Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Masochism, part 428914

YOWCH. I'm basically having to relearn most of my sentence cards, now that I've switched up to dictaction. It's funny how I'm able to quickly recognize and read so many kanji just by a quick glance, but when it comes time to produce that sucker, my mind strains to do so and usually fails. Even some of my more mature sentences are getting the "Again" button, but I don't see this particularly as a bad thing. The way I see it, I'm reinforcing my weaker points considerably this way, and truly learning the ins and outs of these words and compounds. It's tough going, but something I feel is necessary, and I'm enjoying it so far. My brain is actually feeling stimulated again as far as Japanese study goes.

One suggestion I got on Twitter was to highlight one key word in a sentence and focus only on that in my dictation - very good advice, I think. I'm currently writing out the entire damn thing each time, which is really good practice and all, but incredibly time consuming and tiring. I've already highlighted specific words in previous sentences, so applying this practice would be quite simple.

At any rate, back to this wonderful pain I'm inflicting upon myself.

3 comments:

igor said...

That's interesting that you're doing it that way now. I've considered doing the dictation sentences for a while instead of the readings ones (of course, I'm still not done with RTK, yet, so...).

I asked Alyks recently how he does his, and he told me that he's doing reading cards. Also, now that I think about it, Khatz' writing ability wasn't exactly crap at the end of his 18 months, right? Whatev. I think I'm just gonna stick with reading cards. Good luck to you! Those cards take a lot of effort!

Burritolingus said...

I'd definitely recommend trying dictation at least briefly to see how you like it, but writing out the entire thing each time will definitely get old fast. Plus, recalling those kanji really takes some brain power, but if you're up to date on your RTK reviews it should come pretty naturally. Having done both dictation and reading now, I feel like I've paved a ton of paths in my brain to make the process of remembering vocabulary and producing kanji as efficient as possible.

Whatever works for you, though!

igor said...

hmmm. Maybe. Are you using text-to-speech (like Misaki)? If I *did* do dictation, I probably would use text-to-speech. Maybe a few iKnow sentences or something with the audio, but that's about it. The only way I could see myself continuing in the longterm that way would be going kana to kanji. I'd probably give myself pictures to help the process. Well, I guess I'll consider it :)