We are already in August, so we’re past the halfway point of the year. I wasn’t going to write an update post like the one I published at the beginning of this year, but there are some achievements worth mentioning: I’m now using Japanese definitions.
I have finished all 16 volumes of Yotsuba&. I’m currently reading Mieruko-chan, one chapter per day, just as I did with Yotsuba&. I also began reading my first book, a light novel: KonoSuba.
Walls of text usually scared me a lot, but I needed to face them. Otherwise, I wouldn’t improve at all. After a few pages, I went from freezing because I didn’t understand anything to being able to scan the page and more or less read properly. Coincidentally, this also helped a lot with navigating Japanese sites. Those walls of kanji don’t scare me anymore.
The sentence mining continues, from books, manga, and anime. I’m now at 4.8k Anki cards, which is 48% of my 10k-word goal. The most important change I made was moving from English definitions to Japanese definitions.
There is a very pleasant feeling that comes from learning from the language itself. Many concepts do not translate one-to-one into English. Take 気, for example. You can find an approximation, but when it appears in set phrases and expressions, you develop a kind of intuition for it. Then you see the translation and feel that it is a little off. It’s hard to explain, but Japanese definitions make this kind of understanding possible.
So, I added a feature to Jitori that gives it two dictionaries: Japanese and English. You can choose between them depending on what you need.
I hope it helps. Bye.