2.0 for reviewing mandarin on anki (I use both anki 2.1 and anki 2.0 to use the plugins). I was really attached to anki 2.0 because of wordquery since it doesn’t work on anki 2.1 even with fastwordquery – the dictionaries just DO NOT show up. So I tried to see if stardict is usable and it is once I change the font which is an impossible feat for goldendict (don’t need ya anyway) and i know from past experience that autohotkey makes everything more convenient, useful, efficient. The end result of combining autohotkey and stardict is better than wordquery so I made the transition to anki 2.1 for anki minus search cards by length plugin on anki 2.0. Morphman and mandarin is a pretty sick combo since there’s no conjugations in mandarin. I never used morphman/subs2srs for korean/japanese because my korean/japanese were already too good to use those tools when i found out about subs2srs/when it came into existance lol… it’d be ridiculously time-sucking for very little benefit. i don’t need audio and i don’t have time for anki cards with audio. I do use the MASS TAGGER function of morphman for Korean because I have A LOT OF cards dumped into anki from HUGE tables from a japanese site and dictionaries with example sentences etc etc… that aspect of morphman is worth it for korean. I can easily curate or segregate the potentially useful cards from the useless cards.
programs:
lingoes dictionary – it’s an off-line pop-up dictionary that works on double click. it works for 1-2 syllable chinese words after I run the add pinyin on top of hanzi inserts spaces between the words. I double click to get the pop-up dictionary instead of manually highlighting the word when the parsing is perfect. of course the parsing isn’t 100% accurate but it’s pretty damn good. This prompted me to make an autohotkey to double click when i press insert.. i also set it so that lingoes looks up the words that are highlighted so I do that for words that are 3 syllables or longer.as much as i love pinyin helper’s definition table… scrolling and pressing page down and end is kinda annoying . I’d say 98% of the time i use lingoes/goldendict and have no use for the definition table. also since i’m using morphman and seeing it i+1 stuff most of the time i rely on lingoes over the pinyin helper definition table since i usually just need to look up 1 word. There have been times where the definition table has it and lingoes doesn’t so i love having options. i think the biggest dictionary on lingoes is the naver c-k one. lingoes has J/K/E dictionaries for mandarin!
stardict dictionary – dictionaries are a must because even though the pinyin helper anki addon generates the english definitions sometimes I want a MORE detailed explanation (it makes it easier to remember/understand the word) or another explanation or a dictionary example sentence or hear it from a japanese/korean point of view. in general korean/japanese dictionaries are more useful than english dictionaries… which makes sense since those languages are closer to chinese than english. Dictionaries also come in handy when the pinyin helper doesn’t parse correctly which is a rare occurrence.
<__–STARDICT with an iffy font 😦
hmm i think all in all i like the fonts 何尼玛-细体 常规 and .黒体-日本語 because they’re very readable. i think you have to google heiti to download the font. I love how the different languages are distinct and clear in one glance as to what’s korean, japanese, mandarin. the font in the screenshot is noto sans and i now have the font set as 黒体-日本語 which is so much better.
GOLDENDICT
goldendict has a pop-updictionary function but i don’t care for it because it doesn’t let me change the font-size/window color etc . or so i thought! I don’t use stardict anymore since only goldendict has the pop-up dictionary function! I figured out how to change the font via googling but it’s totally worth it. i set up the keyboard shortcut for the pop-up dictionary in goldendictionary to alt + g and then i used autohotkey to make it what i want in ANKI which is BACKSPACE. When I press BACKSPACE on the anki window titled AUDIO (name of my anki profile), the autohotkey script double clicks, copies the highlighted text and sends alt + g that goldendict likes. I also set up an autohotkey to copy and send alt + g for words that are 3 syllables and longer. Lingoes has dictionaries that stardict/goldendict doesn’t have and stardict/goldendict has dictionaries that lingoes doesn’t have so I like having 2 pop-up dictionaries that work in anki. on anki i press insert or double click on the word to bring up lingoes and if lingoes fails then i can press backspace to bring up the goldendict pop-up dictionary or i press backspace with the mouse hovered over the word which brings up both. i think stardict dictionary is still useful even though i can’t use it as a pop-up dictionary because on the main window it does the search as you type thing and show you partial matches while goldendict doesn’t and i can’t see anything in the option about enabling that. that feature is useful for korean and doesn’t make much of a difference for mandarin. but in all honesty i have the authoktey set up so that if goldendict pop-up dictionary doesn’t find it, the autohotkey goes to google/daum/etc
it also contains stardict/lingoes dictionaries that I use for korean/chinese – k-j, ke, k-k, c-e, c-k, c-j. I love how I get good coverage with multiple dictionaries and I have autothotkey so if i want i can go to the internet dictionary with a click. i had to modify the stardict dictionaries i use for wordquery on anki 2.0 because <br/> shows up <br/> as is the case with <font style so I did find and replace with \N etc etc to make it look pretty and functional ( I got the fix!!! ) . I prefer lingoes pop-up dictionary so if a dictionary exists as lingoes dictionary and stardict dictionary i only load the dictionary into lingoes. some dictionaries are only available as lingoes and some are only available as stardict . for stardict the mediafire link for korean includes the korean-wiki with 225,331 words, standard korean dic that contains 366 ,507 words, comprehensive dictionary that i made from the online dictionary that has over a million entries has 926,670 words. also recently got dz dics from this russian site = Explanatory Dictionary of Korean Language (Kor-Kor) (for GoldenDict, UTF-8, Version 1.0 red. 16.01.2020) (headwords: 279,210)
I had to open goldendict, click on help -> configuration folder-> make a folder in the styles in folder. I named it me. Then i pasted the qt style and article style with the font/color rendering specified to my needs. I had to add extra crap for Korean TEXT. Then i had to go back to options in goldendict and change my theme to “me.” I had to rename all the korean dictionaries with (ko-ko) at the end to get the font to show up because i love seoulhangang ! for some reason.黒体-日本語 does not work but 何尼玛-细体 常规 works… but they’re nearly the same so i’m happy 🙂 It’s a pain to figure out but I like how the rendering is customizable since i can’t find a font that looks nice in japanese/korean/mandarin/english. I do like the English and Japanese text-font of the Chinese font though.
deepL – amazing pop-up dictionary. Can’t believe it’s free amazing! it makes mandarin subs2srs cards so much more useful since the problem is I know some/most/all the characters in the sentence but i have no idea wtf it means. it’s all about comprehensible input NOT incomprehensible input which is a legit waste of time. deepl is like a must in my eyes lol.
The other option for a pop-up dictionary is a hover dictionary via zhongzhong /zhongwen on chrome. you can either go on ankiweb.net and do reviews on the browser to do that OR use the Copy2Clipboard addon + texthooker.com + toggle clipboard inserter on chrome. https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1525025114
there’s also yomichan which allows for c-j in addition to c-e
anki plugins:
advanced copy fields I use this for swapping fields, copying fields etc. on a related note i use [ a-zA_Z}[a-zA-Z0-9]* and [\u4e00-\u9fa5]* for getting rid of english text/mandarin text respectively. you have check regular expression to make it work.
morphman definitely worth tinkering with the settings by following mattvsjapan’s guide like what’s considered too short and too long, what’s considered mature, css on the unknown morphs (I made them huge and bold lol) etc. i had to change the config.py so that it does not skip morphs i saw that day since just changing it in the options didn’t do shit. I also made an external.db and dumped into hsk1-2 stuff so i don’t have to see shit like wo shi sensei. i tag and suspend cards that are tagged MM_toolong because morphman still shows them sometimes and it’s infuriating… Actually I prefer using search cards by length on anki 2.0 for suspending. most of the times if it’s over 12 characters it’s just way too hard and not ideal. it makes more sense to expose myself to a shitton load of sentences that are 5-9 characters long etc since i have a fighting chance of comprehending them. I use autohotkey to save words/sentence patterns to a .txt during reviews. I gather up cards that contain the words/sentence patterns I collect by searching in the browser and tagging. I search at least 30-40 things at a time using Expression:(*word1* or * word2*) etc etc. My other option is to use MASS TAGGER feature of morphman to tag the cards that contain the words in the pinyin field that was generated using pinyin helper since the parser is pretty good. this only works if you change the morhpman cardtype to SPACED LANGUAGES. The other thing I figured out is that you can search the field that contains the definitions generated by pinyin helper to gather similar cards like if I search the word idiom I can gather up all the cards that contain an idiom. The idiom cards that are tagged 0.5t are very useful!
multi-column note editor
set font size default font is too small on anki ui
quick field navigation I use this plugin to save time and it enables the authotkey scripts to work. technically you could still get the scripts to work by sending tab a bunch of times instead of sending control 6 or whatever field it is
tagger toggler fork this one can be very useful because you can easily tag cards during initial reviews. I either tag the card with something, suspend the card, delete the card, or mark the card by pressing asterisk. i’m still experimenting around to see what tags are most useful i have stuff like “cute” “funny” ” dramatic” “easy-to-remember-tones” (when the tone repeats like 22 or 44) “grammar” “vocab” “zze” (for easy cards that are mm_already) “4-ji” for words that are at least 4 chararcters long that don’t have “iidiom” in the definition generated by pinyin helper, “ssimliar-sounds” – if the sounds that sound the same appear in succession in the sentence (if you watch the youtube video about z/c/j/ch etc etc you’re like they sound totally different or a little different then you hear shit at native speed and then you’re like yep i’m back at square one. can’t really force your ears/brains to be woke). the plugin can also TAG AND suspend the card if you want and I definitely do that for cards that are too easy or too hard or the audio is f
‘ed up etc. lol i found a nasty, random example from subs2srs that i tagged as easy-to-remember-tones:
✎ 它们会用大便攻击 它们会用大便攻击 ♥ ☂ Those throw poop at you.. 4 4 4 4 | 11 .
here’s a more normal sentence:
✎ 逃到书桌后面去 逃到书桌后面去 ♥ ☂ Get behind that bookshelf! 11 | 444
I get amazed when i find sentences where the 4th tone is in succession 6 times in a row
i definitely love my deck that i made outta the cards tagged tones-easy-to-remember. i notice the crap out of the tones of words since the tones are in succession.
I got an idea to also try the tag hhard-unique for words with hanzi that i don’t know and tag ppayAttention for words that seem easy but the meaning isn’t what i expect/predict which is all i do since mandarin is written in chinese chracters and i know japanese ( can’t really turn it off!) . Also I’ve been trying exists-in-japanese tag for words that exist in japanese and means the same thing ( if it means something different i’d tag ppayattention) which means all i have to focus on i remembering the pinyin and the tone. i use the tag ez-hanzi where the hanzi and the meaning are easy and straight forward/logical. i still use vvocab for words that are kinda easy that don’t fit in with any of these tags.
