I have been making small tweaks to blog appearance, including lighter colors, and a little blog logo. I hope you like the new look!
I finally added a new page : How To Play Karuta. It’s the first page I’ve added in many years (some were made in 2011! 😮), but since I’ve been talking about karuta so much that I figured it was time to make a new page.
My progress on memorizing the Hyakunin Isshu has shifted in memorizing the kimariji so that I can play. I think I am about 75% complete in that regard.
The good news is that I cross the halfway point in late March and memorized 50 of the poems! 🎉 When I started in January, I wasn’t I’d get very far before life got in the way. It has gotten in the way since returning to the US, but I have been able to manage learning the Hyakunin Isshu amidst the chaos.
The bad news is is that I stopped to review the 50 cards that I learned so far, and discovered that even those that I knew well are already starting to fade from memory! 😮
This has reinforced for me that periodic review is required for weeks, maybe months on old cards. Even if I feel I have “nailed it”, my mind gets rusty pretty quick. So, I had to go back and start reviewing old cards again, which takes away from learning the remaining 50.
Thus, I am experimenting with a hybrid method whereby I review a small number of cards per day (3-5 max), with a mix of old and new. I found that powering through more cards per day was exhausting and not always feasible with my schedule, and one card per day wasn’t quite enough. So, I settled on 3-5, and keep it on my desk at work so that i can review for a minute or two. Small, frequent reviews seem to work better than “power sessions”.
By mixing old and new, I hope I can also trim down the cards that I need to review, but also keep the momentum going in learning the remaining poems.
One nice thing to consider is that once I’ve memorized all 100, then it’s just review for the rest of my life. No need to learn more poems (unless I delve into Imperial anthologies or other works). So, part of me just wants to hurry up and power through the last 50, but until we get closer to the end, I think it’s essential to keep an even pace of learning a few poems at a time, while also reviewing old ones bit by bit.
Time will tell.
P.S. Thanks to everyone who’s been submitting ideas, suggestions, translations and so on for the Hyakunin Isshu. I am not always able to respond, but I do read and appreciate them. 🙂
P.P.S I am posting this at the end of March, despite the title. I just assume that as April is imminent, people won’t always read this post right away.
My progress in memorizing the Hyakunin Isshu poems, for the sake of learning to playkaruta, continues, but since returning to the US, it has taken some twists and turns.
When I got back home, it became clear how busy my day to day life is compared to Japan, where I didn’t have to worry about work commitments, and had fewer natural distractions from hobbies, projects, etc. So, my original strategy of learning one poem a day quickly unraveled.
Further, as the number of cards I memorized has grown (38 out of 100 as of writing), the effort to review them all has grown too. As the number grows even larger, it gets harder and harder to review all of them daily.
So, I started switching to a spaced-repetition style of learning to help manage the load. This means I focus more on the cards I still need to improve on, and focus less on the ones I know well, while still reviewing periodically. To accomplish this, I needed a way to not only organize my cards, but also manage the progress of each one.
I brushed off one of my old Legion brand deck boxes from when I used to actively play Magic the Gathering (yes, I am a giant nerd).
Inside, I used a few card dividers (some borrowed from other deck boxes) into sections. The section in the back represents cards that I know well and can recite with little or no effort. The section in the middle represents cards I am still struggling with. The section in the front is the “new” queue: cards I have yet to learn but have lined up next.
I mostly focus on the middle queue, since I am actively learning them, but not comfortable enough yet to move them to the “back” queue. I also review the back queue from time to time, and occasionally have to move cards from there to the middle queue in situations where I feel a poem needs a bit more active review. I also try to add a new card from the “front” queue every 1-2 days.
This process took some trial and error to get right, and it may not work for everyone, but it has helped me regain my pace in memorizing the Hyakunin Isshu after some interruptions after coming back to the States.
My original goal was to finish by end of April, and this is still possible, but I have lost some time and now I am hopeful I can memorize all one hundred poems by June.
If you’re following on this blog, which I started way back in 2011, I am happy to report that the updates I made are now done. I made several updates and fixes, including:
Fixing broken links. There were quite a few (such is the ephemeral nature of the Internet).
Converting poem text into HTML tables for easier comparison.
Replaced some photos with updated photos from Wikimedia or Pexels where appropriate, proper citations added.
Consistent formatting updates to each poem page. When I first wrote them, there was some drift between how certain pages looked vs. other, newer pages.
Fixed or replaced, a few non-poem posts that were just really outdated.
Behind the scenes, fixed markup code in WordPress. The code I
used predated the current design, and led to some weird behavior.
Edited and rewrote some historical descriptions for clarity, or expanded on some details.
Anyhow, thanks all for patience, and please continue to enjoy!
P.S. I will be heading to Japan in a few days with the family (first time since pandemic), and hope to provide some updates for this blog, along with the other blog.
I am down to the last 10 poems of the Hyakunin Isshu! I started this blog in January of 2011, but I didn’t expect it to last almost 3 years or gain this many readers. It’s been a real treat.
However, with only 10 poems left in the Hyakunin Isshu, I’m trying to decide what to do next:
I could try and feature Waka poetry from the official anthologies of that era. The trouble is that they are hard to obtain in English and I can’t translate Japanese that easily. Certainly not at Professor Mostow’s level.
I might also try and feature Waka poetry from the Tales of Ise which is a famous book/poetry anthology from that era. Professor Mostow has a translation of that which I’ve been slowly reading through.
I could feature more cultural/historical posts about the people and places featured in the Hyakunin Isshu.
Perhaps some combination of the above.
Or finally, I could just stop the blog after the 100th poem and let it stand on its own merits. Sometimes, less is more.
Feedback and ideas are welcome. Thanks for reading and journeying with me thus far.
–Doug
P.S. I’m excited to post these last poems too. I think there are some good ones in here.
I have been actively updating the blog recently, and I realized that I’ve reached the 85% mark! That means there are about 15 poems left in the Hyakunin Isshu to post. I didn’t realize how far we’ve come this year.
I’m pretty excited, and I hope you are too. My goal is to complete the blog by the end of the year, but with the baby being born soon, who knows?
Behind the scenes though, I am working hard to complete the last poems, fix links, and find some cool things to share about the culture behind the famous anthology, Heian period culture, etc.
The Hyakunin Isshu 