1500 Kanji, One Year Later

It’s now been a year since I completed my “1500 kanji” project.  At that time I knew 1503 kanji, maintained with 225 reviews/day.

Since then, I’ve been doing my reviews every day, which pretty quickly dropped down to a reasonable load in the following months.  I’ve also been adding “Rare” kanji on an as-needed basis, as I encounter them when reading.  These include  寂 (lonely),  震 (quake),  添 (append),  履 (footgear),  妥 (gentle), and 賑 (bustling).  Some of these come from business terms, like 履歴書 (resumé); others come from manga (I’m currently reading New Game!, about a new character designer at a video game company).  And I’m continuing to add vocabulary and sample sentences, at a rate to keep my total review load around 50 per day.

Why I want to study at GenkiJACS

Readers of this blog know that, almost a year ago, I completed my kanji study project.  I’ll have an update at the end of the month reflecting on the year since in more detail.

But, though I can now read and write most kanji, carrying on conversation is still a struggle.  There is no time to look up unknown words, and there are just so darn many homonyms in Japanese, that even when I know the words, it can be hard to quickly guess which meanings are meant.  And when speaking, I have to dredge the words up out of my memory quickly, and string them together with some semblance of grammar… this is hard.

Before I moved to Arizona, I had an amazing personal Japanese tutor.  She patiently helped me through conversation each week.  I haven’t found anyone like that here.  I do have an online language exchange friend with whom I meet once a week, but it’s not the same — he’s learning English while I’m learning Japanese, and so we shift back and forth a lot, and I’m not really forced to express myself in Japanese.

All that has led me to look into intensive language schools in Japan.  GenkiJACS is one I’m considering.  It looks like they have something like 20 to 35 hours of instruction per week, and can also help you arrange housing (I’d hope for a homestay).  They get great reviews; everybody seems to love the program and learn a lot.  I could only do a couple of weeks, but I’m guessing that two weeks there, living with a Japanese family and studying with professional language teachers for much of each day, will do more good than 6-12 months of studying on my own.

If anybody has experience with this sort of thing, please share your thoughts in the comments.

Wrapping Up

The fourth month saw a continued drop in the review load, which almost — but not quite — broke the 50 reviews/day barrier.

Because I dig graphs, here’s a graph of the reviews per day for the entire period since the end of the 1500 Kanji project — November through February.

Month After, The Third

My review load bounced around quite a lot in January too (I’ve come to believe this is inherent in the nature of a spaced repetition system — an interesting question somebody should delve into).  The overall trend line is almost horizontal again, but the average this month was 84 reviews/day, which is down significantly from the 104 reviews/day I was averaging last month.

2nd Month After

Given how quickly my reviews were dropping in the first month after reaching my goal, I had high hopes for December.  But these didn’t pan out.  My review load bounced around, but was essentially level, at around 104 reviews/day on average.

The Month After

Well, it took all month, but my review load did finally dip below 100/day, just yesterday:

It was 98 yesterday, and then of course popped back up to 123 today.  But the trend line is pretty clear; each day, on average, has about 2 fewer reviews than the day before.

The Week After

This was the first week after completion of my “1500 kanji” project.  I didn’t add any new facts to my study deck, so I was hoping my reviews would drop off substantially.

Well, they did drop off, but not quite as quickly as I might have liked.

PROJECT COMPLETE!

30 weeks ago, I knew about 450 kanji.  I decided that wasn’t enough to be very useful, so I set a goal of learning the 1500 most common kanji by the end of October.

Well, Happy Halloween!  The end of October is here, and so is the end of my kanji project.

All 1503 of the most common kanji — all characters in the Core, Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced levels — are now in my review deck.  And more importantly, I won’t be adding any more reviews from now on, except the occasional rare kanji I stumble across while reading and decide is worth adding to my collection.

FINAL WEEK!

Well, here we are, at the final week of the project at last!

I currently have 1,476 kanji in my review deck, with 27 kanji left in the “Advanced” group.  That means I’m 98% done, and by this time next week, that’ll be it.

Week 28: Two Weeks Left

1440 kanji down, 63 to go!

I had about 240 reviews/day almost every day this week.  It was a rough week with lots of distractions — in fact as I type this, I’m in my hotel room, all packed up to return from the New Worlds 2015 conference, where I gave a talk on Friday.  I did manage to get all my reviews in before bed each evening (and some on the plane on Thursday), but yeah, the ol’ kanji neurons weren’t firing as well as I would like.

So, I confess, I cheated some.  When I had kanji that I knew I knew, but they wouldn’t leap to mind because I was rushed and distracted, I hit the “hard” button instead of the “missed” button in my review software.  So instead of going back to square one, they were scheduled for review in a month or 24 days or whatever (depending on how well I knew it before).