6,000 Word Challenge

I officially started my 6,000 word challenge 4 days ago. I thought it would be a good idea to keep a diary documenting my progress. I'm also hoping this prevents me from quitting prematurely.

What is the 6,000 word challenge? First I'll give a quick overview of my Japanese studies. I starting studying Japanese around October, 2008. My first step was to complete "Remembering the Kanji" by James Heisig. Using the freeware flashcard program Anki I completed the task in about 4 months. I subsequently took a trip to Japan in March, 2009. I struggled during this trip to balance learning the language, having fun, and maintaining my knowledge of the Kanji. I might write more about this particular struggle in a different post.

Living in Osaka for 3 months taught me a few things. It was incredibly frustrating not being able to speak the language. I realized that learning the etymology of 2,000 Kanji was just the tip of the iceberg. I also realized that if I wanted to actually achieve native level fluency that I would need to move to Japan and learn at least 10,000 words. This number is somewhat arbitrary but I think 10,000 is a good number.

In October, 2009 I relocated to Osaka, Japan and began walking down the long road of vocabulary acquisition. At this point in my studies I my personal lexicon was around 1,200 words. As of about a week ago my vocabulary hovered at around 1,800.

My goal for this year is to finish the 8,000 or so words in the infamous JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) using Anki and a little bit of brute force. The 6,000 word challenge is going to test my endurance and sanity over the next 120 days (50 words per day).

I'm currently on day 5 of the challenge. You may be questioning both my honesty and my sanity at this point. 50 words per day in my opinion is not possible (for me). The sheer number of review cards that build at this rate would force me to do an unthinkable number of daily reviews. My strategy is to set the leech failure threshold in Anki to 10 initially. What this means is that any card failed 10 times will be suspended. I'm hoping this will allow me to keep pace. If I start falling behind I will adjust the failure threshold so that I can continue.

Can I really learn 6,000 words in 120 days? Of course not but I will learn a lot of words and a lot of Kanji readings along the way.

Steve Kaufmann talks about "letting the words overflow" in this video which I recommend anyone studying a language to watch. I really like his theory that if you let the words overflow they will start to sink in. I also believe in the power of SRS (spaced-repetition systems). I think that my current strategy will allow me to pick the long hanging fruit. If I can retain 1/3 of the words in Anki by the end of my experiment then I think I've succeeded in merging these two learning theories and I will be more than happy. Not only will I have learned 2,000 new words (~16.67 per day) but I will have many new Kanji readings and at least partial knowledge of the other 4,000 words. I believe that I can retain more than 1/3 of these words over 120 days.

Here goes! I'll be posting about my progress every few days. I hope to include some stats and graphs from Anki periodically as well.