My Journey with Japanese

I discussed how I study Kanji in the previous post. Now I will describe how I go about sentence mining, another key activity in Immersion learning.  Sentence Mining Sentence mining is the meat and potatoes of immersion learning. I use anime with Japanese subtitles and text heavy video games as my main sources of sentence mining.   Sentence mining involves making flashcards out of sentences from your immersion. This is called 'mining.' The best kind of sentences to mine are those that contain only one unknown element (word or grammar point).  Of course this is not a hard and fast rule but, sentences with more than one unknown element can become tedious to review in the initial stages. Sentences with only one unknown element are generally called 'i+1' sentences in the immersion learning community, The Process There are many software tools and Anki add-ons that help streamline the process of sentence mining. Instead of explaining them individually, I am going to step th...

In this post I will explain how I learned kanji with Hesig's Remembering the Kanji and Anki. Since immersion focusses on acquiring your target language through reading and listening, it is necessary to master the writing system first and foremost in order to look up words . What this essentially means for Japanese is that the first few months are spent on learning only kanji.   The Hesig Method The amount of information one has to memorize with regard to a single kanji is quite overwhelming. A character's readings, meanings and stroke order are usually taught together. This makes the process of learning kanji very tedious. James Hesig, in his book, Remembering the Kanji (RTK), came up with a system which associates each kanji with an English Keyword, which eliminates the necessity to memorize a large amount of information from the outset. The general idea is that the keyword serves as a kind of 'bridge' between the kanji and its readings/meanings. The kanji are ordere...