Another month has gone by and I've made some meaningful progress including changing up a few things in how I'm learning and formalizing my immediate roadmap.

🟨 Current Progress

Right now the goal is to set a strong foundation for myself by learning all of the Hiragana and Katakana. I've taken my time learning these, introducing only a few new kana at a time.

As of today, I know both the Katakana and Hiragana for K, S, T, N, H, and M. That only leaves a handful of kana left to learn which I'm finding really exciting and motivating.

With this much kana under my belt, I find I can sound out most Hiragana or Katakana I come across in the wild, which is a fun way to practice.

remaining

While I do have a loose grasp of the diacritical marks, I haven't officially tried to commit them to memory yet. I also have not started looking into contracted sounds, double consonants, and the various additional nuances that can be applied to Hiragana and Katakana.

Never the less, with this much kana under my belt I decided to make two big changes this week:

1. I turned off romaji readings in Duolingo
2. I installed a Japanese keyboard on my computer and phone

🟩 Duolingo

I have remained mostly diligent in doing a bit of Duolingo every day. Up until this past week I have worked almost exclusively on Hiragana and Katakana in Duolingo, avoiding the Lessons for the most part.

In the past week, however I have started to make some progress on the Lesson track to dip my toe (と😅) into some vocabulary and more listening. As mentioned above, I have also disabled the romaji readings. It was just too easy for my eye to drift to the romaji and never try to recognize the kana.

I've found that intentionally using Duolingo to further my current goals has been effective and fun.

I don't try to answer as quickly as possible, instead, I always actively listen, then speak each phrase out loud, then read the kana. Once I have listened, spoken, and read, then I start selecting the answer.

Since I already know the majority of the kana, I can focus on listening, pronunciation, and vocabulary in the lessons, instead of additionally trying to learn a whole new alphabet.

🟦 Flashcards

The Spaced Repetition System (SRS) is the go-to way for memorization for most people. So far, I had been using a plugin in my note taking app Obsidian to build SRS flashcards. However, I've felt recently that I will out grow that plugin and so have decided to switch over to the crowd favorite Anki for building my flashcard decks.

For now I organize my Anki decks as so:

• Japanese
  • Hiragana - Kana I have learned
  • Katakana - Kana I have learned
  • Duolingo - Vocabulary I've learned from Duolingo
  • Mined - Vocabulary I've mined from other sources

I'm not convinced this is the best organization system, but it's a starting point.

I've also been creating all of my flashcards by hand instead of installing pre-made decks. For now I prefer this approach as it let's me get that extra level of practice and ensures ever card in my study rotation is something I am intentionally learning.

I suspect at some point I may upgrade some of my cards I've already learned to "nicer" versions from packs I find.

🟪 Miscellaneous Tools

A couple additional tools I've come across that I've found exceptionally helpful for supplementing my practice:

Study Real Kana

This site lets you select which Hiragana and Katakana you would like to practice and then runs you through a quick flashcard deck of those kana. While this may seem redundant if you already have flashcards and Duolingo, I sometimes find it mentally refreshing to get to use a different tool. It also doesn't really have any progress tracking or accounts to mess with, so its very simple to build your own quick practice session on the go.

Jisho Dictionary

I've been using their website and Android app for casually looking up some words. I'm honestly still learning how to use it as it presents way more information than I know what to do with. Mostly for now I've used it to double check the vocabulary that Duolingo is teaching as I know Duolingo is notorious for not always teaching vocabulary correctly.

🟧 Learning Roadmap

👋Till Next time...