Fetchez la vache!

It happened without ceremony, on a rather uneventful sick day in which I was feeling sorry for myself while suffering from a number of simultaneous afflictions. After yet another period of studying no new characters for a few days just to entrench the older ones in my mind, yesterday I managed to break the 1012 barrier, which represents half the kanji in Remembering the Kanji 1. This makes me happy. :-)

However half way is not all the way, and I still have the same to go again until I can reach my target. And even then that is not the end of the kanji. But it does feel good to have kept my resolve long enough to make it half way. I now have more than 1000 previously indecipherable symbols in my head. One benefit I’ve noticed is that I’ve actually started recognising the meanings of bits of written CHINESE, which is awesome considering my Chinese basically consists of ‘ni hao’, 'duoshao qian’, and 'tai gui le’.

Anyway, if I still want to achieve my goal of learning the meanings and writings of all 2042 characters in this book by the end of the year, I’m going to have to do 12 new characters a day without fail until the end of the year. I’m not sure that’s going to happen, but if I overrun it’s not the end of the world. There is some possibility that I could pull out the stops during the Christmas holiday to catch up on any inevitable set-backs that occur between now and then, but regardless of whether I manage or not I still want to do the supplement that covers the newly approved general-use kanji from 2010 before I diversify into finally making a start on the language itself.

Which reminds me: I stumbled upon a website today that seems to have independently come up with the same principles as the Heisig method I am following, except the author is less formal, more entertaining, and has put all his stuff up on a website for free. The Introduction is well worth a read, even if you’re not interested in Chinese/Japanese characters. Anyway, the site is called http://kanjidamage.com/ and looks interesting. I don’t know how the order of the kanji are arranged on it compared to the Heisig ordering, but I’ll definitely cross-reference that site from now on for characters I’m struggling with.

Another thing I’ve not really been doing seriously is the immersion environment advocated by the AJATT method. That’s really designed for the post-kanji stages though, so I’m not too worried about it and I have been listening to this radio station quite a lot while at work / studying in the evenings. It has a nice mix of genres and lots of general chatting to slowly get my brain used to what normal conversation sounds like.

One technique I keep forgetting to do is to actually use the characters when I’m taking notes in English. Since they are words in themselves, this is completely possible and is excellent practice. It’s just one of those things that is hard to start because of the initial slowness in writing / note-taking. I’m going to start that tomorrow and try to keep myself at it.

That’s all for now. I’m off to bed. Here’s to the next milestone. :-D