So what do i do now? I've worked my vocabulary to about 4000 words all together, I can understand what I hear, but it's not forming into anything between the ears. So, what do i do now? I assumed once I was able to hear it comprehension would be automatic, and that is not the case, so.... what now?
I credit Migaku with kicking my butt into gear and showing me enough progression to rekindle the fire in my chest that learning Japanese sparked a decade or so ago. Now I am on a pace to know over 6000 words by the end of the year, and travel to Japan with my wife and kids.
But here is the thing: I have over 5500 cards in Migaku. Everything I touched that had to do with Japanese went into Migaku: any vocabulary from other sources, any words I picked up in random places, every song I listened to, shows that I wanted to decode. Everything.
I have stopped adding new stuff to Migaku, so my workload isn't too bad (about 250 a day, give or take), but I took a day "off" for my birthday last week (after doing a minimal review to keep that streak going). I tried to find a vacation or a suspension option, but had no luck there. The next day, I had 559 reviews due, which is kind of unacceptable.
I almost feel like I'm being punished for buying into what Migaku does. I mean, I'm not super mad about it; I'm still going to do my full reviews every day because I have goals to hit, but it is unacceptable that there is no vacation or suspension option, or anything like that.
This is not a "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore" post.
It's more of a "I love what you do, but this feels broken and penalizing. I almost feel like I'm paying a debt every day instead of doing something I love, so maybe this should be addressed, and oh yeah, any updates on Academy 2?" kind of post.
First and foremost, I wanted to say thank you to everyone who commented on my original post and all the suggestions and conversations that came out of it. It's been 8 days since I basically stopped engaging in any media that wasn't Japanese. So I figured, just in case anyone cared to know, that I would update you on my progress.
First of all, where I was. The general consensus was that I was lower intermediate/beginner when I started. Obviously that has not changed significantly in the last 8 days, but what has changed is that 8 days ago my comprehension was literally 0. I could hear words, but I couldn't comprehend a thing regardless of how fast or slow the speaker was speaking, regardless of whether it was N3 or N4 or N5 .....I even saw one that said N6...yeah, that was weird.
As I was cleaning up the kitchen after dinner tonight listening to a Japanese podcast that just plays conversations for about 30 minutes. I have been spamming that type of content along with just general podcasts the whole time. I haven't paid any attention to the level, just that they are natural-sounding conversations or natives speaking.
And I noticed tonight that if I paid enough attention to the podcast (Listen & Learn: Real Japanese Conversations), I could understand stretches of it. I did have to kind of stop and focus, but I wasn't able to do that 8 days ago. The conversation was N5-N4 level (which kind of bummed me out when I checked), so it's not cause for tons of celebration. I wasn't automatic, and it did take focus, but after all this time I finally feel like I have my foot in the door, and it's just a matter of staying on task. Finally, it really feels like my goal is in sight.
Very, very, very, very distant sight, mind you; there is a massive difference between wedging your foot in the door and walking through it after all, but the goal is in sight nonetheless.
Even if nobody reads this, I'm still grateful for all of your comments that helped me design how I execute this to finally see a small sliver of daylight through the deep dark cavern that is my Japanese listening comprehension journey.
So thanks again, everyone.
I just finished mining a video for sentences, but it would be great if I could just print out a transcript so I could practice reading it along with the audio without having to play the video. Or if I could put a transcript made of the generated subtitles into the reader.
It would just make it easier to really dig into the video without having to watch it and pause it every time a sentence pops up to look at and dissect.
So I am using every bit of Migaku's card creator that I can right now. Wednesday night, I decided to take an episode of a short little Jdrama that I have and run it through Migaku's player with the player generating Japanese subs. Then I mined every sentence that I didn't know all the words for (74 in a 23-min episode!!)
Anyways, the next day I decided my approach would be to run the cards as normal, but since Migaku records the audio from the show, for the following 3 days (starting yesterday) I will shadow every sentence (25per day, I'm not a total masochist) until I feel comfortable with it, then write it in my journal/review notebook, and move on.
And each night I am watching the episode of the drama with Japanese subs, with the goal of, after I finish all the sentences, watching the episode without any subs at all and hopefully still understanding the show.
I'm just curious if anyone has done something similar with Migaku, and if so, how did it work out for you?
In theory, it should work all of the things listed above, but it is a lot of work; I hope it's worth it.
I have always heard about people who are able to learn a langauge like that, i just figured that my brain wasn't capable of it, but now that i've been looking around I'm not sure if it is a real thing, a persistent myth, or something that people say and neglect that they also have another means of learning the language e.g. a class a textbook, app, etc.