haven’t been really stressing out about tones. i figured learning by association would be as effortless at it comes?? i see no point in trying to memorize or notice or remember tones during subs2srs reviews/inital views since i’m not going to remember it anyway. i just focus on comprehending the card or increasing my comprehension of my card… reading the pinyin and accent marks carefully is a futile exercise… you can’t expect yourself to remember/memorize something in the first encounter.. maybe after 20th encounter or 100th encounter? it depends on the word. i’m assuming like japanese shit will sound like what it sounds like because they say it the same way 5 billion times as i get my exposure( In this case condensed audio/subs2srs). i’m sure laid back is fine for really common words but it’ll probably require more effort less common words. i’m not interested in output anyway so it’s not a big deal to me. also i can’t type pinyin because i don’t know pinyin… i refuse to memorize/study it lol. I will learn the sounds first and some words so that i have less issues with pinyin cognitive dissonance. pinyin definitely deepened my love for hangeul ! i think i saw yoyo chinese’s video on tones and pinyin a year or two or three ago and i don’t wanna re-watch it or watch other teach chinese youtube vids at this point in time. Also I never got the hype around coloring pinyin for tones… my anki is black and white for good reason. COLOR doesn’t help me.. it’s like expecting to have mastered korean spacing rules from just reading and watching tv ( which does not work since I’m just reading to comprehend and not to memorize how they spaced the words ) . One of rags is mm_alreadyknown for morphman and I was unsure when I want to use it since the word may be really easy becUse I know Japanese but I don’t know the tones whatsoever. So what I’ve decided to do is use that tag during anki sessions if I have strong conviction tell that I will understand and recognize the word in question outside of anki like condensed audio. There have been times where I’ve surprised myself when I understand words in condensed audio that I’ve seen in anki that I was rather sure that I wouldn’t understand/recognize it outside of anki when I saw the word in anki (after all I have context, hanzi, pinyin, english translation etc always on the FRONT lolz). I realized that I can understand words even if I don’t have the tone numbers memorized and the fact of the matter is that it takes time for me to notice that a word is being pronounced in a specific melody so it literally takes time. I am very aware that I am relying on the characters and pinyin etc in anki to understand the word in anki ( that’s why I love subs2srs for mandarin) and I try to assess harshly in anki whether I’d understand and recognize the word out there in the real world with just the sound. If I assess that I can understand the word outside anki with only sound i use tag toggler to tag it as alreadyknown
speed focus mode auto-alert auto-reveal I use this plugin to use subs2srs cards like comprehensible input lol. i have reviews set to zero save for a couple curated decks and those are capped low too lol. i mostly see new cards because that’s what i wanna do. Not so sure if such a strategy would work if you only know English. I set it so that it shows the answer after 1 second so i can just grade the card instead of pressing enter then the grade. I also paste the {Audio} 20 times in the back of the card so i don’t have to press R to repeat the audio. i’m still trying to figure out exactly how i want to make subs2srs cards work for me. it makes anki more effortless since those enter button pushes add up. Technically I’m still getting spaced repetition since stuff still repeats (grammar/vocab/whatever patterns) even if 99% of the cards I see are new cards rather than reviews. I’d rather see 20-30 cards with the word I want to learn than one card 20-30 times with the default the anki settings… it’s just more effective. Speaking of which my lax settings are even more lax for mandarin.. it’s like 9 days 10days 15 days and minium interval of 7 days ? I feel like if you can’t learn the card with a minimum interval of 7days, the card shouldn’t even be in anki… thinking in terms of efficiency. I’m thinking the settings should be even more lax since these are subs2srs cards with audio and all that. I tag like crazy while seeing them so I can curate them later
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chinese companion -frequency sort hsk suspend
Pinyin on top of Hanzi – holy crap this one’s amazing. it adds pinyin AND the definitions FOR EVERY SINGLE WORD IN THE SENTENCE! I don’t know of any plugin that does anything like this for other languages. it literally only works because of the writing system! mandarin is a really convenient language to learn when you have technology on your side! the parser is pretty good but when it fails i just use deepl/stardict/lingoes/naverline site etc using AUTHOTKEY. in the anki UI it calls itself pinyin helper but it’s so much more than just pinyin since it can parse and generate definitions. ONLY DOWNSIDE is that it DOES NOT WORK on traditional characters which is a non-issue for me 🙂 and another downside is the fact that it looks up every single word in the sentence which just adds to scrolling aggravation etc so I absolutely recommend pairing THIS plugin with lingoes pop-up dictionary! i usually don’t need to scroll becuase lingoes works.
search card by length – only anki 2.0 – i still use this in conjunction with anki 2.1 so i can suspend long cards. i search min : 12 etc then tag it as llong and then suspend. suspending cards tagged mm_toolong by morphman doesn’t always catch all the long cards for whatever reason… i also search max:5 and tag as 2short
other premade audio decks i use besides subs2srs include counters, hsk 1-6 ( it has the word and the sentence), immersive chinese, zhongwen redgreenblue, free blueprint mandarin deck, hsk1-6 grammar deck, measure word, spoonfed, mandarinmania, tatoeba, japanes-chinese sentence thing. i only use decks with sentences because isolated words do nothing for me since i can’t make myself associate arbitrary info with arbitrary info. at first i capped the reviews to a really low number like 2 or 5 than i capped the reviews to ZERO but it still worked out since there’s overlap among the decks. anyways it was either i cap the reviews to zero or not do them at all so that’s what i did. now i have the decks capped low instead of zero but i don’t necessarily do them everyday lol.
<- english and korean is shit since they’re both from google translate. thank god deepl exists!! the korean translation is hilarious. kinda surprised the c->english translation beat the c->korean google translation. now that i think about it maybe papago’s c->k translation is good haha. i gotta test it out. k translation says “the friends you have bought peter.” jeez it makes this kid’s anime so dark. this anime is dark but it’s not that dark. the original japanese line is useless af for understanding this mandarin dialogue since that is the point of dubs (turn it into mandarinnnnnnn so people don’t have to read subtitles).. hmmm maybe the line before/after that line coincides with the dub dialogue. but no matter, this sentence is easy now.
if you install authotkey and run all these scripts chances are some of them won’t work or it’ll go rogue and delete crap since i set it to copy over text in the 9th field of the anki word etc for some scripts since i set it up for my computer/anki but learning about autohotkey isn’t hard just google or bug people on the forums to modify them to your needs. i still share them because it’s helpful to learn from examples. it’s easy to modify the scripts to make it work for you.
I highly recommend getting a gaming mouse with extra buttons if you use autohotkey that way you don’t have to remember the keyboard shortcuts. I wish i was a gamer so i could have found out about gaming mouses sooner
2.1-deepl-stardict.ahk when i press f5: if text is highlighted on anki, the autohotkey script pastes the highlighted text in field 9 of my card then looks up the word on lingoes and stardict. i came up with script because the wordquery plugin was the only reason i wanted to do subs2srs reviews on anki 2.0. now i’m all in for anki 2.1 minus search card by length plugin which i don’t need during reviews/initial view.
if text is not highlighted, it runs text in field 1 on anki through deepl. field 1 is the hanzi expression field. deepl is like a must-have for me since the problem is i know what some/most/all the characters means but i have no f’in idea what the sentence means or i’m pretty damn sure i’m missing nuance and not getting the point of the sentence.
i have deepl set as control +c, control + h
the gif below shows wordquery addon at work to generate definitions from dictionaries with the help of authotkey: I don’t use it for mandarin subs2srs anymore since I figured out how to use stardict/lingoes with autohotkey. still use it for korean cards of course since you can batch in the browse window. I technically set up the autohotkey script to paste the word into the field before looking up stuff so I could batchrun for Chinese cards if I wanna
my cards don’t look fugly like this anymore lol.
dubs are definitely more fun and useful for me as a beginner? intermediate? especially the american movies. they tend to talk more slow and clear and exaggerated compared to chinese dramas. to me in terms of usefulness it’s dubs of american movies/ anime dub (taiwanese) > donghua chinese cartoons > youtube videos > talk/variety shows like the chinese version of produce 101 > chinese dramas. my ranking for most fun to least fun is the same which tells you something. I’m sure it will change as my passive mandarin ability/vocab grows or maybe it will never change lolz. i remember i came across some card from a chinese drama and the person was saying something really simple and easy but i couldn’t hear it because they talked so fast even though i had the audio on auto-repeat 20x… the truth is that they’re taking fast. It just sounds fast to me. Whenever I hear korean or Japanese it’s slow and whenever it’s Chinese it’s wicked fast ie girls planet 999. I almost always watch Japanese talk variety shows at at least 1.2 x nowadays. anyways i’m pretty damn sure that if i was a chinese person who was fluent in mandarin I wouldn’t be watching chinese dramas anyway. kinda like i’m pretyty damn sure if i were a korean person luent in korean i’d never watch korean dramas … there’s just so many other things i’d rather than watch a shitty korean soap opera lol. anyways i’d imagine that learning from drama in subs2srs is more fun than actually watching a drama i since i’ll never watch a chinese drama lol. but in all seriousness if i was fluent in korean/mandarin and knew no english i’d probably be watching american dramas with korean/mandarin subs if i didn’t learn english. and in all seriousness you dont have to watch a single second of dramas or wuxia etc to get good at mandarin.
anki-asterisk.ahk if anki is the active window, when i press asterisk, it sends 2 after 200 miliseconds. if i am marking a card that usually means i want to see it again so i’d rather it just mark some answer and cut down on the keystrokes damnit
anki-browser-frontfront.ahk when i press alt + b, it brings browser to the front
anki-delete.ahk when anki is the active window, when i press delete, it sends control + D. on ank i2.1 they change delete to control + delete which is just a bitch anki-editor-frontfront.ahk when i press alt+ e it brings anki editor to the front anki-front.ahk when i press alt + a it brings anki to the front close-EDITOR.ahk when i press f12 if closes the anki editor and then activates anki screen deepL-from-anki-editor.ahk when i press f7 it runs highlighted text through through deepl. easier to press f7 than cotrol +c, control + h.. hmmm it seems lingoes makes my deepL autohotkey scripts not work so whta i do now is tag cards i want to run deepl on then put those in a deck and run the deepl scripts to my herat’s content after closing LINGOES. deepl-paste-5TH.ahk if deepl is the active window, when i scrolll the mouse DOWN it copies the text in the translation window and then pastes it in to the 5th field of editor. i leave deepl maximized so that the coordinates work everytime. f5-lingoes-paste-F6.ahk if lingoes is the active window, when I press f5 on lingoes it pastes copied text onto the 6th field anki. for some reason i can’t get control + c to work so i do control + c then press f5. I have since figured out how to bypass this problem and that is by the authotkey that automatically copies highlighted text. it works like a charm! f5-stardict-paste.ahk if stardict is the active window, if i press f5 it copies and pastes the highlighted text into the 6th field of anki. i have one of the buttons on the gaming mouse set to f5 so i click on the mouse buttons ifFAIL-f2.ahk if deepl is the active window, when i scroll the mousewheel up it runs deepl again on field 1 on anki. i made this because sometimes the first script above doesn’t work or rather deepl failed me. open-acitivate-DEEPL.ahk when i press alt + d it brings deepl to the front. also it checks to see if deepl is open; if deepl is not running it opens deepl stardict-front.ahk when i press alt + s it brings stardict to the front. I ‘m gonna change this to the windows key which is # for authotkey sendtostardict.ahk when i press control + alt + s- it sends highlighted text to stardict sendtolingies copies and sends highlighted text to linges. i have this in the startup folder of my windows computer .
vocab-tag-deck-move.ahk search-browse-grammar.ahk grammar-tag-deck-move.ahk these are authotkeys for searching highlighted text in the review window in the anki browser and tagging them. i have to keep the browser maximized because coordinates are involved. i don’t use these scripts much because i have morphman, mass tagger feature of morphman, frequencylist.txt etc etc but it’s definitely useful if you want to see examples of the exact same phrase/sentence pattern. nowadays i do a search with Expression:( *phrase* or *phrase*) with like 30 phrases to do multiple searches at once so I can tag them, move them into a deck and re-sort using the hsk sort plugin so I could see multiple example sentences with the phrase. i only learn from those tagged cards if they also are tagged with 0.5t or 1 t.
recently I even made ahk to send 2 to anki after I press my tag toggler shortcuts so I can spare myself a lotta keystrokes.
