Day 3

Kicked off today with the Anki deck. Made it through with relative ease; I kept getting hung up on 機会 (きかい … chance), but the others went pretty smoothly. I mentioned why I keep the deck review count low at five cards per day… basically, so I can get through them. The main deck we’ve created for the program (which is the one I’m using) has voice and type-in capability, and when you don’t know most of the words (as is the case with me) you end up never being able to finish a deck for the day. I’d read somewhere in the Anki support forums, I believe, that keeping the review count low eliminates this problem, made that change and have been quite happy with the decision.

Other than going through Anki, I’d planned to go through the vocabulary I didn’t know from yesterday and slow down my progress in that way, but given that grammar is my main weakness, Reiko suggested I focus on that first. So, I began working on the Pacing and Structure Worksheet for the first paragraph of Dazai’s story. You can see from the shot how terrible my handwriting is… it’ll be neat to see how much that improves over time. A sharp pencil is always a good thing… you can literally see where I had to reach for the sharpener. Ha.

After some time working on that she suggested I switch to the grammar video modules… the first one in the program is for という. It’s just over five minutes… stopped it several times for listening practice and to take notes. You can see some of that here in the photo as well. At this point because I’m unable to hand write a significant portion of the kanji without consuming more time than I have to spare right now, I’m writing things down by ear, and thus the romaji. Just helps me get it down quickly; in time, I’ll be quicker with that after practicing…

Overall, while I didn’t check the clock before starting today, I probably spent about an hour or an hour and a half studying. From here on out, I’ll make note of my total time spent and whether I did Anki or not. Yesterday I forgot to run through the deck. A good day, though. I’m happy with the progress in keeping at things.

A final note… just writing about きかい here will have me remembering it means chance… being able to hand write that darn kanji, though, is a different story altogether.

Peace out.
D

Time spent: @1.5 hours
Completed Anki deck: yep