But amazingly I remembered the onyomi readings that I’ve made story about. o_o; This is weird. But making the stories are so tiring…

Change of plan, yet again. I find making stories for readings is just too hard to do. Too many kanji at once, and too many readings. I’ll just do it the hardcore way. Drilling the vocabs. Like RTK2. That’s faster I guess. While doing that, I can just read up my novel. And add some sentences. But I’ll still add the kanji in vocabs in KO2001 level3’s order. And yeah, better clear up that RTK failed stack.

Reading the forum today, I was thinking. Maybe instead of trying to drill myself with vocabularies, I should try learning the readings. It doesn’t take long, does it? Moreover, I more or less already know 1000 kanji readings. I believe it’ll help in learning new vocabs. I can try learning the readings while I strengthen my RTK memory again.

I still have 500+ on the failed deck. I’ve gone through around 40 of KO2001 level 3. But hmmm… Maybe I should suspend the rest again. I did try mining sentences from iKnow, matching with the remaining kanji. I’m up to step 6 of Core 6000 now. But they’re not in order, and I only have 100 sentences now, and I need 1000. Also, Core 6000 doesn’t cover all Joyo kanji. Maybe again, I should just mine sentences from the novel I’m reading (very sloowwwly).

But really, can I learn the readings in like 2 weeks? 3 weeks left till I arrive in Japan. Excited and panicking!

Finished KO2001 today. Still suspended the remaining kanji. But I think I’ll just go on with them tomorrow. Better than waiting until I got the ‘perfect sentence’. Meanwhile, the RTK is progressing slowly. Still have 700 failed cards and in the middle of reviewing. Will try to get them down to 600 tonight.

Finished adding all (well, almost, threw away and cropped those boring or easy ones) sentences containing 1110 kanji from KO2001. I’m up to kanji 1049 now. It’s verrry clooose. Gonna finish them off tomorrow. Well, the thing is after that. The review. And the remaining 900 kanji. I’m not sure either to just drill the vocabs to understand most of the kanji readings. Or to use sentences. But if I want to do them in order, that’d take awhile. Mining a good sentence is tiring.

On the other hand, I started reviewing Heisig again. Had 1000+ failed kanji yesterday. Added 200 to stack 2 already. Sounds crazy, but I must’ve encounter those kanji at least 5 times each. And yet I still forget them after awhile. orz.

I updated my Anki. And was surprised at the change. The new Anki looks so cool. I wonder how old my version was. I love the new editing part. It’s now easy to color! The session is cool, too!

I read Flesh & Blood 1 again today. 10 pages. And had like hmmm… at least 4 unknown words per page. Scary. It just has too much difficult kanji. Like 邂逅,復讐,縋る. But it’s also fun in a way. I wrote in on the 8×8mm grid book that I bought in Daiso. I numbered the pages and date I read. Used 1 page today.

Maybe. What I’ll do after 1110 kanji, I’ll just add the kanji according to KO2001 order. And use one vocab from the list. For the ones that I can’t find satisfactory sentence, I’ll still add anyway, but edit at a later time.

I finished listing the 1000 kanji left in level 3 of KO2001. Just wanted to have the list of what’s left. I used this online OCR, since I’m on a Mac. The OCR I had was in Windows. It’s tough… since the result of the OCR is not that accurate. But it’s still faster than typing it manually. I also prepared some 150-ish sentences for the first 150-ish kanji.
Still hasn’t finished the leftover review though. The sentences added is up to kanji 1013. Less than 100 to add.

There’s this (new) game called Kanji Kioku Jutsu on Nintendo DS. It has kanji drills based on school grade levels, from grade 1 until high school. It doesn’t test most common 単語, but it seems to test all the kanji. What I like is that it drills from the basic kanji. Unlike most other softwares, it directly goes to the hard level.

The drill is done with 10 questions per session. It’s then divided into 5-5 questions. Firstly, you’re given the reading and the kanji. Then you’re supposed to mark the hard part of the kanji. After all 5, you’re tested on the kanji writing. Then you’re on to the next 5. If you got one question wrong, you won’t get a medal. So, you have to repeat the session again, the whole 10. =_=; But it’s good in a way. It made sure you know the kanji writing properly.

