But the chinks in my system have been showing. As we know from queueing theory, if you keep your queues too close to their average capacity, then, when something goes wrong, things go out of control pretty fast. And, a couple of weeks ago, I had a cold that dragged on for a while; that, combined with some evening events that I had to drive to, meant that I didn’t walk to work for two weeks straight. The result was that I now have way too many podcasts to listen to.

Which has caused me to re-evaluate my behavior. One question that it raises: why do I feel that I have to listen to those podcasts? Just what does it mean to me to be subscribed to a podcast? My meaning had been that I intended to listen to every episode of that podcast; as I’m discovering, that’s a significant commitment, enough so that I should make it consciously instead of through inertia.

And, now that I think about it, I’m realizing that that compulsion conflicts with one of my planning rules. I try to structure my life so that, as much as possible, I’m doing what I’m most interested in at any given moment; the mere existence of subscriptions encourage me to not even think about that question. And, to the extent that I do think about the question, it biases my results: for example, it makes it less likely for me to listen to CDs, because I have to fit them in between my podcast subscriptions.

Don’t get my wrong, I really like the podcasts that I’m subscribed to. Having said that, if I didn’t have time to listen to, say, In Our Time last week, is there any reason for me to make a point of finding time to listen to last week’s episode? Stated that way, my behavior is a bit silly: there are no end of episodes that were made before I started to subscribe to the podcast; I haven’t listened to them, so what makes the more recent episodes so special?

And that’s not an isolated example. Looking through what I have in iTunes, most of the podcasts that I’m subscribed to are ones that I don’t really have a reason to commit to listening to every episode. So, while I’m not unsubscribing from any of them, I’m also going to pause on listening to several of them while I catch up on other listening, and I’m unchecking the box that will cause them to be synced to my iPhone until I’m more confident that I want to spend time listening to them.

Having said that, I’m not completely giving up on my old conception of subscriptions. In particular, I really do like JapanesePod101, This American Life, and Planet Money enough to want to listen to every episode. (There are other podcasts that I also plan to listen to every episode of, but those three are the only ones that regularly come out at least once a week.) That’s about three hours a week of listening; that will leave me with quite a bit of unscheduled listening time where I’ll be able to explore more widely than I have been in the past.

My blog reading has gotten out of control a little more subtly: it’s not that I don’t have enough time to read the blogs in my feed reader, it’s more that doing so eats up enough of my time that I find it hard to get a solid hour to really concentrate. So, if I catch up on my reading on some evening, then doing so rarely leaves me able to, say, write a blog post of my own or play a game or read a book. (The latter of which I’m not doing nearly enough these days!) So, while I am spending too much time reading blogs, it’s also interfering with my time usage out of promotion to the total time I’m spending on it. Also, constantly feeling like I’m under pressure to clear out my reader means that I don’t always take the time to really think about longer form posts, posts that are saying something new to me. (Which is more than a bit ironic, given the average length of my own posts; I’m very grateful to those of you who actually read these!)

This is pretty screwed up: I need time to think and do, to not always be hitting the ‘j’ button. Fortunately, phrasing my behavior that way makes the next step pretty clear: I should cut out larger chunks of free time explicitly by timeboxing my blog reading. Concretely, I’m going to experiment with only reading blogs three days a week: Tuesdays, Thursdays, and once on the weekend. And I’ll try to clear out my feed reader every time: if I don’t make it through my feeds, that’s a sign that either I have to unsubscribe from feeds to fit my time budget or I have to get used to the “mark all as read” button.

It’s an experiment. But I need to make more time for myself; I also need to make more time that I can spend with primary experiences (games, music, books), instead of secondary reflections. I’m overcommitted right now: I need to rediscover the void in my life, or at least a richer texture.

Actually, I subscribed to several of the company’s series: I was pretty sure that the lowest level they offered was too basic for me, but the next five levels (going from 2-year-old through 6-year-old) all seemed plausible. So I subscribed to all five, planning to unsubscribe from the lower levels as I got more confident. In fact, I subscribed to them several months before I finished the textbook, so I had a backlog built up before I started reading any of them.

So I started working through my backlog of the 2-to-4-year-old fiction level, こどものとも年少版. (Which means something like “child’s friend early years edition”?) It was surprisingly hard, in some ways harder for me than later levels: it uses an awful lot of onomatopoeia (which Japanese uses much more than English in general), and I’m fairly sure that some of the speech forms are somewhat nonstandard parents-talking-to-kids forms rather than what I’d learned in grammar books. Fortunately, the books were totally charming, and while I wouldn’t want all books to be as repetitive as those ones are (a lot of doing the same thing on different pages with different numbers or colors or animals or whatever), it really helped me to have the same sentence structure and half of the same words to cling to while figuring out the rest of what’s on the page. And I’ve gotten a lot better at reading books in that series over the intervening months; the onomatopoeia words are even starting to stick.

Once I made it through my backlog of books at that level, I started on the next level: ちいさなこどものとも (little science’s friend?), nonfiction for 3-5 year olds. This was a great level for me: the sentences didn’t have the word usage quirks that previous level had, and the sentences were a bit more interesting while still not requiring me to look up an overwhelming number of words.

About a month ago, I made it through my backlog of those (I’d been reading one every weekend), and moved up to the next level. It’s called こどものとも年中向き (child’s friend targeted at intermediate years?), and is fiction for 4-5 year olds. And I’m enjoying the transition: the books are a bit longer than previous volumes (28 pages instead of 24 with more words to a page), but my practice from previous levels is paying off, as is my memorization practice, so they’re not taking too long. I’ve only read three books from that level so far, but they’re really quite varied: one was a regular story that confused my a lot until I realized that some of the word endings were in regional dialect; one consisted of scenes from a train station that might have fit better in the science series; and one was a counting/animal story that, honestly, probably would have fit better at an earlier level.

I’ve subscribed to but not started reading two more levels after that (one nonfiction, one fiction, both going through age 6); for now, I’m staying subscribed to the earlier levels, but I imagine at some point I’ll unsubcribe to those and add a subscription to something still more advanced. Also, for what it’s worth, all of the levels I’m subscribed to are kana-only, so my kanji practice isn’t paying off here yet. Though it’s paying off in other areas: for example, it’s kind of weird looking over at the spines of my Japanese go books and realizing that I actually recognize most of the characters I see there, even the non-go-specific ones.

I’m still listening to JapanesePod101, of course (incidentally, they just added a Chinese sister site, if you’re interested in learning Mandarin), and I’m spending a lot of time (almost certainly an unproductive proportion of time) memorizing vocabulary in general and Kanji in particular. In particular, I basically haven’t skipped a day using my memory program since it went live almost 10 months ago. (I usually use it during my lunch break at work.)

