#study progress

i can’t even begin to imagine how good i could be a year from now or even a couple months in the future. it’s really exciting and interesting to see how i’ve developed. i use a normal google docs document, and it helped me out with my grammar in the beginning, but it didn’t take long until i almost became my own spellcheck haha. i can almost always instinctively know what mistakes i have made when i see the blue line appear under a word or a part of the sentence. really interesting progress with way less effort than i thought was needed.

it’s so interesting, how i thought language learning would be like climbing a mountain, when in reality it’s just like climbing a little rock every day. small efforts make great achievements in the end. really happy.

now in sam winchester stanford law school high score nerdiest student era

In the beginning, I was a C student. I only studied when I felt motivated or when exams were very close, sometimes even the night before an exam. I struggled a lot and didn’t know what kind of student I could be: a B student or an A student. I didn’t have anyone to guide me or give me advice. At that time, there was no ChatGPT or advanced AI to help.

So I started organizing my studies using just a notebook and a pen. I wrote down all my assignments and everything I needed to finish during the week. Then, every Sunday, I rewarded myself with the thing that gave me the most pleasure and dopamine, back then, it was watching anime.

That simple system started working. Year by year, I began to see real progress. When I got to high school, it was an amazing period of my life. I achieved grades I never thought were possible, and I was doing much better than before.

Later in high school, I discovered Notion. At first, it felt extremely complicated and overwhelming. Every time I tried to use it, it seemed impossible. But I knew how powerful it was, it could organize your entire life in one place. So I decided to learn it from scratch.

After two years of learning and experimenting, I built the same study system that helped me succeed, but this time inside Notion. Now, I’ve turned it into a system designed for high school and university students, made to feel like playing a video game in real life.

[𝐖𝐞𝐝𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐝𝐚𝐲, 𝟔 𝐌𝐚𝐲 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔]

hihi!! sorry for the inactivity lol I promise I'm studying. I just tend to forget to post my progress ;-;

Anyway! I'm having my first A Level exam today. Stats 2 starts in around 3 hours. I've been doing a bunch of past papers from 2020-2025 this week, and I'm feeling?? oddly calm?? I've been timing myself and I usually finish with 15 mins to spare, and when I do make a mistake, it's pretty small. Idk tho I'm still gonna go into this expecting a difficult question or two

It's useful of course, because when I learn knew hanzi as I read I tend to remember roughly the pronunciation, so when I hear that new word later I can transfer the reading-comprehension ability to listening-comprehension ability eventually. I can sound out words when reading, if it looks familiar but hard to recall, and see if the sound jogs my memory and helps me recall the word.

It's interesting in seeing how this interacts with my japanese kanji understanding. Its hard to estimate how many kanji I know, I'd put the estimate around 100-300, in terms of ACTUALLY knowing a japanese pronunciation of a given kanji if I saw it. With chinese hanzi knowledge affecting recognition though, I can guess the meaning of a large portion of kanji I see when reading, and if I know the hiragana or listening form of a word or can guess from context, then I can guess the kanji's pronunciation in the word. So artifically, I can recognize more kanji than I actually know.

My study routine in japanese has been HEAVILY listening focused, precisely because I lack recognition of MOST words when in hiragana only (with no chinese hanzi near-cognates to rely on if I can't see kanji), and because I need to know the actual Pronunciation of new words I figure out when reading... and if I see kanji and manage to guess a new word without knowing it's pronunciation, that's an issue that's been ongoing. So I hope as I learn more words through listening, that will help me 1. add a pronunciation guess to kanji words I run into when reading, causing less words to be 'picked up only in kanji written form' and 2. I'll develop better understanding of hiragana words. The listening heavy approach has been working very well - although I don't think I would recommend it (if you care about reading skill), unless you ALSO have a lot of kanji meaning recognition already. If I did not have kanji meaning recognition/a lot of decent guesses from hanzi meaning similarities, then I would instead be doing Listening-Reading where I read things and listened to them pronounced at the same time. So, something like the Satori Reader app lessons (which is my next study plan for japanese, after I get through Glossika japanese course and perhaps listen to some audio-only things like an audiobook or audio drama or show with no subtitles... I really want a solid foundation of thousands of common words I know BY listening comprehension, before I go back to tackling kanji pronunciations).

