Friday, April 17, 2009. 1:27 pm. I started by adding a few new vocab words to my japtemp card deck, words I learned this morning from my girlfriend, one of which is too slangy to even be in the dictionary ;) I love slang! Japtemp is now at: 5 scheduled, 4 unlearned. I went through the scheduled cards, passing 4 and failing 1 (confused the meaning of 今朝 as "tomorrow morning" instead of "this morning", for some reason).
1:30pm. Opened kanjiaid.mem. 8 scheduled, 0 failed. Passed 'em all in no time. One of the vocab words I have here, 派閥, was added to familiarize myself with the kanji 閥. The other kanji in this compound, 派, was one of the ones I added yesterday in chapter 50. So with this particular item I hit two birds with one stone, quite unintentionally at the time.
1:46pm. (I was distracted for a few minutes to proofread something for my gf) Opened my main flagship deck. 80 scheduled cards, 228 failed.
2:00pm. Finished the 80 scheduled, and now the failed pile is at 233, meaning I missed five. Now I'll do the 20 reviews on the failed pile to make 100 total reviews on this deck for today.
2:06pm. Upon completing the daily reviews for sam.mem, the pile-o'-fail is down to heigh 219. A net shrinkage of 9 cards, which is not bad for a 100-a-day regimen on a card deck this gummed up. Since I have a little extra time today, I took notes of which kanji I failed, and now I'll go sentence mine them a little and add some new cards to the kanjiaid stack so I'll get extra visual memory aid.
2:38pm. Ended up adding 14 new cards to kanjiaid: 7 sentences, 7 vocabulary words. Now the main event, the latekanji deck. There are 8 scheduled cards and the 27 new unmemorized ones I added yesterday. Passed all the first eight easily. By 2:57 after 42 total ratings (including some repeat ratings on items where I was struggling) the failstack was down to 3, and then I stopped to go do stuff with the GF.
Saturday, April 18th. Yesterday night glowing face girl and I went clubbing at Sugar Bar, and we slept in til close to noon this morning. 4:12 PM: Open japtemp.mem. There were 2 old cards due, 4 unmemorized that I added yesterday, and 1 failed. Passed 'em all. 4:15: Open kanjiaid. 8 old cards due, and the 14 unmemorized cards from yesterday. After three minutes it was down to 0 cards due and 11 failed cards. One of the failed cards was an old vocab card and the other ten were just new ones from yesterday which haven't been assimilated into my brain yet.
4:19: Open sam.mem, the main flagship deck with over 9000 cards. Today I'm greeted by 76 cards due and a stack 219 high of failed cards. It took 'til 4:37 to get through the scheduled reviews, during which time the failstack grew to size 229 (10 fails). By 4:44 I finished 24 reviews on the failed pile to make the 100 total for today. Now the deck clog is down to 214, a net shrinkage of 5 items.
4:45: Finally the kanji sprint that this is all about. Opened latekanji to find 21 scheduled kanji cards and 3 failed. Got through the scheduled cards by 4:52, with only 1 miss. Four more ratings and the failed stack is down to just 2, where I'll stop.
9:30PM: Now, I open RTK1 and start adding the lesson 51 cards. This chapter is the last of several chapters where Heisig gathers up kanji oddballs which deviate from usual patterns. I guess it's the equivalent of the "Irregular Verbs" part of studying a European language. (If you follow that link, though, you'll see I'm not really all that intimidated by irregular verb conjugations.) James says: "This is probably the most difficult lesson in this book." We shall see...
It starts right away with a weird-arse kanji: #1880, 繭, "cocoon" (also the Heisig-name of a certain rare primitive, the left half of 幻 from the previous lesson). Looks like this lesson is going to be fun :) It has the characters from #1880 to #1903, 23 in all. It happens to contain a couple of my favorite kanji: 声 "voice", 気 ("ki"), which I wrote a little about here, and 飛 ("fly").
As I harvest some stories from the Reviewing The Kanji website, I'm noticing much higher vote numbers for the top stories for these. Probably since these kanji are really-freaking-hard, a lot of people have used the community stories ;)
I predict the most difficult kanji here will be 蒸 "steam" just because the part in the middle is so weird and klunky. When reviews come, we'll see how right this guess is. Maybe just by making the prediction, my mind will subconsciously work harder to remember the thing, like how you can't make yourself not think of a pink elephant.
I finally finished adding the new stack of cards at 10:22. It took a long time cuz I kept being distracted. I had a lot of fun though, cuz my girlfriend was working in the same room and we both got a laugh as I explained some of the funnier visualization tales to her. Like the one for "come" (来): "You horny bastard, don't come, at least not yet".
I'm very happy that Heisig didn't do the traditional thing and order the kanji by their commonness. Besides being suboptimal in that you end up learning more complicated kanji before learning their constituent parts (like learning 猫 before 苗), that would make the kanji final sprint an agonizing trudge through boring tree names and obscure words. Instead, every lesson I do, I'm finding very useful new characters. As long as I've been studying the speaking and reading of Japanese, a good 50% of each new lesson, I find I already recognize.
The deck is now at 0 scheduled, and 26 "not memorized", which includes the 2 failed and the 23 I just added. Wait a second.. 2 plus 23 makes 25... Why is it counting an extra card?? The plot thickens!
