tests

I was almost going to slip on my once-a-day posting today, but I’m going to prioritize churning out anything, even if I only spend 5 minutes on it, just to try it out. It’s possible I’ll switch to longer, detailed but less frequent posts at some point, but figured I’d give this my best effort first before quitting.

We have one big test every 2 weeks or so, and you know from my previous post that I completely did not study until last night/this morning. Hence, being tempted to punt the blog post today. But studying is so much more effective when you do a little bit every day instead of cramming, of course, and that also fits with my new blogging plan too. So given the new blogging schedule, I’m going to try to fit studying into that plan too. Anyways, once I quit language school, I’m going to have to learn to be more self-disciplined in order to keep up my Japanese learning. Procrastination without deadlines simply doesn’t work.

This semester of Japanese is way harder than the previous one in my opinion. The first semester was really hard, semesters 2 and 3 were absurdly slow, and this semester finally picked up the pace again. Previously when I was studying for tests, I was just spamming SRS’s - I was using StudyKit at first, then I ended up switching to Anki. I wasn’t a big fan of Anki at first, but after discovering how to design my own templates, it was a game-changer. My templates auto-generate English definition -> Japanese and Kanji (pictograph) -> furigana (pronunciation) flashcards from each entry. I also don’t like flashcards because it doesn’t provide enough active engagement for me, so for my cards, you have to type out the definitions (more similar to Quizlet/StudyKit). Anki is still far from perfect for my use case, but it is open-source so I can’t complain too much - I should just fix it myself :)

For today’s test, I tried something different. The new textbook is pretty reading-heavy with lots of short essays. Usually when I read a short essay in Japanese, I can kind of get the gist (enough context clues to fill in vocab/grammar blanks), but if I were asked to come up with a perfect 1:1 translation, it would be pretty challenging. But this time, instead of brute-force memorizing vocabulary, I tried really hard to understand every single word, grammar, and sentence in each essay. It was way slower than effectively game-ifying my studying, but I think it is a vastly superior way to study. Who would’ve thought the old-fashioned way of actually reading my textbook would be helpful. Unfortunately, it took so long, I only got through 2 of the 10 parts I had to study, so…SRS’s are certainly the more efficient cramming method. I had to change it up though because the vocabulary is becoming more and more esoteric and my brain just can’t absorb it anymore. But back to my original point, I’m going to start carefully going over the class material every day, or night (haven’t decided which one yet) which will hopefully make the learning experience better in the long-run.