Sunday, November 29, 2009

Shadowing Update

それから、韓国語がわかります。

I can say that a lot better than I used to be able to. This week I'm doing the first half of Unit 2, intead of the whole thing. As the sentences get more complex it will be better to do more repetitions...

Man, I was going to attempt another song translation today, but I have a lot of stuff to study. Might be better to do it tomorrow? We'll see. There is a crisis of laundry building. I wish I had a bigger laundry bag so I could just take everything to the laundromat at once and read Haruki Murakami allllllllll afternoon...

Friday, November 27, 2009

Lazy Friday

Not sure if I'm going to have the stamina for 敬語の金曜日 after all...

but I got a lot of other stuff done! And then I read comics ;)

Thursday, November 26, 2009

Thanksgiving Check-in

Just had a super productive and wonderful study session. Maybe it's because I had the day off and had the time/energy, but really, I've been doing a pretty good job of keeping at it all week. I feel like I'm improving, which is always good motivation.

Shadowing

Unit 1 is getting a little old, but I've noticed that I can keep up better with phrases like 私は十七日です。(That sentence looks really funny, btw—she's talking about her birthday.) As expected, repetition is the key.

Kanji

I feel like I have the vocab down for this lesson, which is awesome. I guess that means I could add some of the harder vocab to the mix if I wanted. The plan was to go through all the plain ones first and then go back and sweep for the ones marked as not immediately essential or specialized afterwards...

Grammar

Now that I am sinking my teeth into 初級から中級への日本語ドリル(文法)I am lovvvvving it. They give you really important pointers, like how when you're using 〜たまま the person doing both the action that is finished with a continuing state and the current action has to be the same person. This is actually the kind of grammar advice I REALLY need, so I'm thrilled. Also, since they have grammar explanations in Japanese AND English (and Chinese and Korean) it's really easy to pick up vocabulary like 過去否定形 (past negative form [of a verb]).

Casual Listening

Well, it's casual. I have to say this is the thing that I feel ok about dropping if I'm sleepy or dont' have time, but tonight I did listen to a story about a lady who lives with a crow. Whoo!

That's all. Just a progress report. I'm actually pretty sleepy now, for whatever reason. I kinda wanted to play some videogames, but not sure I have the attn span ;)

Monday, November 23, 2009

An actual study session -- wao!

Check it out—I studied for about two hours tonight. Here is what I did:

Reviewed Unit 1 of the Shadowing book

There are ten lessons with ten SHORT dialogues. That sounds like a ton, but Unit 1 is the most basic stuff. Like I said, I'm pretty happy just confirming the patterns I know, right now. Plus there are some thing that don't exactly roll of the tongue and this is a great way to drill them. 失礼します will never be easy to say : / お先に失礼します。It's too bad, because this is one thing you will say ALL THE TIME if you work in Japan. It's really too bad that the bar to fluency is set so high right off the bat. しつれい is just...difficult as hell. HELL.

That and it's nice to have this book really moving your tongue. Some listening activities are pretty slowly spoken, but this CD just rambles right along, so you have to keep up. Numbers are the other hardest thing. 一泊350円です。That's a pretty expensive movie rental!

Got all of lesson 1 Kanji in Context must-learn vocab into Anki and gave it a spin

I did some of this over the weekend, but now all 26 of the easiest kanji in the universe* are in there. It seems there is almost more vocab you didn't know—八百屋, I had no idea, really— plus, of course, tons of vocab that will be nice to see to remind you that you do indeed know Japanese. The plan with this is to do a chapter a week. Once we get through the stuff they assume you know already (which I may...not...anymore) it evens out to about 10 kanji per chapter, which should be feasible as far as learning new things goes, which makes me excited.

*I know, I know. AGAIN? Haven't you been studying these for about 10 years now? (Yes.) It's not like I forgot them all, I know them. How many times do you have to lay the foundations? (Over and over?) I have to justify this somehow in a way better than a personality flaw (yeah, you really do) but I can say that the examples sentences are...really great. Just from the first lesson, I feel like I'm reading at my level in real things that might actually be said. I LIKE the context. I need the context. The context will help me learn. Putting my kanji in it!

Was indecisive about how to proceed as far as grammar goes

I'm eager to get into the blue 日本語ドリル book from The Japan Times, and I think that will do me ok. I'm a little nervous about not having answers available. I guess that is the one nice thing about 文法が弱いあなたへ.