Which has been an interesting experience: in particular, at first, I ignored some of Wozniak’s suggestions, and I’ve learned that I was wrong to do so. To be clear, I don’t claim to be following any of his algorithms at all—I’m sticking with the algorithm I outlined here—but there are recommendations he makes that would apply to my algorithm that I ignored. In particular, he suggests a floor of 1.3 for the exponent; initially, I figured I’d put in a floor of 1.0 instead. But, after a few months, that turned out not to work at all: it was taking more and more time each day to review stuff because, once an item got tagged as “most difficult” (not too hard with kanji), I’d review it every single day for a month, and that clogged up fast. So I bumped the floor up to 1.2, and things got better; I then figured I should stop reinventing the wheel and bumped it up to 1.3, and I’m glad I did.

I’m also doing a better job now of following his suggestion of breaking up items into small chunks to memorize. Before, I would list all of the readings of a Kanji as one item: e.g. for the question 問 I would list the answer “もん、と（い）question, problem; と（う）matter, care about”. But now I break that up into three pairs: Q: 問, A: もん question, problem; Q: 問い, A: とい question, problem; Q: 問う, A: とう matter, care about. That has several advantages: individual items are smaller (as Wozniak recommends), I naturally focus more on the readings that are harder for me to remember, and I’m testing myself on something that actually matters when reading instead of an abstract skill. (I.e. I will encounter 問う when reading, but I will never be in a situation where it matters if I can list all the endings that you can stick after the Kanji 問.) In particular, the previous method wasn’t good at training me to tell whether, say, 上る was the reading のぼる or あがる. (It’s the former, the latter is written 上がる.)

Also, I made another Japanese-specific change while breaking up the kanji into multiple questions: I started writing the On readings (derived from Chinese) in katakana and the Kun (native Japanese) readings in hiragana. (So the answer to 問 is really モン.) It’s actually usually pretty obvious whether a reading is On or Kun, so that’s not important from a memorization point of view, but it meant that every day I was exposed to hundreds of katakana characters, so my katakana recognition speed has increased dramatically. (Incidentally, if any of you are learning Japanese, a recommendation: learn how to use your keyboard input method. Under Linux, you can convert a word to katakana by hitting F7; under OSX, by hitting control-k.)

Another surprise: I’d sort of assumed that some sort of geometric series magic would mean that I would be able to keep adding items to the database without increasing the amount of time I need to spend reviewing each day. Which, if you think about it for a minute, isn’t the case at all: e.g. if all items are at exponent 2 and I never make a mistake, then every day I need to review all the items I added yesterday, all the items added 2 days ago, all the items added 4 days ago, all the items added 8 days ago, all the items added 16 days ago, etc., and the growth here is unbounded. (Or rather, is bounded only by my lifespan!) I don’t think this is a big problem, but it might be; it does suggest that if I have too many items with small exponents then I’m in trouble. I hope that that problem will naturally ease: there’s a limit to the number of Kanji I have to memorize (I’m almost halfway through the official common usage Kanji list), and as I start reading more, I’ll get exposed to vocabulary more frequently in other contexts, which should manifest itself by the vocabulary seeming easier from the program’s point of view. We’ll see how it goes; if it gets too bad, I’ll cut down on the forced memorization and spend more of my time just reading and not worrying much about words I don’t know.

I had plans to quickly spiff up this application and make it multiuser, but that didn’t happen: basically, it became useable shockingly quickly, and I really didn’t have much of an impetus to improve it past that stage. It’s amazing what I’ve managed to leave out: for example, I assumed that I would have to implement a search functionality early on. But part of the basic Rails CRUD functionality is a URL that lists all the items, and combining that with browser search still works acceptably for search even though I’ve got over 3000 memory items listed. Or I assumed that I would have to secure it (and probably naturally add multiuser functionality as part of that) to get it useable while at work or travelling, but ssh tunnelling to an unsecure deployment was working fine for me until I got my new iPod and wanted to be able to use the program from the iPod’s web browser.

That’s changing now: aside from the iPod issue, I’ve recently gotten a bit frustrated with some UI elements, Miranda has shown some curiosity in using the program, and I just finished reading the paper version of the third edition of the Rails book. So now I’m pretty excited to start up my tinkering again! And in fact I started that last weekend (I continue to be impressed at how easy it is to write functional tests in Rails, incidentally), and I plan to continue with that on future weekends until the program looks/works a lot better. So: Jim and Praveen, I apologize for the delays, I’ll have a multiuser version available soon if you’re still interested! And anybody else who is interested, let me know; I’ll announce it here when it’s ready for use by people other than myself.

For whatever reason, the grammar in the middle third didn’t seem any harder for me to learn than the grammar in the first third. And there are actually fewer vocabulary words to memorize than in the first third; I suppose it makes sense that, when starting the language, they have to throw more new vocabulary at you to enable you to read anything.

I’m also getting better at memorizing vocabulary and kanji. I’m now up to 448 kanji on my journey through the joyo kanji; I can reliably learn fourteen a week (seven every three days, actually), whereas before I only did seven some weeks. I still have a hard time believing that I won’t run into a wall at some point during the 1500 kanji that remain, but I could be wrong; if I haven’t run into problems so far, maybe I won’t run into problems later? I still have a good two years of kanji memorizing ahead of me, unless my rate speeds up dramatically, but that trip is starting to look increasingly manageable.

If I could wave a magic wand and fix one thing right now, it would be my retention of vocabulary (and, to a lesser extent, grammar) that I learned a few months ago. I don’t have a magic wand, but I’m hoping that the memory project will solve that problem. (I still haven’t started programming on it—bad David—but I did write my first toy Rails app this evening, so I am taking baby steps.)

It looks like I’m about five months away from finishing the textbook. Which isn’t exactly right around the corner, but it’s close enough that I should start thinking about next steps. Some possible areas to work on:

• Speaking Japanese.
• Listening to spoken Japanese. (E.g. in movies or video games.)
• Reading Japanese.
• Increasing my vocabulary.
• Learning more grammar.

For now, my main goal is to improve my ability to read Japanese, so I’m going to have that drive my next actions. (Though if we decide to travel to Japan next year, I’d want to bump up the priority of speaking Japanese.) I’m getting some pretty good ideas of what I might want to do next in that vein: Japanese volumes of Hikaru no Go, the annotated books I recently purchased, some kids’ magazines that Jim mentioned. (I realized that I’m acting like some of the people mentioned in the NLP book: I want to learn Japanese, so I try to imitate people who learn Japanese better than I do, so I act like a Japanese kid (or an American kid with Japanese parents), so I order Japanese children’s magazines!)

