Epic Cookies

Sorry I haven't posted in a while! I've been a bit busy. My dog died and I lost my job... In a two week span. Imagine that, loosing your job when you work for yourself?! Well technically I worked for Amazon and they decided that I was breaking their rules (I wasn't but I couldn't reason with them, couldn't even get to talk to a real person). So I was forced to close my shop and loose all of my inventory and income.

So I'm starting a website with my new found spare time, we'll see where that takes me! I'll post here when I get the domain name registered but I'm thinking it will be epic-cookies.com or something like that =). It will be a website about cookies! I'm hoping that my friends and family will really enjoy this website so when I get it up and running you should all come and be involved! (There will be lots of places to put in user input, comments, submit your own recipes, forums stuff like that!)

Really excited guys!

TAC 10/23-26/10

Had a busy last few days working on my Japanese I spent most of the weekend working on flashcards and reading my language forum surfing for more ideas to help me along my way. in total I'd say I spent about 6 hours doing that. Today I studied flashcards and read Textfugu (3 chapters) plus I looked did some more stuff with the forum. I also signed up for LingQ and did one lesson, adding the vocab to my stack of flashcards (56 cards added). In total I spent 6 hours studying today. So twelve in total.

Total study time the last 4 days: 12 hours
Total time studying: 22hrs

TAC 10/22/10 Post 4

Today I was a much more diligent student! I reviewed chapters 1-4 in the Basic kanji book and went over the flashcards for those chapters. I spent 1 hour and 45 minutes on that. I also went to the Japanese store in Beaverton and bought a cookbook in Japanese. I'm planning on picking out an especially tasty looking recipe and translating it to help me learn new cooking kanji/words!

Time spent studying today: 1.75hrs
Total time spent studying: 10hrs

TAC 10/21/2010 Post 3

Didn't get much done today, had classes all day. Spent 30 minutes on my flashcards and that's it. Very sad on the studying today. But I had midterms and a quiz in the morning so it was a long day. I'll try to get more done this evening and if I do I'll edit this post.

Time spent studying today 30mins
Total time spent studying 8.25hrs

TAC 10/20/2010 Post 2

Today I worked through 2 lessons in Basic Kanji. I learned the readings for the kanji 1-10 and 百千万円
年上下中大小本半分力何.  I made flash cards for all of their readings and studied them thoroughly. I spent 6 hours studying.

Time spent studying today: 6hrs
total time studying: 7.75hrs

TAC initial post

I am focusing on Japanese for this challenge. I am mid to fluent basic level at this point. I understand basic grammar ideas, I can read and write katakana/hiregana and I can pick words out of recordings of native speakers talking at normal speed. My goal is to land square in the advanced level. I would like to understand 60-70% of what I read (In Kanji), understand 30-50% of what is spoken and have a firm grasp of grammar by the end of this challenge. 

I plan to do this by following the books "Basic Kanji" vols 1-4 and textfugu. I will watch television in Japanese and listen to audio books. I will be using flashcards to help embed the readings that I will be learning in the Basic Kanji books. I plan to repeat lessons a lot because I want to make sure I have this down pat, and with that in mind I'm going to be using as many resources as I can, that includes Kanji dream, Anki, flashcards, NihongoUp and anything else I can find in the mean time.


The challenge officially starts on November 1st but I'm starting to log today.


Today I created 50 flashcards and spent 45 minutes using them to memorize the readings for the 20 kanji. I downloaded several audio books and spent 1 hour listening to books and music in Japanese.


Time spent Studying today: 1.75hrs

Total time spent studying: 1.75 hrs

Total Annihilation Challenge!!!

Sounds pretty awesome huh? I've been fiddling around on this forum that is specifically for people who learn languages as a hobby. One of the things that caught my eye was the Total Annihilation Challenge!! Sorry, it just sounds awesome, anyway... The challenge is supposed to help motivate people who are in a studying slump, super charge their study habits and hopefully become fluent in their chosen language in a set amount of time. The challenge on the site was over last year but I didn't think it would hurt to create my own challenge and follow the same rules. So here they are:

1. Participants must create a study log and report their study habits daily (including study time)
2. The first entry in the log must include the target language, what previous knowledge the participant has and how fluent they expect to become
3. As much information as possible about study habits should be included.
4. Any study methods can and should be used.
5. The challenge begins on November 1st 2010 and ends on January 1st 2012. (that's 14 months peoplesss study hard!)

So the whole point of this challenge isn't just to write down your study habits, it's to go above and beyond what you would normally do so that you reap the rewards of more intensive study habits. Like, if you normally study only 30 minutes a day, try squeezing in another hour with some flash cards instead of watching TV, or take those cards with you on the bus. ANYTHING to challenge yourself, push yourself further! So I'm going to post another post tonight that will include this information and it will be my start of the challenge.

Dun nun nuh nunnnn

Alright update! So this week I added 40 words to my anki deck, got a new book about verb conjugation and organized my Japanese learning apps. I also joined a pen pal site in hopes of finding a Japanese pen pal and I got a book about onomatopoeia.

Next week I want to add another 40 words to my deck and make another deck for verbs from that book. I also want to work on katakana memorization and forming sentences.

Week number... I lost count =)

Haha! Thought I was going to forget again huh? I was smart I put an alert in my calendar so I wouldn't forget this time! So I haven't made any progress on my katakana, I know bad me. But, I have been working with my writing of my hiragana. I also broke down into little parts each thing I need to do for the next.. oh I'd say 30-40 things. That will make time boxing a lot easier. Small chunks are much easier to digest then a large mass of information when you have a time limit (the limit being the time box). I'm also working on organizing my space so I have a good place to work on this stuff with. I still need to get on a good schedule and get Steve on board though.



On a side note, I want to start drawing again and I'm trying to learn about fractals but although there is a lot of general information on the internet about them, there isn't the specific information that I am looking for. I might have to go to the library and look for a book that is specifically about fractals or something.
btw I wrote this last week and forgot to post it because I'm a dork!

Upadate for the last month!

So the last month I have been trying to get into the habit of studying at least 3 times a week. I have set myself up with timeboxing and have been doing my work in small chunks. I've gotten all of my hiregana back down pat, but I'm still hazy on the katakana. My next major step is to get my list of 20 words into Anki so that I can study them more easily. I want to get Steve to start drilling me on my katakana so that I can get those down, and I'd also like him to drill me on how to write the hiregana so I can write them from memory (that has always been a problem of mine.)

Alright! I will book mark this now so I don't loose it again! lol

-Becky

Starting Fresh - The Kana

So, since It's been about a year since I last studied Japanese hard core, I thought I should start over again and really work hard on it this time. I'm making time on Thursday afternoons/evenings to study and I'm really going to knuckle down and work hard on it. As my friends, I expect you all to ask me how I'm doing and keep me accountable by reading this blog and nagging me if I'm not keeping up with it weekly. I will post in this blog once a week to update what I have learned this week and what I plan to learn next week. A quick email, phone call or text will suffice to nag me along my way! I just need a support system in this journey. Alright, on to my first post!

This week I refreshed my memory on Hiragana and Katakana. I spent the afternoon studying the characters on smart.fm and RealKana.com I also practiced writing them and read a few articles on TextFugu.com. Next week I plan on learning the basic particles wa, ga and no. I also want to be able to form simple sentences with these particles without the use of wrote memorization (ie: the use of phrase book type sentence memorization).

So until next week
-ja mata ne!
-Becky