I'm learning towards it being a myth, but has anyone ever actually done it with just media? And if so...how?
I'm a little nervous, I normally listen about 4 hours a week and listen to AI reddit story slop on YouTube, but i need to cut that out anyways since I am serious about learning Japanese.
Any suggestions?
My level is intermediate trending upward, but still intermediate. Maybe somewhere between intermediate and upper intermediate.
Any tips or advice on going "full immersion" would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions or advice.
I'm a little nervous, I normally listen about 4 hours a week and listen to AI reddit story slop on YouTube, but i need to cut that out anyways since I am serious about learning Japanese.
Any suggestions?
My level is intermediate trending upward, but still intermediate. Maybe somewhere between intermediate and upper intermediate.
Any tips or advice on going "full immersion" would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions or advice.
I've seen people talking about different rates of input vs output for effective Japanese study. I believe I+1 is one I have recently run across. But I'm not sure how to gauge that with my current routine, so I thought I would lay it out so someone who knows more than me and is WAY better at effectively studying the language can break it down for me if I need more input or more output. I try to balance it, but I have no idea if what I'm doing is how you are supposed to do it. Ok, so here is what I do daily.
I wake up, and I have a small deck of physical cards normally; these are words that have been "sticky", and they are older words that I need more time to get in my thick head. I dub this my loser deck. It's usually about 50-80 cards, depending on if I've cycled out words that I've had in there long enough to feel comfortable with. Then I have smaller purely kanji decks, no vocabulary. I try to do 22 new Kanji a week, but I've only been doing that for about a month, so right now I only have 66, but it usually takes me 2 weeks to get one deck really in my head before I add another. These Kanji are N4 level from my Japanese with Hikaru program.
Then I do my Pimsluer for the day (I'm in month 3 of 5 for that right now.
If it is an office day, than i'll listen to a Japanese pod 101 lesson on the commute for listening practice and light shadowing (though they talk too fast for me to shadow most times)
When I do my "primary decks," which is basically my Migaku decks, which I get from their academy course and various other lessons/books, or pick up randomly. The new words I will write in my journal (normally about 20 words a day) and any words that are sticky but too new to go in my "loser deck".
After Pimsluer, I review my journal. How I do this is i do them 10 at a time, I read a word outloud 5x then move to the next word, than do that word 5x, then go back up to the first word, hit it once, do the second word once, and go to the next word and do it 5x, and go down and up the list in that fashion once, then move on to the other set. This is part speaking practice and part rote memorization because my stubborn brain won't learn to hold on to stuff I watch on TV or games or anything.
Then I will do my ancillary stuff. I slowly study and then listen to a song on LingQ and do that day's review, then I jump over to Hayai Learn and listen to the same song because they do better at explaining the grammar from songs. Then I do my wani kani for the day (I try to keep my Guru queue in the 200 range; if it gets higher, I stop taking lessons and work it down), then I will do my iKnow jp review for the day, and finally my bunpro for the day (where I try to do 3 new grammar points a day). None of this is out loud reading.
Then I hit my primary deck, which is Migaku, that
It's a range depending on how actively I'm adding words. If I'm adding it's between 3-400; right now I'm taking a break to work it down, so I'm at about 280-300.
Sometimes I will pull Jpop songs that I like and put them into LingQ and then find the lyrics and put them in there, and then listen to the song line by line and make the timestamps fit so when I watch them during my lesson the lesson keeps up with the video which makes it more enjoyable for me. So that is listening practice, but it's not consistent.
And if I'm feeling extra motivated, I'll do some reading on Satori Reader, or play a little Persona 5 Royal in Japanese, but these are not consistent, but they exist, so I'll note them.
I'm not sure how the I+1 thing works exactly, but I think input would be new words I pick up, and output would be reading out loud, but does writing down the vocabulary count? Or reading but not out loud? Is reading, writing, and speaking all output? Since a lot of my input revolves around reviewing the same words a lot, does that still count as new input, or how does that work with review stuff?
This post got way longer than I expected; hopefully someone gets through it all and can give me some kind of feedback.
I've really ramped up my vocabulary study the last 6 months or so: flashcards, apps, the whole 9 yards.
But I've noticed that as I'm studying a word, right before I "get it" into my head in a way I can recall later without much effort, when I see the word on a flashcard, I reverse the kanji.
