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...

Hello, and welcome to my blog. I'm going to document how I study Japanese on this blog.   My name is Kartik. I'm a third year student of BA Japanese at EFLU, Hyderabad. I have a physical disability known as cerebral palsy, which limits my mobility and restricts me to a wheelchair. As a result, I gravitated to hobbies such as anime and video games. I forget exactly how or when I discovered the term 'anime'  but I can safely say that I have been watching Japanese animation for as long as I can remember. Shows like Ghost in the Shell: SAC, Mushishi, Spice and Wolf, Black Lagoon, and Kino's Journey are some of my all time favorites. Eventually, I wanted to understand anime without subtitles. This became one of the motivating factors for me to start learning Japanese. My first attempt at learning Japanese was way back in 2009. I  enrolled for the certificate of proficiency in Japanese at EFLU. This was an introductory program  that lasted for about a year. While this...