Benchmarking Your Self-Studies

People who take traditional language classes have it kind of easy in at least one way. While standardized tests are are not an exact science, they do allow for progress tracking. When you are studying a language on your own, you don't really have any guide posts to tell you "You should be here and doing this." Even if you are taking a structured self-study course the tests and end points can seam trivial, especially if you happened to already know the material in a section.

So how does one measure their own results? I don't know. But I can tell you how I do mine. When I started this I installed a few apps on my phone that are basically Japanese flash cards. They break things up like hirigana, kanji and phrases into  sections and track your accuracy completing the sections. I don't think they are valuable learning tools so much as they have proven as great ways to track how far along I have come.

When I started 2 months in January, I could complete each of the hiragana sections in 15 minutes with about 70% accuracy (that's that built in exposure working in my favor). Today I was able to complete all the sections combined in under 5 minutes with 99% accuracy. Damn you ち and さ and き, I know you, but you look so damn alike I press the wrong one sometimes. Incidentally, my trick for remembering ち vs さ is that ち's bottom does NOT for a "c" for it's "chi" sound. Anyway, that is some remarkable improvement.

I decided to stop tracking the Kanji I have learned on this blog. It's getting unmanageable since I'm getting them from multiple sources. But, according to one program , I know close to 300 now. It's still not enough to read kid focused Japanese websites yet (some of the Kanji I know are more advance words, so I have this strange gap between easy common kid friendly kanji and some more esoteric rarely used Kanji).

This brings me to something I read somewhere and I agree with now. Don't bother trying to track how many Kanji you know. 1) the number doesn't mean anything. You could know 3000 of the completely wrong Kanji and not be able to navigate your way out of a train (電車駅) or subway(地下鉄駅) station. 2) You may not actually know as many as you claim. This is true even for native speakers. Many young native speakers have Kanji Amnesia which is like "I'll know it when I see it or my phone/computer popes it up when I type the hirigana." Great reading comprehension with 0 recall ability. 3) It is no actual measure of progress. As you learn more Japanese you will learn more Kanji, yes, but as you learn more Kanji you may not actually learn more Japanese. This was certainly the case when I was studying Remembering the Kanji.

So how do I track my progress? By trying to read Japanese sites. Sometimes I get nothing, sometimes I get pieces, and sometimes I'm lucky and get decent chunks of info.. While I can't actually put it to number like I can my kana, I can say it has certainly improved from "The fuck are all these symbols???" but is still nowhere near any kind of admirable comprehension level. When I can read the front page of any online Japanese kids newspaper without having to look anything up, that will be my first milestone. My final milestone will be reading all of 新世界より. It was one of my original goals for learning the language in the first place.