And, of course, reading Japanese will require me to increase my vocabulary and grammar; I’m comfortable with my plan for the former (words that I run into in books, the joyo kanji), and I have some resources for the latter.

All in all, pretty happy. I just need to get off my butt and start programming, so I’ll have the memory program available before I go on vacation. (Or before I run out of blank cards in my vocabulary box!) And I should probably just go and subscribe to a subset of those magazines; I might as well start trying to read some of the younger ones right now.

In my first game, I took one stone, and the only reason why it was particularly close was that my opponent made a stupid mistake in the endgame that cost him about 10 points; I should have resigned earlier. Judging from conversations I overheard, I got the impression that he normally plays as 3 dan but his rating has slipped recently; I’m quite willing to believe that, it felt like he was 2-3 stones stronger than me.

My second game was frustrating in that the score on the board was 61 to 54, and the AGA rules have a rather large komi of 7.5. Oops.

The way my third game ended was instructional. We were fighting a ko; I made a ko threat. At least I thought it was a ko threat: my opponent started looking at it, and I realized that, because of a snapback, it wasn’t actually a threat to capture the stone it seemed to be threatening.

And then I looked more closely at the ko, and got really nervous. If I’d given in and connected, it would have only cost me a point. If he won the ko, rather than connecting, he’d capture four of my stones, which could be a big amount at some points in the endgame, but I had (despite my misreading of this one) several ko threats on the board that were bigger than that.

But then I realized that his capturing those four stones wasn’t all that was going on: it created a serious threat on my group adjacent to them, and in fact I wasn’t completely sure that my group would survive if I tenukied. (Which I would have to do to make good on any ko threat I would play.) This is something I hadn’t really thought of when doing ko fights: it’s not enough to just calculate the value of your opponent’s first move if he ignores your ko threat, you also have to figure out if that move is sente. And, if it is, you have to play ko threats that are enough larger to make it worthwhile to ignore that sente move.

Despite all of that, it turned out well. My ko threat wasn’t a threat in the way I thought it was; fortunately, when I read it more carefully, there was a more subtle shortage of liberties there. Which my opponent missed, so he won the ko; he captured four of my stones, lost twenty of his, and didn’t manage to capture the other ten of mine that were threatened! (In our post-game review, we decided that the best play after his initial capture lead to my group living in seki, but as it was it lived outright.) A very odd result: we both misread my ko threat, and the result was that, as an outcome of a ko fight that I’d initially miscalculated as small, the game turned from a close game to one where he resigned!

My fourth game was really weird. My opponent’s grasp of large-scale structures was even worse than mine, but he constantly wanted to get into fights with me. And, in doing so, he left himself weak, so I was constantly attacking him! Really bloody, and we both misread situations in significant ways; I misread more than he did, and lost. I really shouldn’t have misread some of those situations; the flip side is that I should probably look for clever attacks more often, because if he can find weaknesses like that in my positions, I’m probably missing some in my opponents’ positions.

One big takeaway from my first two games, which jives with my memories from other recent tournaments: I’m probably doing a better job of building up influence than I did a few years ago, but I’m also being far too cavalier about letting my opponents getting significant territory on the sides. In particular, I really underestimate how valuable it is to have an entire side of the board.

The nice non-go-related aspect of the tournament was that it was in the SF Japantown. I had lunch at Sapporo-ya, which doesn’t look like much from the outside but which we discovered has quite good ramen when we tried it out because we NEEDED FOOD NOW the last time we went to Japantown. And I did some shopping at Kinokuniya; they didn’t have what I was looking for (more Puzzle Nikoli books; fortunately, the ones I have will last me through the only upcoming trip we have planned), but I found a go book I didn’t already own.

And I browsed through the instructional language section, and acquired more inventory there. Which doesn’t entirely thrill me, but I’ll be finishing my Japanese textbook in about half a year, I’m not sure I’ll go to a Japanese bookstore between now and then, and I could use ideas from browsing in a bookstore. And if I learn about books that I want to buy while browsing in a bookstore, I’m going to almost always buy them there, instead of noting them down and buying them elsewhere. The haul:

• Collections of essays and fiction with “translations of all the complex passages”, copious notes, and a dictionary. (And a CD and profiles of the authors.) I’m really excited about these: they look like a great way to make the transition from book learning to reading real Japanese.
• Two volumes of Japanese in MangaLand: I liked the other introduction-to-Japanese-via-manga book that I read, so I figured I’d give these a try as well.
• A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar. I bought this partly because I figure it might be a reasonable thing to read once I’m done with the textbook and/or a reasonable reference, but mostly because there’s an intermediate grammar in the same series, which I expect will be a good follow-up to the textbook.

All in all, if I’m going to accumulate inventory, it doesn’t look like too bad a choice: I have specific triggers coming up in the not-too-distant future that I expect will cause me to start reading all of them, and I’ll probably start reading the manga volumes sooner than that: the first one would be a good candidate to bring on vacation.

A quite pleasant day. I even got some studying done over lunch, so I didn’t particularly fall behind in my regular activities.

Fortunately, I have not been slacking off on all of my side activities: I’m finally caught up with all the back episodes of JapanesePod101! I even managed to catch up a couple of months earlier than I predicted, largely due to the fact that, for a while, they were only doing two episodes a week that were at about the right level for me instead of three episodes a week. (I listen to all the episodes, I just pay more attention to some than others.)

Actually, learning Japanese has been going well for the last two or three months. I was unhappy with how long it took me to go through the first ten chapters of the textbook I’m using; since then, I’ve done six more chapters, and only one of them took more than two weeks, so my pace has increased noticeably. (And that one only took three weeks.) And I’m up to 301 characters in my march through the Joyo Kanji; I still have years to go on that journey, but at least it isn’t showing any signs of stalling.

Happy signs everywhere.

Of course, now that I’ve finished those, the question is: what next? To follow up the latter book, I’m trying to spend more time imagining ways to link radicals to characters when memorizing characters. And Amazon commenters recommended the book Chinese for Begninners, which is apparently really about the characters rather than other aspects of that language; I’ve ordered a copy, we’ll see if I like it or not.

To follow up the former book, I’d been tentatively thinking that I’d start going through Hikaru no Go: I have the first volume in both English and Japanese, so it seems like a good place to start testing myself against the language more. The problem with that, though, is that I’m not sure exactly where in my schedule I’d find time to read it in Japanese! Fortunately, the problem doesn’t seem very urgent right now: I’ve found other ways to expose myself to Japanese (watching episodes of Hikaru and Twelve Kingdoms in Japanese with English subtitles; playing through Eternal Sonata in Japanese with English subtitles), and I’m learning a fair amount from them. I get the feeling that I’ve gotten over some sort of hump: most of the time, I very much rely on the subtitles, but more and more often I can figure out individual words after the fact or even decode whole sentences after the fact, and there are even some very simple sentences that I can figure out without the translation.

