Which is kind of what it’s been like lately.  Sorting out what works and what doesn’t is half the challenge of this game, of which more anon.

I’ve finally given up completely on the long-form incremental reading; while effective, it’s just too easy to make excuses for.  The most common are “don’t feel like reading this story again” and “don’t have thirty consecutive minutes right now” which is of course kind of lame because everyone does have that amount of time if the desire is there to use it.  But if the desire isn’t there sometimes it isn’t even worth questioning why not.  Just move on to something you do want to do.

The shorter variety though, is going superbly.  I’m mixing it with audio now to improve listening comprehension, with very good results.  Right now I’m just working through Miki’s blog from japanesepod101.com, reading the blog first and then listening (have the audio on the cards).  If anyone wants this Anki deck let me know and I’ll give you an address to download it.

After a very rocky upgrade, readthekanji.com is working pretty well again, and I’m well into the JLPT1 list.  It’s odd how much you get good at what you just focus on doing regularly.  Kanji readings are going from a weak point to a strong point (well, relatively!), so much so that I quite often can easily read a word without having any clue what it means.  That’s OK though; that’s for tadoku to sort out.

And speaking of which that starts in a couple of days, doesn’t it.  This round I’m going to worry about my score even less than last time, and especially am not going to drop everything else the way I did.  I’m basically done digging out from under my vocabulary deck after adding all 800+ words at once that I collected the last tadoku month, and I have no intentions of going through that again.  So new words will be added immediately, readthekanji will continue, incremental reading and listening, etc.  I want to reread quite a bit of what I read last round, expecting the 50% score to be roughly balanced out by faster reading, and more importantly solidifying what I learned.  Also, I want to finally finish Alice in Wonderland, probably read through Death Note and Durarara!!, and, well, play it by ear pretty much.

You know, if you’re exploring an unknown sea, it hardly even matters which way you’re going.  There’s so much unknown territory, you can hoist sails and go whichever way the wind blows and you’ll discover things everywhere.  And at some point, the parts you’ve seen before often enough become familiar, and once enough of the sea is familiar, then maybe it’s more worth your trouble to seek out specific areas, but until then 風任せ 🙂