Japanese and Korean learning update!

It's time to document my progress again.
After the busy Holiday season I had to start preparing for an exam at the end of February. Not a language exam but another one, so my time was pretty limited.
As a result, I went easy on the new words on Anki. Or rather I stopped with new cards on my two Korean sentence decks. I however kept going with the Japanese core2k and Evitas vocabulary deck. In hindsight I think that wasn't the best, because I at some point abandoned Anki all together and now don't want to open it again, the reviews scare me.

As for immersion, it is not entirely clear to me what I did during that time. I think mostly listen to podcasts for upkeep, but nothing very consistent.
I also started the visual novel summer pockets (in japanese), but I was having trouble staying interested enough to overcome the inarguably too-high level.
For Korean I browsed around in dramas, but they ususally have a too high level for me too, so I would often switch back to English subtitles. I don't think this is bad for language upkeep actually. There were often times where I'd recognise a word and be able to further affirm the meaning with the help of the English subtitles. It's probably just not very useful for learning new words.

After the exam however, I was finally able to increase my learning a bit. In an attempt to buy a book for reading in Korean, I found the Olly Richards short stories for intermediate learners in Japanese. I read the first three stories with relative ease, I didn't even need to look up any words outside of the vocabulary in the book. That was a huge win for me. It is still absolutely baffling to me that I was able to read stories entirely in Japanese, not even with parallel text. I am already exceeding my own expectations by far. How come I was able to do this in a few months?

Since then I have been very excited about my Japanese learning. I saw the entirety of 君の花になる. It would not have been my first choice entertainment but it was comprehensible to an extend. I would say I got the story line with checking out the English subtitles from time to time. I also found that watching streams of the new Hogwarts legacy game is working for me. I guess the language in Little Witch Academia prepared me for this!

Korean has been going just a bit slower. I realised that the reading I was originally looking for was too easy for me, but I am lacking something engaging at my level. I am sure I'll be able to find something once I inevitably swing back to Korean.
I was however very pleased to find out that I have outgrown the TPRS videos by our one and only best Korean teacher on YouTube, the GOAT 태웅쌤. I don't mean his game playthroughs, those still teach me new things, but the ones for beginners where he intentionally introduces new grammar and words. In any case I see all of his content anyway, it was just nice to realise that I have advanced.
Evitas Vocabulary is becoming increasingly more annoying. On one hand it is great to have a pre-made deck for these early stages, but my retention without example sentences is just terrible. Getting the words to stick is a lot harder for me when I do not have any context. The difference between the pure vocabulary decks and the pure sentence decks is shocking. I was gently putting my hopes into the new KO1K to be released by Refold soonish, but it seems the release date is very unclear and I am beginning to think I should give up hope and find something else that works for me. For example, I might go hard on the sentence decks and let the vocabulary deck chill for a while. See if I learn more words that way.

I am considering streamlining my sentence mining setup. So far I have only ever mined by hand, into sub-optimal card formats. Unfortunately I do most of my immersion on a mobile device, so I would have to change those habits too. On top of that, I am not sure if I actually want to mine the words into Anki quite yet. At the moment, the words that I am learning still occur so often in my immersion that natural SRS helps me acquire them.

As has worked so well for me so far, I will just do whatever! If I feel like I am struggling with consistency, I might try to make myself more of a plan. But as long as that is not the case, I am still happy with my studying into the wild approach!

Until next time,
Zora