Week One, Accomplishments

The first week has come around. I think it’s a good time to reflect on what has happend and what has been achived.

First of all getting back into Japanese was easier than I thought. In just three days I’ve completely recovered my Kana recognition. This means I can read and write ひらがな and カタカナ without major issues. Though I think I can still improve a lot on speed, so that’s next. On the 日本語 side apart from kana it’s not looking so bright. The Core 2000 sentences are pretty hard if you know nothing. Therefore I have decided to stop Core 2000 for now and start adding all the sentences from Genki I’s dialogs into Anki to study. After all learning works best if it’s fun. And what is no fun and produces no results should be stopped if not for your own sanity at least for everyone elses. I’ve come to like the StickyStudy apps on the iPhone and iPad. But StickyStudy Kanji has some serious flaws right now and I cannot recommend that app right now. Justin Nightingale, the author of StickyStudy has been very responsive and positive about my critic I sent via mail and I’m confident that I can recommend the app, once the next update has been published.

On the second language: Vietnamese, I think I did make some progress even though my girlfriend and tutor is somewhat sceptical about my performance. Simmilarly to the Genki I sentences I will create an Anki deck with the vietnamese sentences from the textbook I have and ask her to create audio files for the sentences. I’m confident that audio is an integral part of language learning especially of tonal languages. I often feel more confident saying something that I remember hearing in Vietnam. Written language always only conveys the language to a certain extend, getting intonation and stress right or even the languages melody is hard when studying from a text book only. This–I assume–is also the reason why Fluent in three month has such a great success with what he does.

Next, I’ve intended to cope with my procrastitation habit. And I did. I feel better than ever. First thing I did was to get the noprocrast gem and block reddit and hackernews. Additionally I’ve stoped unfollowing many I followed on twitter arguably I could have set up a better management using lists. I consider unfollowing the cleaner solution though. I’ve also unfriended some on facebook. While you can always igore someone on your news feed, they could potentially pose a privacy hazard. And honestly, why befriend someone you barely know and ignore on your news feed? Trying to prevent Procrastination has had other positive effects two. I’ve (re)started this blog more easily, create a list of tasks my girlfriend and I have on your weekly agenda and pinned it to the front door. This will–and so far does–hopefully give us a better look at the current situation and lessen some stress that often comes up in the form of “Didn’t I tell you to do …”. Finally I have found the time to read many of the articles on my instapaper list and develop a regular feed reading habit in the morning while making some good progress on my thesis.

The last week has been a blast for me, I have never known how much time I really had for activities I enjoy. Getting out more and being more organized, while taking some distance from the laptop has been a great experience. Finally I feel like I have a chance to improve on my langauge skills I wanted to improve for so long and get my thesis done on time.