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last week
○ figure out what to do
○ pre-process grammar deck
I figured out what to do for study, but I haven't done a great job doing it.
I monologued to the cohuman about it, and convinced myself that the thing I don't like doing (grammar) was, in fact, the correct thing to do: per unit effort it would teach me novel things; could be done with high effort only at startup and then forward motion could be maintained with much less energy.
( monologue )
The startup cost was moderate: it took about 8 hours of focus to get it ready to work with, which I somehow managed to do in one day (noon to 9, with an hour break to pick up and eat dinner, I think). Some code archeology was involved, but only took an hour. I'm willing to call that moderate because I knew what I needed to be doing the whole time, and I was able to get it done with one day's motivation.
The downside, of course, is that grammar/(words & collocations that are used in ways hard to convey in a short definition) is dull dull dull dull. There's a couple of things going on there - I think a surprisingly large one is that there's no audio with the example sentences.
The example sentences themselves are hella boring. The learner is expected to have a sorta limited vocabulary; the learner is expected to be unfamiliar with Japanese so the sentences are pretty grammatically simple as to not detract from the structures being explained; it's from the 80s and everything is about eating steak and playing tennis.
It would be _fine_ except I left the intervals really short by accident, and seeing the same example three times in three days sapped my desire to power through. I started going through them on Friday, and got through the initial phase for about 1/4th of them, but haven't made any forward progress since. I fixed the initial intervals, which will be helpful going through the remaining 1000 or so cards.
What am I doing with grammar study? What is my goal?
( navel gazing )
Anyway, moving on away from my half-assed philosophical thinking on grammar study...
An interesting (good/bad?) thing is that I had at least some familiarity with nearly every grammar entry that was left to cover in A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar. There were 3 or 4 that I hadn't (consciously) encountered in some place or another. Good, because it means it shouldn't take too long for me to get through it; bad, because it's less than maximally new to me. I could've dealt with it earlier!
When I've finished with DoBJG, hopefully in the next few weeks, I'll have to decide whether I want to move on to DoIJG or if I want to use 日本語文型辞典. They should both be a bit more interesting than DoBJG, though I expect 辞典 will be more interesting than IJG. IJG might have already had some of the preprocessing done to it. IJG will probably have more explanation per point than 辞典, but 辞典 will probably have more examples per point.
"Obviously, the answer is to use both!" Well, maybe. They use different headwords for each structure, and compress them differently, so referencing both at once can be a bit of a pain.
Kanji
When I'm done with DoBJG, I might take a week or three to switch from grammar study back to kanji study for a little while. On top of the 2100ish 常用/Jouyou/General Use kanji, there's quite a few more that show up pretty regularly. There's 800 or so in the 人名用/jinmeiyou/Name Use list; +3k in the last level of the Kanji Kentei test for about 6k in total.
Vocabulary
It's fine. I'm leaving it alone for now, other than doing what's due.
This week
□ keep up in anki, more or less
□ progress with grammar deck
I would say that I don't need to write this much, that I'm procrastinating, but actually I'm surprised how much reading my old overly-verbose notes helped me remember what I was doing.
○ figure out what to do
○ pre-process grammar deck
I figured out what to do for study, but I haven't done a great job doing it.
I monologued to the cohuman about it, and convinced myself that the thing I don't like doing (grammar) was, in fact, the correct thing to do: per unit effort it would teach me novel things; could be done with high effort only at startup and then forward motion could be maintained with much less energy.
( monologue )
The startup cost was moderate: it took about 8 hours of focus to get it ready to work with, which I somehow managed to do in one day (noon to 9, with an hour break to pick up and eat dinner, I think). Some code archeology was involved, but only took an hour. I'm willing to call that moderate because I knew what I needed to be doing the whole time, and I was able to get it done with one day's motivation.
The downside, of course, is that grammar/(words & collocations that are used in ways hard to convey in a short definition) is dull dull dull dull. There's a couple of things going on there - I think a surprisingly large one is that there's no audio with the example sentences.
The example sentences themselves are hella boring. The learner is expected to have a sorta limited vocabulary; the learner is expected to be unfamiliar with Japanese so the sentences are pretty grammatically simple as to not detract from the structures being explained; it's from the 80s and everything is about eating steak and playing tennis.
It would be _fine_ except I left the intervals really short by accident, and seeing the same example three times in three days sapped my desire to power through. I started going through them on Friday, and got through the initial phase for about 1/4th of them, but haven't made any forward progress since. I fixed the initial intervals, which will be helpful going through the remaining 1000 or so cards.
What am I doing with grammar study? What is my goal?
( navel gazing )
Anyway, moving on away from my half-assed philosophical thinking on grammar study...
An interesting (good/bad?) thing is that I had at least some familiarity with nearly every grammar entry that was left to cover in A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar. There were 3 or 4 that I hadn't (consciously) encountered in some place or another. Good, because it means it shouldn't take too long for me to get through it; bad, because it's less than maximally new to me. I could've dealt with it earlier!
When I've finished with DoBJG, hopefully in the next few weeks, I'll have to decide whether I want to move on to DoIJG or if I want to use 日本語文型辞典. They should both be a bit more interesting than DoBJG, though I expect 辞典 will be more interesting than IJG. IJG might have already had some of the preprocessing done to it. IJG will probably have more explanation per point than 辞典, but 辞典 will probably have more examples per point.
"Obviously, the answer is to use both!" Well, maybe. They use different headwords for each structure, and compress them differently, so referencing both at once can be a bit of a pain.
Kanji
When I'm done with DoBJG, I might take a week or three to switch from grammar study back to kanji study for a little while. On top of the 2100ish 常用/Jouyou/General Use kanji, there's quite a few more that show up pretty regularly. There's 800 or so in the 人名用/jinmeiyou/Name Use list; +3k in the last level of the Kanji Kentei test for about 6k in total.
Vocabulary
It's fine. I'm leaving it alone for now, other than doing what's due.
This week
□ keep up in anki, more or less
□ progress with grammar deck
I would say that I don't need to write this much, that I'm procrastinating, but actually I'm surprised how much reading my old overly-verbose notes helped me remember what I was doing.
