Status
I have more than a passing familiarity with Hiragana and Katakana now. It took me two weeks longer than expected, but I also didn't put in as much effort as I had originally anticipated.
The frequency list I found at wiktionary required a better grasp of grammar than what I currently have, so I haven't been able to leverage that very well.
I've been switching the language in Monster Hunter World back and forth between English and Japanese. Interestingly this feels like it has been better Katakana practice, but not really helpful otherwise.
I've been playing the Kanji no Owari game on Android for practice, too.
Since I haven't had time to sit down in front of the Genki books, I've been repeating phrases and vocabulary from the 80/20 Japanese book, to practice grammar, but I haven't been studying or drilling these, just practicing when I remember them. (Yay for PDF!)
Notes
80/20 Book
Vocabulary
There were some sample sentences that I started permuting to make new sentences. I'm repeating the material here so I can review it later.
わたしのくるまはあかいです。
| ひらがな | 漢字 | meaning |
|---|---|---|
| です | verb to be | |
| わたし | 私 | first person singular pronoun (我) |
| ひと | 人 | person/human (人) |
| くるま | 車 | car (车) |
| みどり | 緑 | green (绿色) |
| くろい | 黒い | black (黑色) |
| しろい | 白い | white (白色) |
| あかい | 赤い | red (红色) |
| *あおい | 青い | blue (蓝色) |
| *きろい | ? | yellow (黄色) |
Grammar
の - This is a sort of copula much like 的 in Chinese it can be used to attach adjectives to objects or indicate ownership.
は - Particle denoting the subject. Particles follow words to indicate things like parts of speech.
Genki Book
I'm finding the romaji in the book to be really distracting. I hope they don't keep it up.
Greetings
| Greeting | time of day | formality |
|---|---|---|
| おはよう | morning | informal |
| おはようございます | morning | polite |
| こんにちは | afternoon | |
| こんばんは | evening | |
| *おやすみ | night | |
| *おやすみなさい | night | polite |
*Technically not a greeting, generally said before bed. (我想跟"晚安"差不多一样)。
Practice
With just the one pattern, and all the greetings being so rigid, I generated quite a few nonsensical sentences. For example, I prefixed random greetings to random permutations of that above sentence and came up with stuff like "Good morning, my human is green!" おはよう,わたしのひとはみどりです! I continue to periodically write out the hiragana/katakana charts (because I can just scribble a character here and there while I'm doing work) and I'm pretending that Monster Hunter is Japanese practice, because it's pretty awesome.
Plans
Because I'm behind, I plan to take a picture of a page of the Genki book with me each day to review/practice what's on it when I can. I'll continue to recite random sentences while driving to try and work on my flow of speech. But I don't have a good way to test that my pronunciation is actually correct. Maybe I'll record and playback my voice saying phrases from shows on Netflix or something. I'm also thinking that Monday needs to be my status update day for Japanese study so that I don't slip on these updates again.
Consequences
If I slip further behind in my imaginary schedule then I'll start planning out the explicit content that I need to cover each day. I hope it doesn't come to this, but maybe it needs to.
Feedback
I'm making these notes as I read the text book. If you spot any mistakes, please leave a comment. Even if the seven day window for editing has closed.
References:
- Genki: An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese I, Second Edition, 2011.
- 80/20 Japanese by Richard Webb
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