So if you do not either know a lot of kanji meanings from some SRS app study (like anki and mnemonics for kanji or something), or from chinese similar-cognates meaning wise, then I'd recommend pairing listening with reading activities to hear the kanji pronunciations frequently AS you learn the kanji word meanings. The pairing sound with word is what I used to do for my initial japanese study a few years ago (before Chinese), and worked better for me in terms of learning kanji-words than anything else I tried (Heisig did not work for me and mnemonics only helped me with meaning not pronunciation). For Chinese, I also paired sound with reading the words for the first 2000 words I studied (in an SRS app) and that helped tremendously. I think for me personally, I link sounds of words very heavily to the ability to read them... I remember better with a mental pronunciation in my head of a given word. So for japanese, kanji just did NOT stick with me learning only the meaning. They did not stick in my memory until I also learned them with audio of words containing kanji.

Right now, the hanzi knowledge helping kanji meaning-guessing is basically... I see kanji, I hear mentally the chinese hanzi pronunciation that kanji looks like, then guess the meaning of the kanji in context of a sentence. The issue, of course, is I am mentally recalling chinese pronunciation constantly. I linked hanzi visually to the pronunciation, and that attachment is strong. So I need to work on developing a strong link for japanese kanji-containing words to their japanese pronunciation, only that is going to fix the issue.

And that's how I estimate how many kanji I 'actually' know... can I look at 日本語 and actually mentally hear nihongo (japanese pronunciation instead of ri-ben-yu (chinese), I can see 犬と猫です and know it's inu to neko desu, hearing inu and neko in my head INSTEAD of quan and mao. I can see 鍵を忘れました and mentally hear kagi o wasuremashita instead of wang for 忘. I can see 始めました and hear mentally hajimemashita instead of 'shi' from 開始 (chinese - kaishi start). The words I can read in japanese and actually mentally hear the japanese pronunciations, are the kanji I actually know well.

Reading and Writing (15 out of 15 weeks)

Since I reached out to Hindi speakers in search of penpals in a couple of places (namely Conversation Exchange and Slowly app) I've found some interesting people who are patient enough to correspond with me using Devanagari and bookish language. It's been quite fun and I've been able to reply to emails quite regularly. Both my reading and writing skills have improved and I've learned many useful phrases for discussing opinions etc.

Listening (8 out of 15 weeks)

I found an interesting podcast for Hindi learners, All About India Insider Tales, where they make short about 15-minute episodes about Indian history in both English and Hindi. They have a Patreon through which a listener can download the full script of each episode in both Hindi and English for a small monthly fee. This is not an ad, I was just so happy to find this resource that I need to share it. I've also listened to some episodes of विश्व चर्चित हत्याएँ and Indian Crime Story but so far I haven't found the perfect true crime podcast in Hindi or Hinglish - recommendations welcome!

Watching (7 out of 15 weeks)

Another, and completely free resource I want to share is STARTALK Hindi Audio-Visual project which is a collection of 42 videos with complete downloadable .pdf scripts in Hindi. These videos are based on real-life situations and show naturally spoken Hindi, sometimes mixed with English and local languages. I've also watched three Hindi films, finished Mismatched and started to watch Taj Mahal 1989 on Netflix.

Grammar (6 out of 15 weeks)

Because of regular correspondence, I have had less time for grammar books. One of my pen pals shared a great resource, however, for both reading and grammar: a vast collection of online textbooks by the Indian NCERT - National Council of Education Research and Training. There are Hindi and Urdu textbooks starting from grade 1 upwards and there are also adult education materials downloadable as pdf. Speaking (2 out of 15 weeks)

15 june - end of day update

A long day, but I’d say a good one! My table’s messy as hell but its okay, because I met my study time goal (350 mins) and I made good progress on my readings! I wasn’t able to count the number of pages because I decided to prioritize the more important topics (that are likely to come out) rather than going strictly by the syllabus. I made a lot of notes and I was able to start on my flashcards, which I think would be useful in memorization.