Incidentally, kanji holds you back a lot. This is what the Kanji in Context intro was getting at with the # "sharply rises" thing, but man, it really does. It's very frustrating, esp if you can't keep the stuff you learned already in your head. Gonna try hard.

Gonna wait on the orange vocab book until the blue one is done

I had originally thought of studying these both together, but I think I will be getting as much vocab as I can handle out of the kanji study and just...song lyrics, etc. Randomness. I'm sure there will be vocab to learn in the blue book, too, since I am still so much a nubberduckie.

敬語の金曜日

This seems like a plan and a half, if I can actually find some time. I tend to go out on Fridays (to NEW PEOPLE), so it could be tricky to fit in depending on the timing of whatever I am doing. It can always spill over to Saturday, I guess ;) Actually, I get to go to work later on Friday, so maybe I can study in the morning. That seems ideal.

Casual Listening

As opposed to the hard-working Shadowing stuff, I'm going to use the 50 Days book to just relax a bit. I won't worry about understanding/remembering every word. I'll just chilllllll. Later I can go back and see how much more I understand, maybe. And the readings should be easier once I recollect some kanji.

So the short view of a week is:
Daily Shadowing (Shadowing!)
Weekly Kanji Lesson* (Anki, Kanji in Context Workbook)
Weekly Grammar Lesson (Blue book, with some Tae Kim as necessary) +
Daily Casual Listening (50 Days)
Friday Keigo (日本語の敬語トレーニング, 敬語すらすらBOOK)
Stress-free Saturday (Last Saturday of the month = cooking and conversation clubs.)
Sunday Lyrics (There are so many more songs to sing!)

*spread out over the week
+ Followed by Weekly Vocab Lesson (Orange book...although I half wonder if I should study some basic lists first)

I can't really come up with a more gorgeous study schedule than that. Sticking to it is the trouble, right? Maybe I can't study two hours every night, but if I can do at least one, that is something.

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Translation: しんしんしん - はっぴいえんど

Given that I really require the ability to sing this song, I am going to attempt to translate it. Also, I decided to start including a vocab list. The original lyrics are here (what a great site!)

Incidentally, as a side note: Is it Haruomi Hosono who sings lead vocals? In this song, he sounds like he has a cold. Maybe he always does. I will have to pay more attention ;) 端 sounds more like はじ than はし. And ごみ sounds more like ごび. Is this just me sucking at listening? I don't think so. I don't have THAT horrible of an ear.

Heavy Snowfall - HAPPY END (1)

My heart is a musty old flower (2) falling down onto dirty snow, mixing with garbage at the end of the treet. Mixing with garbage...

Just about everything has become horrible. If only I could disappear into the dirty snow. It'd be fine if it turned into sludge. It'd be fine if it did. (3)

Cars are driving, the white stuff is snow. People walking. The snow is white. (4) Snowdrifts at the end of town.

At that time, I saw something echoing profoundly. (5) The silent snow falls.

Snow and stuff is piling up in town, as usual, dirty. What stupid person got it all dirty? Who got it dirty? Who got it dirty? (6)

(1) To kick things off, しんしんしん is already impossible to translate ;) We don't have a sound for "heavy snowfall," do we? It's quiet! A special kind of quiet. I like that Japanese has "sounds" for stuff like that :)

(2) This is an awful translation, but I literally cannot locate a reading of those two kanji together except for here, which is ridiculous. Of course, he is not saying きしょく, it sounds more like きば, or きま, but I can't find anything down either of those routes. I even though maybe it was a compound verb that ended in む or ぬ, but I couldn't find anything there either. Bad bad bad. Someone enlighten me please :(

(3) I went with "fine" instead of "good." I'm feeling more resignation here than anticipation. Also for the なればいい repition I implied the verb without repeating it...since they didn't repeat the entire phrase.

(4) I wasn't sure if I should imply that cars are driving/people are walking ON white snow... Or why the snow would be white there if that were the case... These songs all seem so simple till you try to find out what they mean. English song lyrics can be pretty cryptic, though, so...*shrug*

(5) This was another case where I just couldn't find the kanji. "Echoing" I inserted based on the verb I thought he said, ひびく. Maybe it's an outdated kanji reading or something? You'd think the dictionary would have it. Is it also possible he miswrote the kanji? These lyrics are hand scribbled with the album, so I wonder if people just take those and write them exactly. Maybe he's making a pun? I'm not sure.

(6) I actually don't feel too bad about how this last part ended up. I was tempted to say, "Who was so stupid as to get the snow all dirty?" but I feel like the way I did it was closer to what he said, maybe?

