GOALS BY MARCH 2021

※ 7,000 Mined Sentences (+3,167 cards to go)

※ Minimum 2 Hours of Reading Everyday / 1 Vol. of Manga

※ 65 Hours Per Week

※ More Passive Listening

Titles I immersed with From May 2020 ~ December 2020:

Total Anime Watched: 34

Total: 12,786 mins / 213 hrs

"At Naniwa Bay,

Blossoms, bloom!

Blossoms, you have slept

all through the winter —

Now bloom in spring."

I immediately fell in love with Karuta the first time I first saw it on the anime Chihayafuru a few years ago. It looks like a simple game, but I see it as a cross between meditation, sports, and art.

I've been meaning to get my own set ever since but I was a broke NEET back then. While I managed to find a PDF with the 百人一首 (Hyakunin Isshu), I never really got to memorise all the poems required to play the game. And then life and filmmaking took over...

My interest in the game was rekindled after watching Queen and Meijin matches uploaded on youtube.

Last month, I tried my luck and searched for "Karuta" on carousell and chanced upon this set selling for cheap. It was an N.O.S (new old stock) from a Japanese Surplus Store somewhere in Manila. This was such a rare find especially here in the Philippines.

Even though it was considerably cheap, I was still quite hesitant to get it due to the limited funds that I had and the temporary unemployment brought about by the pandemic.  I decided to go for it in the end. And as luck would have it, I was was officially offered a gig the same day these cards arrived (๑˃ᴗ˂)ﻭ

※ Translation of the Opening Poem taken from the World Karuta Association.

so... a few things have changed since i wrote my "language goals" post two months ago. particularly for these two points:

※ Finish Core 2K/6K Optimised Deck
※ Pass JLPT N3

initially, i really wanted to finish the whole Core 2K/6K Deck instead of just stopping at 2K, which is what most people do. but i reached a point where doing my reps for this particular deck felt like a chore. one of the main reasons why i decided to do this deck was because i needed to learn the writings for the words i already knew. so at the start, things were pretty smooth sailing, my retention rate was pretty good since i was just learning the characters. there were new words/characters here and there but it wasn't so overwhelming, plus a lot of the words in the deck are pretty common words that i'd easily encounter during immersion. that was until, i reached the >1,500 mark, where i started getting more cards that i didn't know and with harder characters. i mostly spent 2+ hours going through my reviews and new cards each day for this deck alone. out of frustration, i ended up breezing my way through my reps. some of the new words i was getting were also those that i didn't find particularly useful (yet), such as political terms, etc. not good :c

i realised, the deck also made me pretty complacent and lazy with making my own cards since i had this deck anyway. on top of all that, i also felt myself slowly falling for the sunk-cost fallacy.

so i decided to do the most sensible thing that my non-sensible self would hate to do... and that is to "give up" on what i'd started and finally suspend the rest of the cards after reaching 2K. (´｡• ω •｡`)

needless to say, i felt much lighter after doing this. and have been spending more of my time creating my own cards instead. below is my latest stats for the deck. i didn't even realise i only have 13 cards left that haven't matured yet!! 

°˖✧◝(⁰▿⁰)◜✧˖°

as for JLPT N3, with the current situation, it seems highly likely that the exam at the end of the year would get postponed. though, an official announcement regarding the status of the exam is yet to be made two weeks from now, i realised that it might be better for me to focus and studying and just do the N1 exam by next year. also taking into consideration, the fact that if i were to give my own tips/insights on language learning and shit completely on traditional language learning methods, it might be much easier to convince them to listen to what i have to say if i were to pass the exam in one go (i think...). though, not to ride the 調子, it's more of me having so much confidence with this method, along with noam chomsky and stephen krashen's theories on language acquisition (+ anki!) rather than myself. i guess this is just me trying to get back at traditional learning methods for almost making me believe i would never be fluent with how i was studying languages ↑_(ΦwΦ)Ψ

aaaand speaking of making my own cards, here's my rather complicated process of making them. though this process continually evolves like a pokémon.

"One of the things you can be virtually certain of in life is that you don't get something you don't aim at. Often people will keep their goals fuzzy, because one of the problems with specifying your goals is you specify your failures ."  -Jordan Peterson

Officially starting from the 1st of June until the last day of 2020 .

There are 213 days left and seven more months to go, here's this year's game plan:

※ Recognise 1,023 Kanji Characters

※ Finish Core 2K/6K Optimised Deck

※ 4K Mined Sentences

※ Improve Japanese Handwriting

※ Pass JLPT N3

Recognise 1,023 Kanji Characters

As of the moment, I'm using the app Kanji Study to learn Kanji. It's not 100% free but the lifetime subscription will only cost you a mere US $5 and it's full of so many different functionalities which you can watch in action here . Initially, I tried doing the RRTK pre-made deck by MIA but... it just didn't feel... right, for me.

