Don’t Stop: Motivation Hurdle # 4

Though I haven’t publicised this blog much, anyone who was actively following it can see that for a little over three months, I’ve had little or no activity on my learning site. This is due to a very bizarre set of circumstances that left me feeling like I wasn’t going to be in Japan much longer. Well, three months later, I’m still here and I realized I could have finished RTK1, and been mining sentences heavily by now, getting that much closer to my goal of becoming proficient in reading Japanese. Either way, I wanted to make a note that living in Japan has kept me “topped up” on enough daily Kanji viewing, Japanese conversations and situations to keep me from losing everything i’ve learned. Thankfully, my studying system is very visual, and it since I’ve started re-reviewing my RTk1 (I’m up to 1050) I find that I’m remembering a lot of the very complex Kanji, and forgetting either easy Kanji, or Kanji with a very abstract name for example:

Holy.

(which is easy for me now, it’s “Holy Ears and Mouth Kingman! – the primites are Ear, Mouth with King below)

Still, the cool thing about stopping is that, because of muscle memory and constant SRS-ing the word I put in to initially memorize and drill myself on the first several hundred Kanji have left many of them in my long term memory. As I go through the individual Kanji one by one I’m finding that I can write them easily once I see the words. This thankfully, gives me hope because I swore that I would have forogotten everything. Regardless, I’m not judging myself on this front. Within a few weeks of active work, I WILL be done with RTK1 and on to sentence mining.

I’ll be making some notes and observations on systems I’m using to keep Japanese in my head all the time (AJATT style), using a mixture of Ipod touch programs, videos that I can watch on the train, audios and then person to person chatting systems to get my conversational skills up. I’ve also made some quite interesting observations about Rosetta Stone and why I think it has it’s own use in the general scheme of things as well.

I’m at 1,050 Kanji now and I think it will take me about five days of active revision to begin the process of learning new Kanji again. So in a week, hopefully I can hop back on the studying to the tune of 50-100 per day, to close out RTK1 at the end of july.

I revamped the look of the site to feel better about what I’m doing, and I’m extremely determined to have a blog that comprehensively dictates my journey to the end of RTK1, and then 100, 500, 1000, 2000 and 5,000 sentences. This means that eventually I should be able to blog properly in both Japanese and English, which will prove to me these diferent systems really work.

To all out there studying, ganbatte.