This is totally against the philosophy of spaced repetition. You take the hammer and hit the nail good and hard one time. If you continue to strike the nail with the hammer, you’ll start damaging the area around the nail.

You have just motivated me! It took me just over a day to beat slime forest (the free version) which has about 300 kanji, if you check the status afterwords. MotivationPoints +10000. MWAHAHAHHAHA!

I mean, say you were at 300 kanji, you make a mark on the poster to show your progress, and no doubt you worked your butt off to get there (realistically speaking it is alot of work), you would look at the poster and realize thet your only 1/8th of the way to completion! That sucks as a motivator! After that, you feel down and it’s hard to tell yourself that you will do that much work another 8 times.

The poster is great, but I think that the kanji on it are too small to motivate someone. The way I have done it is by using post-it notes. I’m not sure who else is doing this, but it works great.

You go out and buy a huge stack of post-it notes and write every kanji you have learned and stick it on your wall. Use a sharpie and make it BIG! (be neat though!) Now, 300 kanji on post-it notes drawn BIG in your own writing takes up ALOT more space than just the poster. It’s a huge motivator because you cal look at your walls and be like “I know all of that?? Awesome!” and you just keep going until your room is covered in post-it notes!

The great thing about post-it notes is that you can move them from place to place and the sticky part usually lasts quite a while as long as you are sticking them to a clean flat surface. If you have trouble remembering a kanji, whip out the stack of post-it notes and write it 20 times and post them in every common place (washroom, kitchen, car, around your computer monitor, on your school textbooks, EVERYWHERE!) I guarantee you won’t forget that trouble kanji after seeing it all day.

Advantages: Large surface area, visually motivating, portable-kanji, stick them anywhere!

Disadvantages: The cost of post-it notes went up and they are actually really expensive for just small yellow pieces of paper with a little bit of adhesive (I’ve bought and have used over 2500 post-it notes and I say I’ve spent close to $100 on just post-its, then you need a few sharpies too).

Aside from the cost, it’s not like you need 2500 post-its instantly lol. Buy a pack for 10 or 15 bucks and use them. Once they are used and before you go to the store to buy more, look at your walls and just marvel at what you know!

Is there some other way to do it?

Also, I have spent the last month or so studying kanji with Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji. Top notch stuff. I started slowly - it’s hard to build up momentum, but I am about 1/4 of the way through and am learning 25-50 kanji a day. I’ll probably ratchet that up later on, but it’s getting to the end of my college term and I’m running out of free time for extra studying.

I’ll post another comment when I’ve graduated from the kanji book. That’ll be when the real fun begins.

Looks like their advertising dollars were probably well spent.

ラブコン
Lovely Complex
It’s actually an anime…but, again…with Kansai-ben and again, slowed down for a national audience.

That’s all that comes to mind right now…I’m looking for a real Kansai-ben (as in, not dumbed-down and soulless) show myself.

Written? No (not yet), but I do have my moments when I want to say something and the Japanese word is ’stuck’ (it’s probably ‘nearest’ or ‘easiest to remember/reach’ at that moment) and I *can’t* for the first few seconds ~ half a minute remember or ‘get to’ the English or Dutch word.

What’s ‘weird’ is that it most often happens for easy words… One time I couldn’t remember the Dutch word for “world” (even though ‘wereld’ is not that far from “world” lol). But it also happens for more difficult words, which… when I think about it, I’ve learned in English the natural way (encounter them often enough, learn what they mean from context and start using them yourself) but never looked up translation. Or, rare but it happens, I don’t even *know* a Dutch word for, only have the English one available.

With Japanese, it hasn’t happened much yet. But it does happen that I randomly (’randomly’) think of a Japanese response before getting the ‘correct’ Dutch response to something. It’s cool that it happens haha, even though I’m not *that* far into Japanese yet.

About writing, well I often manage to ‘confuse’ “and” + “en” (Dutch ‘and’) when typing, it never happens when I’m actually *writing* though. (I write slowly and thus have ages to think about how to write things, lol.) But when typing I easily mix up similar words in different languages, yes.

For me though (besides the “and” + “en” example) I don’t think it has to do with *actually* confusing languages, but more with the fact that “whichever word is ‘nearer’ (easier to get to *OR* closer to what I’m really trying to say (we all know that most words aren’t really translatable… )) and how I think - usually a mix between Dutch and English.

I ask because when I was studying both French and Spanish (in classes… which sucked; I still don’t know either of them), I’d almost always get the two mixed up. Although my circumstances with Japanese are different in that it is self-taught and only one new language, does this ever happen?

The main character often sounds like he’s got a mouth full of mush and the older yakuza guy’s voice is both gravelly and higher pitched. (who’d a thunk it) making the task of catching a word or a phrase even more difficult.

@khatzumoto
Jonathan was watching trick, I’m watching タイガー＆ドラゴン though wikipedia sounds like a good idea, I’m sure something silmilar exists for タイガー＆ドラゴン. And you did say that it has exact subtitles.

Seems like Trick might be a good second purchase.

Also, Do you get extra if people buy the poster by clicking through from your site? If so, it just might the be extra little push to get me to buy one… lol

http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%88%E3%83%AA%E3%83%83%E3%82%AF_(%E3%83%86%E3%83%AC%E3%83%93%E3%83%89%E3%83%A9%E3%83%9E)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trick_%28TV_series%29

It definitely becomes easier to understand as you become accustomed to listening to the speaking at native speed.

Ganbatte ne.