Another cause for optimism: for whatever reason, I’m going through the textbook faster than I had been. The last three chapters have taken me two weeks each to finish, instead of the three weeks pace that I’d been going at before, and the pace feels sustainable. My guess is that I’d run into a patch of unfamiliar grammar before (while the recent grammar has been stuff that I’d been at least somewhat familiar with from other sources), and I’m also getting better now at learning new vocabulary, and those have combined to speed up my progress. I wouldn’t be surprised if I occasionally go back to three week chapters (or longer, if illness/vacation get in the way), but I’m now a good deal more optimistic than I was that I’ll manage to finish the last twenty chapters in about a year.

I’m also getting more out of my use of JapanesePod101. I’d been annoyed by two flaws with their RSS feed: they only list the last seven episodes, which makes me worried if I ever go on vacation or need to send my computer in for repairs (previously, when I’d checked, they listed all episodes since their inception in the feed), and they started to throw in “premium lessons”, which I had to download by hand. (I do have a subscription, but I did that because I wanted to support them rather than because I wanted to have special access to stuff; I wished they’d just make the premium lessons available for free and stick them in the main feed!)

So I poked around a bit, and realized that there was a feed available for paid subscribers. And it not only remedied both of those issues, it also contained more material that I was aware of but hadn’t been using. The occasional “bonus audio” tracks are amusing but nothing special; having the lesson-specific PDFs available in iTunes, though, means that I actually look at them (since I see them in iTunes when deleting episodes that I’ve listened to), and they’re a good tool for helping reinforce my learning. I don’t actually generally use them to follow up on the grammatical points in the lesson: their main benefit for me is that they write out each dialogue in four forms: one including kanji, one kana-only, one in romaji, and an English translation. Which gives me a lot more reading practice, and in particular is a good way to test my kanji recognition skills in a safe environment. So now I’ll recommend a basic subscription to other people learning Japanese: it’s not just good for giving yourself warm fuzzies, the extra material in the RSS feed really is useful. (I don’t yet have an opinion about the premium subscription; the price difference is such that I didn’t seriously give it a thought, given that I’m learning enough via other means.)

So: I still have a long way to go, but I’m happy with the recent concrete signs of progress.

One other tweak that I’m considering: I write up lots of vocabulary flash cards (which is clearly useful!); when I’ve decided I know the word in question, I put it in the box in alphabetical order. This takes a noticeable amount of time (not a huge amount of time, but time I’d be happy to eliminate), and is largely drudgery; is it actually useful?

In some circumstances, the answer is yes: if a kanji has lots and lots of readings, I’ll only memorize a few on my first attempt, and take the card out later to add more. But for other words (kana-only ones, compounds), I almost never take out the card once it’s gone in the box. So I’m tentatively thinking that almost all of the time I spend alphabetizing those cards is waste; and, if I decide that I’ve forgotten a word that I once thought I knew and want to take out the card again, I could always just rewrite the card from scratch.

So now I’m thinking I might just throw away cards that don’t correspond to a single kanji. I’m going to think about it for a few weeks, since that’s not a step that’s easily reversible, but it might be a good opportunity to reduce inventory.

I’m a third of a way through my Japanese textbook now: I’ve finished ten of the thirty chapters. Which is, I believe, farther than I made it through the book when I was in grad school, and I’m showing no signs of losing track of grammar / vocabulary, so my strategy of not forcing my way through the chapters before I’m comfortable with them is working.

Having said that, it’s been slower going than I thought: it would seem that it’s taken me about six and a half months to make it as far as I have. Which suggests that I have a bit more than a year to go before I’m through the textbook, which is a little disenheartening: I’d have hoped it would only take a year total to go through the book. And, actually, the situation might be worse than that: I breezed through some of the first chapters, while these days it takes me three weeks to go through a chapter, or more if I get sick or go on vacation or am particularly busy. So I probably have more than 60 weeks ahead of me.

Or maybe not. I’ve been getting exposed to bits and pieces of grammar through other sources; I actually don’t believe that the difficulty curve is really going to increase, and in fact I’m on track to finish Chapter 11 in two weeks instead of three weeks. Still, even at two weeks each, I have 40 weeks ahead of me, and in practice I don’t see how I could possibly have less than a year left, unless I find other techniques that significantly speed up my learning.

That’s fine, I guess; I’m in this for the long haul, and if the outcome of all of this is that in five or even ten years from now I’m reasonably comfortable reading a range of Japanese materials and not embarrassed speaking the language, that would be a win: I hope to have that enrich my life for another three decades or so after that. Still, I might as well take this as an opportunity to review my approach. Is there anything I could be doing better?

Well, one question is: better for what? What’s my goal? To learn Japanese, of course, but how do I define having learned Japanese, and what’s the goal that underlies it? (There’s no end of other things I could be learning, after all.)

The answer isn’t as obvious as it once was. When I thought about doing this in grad school, I had some pretty good answers: learn Japanese = be able to read Japanese, and I had some specific ways in which I’d like to use that skill. There are a lot more go books in Japanese than in English; also, I’d been really impressed by the literary fiction that I’d read translated into English, and I was pretty sure that there’s a lot more where that came from. And then I started getting into comics and video games; again, there was a lot of good stuff that hadn’t been translated into English.

A decade later, though, none of those motivations holds water very well. I don’t spend much time playing go these days, I can’t even keep up with the go literature in English any more, and if I wanted to get back into the game, one obvious way to make time would be to give up learning Japanese. Reading literary fiction is a noble goal, but getting to a level where I can enjoy doing that isn’t easy; even reading French literature is enough of a strain that I don’t do it very often, I can’t think of the last time I read literary fiction in German, and realistically it seems unlikely that I’ll end up learning Japanese as well as I know German. Manga and video games are more realistic goals, but the importance of learning Japanese to delve into those areas is much less than it was not very long ago: I’ve been astounded at how much stuff has been translated into English over the last decade.

Still, enough of my entertainment comes from Japanese sources that I think I have a good case for learning the language on those grounds. And I’d like to visit the country pretty soon; we’re not going this year (Paris again), but I very much hope we’ll go there in 2009 or 2010, and if that goes at all well, I hope that will be the first trip out of many.

The truth is, though, I’m not sure either appreciate cultural artifacts or visiting the country is the real reason why I want to learn the language: I think I just like the idea of learning Japanese. Or maybe the idea of knowing Japanese, I’m not sure. I just like knowing something about different languages, and I’m pretty fascinated by the writing system. So maybe the trip itself is the goal, instead of any putative destination.

