20230704: Kana minor success, Continue with grammar & Anki vocabs

 Day 5!

Kana

I've finally been able to score at least 85% in Kana practice these days. I feel so much more confident reading through materials when viewing content on websites or subtitles on YouTube. Even though I'm still very slow, I feel like I can read out sentences at a much better speed that I was able to in the last few days! Another small win :) 

Again all thanks to https://itazuraneko.neocities.org/learn/kana

Grammar

CureDolly's next series of videos about tense is incredible to be honest.

Tense & verb: slightly different but not way too difficult. The important thing to remember is which words go with which ending depends on their own verb group

• Ichidan (いる or える): Change る to て for continuous present tense and た for past tense.
• Godan:
• utsuru う, つ, る change to って or った
• nubumu ぬ, ぶ, む change to んで or んだ
• kugu く, ぐ change to いて, いで or いた, いだ
• su す, change to して
• Irregular:
• 来る (come) becomes 来て
• する (do) becomes して
• 行く (to go) becomes 行って

Adjectives: Will rewatch tomorrow to understand a bit more. 

Kanji

A new day with a new list of characters: 

This raised my total number of characters to 98! 

Already can see some benefits because I can see some words and understand the meaning of them, hence it's going good for me I think! :) 

Anki vocabs

Oh boy, this one is hard and I'm just going to follow through Anki every day in the morning to force it through my head :(. I've started to recognize some decent words that are very familiar, but remembering the kanji is tough tough, and also remembering the hiragana pronunciation on top of it is just VERY tough! Gambatte buddy. 

On the side note, I talked to Hikaru yesterday about my plan to learn Japanese, and I can't wait to surprise everyone to be honest, so I got that going for me :)

20230703: Kana practice, Kanji, a rethink of approach strategy & More immersion with Kimetsu no Yaiba

Day 4!

Kana practice

I found out about this website that is actually ultra-fast which would help with hiragana & katakana learning: https://itazuraneko.neocities.org/learn/kana

It basically just churns out characters after characters, and I got to choose which characters options that I can do, so my strategy has now shifted from doing just random all over the place to just finish a row at a time for Katakana. Hiragana is pretty much nailed, albeit when I try to read NHK news I'm like crawling, but that's pretty much expected for learning new language! 

Kanji

Approached 75 kanji! List of characters below 

With the help of spaced-repetition I hope that I can retain more as time goes by. The idea is that it is totally fine to forget, and forgetting is important to learn! 

Rethink of approach strategy

With no sign of the actual Minnanonihongo textbook in sight, I've decided to change my approach from learning grammar by the book, to learn grammar from this lady (that weirdly looks like an AI robot) here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSvH9vH60Ig&list=PLg9uYxuZf8x_A-vcqqyOFZu06WlhnypWj

She actually does a fantastic job explaining the grammar using the train system euphemism which I've never seen anywhere else, but it just makes sense! Let's do 3 videos per day, and continue to take notes to move along. Notes for today: 

Main car & Engine is linked with が

Engine ends with だ or です.

Main car can also be invisible, that's fine.

Object is with を
は is not part of the core sentence. It stands for [as for] independently. 

Immersion with Kimetsu no Yaiba

Looking forward to this the whole day lol. Basically: watch an ep with EN sub, watch it again with no sub, only picking up words here and there with the context provided in the previous watch session. Continue to do this for YT videos as part of immersion. 

Slow steps! But everytime I think of surprising my Tokyo friends, it made me even more excited, so I hope that I can continue to stay positive! 

20230702: Immersion + Continue with Kanji + Minna no Nihongo

Day 3!

Immersion

I spent a majority of time today to set up a separate YouTube side channel to ONLY VIEW JAPANESE content on YouTube. Installed Language Reactor + yomichan for reviewing keywords during immersion. 

Content watched/read including: 

• SUSHIRAMEN-riku: https://www.youtube.com/@SUSHIRAMEN-Riku
• Comprehensible Japanese: https://www.youtube.com/@cijapanese
• NHK easy again: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/ just to practice reading Hiragana. 
• Nobaman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vdvZKtHbxY for casual chat

Kanji

Continue with 20 additional Kanji in Lesson 3 of RTK 

Some hard words including: measurement (comma for 10x measurements), round (9 but a drop delete the below, morning (mist + moon fades away in the morning), measuring box (thousand or ten? need measuring), rise up (keep measuring till you reach the sun above), specialty (ten fields of measurement), dr (ten specialties and drop one), eminent (a magic wand early in life helps to become eminent).

I think it's important to keep grinding it out and trust the process! 

Minna no Nihongo

Sadly I'm lagging behind a little bit in terms of learning vocab from minna no nihongo, but I've created an Anki deck for this to account for reviewing the vocabs. It's a little bit forced at the moment, but we'll see how it goes in the next couple of days! 

20230701: Hiragana success, Katakana, Kanji & Grammar

Day 2: 

Hiragana

Pretty much nailed down, with accuracy of about 85-90%. Very slow when read articles tho, so that might improve with time I hope! 

