Pay a visit

Again, the power of using Lang-8 has come to my aid. I was scratching my head for the word to say that I had visited somewhere, like when I was in Africa I visited a lot of Safari Parks, or something like that. I know 訪問する is for visiting, but kind of more like if an Ambassador visits a church. I was thinking of 訪ねる（たずねる）but I think this is more often used if you visit your Gran, so I ended up putting plain old 行った:went, when in doubt I guess, just plump for the safest option. Anyway the corrections I got threw up 訪れる（おとずれる）, which I've never heard before, but obviously has the same kanji as たずねる。Looking at my dictionary now actually, looks like these two are pretty interchangeable. Here's the dictionary def: 「訪れる」は、「訪ねる」とほぼ同じ意味だが、「彼を訪れる」という言い方はせず、「彼の家を訪れる」の形になる。他に、「春が訪れる」「平和が訪れる」のように、ある時期・季節・状態が「やってくる」の意味にも用いる

Building a method

Starting to get into a routine after some time away from studying. Taking the useful sentences that I come across in the Smart FM quizzes and putting them into Anki. This should help build my vocabulary, get myself familiar with the sentence patterns, and help with my pronunciation, if I read them out loud as I go through them. This is just for the Chinese at the moment. Kind of feels like I'm starting with a clean slate with the Chinese after wasting so much time learning useless stuff with the Japanese (studying words I will never use in conversation, and not going over what, if anything, I had learnt).

Need more time

Lately, I've had little free time for studying, and it begins to feel like I might have forgotten everything. Of course it's not true, but I think momentum and continuity are very important in language learning. At times where I have had time to study over a period of days, confidence grows and I can notice the improvement. I guess, it's obvious to say, but I really need more time to study.

On a seperate note, I've noticed that I tend to retain flashcard vocabulary better if it's part of a sentence, rather than just presented on its own, so I'm trying to improve my flashcard vocab decks. I think I might have said this before, but context is important, and helps with memorization.