Core2000 step 3 has been a bit draining thus far because the words are quite dense. I’ve been doing reps when i’m tired and i’m finding I forget some words easily and others (difficult words like 影響 （ekyou -> influence) I remember quite easily. I’m not sure why I remembering “solution” 解決 and “realization”(which i can’t remember right now) is much more difficult for me than “influence”. It still baffles me, but try not to think about it. What I know for sure though, is doing Anki reps when the brain is tired is a big no-no. I tend to retain the best memories when I do stuff early in the morning, soon after waking up. Other than that, I’m definitely learning a lot of cool words that relate to politics, but many of them are SO similar sounding that i’m thinking of adjusting my current approach, which is a kind of clunky flashcard method. Will post a blog post about that if i choose to change what i’m doing. I find that when I HEAR a Japanese word, I remember it immediately, but a lot of times I cannot reproduce the Kanji at all and i’m not sure why. It takes a lot of energy to constantly write sentences, and I’m wondering if I should focus more on listening comprehension than being able to write everything I hear. Again it comes down to balance. I find I can learn more words by reading and writing a few, then writing entire sentences and learning less words. But I will see what tweaks I make and see how it affects my retention and energy.
So here’s the observation:
Sentence Cycling.
Many of the initial sentences i learned in Step 3 are long, dense and chock full of words that aren’t related to the key vocabulary word. This makes reading the sentences initially difficult. But as time passes, the other vocabulary in these sentences are introduced to you, and then the sentence, which was hard to read and dense becomes easier to read, and eventually completely comprehensible. I’m thinking this was the idea the Core2000 guys had, but didn’t realize how difficult it was. What this means is that I’m starting to not stress the long sentences because eventually I will learn all the vocabulary for the sentence later on. I am still trying to figure out a good approach, because i’m finding it hard like i said to reproduce Japanese I hear on paper. What’s weird is that I can sometimes read vocab words quite easily, understand it when its said, but not always write it very well. I will keep trying my sentence writing, or on alternating days write sentences but it takes so much energy it’s mind boggling. Typing on a computer is obviously easier, but I like being somewhat able to reproduce what I hear on paper as a matter of “functional fluency” in the future.
Either way, I press on. Hoep
Jamaican Learning Japanese 