Season ONE: Dazai Osamu, Daffodil

Day 26

May 16, 2025

Another long day on the farm and didn’t want to dive into the next grammar module at the risk of letting things slip through my mushy brain overnight. So, I opted for kanji practice and talked through some study strategy with Reiko for most of the half hour. She wants to be sure I don’t spend too much time mired in the second paragraph, particularly on words that might not be so common in the big scheme of things.

As I keep saying, it’s good to have people watching our back so we don’t get lost on processes that might not help us move forward… another great example of that playing out in real time; reaching a plateau in language learning can often be the result of doing the wrong things for too long. Sometimes those things are fun, more so than productive as well (I’m starting to enjoy the kanji practice!)

So, with that in mind… here are some new approaches you’ll see me work through over the next week or so:

1. Increasing the number of cards I’m dealt with Anki each day. Prior to going through the program every day I needed to keep the count low so I would remember things. Now, since I’m knee deep in the learning, I’m remembering more readily. Bumping up the count will help increase my overall pace.

2. Reduce time spent writing out all the kanji. My instructions are to work the paragraph in line with the Anki deck, move with some speed and intention, and perhaps even remove some cards from my deck that I might not encounter so much. For the moment, the goal is to aim for recognizing the kanji with the help of the furigana included in the PDFs, and work the structure of the paragraph to bring these words home. (This sounds remarkably similar to the skimming I was harping on about the other day.) What this means is: don’t rely on my memory to tell me the kanji, but what that kanji means in that sentence (easy to do because of all the other supplemental exposure I’m getting).

3. Get to the worksheet faster, and perhaps create a deck of useful words and phrases from that material. Same goes for the videos. Both contain very modern, timely, functional and situational language. So, good advice.

Okay! So, that is all for tonight. These new techniques should turn me into a kanji master AND an Anki master. I hope!

Today, Andy was ribbing me on some of my English in one of the later lessons in the course… tutor of Japanese, tutor of English. Gotta love that guy.

Peace out.
D

Time spent: @ 30 minutes
Completed Anki deck: Yep.
Start time: 10:00pm (I probably started earlier, but forgot to note the time.)
End time: 10:27pm