I don’t want to go too far down that path, though: it’s easy to use that as an excuse to avoid testing myself (in either the written or spoken arena), and that won’t do me any good: I don’t want to be able to just do textbook exercises or recite lists of vocabulary (even if I enjoy the latter rather more than is healthy), I really do want to know the language at a deeper level. In fact, I’ve gotten far enough that I should start testing myself more seriously soon; more thoughts on that in a later blog post.

So am I doing a good job of meeting my goals? Honestly, I’m not sure. I’m sure I’d make faster progress if I were taking lessons with a native speaker. That would cost money, but probably not enough to be a big deal; it would also cost time away from the house, which is a bigger deal. (Though it’s not like my present approach doesn’t have any time cost – I’m probably putting in about five or six hours a week.) I certainly plan to take lessons at some point, the question is when.

So what would trigger that? One trigger would be if I were going to be in a situation where I’d need to speak the language; when it gets to a year or so before I’m planning to travel to Japan, I’ll want to seriously think about taking lessons. Another trigger would be if I’m finding evidence that book learning isn’t doing a good enough job; hopefully I’ll start trying to read some real books soon, and that will give me more information about the extent to which having outside help would be useful. And a third trigger would be if I see myself avoiding to an unhealthy extent figuring out how well I’ve learned the language: if I do that, I’d need to face my fears.

There are also other tools that I could consider using (and paying money for) other than lessons, e.g. the Learning Center at JapanesePod101. For now, I’m not worrying about that; I doubt that would be a better use of my time than going through a textbook would, though it’s something to think about once I’m done with the textbook.

Something to think about. For now, I guess I should be happy with the real progress that I’ve made; I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me, I don’t want to stay on autopilot, but I know more than I did half a year ago, and that’s worth being proud of.

Actually, I started looking at the workflow a couple of weeks ago. One problem I was having was that it was taking me more and more time to review my vocabulary each night, and yet I still wasn’t sure I really really knew words when I claimed I did! Before I go further, I should explain my vocabulary flow: I have three bins of cards. One is a bin of words I know, one is a bin of words I don’t know. And there’s a third bin, of candidate words that I think I know, but need to prove it.

I go through the “words I don’t know” bin every day. But, on weekends, I also go through the cards in the “candidate words” bin, and every card either gets promoted to “known” or sent back to “unknown”. On the same day, I also go through the “unknown” bin and promote words that I’m comfortable with to the candidate bin.

The theory here is that having words spend a week in the candidate bin will give me time to forget them – it’s one thing to be able to remember a word night after night, and another thing to remember it after not seeing it for a week. I’ve been using variants of this system for decades, and it works pretty well. (I wish I could remember exactly how I used this system back when I was in college – was I using it just like this, or in a different way?)

The problems, though, were that I wasn’t sure spending a week in the candidate bin was long enough for me to forget words, and that also I would spend a noticeable amount of time going through words in the unknown bin that I actually knew pretty well. Fortunately, when you phrase it that way, the solution to at least the latter problem is pretty obvious: promote more frequently. (I was probably conflating the notions of transfer batch and processing batch.) The easiest way to do that is to introduce another bin, the “early candidate” bin; I can move words in there at any time, and then, on weekends, after clearing out the candidate bin, I promote everything from the early candidate bin to the candidate bin without looking at them.

Seems to be working well so far – it’s cut down the time I spend on vocabulary review each night, without any obvious cost. And it actually helps my first problem, too, since words are in one of the candidate bins for a week and a half on average instead of a week. If that’s not good enough, I guess I’ll introduce another candidate bin, to let words sit for (at least) two weeks before final approval instead of one.

That’s helping with the time I’m spending midweek. But, last week, I must have spent three or four hours studying, which is a pretty good-sized chunk of my weekend free time. And today, I really wasn’t excited about doing the exercises in the current chapter over again, as well as writing new vocabulary cards, going through the above candidate rigamarole, etc.

I’m not entirely sure about what to do with that, but at least part of the problem is that I’m trying to do too much at once on the weekends. (Especially on weekends when I’m starting a new chapter.) I think the lesson here is that I should just avoid doing everything in one sitting: I shouldn’t read through a chapter, do the exercises, sort through old vocabulary, and write down new vocabulary on a single day. There’s simply no need for me to do all of that at once: e.g. today I sorted through old vocabulary and wrote down new vocabulary, which was maybe an hour’s worth of work, so why not defer redoing the exercises until tomorrow? And, on weekends when I’m starting a chapter, maybe I can defer some of the work until midweek, or even the next weekend?

The down side of splitting that up is that it means that, on weekends when we have something planned to do, it will be hard to find time on both weekend days. Still, I don’t want to stay in a situation where I’m not looking forward to learning because of the quantity of work; if need be, it’s better to take three or four weeks for a single chapter than to push myself too hard, I’m fairly sure.

On a related note, Miranda and I looked at one German class today, and will probably look at another one next week; hopefully she’ll start lessons this month or next month.

Enough blathering: I suppose I should tell you what the game is. As you might suspect from the title, it’s a collection of puzzle games. (Of the pen-and-pencil variety as opposed to, say, the falling blocks variety.) It has five types of puzzles in it: Sudoku, Kakuro, Nurikabe, Light On, and Slitherlink.

The sudoku interface is crap, at least compared to the interface in Brain Age. (Or, for that matter, the interface in a random physical book of sudoku puzzles.) And I don’t particularly like kakuro. So I gave up on those puzzles ten or twenty into them, and only made it that far because the initial puzzles were so mindnumbingly easy.

The other puzzle variants, however, were much better. I’d seen nurikabe and slitherlink before; they’re both pleasantly geometric (or perhaps topological would be a more appropriate adjective?), and have a completely different feel to me than most other puzzle types that I’m aware of. (Masyu is another example of that; a pity there aren’t any examples here.) Nurikabe is actually the reason why I’m currently subscribed to Games magazine: before a trip a few years ago, I picked up a copy to go through on the plane, and they had some really fun nurikabe puzzles. Of course, not all puzzle makers are of equal quality, but the ones in Games magazine and the ones in this game are both by Nikoli, and they definitely know their stuff.

So: good puzzles. The DS screen is only so large, and they decided to avoid scrolling, which meant that there weren’t any enormous nurikabe puzzles that take an hour to solve. I can live with that. The slitherlink puzzles were actually done on a grid that was a bit too small, so it occasionally read me as trying to draw a line somewhere other than where I intended; annoying, but I could deal. I’d never seen light up before; it’s a pleasant genre, though all the puzzles that were included were basically trivial, which makes me suspect that it’s impossible to make difficult light up puzzles unless you’re working on a larger grid.

