I didn’t post a pre-readmod post this time around because I really didn’t know what to expect.  Looking at my previous results, it’s clear something went very much off the rails somewhere.  I’m still not entirely sure what it was, but quite clearly, sometime around the one-year mark of  learning Japanese in earnest, I lost the plot rather badly.

However I think I might now be getting a little closer to the well-oiled assimilation machine that I want to be.  I’m not nearly there yet, but the fact that I hit 300 pages yesterday says something; it’s not impressive at all, no, but it’s over twice what I read in the previous contest all together.  And I’m enjoying it, too.  (Well until they get into the explainers – the history and science of Aqua (the ARIA world) are a little – strike that, a lot – heavy on the vocab.  Just drives home again how critical it is to stay within that 95%+ comprehension zone.  Those sections, even if I look up everything, I still often don’t quite get the sentence – it’s all just too much at once.)

It’s also become quite clear that for me, doing a lot of a few things works much better than spreading my studying around amongst too many different tools and approaches.  I guess I was the same way as a kid; play for hours with one toy more so than five minutes with a bunch of different ones.  So now I have to limit my toys in order to maximize their effectiveness.  Extensive reading (and its variant, incremental reading) has to be the cornerstone, and other techniques will be applied if and as they complement that.