Obenkyo

Have been drilling kanji with the Obenkyo Android app and am very impressed; started with the easiest JLPT level 5 kanji and have made it up to working through level 2 at the moment.  This has only taken about 4 days of a couple of hours' work a day.  Levels 5 to 1 contain 79/166/367/367/1231 kanji and there's an Additional Kanji list of 130 (mainly recent additions to the Joyo list, I think).  In kanji-drilling mode, the app shows you an English definition, say "study, learning, science", and you have to choose the correct kanji 学 from the 6 shown.  Or you can do it the other way around and given a kanji, choose the definition from a list of 6.  The 'definitions' usually include something very close to a Heisig keyword, but as seen in the example above, are a bit longer and woolier and wordier.  This means there's often some overlap between definitions for different kanji, which is something that you just have to deal with.  On and Kun readings are also given.  There's even a draw-the-kanji challenge; the AI that judges whether or not you've done it properly is imperfect but frankly it's amazing that it works as well as it does.  For the 79 level 1 kanji I drilled the drawing of the kanji, but on the later levels I didn't bother; I just wanted to fix the kanji in visual memory.

There are a few imperfections: in particular there seems to be a fixed internal ordering to the kanji and the 6 kanji (1 correct, 5 incorrect) to choose from appear in that order, so you subconsciously learn that such-and-such a difficult definition is likely to be at the beginning of the kanji selection list, or at the end.  The weighted-random selection of kanji gives pretty good spaced repetition, but it might be useful to have the option for extra-hard kanji selection: select the defined kanji from among deliberately-chosen almost-but-not-quite-right ones.

I worked through about a quarter or a third of Heisig several times over the past three years and always got bored.  The knowledge has proved useful for drilling with Obenkyo, though I can't remember all of the Heisig names for radicals and have had to resort to making up my own.  Perhaps a revisit to Heisig will be necessary before I move onto the big final block of 1231 kanji and then the additional ones.

Readings will have to follow later!

Peking / Beijing

When I was young, I saw a TV news item that told me that Peking was now no longer called Peking, it was called Beijing.  (Perhaps the news item was in fact a bit more accurate than that and went into the gory details of Wade-Giles and pinyin, but if it was, it all went over my head).  It struck me as a puzzling thing to happen to a city, being renamed like that.  This must have been at the time of the 1979 pinyinization.  Peking still persists in the names of institutions that want to boast about their age, such as Peking University (and I think that on the Chinese version of the site, the last character in 'university' on the logo is the unsimplified version  學 as opposed to 学, for added old-fashionedness).

I keep wanting to train my ear to hear the sounds of Chinese properly: never mind the tones, many of the initials are very hard to distinguish.  Perhaps something to do next year.

Reading

Having (yet) another go at the O'Neill and Yanada Introduction To Written Japanese.  Previously I've always foundered round about lesson 4 or 5 (of 20, although no new kanji are introduced after 16: the last 4 lessons deal with pre-war kana/kanji usage and difficult handwriting). This ought to be do-able in reasonable time.  Have also dabbled with the Miller Japanese Reader and would like to have another serious go at this.