まだ頑張っている。

I hope to get past 700 in RTK tonight.
If everything works out, I could get to go to Japan in a few months to teach English for an extended period of time! Needless to say, this is increased my motivation quite a bit. ^^

Slow but steady wins the race. I'll get to fluency eventually. ;)

５百

Past 500 in RTK! At about 525ish, still going (more or less) strong.

Sorry for the short and infrequent posts, I'm too busy learning 日本語 to talk about learning 日本語. ;)

Look up Rikaichan if you use firefox, or Rikaikun if you use chrome. Possible the most useful things, ever in this hyperbolic world.

Linkage

A trivial amount of work in a nontrivial direction always has nontrivial significance.

Here are 2 really inspirational posts I found on AJATT.com, both dealing with goals and language acquisition.
http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/critical-frequency-a-brand-new-way-of-looking-at-language-exposure
http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/kill-your-heroes

I think the critical frequency idea is very interesting, just exposing yourself to your L2 (Second Language) as many times as you can throughout the day, with the time you spend on each exposure not being as important as how often the exposure is.

Anyways, I'm up to ~425 in RTK, still going at a mostly slow but steady pace, and I have 5 various decks in Anki for vocab and sentences. I can definitely see my progress in kanji, but I keep wanting to spend time studying more vocab. For now I'll stick with mainly RTK, as tangible results are the most motivating. After RTK though (that seems like forever away to me right now...) I'll make vocabulary my ******* *****... I mean, I shall learn numerous vocabulary words and phrases so as to employ them in an eloquent manner. Eventually I hope to switch this blog (with all it's current 0 readers) over to entirely Japanese or bilingual, doing an English and a Japanese version of each post. For now, back to RTK.

夢

^I learned a kanji I really like today. 夢ーyume
It means "dream".

In other news, still going fairly strong on srsing and RTK, slightly less strong on AJATT. It seems like having regular access to a laptop would help on that front. I currently only have my android phone. While great for srs, its not as convenient for media immersion. But I'll make do with what I have. Making progress is really exciting. I'm excited to hit the 400 and 500 milestones in RTK, I'll update when I do.

For anyone doing RTK

Incredibly useful spreadsheet I found that gives a (usually) common Japanese word for most of the kanji in RTK.

https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pSVGYHKdvOhPxNTHq5aUHNQ&gid=0

Past 300!

I'm officially past 300 in RTK! I actually got there a few days ago but I've been slacking a bit and I didnt have any flashcards so I haven't gone any further since then. (I use traditional paper flashcards in addition to virtual srs flashcards). I have still been reviewing what I have though. It seems to me like I am going through the book at a slower pace than most; I would estimate I do about 10 new cards a day average. I think it's okay though, my retention rate is still very high. I'll keep the progress going, that's for sure. Also, I'm not quite fully doing the Ajatt (http://www.AllJapaneseAllTheTime.com) method in full, but I'm taking and using some of the better ideas from the site, such as listening to Japanese music (Thank you, Mr. Children) and podcasts (I recommend any of the free content on http://www.japanesepod101.com) whenever it's not inappropriate to wear earbuds. All in all, I'm still pleased with my progress so far and I'm excited by both how far I've come and by how much better I can still get. Thanks for all your support so far, 0 blog readers! ;)

Bonus: Some of my favorite kanji (because of look or meaning) - 傘　災　希源　完　憂鬱　霧　雪　愛　悲　春夏秋冬　茶　漠　影

Results of Scouring the Web

Here are some of the most useful sites that I have found whilst browsing the web for any useful (read: methods that don't require massive amounts of work) helpers to learn Japanese.


http://japaneselevelup.com
http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/
http://kanji.koohii.com/
http://tatoeba.org
http://wwwjdic.org/