Not to worry, I haven’t vanished quite yet, just haven’t had a great deal to blog about lately nor much time to write.  Right now I should be snoozing but I’ll divert a minute for a quick status update.

Lately I have been focusing mainly on going through the core2000 decks on smart.fm.  I haven’t finished any yet, because that doesn’t actually seem possible – how long do those things stay at 99% anyway?! – but I’m nearly done step 4 (out of 10) and started step 5.  200 words and sentences per deck.  I wanted to start my own sentence deck long ago already, but I figure I’ll finish this as quickly as I can and then get going on building a sentence deck and a great deal more extensive reading.  The sentences one gets whilst going through the core decks are not bad anyway and if one pays attention to them and tries to understand them fully (not hard so far) it’s pretty much as good.  I think.

Speaking of reading I’ve been sporadically reading the graded readers a bit and finished the first set and and working on the first book of the second set.  The first set was really easy and the second set is a nice step up.  Next month is the reading contest so I’ll be working much more on that, both readers and my stack of manga which is getting almost impressive when it’s all piled up at once – probably about thirty volumes by now.

Kanji is still ongoing of course and after importing my deck from the RTK website to Anki my daily reviews have on average gone down a little.  Usually between 60 and 80 now.  But I also made a deck to review for recognition, so that makes for another 60ish reviews a day – that’s quick though, can be done in ten or fifteen minutes usually.  The writing reviews usually take 15 or 20 minutes so on average so I’m done with kanji in half or three-quarter hour.  As far as readings, I did take a membership on readthekanji.com but haven’t really had time to use it yet since core2k takes up most of my study time in the evenings.  So I depend on learning readings in context for now.

Also I’m slowly progressing through the Tae Kim grammar deck, adding just five cards a day, so that is usually ten or fifteen minutes worth.  I guess I’m about 20% done with that.

As far as listening, passive and otherwise, I just started the lower intermediate level podcasts from japanesepod101 which are nice because they have a whole lot less English than the beginner levels.  They’re somewhat of a challenge though, so listening to them at work isn’t proving to be terribly helpful.  Not sure what I’ll do about that.

So that’s that for now – I’m really focused on progressing through the core decks as far as I possibly can in the next week and a half before the reading contest starts, because once that begins then reading will get top priority.  It’ll certainly be interesting to see what progress I can make that way.