It is now day 321. It feels like a really long time has passed. I haven't missed a single day since last time, but there have been a bit less than a dozen that barely count.
I'll just go through the highlights.
After the last post I've read a dozen or so chapters of Madoushi Michi.
I also read a few more fairytales on Hukumusume: Urashima-san (and) Ko-soda Yuurei.Since I had decided to move on to more difficult text(Madoushi Michi) I stopped reading fairytales after those.
At one point I translated a song by Yousei Teikoku(妖精帝國) called Viscum Album, since I wanted to know what it's about. Link. I am sure it could be done much better, but at least I now know what I wanted to know.
Near the end of March a friend told me he had some coupons for a language learning site. It turned out that they also have a course for Japanese, so I tried it out. It's called Transparent.
Intrigued, I started and finished the Japanese course in less than 2 weeks. It was disappointingly small and so the relatively higher-level content wouldn't be possible to reinforce on that site. I finished nonetheless, as I saw it as an opportunity to add a couple hundred words to my Anki deck.
On youtube there is a channel called Japanese Ammo with Misa. She has excellent videos for learning grammar and she explains things in a way that I understant. I haven't watched many, but I plan to watch all of them at some point.
I joined OhMyJapan and found some people there to talk to. Apparently my level is high enough that if I write slowly, I can make myself understood. I feel like a child though, since I use only simple grammar and often build strange sentences.
I tried writing a short story in Japanese and while I'm fine with the result, it's too embarassing to post it.
Eventually I got tired of reading Madoushi Michi and quit, because the amount of new words
was too hard to keep up with. A hundred new words a day? I could do that
sometimes, but as is I'm not good enough to consistently work this hard.
The main problem with the words in Madoushi Michi is that they are
too high-level for me. When I started reading the story, I had learned
less than 2000 words in total, so it would be better to focus on easier
words first.
Thus I started looking for other stories to read on the same site and came across something familiar. I had seen the Slime anime, so I was aware of what kind of story it was. I began reading this instead of Madoushi Michi. While the grammar isn't necessarily easier, the words so far have been a little lower in level and thus, more useful.
I've also watched around 10-20 more anime series by this point.
Throughout the months I also quadrupled(4x) the Japanese words I have in Anki. I now also keep a large amount of unlearned words so that if I wanted I could just keep going for several days no matter the pace.
One day I noticed that the Duolingo Japanese course had become longer. I haven't done much yet, but I plan to finish it again, since unlike previously the course now contains way more Kanji. There are also more example sentences, more vocabulary, more grammar, etc. Overall it's more of the same good stuff that I was there for in the first place.
I am now at 6221 words in Anki, 953 of them unlearned and 4 suspended for not sticking in my head. Having learned this much, I feel like it's starting to get more difficult than it should be. There have been months where I learned around 900 words, but as time goes on I feel more and more that learning just words is not enough. For the year I've spent on Japanese and considering the amount of words I know, my ability to actually read, write or speak the language is low.
Thus, lately I have begun to think about changing how I learn. I've been learning Russian for way less time, but the progress feels faster considering how little effort I've put into it. One major reason seems to be that in Russian I don't learn only words, but also sentences. I have 2 separate decks for Russian.
It seems reasonable to do the same with Japanese, but I haven't got to it yet. That said, I don't think learning words by themselves is necessarily bad. It's just incomplete.