New words (bold as I used it here):

Note that some words used in this song seem to have simpler kanji than exhibited here. Like まち. 塵 is usually written in kana these days. Also, I'm only listing words here that were pretty new for me AND for which I was confident in the meaning/interpretation.

古ぼける to look old, become musty, wear out ふるぼける
端 end (of a street), edge, tip, margin, point はし
泥濘 quagmire, sludge, mud, slush, mire ぬかるみ
裏 bottom, rear, back, behind the scenes (etc.) うら
吹き溜まり drift of snow/leaves, hangout for drifters ふきだまり
黙りこくる to keep silent だまりこくる
積る to pile up/accumulate, estimate つもる

Hey, if nothing else, we can sing along easier :) This is a really fun song to sing.

Hrm hum hrm: New Approaches

Heisig has once again lost his luster. By the end of the book he becomes way less helpful, offering only some key terms instead of full breakdowns of stories. Obviously it gets harder the more complex the characters get, but studying kanji is hard anyhow, so you might as well be absorbing some actual Japanese along with it.

In the meantime, I've also discovered the limitations of learning from Japanese materials for kids. Not that they aren't obvious from the beginning, but basically, you're learning at a kid's level when you need to be gearing up to speak as an adult. It's a fundamental paradox of social venue (or something).

Enter the Kanji in Context books from The Japan Times. As it turns out, The Japan Times is my best friend. I think of all the textbooks I have used, theirs have felt the most targeted to my needs. I used the Genki books in college, and although the sitautional conversations are useful, I felt like for a beginner, themed vocab lessons work better (for instance, I still don't have a good grasp of "around the house" type of words). The intermediate --> advanced pair of books they have on grammar and vocab will be a big help, I think, and I'm finally almost ready to start using them. (It's been slow going, clearly, over the past year, but I'm intending that to change.)

*Vocab tangent* Think about a word floating in space. Say, 雲。So you have 雲 just hanging there, in the sky, say. This is speaking generally, not with specific reference to Genki, by the way... If you learn it with a bunch of random words like "chair," "lawyer," "puppy," and "DVD" (but 50 words instead of 5) you may not remember it as well. But if you learn 雲 with words like 晴れ, 雨, 天気, 空, then you have more of a picture (of the weather/sky). Then you can do lists for furniture, professions, animals, and movies. Incidentally, I think you can benefit from this kind of training no matter what level you are at. There are always gaps in vocabulary that can be filled in... *end tangent*

Anyways, I think I was going to talk about Kanji in Context. It's yet another book that I feel is intended exactly for me. Let me quote a bit from the introduction (bold is mine, italics are theirs):

"...created specifically for learners who have just completed a beginning course or have already learned a fair number of kanji at the intermediate or advanced level but would like to amplify their knowledge of kanji and kanji-based vocabulary in a systematic fashion."

Theoretically, I should know way more kanji than I do. I DID complete a beginner's course, and I used to be THE MAN when it came to kanji. What happened? Well, I didn't use them enough. I think this book will be a pretty big challenge for me, but I also am beginning to think that that is what I really need. I've done enough beginner style review to know that it isn't kicking my ass over the intermediate hump.

"At the intermediate level and above, the number of kanji needed by learners rises sharply. In order to effectively meet this growing need, it is not adequate to learn each new character randomly..."

Couldn't. Agree. More. This is one of my main problems, just the way that regardless of what goals in communication you are working on, regardless of what vocab you are trying to acquire, kanji has always sort of been its own beast. Hopefully this system will help give me some...CONTEXT ;)

"...traditional kanji textbooks have focused excessively on the study of characters one by one, providing only a sprinkling of vocabulary which , more than often , have little practical use for learners."

I'm really excited to get some practical use out of kanji. That is the only way to keep them around.

"The frequent contact with a particular kanji or word will reinforce its acquisition, while at the same time relieving learners of the pressure experienced under the single-presentation approach."

It is really hard to learn kanji or vocab when you only see them in one example.

I also picked up "the" Shadowing book (that you may also see everywhere, tempting you, the one with green all over it), and from initial exposure last night, I am really exited. The speakers sound pretty energetic, but also follow the intonation patterns I know already. I'm especially psyched to get into more complicated conversations, because it seems like the longer the sentences get right now, the more my intonation breaks down (which makes sense, which is why the book is arranged like it is.