And, in my brief experience, the randomly generated light up puzzles were good, too. I didn’t get around to trying the randomly generated nurikabe or slitherlink puzzles before I lost my copy of the game, unfortunately.

I recommend the game, and Liesl enjoyed it as well. Having said that, if you’re only going to get one DS puzzle game, then Picross is the one you want: Liesl is sitting to my left playing it right now, and it is insanely addictive. But this is good, too; writing this review, I want more of those puzzles to work through! Hmm, I was thinking of doing an order from Amazon Japan soon; I should throw in some of Nikoli’s puzzle books…

I started off studying the language with the help of JapanesePod101 and a textbook (Japanese for Today). Then I added Read Japanese Today, which I continue to think is an excellent way to learn kanji. I’d also been using Kanji & Kana as a reference book, so I got my stroke order right when writing characters for vocabulary cards; over the last few month, however, I found myself browsing through it more often in odd moments.

It’s a book I’ve had around since the last time I tried to learn the language. It contains the government-approved list of 1945 basic kanji, showing how to write each, giving the various readings and meanings, as well as a few compounds in which they appear. And does so in an order based more or less on how important they are. A great book to have around, if you want to immerse yourself in the basic kanji; last decade, I tried to go through the book and memorize the kanji in order.

But I went too far with the book. At one point, I could go through the first 200 characters or so, and write them down in the order given in the book, with the proper stroke order. Which is a very seductive thing to do: it gives you something to practice if you just have some spare time, or are falling asleep at night, or whatever. The problem is that my memorizing of my strokes got ahead of my memorizing of the readings and the meanings, so things got unbalanced.

Because of my bad experience, I stayed away from doing the same thing this time. But then I glanced through the start of the book and realized that I claimed to know most of the characters on the first few pages. So what’s the harm in memorizing the order in the book, and reviewing the strokes in my head?

Thinking about it more, I think that, not only isn’t there harm, there’s virtue in it. If I claim I know a character, even if I’m only interested in reading the language rather than writing it, I have to be able to recognize it completely reliably; given the number of characters that look similar, in practice I can’t claim that unless I could write the character. But vocabulary cards, by their nature, don’t give me practice in writing characters. So I have to find another way to practice writing them; memorizing them in the order in that book is as good a way to practice that as I can think of.

Having said that, I don’t want to forget what happened last time. I think/hope I’m doing a better job of managing my learning; the key here is to not have my memorizing how to write the characters get ahead of my memorizing their readings/meanings. If I do that, I’ll be okay.

The other book I’m reading right now is Japanese the Manga Way. It’s a relatively informal grammar of the language, with examples taken from manga. Which works well: besides being fun, manga gives a natural source of language examples that are closer to regular spoken Japanese than other written examples would be.

Other things I like about the book: for one, I can occasionally figure out what the examples are saying, kanji and all, before reading the explanations. And, for another thing, it presents the grammatical points in a rather different order than other sources that I’m using. (Perhaps because it isn’t constrained by having examples only use material that has been previously introduced.). I like seeing another lens on the language, and one which is perhaps a bit more coherent than others I have access to, one which is less intent on mapping the grammar to concepts in English.

The other thing I’ve been doing is watching (the excellent) Last Exile in Japanese with subtitles; again, nice to occasionally be able to figure out by myself what people are saying. Don’t get me wrong, the vast majority of the time I depend very much on the subtitles, but I’m starting to get the feeling that it might really stick this time.

Or maybe I’ll burn out in another couple of months! Always a possibility…

One problem: when I claim I know a vocabulary word, when I move it from the “review regularly” stack of flash cards to the “mastered” stack of flash cards, I want that to mean that I really do know the word! But, for an uncomfortable number of flash cards, what is really going on is that I can reliably, upon seeing the front of the flash card, recite what is on the back of the card. Which isn’t the same thing.

Some aspects of that problem show up no matter what language you’re learning. For example, I usually only do my cards in one direction, so I regularly drill going from megane to “glasses” but not in the other direction. Also, their are grammatical issues: to really know a verb, you should be able to conjugate it at will, and recognize it in any of its forms.

Those particular problems aren’t that big a deal for me yet. I haven’t learned too much grammar, and I’m doing a pretty good job so far in being able to go from English to Japanese even though I’m drilling Japanese to English.

What is a big deal is the presence of kanji. This increases complexity in a few different ways. For one thing, I have to go between three forms of the word (kanji, pronunciation, and English) instead of just two forms (Japanese and English). And, of course, a single kanji character can have multiple pronunciations, which may or may not have multiple readings, and which may or may not be signalled by adding some kana at the end. (After some experimentation, I’ve decided to exile all the extra kana to the back of the card, instead of leaving it on front.)

That’s the obvious problem, but there’s also a more subtle one. When I see a vocabulary card, I see something I wrote by hand, taken from a limited number of other vocabulary cards that I’ve written. So when I see, say, the kanji for bijutsukan, what I really see is a card with three kanji characters on the front, where in this case I happen to have written the kanji characters a little smaller than would be ideal, and a little bit off center. And, honestly, that enough is almost enough to allow me to uniquely identify the vocabulary card from among my current set, especially if one of the radicals in one of the kanji seems familiar for some reason.

But, of course, that doesn’t mean that I know the word at all: if I saw those same three characters in a Japanese book, I would have almost zero chance of recognizing them as bijutsukan, and for that matter I’d be equally likely to mistakenly think that some other sequence of three characters might represent bijutsukan. I now appreciate what kids learning to read and write English are going through when they see a sequence of letters and guess that it’s some other word that happens to start with the same letter or two and is more or less the same length: they don’t have any deeper grasp of the phonetics of written English than I do of the radicals that make up a kanji character, and in both cases we quickly get overwhelmed by the task of really understanding how a word is written.

So what do I do about this? Part of my solution is to simplify the problem. I can adopt a classic agile planning technique: recognize that there isn’t a strong correlation between the difficulty of a task and its business value, and that, when chosing between two equally tasks of equal business value, you’ll get the quickest bang for the buck by doing the easier one first. What that translates to in this case is that, all things being equal, I should try to memorize words made up of as few kanji characters as possible. So one is best, two might be okay, especially if I’ve seen one of them before, three is unlikely to be a good idea. And not all kanji characters are created equal: given a choice, I should choose characters made up of as few radicals as possible, to increase the chance that I’ll be able to really know the whole character. (As opposed to, say, having the left side of the character trigger a memory in me.)

