Japanese 3DS: 妖怪ウァッチ2(本家)

You may have heard of the Youkai Watch series. It’s an anime and video game series that is popular with children in Japan right now. I’ve been playing Youkai Watch 2 Honke off and on. When I first started playing the game, it was a bit of a struggle, just due to the amount of vocabulary I did not know. But the game is fun and immersive. I like the fact that as the player, you have a lot of freedom in terms of subquest and how you want to customize the youkai in your party. Playing Youkai Watch 2 Honke has greatly improved my vocabulary and it has continually confused me with terms that do not appear in my electronic dictionary. The confusing terms are usually onomatopoeia or specialized terms I’ve never learned. Sometimes the dialogue in the game is easy for me to follow and I can honestly laugh at the funny parts in the characters’ conversations. The more I play the game, the better my vocabulary and reading comprehension gets. The game has a wide range of kanji and vocabulary from all of the JLPT levels, so I can say I’m studying for the JLPT when I play it!

Update and Reading

I recently received my JLPT certificate in the mail! Many of my friends also took the JLPT and passed their exams as well. This year I would like to take the JLPT N2. I heard it’s more difficult to pass than the N3, so even if I do not pass this year, I will not be discouraged.

Lately, I have been thinking about language learning a lot. I finished reading a book called ‘Fluent Forever,’ which is about concrete steps a language learner can take to learn a language. I really enjoyed reading the book and its appendixes. It helped motivate me to use Anki again. I like using Anki, but the deck building process can be a little convoluted at times.

‘Fluent Forever’ introduced and reminded me of many aspects of the language learning process. Specifically, it mentioned the developmental stages of a L2 (foreign language) learner, pronunciation, frequency lists and Anki. I want to explore the concept of developmental stages of language more. Basically, the developmental stages of language refers to the process of learning a language. For example, we learn present tense before past tense etc. Of course, this is not the best explanation of this concept, but I think if I understand these stages for L2 learners it will make me a better L2 learner and a better English teacher.

Pronunciation is something I struggle with, not so much with Japanese, but there are some sounds that I need more training in. The book talks about how to tackle pronunciation, so I am going to try to incorporate that advice into my studies.

Frequency list are something I keep hearing about in passing, but I have not used them very much. For Japanese, I mostly use JLPT vocabulary list or vocabulary list provided by my textbooks. I would like to try out learning vocabulary through frequency lists, because I have heard a lot of good things about it.

Anki is a free online SRS (spaced repetition system) flash card website and app (the iTunes app is not free and cost about $25, while the Android app is free). You can build your own flash cards with whatever features you want (audio, text, pictures etc.) or download and use flash card decks shared by other people. I do not use Anki regularly so, I had to look a lot of things up to figure out how to build a custom deck. Also, Anki uses HTML when you create fields or question cards, so that can be confusing. It helps to know HTML, but you can use Anki without knowing it. Anki is a great free resource that is customizable, so I am going to try using it again.