So when I first come across my 1T mm_frequency cards my options are to double click or hover over the word and press insert to bring up the lingoes pop-up dictionary, press backspace for the goldendict pop-up dictionary, press LEFT arrow keu to run deepL on the first field, highlight the word then press the shortcut to look up the word on stardict/lingoes, press windows button + c to look up the word/phrase/grammar etc on naver linedict, or press down/page-up/down/end to see the definitions generated by pinyin helper, and to press a tag toggler shortcut and grade the card if i understand the card fine with the english translation and the hanzi. I mostly do deepl/lingoes-pop-up but i definitely use my options. i use the naver linedict the least because usually the other stuff is enough. I also heard of people doing anki reviews on the browser to use zhonwen pop-up dictionary so they can just hover the word but i have too many cards to be uploading it to ankiweb. Also I hate how ankiweb doesn’t automatically play the audio. also i like tagging the new cards during the initial encounter
I’m not gonna write extensively about how to subs2srs mandarin and all that bs but i didn’t just jump into subs2srs decks with my japanese kanji knowledge and trudged on. it’s the opposite. Even if I have a million subs2srs cards and morphman and I am super literate in Japanese I can’t just jump into mandarin on anki because i don’t know any mandarin grammar and i can’t hear mandarin. I was not qualified to learn from subs2srs on anki… like the saying that it’s possible to know all the words in the sentence and not understand the sentence, it is POSSIBLE to know all the characters in the sentence and not understand the sentence. Deepl is my savior lol. Of course deepl fails me at time but it’s still helpful a majority of the time. in my experience korean and japanese are more similar than mandarin/japanese or mandarin/korean so mandarin is hard for me. Anyways, if you can’t hear mandarin even if the sentence on anki is short and audio repeats the audio 20 times, you still can’t hear it! there’s at least 5 sounds that sound exactly the same and the tones are impossible to hear when people speak at natural speed when you’re a complete beginner with virgin ears. so I did some grammar cards, and other wonderful premade cards halfassedly as halfassedly as possible ( set huge intervals, cap the reviews to 0, do it very sporadically and inconsistently. Chinese grammar isn’t rocket science at least for beginner/intermediate stuff so default anki settings aren’t needed… actually they’re never needed. there are more important things in my life not to mention fucking covid) and I listened to condensed audio of code geass (it’s the most fun thing I could think of to listen to in mandarin and C.c.’s voice DOES sound like the japanaese counterpart which is impressive. The French dub doesn’t even try… cc just sounds like some random French woman. Omg I heard some of the mandarin voices for season 2 and the Chinese dub definitely tries to make the voices similar to the Japanese voice actors which is REALLY appreciate.. it was very noticeable with the bald? Chinese character with the unique, annoying voice) and some other crap when I felt like it. Like most good anime, i love the background music and sound effects and it makes condensed audio more entertaining and useful. I didn’t do anything hardcore because there’s no rush. i’m all about the cardinal rules of AJATT which is to have fun and to do SOMETHING than NOTHING. on a random note, I read somewhere on japanese google that japanese literacy gives you 1000 hanzi for free ~
hmm I actually made subs2srs decks that only contain cards that are 2 characters long, 3 chacratser long, 4 charactesr long, etc up to 7 characters . I’ve also tagged cards that are between 6-10 characters long with “ideallength.” this is something that you can only really do with mandarin because they only write in hanzi! those decks are pretty cool and useful since the BEST cards to learn from are SHORT and comprehensible (they usually are since they’re short and i have my english translation and DEEPL). not to mention I ran morphman and suspended comprehension cards, have a frequency.txt ( i paste stuff i collected via gaming mouse + ahk + subs2srs reviews on the top of it) etc so all i get is USEFUL SHORT cards which are extremely desirable characteristics for subs2srs cards. if you don’t run subs2srs you’re gonna get a lotta useless shit like people yelling people’s names or whatever bs phrase or variation of that bs phrase you already know and heard 5 billion times.
useful regex: CHECK off TREAT AS REGULAR EXPRESSION in find and replace window of anki. useful when you have fields that contain mandarin and english and you want to separate the fields.
aka the YG DUNGEON according to kpop fans because YG artists don’t make much music! I think in the first episode YG describes the treasure box and if you replace those words with dungeon, the sentence still makes sense.
So I forgot to post this post. I watched yg treasure box when the eps were coming out one by one and it’s been a long time since then!
here we go:
Only thing I can recommend on v-live (a website) is YG Treasure Box show on VLIVE because I don’t use that site very much. Tactually there’s also produce-x 101 content too. I think it’d be a fantastic resource for beginners and intermediate people since it seems to be full of daily conversation stuff and you have access to Korean subs and English subs and subs in many other languages. They sub all the talking since it’s closed captioning and you can rip the subs and learn from it using sub2srs or workaudiobook or re-listening via files generated by sub2srs etc. Check out this language log for more details on how to use vlive to learn Korean! https://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=9646 <- link is probably dead
Ondemandkorea.com also has Korean subtitles for some of the content they upload but as far as I know there’s no way to download it. I think it’s stuff they uploaded in 2017 like for sketchbook. For me, I don’t have that many words to learn from korean tv so I don’t have as much of an incentive to download the sub file to learn compared to the me in 2012. This site is a pain with the ads but if you load multiple windows of the same thing you don’t have to watch ads or use ad-block. If you need a recommendation check out the documentaries (don’t think there’s korean close captioning for this one) https://www.ondemandkorea.com/sbs-special-e547.html
So it turns out v-livethe only the place you can watch YG’s boy group survival show. I have a thing with cut-throat survival shows. It is such a blessing that they went that route instead of a TV network for Korean learners. The videos come with subtitles in Korean (legit closed captioning every word that comes out of people’s mouths), Japanese, Chinese, English, and many many more thanks to the billingual k-pop fans out there. So far there isn’t a lot to mine from this show because I’ve seen so many kpop survival shows / other korean shows. I’ve mined more from the first 2 episodes of mix 9 (the closest thing to the PRODUCE show which reminds me the UNIT made me appreciate MNET more because that show was SOO Boring. watched it at 1.5x etc most of the time. i’M STILL glad I watched it though since I got to find out BI/RAIN’s personality/work ethic/style – it was very uncomfortable TV. felt like i got a glimpse of what the mblaq members had to deal with haha ) than this whole show. I think I looked up maybe 5 things and made 2 cards from all the eps?? This show is easy to understand. I love how it’s so easy to mine from it since I have Korean subs and if I really need help or confirmation I can reference the English or Japanese subs. ie download the episode, watch on potplayer, press my shortcut to copy the subtitle on the screen etc etc.
This was one card I made from the show
<-i swear on another korean show i saw them make a pun with oo dang tang but exchanging oo in hangeul to the hanja for cow. it was kinda random but cute.
One of the things I noticed while watching was all the direct word to word translations the Japanese trainees employed in their speaking. It stood out since they “corrected” what they said whenever they put up the korean text (They do this on Japanese TV too since otherwise they’re gonna irresponsibly display incorrect Japanese text on Japanese TV. For Japanese TV they also love playing around with the effects and colors of the text to imbue a certain mood. They can also use KATAKANA against the person! I sometimes wish something like katakana existed for Korean where they distinguish foreign words; even if it’s something as simple as putting dots on top of the hangeul etc. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has wasted time and effort figuring out simple english words/names like Martha or zolpidem (at least put sumeunjeh next to it so i can exert less EFFORT!!!) -r. Now that I think of it don’t they make the font of foreign names in korean books different from the rest of the text?). I was thinking though why do they need to learn Korean since you can make more money in Japan.
I like this Japanese expression a lot. It’s just very satisfying hearing an expression that fits the situation perfectly. I recall wakabayashi from AUDREY (odori… i didn’t know the meaning of their conbi name for years lol. there’s katakana for you) and nicole from KARA using it. So the former was cathartic and funny because it was perfect since he’s fluent in Japanese. The latter was lackluster because of nicole’s pronunciation/intonation/pitch accent of the word. Her usage was correct but the delivery was lacking. so the only thing that came to mind was Nicole is really putting effort into improving her Japanese. Cool… instead of me just enjoying the convo. The mispronunciation stands out that much more when people you use fancy expressions or big/uncommon words etc etc. Though in all seriousness Nicole from KARA improved by leaps and bounds. I think she’s trying to work in Japan ~ happy for her.
few examples:
오디션을 받았다 가수에되고싶다
Well at least korean peeps have no problem understanding what they mean.
Those instances are always amusing to me. I felt worried and bad for the Japanese trainees since they didn’t seem to provide a translator. If they don’t understand what YG says they can’t help it. There was this one scene in ep 3 where YG asks as a yes or no question of “Are the fellow trainees hard to keep in line” (something like that, I’m going off my memory) and the Japanese trainee answered “Yes” and then everyone laughed and it’s either because the answer is funny or the trainee answered the question without understanding it or maybe he misanswered because he was nervous. I could not tell since the answer could be interpreted as funny. I am assuming they understand Korean better than they can speak it.
In episode 2 I was so impressed with the Japanese guy’s English rap because I have realistic, low expectations whenever it involves Japanese people speaking English. I think I was even more impressed with the cute korean kid who rapped.
another entry about the now defunct lang-8. it’s not defunct to me, japanese peeps still roaming there being super helpful. i wanted to share my entries over the years to see how much I proved or stayed stagnant over the yearsI think I started learning japnaese in summer 2007. By that I mean that I ALSO started learning about how to learn a language since I never learned learn a foreign language as a teen/adult at that point. I did my share of wandering and schumucking around around. some of my entries are realllllllllllly long so I tried to choose the shorter ones. I included some of the corrections. DON’T learn japnaese from my writing since i’m not a native speaker haha.
I pulled stuff from lang-8, & for the recent years I had to pull from dokushometer. As you can see I improved and also kinda stagnated and I made zero effort to memorize corrections and even if I did I would’ve never improved to this extent… what gave me the improvement was doing a lot of stuff in Japanese with the self-talking and watching and consuming COMPELLING Japanese content especially the LOL VARIETY. It’s pretty decent Output progress for 12 years Especially with 2010 and 2020 fucking me over. Never went to Japan maybe I never will… we will see.
Things I remember:
-I practiced output feverishly via talking to myself, self-thinking in Japanese from the get-go.Therefore my output in the beginning was extremely simple, basic Japanese. I avoided “making up” japanese but I still kind of experimented forming japanese when I self-talked and then looked it up later etc etc. I just really wanted to get good at Japanese ASAP. eventually i did exclusively think/self-talk in Japanese like 90% of the time automatically because i got used to it. Nowadays I do english and japanese since i live in america and i don’t want to sound like a buffoon by thinking in japanese 24/7. maybe my korean output abilities would improve if i tried to implement this for korean but i have no desire/need to do that so i don’t…….. i will say it’s good to have options. i saw some youtube video where somebody said the way you use your tongue/mouth in english is mostly this and for japanese it’s mostly this and korean is in the middle between the two. I agreed with that person. something about the vowel-heaviness or the way i use my mouth/jaws/etc in japanese is more physically tiring/demanding than korean/english. I tried practicing self-talking/reaading-out-loud to myself in japanese for years and this discomfort/obstacle has not been resolved lol. maybe it’ll resolve if i exclusively use japanese for x years?? or maybe it’s my jaws wtf lol. I Wonder how mandarin fits into the venn diagram. I had to mention the self-talking stuff because as much as my korean comprehension and vocab has improved vastly over the years my output is shit that’s because I only use korean passively (comprehending).
On the other hand it’s clear I’ve improved my Japanese output ability dramatically over the years.
-2008 – I was into j-dramas and j-music. I also read stuff using the pop-up dictionary rikai-chan.
-2008 – discovered talk/variety shows on youtube and love some of them to bits. I remember looking up the word UWAKI. I was especially motivated by the reactions of the tv tarento people. I was like what is that!!! I already finished RTK at the time but the kanji doesn’t really help me infer the meaning. I went from looking up words every 5 seconds to every 5 minutes to some infrequent interval quickly since they say the same shit over and over in daily conversation. Of course I was at the level where it’s a roulette in that sometimes I barely look up anything and other times I have a lot to look up… it just depended on luck since 80-90% coverage isn’t that helpful sometimes if they use a lot of words that’s in the 10-20%.
-2010- STARTED reading physical japanese books via book-off and mined sentences/vocab from it. I read a novel or two back in 2009 since i found something online. in 2010 i read mostly fiction… or maybe all fiction. I think I like japanese fiction more than american/english fiction or at least it feels like it’s easier to find good fiction books in japanese than in english. i think the most i read was 15 books in a month or two?? (can’t remember the exact numbers) because it was summer vacation and i was working a part=time job. I was also makin anki cards from it etc… only if i had the kindle then. i remember writing words/sentence fragments into anotebook to later make anki cards since i didn’t have a smartphone to take pictures… I have yet to break this record of 15 /month lol… i don’t gots time nowadays.
