Well as I mentioned in a previous post I was going to learn to read Hangul 한굴 this year well days after that post I went ahead and re-learned the Hangul probably took 1-2 days to memorize them all and a little longer to get the pronunciations and irregularity's correct, still probably not perfect but can read quite well now I just need to speed up. After getting the taste of Hangul my attention turned to actually wanting to learn Korean itself as I've always had an interest in Korea and its culture other than Japanese its by far my next favorite language, so for a while I'm going to switch my attention to learning Korean especially after my long hiatus from Japanese its very daunting to re-start 1700 sentences that haven't been reviewed for 5 months or so. Although to not forget my Japanese I'm going to were I can translate my Korean sentences into Japanese and avoid English as much as possible the great thing about Korean for anybody who has studied Japanese is the many similarity between the two languages. e.g. 저 - jeo = Similar to 私 씨 - ssi = similar to さん Mr, Mrs, Miss 은 / 는 - eun / neun = Topic Marker similar to は 입니다 - nida = similar to です　"to be" 이 / 가 - -i / ga = Subject marker 저는 학생입니다. = I (topic marker) student am a - I am a student The sentence structure is pretty much the same too as above. Now that I know the writing its just a case of learning the vocab and grammar so should be pretty quick to match my Japanese ability and to pass it, currently the thing I'm finding most difficult is getting the pronunciation correct but that just needs practice. So I intend to keep these regular logs on my Korean progress and also for a place to list things I've learned which will hopefully be beneficial for myself and anybody else that's interested in or learning Korean. Oh and one last thing to finish up I'm also going to set a few mini goals (as suggested by Squintox) each time I make a log as a way to keep pushing myself along and as a guide of my progress. - Finish Beginner series 1 of Korean Class 101 - 5/31 - Add 200 vocab/sentences to Anki - 62/200 - Watch at least 1 Korean movie a week - 0 (3-iron has arrived ^^) - Listen to more audio 20Mins today so far (still collecting things together for this) Feel free to follow me over on Twitter - Tibul

From My Yaruki I've read and seen many ways that people do there reviews for there sentences, people recommend different things like "you only should pass a sentence if you can read everything" and "you should click hard for every review unless you can read it instantly". I've adapted many of the principles and completely thrown some out depending on what I thought suited and worked best for me. Now the way I review goes like this, 1) I first look and see if I can read the main word of the sentence (the part I'm wanting to learn) which I usually bold for emphasis. 2) If I can read the word I go onto trying to read the rest of the sentence and try to understand how the word is used in context. 3) If I can read it quickly without much thought it gets an "easy". 4) If I can only read the word I'm trying to learn and maybe some other bits of the sentence it gets a "Good". 5) If I struggle to read the word but manage it after some thought it gets a "hard". 6) Obviously if I don't understand anything its an "again" Now here is were I may differ to other people, if I can read the sentence and the word but mispronounce or just miss out on the exact reading and go "haha damn I new it was that" I give it a hard. Really doesn't help me to fail every card just because of a little mistake if anything it makes me feel down and have less urge to get more done but meh people might disagree and say we should understand it 100% or we might make future errors when speaking etc. But this is were I disagree again who can speak, read, write there native language 100% without any areas or without picking up bad habbits? So look at it this way if you cant be 100% perfect in your own language how can people expect this from a foreign language? The advantage is even though you may make little mistakes here and there think how easy it will be to correct this when you have the general knowledge of how something is read/spoken, much better than not knowing the word at all or getting so frustrated that you cant learn it perfectly that it effects your learning in general. It will correct itself in time either via somebody pointing out your mistake or your mind working a way in the background clicks when it realizes its wrong and sticks much more easily than repeated 'again, again, again" in an SRS.

Was just reading a post over at Nihongo day by day (雨と水） and remembered just how excellent SRS software is for not forgetting things that you've learned I could read most of the article bar a few vocab, that I'll be sentence mining by the way. Now for the last few weeks I've not really added much to my sentence deck and not had huge exposure either except the 5 hours of listening I got the other day but yet I still could read the majority of that article the only thing I had kept regular was my sentence reviews.So even though I hadn't actively been using Japanese each day for a while I've not really forgotten anything and the bits I have forgotten get picked up much easier the second time.So for all those that worry they are going to forget everything if they take a brake from there Japanese studies don't worry about it just be sure to keep up with your reviews and when your ready to get back to your Japanese you'll be almost were you left off.

Recently I've been thinking back to before I really started learning Japanese to a time when I thought that to learn a language you needed to be really smart or have it forced down your throat from a young age and also that other huge myth that a large amount of people (maybe the majority) still believe that you need to live in the country of the target language to reach any sort of fluency which i now know to be completly false and so does a growing number of language learners just checkout some more of the blogs on my blog list for some good examples.Why you 'DON'T' need to live in the country of your target language to be fluent you have so much more resources at your disposal these day if you think the advantage to another country is that you will be surrounded by people talking in L2 then just get some headphones and audio and have this playing in your ear its exactly the same if you think "oh well there is newspapers and tv etc" erm well you can find all these on the internet for free so in this day and age there is no excuse for the 'you have to be living in the country' tiss a complete myth.The old teachers and classes myth another potential if not possible harmfull waste of time is taking a course in the language some people may argue that you need somebody to explain things to you or that they learn better when somebody is telling them directly what to do. The only issue is that half the time the teacher wants you to feel good about yourself so they will only teach you how to say things whether you can understand the response is another story also if your learning something like Japanese you probably wont even start learning the Kanji for atleast a year and even then only a few as there is a misconception that the Kanji are extremly difficulty which is false really if you want to obtain fluency you need to be learning the Kanji from day one I recommend like so many others that you get a hold of Remembering the Kanji by James W. Heisig and you can learn all the 2046 jouyou Kanji in a few months.Also in a lot of cases people who take classes will tend to go slower at learning the language unless they learn a lot in there own time put it this way the person who self studys everyday of the week x amount of time will be much further ahead than somebody who only does 1-2 days a week of classes and for the people that say they learn better when somebody is telling them are you sure that its not just a motivational thing? As when in a class your forced to listen/learn but at home its easy to be distracted by the next show on TV unless you keep motivatedSo ...

As many of you may know Anki (SRS) has recently been updated to include a timeboxing feature which i think is great, for those who don't know timeboxing is basically setting yourself an allocated amount of time i.e. 10 minutes and within this set time you do your reps, when you reach the end of the set time you stop and take a brake.This can work wonders for efficiency and getting alot of reps done in a short amount of time probably the reason being is because you know you hav'nt got long and there's no "oh god this is going to take forever" which causes you to procrastinate and be distracted easily, your mind tends to work more efficiently and you get distracted much less when you brake it into smaller chunks.So now that Anki has timeboxing built in you can set your 10 minutes or what ever you choose and hopefully be more efficient as the problem was before with me anyway is that i would set myself say 15-30 minutes to do reps and completly forget to check the time etc so ended up going way over, which is'nt exactly a bad thing if your in the right frame of mind.So the next time your doing your daily reps try timeboxing to see if it improves your efficiency.Stats Update.The 515 seen cards in this deck contain: 359 total unique kanji.Jouyou: 352 of 1945 (18.1%).Jinmeiyou: 2 of 287 (0.7%).5 non-jouyou kanji.Card countsMature cards: 35 (6.80%)Young cards: 480 (93.20%)Unseen cards: 0 (0.00%)Correct answersMature cards: 0.0% (0 of 0)Young cards: 76.0% (2009 of 2643)First-seen cards: 78.6% (485 of 617)