#parse it very well for subject object verb location tense particles keywords versus probably skippable words

[rigelmejo]

So what my June-July study plan ENDED UP being:

Clozemaster experiments - mainly going by common words or fast track (listening game mode), or radio mode (so just listening in background generally - which I could do more if I tried). I’ve been doing mostly Japanese and a bit of Chinese, most days.

Reading guardian (partly L-R method, partly just re listening to chapters, partly redoing old chapters, partly just reading the actual physical book in my hand just... in general engaging with the audiobook and textbook lol)

Reading tiny bits of textbooks/study books (very tiny bits, just random stuff basically, watched a little of that YouTube Learn Korean in Korean cause it’s cool tbh.. I rediscovered my Barron’s At A Glance Korean book, which btw the At A Glance books are all great they have grammar guides and pronunciation guides and a bunch of useful words they’re compact but very nice I used to have a French one).

Language Exchange 1-2 hours a week. Not much but it’s regular and requires me to speak and write 30 min to 1 hour a week so it’s more than I had to have an active vocab before this lol...

Basically I’m busy with things. Anyway I will mention at the end of July if Clozemaster’s been useful! I am fairly sure I’m just planning to keep doing this stuff through July. I have other books I wanna read and clozemaster easy to just do randomly, and guardian I still want to keep reading.

My thoughts after just a few days are: I like Radio mode mainly because I will actually do it (whereas flashcards I will forget and am not always in the mood if I remember). I like that I see text during Radio mode if I want to look (again like flashcards but I don’t have to remember). I like that clozemaster specifically limits reviews per day so you always see a mix of new and old sentences (which is good since I get demotivated by reviews-only). I actually am noticing some clearer understanding of some parts of Japanese, mainly because I’m seeing SO MANY sentence examples for each grammar point and word (in the common word track), whereas in Nukemarine’s LLJ memrise courses I didn’t usually see “weird to me” but super common grammar early on and regularly at random.

So I feel like these clozemaster sentences are much more similar to stuff I ACTUALLY see in manga etc grammar wise and word usage wise - as in a mix of politeness levels, some shortening of common words, a mix of whether it’s in hiragana or kanji, different conjugations and verbs stacked together and common phrases. Which if you’re a total beginner might feel drowning tbh. But I’m at a point where Kanji generally look familiar so it’s just sound being drilled in for me, and I know a lot of the basic N5-n4 grammar and bits and pieces beyond from other stuff, so I can recognize if I’m looking at adjectives or verbs doing something and if it has to do with politeness or grammar.

One thing I like a LOT about clozemaster and I’m not even sure if it’s intentional but it splits off things like なさい as “do”, like ください which is like please do X, so you can see like しださい　- please do something, it splits of たい as “want” to, so したい　want to do, 見たい want to see. And like if you’ve read genki you’re used to those endings as conjugations of verbs, but seeing them like this sort of like their own verb attached to another verb stem makes it easier for me to recognize the verb stems, and the conjugations and their specific purpose. I’m not explaining quite how it does it since I’m not looking at the app this second, but just this way of breaking down the words is something I haven’t really seen in textbooks, and usually word lookup apps only look up the word stem so you can’t click たい to figure out that part and if it’s part of a new word or part of a conjugation (and if so then what it means). Clozemaster also links all definitions to jisho.org so I can go read more thorough explanations.

I think the clozemaster sentences would compliment reading a grammar guide like my Japanese in 30 Hours, or Tae Kim (which helped me with grammar a lot), or Cure Dolly. Because these sentences are good examples of realistic in life stuff you might run into but not simplified to only have one “new” grammar thing per sentence. So grammar specific sentences made as examples would be nice as a comparison to get a better handle on the rules/concrete patterns (ohhh or my Japanese Sentence Patterns book). However I am pleasantly surprised to find few actual totally-weird sentences so far in Japanese or Chinese (just some not literal translations so far), so I do actually think yeah Clozemaster would probably be a relatively similar substitute to learning a language primarily by sentence mining (like people who collect 2k-20k sentences from media with around 1 unknown things per sentence and learn by studying those sentences with srs flashcards). I see the benefit in the sense that... again, these sentences have more frequent examples of grammar I actually run into in shows and manga, versus my learner-material-made sentences in Nukemarine’s Memrise courses and Genki that do NOT cover this stuff this early (or Tae Kim’s which only barely touches on a few of these in the first section).

However, of course being more like what I see in manga and shows means it’s also less transparent to understand (and explained less well), so it really does feel a lot like studying ones own self-made sentence cards just less geared toward you personally. So a person who enjoys sentence mining would benefit more just continuing to sentence mine probably, but for a person who only wants premade convenient stuff (hello), this feels like a good balance between Nukemarine’s much more learner-geared material and native-material sentence mined stuff.

I also happened to find audio files for glossika back when it was a book and! I have some opinions. Mainly that it is literally premade “audio flashcard files” which I love studying from. So I will be experimenting with using those at some point - I will say the old glossika books opened with summaries of super important grammar words, key words, and grammar, which is nice and reminds me of when I look up about 300 keywords and a grammar guide when I start a new language. I also like that glossikas audio files seem to basically be like JapaneseAudioLessons.com or my Chinese SpoonFed Audio files. Which I learn very well from, particularly listening skills and some shadowing practice. And the glossika files have real voices so that’s nice (compared to clozemaster which has phone voices).

I’d still like to read... a lot of the books I got... see I just am trying to get through some lol ToT