-2009-2010 was the high/peak of me watching Japanese TV.
-I probably started stagnating in improving around…. 2011-2014… life was hard then. still is now, less so. What’s important is that my priorities are STRAIGHT.
Things that I remember from lang-8:
-some fellow japanese learner was complimenting my “huge” vocab and she wanted to know how I learned so much. I honestly thought my vocab wasn’t huge at all lol. talk/variety show vocab is nothing special imo… at least not to warrant a compliment or maybe i’m being too modest. My answer was I watch a lot of japanese tv (talk/variety shows), use anki, read with a pop-up dictionary, etc,etc. I remember this girl never got far in Japanese because she didn’t AJATT like moi. I wasn’t ajatting hardcore… BTW. I’m not a weirdo.
– i wrote on lang-8 for fun AS A RESULT the posts are fun to read. Of course this is my subjective opinion. i didn’t force myself to write. I wrote about topics that interested me so i did not post on a regular schedule.
also thank god lang-8 didn’t die otherwise I couldn’t have made this post!
LASTLY i’m shook and surprised I updated my blog before the year ended. As is the case for many people, my life was f’ed over by corona. Because I had to tend to stuff in order of priority, I planned on neglecting this blog for the foreseeable future. I also dropped my task of reading 2 japanese books a month because I had bigger pickles to fry. Perhaps now that the problem is resolved for the most part I can play catch up and reach my goal of averaging 2 books a month. If I don’t, that’s fine too. Year is ending on a much better note than I predicted. Super excited for what 2021 will bring me. Turtle > Hare for good reason. I like the sound and spelling of turtle more than tortoise.
HERE ARE LONG-ASS LANG-8 ENTRIES BY ME. i DIDN’T include all the corrections because copy/pasting doesn’t work and I don’t have time to be screenshoting every correction. i chose the entries that seemed the most interesting and representative of my Japanese abilities. They also embody the core, cardinal rule of AJATT which is ENJOYMENT since i’m not forcing myself to write. I felt compelled to write in Japanese.
07.2008
欲求不満
一年前から独学で日本語勉強を始めましたがまだ甘いです。
ジルという奴の事で書きます。（勿論それは本名ではないけどそいつが本物とちょっと似てる）。彼女は私の馬鹿な妹です。 馬鹿と言えるのは毎日彼女がパソコンを八時間ほど使うことです。 使う理由はアホのゲームです。 今年の夏休みていうか先年てういかあの問題は三年とか二年まえからあ始めました。
二とか三ゲームで時間を無駄に過ごしてるのでかなり怒っています。 そしてゲームは 価値も持ってねい! 多分 ただのアホのネットにあるゲームをプレイするのは醜い人々ばっかでしょう。ではなく,一所懸命で信じておきます。 だから結構かっこ悪いでしょう。 こんなことを思うだけで気持ち悪くなりそうな気がする。そういう訳でいい方法を見つけています。 あの方法は行けなくようにされるプログラムなどを使う事です。 勿論色んな事見つけました。なんとなく妹の人生のために見つけられるプログラムの全部を使います。そして必ず大成功になります。彼女の夏休みはあのアホのゲームしかないのでなくなったらどうするかなと楽しくつうか必死に思っています。
では私の事：昨日に面白い日本語音楽見つけました。 見つけたのは梟というバンド。 本当に上手だけど想像シャボンというミニ・アルバムしか見つけられなかったんです。
http://www.imeem.com/people/Art8-A/music/8PQRclbT/fukurou_tatoeba/
あのLinkで梟のたとえばという歌聴けます。
some of the corrections:
comments:
： 24なのに歯医者で漏らした
http://blog.livedoor.jp/himasoku123/archives/51309348.html
昨日 まさか、まさかと思いながらこれを読んで結局そのままの意味だったのだ。漏らすは小便を漏らすという意味が知ってるが、読み始まった所で、その漏らすという単語には号泣とか泣くという意味もあると勉強になったと思った。なぜなら、彼が、泣き出したと書いたから、あーそういうことだと思った。本当に、その小便を漏らすことじゃないと思ったからその一行を読んだ時、相当衝撃的だったねｗ。でも、やっぱり、歯医者は怖い。スレの投稿者たちは結構同情してたな。
＝＝＝
前回のエントリーは。。まぁそういう感情や考え方は一過的というか、そのまま続けると完全に疲れる。 現に、そのまま続けると、本格的に憂鬱病になるはずなのだ。
some of the corrections
some comments
09.2010
日々の鬱憤
日常の理解不能な行為
トイレの個室を出た後すぐ髪を触ること。汚いにも程があるよ。私はそれぐらい意識してるというかそれぐらいの常識持ってるので これは絶対しない。 個室で自分が何をしたか云々を置いといて自分の前に他の誰かが個室に大の方を足したかもしれない。実をいうと、髪を触ること自体がムカツク。一日で絶対何百回触るはずの人って何人知ってるのでいずれこんな気持ちになってしまった。。何千回にも到達してる人もいるかもしれない。特に、前髪の人が髪を一日中に何回も触る。
特にダサい横前髪（直訳した所こんなことになった。。調べたところ横髪？）の人。。横髪を批判してるわけじゃなくて、、、あまりよくできてない横髪の人。あまりにも横で、禿げてるオッサンみたい？
横すぎててしょぼい感じで清潔感が皆無の横髪。。。 でも、正直言うと、私は横前髪に賛成してない。何か、そう切られてもらったら触らなければいけなくなる。つまり、迷惑髪型というか大体物理的にめんどくさい。それで、かわいく見えるとかそう思うのは本人の自由なんだけど。。アメリカには横髪が。。。いつから流行ったか知らないけどマジ嫌た。多くの女子が横髪派に入った所から今も流行ってると思うけど。
後は目覚ましの事。私的には目覚ましが鳴ったら 零点何秒（０．❊）以内にスヌーズ・オフする（ルームメートがいたら圧倒的にオフを選ぶ。そうやって気が利いてるので。自慢してるつもりじゃなくて本当にそうしてる）。単にアラームの音が超邪魔で、寝たいが為に自分がこの衝動に駆られてる。それなのに。。白人・アメリカ人・ルームメートは必ず5秒か。。。超マジナゲー間鳴らせる。 その何分に感じる５秒で起きてしまって私は寝直せない（鳴る一瞬一瞬に体が何かで刺さられてるような感じ）。もちろん、本人は目覚ましをスヌーズにしてから平気で寝なおせる。それに、アラームが異常にうるさい。
得に、上記みたいに鈍く行動する上にスヌーズをして何度も繰り返す場合もある（そんなに気にしてないらしい）
音量がハンパないくらいうるさくて、。。。マジで必要以上にうるさくて（何倍ぐらい）無性に 腹が立つ。
私から見ると、異常だぁと思った。そのうえ、アラームの旋律（メロディー）が超チョーチョーうざい。一回聞いただけでも十分損してるような感じでほぼ毎日聞かされてるわけでかろうじて我慢してる所。 私の経験からするとアメリカ人って大体無神経がちというか、何やら鈍いというか気にしなさすぎというか（ちなみに、気にしすぎ芸能人って最高に面白い。お勧めします。）、その無知さがうざい。どの国の人でもいい所と悪い所があるので、これだけを基準にどうこう決め付けるのも駄目なんだけど。。。
所詮、わたしは消極・小心者で陰で悪口を言うことしかできない。笑。
そういえば「コレってアりですか」という番組で芸能人・役者・俳優たちが我々一般人の為にキレてくれてありがたい。（たとえ芝居だとしても。。）
「特に、誰かさんたちの演技がうまい」というより「誰誰を除いてみんな演技がうまい」と書いた方がより書きやすいので。。。
若林除いて皆、演技うまい。若林っていつも棒読みでつまらない（他のメンバーにやらせてって感じ。彼がこの前演じた元気のない新人（車関係？車を洗う所か。ガススタンドか）はよかった。所詮彼は今まで棒読みしかできないので、こんな役を演じたらまったく違和感を感じません。どっちかというと上手だと思った。 それに彼顔は地味でそういう役柄に合うね。
質問：
的（てき）を使いすぎるのってバカっぽい？
ある番組にいわゆるおバカキャラのテレビタレントの女性が的をつかいまくってたのが印象的だったので一応聞いときたいなと思って。
some corrections
a compliment
07.2011スタイルの意味
つい最近気づいたというかずっと薄々違和感を感じていました。 英語だと普通に服のことを指しているので日本語のカタカナのＳｔｙｌｅもそういう意味だと察しました。 スタイルという単語ってすごく使われててその大半の度は いつも違和感を感じてました。
例えば、誰かが登場した時に周りが「スタイルいいね」とコメントする時とか「どうやってスタイルを維持するんですか」と誰が聞く度に「何でわけの分からないこと言ってんの」といつも当惑していましたｗ （私が思っていた定義からすると馬鹿馬鹿しい質問ですね。スタイルストさんが選んだんだろうとか服を買うだけでしょう とつっこみたかったんです）。日本人って礼儀正しいだの内気だの という印象が世界的に受けられてることを考え、 スタイルという単語の使い方に対しての整理をしました。つまり、たぶん あの変な使い方ってそういうところから来てると思っていました。
何をきっかけに気づいたかというと韓流スター出てた番組と２ちゃんねるのＡＫＢ４８の悪口ｗ。韓流スターが出てた番組では韓国語を勉強している日本人のクラスに韓流スターが訪れました。ある生徒が案の定「どうやってスタイルを維持するんですか」と聞いて韓流スターがある程度日本語を分かるので翻訳さんに体のこと(몸매)聞いているのと聞いたんです。そこで気づいたんですけどもっとスタイルという単語の印象を深くしたのがＡＫＢの悪口が書かれていたサイト。
きっかけは芸能か何か系のニュースの記事を読んでたらイケパラのリメイクに関しての記事を読むことになりました。それで、前田敦子のことについてコメントのところに書いてあってその中では 彼女が自分の顔があまり好きじゃないということと 彼女の顔が浜田さんに似ているということがすごく気になりました。それで浜田 敦子と検索したら 写真を見つけてすごく似ていましたｗ。他の悪口も書いてあってその中ではＡＫＢのスタイル悪すぎるという２ちゃんねるスレから引用したやつで証拠写真が載っていました。それがスマイレージと一緒に並んでるＡＫＢ４８の写真なんですけど説得力がありますｗ。スマイレージの子たちの足はすごく長くて綺麗なんですけどＡＫＢ４８の子たちと並ぶと一目瞭然というか スマイレージのスタイルの良さをすごく分かりました。
こんなにも使われていて頻繁度の高い単語をずっと勘違いしてきた自分にちょっと落胆しましたｗ。
corrections:
04.2011
ちょっと久しぶりぶり
下品な話になるんけど一応偶然でテレビで見ちゃっただけですね。いわゆる白昼堂々セックスシーン。普通にテレビで見ちゃったんですね。よくも普通にこういうことも放送できるんだな関心しましたｗ。別に夜遅くでもなく11時か12時の昼間頃での映画放送。ルームメイトがテレビを見ながら洗濯機を待つ慣習になっています。たまたま、自室を出て茶の間みたいなスペースに入ったら付けっ放しのテレビを見たら白昼堂々のセックスシーンでした。最初はドラマだと思ってて とにかく設定か何か「どうしてもあの瞬間で公の場でもしなきゃいけない」理由があるだろうと仮説を立ちました。仮設が多分 当たってると思ってたので具体的な理由の知りたさに飲み込まれて見続けました。で、セックスシーンのあとはすぐＣＭが入りました。そんなに映画を見る気じゃなかったのでパソコンで調べました。この時間帯でこのチャンネルで放送されてるという情報を持っていれば簡単に何の映画・ドラマだったか分かることが出来ます。結果はあれは映画でＣＲＡＮＫＥＲが題名です。正直この映画のことは聞いたことありません。第二弾もあることを知ってさらに第二編にも白昼堂々のセックスシーンが入ってることが分かりましたｗ。
仮説のことはネットで調べた結果当たってます。具体的な理由は分かりませんが とにかく ああしないと彼が死ぬという設定かなんかです。私は映画のシーンのエグさにショックを受けつつ「何の設定か展開のゆえにあのシーンが入ってるんだろう」という疑問の方に気になります。やっぱり、アメリカの映画ではこういうエグいシーンも入ってるのは当然というかたくさんのアメリカ産の映画を見て慣れてきたという部分もあって前者より後者の方に関心を投げられます。
見たいんだったらこちらへ。
このシーンはあからさまにコメディチックのつもりです。
corrections:
10.2012このような質問を聞かれる場合はどのようにお答えしますか？
英語でブログをやっているんですけど 自己紹介事項を詳しく書かなかったことで ある人に勘違いされました。 ブログでは好きな韓国の音楽や好きな日本の音楽や日本語で書いてある面白い記事の抜粋や英語で書いてある面白い記事などを紹介しています。それであるアメリカ人に言われたのを私なりに日本語に翻訳すると『ブログを見たけど言いたいことが 「同時に韓国と日本を大好きな人がムカつく。なぜならそれは日韓関係を完全無視していることだから」。最近KPOPが日本で流行ってるけどさ。。総合的な感性は憎しみで人種差別が結構ある。日本が韓国に酷いことたくさんしてきてハングル使用を禁止させていた時期もあったよ。』
原文はこれです～
so, I looked through your blog and I just wanted to tell you that it honestly bothers me when people are “totes in love” with Japan and Korea at the same time, because it completely ignores the relationship between Japan and Korea. While KPOP has gained footing in Japan, the overall sentiment is still one of contempt, and racism is rampant. Also, the sentiment runs deeper than that. Japan has committed horrible atrocities in Korea throughout time, and even made hanguel illegal for a bit.
