Day 6

Squeezed in a bit of time today so I could stay on track. Had a long, long walk in the sun this afternoon which always tires this pasty Irishman out. 😉

Went through what remained of last night’s worksheet exercise for the の lessons… Reiko went through this portion of the exercise for me first and voice recorded most of the kanji in an attempt to save time. It worked.

So, instead of finger-writing each kanji in Midori to find a definition, I was able to just type in those I didn’t recognize by sound using the pronunciation—probably saved me at least 20 minutes compared to yesterday’s very manual effort.

There are immediately apparent positives and negatives to this process… the time savings is obviously notable, and the only real negative is that I didn’t get a chance to finger-write the kanji when looking things up. Realistically speaking, though, I’m not sure how impactful that would be if I’m only doing it once to find meaning. So, on the whole, I found this technique a BIG plus. If you’re considering our self-paced study program, I’d ask your Maplopo certified instructor to do this for you. Otherwise, have a friend help you out when one is nearby!

After doing the translation exercises and marking my time spent studying, I went ahead and “completed” the lesson in our LMS. I was prompted to take the recap quiz, so I gave it a whirl. As you can see from the photo, despite my very positive start with the thing, I didn’t do too well in the end—clearly a lack of vocabulary. The seven question quiz was to measure my success at identifying the proper separation of clauses, but, because I didn’t know many of the words in both the listening nor the reading portion of the quiz, I ended up with the lovely score you see here. So…, more to study!

That said, I was pleased with what I was able to understand today. It was also great to walk through my understanding of the sentence structure with Reiko… pretty neat to see how only after a few days, I’m already able to speak with some intelligence about what I’m seeing (or not sure about) from a sentence structure standpoint.

Back tomorrow!

Cheers,
D

Time spent: 30 minute plus an extra 10 not noted in the photo
Completed Anki deck: no
Start time: 8:30pm
End time: 9:00pm