A Random Sentence

でも、朝飯は何を食べましたか!

I was reading a japanese learning blog, and I stumbled upon the sentence half made up of kanji I've probably only seen once, and half of them I was familiar with. I believe I read it correctly.

I did it awhile back with a sentence involving the weather. I wonder if I can remember it. I know I can remember some of the words


今日は天気が素晴らしいです。

I know I'm missing something from this sentence, but I had a loose translation to go off of, with "weather" and "good" being the main keywords that I knew to look for.

Running in Circles

おはようございます！

I need to start adding simple vocabulary words to my anki decks. I had trouble coming up with the correct spelling for that common greeting. Looking through my IME I saw it written a few other ways お早う御座います being one of them,  but that involves two kanji I haven't learned yet, so I stuck with hiragana.

Fairly sure that kanji is completely wrong for that.

とにかく。。。

I am caught in a rather frustrating kanji loop, where after all my repetitions I haven't the energy or inclination to add more to my deck. This has the unfortunate side effect of making me hesitant to start sentences.

How do I tackle a sentence if it's comprised of half a dozen kanji I've never seen before, let alone the parts that make it up. Stroke order is a mystery, meaning is a mystery. If I can't accurately reproduce these on paper with my horrible handwriting, then I don't think I can learn anything in the long run.

So, I have to wait until I atleast get all my general use kanji to the point where I don't hesitate on stroke order. Meaning, reading, and everything else can wait. I just want to be able to reproduce it.

Notable words I cemented down through listening are the fairly similar

時間と事件 and when to use 時間 and 「何」時 in reference to time, o'clock, and hours as a count.

As a result of my last post and looking up past tense of 行く and reading at the same time that 言う takes the same form, I've been hearing these alot, just learning it that one time to write 「昨日はわたしが釣り行った。」I hear that conjugation everywhere, so I've been doing alot more heavy reading in the middle section of my dictionary as opposed to vocabulary and reading practice 「れんしゅ?」


I'm not entirely sure if I have the kanji right for じけん so I'll have to look that up later.

Let's see if I can't make this circle a bit more elliptical.

それじゃ～

Repetitions and a Big Fish Story.

昨日は私が釣り行った!* For the first time in many a year. I caught two* 魚. Almost three. One jumped the hook at the very last instant.

Bit of a sunburn. I was in the sun for about 四 hours*.


漢字 review is going a bit 遅い(?), and I had skipped my repetitions for a bit but I jumped back on the saddle. My biggest issue is making the cards. I go through the 漢字の本, search the keyword on my dictionaries, copy and paste the 漢字. If that doesn't work I draw it through my IME until I can find it. The entire process of making the cards burns me out for quite awhile. I have a completed deck complete with both 英語と日本語 keywords and about 二千漢字 but I just don't feel I've earned the right to use it until I complete my own card deck first.

Trying to feel more confident with using as much japanese as possible, but I still have to mark everything I am unsure of.


 This post is brought to you by "*", the handy tool to denote things I need to look up, confirm, or learn later.

Step Forward

2012年8月31日

This isn't really going to be a blog per se, more of a tangible archive tracking my progress as I attempt to very slowly, and hopefully steadily, learn Japanese(日本語). Pretty much up until this point all I've done is practice writing kanji, and practice reading hiragana in my japanese-english dictionary which is where most of my deeper knowledge originates.

Hopefully, once I learn all of the general use 漢字 I'll be able to dive into everything else with more gusto, but 今(?) it's more of a tip toe-ing forward. While I find the process of language learning fairly endearing, the actual heavy lifting involved with learning a few thousand kanji is a bit rough on the 目.

  Also, my handwriting is horrible, as you can 見る in this here example:

Yes, that is Genkō yōshi (原稿用紙)

I'm sorry for murdering it with such uncouth pen strokes.

I'm not exactly rushing, though I am writing a bit faster than I should. I spent a long while practicing ひらがな and I got.....ehh....decently good, I guess, but I stopped writing it, focusing on slogging through Remembering the Kanji - Book 1, the strategy being once I can write most any sentence, I'll get my needed practice then. Not that it'll help, there's a reason why neat handwriting is pretty much impossible for me, and it's a problem that has plagued me since I first learned how to write.

I'm not exactly concerned about it, I just have a rather deep-seated feeling that writing is intrinsic to the learning process.

So, with post one, I am tracked to six or seven some-odd-thousand listening hours, and a rather small 五百漢字 in my Anki deck currently. Hopefully as the months go forward, that number will increase, and I'll start inserting more Japanese in to my posts.


p.s. My current rules for inserting japanese kanji into my posts is when I know the reading and can correctly pick the correct kanji out of the list that shows up in my IME. Also, ignoring grammar for the time being.