ちなにみにTOTESとはTOTALLYから由来した単語みたいで TOTESの使用はこれで初めて見かけました。私の感性ではこれはダサいので絶対使わないでください
「韓国人だけど。知ってるけど。だから何をして欲しい。だから何をすりゃいいっつってんだよ。だから何をすりゃいいっつってんだよ」と返答しました。話を広げたことで知ったのがこの人も私と同じく日本語を勉強している者で 「韓国人だ」とか「日本人だ」と主張しなかったので多分国籍はどっちでもないと思います。なぜ私がこのように返事したのはお分かり頂けましたでしょう。 このような事を人に言ってること自体がおかしいです。 証すると、私があとあと言ったのが 「お前の思想では私には日本のものと韓国のものを同時に好きでいることはダメ？私にはものを好きになる自由がないわけ？」。それに対する返事は「お前が何が好きでもどうでもいいよ」と返ってきました。 これでこの人は完全に矛盾しているんだと気づいてムカツキました。
そもそも人に 丸々と丸々を同時に好きでいることがムカつくといったら、 私がこの人の言ってることに応じたいわけじゃないですけど もしそうしようとしたら わけの分からないことになります。例えば、あの人に言ったのが 「だったらさ、お前に免じて日本に関する投稿を５個投稿したあとは必ず一個の反日投稿してほしいわけ」とか 「お前に免じて韓国選ばなきゃいけないわけ」とか、 「そういうわけのわからない 私の自由と時間を奪われるようなことに 専念してほしい？」 という具体的で最初のメッセージの文面から察した彼が望んでいるであろうという行動を何個も上げました。そもそも自分には時間が限られています。それから好きな日本のテレビ番組や音楽や好きな韓国の音楽やテレビ番組がたくさんあります。彼が言ってるのは 私の限られてる時間をこんな風に使えと言ってるのと同じです。 それから彼が言っていることがどれだけ常識を反しているか証明するためにさらに具体的な例もあげました。例えば、「日本に住んでいる韓国人とか、韓国でもっとも選択されている外国語が日本語であることや両親が日本人と韓国人の人はどうすればいいの」と言いました。日韓関係云々以前に、これは無責任な発言を言っていることで彼自身は私より上であると見せびらかしているとでも思い込んでいるでしょう。私が思うにはこういう 知性の欠片もない馬鹿な発言を発しているようにしか見えません。
最後にお聞きしたいのは もし誰かがあなたに「何で日本が韓国に酷いことをしてきたのに韓国語を勉強しているの」とか「何で韓国が日本に酷いことしてきたの日本語を勉強しているの」とか「何で日本語と韓国語を両方勉強しているの。両国に失礼だと思わない？」と言われたらどんな風にあしらいますか？ 大体、アジア内では歴史のどっかで日本に酷いことがされた国が他にもいるみたいで 韓国だけじゃないです。何が一番適切な答えだと思いますか？ 私の場合好きな日本のことと好きな韓国のものは沢山あります。 それで、歴史の云々で好きなことは好きでいることはダメだと言われるのはおかしいと思います。 直接関係があるわけじゃないですけど 一応 日本のものであることで なんとかなんとか うるさく言えるでしょう。 ひいて言えば 「日本製品の何もかもは絶対使っちゃ・買っちゃダメ」となって切りがないです。大体日本って優れてる物を製品していることで有名なのでもったいなくて 悲しいばかりです。 どうしても実用的じゃないです。 それじゃ生活を不便にしてまで ある国の人を恨むことですよね。 理論的に考えると何もかも情緒や歴史だけで決めるのはナシです。
これに対してそんなに深く考えたことがない身ですが 絶対にあの馬鹿げたメッセージを送った人より詳しいと思います。運良く、私は前々に言ったように 日本語習得を秘密にしているので実生活でこういう衝突に遭ったことはないです。日本のテレビを見ている限り反韓の情緒は感じ取れないんですけどインタネットだと露骨に反韓な人もいるのは確かです。
some corrections:
09.2013
ずっと勘違いしていた英語
こういうことって起こりえるんだなと関心しました。Just desertsという言葉は聞いたことありますか？ ここ最近自分はこれを何回か聞いたことはあるけど実際読んだことはないと気づきました。 読んだことがないと断言できないけど 最近 この言葉をちゃんと目に通したことは確かです。読んだ瞬間「あれこれっていわゆる誤植」と思いました。しっかりとした出版社から出た本なので誤植じゃなくて自分がずっと勘違いしていたという可能性にも傾きました。調べてみると”痛いところを突かれた感”がしました。まず知らない方々のために意味を教えてあげます。 Just desertsの意味は「ざまみろ」や「自業自得」に近いです。よく使われている文章はHe got his just deserts. 例えば酷いことを犯した悪人が罪にふさわしい罰を受ける始末を指して使います。発音は摩訶不思議なことに砂漠（Desert）の複数形（Deserts）ではなく Dessert （デザート）の複数形の発音 （Desserts）です。発音的にはこうなので、つづりがちぐはぐだと思い込みました。 今のところはちゃんと覚えましたのでもし将来的にJust desertsという言葉を書く機会が現れたときには正しいつづりで書きます！ この言葉みたいにつづりと発音が一致していない言葉は沢山ありますけどこういう発見は初めてというか稀です。 不思議じゃなくて摩訶不思議を使った理由は完全に嵐の曲の影響ですっｗ．
発音は下記のリンクで聞いてください
http://translate.google.com/#auto/ja/dessertsdessertdesertsdesert
some corrections:
10.2013
現実逃避と現実直視を繰り返しています。
英語でいう「F* this s*」を日本語で言い表すと 「やってられない」か「やってたまるか」に該当する所存です。 大体、大学生の間ではやるべき課題に対するやる気がなくなったり挫折したりイライラしているときによく使いますｗ。 題名に関して端的にいうと現実逃避は日本語での娯楽で現実直視は職業に繋げる勉強です。勉強と言っても試験を受かるために一時的に暗記しきって次の日にポイと忘れる類ではなく仕事する上にずっと兼ね備えておくべき知識と情報です。そもそもの計画は徐々に覚えていくことです。一日の時間は限られていて日本語で堪能したいことが多くてそっち優先するようになって だんだん上記の必要な情報・知識を覚えようとしていないです。 もちろん英語で堪能したいドラマなども含めると膨大です。社会人の辛さについて考えました。例えば、週５で一日８時間働いて更に通勤時間や睡眠時間やシャワーと食事などの不可欠なことを配慮すると自由時間が著しく少ないです。年上の知り合いによるとただ慣れるらしいです。今はそういう生活を送ることを想像して出した結論がたぶん２週間で憂鬱になりはじめると思います。でも、週末でなんとか飢えている精神を養えて憂鬱にならずじまいの可能性ありますね。実際そういう環境になるまで分からないことだと思います。今のところは日本語の勉強や上達よりも単に日本語で好きなことを堪能することですかね。例えば、日本のニュース記事やニュース動画を通して言葉を覚えようとする日本語の独学者もいるんですけど私はその内に入りません。理由はニュースに興味ないからで言語が変わったところで興味が湧いてきません。それと漢語は聞き取りにくかったりして特に知らない漢語だと聞き取るのがさらに大変な試練になります。ニュースだと興味のなさも手伝って聞き取りたいという望みをもかき消します。下品な話、最近はゴッドタンにハマっていて数日前に狩野英孝のマジギライ１/５を楽しく拝見させてもらいました。こういう事でなかなかなすべきことをやり遂げずにいます。
some corrections:
02.2014
英語でしゃべるときに避けるべき単語
日本語でも通じると思いますが頭がいいように見られるしゃべりかたのコツは必ずしも難しい単語や表現を使うことでなくある特定の単語の数々を使わないようにすることです。日本語の場合は「ウケる」、「みたいな」、「マジで」、「あれ」、「やばい」、「なんか」、「超」、「すごい」のあたりだと思います。私が思うには「あれ」と「マジで」と「やばい」だけで友達同士の日常会話の相槌ぐらいは打てそうですｗｗｗ http://nyaasokuvip.blog.fc2.com/blog-entry-1226.html http://neta-matome.doorblog.jp/archives/36151556.html
こういうのまとめを読むと３つの単語でこんなにもしのげるんだって逆に感心しちゃいます。私の場合は英語でも日本語でもなるべく頭の悪い人のしゃべり方は避けたいです。人にウザがれるのは嫌ですし。ダメな癖を断たないと相当乏しい表現しかできなくなると思うからです。英語の場合は思い当たる単語が４つありますが他にもあるでしょう。それらが actually, basically, like, とliterally. ４つのうちまったく使う必要がなくて無意味なのはLIKEで日本語の「なんか」に該当するかもしれません。残りの３つは使うべきときにだけ使ってほしいんですけどそれらを乱用している人がたくさんいます。乱用というのは使いすぎることで私は乱用を聞くとイライラします。 例えばBASICALLYの意味って「簡単に」や「平たく」です。よく説明するときに使うんですけど別にそんなにわかりやすくしゃべってるわけでもないのに使う人がたくさんいますｗ。乱用する人ってBASICALLYを説明する前に１回言うのが普通なのに 説明の中にも３，４回使います。
LIKEの乱用の度合いは人によりますけど口から出る単語の５分１がLIKEの人のしゃべりは聞いたことがあります。そのときにぱっと頭に浮かんだのが「この人、超頭悪い」と「うざい」と「電話の向こうの人がかわいそう」と「電話の向こうの人も相当頭悪いだろう」と「語彙力ないんかい！」でした。LIKEの乱用が甚だしい大学生の子も高校生の子も聞いたことがあります。
LITERALLYの意味は文字通りなので使いまくれるのはわかるでしょう。自然とみんなはおおかた文字とおりのことを言ったりや文字通りの言い方したりしますね。それでたいていの発言の枕詞としてLITERALLYが使えます。普通の人って特に何かの事情で文字とおりの意味だと主張したいときにしかLITERALLYを発言の前に言ったりしません。乱用する人って発する文章の一番最初の単語の４の１がLITERALLYだったりします。
ACTUALLYの意味は「実は」です。私を特にイライラさせるのは LIKEとBASICALLYを乱用する女性たちです。英語がペラペラじゃなくてもこういうダメなしゃべりかたを聞くとイライラする方はいるんじゃないかなと思います。
余談のことですけどついにいい邦画を見ることができました。ちょっと前までは正直駄作か及第点のあたりにある邦画しか見たことがないです。例えば「リング」はとてもつまらなくてアメリカ版に比べて話の筋がなさすぎて怖くなくてがっかりしました。本の方は３巻とも読んだので実に話の筋の濃さは分かっています。本を読んでなお映画にがっかりしましたｗ．そのいい邦画というんはまさしく「告白」です。２０１０年にこの映画のことを知りましたけど２０１３の終わりか２０１４の始めで見ました。理由はただただ邦画にがっかりさせられた経験があるので絶賛されてたって見たくならなかったからです。ダメな邦画しか見たことがないと期待というのがまったく出来上がらないですね。もっと早く見たらよかったなって今はちょっぴり後悔しています。映画がすごかったので原作の本をも読みました。これも素晴らしい出来でこの作家さんの他の作品も是非読みたいです。とても暗くてある種むごい作品なので普段使う絶賛の言葉に違和感を感じます。とにかく大変オススメします。ただ、見終わったあとに映画について思い巡らすことになるかもしれないので、夜に見ないことをおすすめします。
これは酷いでしょう。さすがMTV wwww
some corrections:
12.2015 from dokushometer – I wrote 0 lang-8 entries in 2015.
