Day 5

Another busy day with work and life, but put in the time. It’s certainly challenging to bang these lessons out later in the evening, but it’s really the only time I’ve got at the moment with everything else on our plates.

Went through the の modules today… we have three videos for this section… it was a nice refresher on simple sentence structure in both English and Japanese. One of the things I like about the way we build this program, is how all the learning is scaffolded to parallel the story. I often tell learners when I interview them for a cohort that things start off easy-ish in the beginning because Dazai’s story is just getting warmed up, and as the story becomes more complex, so does the workload.

For intermediate and advanced learners, these early exercises are a mix of depth and ease and some are a warm-up for what’s to come (we don’t call these initial three weeks “hell week” for nothin’!), and for advanced students we’ve deliberately placed “Challenge” exercises throughout the program to keep them on their toes.

For an advanced beginner like myself (I think that’s where I’m at?!), though, these initial practice exercises are quite the brain bender and all the writing by hand, and visitation with new words has a deliberate way of keeping me from moving too fast. That is GOOD. Moving like a turtle is helping me remember things, and I realized last night that my hour plus of study a night compares only in time with that of our advanced learners… we may both be studying the same length of time, but we’re actually learning and reinforcing completely different things. That’s pretty darn cool.

More tomorrow.

…quite pleased with myself that I’ve made it this far. For me, if I can make through three days with a new habit, I tend to fare pretty well. This is day five, so I’m on the right track.

I mentioned Midori yesterday… I had my phone charged up, so I used the finger-writing function to search for all the kanji I didn’t know (pretty much everything)… I’m also not great with remembering some of my hiragana, and I’m terrible with remembering katakana (thank God none of that yet), so I had to look up quite a few things so I could write them down. You’ll see that in working on the practice problems I wrote out the pronunciation so it would hep me study beyond the lesson… otherwise, I’ll just forget if I can’t read them when reviewing.

Back to Midori…  I like the ability to keep track of these things in this app, and it’s affordable. There are likely a million Japanese dictionary apps where these functions exist. This is easy for me. I think I have the ability to create flashcards with this app as well… something for another time. Anyway, a good tool. On to tomorrow!

Cheers,
D

Time spent: @1 hour and 20 minutes
Completed Anki deck: yep (nailed きかい … ha!)
Start time: 8:35pm
End time: 9:54pm