Mitchell’s Posterous

Now that summer classes have finished, I have much more time to dedicate to more serious study. I've started reading デスノート, and I finished the first chapter this afternoon. I managed to mine 22 sentences from there, although I might go back and add more later. I'm really surprised that I can read and understand most of what's going on without having to whip out my 辞書 iTouch app. (Japanese, in case you're curious. Highly recommended.) 

I'm still working re-doing all my kanji, but I'm already more than halfway finished. It really isn't so bad the second time around.

Also, I made a "victory calendar" spreadsheet to track my progress. It's basically a chart where I can mark if I did my listening, reading, and SRS practice for the day. But I'm also counting down to how many more days until I should be reasonably "fluent" (18 months, according to Khatzumoto). Since I began studying on or around 11/9/09, I am 240 days in to my study, leaving 300 to go until I'm "finished." That's scheduled to be on May 2nd, 2011. It's a little strange to have a definite date by which I'll at least be pretty good with the language. It really doesn't seem so far away, and it's a little hard to believe that I'll improve by so much by that time. I guess I can just hope for the best, and continue to soldier on!

UPDATE (6/30): I got this back yesterday, and I got an A! :D :D :D I can barely remember the last time I got an A on anything... way back in freshman year, back before my hard classes :P. Anyway, I'm ecstatic that my effort paid off, for once :D.

So here's the paper I wrote tonight about Morita's The Family Game (家族ゲーム) and Banana Yoshimoto's Kitchen, and how they portray familial and social problems in 1980's Japanese society. Enjoy?

Dedicated to you-know-who-you-are ;). I can't thank you enough for saving my day and inspiring me to actually try on this paper <3.

Today, while I was leaving class, I caught myself muttering 「何を
する。。。」as I was walking! No idea where that came from, but
I'm going to interpret it as a sign that my subconscious is at least
starting to think in Japanese :). Yay!

Here's an analysis of an excerpt from Kenko Yoshida's Essays in Idleness which I did for this weekend's J7A close-reading assignment. I'm particularly proud of it, so I'm sharing it publicly. Hope you enjoy!

So I was unable to meet Koichi in person, unfortunately, but I did finally get my Tofukuburo today! And not a moment too soon, considering that I've just begun finals season :o.

Here are the goodies I got in my box:

1. Motorola H350 Bluetooth headset
2. A pair of sunglasses
3. The Book of JavaScript, 2nd Edition: A Practical Guide to Interactive Web Pages
4. Japanese Language Proficiency Test Level One Grammar (完全マスター 1級：日本語能力試験文法問題対策)
5. A Gloomy Bear (グルーミー) wind up toy (I find the whole concept hilarious, in a sick, evil sort of way)
6. A kendo men (面) keychain
7. A kendo 面 cell phone charm
8. いま，会いにゆきます (trans.: "Be With You") DVD (not sure if I can play it, since it's Region 2 :/)
9. Raising Arizona DVD
10. Barton Fink DVD
11. Tekkonkinkreet Art Book
12. Cromartie High School Vol. 6
13. GTO (Great Teacher Onizuka) Vol. 1
14. GTO (Great Teacher Onizuka) Vol. 2
15. Doing (ドゥーイング) a random manga which appears to not exist at all online :o.
16. Three T-Shirts. Not sure if I'll ever wear them though.
17. $20 bill, because Koichi couldn't meet with me, and also didn't want to charge me postage. Yay for generosity! :D

With all these goodies, I'm gonna be totally set for reading material this summer! Woohoo!

Wow, it's really been quite a while since my last update. What's happened since then? Well... a lot of things. First of all, the bad news: I stopped reviewing my kanji! :o I know, I know, I spent over 3 months studying them, and I let that time go to waste... Actually, it isn't quite as bad as it seems. While I'm sure that I've forgotten a vast majority of the kanji I've studied, I still know many of them (I think...). I've decided to go through RTK all over again this summer, but this time I'm going to try the Lazy Kanji method and go at a faster pace. My hope is that they'll all come back to me once I start looking them over again.

Now for some better news: I have (tentatively) started sentence-mining recently. I started by putting in the lyrics to one of my favorite songs, which worked kind of well, except that I didn't really have a good translation, so I couldn't match up each word to its meaning. So I went elsewhere. I've started using smart.fm and Read the Kanji to learn readings, and to build vocabulary. I found an Anki plugin to import items from smart.fm into my anki deck, so now I can practice both on and offline. I'm still listening to music as often as I can, and I'm planning on making a trip to Japantown soon to get me some manga for reading practice!

In fact, on that topic: Koichi over at Tofugu is currently in the middle of a move from San Francisco to Portland, and in the style of fukubukuro, he has created... Tofukubukuro! Since I just had my birthday last week, I thought I would buy myself a nice gift, so I purchased one of the large Tofukuburo for myself! And, in order to save on shipping, I'm going to pick it up in person from Koichi himself next week! Very excited to meet him, especially now that he's moving away! Since I'll already be in the city, I might do my Japantown trip on the same day for extra Japanese goodness!

Kanji Kount™: 2000

Well, I've got two things to say for myself:

1. I'm really, REALLY disappointed how my schoolwork has gotten in the way of my kanji study. For the last month or so, come Wednesday and Thursday nights, I'm forced to only partially complete (if I have the time for even that) my reps. I wish I could blame it solely on my four weekly problem sets being due Thursday and Friday, but part of the problem is that I (like nearly every other student) procrastinate so I don't get them done until the night before. And, I often underestimate the time that problems will take to actually solve in full. So, I invariably end up falling behind, only to play catch-up on the weekend. For instance, last Saturday night, I spent ... wait for it ... over SEVEN HOURS doing kanji! So... bottom line: progress has been intermittent, with predictable weekly gaps in study.

2. Good news: I'm finally far enough that it won't matter anymore, because I'LL BE DONE WEDNESDAY NIGHT!!

That is all :)

Kanji Kount™: 1800

Making progress! 10 more days to go (assuming no days skipped)!

Gosh, it's so hard to believe that I've studied nearly the entire Jouyou kanji in the span of just over 3 months! Considering that native-Japanese learn these throughout their entire school career, I feel like I'm zooming right along. Of course, I've still got readings and sentences to do after this. No need to get excited so early in my journey...

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Still, 10 more days to go! :P