For example, I just came across the word for self- study 独学 （どくがく）, and I read it as 学独 （がくどく）, which is silly of course, because intellectually 学 is one of the most common kanji I have used over the years. But in that split-second moment flying through cards, I still read it as I did.
I used to get mad at myself for going too fast or not reading recognizable kanji correctly, but it happens a lot. Not with every word, but enough to where I have recognized the pattern.
So is it just me being weird, or is this a thing?
ok, so i know that the sentences are AI generated and AI spoken, but they don't sound super robotic (for the most part), but i've been shadowing the sentences regularly and never considered how good/bad the pronunciation is.
Is there anyone who focuses on pronunciation from other sources who can tell me how good/bad Migaku is at general pronunciation?
I'm doing something that sounds awesome in practice, but is a really massive thing to undertake, i got my hands on the game script and audio files for Persona 5 Royal (a JRPG video game). So I figured that I can just pull dialogue from the game, use the audio files, and let Migaku do the straight-up translation (no western localization included), so I could really see the difference and immerse myself in the game.
Has anyone ever tried this with a less insane game choice? How did it work? Or did it work at all? It took me a while to make the first card, but I imagine I'll get better over time. So before I got too into it i wanted to reach out and see if others have done it, the pluses and minuses, and maybe even some tricks to make the process smoother.
And for the sake of transparency, in case anyone is curious, these files are from games that I own both physically and digitally on every platform I own (save xbox) because it is probably my G.O.A.T game (hence why I picked it to do this), or at least my G.O.A.T RPG.
Is this doing too much? Or is this a good way to immerse myself in the language?
Interested in any feedback.
Just curious if anyone vs add some this, and the results from doing it?
Is it worth doing? Is it just extra?
I was thinking of f reading the sentence outloud if I miss the card. Hoping context helps with retention, but I wonder if anyone else has tried this, and the results.
Recently I've started shadowing the sentences for cards that I miss during my sessions. Everywhere I look shadowing is one of the best overall methods for language learning, but i worry because the sentences are AI generated, not truly natural Japanese, so does that make shadowing them less than great? Or does it matter that the sentences I'm focused on are in the academy as opposed to a custom sentence or created in the fly.
Has anyone tried this? Was it effective? Was it not?
I tried googling it, but all I get is psychological thrillers of things clearly serious drama. Not a fun little comedy.
Please help
I've been studying for a while, on and off at varying levels of intensity. The last 6 months I have locked in, in a way that I never have. It has helped, but i've noticed something a little concerning.
I don't know if it is normal and staying the course will eventually break through these barriers, or if there is something I can do.
When I listen to Japanese at full speed, normally by listneing to songs, or sentences created for vocabulary words by an app, i can pick out some words, some times, but it's mostly just gibberish.
When I read, I can read it at full speed, but i'm not comprehending much if at all.
It is only when i take a breath and read slowly (sometimes with the translation open, sometimes not) then I get it.
the disconnect is concerning. If i can read it and understand it, I feel like it shouldn't be gibberish at full speed, i should recognize structures and vocabulary even if i can't put it together in real time effectively.
and i feel like reading at full speed (normally trying to keep pace with the app's reading of said sentence, I should understand more than I do.
Why is this? Is this soething that continued practice will eventually "break through", or is there something that i'm missing, or some action i should be taking?
any guidance would be very much apapreciated.
I've been grinding away at Miagaku. I have about 26 decks, most are small decks from different songs, or sources (textbooks, apps, general vocab I pick up every now and then, ranging from 15-30 cards each, and the Migaku Kanji and Academy decks that range anywhere from 80-100+ cards a day.
I have been grinding out the decks for about 6 months now, and have a decent handle on it. But I'm wondering if I should be doing more.
When I go through the deck, if I get the word wrong, I repeat the sentence out loud and write it in a notebook, or a physical flashcard if it's a word that is old that, for whatever reason, I didn't even recognize.
I go through the deck of old words I shouldn't have forgotten to begin with in the morning.
I go through my notebook and repeat the words added the night before (ranges from 20-40 depending on the day) according to a "brute force" method I've been working on to get them in my head better. and then go up and down the list a few times.
Then I get into the decks for the day in the main app, and repeat.
It's helpful, but I want to make sure I'm doing as much as I can. I'm getting better at reading the sentences through sheer repetition, but I'm not sure my comprehension is progressing like i wish it was, and my general ear is still horrible. Which makes me think I'm missing something important.
Has anyone worked out a more effective way to utilize the app to get better? Am I missing something?