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.
Memrise Streak Contests
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.
Watching Risque jDramas
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.