Study Diary, 07/30/2008
July 30, 2008 – 10:42 amI was quite busy today with hanging out around Stellar and the JR Tower in downtown Sapporo. Though, I did manage to have about 90 minutes of downtime available to do some serious studying.
I’ve been going through the sentences in the Unicom JLPT 2kyuu Kanji Vocabulary Drill book. This book runs through kanji ordered by reading, associated compounds, and example sentences. So in each lesson you learn a whole bunch of kanji words that use kanji with associated elements in them, and this helps you realize which radicals can give you a sign as to the reading of a kanji. This helps you guess how a new word is read, and makes it very easy to look things up.
The strength of this book, though, is in the example sentences. They are interesting, varied, and fantastic. They employ varying levels of politeness, and varying levels of grammar. Sometimes they’ll even throw in new compounds that have elements you’ve seen before to see if you can guess what they mean. Probably not by accident, these new compounds tend to show up within another lesson or two.
Because these sentences are so useful, I’ve stopped putting single words in my SRS flashcard vocab deck. I only put these sentences from the book in that deck. The context helps quite a bit in actually knowing how to use words, and once you know a sentence backwards and forwards it doesn’t really take that much longer than testing a card with only a single word. On the contrary, sometimes it’s faster because the context gives you big hints. Recognizing single words, apart from any surround elements is a completely contrived concept. It’s a weak way to practice vocab, and I would try to avoid it if possible.
In this way, I’m sort of becoming a convert to the AJATT sentence method. I can go through this vocab book a lot faster this way than I can the other way, and it sticks just fine. I’ve been able to use some of the words I’ve learned from the book already. I’m enjoying it a lot.
So, today, during the downtime I burned through a bunch of these sentences, and the pace picks up with each lesson I do. I’m really starting to hone my Japanese instincts, and it’s an awesome feeling when I can see a sentence for the first time, even including new vocab, and completely understand it. It’s happening more and more, and surely will be much more advanced after I finish this vocab book.
I anticipate that I’m going to work through each of the books I bought in succession. I’ll do the two vocab books first, then the grammar book, the reading book, and finally the listening book. I’m a little worried I’m going to overlook some level 3 & 4 vocab/grammar but it should be okay. I’m also worried I’m going to run out of time before I have to take the test. I may do some creative things to buy myself some more study time after school starts again.
Today, in addition, I did the ordinary RTK stuff. No added cards. 636 total, 78 failed, 217 in long term. I’m hovering steady around 50% retention when I do my cold reviews in the morning. After I review RTK, I try to cut the failed stack down enough to give me a few more recent kanji. I keep pushing forward like this bit by bit. RTK will definitely be finished completely by the time the JLPT rolls around. That should help my instincts quite a bit.
