Huzzah, my Japanese flashcard deck has reached 1000 cards in size! While playing games, watching anime, and basically enjoying assorted Japanese media, I look up words and turn them into flashcards to review if I see them enough. It’s pretty cool to see that it’s accumulated up to this much.
The flashcard program I’m using is jMemorize, and if you’re interested, you can check out my 1000-card deck here. I try to make flashcards for words that I’ve seen frequently enough, but who knows if they are really esoteric or not — I am reading some fanciful fiction after all.
At some point, probably during some new year, I resolved to study Chinese regularly, which meant making a number of flashcards every week. At this point, my Chinese deck has been untouched for quite a while now, and I have somehow switched over to Japanese in full force. Definitely, the enjoyment factor is the biggest reason for this. There’s so much in terms of games and media to experience that I would rather spend my time becoming proficient enough to translate and appreciate it natively.
On the other hand, I have only really regularly watched the news in Chinese. Watching domestic news in Chinese is just about as fun as watching domestic news in English: it just isn’t. The international news segments are pretty interesting though, and the special interview segments are pretty cool because they’re typically targeted to the native Chinese demographic. But the news only gets you so far, and I drove myself away from Chinese because the news got too boring. I probably also wanted to focus in on one language as well, but that’s probably just an excuse.
Anyways, I think I can finally say that I know the same amount of vocabulary that an elementary school kid should know. I’m definitely looking forward to the next 1000. Also looking forward to graduating from games and fiction and moving on to more “grown-up” things like science and tech periodicals and other specialized media. And I mean in Chinese or Japanese.
Feral Chicken 