The 2000+ Kanji in 97 days challenge! – Week 4

Reviewing the Kanji – Stats for 2014-03-29

624 Kanji in and things are really starting to pile up!

I currently have 52 Kanji in my restudy deck which I really ned to get round to fitting in especially as over 20 of these are Kanji that I have yet to successfully recognise and recall.

After around Kanji number 516 Heisig stops providing complete Kanji stories and only provides a listing of the main primitives encouraging you to come up with your own stories. This is quite clearly something that I have not yet mastered however the community at ‘Remembering the Kanji’ (RTK) have provided numerous stories for each of the Kanji and I have begun incorporating some of these stories into my study.

The upside of this is that the stories provided by the community at RTK are far more outlandish and wacky the Heisig’s stories so many of them are becoming far easier to recall.

The primary piece of advice I would give anyone else studying this method is to ensure that the Kanji reviews are done on a daily basis as there is nothing more discouraging then seeing over 80 Kanji for review plus 22 new to learn on a particular day.

In an effort to reduce the ever increasing stack of forgotten Kanji I will aim to record each time a Kanji has been forgotten thus giving me a better idea on the Kanji stories that I need to revisit and concentrate on, most likely this will be around the 5 Kanji mark.

 

 

The 2000+ Kanji in 97 days challenge! – Weeks 2 & 3

Reviewing the Kanji – Stats for 2014-03-21

Well 470 Kanji in and things are certainly a lot tougher than the first week.

There are a few Kanji that I am confusing with each other and this is likely to me not placing enough emphasis on the key word.

For example getting 切 (cut) confused with 刃 (Blade). A revisit to Heisig’s accompanying story for each Kanji cleared up any confusion.

It is however encouraging to see Heisig’s method working so well, and sure there will be Kanji that are forgotten along the way but the important thing is to keep doing the reviews every day – otherwise they really do start to pile up!

Although this method is only going to equip me with the key meaning of each Kanji rather than learning all of the On and Kun readings separately I will be using a method popularised by Khatzumoto and his blog AJATT (All Japanese All The Time).

It will be quite some time before I get to that stage of my study as I still have long way to go!

Right enough for now, time to go and study today’s 22 new Kanji.

The 2000+ Kanji in 97 days challenge! – Week 1

Here are the stats from Reviewing The Kanji for week 1 of the 2000+ Kanji in 97 days  challenge:-

I will be posting daily statics on their own dedicated page and weekly summaries here.

The first week went very well indeed, mainly because this is not the first or even the second time I have attempted to learn the Kanji; this will be third time lucky!

As I have covered around 150 Kanji using Heisig’s method previously the stories and associated Kanji were easily recalled.

Over the next week I will be encountering many Kanji that I have not previously studied so I will have to pay much greater attention to the stories and will most likely be forgetting quite a few Kanji!

The 2000+ Kanji in 97 days challenge!

In my never ending quest of Japanese language proficiency I came across an ebook entitiled ‘How to learn Japanese in a year’ by the Nihongo Shark team available by signing up to their newsletter.

Of particular note was the section on how to learn the 2,000+ (2,230 to be exact) Joyo Kanji in 97 days which you can find here.

As you can see this is no small feet as 2,000+ kanji look a little something like this

The article recommends using the following resources in order to maximise the learning process.

1. Anki Flashcards
2. Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji
3. Reviewing the Kanji

So from the 3rd of March 2014 until the 3rd of May 2014 I will be using the above resources and will document my progress here.

See you in 3 months!

How to Make Yourself Work When You Just Don’t Want To

Information Security Highway

To kick things off and to refresh some of the areas I studies at uni I have been working my way through the CISSP study guide as well as learning Python and Powershell.

One of the biggest issues is knowing where to start and what to focus on. As I already have a background is software testing, I think a logical place to begin is with Web Application Security Testing.

To give a good overview of web application security I will be working my way through the OWASP (Open Web Applications Security Project) top 10 list of vulnerabilities which are:-

• A1 Injection
• A2 Broken Authentication and Session Management
• A3 Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)
• A4 Insecure Direct Object References
• A5 Security Misconfiguration
• A6 Sensitive Data Exposure
• A7 Missing Function Level Access Control
• A8 Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
• A9 Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities
• A10 Unvalidated Redirects and Forwards

Android Apps For Learning Japanese

Here you will find reviews and opinions of  Android applications for learning Japanese. These will be assessed both on the Google Nexus 7 and Samsung Galaxy S3.