石ノ目 by 乙一
石の目が一番のお気に入りです。 他の話は感動・ほっこり系だったのでちょっとがっかり。はじめの話に関しては思いっきり復讐の展開を予測してたので意外でした。ひやひやしながら読んでたら”感動かい”とツッコミました。今まで乙一の作品を読むにあたって何の期待もせず読みだしら強烈に共感できたりハマったりしたんですけどこの作品はその中に入りません。
05.2016 from dokushometer – I wrote 0 lang-8 entries in 2016.
08.2017
さすが浜田さん！ 母校の話で大笑いしました。私の場合、本だとクスクス笑ったり微笑みになったりするけど大笑いは珍しいです。
読め! by 浜田 雅功
09.2017北朝鮮 絶望収容所 (ワニ文庫) by 安 明哲 (translation from korean to japanese)
もともと大学時代ではまったく読書しなかったです。大学出て就職してから読書しようと踏ん張ったがいい本を見つけるのが大変でした。どういう経由で北朝鮮にまつわる本に手を取ったのかは覚えていません。一冊読んだら全部読みたくなって英語で書いてある本ほとんど読みました。ある日、また英語に翻訳されてない北朝鮮に関する本の存在に気づきました。それで、この本を読むことになってあらためて日本語を覚えてよかったと思いました。何人も命をかけて脱北してその国の実態や人権に対する犯罪について書いたのは奇跡です。
それらを踏まえると内容が悲惨で読むのがつらくてきつくても読むべしという気持ちになりました。
08.2018読書感想文の添削をお願いします。
乃南 アサが書いた「風紋」の下巻のついて書きました。
上巻を読んだときは飛ばし読みをもっと早い段階で敢行するべきだと後悔したので下巻は70ページあたりから思いっきり飛ばし読みしました。おかげさまで2日で読み下しました（実質3分の１を読んだと思います。しかし私の勘では全文を読んでもこの本に対する評価は大して変わらないと思います。）。特に次女の母に対する思いは上巻に引き続きもう散々聞き飽きているのでそういう叙述はなるべく読まないように飛ばしました。上巻と違って下巻では犯人の家族の苦境の描写に相当ページを割かれました。正直に言いますとコロンバイン高校銃乱射事件の犯人の子の母兼著者Sue Kleboldの「A Mother’s Reckoning」を読んだので下巻を通して新しい悟りを得ることはありませんでした。被告人の家族の描写したのはいい考えであるもののノンフィクションの威力には勝てません。３分１を読んでちょうど良かったと思います。全文を読もうしたら挫折か普段より膨大な時間が掛かったはずだと思います。私の感覚では読ませる文体じゃなかったです。無理して全文読もうしても損をするだけだと上巻を読んで痛感しました。本という媒体だから私の期待が高かったかもしれません。上巻を読んでいたときに脳裏によぎったのは「こんなありきたりな事件についてただただ延々と次女の心境を書くわけないだろう」という思いでした。一見の見かけによらず何かしら斬新な展開なりどんでん返しなりもっと面白く調理してくれるという期待が無残に裏切られました。上巻は厚いだけあって叙述や描写や地の文は充実しています。しかし、普遍的でありきたりなことについて書かれているだけなので読む甲斐はあんまり見い出せませんでした。普通、小説を読んでいるときは作者が読み手が知りたがってることについてどどん掘り下げてくれるんですがこの本は「見かけによらず」の例にならず一見のままだったのであんなに厚くする必要性を感じられませんでした。下巻では起承転結の「転」も上巻に登場した事の発端と同様につまらぬものでした。ネタが弱いだけあって作者がもっと器用に簡潔に本を練ったらこんなに辛辣な格調で読書感想文を書かなかったと思います。
some corrections:
01.2019
大人として評価すると「いまいち」の一言に尽きます。読ませる文体じゃなかった上に感情移入する所か関心を持てませんでした。主人公たちがどうなろうが私自身が悲しんだり憤ったりしないと確信できるくらい物語にハマりませんでした。
何かが来た (21世紀空想科学小説 2) by 東野 司 – kids book
08.2019
後書きがみすぼらしい
涼宮ハルヒの驚愕(後) (角川スニーカー文庫) by 谷川 流
12.2019
会話三昧。
ノルウェイの森 上 (講談社文庫) by 村上 春樹
01.2020
さすがに最後の１０ページあたりに「AVかよ」とツッコみました。結局、これは凡作か凡作以下ですね
ノルウェイの森 下 (講談社文庫) by 村上 春樹
I have not written much on dokushometer this year!
I read this Korean ebook months and months ago ( I think it’s 공지영… too lazy to check. I’m never gonna read another book by this lady? ) which was actually a collection of short stories and this one short story was a real nightmare to read. I was hopeful at first since it featured a North Korean since I find North Korea fascination. I didn’t get that into it so I didn’t feel like re-reading stuff so I trudged on reading while being confused (doing my best to tolerate it and ignore it) and trying to use the least amount of mental energy possible.
The most frustrating part of the book was reading the dialogue. the frustration is similar to reading text messages in English where you’re not sure what the tone of voice is or the person’s intention or emotion is behind the text. Not only that Imagine reading texts between 2 people and the cellphone doesn’t tell you who said what ( no blue/green color differentiation or text justification etc)… dealing with that bs is always worse in korean than English. Reading texts and Thinking about this and that in an effort to mind-read is tiring and not worth the effort. I’d rather just talk to the person on the phone or in-person! Reading Korean dialogue in books is like that frustration times a hundred AT LEAST
I think it’s the author’s fault and not my fault haha. I say this even though I’m not fluent in Korean just because the book pissed me off. My vocab was decent. I think I already knew 80-90% of the vocab and I used the pop-up dictionary in the ereader
So she kept doing ONLY quotes where the characters have back and forth dialogue and but she doesn’t say ANYTHING about who said it. Generally, in books the author will be like “~~~” sally said in a bitchy tone or “~~~” Bob said while looking down etc. They don’t resort to pure quote dialogue with no descriptions unless it’s really obvious as to WHO is speaking. This is a short story so I can only know the characters/situation so welll… This bitch (the female author lol) kept doing back and forth dialogue with only quotes with no description of action or how it was said or who said it. The problem is nearly everything a person said between the quotes can be interpreted in more than one way. sometime it’s more than 2 ways becasue KOREAN GRAMMAR. It’s really frustrating to read! Korean grammar is just extra. This is one of the reasons why I LOVE HAVING an English translation or Japanese translation or whatever translation where the translator does ALL THE INTERPRETATION FOR ME ( you can google for definitions or use papago translator or lingoes for looking up meanings and grammar crap but the interpretation requires a korean person!! it’s especially the case when there’s multiple multiple possible interpretations) and I don’t’ have to waste time/energy on interpreting stuff only to be completely off the MARK. I find korean harder than japanese simply because of this “interpretation” skill that I don’t possess since I’m not a native speaker and the onyl way to clarify shit is to ask a native speaker. Japanese interpretation/comprehension/inferred-meaning/actual-meaning/etc is pretty straight-forward compared to korean interpretation/comprehension/inferred-meaning/actual-meaning/etc haha… Because of the grammar ending and lack of descriptions the line of dialogue could be interpreted as a sarcastic remark, a joke, hypothetical question the speaker is saying to himself, hypothetical question the speaker is directing to the interlocutor, a firm statementnt, a REAL question, angry remark, sad remark etc etc and the only way to know is by context. BTW, in KOrean you can ask questions (to yourself especially for pondering and wondering or agonizing or whatever it is) without the question mark because of the millions of grammar endings lol. Of course, like Spanish, Korean people omit the subject of the sentence whenever possible so it was a fluster cuck of circumstances culminating together to confound me. I guess Korean is worse than Spanish because at least with Spanish if they’re asking a question there’s always a question mark AND they have the upside question mark to make it that much more obvious that indeed a QUESTION IS BEING ASKED. I would read a line of dialogue and go who is doing what to what??? (it’s just awful). Also, I’d literally be like it’s either person A talking or person B is the one talking and he happens to be extremely self-deprecating or maybe it is person A and the statement that he made is a joke (plus I’m not 100% if the speaker’s statement is being directed towards the speaker himself, the conversation partner, to no one in particular etc). It’s so bad that I don’t even know WHO IS TALKING!!! I can’t even tell if the statement is directed towards the speaker or interlocutor. It’s impossible to tell because I don’t even know if it’s a firm statement or a sarcastic remark… Imagine 2 people having a conversation and 90% of the dialogue is like this from BOTH PARTIES where it’s vague and confusing as to what they mean. I wish I had an anchor ! Instead I get 2 buoys that confuse and distract me. Neither party speaks in a way that is uncryptic and unambiguous so a maelstrom of frustration ensues. Not to mention they’re arguing and whatnot so it adds another layer of frustration and annoyance and difficulty (I don’t know the characters’ personalities inside out so i don’t know if person a is just being passive-aggressive or it’s actually person b who is talking… wtf. ) ! Perhaps it is possible for me to figure out who is talking in the dialogue if I were to analyze it and explore all the possibilities (the interpretations) but I refuse to do that! The only way I can figure out what’s what is to ask a korean person (who is willing to read this story. Can’t really guarantee that since most korean people don’t read books nowadays lol), track down an audiobook etc. It’s a real nightmare!!!! I just kept reading and making assumptions and my assumptions changed every 10 seconds lol. At the end I was thoroughly mind-fucked because I understood what happened in the story but the dialogue was really confusing because I kept interpreting it wrong then correct then wrong or I’m not sure if I’m correct or not. I thought person A was talking but then it sounded like Person B was talking UNLESS person a was being sarcastic or asking a hypothetical question (I can’t fucking tell). Then I started thinking well if you’re writing quote only dialogue can the same person speak twice or does it mean the dialogue is always alternating… I did not reach a conclusive answer by the end of the book lol. In the beginning I even tried to keep all the possibilities in mind (I was like let’s assume this is a hypothetical statement or a firm statement and make my final judgement based on the dialogue that follows and then the dialogue that follows is even more AMBIGUOUS And vague as to the correct interpretation or emotion behind the words and just makes my judgement forming action that much more impossible and taxing) while reading the dialogue and I had to stop after a while because it’s way too TAXING and NOT working.
The 2 people don’t even speak in drastically distinct styles (ie dialect, personalities, speaking quirks or habits) and they were close in age and the gender was the same. The only way to follow it is via LOGIC (in relation to the story and the character dynamic etc) and interpretation skills because the statements are vague and you can interpret them in many ways (the key is to interpret it the correct way, the native-korean speaker level way). I just blame the author!!! One of the stories also had the same problem with back-and-forth dialogue with quotes and nothing else except instead of 2 characters it had 5 characters and i was too lazy to keep track of the characters. some of the characters were literally referred to by their outfit/garment color so I had zero interest or energy to keep track of it.
