I’ve been spending (or wasting depending on how you look at) with keeping my streaks up on Memrise. I think it is great to have that daily goal, but I have busy days and not so busy days and it can make it hard to keep up with keeping a good streak going. This has lead me to ‘learn’ a lot of words, only to score 50% on the tests afterwards. This can get a little frustrating.

Other than bulking up on vocab, I picked up a new jDrama, Hirugao, which literally means afternoon face. It is a pretty risque drama about two women involved in affairs during the day, hence the whole afternoon face. So far it is pretty interesting and has some interesting phrases. Although I hope I won’t need so many of the vocabulary words.

And finally, I’m back to doing some translation. Although translating is not communicating at all, and isn’t the best form of practice, it helps get me some reading practice while getting paid at the same time. Studying during work is really important, as any new father will tell you, and it’s been great to get back into doing it when I can. I hope I don’t get buried again.

So recently Memrise has held a few contests on their platform. In January, they held a contest to see who could learn the most words in a month. And in February, they had a competition that asked participants to meet their daily goal for a particular course for at least 12 days straight.

These competitions have come under a little fire on the site because a lot of people feel like this is just encouraging people to ‘over-game’ and use Memrise simply to get more points so that they can win prizes. And in general, they teach bad study habits because users don’t develop a slower, more thoughtful process of absorbing vocabulary.

And I would have to agree that yes it does encourage some bad behavior. Especially if they kept the contests up for an extended period of time. But fortunately, they just limited these competitions to the first two months. And I think these little spurts of focused study can be good for you. It helps you create ways to cope with !unpredictable schedules and prioritize your studies.

After you’ve established the study habit, you can modify it, scale it down or up to fit your lifestyle. I found the February streak contest a bit of a blessing and a curse. It forced me to make time for studying, and I scored a tremendous amount of points, but it also forced to push through study sessions a little faster than I would have liked so that I can score my points for the day and move on.

I personally slow way down on the weekend because I spend a lot of time with my family and just doing the usual errands that you tend to only get done on the weekend. However, during the week, I can be incredibly focused, especially during my morning and evening commutes, and traveling between teaching locations. I love having nice trains that I can sit on and get work done on, instead of sitting in a car.

I was interested in picking up a new jDrama to watch and I ended up doing a Google trend search just to see what was really popular these days since I hadn’t heard of too many mentioning one particular series. Google came back with Hirugao, which was apparently wildly more popular than other dramas.

And it is easy to see why. The series is a scandalous story of one married woman who was having an affair recruiting a complete stranger to help her cover up her lies. And trouble ensues from there, complete with edgy scenes and implied nudity. The end credits are barely suitable for prime time TV. Hmm, I wonder why it is so popular?

So far, it has some useful dialog with some good daily expressions. This can be a bit hard with jDramas because they are often set in some particular industry with its own yougo or jargon that makes the phrasing not so useful. Although it is fun to quote some things from Hanzawa Naoki from time to time, it didn’t have a lot of reusable material.

I also find the series a little interesting culturally speaking. The series focuses on the plight of the two women and the husbands aren’t shown in the best light. The story plays a lot on the fact that the affairs are just ways to get the attention that they aren’t getting from their neglecting husbands. The characters are still somewhat 2D and stereotypical. The handsome smart teacher guy, and the brooding troubled artist are the two characters that play their love interests. Not exactly ground-breaking stuff.

I took a bit of a break from translation because I got busy with a lot of other work, but have now managed to pick up a few little gigs here and there to get the ball rolling again. I think translation helps expose you to the wide variety of material out there that is in Japanese. It seems I get everything from personal emails to legal documents thrown at me, which makes for interesting reading.

I don’t think translation is for everyone, but for me, I really do like to piece things together and see how the puzzle fits together. Translation is like writing but you don’t have to come up with ideas and the topic. You can just focus on how it all comes together. I’m not sure if I could do it for 8 hours straight, but the occasionally gig here and there is a good little break from teaching.

I should say that translation isn’t actual studying. In truth, when you do translation, all you are really getting good at is well translating. Although you do pick up a few words here and there, I don’t find it to be the most efficient way to study.

However, I have learned how to decipher some pretty tricky messages through translation though, which comes in handy for comprehension. Translation is paid per Japanese character you translate, which means some cheapskates will attempt to write the shortest message possible and hope that you get their full meaning. Often times I’ve had to make my best guess, and later I double check my work with a native, and they didn’t even know either.

If you are studying for the JLPT this July or December, be sure to check the 2nd Month of the JLPT Study Guide for tips on what to do this month.

Have you changed your study routine? What is working for you? Let us know in the comments.