So, (...as usual) I am really really really ready to just study forever. More than anything, it's about time, and I have taken some additional steps to free some up (like quitting my last freelance writing job). I really believe that if I make this as high a priority as possible, that I can really accomplish something. I must be able to! Gotta just...do it.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Mistranslation: はいからはくち ー はっぴいえんど

AKA Drink your #failsauce with a spoon

PLEASE IF YOU READ THIS POST, READ THE WHOLE THING—NOT JUST HALF.

So instead of continuing with the Wikipedia article for now (since you can't sing along to it) I am going to はいからはくち. As it turns out this is easier said than done (like any project), but even the title is problematic. Let's take a look...[at how badly we can fuck it up.]

Original Japanese lyrics, by the way, are here.

Cuz I'm high, I'm an idiot! - HAPPY END (1)

Cuz I'm high...
Cuz I'm high...
Cuz I'm high...
Cuz I'm high...
Cuz I'm high, I'm drinking Coca Cola with you, appreciating the blood-stained sky. (2)
Cuz you're high, we'll roll up our sleeves and decorate the lively town —golden lace. (3)
Cuz I'm...
Cuz I'm high, I'm an idiot!

Cuz I'm high...
Cuz I'm high...
Cuz I'm high...
Cuz I'm high...
Cuz I'm high, as I vomit blood, in spite of your "no," it's just the evening twilight. (4)
Cuz you're high, you look like a hippy turned blood-orange. (5)
Cuz I'm...
Cuz I'm high, I'm an idiot!
Cuz I'm high...
Cuz I'm high...
Cuz I'm high...
z...(6)
z...

Notes:

(1) 白痴 is the はくち I assumed they meant, which translates as idiot/idiocy. I guess that makes sense. I'm pretty sure they are, after all, talking about being "that kind of" high. You could also read this as, "Because I said yes, I'm an idiot!" But the rest of the song makes them sound pretty stoned ;) Incidentally, I used "cuz" because, well, they're high.
(2)
玩ぶ can mean "to trifle with/do as one pleases," but I took the "appreciate" meaning just because...well, I wasn't sure what you would really "do" with the sky. Plus I can imagine two stoned people sitting around drinking Coke and watching the sun set.
(3) We wouldn't say "tuck up the cuffs of our pants" to do work. I'm not even entirely sure that is what Japanese people say, but that is sort of the image that the dictionary gave me. I just localized it to "roll up our sleeves" to preserve the meaning more than the action. Maybe I shouldn't do that. Is it like naming a whole song "Sukiyaki" cuz it's easy to say? lol For some reason in this case I feel like recognizing the symbolic gesture is more important.
(4) This was definitely the hardest line of the song. Thanks to this page for explaining ("Advice for people who can't read" -- interestingly, 読み取る is translated as "read between the lines" but I don't think that applies when you're just trying to read kanji or hiragana that would normally be katakana, plus I think it's funnier that he offers this with a little star. Like, good job! Keep working at it! Someday you'll be able to read real Japanese! haha) that のお is actually ノー which is actually just "no."

And then that に was really throwing me off. I just wasn't sure how to parse this thing. In the end, I nearly almost went with "your "no" was only to the night" but I realized it wasn't 夕まぐれに, but ノーに so that was out. Then I was thinking maybe the ni with the ノー was simultaneously a play on the conjunction (?) のに, which means "although." So it was like he was saying, "Although you said 'no', it was just the evening twilight" which I basically took to mean something like he's high so he's forcing himself on this poor girl. You know, though, I really have no idea. This could be so wrong. Anyways, in order to preserve ノー as a noun, I used "in spite of" instead of "although."

So basically, yeah, this line relies on a ton of assumptions. I'm gonna look up a real translation of this...

Oh hey, so this is interesting: "Haikara is a pseudo-English Japanese word from the Meiji period derived from the phrase “high collar.” (It originally had a long final a: haikarā, ハイカラー.) You might summarize its meaning as “fashionably Westernized,” but of course, the full story is more complicated."

Do you think that is what they mean? Maybe I'm coming at this song from too much of an American 60s/70s view. This song is insane, though lol I like how that author points out that はい also means lungs, so really the line marked as (4) could also read, "While vomiting blood from my lungs..." which is sort of gross. Let's return to this string of revelations in a minute.
(5) 蜜柑色 is the color of a mikan, but a crimson one I'm guessing would be reddish? We call those "blood oranges," I'm pretty sure, right? And in any case, it goes WAY awesomely with the rest of the blood-obsessed song, so it's staying in there.
(6) I don't even remember this part. I think it must be different depending on the recording. In Kazemachiroman it goes straight into the "Western fashion/high collars is/are beautiful" thing or "Because I'm high, I'm beautiful" thing. Anyways, the point I was going to make is that they are repeating the last sound from から in my original crazy American version, which I translated as the last sound in "cuz" instead of the last sound in the phrase.