So far I’m up to session 11 of the grade 1-3 level. Pretty good. But there are lots and lots left. I feel so stupid for not recognizing the “bun” of “shinbun”. orz Now I know. That’s why this drill is good, I think.

On the other hand, my KO2001 review has been on stagnant since early March. I had more than 1000 items overdue when I started reviewing slowly a couple of weeks ago. Now I have around 100 left. Hopefully I can finish this up quickly. Only have like 100-200 kanji left to add. The original plan was to finish KO2001 in March… orz And had the rest of the time for the remaining 1000 kanji. But yeah. I only have a month left now. Not sure how I can fit in those 1000 kanji. Haha.

The 1833 seen cards in this deck contain:
1012 total unique kanji.
Jouyou: 1008 of 1945 (51.8%).
Jinmeiyou: 0 of 287 (0.0%).
4 non-jouyou kanji.

Jouyou levels:
Grade 1: 72 of 80 (90.0%).
Grade 2: 150 of 160 (93.8%).
Grade 3: 181 of 200 (90.5%).
Grade 4: 167 of 200 (83.5%).
Grade 5: 146 of 185 (78.9%).
Grade 6: 111 of 181 (61.3%).
JuniorHS: 181 of 939 (19.3%).

Whoah. More than half of the kanji already. Though I kind of doubt if it will reach much more than 1100 by the end of KO 2001. Oh well. Will manage the rest somehow, rite?

Meanwhile, iKnow
core 6000 Step 1: 95%
core 6000 Step 2: 76%

Is going to start Step 3 by the day after tomorrow.

http://alyks-rant.blogspot.com/
This guy inspires me.
I like the idea of collecting the sentences first, then pick between them. But this only works with digital novels. If I do that with a non digital one, that’d take hell long to type sentences.

So I’ll try to hit Haruhi after finishing KO. Not sure if I’m gonna finish iKnow Core 6000 or not. After removing the easy ones, it does gets more challenging. But some words have very familiar kanji, and yet I’m not used to the compounds and often get mixed up between them. But never mind, I can save about half of the time since I can cut half of the vocabs.

It is not that fun doing KO or iKnow Core (though it is more fun with the quiz like GUI). I also think it’s more fun if I read my favourite manga straightaway. But I barely see hard/unrecognizabe words when I read manga. And I want to improve faster. Since manga doesn’t contain words that show up on the news, or on scientific stuff(?), I guess doing KO helps me on that matter.

Reading math related stuff would probably help me better. But I’m not that interested on it, besides, I don’t really have the material. But of course there’s google. But still, manga and anime are more fun, yes? I’d rather go through KO than going through news articles and find the words. *shrugs* I do need to tackle the Japanese math, but I’ll leave that matter later I guess.

Euh. Currently at around KO#725. Trying to input 25 kanji per day. It’s hard to keep it daily. I’d miss 1 day in between now and then.

So i decided to try this iKnow, since I thought it’d help with the leftover kanji from 2001 Odyssey (still a bit over halfway) and it’s a good thing to learn common words that I’m still not familiar with.

I started today with Core 6000, part 1. Since I don’t want to go into the more basic one. Even with this level, I know well most of the words, and I think I’ve seen all the words before, just that some I’m not too familiar with. But never mind. The iKnow GUI (launch it, and it’ll load a big flash GUI, it took awhile) is game-like, and it’s fun to click on.

My target is 1 lesson per week, so I can finish it before I leave for Japan. That’s quite tough. I did 17 lessons, 170 words, to reach today’s target. Total words for this part is 250. So I suppose I’d have to review those words in this one week.

You can choose one lesson with 5 or 10 words. I chose 10 words to get me faster. I finish one lesson in about 5-6 minutes. It keeps on repeating the words and testing you on kanji-meaning, kanji-reading, and so on. I think not having to read the sentence is also a good thing. You just have to listen the sentence being read after you correctly answer the question.

There are some settings you can change, background, go slowly, or set your target date manually, test on romaji only, etc. I really like that I can set the target date.

I’m gonna try to finish all 12 lessons of core 6000 before May. That’d mean I have to learn 4000 words in 3 months! Not really, since I studied JLPT 1 and 2 already (though not considerably passed). Should’ve something like this when I studied JLPT. orz

I can read well after that, but then… there’s still problem with my kanji writing skills. I really need to review Heisig again, yes?