Pop Hits for Piano

Markdown

I made a new playlist from a songbook I bought on vacation. So far I've digitized most of Skinny Love. I will post a cover when I get the bugs fixed and a good piano instrument. I plan to learn at least 10 of these. Since I'll be making a lot of midis I will post them as I create them.

This playlist is really sad. You might find yourself wondering what in the world this happened to the person who created this list. Well, it wasn't me. I didn't create this list and I don't know who did.

Read more »

Learning to Read and Write Kanji Repeat Row 1

As with other posts in this series, this is the results of a test I took today, Thursday, Aug 26th, 2021.

kanji test repeat row 1

糸 落 晴 念 存 習 降 価 符 服 頼 通 係 替 頂 好 買 和 橋 易 方 寂 相 力 離

Read more »

Learning to Read and Write Kanji Tests

This is a post that covers 17 writing tests over all the kanji I've learned, 29-30 kanji per day.

The concept behind the big test is to test 30 kanji per day, excluding the one's I've already tested to get an idea of how many kanji I know. Since I learned 496 kanji, 30 kanji per day should result in 17 tests. Because I didn't have the optimization on the first three tests, there are a few repeated kanji in the first tests (五 具 典 所 語 高). It looks like 17 will still be the number of tests. Without the optimization I'd have to do a lot more tests. Since each test takes ~15-30 minutes (drawing kanji is difficult), this optimization is necessary (as more tests are done, the number of repetition per test grows).

I was really upset as I found that the rate of recall is close to 50%. While this is substantially lower rate than when I was learning rows and testing daily, I believe that it is accurate. You can see how many I don't try on -- because any attempt at drawing is a waste of time if I cannot draw the whole kanji.

Read more »

Japanese For Busy People I

Review by Javantea
Sept 9, 2021

Japanese for Busy People I cover

Made for beginners, this 1995 book by AJALT is boring, formal, and slow. The fact that is uses hiragana and katakana instead of kanji is a major limitation. Compared to courses made since 2010, this is more historically valuable than the price of the book. I finished this textbook despite being far beyond its material level in a matter of months of podcasts because I wanted the easy stuff to be very solid in my head -- listen, read, and think. Because it has to start at such a low level, it might be good for people who have trouble with the alternatives. But to get a substantial handle on Japanese, one will need more than this book can teach. What does it teach?

Read more »

next »