That alone isn’t good enough, though: it doesn’t leave me with a strategy for dealing with important but more complicated characters/words, and doesn’t directly address the complexity of what it means to learn a character. To really learn a character, I should be able to write it out myself, and be able to reliably tell it apart from similar-looking characters, characters with, say, the same radical on the left and on the upper-right but a different one on the lower right.

The answer to both of these aspects of knowledge is, for me, the same: I need to learn to love radicals. Once I really know the radicals, I won’t have to, say, recognize and reproduce the thirteen strokes making up a complicated character, I’ll just have to recognize and reproduce the three radicals making it up. That’s not a simple problem, given that there are about 200 radicals to grapple with, but it’s at least a tractable problem. Especially since the radicals in a character aren’t chosen arbitrarily: radicals have meanings on their own, so you can frequently build up the meaning of a larger characters out of the meanings of its radicals, and radicals can at times lend their pronunciation to the pronunciation of the entire character. So there’s real structure to work with here; as I buff up my radical credentials, it should become easier and easier for me to learn more and more complex characters.

And, fortunately, I’ve recently acquired an excellent book on the subject. It does a great job of showing how the characters evolved (and is historically accurate, as far as I can tell), and of gradually introducing radicals and showing how they add meaning in more and more contexts. So I’m gradually adding characters from that book into my stack of cards to memorize, even if I haven’t run into those characters in my textbook, and trying to remember the evolution of those characters in the bargain. Should make learning characters more fun, and easier.

That’s the main problem; there are a couple of other problems that I’m running into as well, though. One is that there are too many new words in each chapter for me to be able to memorize. I was worried about this three weeks ago: it seemed like my stack of unmemorized cards was getting longer and longer. Since then, I’ve been doing a pretty good job of moving cards into the memorized stack, but I don’t want to ignore the problem. (Especially since I’m now adding vocabulary cards from a source other than my textbook!)

Part of the solution is to simply not memorize every new word in each chapter. Each chapter introduces maybe 80-100 new words; I’m pretty sure that I can get away with only learning 40 or 50 of them right then. So I’m picking the ones that seem particularly likely to be important, or particularly likely to be easy to learn, and I don’t sweat the other ones for now. And if, in subsequent chapters, I keep on encountering a word that I didn’t memorize when it first showed up, then I can always learn the word later. It’s not completely clear that this is a scalable strategy – maybe, once I get to chapter 15, I’ll have to memorize 5 new words from each of the previous 15 chapters along with an extra 50 words from that chapter, which would suck – but I think it’s worth giving a try.

The second part of the solution is basic queue management: the problem here is an unbounded queue. And if you don’t want to have an unbounded queue, then put a cap on it! So I could adopt a rule that I can never have more than, say, an inch of unmemorize vocab cards in the box. Once I reach an inch, I have to do something else until the stack goes down: some combination of memorizing a smaller proportion of words in each chapter, taking longer to go through each chapter, and learning to be more effective at memorizing words. I don’t have an exam schedule or anything that I’m working towards: I want to do this right, and to do this right I need to balance my capacities, my time, and the number of words that I’m attempting, instead of letting artificial pressures skew my attempts at the cost of a loss of effectiveness.

So far, all the problems I’ve talked about have been about memorizing words, but it’s also starting to get a little harder to put everything in the chapter together. In the fourth chapter, for the first time, I had a bit of trouble doing all the exercises in the chapter the first time through, because of a combination of not having all the grammatical details, the usage details, and the words at my fingertips. I think that, for now, the best approach is to acknowledge that this is a potential issue, and be alert for warning signs. So I’m planning to go through the exercises in this chapter until I can do them all easily; if that means it takes three weeks to get through the chapter instead of two, that’s fine.

I imagine that further non-vocabulary issues will crop up as I go along: needing to memorize conjugations, for example. It’s been a while (almost 15 years! Ouch) since I’ve had to deal with that sort of thing, but I was once adequate at memorizing grammar, so I assume I’ll be able to do it again, and I don’t think Japanese holds any particular horrors in that area. And further holistic issues will appear: getting practice in reading actual books (and finding a suitable gradual series of books to practice that), practicing spoken Japanese. I imagine that, once those become urgent problems, outside guidance will be essential; fortunately, outside guidance shouldn’t be hard to find around here.

Fun stuff.

So I pulled out my box of blank vocabulary cards, and started writing down words. At which point I felt like I was stuck in molasses.

Basically, my handwriting in hiragana sucks. Admittedly, my handwriting in roman script sucks, too, but I’m used to that, and if I slow down just a bit, I can produce writing that I don’t mind looking at. While, when writing in hiragana, I simply don’t know how to produce writing that I don’t mind looking at!

Part of the issue, I’m sure, is that I have basically no experience to hiragana outside of print or artworks. So I expect some of my issues are similar to somebody who was used to reading English in the Times font, had a hard time reproducing those serifs, but felt that writing looked weird without them. But I’m sure that there’s a lot of plain old practice required, too. (I bet practice will help with the basics of generating characters with the appropriate spacing and relative size, for example.)

Actually, I suspect that hiragana may be a bit tricky to generate neatly, as writing systems go: I’m not nearly as self-conscious about my kanji, it turns out, and I don’t remember being particularly self-conscious about my greek or devanagari. So hiragana may be a bit higher of a hill to climb than most. I was surprised to learn today that I was even getting the stroke order wrong on some of the characters; I’m sure that much of that is simple ignorance, but it also suggests that the characters don’t fit into patterns that I’ve learned to expect.

I’m optimistic that this will get better pretty soon. For one thing, I bet that I’ll gain a lot from just reminding myself to slow down. I usually scribble quite quickly, and correspondingly illegibly; if I were to take, say, two seconds per character, it would feel like a glacial pase, but I bet I could do a decent job of writing neatly without too much practice at that rate, and I’d still be able to churn out a bunch of cards in five minutes. Whereas now, I try to do it faster, but have to practice over and over again to get it right, more than eating up the time savings. Tonight already felt better than last time: I came armed with some practice sheets, and I spent a fair amount of time going over each character there before I wrote it on a card. But the results seem to be sticking: I just slowly wrote a ka on my palm with my finger, and I didn’t cringe in horror or anything.

I sure hope it gets better soon. There’s some virtue in having the process be a bit slow, so I don’t try to cram too much stuff into my brain at once, but I’m already finding it hard to make time to do this, and having the process of generating vocabulary cards slow me down excessively doesn’t make me any happier. Compounding the problem is that the book contains a fair amount of vocabulary, without much guidance as to which words to learn in each chapter. (As opposed to when you’re taking a class, where the teacher will give you a list of words to memorize.) So I think that I’ll probably end up basically trying to memorize them all, which means that I have to generate a lot of cards; the more time that takes, the less time I have to drill on them!

