So my procrastinating work this week to set up and post on my blog is probably good news for my language learning progress (reflects my goals/what I want)…not so good for my actual, paying job.

Luckily Japanese falls under the “what I want” group so we’re cool. :-p

http://www.memiary.com/

I’m quoting the guy who sent it to me:

“If you want to take more frequent snapshots of your life, there’s an excellent little online app at memiary.com. It puts emphasis on the stuff you’ve already done (the question What did you do today? greets you every time you log on) but you can type in anything you like, as long as it’s 160 characters or less.

[...]

I’ve been using it for a little more than a month now, so I can’t really comment on the long term looking-back aspect. What I’ve noticed, though, is that it’s quite good at making you (re)evaluate your immediate priorities. Keying in “six hours of useless postgrad lectures” for five days in a row, with a couple fields left blank ’cause I didn’t have time to do much else, was an eye-opening experience of sorts.”

It seems it might be really useful to finding out where you’re loosing your time so you can fill that with even more language immersion goodness (e.g. you can write “went shopping, but didn’t bring the mp3 player. Again”. or “spent 2 hours in front of a TV watching stuff in English instead of Japanese. Again” )

I definitely intend on using an SRS way later on… to perfect small parts of the language I might still be struggling with, to learn kanji readings, and so on. But… I dunno. It’s going to be a while before I finish RTK, and I feel like I can get a lot done while I’m waiting.

Btw, I’ve previously learned French to (essentially native-level) fluency, and my method was really similar to what Khatz did in Japanese, except that I never used an SRS; I’d never heard of them until I found this blog. It still works; it’s just a slower process.

My experiment is mostly to prove to myself (and to my disbelieving peers) that adults are capable of figuring out language just like children… Japanese is a great language to try this with, since it’s very different from English; if I tried it with French or another IE language, people would dismiss it as a fluke because I chose an “easy” language.

And yeah… I know what you mean about wanting to finish RTK as fast as possible. It’s really annoying, being illiterate

I’m in kind of the same situation as you. I’ve been watching lots of anime and dramas w/o subs as I’m going through RTK. The whole time, I’ve been wondering about my progress that I’ll make before I actually start real reading and sentences. (except, I’m not doing the monodic thing like you are right now…) I think I’ve seen some improvement. I can pick out words (even if I don’t understand them). There are some things that I’ve come across randomly that I’ve just figured out, but there are even more things where I’ve heard them so many times, but can’t figure out what they mean, so I just go look them up anyway…

I think you (and I) will make some decent progress on listening etc. before we start sentences. But, like, I’ve been thinking…our progress once we start sentences is going to be even quicker then, right? So…I’m thinking I’m just going to just hurry through the rest of RTK as fast as possible. I’ll probably have as much japanese on in the background as possible until then of course, and I’ll actively watch at least 2-3 episodes of anime (or drama) per day. Something like that. Anyways, best of luck with your experiment.

I’m trying out an experiment, inspired by many of the things I’ve read on this blog. I’m calling it the “yellow experiment” (do you like my politically incorrent sense of humour? … on second thought, don’t answer that ^^).

Anyway, starting today I’m watching 1-4 hours per day, of anime/dramas/random Japanese TV shows/etc… live, native Japanese audio in context. I’ve studied some Japanese before, mostly with inefficient methods, so I still suck (for now). I’m going to keep doing this everyday for several months on end while I work through RTK (I’ve done 250 or so kanji so far, so I still have a long way to go).

I’m watching without subs, without writing anything down, using only a monolingual Japanese dictionary (one for shougakkou-sei-tachi, so there’s enough kana for me to be able to read it). Long story short, I’m going to listen to tons and tons of Japanese in context, and see if I can “figure out” Japanese… not the entire language (I don’t think that would be possible without kanji), but maybe to the level of a Japanese 5 or 6 year old. Wish me luck

Once I’m done RTK, I’ll be able to start reading stuff to pick up more sophisticated words. Btw, the watching/listening stuff is going to be done seperately (i.e. at a different time) than when I’m working on kanji; I suck at multi-tasking. If I try learning to speak and write in Japanese at the same time, the only thing that’ll end up happening is that I won’t end up learning either one properly.

Peace.