Aguro

I have written on my old blog about how important it is to practice kanji writing using Mnemosyne. Here I will describe the process in more detail, not about the way questions are crafted (that’s for another post) but about the physical process of it.

The basic equipments are a pen and a book. I prefer books with Cartesian lines in it but a more common horizontal-line-only book works fine.

I see squares

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I have this book borrowed from my cousin, Routledge’s “Japanese: A Comprehensive Grammar” (Stefan Kaiser et. al.), which has been tremendously useful for my Japanese studies.

It’s a quite nicely organized grammar collection. For every grammar entry, after an explanation there will be wealth of example sentences each with their kanji, romaji, and English translation. Here’s one example sentence under the entry about the classical copula なり (なる in its noun-modifying form):

I use it to look up new confusing grammars I find while reading, but most importantly, I try to exhaustively read it from the start to beginning with the method I will outline.

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I’m a big fan of the Japanese language study podcast japanesepod101.com. Since I knew it quite some time ago, I have listened to around 390 episodes. Of course my main target is to improve my listening, but it has improved other areas of my language skills as well. Here I will share you my study method.

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As explained before, I use a spreadsheet word list to store all the words I’ve encountered. I also put these words into the flashcard review software Mnemosyne so that I won’t forget them.

I use the term word listing to describe the process of putting new words into my word list. The source can be from anywhere such as anime, song, book, web site, or even ATL. For example, today I read the Japanese Wikipedia article on the Watarase Bridge (渡良瀬橋). On that article, I encountered a never-before-seen word 建立 (super weird reading, check it out). I then recorded that word into my word list, and that is exactly what word listing is.

Words in the word list by itself will probably get buried by time and forgotten by time you encounter the word again in real life. Therefore I need to put the words into an SRS like Mnemosyne, which will kindly schedule the review for me. The process of putting words from the word list into Mnemosyne is called word dumping.

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I was really busy with many stuffs today so basically didn’t do any Japanese studies except reviewing Mnemosyne and listening to a jpod101 episode.

The podcast was about an NHK guy collecting money house to house. The grammar point is -てくる (-te kuru), which is to do something and then return back. The example was:

Note that -てくる have other uses.

Anyway the grammar was not alien for me. What’s interesting is that Natsuko-sensei spelled H as エイチ (eichi). I always thought it was ecchi!

Well here’s what the Japanese Wikipedia has to say about the letter ‘H’:

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The amount of cards we have to review every day on Mnemosyne depends on a lot of factors. One of the factors is of course how many new cards we add daily.

Earlier, I was so keen on adding items to Mnemosyne that I could add more than 20 Japanese words and 10 kanji every day. But Mnemosyne is one hell of a beast. If we feed him with lots of cards, Mnemosyne will in turn ask lots of cards the next days. It means that you have to spend even more and more time facing your SRS. At one time, I could reach 400 Mnemosyne cards to review each day!

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On the comments column of my word list, my current policy dictates me to specify the source of the word. For example, when I find a new word from the book Colloquial Japanese page 142, the comment column of the word will contain, among other things:

clq 142

With clq obviously being the abbreviation of CoLloQuial.

Now a lot of my words come from “atl”. What does it mean for a word to be an “atl word”?

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As mentioned on my word list column description, I now store context-bound words. However, there are still tons of old entries where I primitively store only the words proper. Here’s an example, the 1840th word on my list:

理由 - りゆう - reason

On the process of my daily Mnemosyne drill, I sure get lots of cards wrong. Most of the wrong answers are for those old, contextless entries.

Therefore, everyday I do word busting, or contexification, or in simple English, “giving context to words”. While reviewing the wrongly answered cards in Mnemosyne for that day, I pick 2 words to give context to.

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As written before, my old word list is stored inside a primitive text file. The next progression was of course to store it inside a spreadsheet. At least it makes the display a lot easier on the eyes. At first I used Microsoft Office, but now it’s stored in OpenOffice.org’s ods format.

On this post I will describe the three leftmost columns on the word list. The contents on the list will eventually be dumped into Mnemosyne.

Leftmost column: kanji

The leftmost column is for the kanji writing of the word I want to memorize. But one thing to keep in mind is that I now store “words” not as isolated entities, but as context-bound words. Believe me, when you’re dealing with a list of 10,000+ words like me, having a context is just a must! For example, suppose I find this sentence with the new word 尾翼 (tail):

翼を円形に広げた優雅な赤い鶴を垂直尾翼にあしらったボーイング７７７が羽田－伊丹間を往復し、飛び慣れた大空に別れを告げた

I do not just store 尾翼, but the relevant sentence fragment containing it! Note that I said “sentence fragment” instead of “whole sentence”. The whole sentence is often too long, just like the example above. However, you have to also pick enough to surround the word in a meaningful context.

Picking the fragment itself is a challenging process. For the above sentence, we can pick for example this fragment:

鶴を垂直尾翼にあしらったボーイング７７７

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Since the beginning of my Japanese study, I’ve used a word list. At first, it was just a tab-delimited text file. I actually planned to write about my current word list format, but found my old list an amusing attention grabber.

First of all, you can download it here (10.4 KB), unedited, uncensored. I probably last utilized it in 2005.

At that time, one of my main activities was to gather words from anime. Rest assured, I did some pretty silly ear transcriptions. That and my lack of knowledge for any Japanese grammar back then caused me to record inflected, and worst of all wrong, phrases. Here are some highlights (of course in romaji, since it’s what I used at that time):

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