Anyway, I have zero interest re-reading the story because it just pissed me off and I’d rather just read a summary. It’s just way too confusing and energy-consuming to read. My korean interpretation skills need work or this lady needs to stop assuming that people can read her MIND or that we know her characters’ personalities inside out because we don’t since it’s a SHORT STORY. I never had this awful experience in Japanese or English or French. I didn’t experience this in the other few KOrean novels I read. MAybe I would experience the same level of confusion and frustration if I were to read a script for a Korean drama episode with all indications of who is the speaker is omitted (the name colon thing on the left side in scripts) ?? I notice sometimes in dramas person A will say something that’s not directed towards anyone (they’re just thinking/pondering/bitching out-loud while having a conversation with person B), or it’ll be directed towards themselves, or it’ll be directed towards person B etc etc. It must be a bitch to follow that just from the text compared to watching a drama. BTW, They talk way too much in KOrean dramas. Conversations that drag on for 5 minutes could be done in 20 seconds and most importantly no one talks like korean drama characters. do not talk like korean drama characters with korean people… they will think you’re crazy.
wish i had that version from the get-go 😦 for reals. I’d learn so much more and I’d feel so much more motivated and I’d have the option to read the English first if it gets unbearably vague and cryptic and confusing . i will avoid thsi lady like the plague then lol.
At least with japanese books I can read the 1star reviews on amazon japan and commiserate with japanese peeps but no one reads in korea so there are barely any reviews on the book and the ones there are 4-5 stars so i am not reading them. there’s only lotsa reviews if the book is really popular. yes24 site!
FRENCH
My goal isn’t to be fluent or to get good very quickly. I know how to learn a language while being inconsistent/sporadic in my efforts. I’ve had many half-baked attempts at learning french since 2015?? 2016?? I’m okay with it since there’s only so many hours in a day and I have a lot of stuff I want to do in English, Japanese, Korean and I have a life and I want to practice self-care and all that.
I think once I read 10 books in French I’ll feel more comfortable/intermediate but I have a life so I don’t have time so who knows when I’ll get there (I have zero interest reading french translations !) . Plus I’m interested in Spanish so I may read 10 books in Spanish first. I’m torn but I have no time anyway! I’m leaning towards French because I love how French doesn’t drop the subject while Spanish like Korean ALWAYS DOES whenever possible which is a nightmare for language learners and it’s a no-biggie for native speakers of course! Plus learning Spanish while knowing English and French is easier than just knowing English right (If I do the French -> Spanish route) ?? I gotta make decisions.
I read the little prince in 2016? I had the English translation at hand to reference it so I understood it. Anyway, the Little Prince sucks. I have nothing against kids books but I have something against kids books that are poorly written. I have so many recommendations for interesting, well-written kids books in English for kids between the ages of 5-10. Why is this book being recommended so much? I am truly stumped.
Besides being an awful book it’s horrible for language learning
!
1) I hated it. Unfortunately I read it to the end instead of stopping!!
It is not because of unwarranted high expectations because I know it’s an extremely old, kids book. Actually, children’s book have STIFF COMPETITION… I’ve read children’s books in English because I was once a child and this book really sucks compared to whatever I read as a child. There are so many wonderful children’s books out there and some are so good that even adults enjoy them. The little prince was unremarkable in every single way.
2) It’s random and illogical.
Those are pretty much the worst characteristics of sentences/word-choice for language learning. I don’t mind random if it’s executed well ie when it’s witty, funny, interesting, entertaining. For the little prince it is never any of those adjectives.
It felt like random for the sake random in the worst way possible. I never knew random could be this dull. The
sentences are not conducive to language learning. You could’ve told me ivrogne means thomeless/stripper/dancer/pedestrian/hula-hoop (it really means drunk) etc I would’ve believed you and also promptly forget the word and meaning because it’s arbitrary. I have to mention that I subscribe to STeve Kaufmann’s belief that you may need to encounter the word being used 20-30 times sometimes to have to it stick so I don’t have unrealistic expectations of coming across magical sentences left and right that make the word effortless and easy to remember on the first encounter. Even taking that into account, the sentences/story in Little Prince are not good for language learning.
I also hate alice in wonderland. I never knew how much the book sucked until I actually tried to read it. Holly from girls next door quoted from that book a lot and the quotes make the book seem much better than it actually is. It’s astounding how much a book can suck despite its popularity. Well there’s 50 shades of Gray but I never really tried to read-read it lol.
I listened to the audio using workaudiobook while reading so one thing I definitely learned is that petit prince is pronounced PETI PRAN in French. Or at least that’s what it sounds like to my American ears. I’m still working out the phonetics in French. Which reminds me I can’t pronounce petite prince because of the French R and I can’t pronounce cinq (probably because I can’t hear it)
For good children’s books in English for people learning English I would recommend Roald Dahl of course and My Father’s Dragon.
i recommend the WHO Is SHE STORIES on lingq for anyone who is beginner. It’s fairly fun and entertaining while the little prince is dull as paint drying on the wall
On a positive note, I learned my lesson and gave up on The Stranger very quickly (maybe after 1 chapter). It was not drawing me in whatsoever. I don’t think I’d read it even if i was fluent in french or only knew french etc. When I read fiction in English that doesn’t click with me I usually just stop or skim like crazy or skip pages like crazy and I may or may not read the end just to get it out of my system. I gotta go with my gut feeling. It’s hard to find good fiction books in English because I’m very picky about writing style. I want to read something that feels enjoyable and effortless or not effortless but worth reading. I recommend the martian, perfume (german book translatd to english and the translation won an award. the translator is brilliant), you by caroline something, and octavia butler ( thanks Oprah).
On an even more positive note, I started reading Jamais Assez Maigre de Victoire Maçon Dauxerre in french with the english translation at-hand and no french audio. I’m confident I can read it to the end and pick up on whatever words/sentence structures that repeat a lot. I listen to korean/japanese music while reading it since it’s not that distracting.
The book isn’t amazing but it’s entertaining enough and useful for learning French. Coincidentally or not I am watching America’s Next Top Model haha. I make anki cards while reading book because I have a .txt of the French book but I don’t go crazy over it. I am very picky because I know words will repeat and I don’t want to spend too much time making anki cards. If I come across a sentence 2 words I don’t know I usually just choose one or none or if I come across a sentence with 5 words I don’t know (ie list of nouns) I choose one or none. I’ve been trying to hone-in on my decision making skills and I am very aware of natural SRS when you just read a lot! I use autohotkey and excel to collect the text and make cards so I try to keep it efficient. I have to use EXCEL because I can only tolerate cloze cards! Also I can easily make all the words bold/huge/etc I can’t imagine clozing the whole word. I cloze 1 character usually. I cloze 2 characters if I think the word is easy and I should push myself. I execute that by sending the sentence to one of the 2 different .txt files using authotkey. I haven’t imported any of the cards yet. I think I’ll do it after I finish the book.
Here is an example:
Si elles deviennent gênantes , il suffit de leur jeter un sort pour *-{{c1::b}}rider -* leur magie .
*
If they become annoying , just cast a spell on them . to bind/ *-{{c2::re}}strain -* their magic .
As I explained thoroughly in my posts about anki and Korean, anki is merely a tool and
passively reading sentences over and over doesn’t do shit for me unless it’s in the context of REAL LIFE or of reading an actual book if some sentence structure happens to repeat etc. Passively reading sentences in anki is especially unhelpful for remembering or learning words. Cloze facilitates active recall which is so much more useful than passively reading crap. Also like Korean I use very lax settings in anki so I push shit out far which lets me figure out which words are actually hard and which are actually easy.
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Also I use lingoes pop-up dictionary and DEEPL since I have the .txt of the French book in addition or in lieu of referencing the English translation. In hindsight, I’m very glad that I dragged my feet and didn’t accomplish much French learning in 2015/2016 because DEEPL’s pop-up translation windows program only became available this year or last year. It’s an amazing tool! It’s superior to google translate for French, German, and a bunch of other languages.
In conclusion, I should have dropped little prince 3 paragraphs in, and the same with The Stranger. I cannot make myself like something and my gut tells me that it has nothing to do with my level of French. English is my native language but that doesn’t mean I love Charles Dickens or How to Kill a Mockingbird or whatever bullshit book that is supposedly amazing. You have to read stuff you actually like. there’s so many books out there and you don’t have to read a book that makes reading feel like a chore. It’s a cardinal rule of AJATT and it’s something I should always keep in my heart and mind.
I was going to blog about what a nightmare it was to read a Korean short story but I can’t find my draft. It’s a nightmare that never happens in Japanese, French, or English.
HAPPY READING!
as much as I hate the story, it doesn’t prevent from liking stuff that are inspired by it. So long as nobody forces me to read the original story, I’m aright
As you can see, I suck at showing up lol. It makes sense since I usually don’t do anki on most weekends (about 73 days when I do 52 x 0.7 x 2.. so there were 93 additional days that I didn’t do anki.. i musta been busy or didn’t feel like doing it) and I do reviews during dead time rather than part of a daily routine. They say you should use anki everyday for optimal results but I don’t completely agree with me at least for my case. I can say with confidence that half-assing anki does HELP and WORK. Of course since I don’t do reviews every day there are times where I have 500 reviews overdue. There have even been times where I was over a 1000 deep in overdue cards. However, this doesn’t freak me out since I have huge intervals so even if I chip at it slowly I eventually catch up because it’s not like the cards that I press “good” on come back into the pile in a few days…. Because I exclusively use cloze cards and have at least 2 clozes per card the 1000 card is more like 500 cards… Not to mention if I remember the word despite the card being over due for however many days or weeks, that just goes to show that I have great memory lol and I can feel better about myself j/k. Sometimes anki underestimates me! Because I have huge intervals, most of the cards that intervals of at least weeks or months so it doesn’t make a big difference if I see it 9 weeks later as opposed to 7 weeks or 2 months and 3 weeks instead of 2 months. Most cards have intervals of weeks or months so catching up is not a big deal and I don’t fail cards left and right to the point of despair. As I mentioned in my huge holy grail anki card format post, I do not mark fail on all the cards I fail since it’s counterproductive. For one thing, all cards are NOT equal. Some cards/words are just more useful than others and it can take a while to figure out which cards/words are very useful. If I had guess, I’d say I fail 70-100% of failed cards during reviews depending on how I feel. For example, if I already failed 10 -15 cards, I will feel less inclined to fail failed cards since I know I won’t want to deal with more than 15-20 cards 3 days (my step for lapsed cards) from when I failed them. Also if I skip anki for several days I may end up dealing with 40 failed cards from the 2 previous anki sessions in a review session so I keep that in mind too. I usually choose HARD for failed cards that I don’t want to fail (I’d rather deal with it x weeks/months from now rather than now) but sometimes I choose GOOD if the interval for GOOD is more ideal. Sometimes it’s better to deal with those cards LATER than right away since there is the off-chance that I will learn the word effortlessly from watching Korean TV. One recent example is 사재기 . At that time it was just another unknown word in a rap song from show me the money or high school rapper (it clearly wasn’t in the chorus lol.. i love the repetition in korean hip-hop/rap in the chorus/hook/etc especially when it features words I don’t know so that I can remember them effortlessly).
