I'm doing 41 things
I got to 550 on July 26th, and I just met 600 today (a goal which I failed to even set… might explain why it took so long to meet it). I could say that I’ve been busy with school and work, but really I’ve just not been very keen on adding more reviews by adding sentences. It was kinda nice to just reinforce the sentences I already had for a while, but now it’s time to push forward a little more.
Meanwhile, I’ve been completely neglecting the kanji. I have some 700 or so reviews due on that. And I don’t have any plans of tackling that beast any time soon. It just isn’t doing me much good to know a whole bunch of kanji that I don’t even see in use, because most of the Japanese reading I do is when I’m reviewing my sentences. I would like to change that eventually, but reading at the beginner level is so much less enjoyable than watching anime or listening to music at the same level. At least I can get the gist of things, see the interactions taking place, hear the music and the tone of the voice. With written Japanese it’s a big mess of a puzzle that takes a huge effort to decipher. I’m sticking to the principle of “do what’s fun”, and for now, that’s watching anime and listening to music.
I’m sticking with my hope that at about 1,000 sentences, I’ll have the vocab and grammar familiarity to be able to claim marginal proficiency. Maybe then I’ll be able to at least enjoy manga, where the pictures can do a lot of the work for me. Speaking of that, I’ll need to figure out where to get non-translated manga for non-exorbitant prices.
