More than 3/4 of kanji done

I didn't realise I passed the 3/4 mark a few days ago.
The forecast says I have 24 days left. I kind of hoped that I would be able to finish it before new year.
But unless I manage to break through my mental block I can't go faster as I already have issues with the new kanji sticking.
The older ones are pretty solid by now though, so that's nice.
The first 1/4 is already pushed a few months in the future.

Memrise 3 almost finished

I hoped I would have completed memrise 3 by now but I have about 80 words/sentences left.
I shouldn't take much longer now, maybe just tomorrow even as I tend to do more on Fridays.

Overall it feels like I kinda hit a plateau at the moment. Especially the new kanji don't seem to stick as well.
I will just keep going for now though and hopefully it will become better soon.
I'm gonna need to adjust my schedule a bit anyhow in January, so if the problem continues I can deal with it then.

Clozemaster

I found a new app again : clozemaster.
I'm not exactly far enough with Japanese to use it.
But I like trying it out anyhow. So far I see great value for it in a few months.

Meanwhile the kanji is coming along quite well. And I'm determined to finish memrise ASAP.

Memrise 2 completed

I completed memrise 2 and got a good amount of 3 done already.
Number 3 is the biggest one so it's probably gonna take a while.
I'm going to try to do it in 2 weeks though.

Halfway through the kanji

Hooray I'm halfway trough the kanji.

My learning speed for the kanji has dropped a bit but at an average of 22 per day it's still going well.
At this speed it will take me 50 more days. My speed might drop a bit more as the amount of reviews per day is also slowly going up.
It's about 150 per day now instead of always below 150, it doesn't take me longer though as I can answer the mature cards a lot quicker.
The mature card count is over 10% now, so I can say I know 220 kanji now.

Memrise to anki success

I got the anki deck fixed quite nicely. It's now Japanese with male and female audio to English.
I tried to get separate cards with kana and kanji but that didn't work well, so now it's just both kanji, kana and audio on the front side and English on the back.

I'm still learning the new cards in memrise itself, but I'm glad that I can review in anki now.

Memrise to anki

I got memrise exported to anki. But it's not in the way I want it yet. The cards are from English to Japanese and I want it the other way around.
Apparently you can only reverse the cards on the desktop version.
The cards also contain romaji which I don't want.
I would also like to split up the kana and kanji into separate cards.

Memrise on the rise

I decided to continue the memrise course and completed part 1. I also selectively did a few parts from part 2 and 3.
Like the colours, numbers, weekdays etc.

I like memrise a lot for learning new things but not really for reviewing them.
Apparently there is a extension for Chrome to import to anki.
If I can get that working that would be nice.
Meanwhile I will continue selectively working trough part 2 and 3. With on top of the list the countries.

Duolingo gold till first checkpoint

I'm starting to like the duolingo course. I still think it's too difficult to use duolingo from the start. But I think I'm at a decent enough level now to effectively use it.
I got my tree completely gold till the first checkpoint.
I did most of the lessons till the second checkpoint but I think they are still too hard for me.I will probably slowly start to work on them though and see if I will feel more confident after a few weeks.

Meanwhile I keep on learning my kanji in anki. I am at 840 so far and at my current speed I will finish in about 2 months.

Core 2000 experiment

I decided to do a little experiment with the core 2000.
I went trough part 2 till 10 in only 2 days. This wasn't very enjoyable of course and I doubt I learned much of the words.
But I interesting how the daily reviews are being affected by it.
The first few days were an overload of reviews of course. But now less then a week later it already starts looking a lot better.
It's still in the hundreds of course but I'm quite interested how quickly it will drop to about 100 a day.

I click easy on all sentences so they get pushed forward quite quickly. With the words I click hard on the ones I don't know and good on the ones I know.
This means the daily load will be mostly the hard cards in a few weeks.

I guess this would work terrible if I was actively trying to learn these cards instead of just clicking without really thinking. But I doubt learning the core words along the kanji works well anyway.

There a few ways to realistically deal with this :
1. Spend 100% of the effort on kanji first and then 100% on the words.
2.spend 90% on kanji and 10% on words, and after that 100 on the remaining words.
3. 50% kanji and 50% words and finish at the same time.

And the unrealistic way I'm dealing with it right now :
4. Spend my attention on learning the kanji at a manageable speed and spend time without attention on words in an unreasonable speed. And only start paying attention after I finish the kanji.

For the kanji 20 to 30 cards is quite doable. For the words I assume it would be an higher number as they also contain those same kanji. Let's assume between 50 and 100.

I will do some calculations later to see how long option 1 would take.
I assume option 2 and 3 will be slightly slower.
I'm not sure yet how I would calculate option 4 but I will think about it.