It’s in anki in my usual cloze format but for some reason I have trouble with remembering the word and the meaning… the word just doesn’t sound like what it means to me for some reason. So I failed it a bunch of times but later on I ended up learning the word effortlessly from Korean NEWS since everyone is stocking up on food and masks with the Corona Virus panic. I saw it being used in the news and remembered the cloze cards in my anki and understood it free of manual dictionary look-ups. Of course I probably couldn’t have done that if the card wasn’t in anki in the clozed deletion format (some words are memorable so even if i don’t make an anki card for it,,, i still remember it months later while other words/definitions leave my memory the second i finish reading the definition in the dictionary. I can vouch for this with conviction from my experience anking all these years with the crappy default settings and my superior settings ). Even though I failed the card a bunch of times, the cloze deletion format enables me to gain vague familiarity with the meaning and the word so that when I am presented the word in native media in the specific context/usage I recognize it ( that it’s in my deck and the info itself usually) then make the connection effortlessly and strengthen my connection. So the next time I see the word in anki I will mark it easy and not suspend it since I want to practice easy active recall (I only suspend really easy words)!
same thing also happened with gijige = stretch. I think I don’t have a cloze card for this word. The cards (plural because there are duplicate cards) for this word are in basic format in the huge decks I made from importing stuff from various sources.
It’s obviously better to spend your time learning/remembering words in memorable context in native material than to mindlessly drill words using ridiculous steps in anki (even if it feels like it works, it usually implodes on itself a week or 2 or a month later). The memory bond you make from encountering the word in a native material is always going to be stronger and longer-lasting than the memory bond you make from drilling the word in anki using ridiculous steps. My goal is to enjoy Korean media as much as a native, and not doing my anki reviews as honestly as possible.
It shows that I haven’t added new cards recently but I did have 300 new, unseen cards at one point. It’s inevitable since I only see 14 new cards a day with my settings. hmm I might have temporarily lowered number of new cards to 9 or something… can’t remember. It worked out fine since settings enable me to figure out which cards are actually easy and actually hard. I can never tell with certainty until anki shows me the card x months or weeks later.
Besides how I feel, the retention rate dictates whether or not I am using anki optimally. The retention rate is the section with the buttons. You can download plugins to get true retention rate or retention rate for mature card and whatnot if you want more data! I personally don’t bother since I know anki works for me.
The ideal retention rate for language learning is 80-90%. If any more or less, you’re probably wasting time. For my I got 97.95% for learning cards, 91.45% for young cards, and 90.95% for mature cards. They’re all above 90% but I’m not going to modify my settings because the majority of my cards are cloze cards and I don’t fail every card I fail. So I’m just going to assume that due to those factors, my retention is rate is actually around 80-90%.
Regarding my holy grail cloze format, it still is my holy grail format. How else do I get 7.4 secs per card? I don’t make as much cards one at a time while watching Korean shows. Compared to before I make 95% less cards than before. If I look up 20 words on lingoes while watching a show, I will probably end up hand-making my cloze deletion card for maybe 1-2 of them. The reason is because I use morphman’s mass tagger feature and priority.db. https://massimmersionapproach.com/table-of-contents/anki/morphman/
Probably out of the 20 words I look, I will probably send anywhere from 5-10 of them to a .txt file using authotkey and a gaming house so I can curate those cards into a deck. Then during reviews I mark cards that I want cloze versions of since korean has homonyms and i have duplicate cards on top of that. Also some cards have example sentences, some have English, some have Japanese so I gotta pick the cards out. As I’ve mentioned before, you can mass make clozes in excel so the cards I pull into a deck CAN BE converted into cloze format by changing note type. I suck at deleting and suspending anki cards sometimes but I am great at curating! Doing the same thing for Japanese of course though I have very little to look up while watching honestly compared to Korean.
I think it’s 1 day for good and 4 days for easy and like 1 minute again for the default settings lol. As you can see the settings make a HUGE DIFFERENCE.
I highly recommend changing steps, minimum interval (why the hell would i want to see a card the next day.. that ain’t spaced repetition and i have no patience or desire to see failed cards that soon let alone 1 minute later….) and graduating interval from the default settings!
I’m very satisfied with my anki settings. The setting that I despise the most in the default anki settings is the steps. I love my 3900 for steps for new cards. I don’t do multiple steps because I like the FUZZ factor that anki imparts on cards that are in review (and out of steps) so that if you have 10 cards with the interval of 5 days they don’t all show up 5 days later (some are 4, some are 6 etc). The fuzz factor evens out anki reviews better than steps which are exact… The default anki settings for steps is asinine and insulting especially if you make your own cards one at a time!!!I try to import whenever applicable though. Isn’t the default steps like 1 10 .. wtf is that. who the hell has time for that!!! stop the madness! there’s way too much interesting, compelling stuff to read/listen/watch/etc. So if you do your first run through for let’s say 50 cards depending on your settings (show failed cards sprinkled in the reviews or after reviews or before reviews etc), anki will start showing you the same card 2 times because the 1 min or 10 min is up but that makes no damn sense and kills the flow.
The main reason why I’m okay with not doing anki every day is the fact that my intervals are huge. To me it makes sense to “push myself” with big interviews to weed out the cards that are actually hard rather than over-reviewing cards. The other reason I’m okay with huge intervals is that I am familiar with Korean since I already knew Japanese when I started and I’ve been learning it, albeit half-assedly, since summer 2011. If you still use the default anki settings even though it’s 8 years into learning a language, you either really suck at the language or you’re extremely contently learning a language at an inefficient and slow-steady pace or you’re unnecessarily wasting a lot of time on Anki. I have my 8-9 year history with Korean so using the default settings are OUT OF THE QUESTION. I have a propensity for remembering Korean from the experience and intuition that i cultivated over the years so more times than not shit will sound like what it means or it takes little effort to remember or relearn compared Thai or some language that I have ZERO FAMILIARITY with. I have to use huge intervals and lax settings to make anki useful for learning korean. The conservative, default settings are straight up useless!! Of course if you have no foundation in the language that you’re learning or you’re doing some pre-made deck, you probably can’t do huge intervals. However, at the same time you don’t know what intervals you can handle until you actually try it. In fact, I first entered these settings on a whim as an experiment, just to see how “bad” it’ll be with not remembering anything but I ended up weeding out the “hard” cards and not wasting time on easy cards. Of course I failed more cards (it wasn’t a drastic increase) with the newer lax settings compared to my original lax settings but overall I end up saving time with the laxer settings since I can efficiently identify troublesome cards and easy cards (sometimes you just don’t know if a card is easy or tricky until anki tests ya x days or weeks later). For example with my original lax settings I might press good on a “hard” card 2 OR 3 times then fail it on the 3rd view and with my laxer settings I end up pressing good on a “hard” card once then fail it on the 2nd review. For easy cards, I would press easy on an “easy” card on my original lax settings 2-3 times in the same time span it would take for me to press “easy” once on laxer settings. Another boon of huge intervals is that it helps me notice how much better it is to learn a language with anki versus NO anki. It’s so much easier to notice how much I would’ve never remembered or retained by ONLY looking up a word in a dictionary and not addING it to anki since there’s no guarantee I will come across the word again in a convenient time span in native material. The settings are definitely are hitting a sweet spot in which I’m shown the card sometime right before the memory is completely obliterated from my brain lol( I pretty much never experienced this with the default settings lol) . I can say with overwhelming, beaming confidence that I learned/retained/re-learned WAY MORE KOREAN this past year with ANKI versus if I had done the exact same things I did with KOREAN with no anki. Not bad for only doing anki 200/365 days = 54.8% of the year especially because it said I averaged 16.7 min/day (I shudder and gasp when I hear horror stories of people spending wayyyyyyyyyy too much time on anki reviews for language learning). I had no idea I sucked at showing up this badly but it doesn’t make much of a difference since I can only tolerate anki with huge intervals. Space repetition for the win! As I’ve said many times, I have no idea why people use flash cards or notebooks (i especially roll my eyes and wince at the people using multiple colored pens to copy the dictionary and example sentence etc) for learning languages…
I cap the number of reviews at 40 and number of new cards at 14 because I like doing those number of cards especially since doing 14 new cards is like doing 7 easy new cards since they’re clozed cards. Any more just feels burdensome. However, I usually go back to the Korean deck multiple times to do 50 or 60 more reviews after doing other decks. Even if I tried to do 200 reviews in my korean deck, I know I will zone out after probably the 50th or 60th or 70th card so I don’t even put myself in that position. I use to lie to myself that I was paying attention after the 100th card etc but not anymore !! No point lying to yourself! I know what I can do and what I hate, so I work around that. Again, the conventional anki wisdom of completing all your reviews for the day does not work for me. It would just make me miserable, make anki time-consuming. Lastly, I don’t feel a tangible/noticeable benefit in my comprehension of Korean media when I keep on top of my anki reviews (as in getting the number of cards due for review down to zero and keeping it there) since I already understand korean tv well. I’m just learning words that natives know that I don’t know that aren’t common (ESPECially since I don’t watch/read Korean everyday since I have a damn life and enjoy my media in Japanese and English) but are still useful. I have NO aspirations of learning obscure Korean words that most native speakers don’t know unless there’s some special reason such as me possessing a keen interest in some niche field that most Koreans don’t have interest in (this has not happened to me yet!). I have my priorities straight which is that Korean media dictates what’s important and what I want to learn and remember rather than anki.
Anki said I did 27,039 reviews and I have 4064 cards. Of the 4064 notes, 2400 notes are new cards. To do some crude generalization and math, 27,039/4064 cards gives me 6.6 reviews per card over the year. Since I only do cloze format for Korean that 6.6 reviews feels more like 13.2 reviews ( I usually make 2 cloZes) so I’m that much more content. That sounds good and efficient to me and you sure as fuck can’t get that with flashcards that have no space repetition especially with 2400 cards. All it means is that I see the cards a bunch of times in increasing intervals over a long period of time which is what I want. I’m sure if I use the default settings my number of reviews would be triple or quadruple or even sextuple this number and I wouldn’t necessarily get better results and waste a shit ton of time and be anki’s bitch. This is one of the biggest reasons why I get irate when people try to compare anki with flash cards. They’re not in the same realm. They’re COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. STOP COMPARING THEM. I rolled my eyes when I read that someone decided to use quizlet instead of anki for aesthetic reasons… lol… talk about making an uninformed ecision. There’s a lot to customize for anki and nothing to customize for flash cards… even if we Were to talk about anki, depending on your settings and card type and plugins and how you use it and god knows what else since anki is so versatile, our experiences will be vastly different. The Anki experience varies greatly depending on HOW you use it and SET it up. Sure you can review a card with flashcards 13 times over a span of a week or a month but you probably won’t remember shit after a year or two since you’re not spacing the intervals. I have no idea why some people are so set on learning inefficiently with flashcards for languages of all things. and they’re usually learning 10 languages at once ORZ lol. My policy for learning Korean from the start has been what will make my vocab bigger 2/5 years from now not 1 week from now or 1 month from now because I know from experience how much better spaced repetition is compared to flash cards. PLus I’m kinda trying to make up for the time loss I experienced from using anki with the default settings for Japanese since I didn’t know better. I must mention that i don’t overburden myself with expectations because I’m not doing AKATT and I never intend to. My yearly goal for Korean has and always been to increase my passive vocab/comprehension as in “is my passive vocab/comprehension better than last year?.” the answer has always been an unequivocal yes!
Lastly it said I made almost 2400 cards but the number of notes is 1204. The number of notes is more important since I make multiple clozes. I found this out by searching card:1 added:365 in anki browse under the deck.
Felt like posting this since people sometimes obsess over using anki the most optimal way possible and end up spending way too much time on it. At the end of the day, anki is a supplementto language learning and half-assanking still works ( It’s especially the case if you’re making your own cards and have a foundation with the language.). ANKI should not be some time-sucking vortex (making cards, editing cards, reviewing cards, fiddling with settings, fiddling with formatting/css etc, fiddling with plug-ins) ! I’d say if you’re using the default settings for language learning, it is precisely what I mentioned in the previous sentence. If the only way you can sustain anki reviews is by using the default settings, you’re probably better off doing other activities like reading and listening while putting your faith in natural SRS. Yes, some words repeat so often that you don’t even need to make anki cards for them….The default settings aren’t based on science and aren’t optimized for learning and all that jazz. Not to mention we’re all different which means we have different forgetting curves. The default settings are arbitrary! Most of all, they are OVERKILL
<- only in Japan… thank god for amazon.co.jp lolz
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