Luckily, making associations is a bit easier since I'm not learning Japanese as a complete beginner. I just happen to still be illiterate because I never memorised Kanji actively and have been passively recognising random characters through titles or typing in Japanese.

It was only this year that I even tried to read Japanese books. I attempted to read the novel Another by Ayatsuji Yukito on my Kindle. The Kanji didn't have any furigana however, but I discovered that it was possible to use the Japanese dictionary on my Kindle to look up the reading/meaning. I realised that quite a lot of these characters were actually words I already knew and would otherwise have no problem understanding if I were to hear it, which is honestly quite frustrating when you think about it. Having to highlight and wait for the dictionary to pop up is making the whole process way too cumbersome so I had to stop reading it and find easier materials that use lesser Kanji.

... I'm fed up with being illiterate in Japanese.

Finish Core 2K/6K Optimised Deck

This is the only pre-made deck I'm doing on Anki. I usually dislike learning from lists, or learning words in isolation, but this deck includes not just written sample sentences but high quality audio recordings of the word and the sentences which is great for shadowing.

4K Mined Sentences

I'll also continue doing my sentence mining since this is how I've mainly been learning words before for both Korean and Japanese, this time however, with the help of Anki.

Improve Japanese Handwriting

I just want to be able to write nicely.

Pass JLPT N3

My views on the JLPT have changed a lot now that I'm older, but the official certification will surely be helpful for future gigs. I took the N4 test back in December 2014, and "revised" using the 日本語チャレンジ series. However, because of my inability to get through textbooks, I didn't even revise for the N4 Kanji.

I did the exercises for the N5 Kanji but since I was taking the N4 exam, that didn't help me much. Although I failed, it was only by a very very tiny margin. We're talking 2-3 points. I lost the screenshot for my results though but i found the exam itself really easy if I could just read the Kanji! (´｡• ω •｡`)

Which is why instead of retaking it, I'd rather do N3....plus, it's been 5 years since then!

That's it for this post... see you in seven months.

오랜만이에요.  ひっさしぶりです。 It's been a while ㅇㅅㅇ) ⁄

the year was full of promise, but the universe clearly had different plans for us. "life" as we know it, has come to a screeching halt and the uncertain future looks even bleaker than it already does...

the good news is, i'm actually coping fairly well even though i've just been cooped up in my room (again) without anything much to do and any means of income. surprising as i used to go a bit cuckoo when i have too much downtime...

it's been more than a month since my city declared a semi-lockdown. prior to work being indefinitely suspended, i chanced upon Inuyasha on netflix — one of the classic animes i used to watch as a kid — and decided to watch a few episodes just for nostalgia's sake. i didn't really think i'd end up rewatching the whole thing since i haven't been watching anime for years now....

after finishing the whole series including the movies, i decided to rewatch my all-time favourite anime series, Rurouni Kenshin, to prepare myself for the new live action films that are slated for release later this year. from the anime, to the manga, the ovas, and live action films — from childhood to adulthood, Ruroken has been with me. and i love it just as much as my younger self does... if not more.

the past few weeks, i've just been thriving in nostalgia, which also inadvertently rekindled my hunger for learning languages after years of not consuming korean/japanese media.

so after weeks of convincing myself to pick up the books again, i'm finally back.  at the moment, i decided to focus fully on japanese, and this time i don't want to cut corners. so... korean will have to take a back seat. for now.

ペラペラランドへ行きましょう！

한국어능력 시험을 위해, memrise.com 통해 공부하고 있어요! 아마 작년에 아니면 재작년에 등록했는데.... 몇일 전에 긴 시간 처음으로 로그인했어요ㅎㅎ제 생각에는 이 상트는 언어를 공부하면 오느 쪽이든지 큰 도움을 줄 거예요. 게임 것 같아서 책으로 공부 보다는 더 재미있어요! 완전 추천해요~ 한번 확인해보세요^^

I'm studying through memrise.com for the TOPIK exam! I've probably registered on the site last year or the year before, but a few days ago, for the first time in a long time, I logged in to the site. I think this site will be really helpful for you whichever language you're studying. Because it's like a game, compared to studying with a book it's a lot more fun! I totally recommend it~ You should check it out!   

요즘 제가하고있는 강의예요~TOPIK 단어 ^ㅂ^ 한 레벌 완성되면 이렇게 생겨요!

This is the course that I've been doing recently~ TOPIK words^^ 

After you complete a level, it will look like this!