Hard to imagine we’re getting into the final week of February already. Let’s jump straight to the numbers.
- Duolingo: 10 lessons, ~60 minutes
Wednesday 2/16
- Duolingo: 10 lessons, ~60 minutes
Thursday 2/17
Friday 2/18
- Duolingo: 10 lessons, ~60 minutes
Saturday 2/19
- Duolingo: 10 lessons, ~60 minutes
Sunday 2/20
- Duolingo: 10 lessons, ~60 minutes
Monday 2/21
- Duolingo: 10 lessons, ~60 minutes
Total Time: 7 hours 0 minutes
In my approach to using Duolingo for Japanese learning, I’m finding myself alternating back and forth quite a bit between actual lessons and the focus on the characters that it offers. I’m feeling fairly confident with hiragana in the lessons as a result of going back and reinforcing it, katakana less so, but I’m working on that. This has taken my focus away from actual lessons a bit, but it’s discouraging to feel overwhelmed by the characters not really being present in my mind all the time. This is all getting easier, and it’s honestly intriguing to me to see how, like, actually easy it is to read things when you know the kanji in them, it feels really fast and snappy in a way that’s different from like English or Spanish.
I know that ‘easy if you understand what it says’ isn’t exactly a sentence loaded with meaning behind it, but what I’m referring to is that the act of reading itself goes by faster having singular characters or pairs of characters that impart a word’s sound and meaning all at once compared to individual letters—or even hiragana/katakana characters—strung together to form the sounds which you then impart meaning from using context. Which isn’t slow to do using letters, but sight-reading kanji is faster, which is something I’d heard said before but didn’t fully believe until I could see it for myself. It’s cool to feel, too. I’m excited to get better and better at it.
Overall not a ton new to say here, though, beyond that bit of insight. I don’t think these blogs are going to have much of a chance of even getting exciting for a while, too much ground-level work for me to accomplish before I can do much else. The journey is the important part, not a destination that won’t really ever come. Just gotta keep working at it.
That’ll do for this week, though, TTFN.
Fumbling Toward Fluent 