Fetchez la vache!

After an incredibly stressful night last night of thinking I might not manage to hit my target, today I finished my ambition of covering all the characters in Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji book in one year. :-) The last lesson was actually quite fun - the author had intended it to be an educational one about preparing to learn new kanji for the future, but all I could do was revel in the imminent achievement of my goal.

I don’t think I’ve ever exercised as much self-discipline as I have in achieving this. Especially over the last couple of weeks, I’ve basically worked almost every waking moment on absorbing these characters. The only moments I wasn’t working I was taking breaks to give my brain a chance to “forget” any characters which needed a bit more work.

I wouldn’t have been able to achieve this in a year without the awesome site that is http://kanji.koohii.com/ and its contributors, as well as the amazingly useful http://jisho.org/ dictionary. Both Koohii’s SRS system and the user-submitted stories are excellent, often improving upon Heisig’s suggestions and pointing out better combinations of elements for easier memorisation. Starting this blog was definitely a good move, as without it people would have never pointed out these tools and I might have become overwhelmed with the sheer task of maintaining so many characters at once out of context, or at least discovered them much later.

So, what’s next for 2012? Well, while I’ve covered all the characters at least once, they will still take some revision to become properly lodged in long-term memory. As evident from the graph above, the last-minute cramming has resulted in hundreds of characters that have only been reviewed a few times. So I’m going to use January to take it easy a bit, maintaining the revision to allow the characters to sink in. There is also a supplement of another couple of hundred characters to bring the book up to date with the revised jouyou kanji list in 2010, so I’m going to add a few of those a day too. Compared to the 60-70 a day I was adding recently, I’m pretty sure it’ll be an easy ride.

Come February (or before if I get restless), I’m going to finally start learning some actual Japanese. I’ve not decided on my method yet, there are so many resources available. It’ll probably be some varient of the sentence method, adjusted for the fact that I have a full time job. I’ll probably have to get creative to keep my Japanese exposure to the maximum, however the last few weeks have been so unsustainable that I don’t want to put myself into the position of having no human interaction again. I have Tango I want to improve on too, and I need time to relax. :) I think the best approach is to avoid setting hard high goals, and instead aim for consistent wide goals. I’m happy to have made an exception for the basic kanji as that is such a barrier to Japanese literacy, but I think for my own sanity and to avoid falling off the rails, from now on consistency of improvement should be the general aim, rather than to achieve X by Y. I’ll just have to be vigilant that I’m not underusing my time or potential.

Anyway, that’s it for 2011. See you next year!