Hey everyone! Aran and Tom and I are ready to start Japanuary now. We’re having our first Japanese “chat” (having learnt no Japanese, so it won’t be very impressive) in half an hour or so.
And if you want to follow along, we’ll be posting various livestreams etc and comments in general in this thread. Let us know how you’re doing, we’d love to hear that we’re not alone…
Still going… We will stop at seven for an “activation session”, whatever that means. If enough people are interested, we might try to stream it, or perhaps just record it and post it - the WiFi is terrible here so it’ll depend on what’s possible. But shout if you’re interested at all
We’ve more or less finished day 2! Japanese is pretty brutal (and we’re making notes on how to improve the course once this is over!), but I think I speak for all of us when I say that we’re feeling much more confident today than we did yesterday… Now I’m going to move on to some passive Japanese listening…
A pretty big improvement will come very soon in the form of an app update which will change the algorithm a little bit - I wouldn’t say that you need to wait for it necessarily, but if you’re really struggling a need a break, waiting for it can be a good excuse
In terms of the course changes, we’ll probably do them in a few different stages - instant fixes to make the start of the course a bit less scary first, then some general changes to the patterns to make it generally easier… But the good news is it works as it is, even if it’s so brutal! You just have to accept a LOT of discomfort.
I’ll watch the Finnish intensive closely and we’ll probably have some fixes for it too, but in the meantime the app update will affect all courses, so hopefully you’ll see that get a bit better too
I’m feeling pretty tired and intimidated going into day 3 - Tom and Kai are both quite a bit ahead of me, I spent a chunk of yesterday trying to get my app reset to the beginning, and I’m running on the trial webapp for now, to get the extra repetitions.
But even as the back marker of the team, I’m definitely getting some of the early signs of progress that Kai is talking about - I feel swamped with words that I can’t quite remember, but I’m starting to be able to do some small amounts of independent production.
I’m also starting to understand the scale of the ten day challenge - all I want to do today is sleep!
Alright, this would definitely be way too brutal for me.
But complimenti to the three of you for persisting!
I think it would be interesting to have the chance to ask you a few questions about the experience, once you’ve finished and had a little time to rest!
Massive update today - we just had a 45-minute chat, 100% in Japanese. As in, real communication, where we said many things, understood what others said, and could respond with more than just “hai”.
We even tried to explain words to each other (we’re at very different levels in the course by now - Tom has been skipping forward like a madman), but that wasn’t very successful today. Perhaps we’ll do better tomorrow We will record the next session we do…
I would honestly be happy with how much we have already learned, but we will keep going and see where the next couple of days take us. Currently I created some makeshift listening exercises that I will play for many hours tonight, and we’re listening to the EASY JAPANESE Podcast for beginners that we’re already picking out many many words from. One of my main goals will be to broadly understand the podcast by the end of day 10, although obviously we’ll be missing a lot of random vocab
We will record the next session we do…
