More miscellaneous stuff

There's a lifetime's worth of reading to be found on openlibrary.org (which provides a reasonable interface to the books scanned at archive.org ) so long as you're willing to put up with not very good metadata and some scanning that isn't as good as it could be.  I was pleased to find this book, published a century ago, which gives lovely illustrations of 'grassy' soosho script; after flicking through a few dozen pages you begin to see the way that this style of handwriting works, even though you recognize it'll be a hell of an uphill struggle to really come to terms with it.

Am up to chapter 4 (of 20) in O'Neill and Yanada's An Introduction To Written Japanese; this is the first chapter where I've had to take things slowly.  The first chapter uses hiragana, the kanji for numbers 1-10, and very simple words; the second and third chapters introduce 20 and 30 kanji respectively (and the second chapter perversely uses katakana where hiragana would normally be used - some later chapters of the book do this too, to give you more practice in katakana than you'd otherwise get).  Chapter 4 introduces 40 more kanji, and there are 40-50 new kanji each lesson up to lesson 16: the last 4 lessons introduce no new kanji but use some pre-simplification kanji and the older okurigana usage.  The book says it uses 680 kanji in total; it's one of the tradeoffs of having a short graded reader that a lot of new kanji and vocabulary is going to be introduced very rapidly, and it's at chapter 4 that one starts to sense a combinatorial explosion, with too much going on simultaneously to cope with easily.  Perhaps I should go back to Heisig for a while.

Flicking through RTK2 the other day, was pleased to 'learn' a Japanese word that millions of British people learned long ago in the 80s: 'roll-call' is 'tenko', or 点呼.  A well-remembered BBC TV series (Wikipedia) taught us the word.