If you’ve been coming here a while (congratulations for being one of the very few?), you’ve observed the scarcity of recent posts – either I’ve run out of insights, or realized that what I thought were insights really weren’t, or whatever – but mostly every time I think about writing a proper blog post I think of the hour or two hours it’ll take and consider the relative value of spending that time reading Japanese or watching a Japanese movie or doing some Skritter or whatever and the actual doing always wins out over the talking about it. Readers have been extremely few anyway (often less than 10 even for new posts), so I’m sure whatever those of you who wander in here are looking for is taken care of elsewhere.

Perhaps once I’ve mastered this language learning lark I’ll explain here how I did it but it looks like that’ll take some considerable while.

The resources that are here including the blog archive will of course stay online; I won’t just let it fizzle until it really does stop getting traffic entirely.

I’ll still post the occasional new word or expression or brief thought over on my tumblr, so follow that if you’d like.

I do sincerely thank all of you for your kindness in reading for these nearly four years now. All the best with your own mysterious journey and may the cookie crumbs never lead you astray.

Underneath the blogroll on the side there, you’ll see a new category entitled Stats, and under that is a link called readthekanji.com record.  This links to a spreadsheet detailing my daily progress on readthekanji, in case anyone is curious to follow along.  I’m hoping this will produce some useful data over time.

You’ll note a new menu on the sidebar, in which the interesting part is the last page; I’ve put together a bit of a links page specifically to gather resources for extensive reading.  There’s enough text linked there already to keep anyone busy for years, but if you have more of such sites, by all means let me know about them.

It’s nearly time for the next ReadMOD extensive reading contest, which will begin on January 1.

LordSilent was kind enough to allow me to write a guest post explaining a bit about extensive reading and about the contest – go read it here.  Registration is easy – sign up today if you haven’t yet!

Completely on impulse, I decided to make a separate blog for matters concerning my study of the Japanese language and related topics.

That’s here, in case you were wondering.

The other place (reachable via the link in my blogroll entitled “the other place”) is still extant, but will now have a laser-sharp focus on – well – everything else.

I believe this will work out nicely.  As you can see by the archives at the other place, I have so much to post it can’t really fit on one blog.  Ahem.

At any rate, you can expect to see here: tips and hints on learning Japanese, as I think of them or find them; interesting facts or photos from Japan; (and maybe even the odd historical article); completely boring updates on my own progress, which will serve nicely to put you to sleep; perhaps very occasionally some anime talk; links and recommendations to other blogs and useful sites.*

楽しみに！

*The way I worded that seems to imply that this site will also be useful … that may be a bit of a stretch … best edit that sometime.