Another useful web site I’ve found: Real Kana is a nice, flexible drill for reviewing characters. I’ve just been using it for a few days and I’ve already swapped almost all of what I’ve forgotten back into my brain; I’m optimistic that, after not too much longer, I’ll be able to recognize individual characters completely reliably and fairly quickly. At which point I’ll want to switch to reading more Japanese passages written out in kana (as opposed to romaji or a kanji/kana mix), not as practice in figuring out what it means but as practice in drilling my brain in going from kana to sounds without an explicit recognition phase in the middle.

Speaking of which, another area where I wish my brain didn’t have to do as much of a recognition phase is numbers: whenever I hear somebody read a number out loud, it takes me seconds to decode it, which is way too long. I wonder if there’s some web site out there that can help me with that, too? Even a robotic-sounding voice would be a big help, I suspect.

It’s a remarkable podcast. Daily Japanese lessons, presented in such a way that reminds me of the recommendations from the late lamented Creating Passionate Users blog. From the beginning, it was all focused on the users. Some of that was straightforward (but not so common) community-building stuff – in the early months, they had a news post every Sunday, and it was full of expressions of gratitude for all the reviews, sounding sincerely thankful and amazed at how well it was going. (I haven’t participated in their forums, but they sound like lively places, too.) But the content itself was all focused on what users, too: rather than talking about how clever they are, they were focused right from the beginning on how, when you go to Japan, you’ll be able to find your way around and talk to people. And done in a style full of personality and, as far as I can tell, honest expressions of themselves: I’m sure it would drive some people crazy, but if it works for you, it’s great.

And it worked for me. I’d flirted with learning Japanese before, so some of the lesson series (Survival Phrases) were easy for me. (Though even those I wasn’t bored by, and if I were actually traveling to Japan, I’m sure lots of the specific topics would be very useful.) The Beginner series was just right for me, though: I had to pay attention to it almost from the first episodes if I wanted to understand everything, and I would finish each lesson by listening to the opening dialogue over again to make sure I got it all. (And once every few weeks I’d have to listen to an entire lesson twice, because of something I missed.) I’d gradually learn more stuff as the weeks went by; about 150 episodes of that series later, I’m still feeling that it’s a great level for me, still providing an appropriate challenge level.

The Intermediate series started out too hard for me, and continues that way, but I still like listening to it just to get the sound of the language in my ears. (And they recently commented that the early Intermediate lessons are easier in some ways than the current Beginner lessons; I went back and listened and, you know, they’re mostly right! Wow!) There’s other nice stuff, too, like Japanese Culture Class episodes once every week or two.

So it’s a great mix of stuff: lessons for a range of levels, and I enjoy even the levels that aren’t targeted at me. Actually, I’m glad that they’re not all targeted at me: I would simply be unable to keep up with seven lessons a week at the Beginner level. For one thing, I’m pretty sure I’d burn out: I have enough experience with learning stuff that I know that, if I push myself hard, it’s a lot of fun for about three months and then I just run into a brick wall. And, for another thing, the Beginner lessons demand enough concentration that I can’t listen to them while driving, so I basically only listen to them when jogging or grocery shopping, which I don’t do every day. (In contrast, the lessons that are either easier or harder are fine while driving, though I’ve gotten in the habit of pairing one Beginner lesson with one other type of lesson every time I jog, and so rarely listen to anything in the car.)

Unfortunately, it took several months for me to realize how much I liked it, and several more months for me to work up to a reliable schedule. With a daily podcast, you can fall behind really fast; I’m pretty sure I was more than a year behind at some point. I’ve been catching up since; I’m up to the middle of last November, and my current pace has me going at about 5/3 real time without signs of burning out. My goal now is to be completely caught up a year from now; I’ll check back next summer and let you know how it’s gone!

My fondness for the podcast is actually forcing one rather tough decision on me. A year ago, I thought about what to do next; two main contenders were learning Japanese and learning Ruby. I decided to do the latter (though hardly single-mindedly), and I still have quite a lot in that vein that I want to do. Having said that, I’ve been devoting enough time to Japanese as well that it would be a bit of a shame to lose that, and I’m afraid that, without some effort to consolidate my knowledge, it will get rather less satisfying soon.

Let me be clear: I don’t consider myself to really be learning Japanese now. I’m listening to podcast episodes and being exposed to new vocabulary and grammatical structures in such a way that, at the end of each episode, I can listen to the dialogue at the start and feel that I understand it. But I couldn’t typically engage in a similar dialogue myself, or feel confident that I’ve really mastered the grammar involved. It’s the difference between responding to cues in context after a reminder and really knowing something, and it’s not the fault of the podcast: that’s all you can hope from 10 or 15 minutes a day without study outside of the podcast. (Their website provides tools for that study, should you choose to use them and to pay money.)

And I’m afraid that, as the grammar gets more complex, it will become more obvious to me that I really don’t know the material, and will be harder and harder to get as much out of the episodes. In fact, my gaps are already starting to be painful: I’ve just gotten to the part where they introduced the Lower Intermediate lessons, and the dialogue in the lesson notes is in kana instead of romaji. I can puzzle out kana just fine, but I can’t read it with anything like the fluency with which I can read Roman characters; that’s exactly the sort of thing that I should be able to learn how to do if I just take time to practice it and that would help me a lot in providing a solid foundation for other sorts of learning.

And I’m sure there are a lot of basic vocabulary and grammatical structures that would similarly repay a bit more concerted study. I don’t necessarily want to immediately memorize everything new in each Beginner lesson, but it would help if I had the material from, say, six months earlier down pat. If I could do that, I think I really would be on the path to learning Japanese.

So I’m starting to think that it’s time to break out my old textbook, start writing down vocabulary flash cards, and get to work. Or maybe buy a new textbook – one of my coworkers was greatly amused by the “for Today” part of the title, and somehow my showing him the insert explaining that, in this modern world of 1988, color televisions are a standard appliance in Japanese households, didn’t convince him of its modernity. But I think it’s pretty well written, so I’m planning to stick to it – after all, I have JapanesePod101 to explain modern vocabulary to me, so I won’t be left in the dark if I hear a hip Japanese person referring to the governor of California as “Shuwa-chan”. Figuring out how to budget time for that is not going to be easy; I think it can be done, but I want to think it over for a bit before committing. I suppose, though, there is one bright side to this lack of time: when I flirted with learning Japanese in grad school, I was unsuccessful largely because I took it too fast and burned out; time pressures should do a good job of preventing that from happening this time, I hope.

I’ll let you know how it all turns out a year from now, when I’ve finished off this queue.