OH GOD I have been doin it rong. Look here. The note about Bannai Tarao. He DOES say it in English, with the "is," I checked. Why would he do that if he were saying "Because I'm high..." unless the English were just really that bad (which I have never thought). UGH. So yeah, it's possible to misread every line in the song. Let's try that again...

High collar idiot (1')

High collar...
High collar...
High collar...
High collar...
I'm fashionably Western: I'm drinking Coca Cola with you, appreciating the blood-stained sky. (2')
You're fashionably Western: We'll roll up our sleeves and decorate the lively town—golden lace.
I'm...
I'm fashionably Western! IDIOT!

High collar...
High collar...
High collar...
High collar...
I'm fashionably Western as I vomit blood: in spite of your "no," it's just the evening twilight. (3')
You're fashionably Western: you look like a hippy turned blood-orange.
I'm...
I'm fashionably Western! IDIOT!
High collar...
High collar...
High collar...
rr...
rr...

(1') I'd rather keep in natural than say "Westernized Idiot" as Wikipedia does.
(2') The "so" in "I'm so Western" is an artistic flourish. Maybe that changes the meaning too much? I like it a lot that way, but...yeahhhhhh it might be considered some rewriting. I miss the "because" aspect. I don't know if I like the colon. I...ugh lol
(3') This may now be beyond reach haha No idea how vomiting blood is a Western thing. Also, are we accusing Western people of being racist?

WAIT

Scratch 2'. Let's change it to "I'm fashionably Western..."

That is at least a minor improvement. This is a train wreck. Where is the professional translation of this? I can't even find another amateur attempt. There has to be something somewhere, but I don't have time to scour the Internet anymore. Bedtime : /

Dude, though, screw me in the eye, I shoudl've known they weren't singing about being high. Why would they do that? Japan is super not into pot. Maybe San Francisco is a bad place to try to listen to this song. Or maybe being American is the complete opposite of ideal state to consume this song in. Ahahahahahaha. Too sleepy. Comments, people. At least come make fun of me!!

EDIT: So yes, always do your homework kids. Keep doing it your entire life!

Incidentally, one other potentially translation that I thought of for はいから was "high color."

So you'd end up with the intro reading, "High color is...beautiful." And then lyrics like, "High color... High color..." and "I'm high color" "You're high color" which seemed like some kind of cool slang for "super cool" or "interesting." Of course, once you learn that はくちmeans idiot, that is totally ruined ;)

Learning is pretty much the best. I only wish that after all this I had a decent translation. I feel like what is there is still pretty double-plus un-good.

Thursday, November 5, 2009

Sick, First Impressions of the Smart.fm revamp, etc.

Well, progress has slooooooooooowed due to fever and nose-blowing.

Smart.fm seemed like a pretty chill thing to do, except that they are buggy as shit right now (which is not meant to be as harsh as it sounds...just a set-phrase—I don't hate them!) and their interface is all new and bizarrely Twitter-like. Anyways, so I spend half of my time reporting bugs, but hopefully once they iron out it will become useful again. Anyways, I'm tempted to just make my own flashcards the old fashioned way. It's better for teaching yourself anyhow.

I am just very well aware how quickly those stacks grow, when you're trying to learn hundreds (thousands) of kanji.

But ok, yes, I could make my own digital cards.

Maybe it's time to give Anki a shot.

Waiiiiit, just kidding. "Reviewing the Kanji" also just did a site update. (PS - after seeing their url, how can you call them anything but 漢字コーヒー?)

This I like. You don't have make anything, you can just have them add it. It keeps track of where you are in the Heisig book and apparently there is a spot to ad your stories about kanji, but of course, mine will always go right here!

Sadly, no new kanji tonight. Too damned dead feeling. I'm going to bed. Of course, this is what I said almost an hour ago, but I felt like maybe updating this blog would be a good idea...

Night!

Monday, November 2, 2009

Personalize it (Heisig Super Alpha Turbo Remix)

So I've been through a hundred Heisig stories now, which is enough to know that some of these stories really work, many of these early ones I no longer need stories for (I will never forget them), but also that for some of them, I may have better ideas for my own stories. If this blog is not a place to put them, then what is it? :)

Companion: Together for two months!

