I returned home from my two-year long vacation to Japan in mid-2006. Since then, my Japanese reading/writing/conversing skills have severely deteriorated. I was a bit embarrassed speaking to Nobuo Uematsu a couple weeks ago at MAGFest when I randomly ran into him walking through the hotel, because I forced myself to speak with him in Japanese, but… I had a hard time remembering words. Add to that the idea that Ashley and I keep throwing around the idea of “some day” taking a long vacation (unfortunately not two years long) back to Japan — possibly/probably in 2013 — and I’m like, “Jeeze, I need to relearn some 日本語.”
A couple days after MAGFest, I busted out the kanji flash cards I had made myself while I was living in Japan. To be considered fully literate in Japanese, you’re supposed to know close to 2,000 of these characters. On my mission, I tried to learn about five new ones every day. By the time I left, I could read about 1,800 and write around 500. Two weeks ago, the numbers were probably closer to 150 and 50, if I had to guess. Now I’m trying to speed-relearn them, so I’m going through 20 a day.
Here’s my method. I have four piles: Learning to read, learning to write, review weekly, review monthly. I put 20 new cards in the “learning to read” pile every day, and I just go over them until I have them all down. In the following days, I continue to review cards in the “learning to read” pile until I feel pretty confident the character is actually learned. So, some cards (the numbers, for instance) stayed in the pile for a day. Others have been there for over a week. Once I have the reading down for a card, I move it to the “learning to write” pile. I then work the card through the same process. Once I feel I can remember how to write the character, I move it into the “review weekly” pile. To make sure I’m not just keeping the readings and writings in my short term memory, I review all my “learned” cards every Sunday. I’ve only been doing this for about a week and a half, so only a handful of cards have made it to the “review monthly” pile so far. This whole process is pretty similar to how I studied kanji in Japan, though I didn’t emphasize writing nearly as much, and I took it a lot slower.
However, if I can keep up this pace, I should be back to my post-mission kanji level in 3-4 months. Then I’ll probably start reading some Japanese novels to relearn vocabulary and grammar. And then I won’t feel like a moron when I talk to Japanese people.
Wish me luck.
i think this is a great idea. i need to keep up on my spanish too- although that’s a lot easier than japanese