Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Sentences (2 months) – Less is more, more or less!


I’m just over 2 months into the sentence stage of learning and I already have the battle scars to prove it…well almost.

It was always going to be a bloody process despite my ‘master plan’ for Japanese sentence domination.

So where did I go wrong and what pitfalls should you look out for if you are following this path…it’s simple…DON’T TRY AND DO TOO MUCH.

Yes, yes, yes, how could I be so stupid?

I had heard all the words of wisdom, the old clichéd ‘it’s a marathon not a sprint’, but boy I just couldn’t help myself, within no time I was sprinting like a Japanese sentence mining mad man having just been let off his ‘Remembering the Kanji’ leash…."add more sentences now god damit, just another 100 more, it won’t hurt." Ah! but it did hurt and it has been hurting pretty damn hard for the last 3 weeks as I try and claw myself out of my overenthusiastic start.

As you can see from my sentence counter on the right I have stalled at 1225 sentences for over 3 weeks now. But there is light at the end of the tunnel. With a hefty rate of repetitions per day things appear to be settling down.

In an attempt to avoid a repeat performance, using the useful features in Anki I have now set it up to only introduce new cards after I have finished all of the repetitions for that day. This means that some days new cards will be added and some days they won’t, it all depends if I finish all of my repetitions…which kind of makes more sense in terms of managing your workload.

Less Hare, more Tortoise.

Question: What do you think is the optimum amount of new cards per day? 10, 25, 40…100?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

nice job. I just finished RTK, and i'm on my second day of sentences. My problem during RTK was adding random huge chunks of kanji, so it took me too long to finish. I'm incorporating what I learned into sentences; like you said "less hare, more tortoise." I only do 20 new sentences per day despite my level of enthusiasm.

Kekoa said...

I appreciate your incite into the process I've been putting off my sentence mining until I could figure out the best way to jump in. I came across your earlier post about sentence mining and I just read this more recent post about your current status.

So I was wondering if you would start with different sentences or the ones your talked about in your previous post just at a slower pace?

I liked the order you laid out in the post because it was an actual path that someone could follow in some form. So I wanted to know if that method worked out for you.

But thanks also for the info on taking it slow. I'll be sure to keep my enthusiasm in check.