Anki Update

Decided to post another Anki update since it's been a few days. For people who are wondering how much can one completely obsessed person pour into a hobby like "learning Japanese" in a short period of time - here is my personal figure:

1,525 minutes in the last 23 days.

That doesn't of course count the 2 additional hours of Japanese class I take every week.

Anyway, in the last 14 days (2 weeks) I have managed to progress fairly well.

Anki Stats

	Day 9	Day 23
Time	526 minutes	1525 minutes
Reviews	2077	5986
Cards	180	459
Correct %	58.60%	69.52%

So, as you can see, I have a lot more cards in my "learned pool" (459?!?!) and my accuracy at getting them right has gone up substantially over the last two weeks.

Part of that is going to be due to the fact that as time progresses I will have seen some cards several times over the period of these weeks and so I will likely be familiar with them. The aggregate of that past history will start to slowly "stack the deck" (pun intended) in my favor on this percentage.

Another part of this is that I am slowly, and I'm not quite sure how, figuring out how to read kanji correctly. That is to say I'm able to make fairly good guesses at both the pronunciation as well as the meaning of the word I am looking at by examining the individual kanji characters that make it up.

It's still a horribly inefficient writing system - and I mean that in every sense of the word. While it at first seems "neat" to have a system based on pictographs, you start to quickly appreciate the simple elegance of the Latin alphabet and punctuation. Oh sweet kami-sama do I miss punctuation.

Anyway, I can totally understand why countries like Korea and Vietnam have mostly ditched this system of writing in favor of their native scripts. It's extremely cumbersome to learn and I can see why it takes most students in Japan 10 full years to obtain the high school level literacy. I pity these poor kids - it must be an extremely draining experience,

Of course, then there are idiots like me - middle aged people who decide that they're going to go and take this beast on long past the point when their brains should have calcified. At least I can take comfort in the fact that I'm using my brain and hopefully staving off the dementia that comes with old age...