Progress Report - Day 9

I'm now 7.5% of the way through my challenge and I feel unstoppable!  I made it through the first 450 words with a cold and a migraine and I feel really good about persevering.  Today was the easiest day of the challenge so far.  Here are a few statistics and mnemonics from day 9.

Review Statistics

General

• New leeches: 5
• Daily leech rate: 6%
• Cumulative leech rate: 17%
• Total words: 450
• Percentage of challenge complete: 7.5%
• Percentage of JLPT1 word list complete: 33%

New Cards (time, failed card queue)

• 11:08 53
• 11:20 44
• 11:36 21
• 11:46 11
• 11:53 5 (91%)
• 12:00 3

As you can see today was a very good day.  I remembered 91% of new cards by the 5th review.  There were only 3 new leeches.  That's a 6% leech rate today versus a 34% leech rate yesterday.

New Mnemonics

Word: 裸足
Definition: barefoot
Mnemonic: naked + foot.  hada means skin.  think of a barefoot woman.  hada, she.

Word: 視点
Definition: opinion, point of view, visual point
Mnemonic: inspection/vision + point

Word: 覆す
Definition: to overturn, to upset, to overthrow
Mnemonic: 覆 means overturn or capsize.  in the wild west when a wagon would capsize it took a lot of work to restore it.  think of all the guys shoes standing in the hot desert sand trying to overturn a wagon.  i call them kutsu-gae's.  (kutsu means shoe)

The last example is pretty strange.  It's actually based on the mnemonic I used to remember the writing of the Kanji which I borrowed from someone at the Reviewing the Kanji website (which I highly recommend).  If you take a look at the Kanji it's composed of two other Kanji.  On the top is "West" and the bottom is "restore".  You can see how the story evolves from here.


This is not the first time I've included or modified old mnemonics used for remembering Kanji stroke order.  In my opinion this is a huge advantage to Japanese language learners and further proof that the Heisig method is effective.

That's all for now.  I'm looking forward to tomorrows word list.  Only 5,680 words to go!