Japanese (week 2)

I haven't been as productive this week as I would have liked to have been as I've been quite overwhelmed in general plus the more I'm learning the more I'm having to review and make sure I remember. Using Anki (an online flashcard app) makes it quite simple but still very time consuming as what I learn piles up. I'm still very motivated and have been studying 2 - 3 hours every night before I go to sleep but I'm probably gonna change my approach a bit. I'm also going to do these posts every 2 weeks instead of weekly as I feel like I will run out of things to say rather quickly and I'm also just not going to be making progress fast enough for weekly updates to be beneficial for me.

I've was studying the meanings of 30 - 40 kanji daily every day last week before moving on to memorizing the meanings and learning grammar and stuff cause I thought it would act as a good foundation before moving on to the more complex stuff. I still do think this but its very quickly became a chore and although I'm happy working hard I want the process to be enjoyable as its something I'm really interested in!! I've been learning them by seeing an (anki) flashcard with the key word associated with the kanji on the from then writing it from memory and evaluating weather or not I've got it right. I will be keeping this up but I'll probably reduce the amount I expect myself to learn every day to 25 to make the whole process take less time (and therefore hopefully feel like less of a chore). 

I've learnt a total of 506 kanji using this method so I feel like I have given myself a good enough foundation to be able to somewhat comfortably be able to start learning some vocabulary and grammar so starting that will be my goal over the next 2 weeks. I also want to become a lot more comfortable using katakana as I haven't dedicated a lot of time to it and its not intuitive to me at all yet. In terms of vocabulary and grammar I'm going to start using the core 2k/6k deck (a premade anki deck with 6000 of the most common words) and learn 5 - 10 new words from it a day and start using tae kims grammar guide for grammar since they're both free online and I've heard a lot of good things about them!! I'm not sure how much I'm going to be using them both yet but I'll work that out over time.

I spent over 16 hours studying Japanese last week and have spent total of over 31 hours total! I decided to be tracking my time as a way of just keeping track of progress but I've found it very helpful in terms of keeping me motivated to study as well. I'm obviously still very much a beginner but if there is anyone else studying Japanese that would like to reach out let me know as I'd love to make more friends studying Japanese!! Also if u have been studying for a while any tips u might have are very welcome also :D

Thank u for reading my blog post and I hope u have a wonderful day :]