Welcome

Welcome to Abundance Declared, which is about my attempts to learn Japanese.  I've been messing around with the language for about a year now, having fun but not getting very far, and now I want to get serious.  With this in mind I'm thinking of going for one of the higher levels of the JLPT either in December or next July.  Ideally I'd like to go for the top level, N1, in December.  This is ridiculously ambitious and probably doomed to failure, but I feel that unless I set myself a very high target I'll just mess around and my attention will wander onto something else of interest, as it usually does.  So: fluent reading ability and full listening comprehension in five months.  Nothing implausible about that, eh?

I'll be starting by refreshing my knowledge of the kanji.  All 2000 of them, using the Heisig book.  This book, Remembering The Kanji 1, rather divides people.  Many absolutely swear by it; Heisig himself claims it's the only method of learning all the kanji that actually works.  Many others, such as Chris in a series of blog posts here (where he's actually discussing application of Heisig to Mandarin rather than to Japanese), are more skeptical.  Over the past year of low-intensity mucking-around with Japanese I've covered the first few hundred kanji in Heisig several times but have always got bogged down about a third of the way through the book.  There are 2042 kanji given in the Heisig book, and these include all 1945 general-use kanji that the Japanese learn at school—actually in the last year they've added some more to the general-use list, but many of them are in Heisig already.  Learning to recognise and to write all of them, getting that task out of the way right away, is appealing.

Heisig teaches you the meaning of each kanji in the sense that it gives you an English word to associate with each kanji.  This first book doesn't teach you how to pronounce any of the kanji: the Japanese readings (of which there are usually more than one for each kanji) are dealt with in the sequel.

We shall see how this goes.