Learning Japanese - Day 5

Today's been a lot better than yesterday for study! After my night out last night, I had to go back and pick up my car which I left at the train station. The walk there takes about an hour so I downloaded some podcasts to listen to on the way. One was a podcast called GLJ (Guys Learning Japanese) I was listening to their rant about memorising Kanji and one of the guys said he'd walk around the park with his ipod and ankii app and practice revising while walking around, so I did just the same on my way to the car!

I downloaded a really good app called Memrise, it's pretty much the same as Ankii and lets you record your progress and transfer from PC to mobile using your log in which is great. It using a memorisation system called spaced repetition. I will have to give it a while to see if it actually works but by the end of my walk I had managed to answer about 40 kanji and through repeated questions I was able to remember most of them. I'll check the app again tomorrow to do a review and see if anything sank in!

You can set how long you want to study for each day and how many new words you want to be added to your review list. It seems like a really great way of tracking progress and makes you feel like you're getting somewhere with it!

If you struggle with a particular kanji on the app, you can look at other peoples mems (easy ways to remember something, short for memories i think) which are memes or little stories that people have written and submitted to the app to help you remember the kanji.

When I got back I jotted down some of the kanji I'd learned into my notebook but I'll leave it there till tomorrow, don't want to over do it and end up forgetting everything!

GLJ's website: http://gljpodcast.podomatic.com/

In a future post i'll write about some of my favourite Japan and Learning Japanese podcasts and Youtube channels!

#LearningJapanese