Facing the challenge!

Okay, so I need an external motivator to get me to study. How about this one?

I've signed up for the free san-kyuu kanji email service from the Japanesepage.com, - this will operate as my external force - and I am entering them in to my brilliant kanji drilling tool from Declan (see Nihongojira passim).

This will force me to at least get exposure to the basic kanji, without my own useless sense of study gold-plating ("can't move on till I understand, dammit!") interfering to block my progress. In fact, as I signed up to the list a few weeks ago, I will have to more than keep up! I need to go faster to catch up!

The sad truth

Inspired by the fact that I noticed that I hadn't posted for several days (well, you can count it in weeks actually), I thought to do a quick check on exactly how much Japanese learning I actually do. After all, this blog is supposed to be about helping me study Japanese, right? So why wasn't I learning anything, or at least, why wasn't I learning anything worth posting about?

Well, a week and a bit on, I think I have found the root cause. I'm not studying.

I have been keeping a record of how much learning (any subject), running (for my 10k in April) and writing (of any sort) I am doing*. Well, I didn't really even need to make the cursory glance that I did make to reveal the cold hard fact that I spent NO time engaged in Japanese study at all. In fact, without much flexing of the old grey matter, I can safely say there has been no casual study at all in a month or so, and no serious, books out study since, well, probably last autumn.

Sad really.

*these, sadly, are the goals I must set myself in order to feel successful.