Japanese Wordlists

Friday night I dreamed about video games. I started playing Terraria, I think it was, and I felt ashamed that I broke my habit goals. Even though I could still remember that shame from the dream on the next day, I had to fight the urge to play, though it wasn't as strong as it has been at times. It's more or less common sense, but I've noticed that I only have a strong temptation to play video games on weekends, usually in the middle of the day when I've got a hole in my schedule. Regardless, I resisted the temptation. Saturday night, in contrast, I dreamed that Mom was interested in reading the Wheel of Time book series and was asking me about them. That was weird, though for a dream I suppose it's reasonable enough.

Yesterday I set two precedents that I hope I will be able to continue. First, I found a website (also usable as a mobile app) which I will use to track my habits. On a daily basis I will do nothing more than check them off. The website doesn't offer as many features as I would like, but supposedly more are coming, and I can export my records into a .csv file to use in other ways if I like. The eight habits and two negative habits are:

1. Bible reading and prayer
2. Schoolwork
3. Programming
4. Exercise
5. Cleaning
6. Reading
7. Writing
8. Japanese
9. No video games
10. No fanfiction

Some of them are disabled on Sunday and Wednesday (because that's my 12-hour work day).

Notice that Japanese is on the list--that is my second precedent. Last night I was inspired to look at language learning forums again, and remembered this forum topic which inspired a lot of my Russian language learning. The author advocates the learning of seven words a day by writing a list and reviewing it with some time in between reviews. It has probably been close to two years since I consistently studied vocabulary--I tried it last night and remembered how fun it was. The vocabulary must come from a source though. Earlier I mentioned that I wanted to read the news in Japanese. Last night I finally took the time to locate a news website in Japanese from which I took my first batch of words. My plan is to start waking up at 6 to give myself a little extra time, and read the news while I'm eating breakfast. When I find a word to learn, I'll write it down in my vocab notebook. Around lunchtime I will write the English translation for these words. In the afternoon before leaving work (sometime after 3 PM), I will rewrite the words to be learned using the English translations as reference. At night I will review words in Anki, and enter the new words from the previous day. At this rate it will only take 143 days to learn 1000 words. Even double that wouldn't be too unreasonable in a single year, and after ten years my vocabulary would (theoretically) surpass that of a native speaker.

Although I'm definitely more fluent in Japanese and more knowledgeable about French, I consider my level in Russian to be my greatest language learning achievement. I started studying in France in 2011, and though I stopped studying for about a year, by the time I went to Russia in 2013 I was able to converse basically and get the gist of most conversations. I read the Harry Potter books 1-5, and with a dictionary I even started reading Crime and Punishment and the poetry of Pushkin. Within a couple of months, I could follow almost everything that my students were saying. If I had pursued my studies diligently in Russia, I think I could have been fluent by the end of 2014, after just three years of serious study. How did I get to this level? First, I used the Assimil program to learn conversations by heart and improve my pronunciation. Once I finished this course, I drilled grammatical forms (mainly pronouns), did word lists, listened to a few podcasts, and watched Russian dramas. I no longer have the records from my study (how I wish I had done more writing, if nothing else!) but I'm certain that I learned over a thousand words through word lists, and I wish for that success in Japanese as well.

I didn't go to church today. As I have said before, I plan to go every week, yet sometime in the twelve hours beforehand, I am confronted with a sense of dread. Even when I went last week, on the way I felt like I was committing myself to a perilous endeavor not unlike jumping off a cliff. I think it was a good thing that I went, because I was encouraged by (and I hope I encouraged) the pastor, and I did enjoy some of the music, but the resulting feeling was more "I'm glad that's over now, and I'd rather not do it again." I should probably press through this feeling and then going would feel more natural. It's a struggle though. Today I only had to get my coat, but at the last minute I decided not to go.