My Nihongo Blog

My Note-Taking Process

Here’s an example of how I take and process my notes. This is just my personal workflow, by the way.

It usually starts with me finding something I don’t know while consuming Japanese content. In this case, I was watching the Japanese TV show 月曜から夜ふかし, and the text on the screen said 「競馬で溶かされた」

I found it funny because I thought 溶かす was about physically melting something, like ice melting. So now I have something new to learn. I started by jotting down 「競馬で溶かされた」 in Quick Notes.

But as my previous Japanese teacher kept telling me, the best way to learn a verb is through example sentences. I also wanted to learn more about how 溶かす can be used in all sorts of situations. So I went to ChatGPT and asked, “Break down: 競馬で溶かされた.”

Now I have a better understanding of 溶かす—how it can be used literally to mean “to melt,” but also metaphorically to mean losing money, particularly in casual, everyday slang. This is the kind of usage you don’t necessarily learn from regular N3 or N2 textbooks.

I took those examples and jotted them down in Quick Notes again.

Of course, there may be vocabulary that I don’t know in those examples. I jot those down in Quick Notes, too.

And with that, that’s my Quick Notes so far.

For some people, they might just leave their notes like that. And that’s fine.

But I want more than fine.

I want my notes to be structured. Because I know that once my notes are in a structured format, features like Quizzes, Search, and my favorite, Vocabulary Radio, can take advantage of that structure and provide more ways to improve my studying.

So I’m going to process those free-form Quick Notes into structured notes, such as Vocabulary Notes and Sentence Notes.

And that’s when things get interesting.

In order to organize notes into a structured format without a lot of re-entering, the best way is to create Segments, and then use the Build feature to construct Vocabulary Notes or Sentence Notes.

There are Extract and Create buttons that you can use to create Segments.

But I’m even lazier than that.

So I created the Auto Extract button.

One click on the [Auto Extract] button, and...

...now all my notes are turned into Segments.

Next, I press the [Build] button, and now I can create Sentence Notes, Vocabulary Notes, or Multiple Vocabulary Notes entries.

Here’s the quick decision process:

• If you have a specific sentence pattern you want to remember, use Create Sentence Note.

• If you want to learn vocabulary and take advantage of Vocabulary Radio to keep reminding you of the vocabulary you want to learn, use Create Vocabulary Note.

• If you have a sentence that contains multiple vocabulary words you want to learn, use Multiple Vocabulary.

For instance, here I want to remember the vocabulary 収穫（しゅうかく）, and the sample sentence is 「大根を収穫された」. In this case, I create a Vocabulary Note.

But you can also use Multiple Vocabulary to accomplish the same thing.

Here, I first drag over the sentence 「場所に取り残される」, and then drag over the vocabulary 「取り残す」 as a word to learn.

I personally use the Multiple Vocabulary option most frequently.

And with that, I’ve turned my free-form text notes into a bunch of structured notes, including the 「競馬で溶かされた」 sentence I originally wanted to learn.

Once all the Segments have been converted, I can delete them. In fact, I can even delete the original free-form note itself.

Now, when I go to my Vocabulary Notes, I can see all the vocabulary notes that I just created.

But wait... do you see the duplicate entries for 溶かす?

This is actually totally normal.

When I create notes using both Vocabulary and Multiple Vocabulary, I can end up with the same vocabulary entry being created multiple times.

That’s exactly why I created the Consolidate feature.

Using it, you’ll find entries that have different meanings or examples associated with them. Just pick the one you find most appropriate and press [Apply].

Eventually, they all get consolidated.

Now you can see your notes in a searchable format. You can use Filter to find what you’re looking for, and all the sentences associated with the same vocabulary are consolidated together.

And the best part is that you can use Vocabulary Radio to keep reinforcing your memory.

Since I just entered the notes about 「競馬で溶かされた」, I can set the Vocabulary Radio scope to “1 Day Before.”

And sure enough, the entry for 「競馬で溶かされた」 eventually shows up.

This is great if you want to review what you learned over the last day while you’re doing other things—driving, jogging, doing the dishes, or even... heading to bed.

There are a bunch of things you can do to make Vocabulary Radio work even better for you, but I’ve already talked too much.

So let’s chat about that some other time!

My Nihongo Is for Note-Taking

I’m sorry that I didn’t make this super obvious in the App Store description. It’s just that there isn’t really a market for a Japanese language note-taking app.

But in fact, My Nihongo is primarily a note-taking app for Japanese language students. I created it mainly for this reason.

Note-taking is a critical part of studying Japanese because it helps you figure out what you need to study the most. Your Japanese notes are a record of your Japanese-learning journey. To me, they even have a certain nostalgic value. Looking back at my notes, I can see how much I’ve progressed along the way. I can even remember what prompted me to write certain notes—maybe after watching a TV show, playing a game, or trying to express a certain idea but having trouble doing so in Japanese.

And because I’m getting older, I keep running into the problem of forgetting what I learned just a few days ago. That’s why I built activities like Quizzes and Vocabulary Radio to reinforce what I’ve learned. I know it may take me three to five times as much effort to learn the same thing compared with a teenager, but if I put in the effort—and with the help of these activities—I believe I can achieve my goal.

I hope you also find My Nihongo useful on your own Japanese-learning journey.

Welcome to My Nihongo App

Thanks for downloading and using the My Nihongo app.

I originally created this app because I couldn’t find an app that did exactly what I wanted: a way to keep track of my Japanese study notes and use those notes to review what I’ve learned effectively.

I’m still using the app literally every day. But after many iterations, I have to admit that the app has become a little complicated. The workflow makes sense to me, but it may not be as intuitive for everyone else.

So, in addition to continuing to improve the user interface, I also want to write about how I use the app in my daily Japanese studies. My goal is to help you understand how I use the app so you can get the most out of it.

After all, the ultimate goal is to improve our Japanese language skills.

I’ll keep posting here from time to time. I hope you’ll find these posts useful in your own Japanese-learning journey!