Xamuel.com

Sunday, April 26. Today I mostly just lounged around and didn’t do much but read Tintin graphic novels. Earlier my keyboard seemed to short out or something after girlfriend wiped it with some hand-wiping towelette. The keys became very irresponsive, so I had to hit a key repeatedly to make it register. I was just [...]

Friday, April 24. 9:38 PM. Opened japtemp. 5 cards scheduled, 0 failed/unmemorized. Passed four of them, failed one. 9:39PM. Opened kanjiaid. 6 scheduled, 2 failed. I passed 5 of the 6 scheduled, and 1 of the 2 failed, leaving the deck at 0 scheduled and 2 failed. 9:40 PM. Opened sam.mem. Since I’m short on [...]

Tues, April 21. Very tired today. Only slept around three hours last night. And then, despite that, after teaching math for two hours I hit the gym and pressed bench ’til exhaustion. My arms are dead, if I lie on my stomach I can hardly push myself back up In spite of being sleep-deprived, I [...]

Saturday, April 19. 10:03pm. Opened japtemp. 4 items are scheduled, 0 failed. Passed them all. 10:04 PM. Opened latekanji. 6 things due, 11 failed or unmemorized. Wittled this down to 0 scheduled and 5 failed/unmemorized. 10:06 PM. Opened the main sam.mem file. Today I’m looking at 60 scheduled cards and 214 not memorized. 10:17 PM: [...]

Friday, April 17, 2009. 1:27 pm. I started by adding a few new vocab words to my japtemp card deck, words I learned this morning from my girlfriend, one of which is too slangy to even be in the dictionary I love slang! Japtemp is now at: 5 scheduled, 4 unlearned. I went through the [...]

Tues, Apr 14, 12:21 AM. It’s technically April 14, but it still counts as April 13. Lately I’ve been feeling really good, which means I need less sleep. I’ve started going to the gym every day again, which is very difficult since I’m really busy lately. Speaking of which, today was busy as heck. And [...]

I recently made a breakthrough in study habits which allowed me to start adding new kanji cards to my Mnemosyne deck at last. See, the past few months (since December), my main deck’s been clogged with failed cards, so if I added new stuff there it’d just get even worse. Yeah, the failed stack has [...]

Now that I’ve switched to the Satellite Method of Spaced Repetition (explained in detail in my article, Using Multiple SRS Decks), I’ve finally broken a long kanji drought and have started learning new kanji (Chinese characters) again. In order to learn the Chinese characters most effectively, I’ve learned how imaginative memory works. And now that [...]

Romaji (also sometimes called Romanji) is the writing of Japanese words in Roman script, i.e., the same script as English, Spanish, French, German and so on. You already know plenty of examples of romaji, words like “ninja”, “dojo”, “sushi”. In these examples, romaji is necessary because Japanese words are being borrowed into English. In a [...]

The sexiest, most badass script in the known universe? The Chinese characters. Devised thousands of years ago by ancient Chinese scholars. Revised, studied, worshipped, all while the Roman characters were wrapped in uninvented slumber. I’m going to talk about a book, James Heisig’s “Remembering the Kanji”, which helps English speakers learn the Japanese variation of [...]