Major update AND Hello again

The first thing you will notice is that I have hooked up my Japanese Twitter account to this blog. Makes much more sense. When I started this blog, I didn't HAVE a Japanese Twitter account. Yay, progress.

The second thing you will hopefully start to notice in the future is me actually using this as a hub for my study activities. For starters, let me just expound a bit on recent happenings:

*I started a Japanese cooking club with a couple friends and one of the members is a pretty hardcore Japanophile, which makes me happy. He speaks conversationally quite well, it seems, and all from some close-watching/listening of J-dramas. Granted he is currently not working or in school, living at home, but I think we can all learn a bit from his dedication.

*NEW PEOPLE opened in San Francisco and I hang out there a lot. This will become apparently if I keep up with this blog like I intend to, because I go to see a lot of Japanese movies there, which is listening exposure, even if you do have the subtitle crutch.

*Bumped my tutor down from an hour to a half hour a week. Basically, I just want someone to chat with and whom I can bounce questions off of. I appreciated her efforts in personalizing a class for me, but I have way to many aspirations to be locked into a set schedule of quizzes and things.

Main study resources, currently:

*文法が弱いあなたへ is a great grammar review book. I have probably mentioned it here before, but since I have only just finally gotten into a good study habit, I'm still using it. To recap: it's perfect for an intermediate student (the book is all in Japanese) who wants to review some points.

*くもんの小学校ドリル, where have you been all my life? The 国語 kanji workbooks are KILLER. I wish I had had these in high school. TO ALL HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS TEACHING YOURSELVES JAPANESE: please go out and buy these workbooks. Oh. My. They are meant for Japanese elementary school kids, so not only are you learning the kanji in the order that Japanese kids learn them, but you are learning them along with the readings and vocabulary that Japanese society deems necessary for kanji n00bs. I went back to 一年生 for some review, but I am already learning stuff I never did before.

*Have been doing Pimsleur Japanese level 3 audio lessons, which are a decent mix of making me think a little and way too easy. I like that they are throwing in some formal language, but the scenarios are feeling a bit simple for the level of politeness they are throwing at you. That said, anything that gets me saying Japanese words out loud is a plus. I am shy and I think this sort of listen and repeat stuff is what I need to get my tongue all 日本語'd up and ready for action.

*にほんご敬語トレーニング has been my keigo book of choice, although I haven't delved too far in yet. Rumor has it there is some sort of ultimate keigo book out there that I must own. I heard it might be in the mail to me. We shall see :)

*The latest addition to my growing stack of extremely useful and practical (no joke) Japanese language books is 日本人の知らない日本語, which has been a huge best seller in Japan. No wonder it was so easy to find at Kinokuniya this afternoon! It's done in "comic-essay" form, and teaches, as the title states, "Japanese that Japanese people don't know." Seems very entertaining, and since it is entirely in Japanese, for Japanese people, about things that even they may not know or do correctly, I am really excited to prioritize this in my study sessions.

*Kotoba! for iPhone is a pretty decent Japanese dictionary. I figured something was better than nothing and this was free (if I remember correctly?) More often than not, the word I have been searching for has been in there and they have translations to multiple languages and even kanji details.

*iEijiro (iPhone) is a dictionary for more advanced usage and...whatnot. Haven't had much luck with this, honestly. It seems extremely useful, but for more limited purposes, maybe?

*Check out the latest Otaku USA for an article I did about iPhone kanji apps :)

*Japanese Flip is a great flashcard program (iPhone) for JLPT vocab.

*Mnemosyne is back in style with me and I'm actually in talks with someone to get an iPhone port going, or at least a comparable program. This is very exciting, especially if we can make it so you can sync your stacks and grade levels. Then I can take all the vocab I'm working on with me in my pocket, where it is far more accessible than on my laptop.

*KeyholeTV is a MAJOR discovery. Not much more to say besides that it is streaming Japanese TV and radio. We should all just let our jaws hang open in awe that this exists.

Main study tactics at the moment:

*Aiming for an audio lesson a day, but not quite making it.
*Doing three lessons of くもん drill at a time, which right now is around per day, but not sure how that will scale, especially since I want to try to absorb all this really good vocab.
*Thinking of how to work in more keigo practice. Might wait until after the audio lessons are exhausted.
*Very interested in looping in more work-related Japanese stuff. Might begin the pain in the neck yet very instructive task of going through all my Japanese language mail from the week and pulling vocab for Mnemosyne cards as well as just instilling proper everything from my Japanese co-workers.
*Also really need to look over the Japanese versions of the site, help materials etc. This is something I mean to do long ago, but I just need to set aside time.
*I'm also interested in doing a translation project now and then. I'm not sure what I would like to translate, but I will probably start with news articles about work, since that could prove to be doubly useful.

Luckily, since Japanese has been placed as one of my three whole areas of priorities in life (right up there with work and health) it has been really easy to find more time to do it lately, which has been making me very happy.

But now look how long I spent updating this blog when I could've been actually studying. We'll see, we'll see ;) Anyways, for now, hopefully someone will find all those recommendations relevant. I will try to update with some less obvious ideas (the ones that aren't "surround yourself with study opportunities" and "take them") as they come up and maybe log some progress/questions and answers from my tutor/etc. Or I could get too busy to update for another few months.

There's a lot of passion here, but I'm not sure it's for the blog. I'm pretty sure it's for the doing and the studying. This is a problem I have had with all my blogs lately, even the ones I bought domains for, so...

yeah. We'll see.