I am learning Japanese because I like the board game Go 囲碁. I’ve been working through GENKI concurrently with a variety of other beginner lectures/books and I have been reading game commentaries in magazine 月刊碁ワールド. I have been able to follow the game-diagrams to patch over my poor reading. But now I am at the point where would like to read using a dictionary and grammar guide. My sticking point is that I need to look up so many things and take so many notes.
Does anyone have any tips for keeping notes? There is very minimal space for writing on the pages themselves. Certainly not enough for the amount of notes I need. I’ve seen some people recommend building an ANKI deck but that is much more time consuming for me than jotting a note. And notes are not working so well as they are disconnected from the text itself. Should I even bother taking notes and focus on repetition of the same material instead?
Surely someone has come up with a better way to get started with reading. Please share your tips.
2 comments
I keep a list of the words I want to learn and add them to Anki later.
I use notepad++ on the PC.
I also keep another list of words I need for the book but I don’t want to add to anki later.
I actually don’t take notes, usually.
I look up the word, then continue reading ASAP. I don’t expect to retain any words on the first, second, third, or sometimes even fourth look up. But eventually I start to recognize the words that repeat the most.
Anything that doesn’t repeat, or doesn’t repeat enough for me to learn, is probably not a big deal. 🙂 I look them up anyway so I can follow the story though.
Sometimes I have bad retention days, or right now I’m toying with monolingual dictionaries… in each case there’s a couple of ways I take notes:
**Vocab Largely**
So either in a notebook, or more often on a spreadsheet, I will just make a list of words:
漢字 | ひらがな | English
———|———-|———-
支配 | しはい | Dominion, rule
恐怖 | きょうふ | Fear, dread
屈辱 | きつじょく | Humiliation
And so on. If that’s all I need to do that day that’s all I do. If not, on the right of that (in a spreadsheet) I keep a sentence list for anything I find particularly useful, interesting, or anything giving me a hard time. On paper it’s likely to go below vocabulary.
**Sentence Focused**
This is what I started with. Anything with a new word in it, I would also jot down the sentence it came with. This became super time consuming but if you’re having a day where you just can’t focus well, or you have the spoons to do this, go ahead!
You can do it the same as the previous example OR you can focus on just sentences.
They tend to look like this:
> 本部は盗みの手口も解くって出来ていませんが犯人の恰好は真っ赤なコートとつば広の帽子
> ほんぶ は ぬすみ の てぐち も とく って できていませんぶ が はんにん の かっこう は まっか な コート と つばひろ の ぼうし。
> Headquarters/ (wa)/ theft/ ‘s/ technique/ (mo)/ solve/ (te)/ can’t/ but/ culprit/ ‘s/ appearance/ (wa)/ bright red/ (na)/ coat/ and/ wide brim/ ‘s/ hat.
If that 1:1 is hard for me to comprehend, I’ll make another line for the correct English.
In a spreadsheet the hiragana goes in a line below the full kanji, but on paper I just write furigana. It saves space.
I tend to write everything out in the 1:1 if I’m working on a spreadsheet, since I can type fast, but on paper I only put down the English translation for words I don’t know, generally directly below the word itself (so I try not to grab too big of sentence chunks).
**Definition Based**
This is what I’m trying right now to kind of double down on vocabulary a bit, and just to see how it goes. I’m taking Cornell Method notes. I’ll write down the sentence (I think I’ll stick to things with multiple words I don’t know so I’m not writing down EVERYTHING). Then below the example sentence I’ll have the vocabulary word in the left hand column, and definitions on the right. With a bottom most section on the page for misc notes.
Keyword | Notes
———|———-
. | あの夜、三成が家臣を数名、賊の追跡に向かわせておりました。そうだな？
数名 | すうめい：二人以上であまり多くない人数を表す
賊 | ぞく：他人の財物をぬすみとる。ぬすみ。また、ぬす人。わる者
追跡 | ついせき：（逃げてゆくものの）あとを追いかけること。
Of course that means I’m looking up even MORE words… but I generally look THOSE words up in a bilingual dictionary and I don’t bother to write them down. At least so far.
🙂 You can always take your notes and add them to Anki later.
So it’s all up to you. I don’t generally stick to one thing. I will not take notes for months…. take notes on excel for a couple of weeks… take paper notes for a bit…. then go back to no notes. Don’t feel bound to one thing, and experiment!