My first novels have arrived! I've gotten surprisingly far (read: 20 pages) into 俺妹１ in the past week. It's amazing how much kanji help comprehension, even if I only know a few dozen readings at this point.Still haven't bought any anime; Amazon sucks and does not accept PayPal (but they'd be perfectly happy to have my bank details themselves... yeah right) and of course none of the big box stores stock anything I want. (In any case, I just blew all my money on a POD HD, so I don't have the cash to buy any right now anyway.)
My sentence SRS deck is growing steadily, currently sitting at 270 cards. (All from Naoko Chino's All About Particles -- I'm going to do the whole book before moving on to other sources.) So far I've noticed a few things:
- I have to physically write out a kanji compound a few times to remember it. Reading is no problem in most cases, but being able to produce the correct kanji by hand is difficult. (Since I do all the data entry by typing (obviously) I guess I don't fully acknowledge the component characters?) Hopefully this is a short term thing and more exposure will make this easier.
- Kana are hard to write neatly. All of the odd curves are very different from the limited strokes of writing kanji. か and て give me particular trouble. (Oddly, though, み is one of the easiest for me to write...)
- Khatz (AJATT) is right about "don't bother studying grammar" -- I can already pick out the basic gist of some sentences after 3 weeks.
I've also spent time getting my immersion environment up for real. I revived my twitter account and follow a bunch of Japanese people. (NHK news, ニコニコ guitarists, character twitters, etc.) This has produced some interesting material that I plan to SRS (once I figure out the necessary readings and such -- they'll sit in a .txt file until then.) I've also started using Khatz's URL shuffler, which is all kinds of awesome -- one click and I get either a Japanese webpage or a YouTube music video. (Unfortunately, I don't see a means of separating the two so that I could chose whether I want reading material or listening material.) As an aside, Dengeki's web site is more of a time-sink than Wikipedia. Hours have been wasted...
じゃ・・・またなぁ。