Core 2000 part 1

So I added core 2000 to my anki decks. And finished part 1 already.
I didn't want to deal with the sentences yet so I just clicked easy on. They will quickly be pushed forward a lot while I review the words.
I guess I will review for a few weeks before I start on part 2.
Every part contains 200 words and 200 sentences which includes those words.

I don't know if it's a smart idea to do both the kanji and the core 2000 at the same.

25% of the kanji done

I'm done with 25% of the kanji deck.
It took me 24 days to get to 550, which averages at 22,9 new kanji per day.
I think this amount is quite doable and it makes sure I will be finished within 3 months.
I actually feel like a could add more new cards per but I don't want the review count get to high. It stays below 150 now which takes me about 15 minutes.

Meanwhile I'm still reviewing my kana. I'm also doing the lingodeer course and I feel like this combination is working quite well.

Learning the kana; what worked and what didn't

I tried different methods to learn the kana, some of them didn't work well and others did.
There are more options out there of course. But I will keep this to the things I tried.

Let's list them in the order that I tried them.

So the first one is the link that I still have on the sidebar. It's the site I shortly used 5 years ago before I gave up. This already shows this didn't work for me. I will remove the link soon as I don't think it's worth looking at.

The first thing I tried since my new start was duolingo. As I said in my last post I was a bit disappointed in the Japanese course after my great experience with duolingo for Italian.
I think I will write a post later on duolingo as I don't want to dismiss it as a learning tool yet. But the reason why It didn't work to learn my kana, it trows grammar, kana, vocabulary and kanji right at you from the beginning. That was way too overwhelming for me as a beginner.

Next up was memrise, it's official Japanese course had the same issue. A bit less extreme though.
It was still too frustrating so I checked the unofficial courses and found a course (split up in 4 parts) basic hiragana/katakana. This worked quite well but for some reason I still didn't like it.
This was the moment I started questioning if I could really learn it and gave it a break.

I decided I really want to learn Japanese so I continued looking. By this time duolingo brought out its other app called tinycards. It's basically just a flash card system but I like the design and I think the little smiley faces are very rewarding.
It has two separate sets for hiragana and katakana.
I started with hiragana which has a total of 66 cards (the basic, a few combinations and a few practise words)
Then the katakana which has 46 cards (just the basic). This worked well for me but it didn't have the modified kana.

I heard about anki so I gave that a try. I downloaded a kana deck with a total of 452 cards. It was a mix of hiragana and katakana which caused a bit of confusion. But with sticking with it I was trough it fairly quickly.
Almost all cards from that deck are 'mature' by now and it gives me just a few cards to review per day.

Although I knew the kana fairly well by the time I finished the anki deck I wanted some practice to not confuse the hiragana and katakana.
I found a unofficial deck in tinycards which was a match up of the hiragana and katakana. This got my memory pretty solid.

I continued to look for ways to learn Japanese and found jalupnext. I found it because of the kanji but I checked out its kana course as well.
I think it's way it teaches kanji is quite interesting but the kana course was just confusing me. It's also a paid course so my verdict is not worth it.
I did just the free trial of the kana and kanji. I won't see anything about the quality of the other courses like jalup beginner but I must say it's quite expensive, so I rather check our free courses.

And last but not least.
My new favourite app : lingodeer. I quickly went trough the kana section and if I could do my kana learning over I would choose this.
I will write more about the app later as I'm currently working trough the lessons.

Stay tuned

A new start

I restarted my Japanese learning with a lot more confidence and ways to learn.
The options are pretty endless with all the new apps and content on the Internet.

I also have a friend who is studying Japanese in Japan.

My current approach is not very structured yet but I learned a lot more already and I believe my current approach works a lot better and faster.

My interest to learning again sparked this summer when Duolingo brought out its Japanese course.
I had been using it for a few months to learn some Italian for my summer holiday. The app worked amazingly well for me and I think it's a great app for European languages.

Anyway I was very excited when they brought out Japanese but I quickly found out that the way of learning didn't work as well for me as for Italian.
So I gave learning a break again, but after a month or so I felt really determined to learn Japanese so I started looking for other places to start.

After a bit of trial and error I decided I needed to focus on learning kana to have a decent chance.
It felt like a massive and almost impossible task before I started but it wasn't so bad in the end.
It took me about a week I think to feel confident about my hiragana and a bit longer for the katakana.
I'm a month further now and it really starts to settle down.

One of my biggest mistakes in the past is that I tried to learn Japanese with just romaji. So I will go over my old content again but with kana this time.

I also started learning kanji. I have a 20 day streak now and did 470 kanji so far. I don't properly know them yet of course but I keep on struggling trough the 2200 in my anki deck.

More on that later, stay tuned.