Second Mass Review

Tomorrow is the first official day of my second mass review. This review will last for two weeks and will cover all of the first 1000 kanji. My game plan is to use Smart.fm as a crutch. I made it at least half way or more through most of the lesson sets. This is the perfect opportunity to complete them. I am also debating whether or not to type stories on RTK. That could be troublesome because most of those early stories were written by Heisig and therefore don't have the resonation of the later ones, but they are nevertheless important. Its not that its counter productive, spelling information out is incredibly useful in my memorization process. I'm just not looking forward to typing up the first 20 lessons. I can't even imagine. And I also don't want to overwhelm myself. I need to remember to stick with the basics. My flash cards are the most readily available resource I have. Though after two months, flash cards have become somewhat tiresome.

This is nearly the halfway point. And I've been looking forward to this review. I get to go two whole weeks without making new flashcards. Yay ... right? I anticipate that I will complete Rosetta Stone by the end of this month. Once I do, I will spend two weeks doing an intensive grammar study. After that, I will return to and repeat Rosetta Stone with the intention of completing one core lesson plus the speaking lesson every other day. In addition to that, I will spend those days off composing journal entries for both this blog and Lang8. I will employ as much vocabulary and grammar from each of the Rosetta Stone lessons as possible. I would like to create a running vocabulary list from which I can study, but like I said before, I do not wish to overwhelm myself. If I burn out, I'm going to fail at this. But if I don't start writing and typing Japanese everyday, this is not going to work. I do my best to spend at least 30 minutes a day hearing the language, but most of my attention is on reading subtitles not listening. Lang8 offers the opportunity to both have my entries read and corrected by native speakers and also for me to read entries typed by native speakers along side the Japanese. Its a useful site. One I have neglected to employ thus far because I believed my vocabulary was too severely lacking to a regular journal any justice. However, once I complete Rosetta Stone and the grammar review, I feel confident that I'll can make basic and relevant sentence structure.