Try to work through approximately the first half of the 1958 Teach Yourself Japanese with reasonable diligence and not get bogged down round chapters 8 or 9 as I usually do. Keep notes and try to remember vocabulary and grammar nuggets; also try to keep translating in head from TYJ's transliteration to Hepburn and vice versa. When I'm confident enough, start alternating study of later chapters of TYJ with chapters of the O'Neill and Yanada An Introduction to Written Japanese. Keep drilling the kana so they don't slip away from me as they usually do. Learn the kanji as O'Neill and Yanada introduce them, but use Heisig for review and to peek ahead and learn meanings (though not readings) of kanji in advance. Once I've finished both books, err, do something else. Might throw Jorden and Chaplin's Reading Japanese into the mix too. Then maybe the Miller A Japanese Reader?
I do need to throw myself at Japanese a bit, if only because I'm finding reading the news these days pretty depressing and want to steer myself away from it. Reading a newspaper once a day or listening to the radio news ought to be enough to keep me informed without wallowing in awfulness. Burying myself in language textbooks from the 50s and 60s is one way out of it.
I'd like to have seen some sort of solid achievement by, say, the end of August.
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