Stomach: You can put all the rice you get (from the fields) in a month in your stomach—yum!

Stubborn: I'm gonna read every page from the beginning (Me regarding 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in 4th grade XD)

Mediocre: With that big enclosue and little drip in the middle it just looks sort of half-assed doesn't it? lol

Texture: He kind of touches on it, but a month of wind can really change the texture of something.

Bull's eye: This one is a weird story, but I sort of like to think of it as ladling the white paint onto the bull's eye....

Fish guts: Are squiggly. The end.

Tool: Keep your eye on your tools (or you'll lose them)

True: Use a (magic) needle as a tool—look through the eye and you'll see what's true.

Bribe: He goes as far as possessed by shellfish, but "clams" (a type of shellfish) is slang for dollars, so that can help even more.

Tribute: Support someone's craft by paying (clams/dollars/shellfish) tribute.

Paragraph: I know it's bad, but I sort of think of the thing on the side as an indent. So its' like you're indenting the page to start the paragraph.

Blade: It's a sword with a slash through it, like a blade makes...

Seduce/beckoning: Honestly, this makes me think kuchisakeonna. With the sword (slashed) mouth, she's beckoning to little kids...

Shining: Seducing of the sun! You don't need to think of a shoeshine to think that seducing the sun makes things shine :)

Village: Can be simplified to just the fact that rice fields plus streets = village.

Place on the head/humble acceptance: He explains all this stuff about nails and heads, but doesn't just say, "I humbly accept the fact that you are correct -- you nailed it right on the head."

Complete: I just think it's hilarious that he manages to make a kid with no arms mean complete LOL That hilarity alone is enough to remember this by XD

Likeness: So dirty.

That's all for now. I have to go eat Mexican food with b-b-brown RICE!

Sunday, November 1, 2009

Revisiting Heisig OR Don't Knock It Till You Try It

Prompted one again by my new study buddy (Link in the sidebar, yo! It's swiftly becoming a vital one...) Victory Manual, I am taking a fresh look at Heisig.

Or that's what I was going to say except that I never really took a look at Heisig at all. I was aware of his method from the very beginning of studying Japanese because some people love him and some people hate him, but I had dismissed him out of hand because knowing the English meaning of the kanji seemed like a truly dangerous and destructive habit à la romaji. Hearing Alex's tale of a reformed skeptic caused me to think it over, though, and what I realized is...

"Something, anything." My mantra had been right there staring me in the face, but I didn't know it.

Language learning is all about exposure, right? So, actually introducing yourself to all the kanji with their core meanings is probably a BRILLIANT first step, because it puts them firmly into your head by using what you know already, building a great foundation on top of which you can later add word after word of vocab with what I assume now to be very little trouble.

Embarrassingly, I think had some misconceptions about the method that are now totally myth-busted. For instance, I had the idea that he WAS looking at the etymological history of the kanji, but in fact, the "stories" he tells about the characters really do make a lot more sense than that.

Incidentally, part of the reason this works, I think, is not even so much the stories as the way the stories force you to break the kanji down into easy to digest chunks. You know how when you are in a room with a lot of people speaking a language you aren't proficient in and your brain sort of gives up trying to understand? You might even start to get sleepy... It's the same thing with complicated kanji and this is something I have recognized for a long time but was not sure how to combat: when you're looking at a kanji with tons of strokes, you sort of see it without really understanding it, so even when you try to ascribe meaning you are glossing over the parts that you do actually need to remember in order to recognize it later. Forcing yourself to take the kanji apart by following to Heisig's mnemonics is, well, a huge breakthrough. I'm just sad that I am so late to the party. 24 years old...if only I could be 6.

The other thing I didn't know about Heisig's study course was the way it focuses on teaching writing. So it doesn't teach you the 100 "most useful" kanji first and it doesn't teach you them in the order that little kids learn them in Japanese schools—actually at first glance it appears to teach them in quite a confusing order, since it uses the same building blocks to make as many kanji as possible per lesson, which makes a lot of them easily confused. THAT IS, if you didn't have the stories to go along. I can't even think of mistaking "prosperous" for "risk" because I know that "risk" involves looking at the sun with your eyes and prosperity is sunny, so you get two suns.

The best thing, I think, is that I am extremely optimistic about learning kanji. 1,945 used to seem like a lot, and now it doesn't at all. That alone is priceless.