Lesson 49
Lesson 50
Lesson 52
Lesson 53
Lesson 54
Lesson 55
Lesson 56 (Not Online Yet!)
1:30pm. Opened kanjiaid.mem. 8 scheduled, 0 failed. Passed 'em all in no time. One of the vocab words I have here, 派閥, was added to familiarize myself with the kanji 閥. The other kanji in this compound, 派, was one of the ones I added yesterday in chapter 50. So with this particular item I hit two birds with one stone, quite unintentionally at the time.
1:46pm. (I was distracted for a few minutes to proofread something for my gf) Opened my main flagship deck. 80 scheduled cards, 228 failed.
2:00pm. Finished the 80 scheduled, and now the failed pile is at 233, meaning I missed five. Now I'll do the 20 reviews on the failed pile to make 100 total reviews on this deck for today.
2:06pm. Upon completing the daily reviews for sam.mem, the pile-o'-fail is down to heigh 219. A net shrinkage of 9 cards, which is not bad for a 100-a-day regimen on a card deck this gummed up. Since I have a little extra time today, I took notes of which kanji I failed, and now I'll go sentence mine them a little and add some new cards to the kanjiaid stack so I'll get extra visual memory aid.
2:38pm. Ended up adding 14 new cards to kanjiaid: 7 sentences, 7 vocabulary words. Now the main event, the latekanji deck. There are 8 scheduled cards and the 27 new unmemorized ones I added yesterday. Passed all the first eight easily. By 2:57 after 42 total ratings (including some repeat ratings on items where I was struggling) the failstack was down to 3, and then I stopped to go do stuff with the GF.
Saturday, April 18th. Yesterday night glowing face girl and I went clubbing at Sugar Bar, and we slept in til close to noon this morning. 4:12 PM: Open japtemp.mem. There were 2 old cards due, 4 unmemorized that I added yesterday, and 1 failed. Passed 'em all. 4:15: Open kanjiaid. 8 old cards due, and the 14 unmemorized cards from yesterday. After three minutes it was down to 0 cards due and 11 failed cards. One of the failed cards was an old vocab card and the other ten were just new ones from yesterday which haven't been assimilated into my brain yet.
4:19: Open sam.mem, the main flagship deck with over 9000 cards. Today I'm greeted by 76 cards due and a stack 219 high of failed cards. It took 'til 4:37 to get through the scheduled reviews, during which time the failstack grew to size 229 (10 fails). By 4:44 I finished 24 reviews on the failed pile to make the 100 total for today. Now the deck clog is down to 214, a net shrinkage of 5 items.
4:45: Finally the kanji sprint that this is all about. Opened latekanji to find 21 scheduled kanji cards and 3 failed. Got through the scheduled cards by 4:52, with only 1 miss. Four more ratings and the failed stack is down to just 2, where I'll stop.
9:30PM: Now, I open RTK1 and start adding the lesson 51 cards. This chapter is the last of several chapters where Heisig gathers up kanji oddballs which deviate from usual patterns. I guess it's the equivalent of the "Irregular Verbs" part of studying a European language. (If you follow that link, though, you'll see I'm not really all that intimidated by irregular verb conjugations.) James says: "This is probably the most difficult lesson in this book." We shall see...
It starts right away with a weird-arse kanji: #1880, 繭, "cocoon" (also the Heisig-name of a certain rare primitive, the left half of 幻 from the previous lesson). Looks like this lesson is going to be fun :) It has the characters from #1880 to #1903, 23 in all. It happens to contain a couple of my favorite kanji: 声 "voice", 気 ("ki"), which I wrote a little about here, and 飛 ("fly").
As I harvest some stories from the Reviewing The Kanji website, I'm noticing much higher vote numbers for the top stories for these. Probably since these kanji are really-freaking-hard, a lot of people have used the community stories ;)
I predict the most difficult kanji here will be 蒸 "steam" just because the part in the middle is so weird and klunky. When reviews come, we'll see how right this guess is. Maybe just by making the prediction, my mind will subconsciously work harder to remember the thing, like how you can't make yourself not think of a pink elephant.
I finally finished adding the new stack of cards at 10:22. It took a long time cuz I kept being distracted. I had a lot of fun though, cuz my girlfriend was working in the same room and we both got a laugh as I explained some of the funnier visualization tales to her. Like the one for "come" (来): "You horny bastard, don't come, at least not yet".
I'm very happy that Heisig didn't do the traditional thing and order the kanji by their commonness. Besides being suboptimal in that you end up learning more complicated kanji before learning their constituent parts (like learning 猫 before 苗), that would make the kanji final sprint an agonizing trudge through boring tree names and obscure words. Instead, every lesson I do, I'm finding very useful new characters. As long as I've been studying the speaking and reading of Japanese, a good 50% of each new lesson, I find I already recognize.
The deck is now at 0 scheduled, and 26 "not memorized", which includes the 2 failed and the 23 I just added. Wait a second.. 2 plus 23 makes 25... Why is it counting an extra card?? The plot thickens!
Lesson 49
Lesson 50
Lesson 52
Lesson 53
Lesson 54
Lesson 55
Lesson 56 (Not Online Yet!)
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