Katakana

Having a little bit of trouble learning with mnemonics, but I think I will revert back to using readthekanji.com to just spell out the katakana and continue tomorrow to test out. 

Kanji

Continue with 20 Kanji: chant, sparkle, good, spine, prosperous, early (sun up at ten), rising sun (9am sun), generation (3x10), stomach (rice cake on fields), nightbreak (sun on the ground), gall bladder (pee when moon at nightbreak), span (sun in the middle of 2 grounds), concave (U), convex (middle finger), olden times (18), oneself (point at eye), white (point at the sun), hundred (100 but upward), in (middle-zhong), thousand (thousand T).

A little bit hard to remember at times but that's how kanji works! Important to review Koohii & Anki every day! 

Grammar & vocab with Minna no Nihongo

I found an Anki deck for Minna no Nihongo, hence will be using this as a way to also review my grammar & vocab when we glide along Minna no Nihongo

Materials used

• https://kanji.koohii.com/
• Learn Katakana in 1 hour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6DKRgtVLGA
• Snowman (雪だるま） https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUTWwLvqOdA
• Shirokuma cafe: https://animelon.com/series/Shirokuma%20Cafe%20(Polar%20Bear%20Cafe)

20230630: Hiragana, 20 RTK Kanji, Lesson 1 of Minna no Nihongo

So I started today! 

Hiragana

Bought a workbook and an eraser to start with my quest of practicing. Starting slow with learning Hiragana by writing all of them down. I think I got about 70-75% correct at the moment. 

Kanji

Slowly start with 20 RTK Kanji: from one to ten, sun, eye, companion (two month), mouth, day, month (moon), rice field, old (tombstone), I (five senses on a mouth), risk (eye under the sun), bright (sun and moon)

Minna No Nihongo みんなの日本語 - 1

Quickly glanced through the 1st lesson. Not much going on at the moment trying to memorize everything. 

Some notable learning materials: 

Learn ALL Hiragana in 1 Hour - How to Write and Read Japanese

https://www.readthekanji.com/ for reviewing Hiragana

Foreword

 

Foreword

Today is 30 June 2023. 

On 19 June 2023, I met a bunch of people that (hopefully) changed my life for the better:

• Hikaru Wakabayashi
• Nobaman
• Kimeko & Sueko-san
• Nephrite
• Pocky

I was lucky enough to be leading a part of the Olympic eSports Week in Singapore, where these YouTube creators and their partner manager were flown in by the International Olympic Committee to have fun in Singapore and to promote the health of eSports as a "real" competitive sports for Olympians to compete. Truth to be told, I didn't really care about the event at first, and I was just trying to do my job, but a few things happened.

1. I fell in love with these people. They are kind, funny and overall just very lovely to be around. Hikaru is my work colleague, but I've always treated her as a close friend and we talk about almost everything. Nobaman is a kind of guy that is just weirdly charming. I bet he could break a lot of people's hearts if he actually stepped outside of his house in Tokyo. Kimeko was just radiating, smiling all the time, and along with Sueko-san (her mother), they were really enjoying the experience of exploring Singapore. Kimeko actually wants to just move here for good, which I was super surprised to hear. Their connection genuinely made me feel that my mother, whom passed away due to cancer about a year back, was still with me in this life adventure. Pocky & Nephrite were also funny in their own ways, and I was also surprised that Pocky (1 out of 4 Japanese people probably knows him - Hikaru) FOLLOWED me on Instagram, which is a big cornerstone for me to realize that I've made it in this lifetime.
2. I had no clue of what they were talking about except when they talked in English. 

So, on 29 June 2023, when Hikaru went back to Tokyo, I've decided that I will dedicate 2-3 hours every day to start learning Japanese, with the hope to be able to talk to them in their own language the next time that I see them in person, whenever that's gonna be.

As a nerd myself, I took some of my hours yesterday to plan out my strategy for this ambitious plan with the steps below:

1. Very briefly learn the Hiragana and Katakana in 2 days, using https://www.readthekanji.com/user/study. Just brushing the surface is good enough because I'm gonna see these characters way too often, hence it's not really necessary to learn them by heart right at the start. 
2. At the same time, start to learn the basics of grammar by Minna No Nihongo and its workbook. The aim is to run through 1 chapter per day/2 days. 
3. At the same time, set up Anki deck cards & run through Heisig's Remember the Kanji. The aim is to learn 15-20 kanji typefaces per day, understand the meaning behind, with no focus on pronunciation at the moment. 
4. After I'm done with Minna no Nihongo & Remember the Kanji (which will take approximately 6-7 months), start to immerse myself in Japanese with readings, shows, YT Videos & Netflix movies. 

This blog is created with the intention of documenting my journey from day 1. I will be treating this as a journal, with each day documenting what I learned everyday, what I was doing right, what I was wrong about. This will also help to motivate myself to do better everyday and to stop doubting myself and my journey (which will definitely happen at some point from now). 

All in all, there's nothing better than enjoying the process. My goal in this lifetime is to be able to tell the people I love that I love them, and if they're Japanese, I would love to do that in their language. I hope that it's gonna be an exciting ride!