Marathon: progress up to October 3rd

I've noticed my first post was dated October 2nd, but it's the 3rd here in Japan. Here's a summary of my progress so far:

I started my current attempt to learn kanji some time in August this year. By September 3rd (the first time I made a note in my diary) I'd written 69 mnemonic stories (one "story" usually lasting only a couple of sentences). Progress was slow from then, averaging about 1 a day. On September 22nd, I decided I'd do 20 a day, come hell or high water, which I've kept to since then, although on one day I only finished 11, and had to do 29 the next day. Up to now I've done 377 stories.

I think I've gotten to a stage where I'm excited to get into my 20 kanji as soon as I wake up in the morning, and get them done. If I don't start the day really organized, I end up studying late and realize I've wasted my freetime and done nothing much except work and study. If I finish early, I have time to do other things, and I can enjoy my free time a lot more, feeling like I've earned it.

This morning, I woke up at 6:00 am (usually I get up 7:30), and I thought "Wow, I have so much extra time to study!" Just thinking about it made my heart beat faster, and I got up and got to it. Even going slowly and stopping for breakfast, doing housework and playing with my kid, I managed to finish before 11:30 am, which is why I had time to start this blog.

As I was doing today's mnemonics, I realized that I've written hundreds of scenarios that sound like utter rubbish if you don't know what they are for. For example: "Gregor Clegane casts ashes into Zoolander's dad's face in coal mine". Gregor Clegane is a character from the fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire. His nickname's "The Mountain". Casting ashes is an action taken from the movie The Big Lebowski where John Goodman's character throws Donny's ashes into the Dude's face. Zoolander is a movie, the titular character of which has a father who is a coal miner. These are menmonics for: moutain, ash and coal. The kanji which means "coal" consists of the kanji for mountain on top of the kanji for ash. Makes sense when explained, but I had a sense of dread that I've wasted the last couple of months, and especially several hours of the last couple of weeks, just writing meaningless jibberish that won't mean a thing. Must be a sign of study stress.

On the other hand, I've also been dreading that I will lose my notebooks, which contain all the mnemonics I haven't committed to memory yet. I've been wandering if I can insure them.

Speaking of notebooks, I finished one small notebook today, which is kind of a milestone for me.

Also, I changed the order in which I've been studying the kanji. I already have the first 200 kanji learned, and I couldn't bear to go back and do them again. So I started around the middle of Kanji ABC. But then I found I was always going back to earlier kanji or graphemes that help make up the later ones, and sometimes I wasn't writing the reference notes that I need to find any given mnemonic in my notebook, which was leading to a lot of confustion. So, having already finished over 200 new mnemonics, I've decided to go back to the start of the book and work through it in order.

What this blog's about

I came to Japan on March 17th 2004 from Australia to teach English because I didn't know what else to do with my life. Since then I've married a Japanese girl who gave me a daughter in May this year. So I decided it's finally time to get serious about my Japanese study. One essential aspect to studying Japanese is kanji, the Chinese characters that are used for writing. There are a few thousand that you need to know to read Japanese. For starters, the government recommends learning a set of about 2,000 kanji known as the joyo kanji.

I've been studying the joyo kanji on and off for the four years I've been here. I have a shaky grasp of about 200. For those of you who don't know what kanji are, they are pictures that represent a meaning. For example, the kanji for mouth is a square: 口. Some kanji can be pronounced in only one way, some in more than one way depending on the sentence. Kanji may be used individually or with other kanji to make a single word. The number of strokes used to write a kanji ranges from one to over a dozen. Many kanji share the same pronunciation. Many kanji look extremely similar. 2,000 is a lot of kanji. In short: studying the joyo kanji is hard work!

And yet I've become obsessed with it, above and beyond my need to learn Japanese. The challenge is huge, but finite, unlike studying the language in general, which I could do forever and still not be perfect (heck, I'm not perfect in English). I'm also interested in memorization techniques, and this seems like the perfect test.

So I've devised a system to memorize the kanji. First, using a book called Kanji ABC to help me, I've given labels to every little group of lines that is used to make kanji. In addition, each of the kanji has its own meaning already, obviously. What I am then doing is imagining people (from my life or from the media) that match the labels of the kanji images and people that match the meanings of the kanji, and I'm joining those people together into a little story to remember the kanji. And I'm writing it all down in notebooks.

This blog will serve to keep track of my thoughts during the road to 2,000, as well as anything roadblocks and milestones.