In the past 8 months or so I have made big changes to the way I study Japanese and it has paid off big-time. I’m still evolving how I study to maximize my learning while staying interested and I thought I’d post a little update on my current study habits.

The biggest change is that I now write everything down. Every time Anki spits a Japanese sentence at me, I write it down. Before I just looked at the sentence and if I could read it and understand I moved on. I was in a hurry to enter more and more sentences into Anki and I didn’t want to slow down to write the kanji. But I started to realize that I was getting similar-looking kanji (Chinese characters) mixed up and I wasn’t noticing when I was seeing the same kanji in different contexts.

So now I write everything down and the difference is amazing. If you are learning Japanese with an SRS, I recommend you write all of the sentences down every time. You will learn your kanjis faster.

Right now I am learning primarily from three sources:

1. Fight Club DVD
2. Lion Boy
3. Textbook (どんな時どう使う日本語日本語表現文型５００）

Fight Club DVD

Although I haven’t posted a Project Mayhem post in quite some time, I am still chugging away at Fight Club. I think I’m on Chapter 13 of 37. Here is how I study Fight Club:

1. I take a chapter and listen to it in my headphones sentence by sentence and transcribe it by hand. If there is a part that is too fast for me to catch even after multiple repeats, I will slow the audio down 300% and try to catch it then. If I still can’t get a sentence, I write question marks into my script.
2. I use my dictionary to find the meanings of unknown words and learn how to write them. Japanese has a lot of homonyms, so if there are two or more likely candidates for a specific word, I will pull out the English script of Fight Club to make sure I pick the right one. Other than that, I try to avoid using the English script.
3. I type my handwritten transcription into a text editor. This is like a short review since I get to read all of the words again and see the kanjis onscreen.
4. I go home and have my wife check my transcription. She corrects any little mistakes I might have made, and she fills in the parts I had question-marked. This is pretty quick because my transcription is usually more than 90% right.
5. For any lines of the script that have a word I didn’t know before, or a Chinese character I didn’t know before, I paste them from my text file into Anki.
6. Now I’m done with the chapter. Anki will make sure I learn all of the new vocabulary and kanji and I will periodically go back and listen to the chapter at full speed to practice listening.

Some chapters are long (7 minutes) and some are short (1 minute) so each chapter can take anywhere from several hours in the long case to an hour in the short case.

Lion Boy

One day last Fall I was checking out the library at the elementary school here and I came across a trilogy of books called Lion Boy. It’s an adventure series about a boy who can talk to cats and tigers and lions. I read the first couple pages and I thought it would be great for me. It had a lot of kanji (Chinese characters) I didn’t know, but they all had furigana (letters telling you how to read the kanji) the first time they appeared in a chapter. Subsequent usages of the same word didn’t have furigana, which is good, because if they did I’d get lazy and skip the kanji altogether.

Reading a children’s adventure story appealed to me too. More light-hearted than Fight Club and not as annoying as Doraemon. So I put it on my Christmas list. Then on Christmas, I opened a present and there was the whole trilogy sitting on my lap! My wife is so wonderful!

Here is how I study Lion Boy:

1. I read it on my own at my own pace with a dictionary. I use the Japanese-English dictionary for this stage because I am just try to go fast through the story. I usually read about half a chapter (6 pages) in one sitting this way.
2. I shadow my reading at a much slower pace. I enter any sentences which have a new word or a new kanji into Anki. For this phase, since I am going slow anyway, I use a Japanese-Japanese dictionary. I usually do two pages in a sitting, which yields 20-30 new sentences in Anki.
3. Anki makes sure I learn all of the new vocabulary and kanji.

Textbook

Finally, I use a textbook. Actually I just started using this last week. The Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) is held in December and I figured I might as well give it a shot this year. The textbook I have, titled どんな時どう使う日本語日本語表現文型５００, contains 500 sentence patterns that you need to know for JLPT level 2 (second hardest) and level 1 (hardest). The level 2 and level 1 grammar patterns are separated from each other, so I can easily ignore all the level 1 stuff (I’m going to take level 2).

The good things about this textbook:

1. All the grammar explanations are in Japanese, so I don’t have to think in English.
2. Each sentence pattern has several example sentences.

Here is how I study with the textbook:

1. I go sequentially through the book. For each sentence pattern, if there are any example sentences that have a word I don’t know or a kanji I don’t know, I enter it into Anki.
2. Anki makes sure I learn the new words and kanji. As a nice side-effect I also learn the grammar too, since each sentence pattern will be represented by several sentences.

The downside of this textbook is that some of the sentences are extremely boring. Check out this awesome sentence:

東京の霞ヶ関には、国会議事堂をはじめとして国のいろいろな機関が集まっている。
toukyou no kasumigaseki ni wa, kokkai gijidou o hajime to shite kuni no iroiro na kikai ga atsumatte iru.

trans: Tokyo’s Kasumigaseki is home to the Diet Building and other various national institutions.

Hell yeah! And check this out:

このような民間レベルの国際交流を通じて、両国の相互理解が少しずつでも進んでいくことを願っています。
kono you na minkan reberu no kokusai kouryuu wo tsuujite, ryoukoku no sougo rikai ga sukoshi zutsu demo susunde iku koto wo negatte imasu.

trans: Our wish is to gradually advance the mutual understanding of both countries through this kind of international exchange at the local level.

The sentences aren’t all this bad, but a good chunk of them are. Because of these boring ass sentences, this new textbook study isn’t very enjoyable for me. Luckily I have all year to finish the book, so I’m hoping I can just slip a few textbook sentences in between my Fight Club and Lion Boy sentences and learn all the necessary grammar and words without even realizing it.

That’s it.  This is how I study Japanese.  Of course, since I live in Japan I am always seeing Japanese on TV, hearing it at work and reading it out in the world too.  But as for formal sit-down-and-study time, this is what I do.  Comments/Questions?  Drop a comment.

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